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PublicationCourse: AR0485 City & LiteratureDelft University of TechnologyFaculty of ArchitectureJulianalaan 132 - 134 2628 BL DelftPostal adress:P.O box 50432600 GA DelftTelephone: 015 27 89805Fax: 015 27 84727email: [email protected] website: http://www.bk.tudelft.nl

Editorial boardJan van BallegooijenAlex Den-Hsien Chen Jelle van der Neut Jeroen van Rijsbergen Erwin RuitenburgMike Schäfer

Klaske Havik (final editor)

© Copyright 2009 TU Delft, and the authors

Publication DatesBeyond the Surface is published yearly as a result of the msc2 course City & Literature

PressPrinter.nl, Rotterdam

Contents

Beyond the Surface

Architectural Reflections of Body and Mind

February 2009

Articles

4. Jan van Ballegooijen Beyond the Surface Editorial

10. Jan van Ballegooijen Storytelling Surfaces, The Paradox of the Parts and the Whole

18. Jelle van der Neut Eisenman’s Archaeology

24. Jeroen van Rijsbergen The Bodily Perception of Architecture

32. Mike Schäfer Memory Peter Zumthor and the Phenomenology of Transsubjectivity

42. Alex Chen Language of lights, Speaking Poetically in Religious Light

48. Erwin Ruitenburg Exploring the Imaginary, A Journey through Experience, Memory and Time

Intermezzos

8. Jan van Ballegooijen Stranger in a Syrian City

16. Jelle van der Neut Talking about Memory...

22. Jeroen van Rijsbergen Exploring Steven Holl

30. Mike Schäfer Berlin...

40. Alex Chen Memory of the Visible and the Invisible: The Delft Faculty of Architecture Building

46. Erwin Ruitenburg Ruined or Not?

5

Beyond the Surface... Imagine yourself a street, buildings on both sides, shopping windows, advertisements, pavement, people. Your tentative eye is the centre of the city. Imagine the of-fice where you work. How does the carpet feels under your feet? How hard do you have to push your shoulder to the heavy front door to open it? Think about your house, how it smells when you come back after a long journey. Think of the view from the window where you see the seasons changing. How did that tree look like six months ago? It is the interwovenness of the senses and the spirit. What hap-pens when you enter the old cathedral, where the coloured light is spread on the marble floor by the leaded glass? Your footsteps break the sound of silence. It’s this endless motion of conscious and unconscious impressions that’s nestled in your mind, and the stories and memories that are soaked up in walls, in streets, squares, spaces and places. They are the magic in build-ings. That is the city where we live in.

Editorial: Beyond the Surface - Jan van Ballegooijen

This magazine contains a collection of essays written by students from the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture. It is the result of the master course City in Literature, organized and tutored by Klaske Havik. The point of departure for most of the writings is how human experience and perception is related to the field of architecture and urbanism. It seems to be evident that experience and perception are taken in account as essential elements but this is not something that goes without say-ing. There are architects such as Peter Zumthor and Steven Holl that use a very personal and sensory approach towards architecture. Another question that is raised is how this is related to the city, the crisscross of people, the traffic, the collage of images and the sounds that we witness. Where do we see the histories in the rapid life in cities? Is there a place for memory? Important in our discussions were the writings of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). In his influential book The poetics of space he approaches archi-tecture from a phenomenological point of view. He discov-ers the house as a metaphor of humanness and intimacy.1

How is architecture connected to our memories, senses and imagination? In the article Memory: Peter Zumthor and the Phenomenology of Transsubjectivity the theories from Bachelard are connected to the architectural discourse. The main subject focuses on memories. They are very impor-tant for us in the past, present and future. They shape our personality and are cradle of our future decisions. In the experience of architecture, memories shape environments by the past experiences of a person. They are personal and different for everyone. Memories are subjective, there are our own. But still we can understand each others memories. Is there a common ground in these understandings? How does Peter Zumthor uses this understanding in his architec-ture? Eisenman’s Archaeology exposes that architect Peter Eisenman encounters memory and perception in a way very different from the phenomenological point of view. Eisenman takes on an approach that is rooted in linguistic philosophic theories such as the work of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Archaeological temporality is one of the themes discussed. The article can be read as an analysis of Eisenman as a writer and an architect in clear relation to a distinct way of using the concept of archaeology. This analysis is then put into the context of the theoretical back-grounds that are of influence to Eisenman. It appears that time as an instability is a mayor issue in both his writings and his designs, and all aspects of it seem to be of equal interest to Eisenman. The idea of memory is also discussed from an urban per-spective. What is the outcome when we look at the city as a personal experience, how do we remember events, people

1. G. Bachelard, The Poet-ics of Space: The Classic Look at how we Experi-ence Intimate Places, Boston, Beacon Press, 1994, p. VII.

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and places? Memory is considered as a key to knowledge, but how to deal with it as the image we create, alters over time? This image, accurate or with flaws, has influence on how we value every experience in the future. The article Exploring the imaginary tries to find out how this works and why memory is important for us today in urban situ-ations. This subject is discussed by looking at Rotterdam, a city with scars of the heavy bombings in WO II. What to think of the always changing cities like Constants New Babylon, or cities without a past like Koolhaas’ Generic City?

The phenomenological approach towards architecture that we already met in the essay about the relation between Bachelard and Zumthor can also be found in the article The Bodily Perception of Architecture. Here the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is connected to the architecture of Steven Holl. Merleau-Ponty analysed during his study of phenomenological philosophy the entwining of the senses with the spirit and the world. He describes how the body and the consciousness are related to the world, and how we can perceive the world and the objects in it. Steven Holl used the writings of Merleau-Ponty for his designs. This essay deals about the way this is done and focuses on the ideas used for Holl’s design of the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. The article Language of Lights focuses on light as a powerful instrument to emphasize sacred spaces. In four case studies about twentieth century churches, the use of light is researched in its characteristics of attributing to religious atmospheres. Light is not only an architectural in-strument but it also bears a symbolic meaning. This subject is discussed by the work of Le Corbusier, Steven Holl and Tadao Ando, architects with different cultural backgrounds. They all use light as an instrument, but in a different way. It is the light as the paint for the poetic space. Returning to the architectural discourse we can state that there seems to be a gap between the way we experi-ence the world around us and the instruments that architects and urban planners use to design and investigate. They determine which space comes after the other. They give dimensions, articulate elements and choose materials. What kind of technology do they use to transform a vision into a building? In Storytelling Surfaces the severe abstractions of drawing, mapping and reducing to diagrams and data is compared to the richness and opaqueness of the everyday reality. Architecture and urbanism are professions that are marked by geometrical rationality. How is this related to the experience of the anonymous user? This essay agues the possibility of extending the architectural instruments with a literary approach. The idea is elaborated by an illustration of the work of the Italian novelist Italo Calvino (1923-

1985). By looking through the eyes of this novelist we see an architecture with a surface that tells a story: another point of view compared with the abstracting tools of the architect and the urban planner. The six essays can be considered as the backbone of the magazine. Between the essays we inserted so called ‘intermezzos’ These short texts can be read as subjective descriptions of architectural and urban phenomena. It is an illustration of writing about buildings that opens the door for emotions and feelings, rather than seeing architecture as a mere technological, or problem-solving profession. Something that goes beyond shapes and aesthetics, beyond organising and dimensioning. We could state that the magazine can be split into two main themes: on the one hand the presence of memory in architecture and on the other hand the relation between the sensory perception and the built reality. The first one can be seen as an architecture of the mind, the last one as an architecture of the body. In the connection between them we find the true experience: something that goes beyond the surface, which is detected by all five senses, which is piled up in the endless archives of our minds.

Beyond the Surface - February 2009 7


9

Stranger in a Syrian City Jan van Ballegooijen

Date: 10th September 2008 – Place: Aleppo, one of the oldest inhabited cities of the world – Number of inhabitants: 2 million – Arabic name: Halaba asch-Schahba – Temperature: hot, very hot. When I overlook the city I see the endless mass of rectangular boxes. They have all different di-mensions and proportions, but they are all rectangular. One façade is almost white, because it’s in the sun; the other one grey, because it’s in the shade. Immeasurable diversity makes unity. In between this collection of stone boxes the mosques. Domes are popping up as solidified bubbles, minarets point the sky as road signs to heaven. I hear muezzins with their electronic voices reverberating over the landscape of flat roofs. The city of Aleppo is an intense city. Uncountable numbers of people are swarming the streets, old yellow caps everywhere; it’s noisy, turbulent, hot, very hot. When I walk the streets I walk in a zigzag; from shadow to shadow. The city smells like a mixture of oriental spices and exhaust fumes. It’s a crisscross of human activities; an outsider has no idea what they are aiming for. The city fabric is a labyrinth. It is a mystery, with underlying structures that we cannot understand. They have their histories, religions, tribes, families, rules, rituals – it’s like a tangled clew where the wires have untraceable origins. The physical city is only the result; an endless variety of buildings, objects, images, places.I wander around the old neighbourhoods; discover the quietness of the courtyards, hidden in the jumble of alleyways. The smell of vaporizing water on the burning asphalt, sprayed on the streets to keep the dust on the ground. It’s the end of the day, but it’s hot, very hot. The sun goes down, again the muezzin, and exactly on that moment there is this cap with two guys, stopping next to me. They make heated gestures, they say things I don’t understand, they look at me almost begging, they point their fingers at me. I shrug my shoulders, they look disap-pointed… They point again, now I understand, it is the bottle of water I just bought. Stupid tour-ist, it’s Ramadan, they were not allowed to drink during the day. I give them the whole bottle. They drink; they pour the water in their throats, without touching the bottle with their lips. I am happy now; I have two friends for thirty seconds. They finish the bottle, they probably say something like ‘thank you’ or ‘God bless you.’ They leave me behind with the empty bottle. I am a stranger again. It’s still hot.

It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can al-most hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. (…) Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.1

1. S. Mendes (direc-tor), American Beauty, Prod.: B. Cohen, D. Jinks, Dreamworks SKG, 1999.


Storytelling Surfaces The Paradox of the Parts and the Whole

Jan van Ballegooijen

Architects draw plans, columns in a rudimental grid, sections that explain the spatial concepts of the buildings. They adore the obscure sketches that contain the traces of a brilliant idea. Their websites are full of the most beautiful pictures of buildings in beautiful sunny weather. They are brand new and completely empty, abandoned. No single trace of human activity, no smell, no painting that is out of tune, no dirty footsteps on the shiny floor, not the sound of a closing door. But wait… somewhere in the corner we see a figure. We see that it is male but we cannot guess his age, we cannot see the colour of his eyes. The photographer de-cided to make him blurry. The same thing in their quasi-re-alistic rendered artist impressions. There are three options. One: the people are dressed up in the fashion of fifteen years ago, but are always seen from the back. Two: people are black or white, fifty-percent-transparent silhouettes. Three: a well-formed yearning lady in bikini is looking at you, but what is she doing in this abstract museum hall? In all these representations of buildings, whether they are built or not, we see the same thing: architecture. We see facades of buildings, white walls, doors – most of the time closed – windows without views, kitchens without food and pans, bedrooms with unslept beds. This essay wants to discuss in the first part the way archi-tects and urban planners deal with human perception. It explains the contradiction between the abstraction of the architectural instruments and the complexity of human experience. In the second part the question is raised if it is possible to extent the architectural instruments by using descriptive techniques elaborated in literature. This is illus-trated by three different novels of Italo Calvino: Invisible cities (1972), Mr. Palomar (1983) and Under the Jaguar Sun (1986).

I sometimes have the feeling that architects and urban planners are captured by their own profession. They look at the city as a ‘system,’ that has to be ‘organized,’ something that you ‘plan.’ The city as something that you build by producing a lot of drawings and diagrams. In the architec-tural jargon I very often hear phrases like: ‘Jean Nouvel builds this… and Norman Foster built that…’ But we have to realize that most architects will never ‘build’ one single summer house. They only make drawings of buildings.2 The strange thing about making drawings is that they are always marked by absence. When the architect produces his drawing, the building itself is absent, there is only the drawing as some kind of coded future scenario. And when the constructer decoded the drawing and surrenders the building, he puts the drawings in his archive and leaves them there forever. When we study the plans, sections and even pictures of building that we never visited, the built reality is often

something very different. The architectural drawing is a plane, almost scientific projection of a future build-ing, reduced to black lines on white paper. The ultimate instrument of the architect is the plan: this organises the different spaces, explaining which space comes after the other, showing the dimensions of the rooms. Le Corbusier’s dedicates in his famous book Towards a new architecture a chapter to three reminders to architects. The first reminder is Mass, where he holds a plea for simple geometrical forms like spheres, cubes, cylinders and pyramids. The sec-ond is Surface, where the question is raised how to make holes in the mass that articulates the form. But he has no doubt about the most important one: the Plan. ‘Mass and surface are determined by the plan. The plan is the genera-tor.’3 But the difficulty of a plan is that it can only show spatiality in projection of the floor surfaces. Le Corbusier must have realized this, and that is why he adds an illustra-tions of the Santa Sophia where we see the plan, the section and an isometric drawing combined in one drawing. He does more or less the same with the temple in Thebes and a palace in Amman (Syria). Although these drawings show in an ingenious way the interconnection between shape, spatiality and organisation, they remain, to speak with Le Corbusier, ‘an austere abstraction; … nothing more than an algebrization and a dry-looking thing.’4 There seems to be a contradiction between the abstractness of drawing and the real building. Our instruments are focussing mainly on the functional, spatial and organizational aspects of architecture. However, the way we experience architecture differs a lot from the image that derives from the plane and severe abstractions that are drawn by the architect. But these drawings from the body through which the architect communicates, they are the language of the profession. But if this language is characteristic by its poverty and abstract-ness, we should wonder what this means for the buildings we construct. When we follow the same line we find a parallel ap-proach in urban planning. It is a way of looking at the city that Michel de Certeau calls the ‘celestial eye.’5 It is an attempt to see the city as a whole, by taking a huge distance from it, and looking at it as if there is no perspective: the city map. De Certeau states that the city never can be seen as a whole, the way we experience the city is by ‘walking in the city.’ When we walk in the city, it is always a matter of choice; do we take this road or that one? And by making these choices we compose our own city, giving one place more importance than the other, by avoiding certain places we make that they do not exist. The city is the endless sur-face that appears to us when we walk trough it, experienced by a human eye in a walking body. A restless eye, reading the city as a text, not chapter after chapter or word after word, but by fragments and flashes, skipping almost

2. S. Allen, Essays: Practice architecture, technique and representation, Amsterdam, Overseas Publishers Associa-tion, 2000, p. 1.

3. Le Corbusier, Towards a new architecture, New York, Dover publications, 1986, p. 25-48.

4. ibid., p. 49.

5. M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California press, 1988, p. 92.


Storytelling Surfaces - Jan van Ballegooijen

simultaneously from details to widescreen overviews. A collage of impressions that we experience through a body of senses. But is this the city of the urban planners? Partly it is, of course. They created the framework; they decided where to place the benches, the trees, the shopping win-dows. But it is also the city wallpapered by advertisement and filthy graffiti. The expensive shopping street where you not only meet the successful businessman with his shiny shoes but also the trudging beggar with all his possessions in a rattling trolley. On the market the smell of fried food, the fresh vegetables, flowers, fish. It is what de Certeau describes as ‘the forests of gestures’, something so complex that it ‘cannot be captured in a picture, nor the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text.’6 There seems to be a gap between the ‘practice of everyday life’ and the way the urban planners see the city.

I want to take you on a little sidewalk and look at cin-ema. Sometimes the built environment plays an important role in movie, and it is always to supports the story that the filmmaker or writer wants to tell. Rear Window (1954), by Alfred Hitchcock is a good example of this. The whole movie plays in the windows and inner garden of a closed building block in New York. This building block is careful-ly designed for the movie, but we have to realize that even here, where the building plays such an important role, the movie is not about an urban building block. The real story is about the characters that are living behind the windows. Maybe one is murdered, the other one is lonely, and the other one tries to compose a piece of music. A complete different idea is elaborated by Lars von Trier in his famous project Dogville (2003). The story plays in a small village somewhere in the United States. Important Hollywood directors like Hitchcock would have built the complete village as a set, to have everything exactly the way he wants to have it. For movies with a smaller budget directors will try to find a real village that is comparable with the village in the movie. But Von Trier did something different; he painted the plans of the houses with white paint on the stage. By doing this he expects the viewer to focus more on the actors and the narrative. Interesting is that in the absence the buildings are very present. It is a telling illustration of architectonic themes as public versus private, seeing and being seen, protection and imprison-ment. These two movies have one thing in common: they show the build environment as a stage for human activity. The ar-chitecture never plays the leading role but it frames, directs and focuses the play of the actors. Especially Dogville can be seen for architects and urban planners as an illustration of the poorness of our vocabulary. When real people start to cry, fight, love, die in what we see as a drawing, it looks

alienating and out of place. People will sleep in the plans we draw, we will hear footsteps in the sections. I want to hold a plea for sensitivity, for storytelling, for close observation, for human nature in the instruments of the architectural discourse. Drawings, models and render-ings are always abstractions of a reality that does not even exist. Exactly this connects the designer with a writer of fiction. A writer creates a reality out of his imagination, a construction of mental images that are translated into words. Where the architectural instruments are always reducing the world around us, literature can create a whole world behind it.

To discover the possibilities of literature in the field of architecture I choose to focus on different writings of the Italian novelist Italo Calvino (1923-1985). Through many of his writings the fascination for complex phenomena in science, nature and daily life becomes clear. It is not surprising that urbanity is a theme that plays an essential role in his writings. For him the city is a symbol to ‘express the tension between geometric rationality and the entangle-ments of human life.’7 In the architectural discourse he is mostly known for his book Invisible cities. In this book he describes in short stories 55 complete different cities. In the end it turns out that all cities are the same city: Venice. This book can be read as an attempt to unravel the complexity of urban phenomena. The city is a condition where many layers of different human activities come together, running simultaneously on the same place. A criss-cross of sym-bols, histories, rituals, habits traditions. The book tries to dismantle the city by isolating one specific theme in every story. Every theme is a city in itself, with different inhabit-ants, acting in a different way. The cities appear to us as surrealistic places, parts of it we do recognise but the real meaning stays hidden under a cloak of mystery. The story-teller is always the outsider, the explorer of new realities. All the stories together illustrate the unreadability of the contemporary city. The descriptions of the cities, which can be read as short stories, are alternated by dialogues between Marco Polo and the great emperor Kublai Khan. To exem-plify the way both characters understand the world around them, I give two dialogues that show the differences:

Dialogue about a bridge: Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. ‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks. ‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’ Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’ Polo an-swers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.8

6. ibid., p. 102.

7. I., Calvino, Six memos for the next millennium, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 71.

8. I., Calvino, Invisible Cities, London, Vintage, 1997, p. 82.

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Dialogue about a chessboard: Then Marco Polo spoke: ‘Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut form the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? (…) Here is a ticker pore: perhaps it was a larvum’s nest (…) This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding….’ The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docs, of women at the windows ....9

In both dialogues it comes clear that Kublai Khan sees the world through abstraction. It is only a square on a chessboard, or only an arch. He wants to bring things back to their ‘essence.’ Marco Polo states that the essence is not in the abstraction but in the whole range of associations that are connected to a certain object. The bridge is all the dif-ferent stones, the square is the history of the trees and the process that it took to become a square. It is this specific technique that Calvino is also using to describe Venice. His is not bringing it back to one large description but to fifty-five different ones. The city is not exposed as a unity but as a wide range of emotions, memories, secrets, histories and connections, that can be found in the reality around us. A gigantic exploded view where the ‘parts’ are taken out of the ‘whole.’ It is the Venice we experience when we walk through it, a place where we love, a city that we dream. When we look under the surface we see the imaginary Ven-ice, the invisible Venice, the poetic Venice. What interests me in particular about the literature of Calvino is his talent for close observation and the shift that he makes from observations to very detailed descriptions. In the novel Mr. Palomar this is crystallized in many differ-ent guises. It is not a coincidence that Calvino named the male protagonist, Mr. Palomar, to an observatory close to Los Angeles.10 He is not only observing the star-spangled sky, the city is also part of his horizon. A description of the roof landscape of Rome is one of the strongest examples of this:

The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chim-neys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal watertanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else the rigging of TV aerials, straight or crooked, enam-elled or rusting, in models of successive generations, vari-ously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems. (…) pipescaffold-

ings of constructions in progress or left half-finished; large windows with curtains and little WC windows; ochre wall and burn sienna walls, walls with the colour of mold from whose crevice clump of weeds spill their pendulous foliage (…) great mansions which have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance as if to confirm the female, Junoesque es-sence of the city (…)12

By reading the whole enumeration of objects, the colours, the shapes, Cavino paints the roof landscape on the canvas of your imagination. Especially by his focus on the seemingly trivial details are important. The wide range of elements like ‘little columns supporting pots’ and ‘sheds of corrugated iron’ or ‘slender chimneys’ form the essence of what we experience as the roof landscape of Rome. Another interesting story is when Mr. Palomar visits the cheese shop. For him a cheese shop is not just a place where they sell different kinds of cheese, but behind every cheese is a particular taste, texture, shape, colour, herd, place, farmer, landscape, sky. In this story he goes beyond the object itself and derives through all kind of associa-tions, comparable with the technique he used in the given quotation about the chessboard. What is very attractive to these examples is the richness in exhibiting the characteristics of a certain situation. These imaginary images do not work by abstraction but by zoom-ing in on details, deriving from the object itself towards the connotations that cannot be seen by the physical eye, but can only be explored by imagination. What connects all the stories is the desperate search for structures, for systems, for order, but the closer we look, the more complicated and bifurcated reality becomes. The roof landscape of Rome can be seen as a metaphor for how the world appears to us. We only see the roofs, the chimneys, the antennas, but the real world takes place under the roof tiles. The surface is the only thing we see, and even this surface is inexhaustible. In almost all of the stories we see a person that tries to make order out of a world that appears to him as a complete chaos. It is a world of details, connotations, interrelations, discrepancies, oppositions, as in the first story in the book, where Mr. Palomar visits the beach and tries to find the essence of a wave. But the closer he looks, the more he is realising that it is impossible to isolate one wave out of the endless motion of the sea. Whether it is the waves of the sea, the city, the universe or a cheese shop, Calvino uses the same technique. On the one hand his description is power-ful, detailed and telling, but on the other hand they fail in describing the whole out of many. It is an encyclopaedic worldview. Every theme he wants to describe opens new

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9. ibid., p. 118,119.

10. U. Musarra-Schøder, Italo Calvino: ‘Zigzaggend’ door de wereld, in B. van den Boss-che, F. Musarra, Italiaanse literatuur na 1900: Deel 2: 1945-2000, Leuven, Uitgeverij Peters, 2004, p. 155.

11. I., Calvino, Mr. Palomar, London, Vintage, 1999, p. 49,50.

12. ibid., p. 50.

themes, new details, new links. It is like searching in Wiki-pedia on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Every lemma you open gives links to other lemmas, and other lemmas and other lemmas and other lemmas. In Calvino’s own words:

(…) the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings. (…) It is only after you have come to know the surface of the things, (…) that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.12

In Mr. Palomar the descriptions have a visual focus; they deal about things that can be observed. However, the human body experiences the world around it by five senses. In the book Under the Jaguar Sun Calvino investigates the possibility of writing from one specific sense. Unfor-tunately he was never able to finish the book, so only the short stories about smell, taste, and hearing are published. For this essay I only want to highlight the story about the sense of hearing. It is about a king that is so paranoid that he does not want to leave his throne, afraid that when does so, it will be taken over by somebody else, claiming that he is the real king.13 The king experiences the activities in his palace by listening. The sound tells him what happens; when he hears the clinking of pots and pans he knows that the cooks are making dinner. When he hears screaming, he knows somebody is tortured in the cellars deep under his palace. But not only activities are translated to sounds, also the spaces are built by their typical audible characteristics. The palace is one big auricle, a visualized cacophony. The sound expends the space, the silence makes it shrink or even disappear. The lesson that can be learned from Under the Jaguar Sun is evident. In architecture and urbanism the focus is mainly on vision. Acoustics is a ‘problem’ that has to be solved. But what if we create awareness that also the other senses, like touch, smell and hearing, can be used as vital aspects in designing? Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust Tower in the Jewish Museum in Berlin is an example where dif-ferent senses are used to experience a space. The darkness is a cloak that hides the space; makes that you touch the grating concrete, the unheated air feels chilly and the sound of the slamming door makes you feel imprisoned. All these aspects are essential for the perception of the space. These kinds of aspects cannot be drawn in a section or a plan, they cannot be visualized in a fluently flying rendering. But they can be visualized by words.

Concluding I want to state that there is a gap between the instruments of the architectural practice and the way we experience the built reality. Architects and urban plan-ners work through abstractions that have their result in diagrams, drawings, models, specifications. Of course we should maintain this way of working; they are the essen-tial documents to communicate the technological aspects of architecture. Besides this we could raise the question whether it is possible to extend the instruments of architec-ture with tools that do not only describe our findings in ‘an austere abstraction,’ but also provide us to communicate the multi-sensory and extreme complex experiences by walk-ing in cities, wandering the streets and exploring buildings. It is a misunderstanding that literature gives the possibility to describe the world as it is. Calvino’s oeuvre is a constant struggle in understanding the postmodern world. There is this big paradox that you notice by reading his work; the impossibility to see phenomena as a whole, even with the most meticulous descriptions of all the different elements. His novels only are the key to open up roof of the laby-rinth in which we are operating. Many architects and urban planners still think that they can design future scenarios through drawings, schemes and data. But their instruments are abstractions of a not even built reality. If the richness of literature cannot penetrate the depths of everyday life, where does the arrogance of architects come from to claim that they can? But in spite of the limitation that is given to literature, Calvino was convinced that it was capable to ‘give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…’14 I am convinced that architecture and urbanism should give speech to the city under the surface, to give speech to complexity and rich-ness rather than using mere abstractions, to give speech to spaces and places that are experienced by a combination of senses. Writing should be considered as a serious option to ‘give speech to that which has no language.’

13. I. Calvino, Onder de jag-uarzon, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 1987, p. 51-77.

14. I. Calvino, Six memos for the next millennium, op. cit., p. 124.



17

Talking about Memory…... Jelle van der Neut

On Tuesday the 30th of December, at around 4 PM, I arrived at the Mahnmal (the memo-rial for all European Jew victims of the Holocaust) after a long day of drifting through the city of Berlin. When I approach it from the Hannah-Ahrendt-Straße, I see its impressive size. The enormous amount of cold, slick, concrete columns of differing height, placed in what seems to be a perpendicular grid, create immense opportunities for children and others to play and fool around. I hear several languages, traffic noise and the sounds of moving, talking and laughing people. I feel cold polished concrete passing my finger tips and cold air in my face. I see camera flashes and guards preventing that people climb and walk on top of the field. This is prohibited, and a pity as well. Walking into the hilly field reminds me of my childhood, running through corn fields with my little friends, looking for each other. Or a walk through Bryce Canyon I did last November. The further you get in, the stranger the experience gets. Nothing there really refers to the victims, yet I am aware of it. The knowledge that it is what it is refers to what is in my memory of it; memories coming from today, yesterday or whenever. They are just never in first person.… On Thursday the 1st of January, at around 2 AM, I am moving myself from the Berliner Tier-garten to another Sylvester party when I accidentally pass by the Mahnmal again. In the middle of a moving crowd I try to get aware of the memorial and what is happening there in this context of new year’s evening. The sounds of the noisy crowds on the move and the sounds, smells, flash-es and smoke of the celebration fireworks are intense and put a shadow over the field. Memory seems miles away, but it is not. Rockets are being aimed through the lanes of the memorial filling them with light and smoke and crowds are wading through it leaving their marks of litter in the field of memory. In this mood and intoxication it seems that no one is aware of the history, and everybody is looking to the future. No-one takes notice of the past that is present. On Friday the 2nd of January, at around 2 PM, the train I am in reaches the Dutch border after a quick stop in Bad Bentheim. I turn on the radio of my cell phone. On the news I hear that this same memorial had been daubed with racist symbols in the night of 2008 to 2009. “The paint can easily be washed off since the surfaces have been treated for it” is the next line the news reporter writes. I remember having read that this anti graffiti coating was produced by the same company that was producing the insecticide which was used by the Nazi’s to exterminate the Jews.

Peter Eisenman is one of the few architects whose work is hard to grasp. Memory has a big role in most of his later complex theoretical and critical engaged theses. How does his office deal with this so-called ‘archaeology?’

Redefinition For Eisenman, no general accepted definition is abso-lute. As archaeology is used to point towards the academic studies on ancient peoples and cultures, for Eisenman this is different. Indeed, it has to do with memory, but for Eisenman information of the past, present and future are all of interest for the development of a design plan. He does so, on several levels, with several purposes.


Eisenman’s Archaeology

Jelle van der Neut

Four levels of archaeology The archaeology that Eisenman defines in both his writ-ing and his design plans can be generally split up into four different expressive levels, which are all of influence on the final design proposal. For one, the design process as a process of development is of influence. This comes from the general position that Eisenman takes in the discourse on process and product where Eisenman prefers process over product, what is implied over what is there. This conflict of meaning is an ongoing critique towards the singular object of modern architecture. Eisenman’s early design studies, the series of ten experimental houses in particular, are primarily based on this critique. In his later works the traces of process can be detected in the fragmented surfaces and reliefs on those surfaces, which represent a sequence of transformations in the search of expressing his thoughts on the issues at stake. In his later works the process of physical movements, sculpting, sketching and carving are coming into expression in the highly expressive elements of Eisenman’s architec-ture. His surfaces are an example of these elements. Greg Lynn formulates it as ‘the rippling and cascading mass-ing reverberates across the skin of the building in relief traces’1, and this seems to denote it quite well. These relief surfaces again seem to be traced back to the analysis of Ital-ian Renaissance ornaments.2 These seem to have been of interest to him not for its meaning but for different reasons. These reasons will be explored further on the article. For two, Eisenman’s earlier designs, researches and studies are used to represent the architects history, memory and consciousness. His educators, mentors, inspirators, students and friends are all in these realms and their reverberations are all traceable in Eisenman’s work. For example, the formal generative systems which were based on the mathematician Chomsky, and tutored by his thesis mentor and friend Colin Rowe are not only traceable in his early houses, but they are still of influence in Eisenman’s works today in the transformative operations. At the same time there are noticeable traces to earlier designs pres-ent in later ones. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin for example was clearly influenced by his competition entry for a similar monument in Vienna, Austria in 1996. This relationship adds up to the level of complexity and meaning of this monument for the observer on the look-out. Another example is his design proposal for a garden in Parc de la Vilette in Paris that partly includes his earlier design for a public square in Venice, Italy. This proposal was created in cooperation with philosopher Jacques Derrida after they were introduced to each other by Bernard Tschumi. The explicit reusing of projects is not only based on the concept that both projects share, it suggests to be about historical consciousness as well since concepts can be expressed in

several ways and thus would not need to be duplicated. For three, other architects designs are being used to represent the knowledge and awareness of these precedents as well as their importance. The use of Le Corbusier’s grid of his plan for the hospital in Venice of 1963 in a competi-tion proposal for a public square in 1978 is a clear example of this. Subsequently, in 1987 to be exact, Eisenman used this design for Venice in the proposal for the Parc de la Vilette garden mentioned before. The evidence of Eisen-man’s awareness of the value of the absent hospital of Le Corbusier is clearly there. For four, site specific contextual information such as politics, geography, archaeology, urbanism and history, is of mayor importance to many of Eisenman’s designs from the mid 1980’s until now. Whether they are used as inspiration or as critique, what can be found from the plan, site, urban situation or landscape is being used. The most famous example of a site discovery is the Wexner Centre for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Here Eisenman reminds us of the history of the site by reconstructing the image of an Armoury building that was demolished in 1959. At the same time he opens up the university campus for the com-munion and the city for the students by creating a dialogue between the two grid systems of the city respectively the campus. Within this lies a critique towards the planners of the campus as well as the city planners, and the demolish-ment of the old Armoury could be interpreted as a mistake in Eisenman’s eyes. All four of these levels of archaeology are represented in Eisenman’s architectural designs in a physical, geometri-cal way. They are interrelated, and extracting the one from the other is not easy. But for what purposes are these four archaeologies represented like this?

We should see these archaeologies in the perspective of the philosophical theories and concepts of deconstruction that Eisenman uses and wishes to narrate with his works. Deconstruction is founded by Jacques Derrida and could be defined as ‘…a strategy of critical analysis (…) directed towards exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary lan-guage.’3 Deconstruction was first connected to architecture in 1988 by Philip Johnson, and Peter Eisenman was one of the architects labelled as such. Eisenman was already con-nected with Derrida at that time, so Johnson’s appointment could be valid. Connecting philosophy with architecture has difficulties and some assumptions needed to be made by Eisenman. The first requirement for Eisenman to use the literary theory of Derrida for his architecture is to see architecture as language like. He evidently has searched for answers to the question of how to incorporate writing in his architec-

1. G. Lynn, The talented Mr. Tracer, in Tracing Eisenman, Peter Eisenman complete works, edited by C. Davidson, London, Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2006, p. 194

2. Ibid.

3. Oxford English Dictionary


Eisenman’s Archaeology - Jelle van der Neut

tural designs. Rosalind Krauss’ essay Notes on the index of 1977 reintroduced Charles Sanders Peirce’s late nineteenth century notion of the index. By index Krauss means ‘…that type of sign which arisesmas the physical manifestation of a cause, of which traces, imprints, and clues are examples.’4 One could also define the index as signed masseging without a presupposed coding. Reading this essay created possibilities of the index as a coding system not only for photography, on which Krauss focuses, but also for Eisen-man’s architecture.5 The use of the index makes it possible to see architecture as text, giving it meaning, the same meaning that modern architecture was lacking. At the same time meaning is being questioned by deconstructivist think-ers since meaning is always the victim of interpretation. For Eisenman the index is the matter of his language: ‘…the index (…) functions as a record or a trace.’6 This directly relates the trace and the index with each other as analogous. This trace is another concept derived from deconstruc-tion. Greg Lynn distinguishes the trace from the sign and the clue as follows. ‘Signs are evident, clues are accidental, traces are provocative and can never be fully resolved.’7 Derrida puts the trace at a very big distance to what is traced, and compares it with ‘…the cinder (what remains without remaining from the holocaust, from the all-burning, from the incineration, the incense)’ and taking this for granted the trace is always a trace of absence, manifest through erasure.8 To judge Eisenman’s interpretation of Derrida’s trace would go into the realm of subjectivity. The question if Eisenman’s traces are far away enough from what it implies, their originals, cannot be answered since every singular beholder interprets them different. The lay-man would not see what is implied by the traces; the well read insider would grasp only parts of it correctly. Eisen-man himself probably has his own interpretation of the trace, one that is not similar to Derrida’s. For Derrida, the trace is referred to as the possibility of meaning, a meaning that is never complete and always un-decidable. This notion of undecidability seems to be under constant influence of time. Eisenman is also aware of this temporality and tries to represent this in his own way. The undecidability of language leads, for Derrida, to a mayor conflict at the moment that text is written down. Text is a medium originally characterized by instability, and fixing it does damage to it in terms of meaning. Both Eisenman’s literary writings and architectural writings express his agreement in, and awareness of this conflict. Already in the introduction of his latest publica-tion (Ten canonical buildings 1950-2000, 2008) he makes the reader aware of his intention of the book and he sees the chosen buildings as something to be reviewed over and over again.9 In his close readings of certain buildings as historically important (canonical), he explains it quite

clearly:

The important distinctions between the canonical and the critical are twofold: First, a canonical work is a hinge as well as a rupture, while a critical work can function principally as a break with its precedents. Canonical in this context refers to a rupture that helps to define a moment in history; it is a constant re-evaluation in the present as to what constitutes such a rupture. Of course, a rupture can only be seen in hindsight, looking back rather than looking at the present. Second, a canonical work is time-bound: it depends on a particular moment in history in order to be seen as a hinge/rupture in either the architect’s career or the architectural discourse.10

The architectural texts by Eisenman deal with this con-sciousness of temporality and undecidability in plural ways. He is dealing with it not as a conflict between language and text, but as one between drawing and building. The fictional movements of lines, planes and volumes are expressed in the buildings, narrating the fictional process of design. At the same time, the use of unrealized paper plans from him and other architects, create a strange sense of reality versus fiction. The instability of architecture as text is expressed through the incompleteness of the realized buildings. For example the Wexner Centre mentioned earlier, where ma-sonry is left unfinished. This incompleteness leaves the end of the story open for interpretation, which would be looking forward in time. At the same time it focuses on the past, by making the observer aware of the process of building it as well. A building could be observed as a snapshot in the process of building it, placing it in time of past present and future. This notion of the ‘snapshot’ could be brought back to that of the index, on which the snapshot-effect has the same affect of time awareness.11

In one of his latest projects, The City of Culture in Galicia, Spain, he is not only questioning the assumption between field and object, but he also creates the fictional idea of what is under the earth’s surface. By blurring the borders between earth surface and building the building expresses a rupture of the surface of the earth, revealing its valuables. This does not only look back in the past of that rupture and its site, but also in the future, of nature taking over this rupture again, erasing the building’s traces and creating archaeological treasures, or of a further rupture, for instance. The possibility of process is there, its future is undecided. This does not fill the gap between the architectural drawing and the building however. The expression of the building process and the possibility of future changes is not enough, since the translation of the drawing to a building

4. R. Krauss, Notes on the in-dex: Seventies art in America, in Tracing Eisenman, Peter Eisenman complete works, edited by C. Davidson, p. 48

5. S. Allen, Trace elements In Tracing Eisenman, Peter Eisenman complete works, edited by C. Davidson, Lon-don, p. 50-56

6. P. Eisenman, Ten canonical buildings 1950 - 2000, New York, Rizzoli IP, 2008, p. 22

7. G. Lynn, The talented Mr. Tracer, in Tracing Eisenman, Peter Eisenman complete works, edited by C. Davidson, p. 186

8. J. Derrida, Cinders, in S. Allen, Practice architecture, technique and representation, Amsterdam, Overseas PA, 2000 p. 58

9. P. Eisenman, Ten canoni-cal buildings 1950 - 2000, p. 15-24

10. Ibid.

11. S. Allen, Trace elements in, Tracing Eisenman, Peter Eisenman complete works, edited by C. Davidson, p. 55



is still missing. The instability of the design is expressed though, and that signifies the conflict between drawing and building, one without a definite solution so far. Stan Allen calls for an architecture that is not so much looking back in time, but one that is more referent towards the future, in spite of the level of abstraction this implies.12 That is exactly what Eisenman is trying to do, in his own ways of dealing with past, present and future at the same time. Just focussing on the future would definitely lead to incomplete, highly abstract and highly subjective narratives, which is not what Eisenman wants with his work. To show his awareness of temporality, Eisenman also uses his consciousness of time in his observations of exist-ing earlier works of architecture. An example of this is his entry for the IIT Student Centre competition. In a cam-pus repressed by the regime of Mies’ perpendicular grid, Eisenman questions that icon of rationality by distorting, transforming it, changing the field of reference. This puts the buildings in another, more contemporary context; one that is not based on that history of modernist ideology. For Eisenman it is also in this context of meaning and temporality that he can question form and meaning and the relations of presence opposed to absence, solid to void. He has a distinctive opinion concerning presence and absence in relation with meaning in the form of history and memo-ry.

History is not continuous. It is made up of stops and starts, of presences and absence. The presences are the times when history is vital, is ‘running’, is feeding on itself and deriving its energy from its own momentum. The absences are the times when the propulsive organism is dead, the voids in between one ‘run’ of history and the next. These are filled by memory. Where history ends, memory begins.13

Could this sense of absence link memory directly to meaning, and this sense of presence link history directly to form? If this is so for Eisenman, his archaeologies can also be read as a synonym of history; that would make pres-ence/solid/form readable as history bringing up personal, subjective memories to the reader as a text does. Reading beyond the codifying signs includes interpretation (based on personal memory, fantasy and experience) to the story. This presence of the past is indeed a very archaeological interpretation to history and this explains the use of the term ‘archaeology’ instead of ‘history’. At the same time, the clear distinction between history and memory, form and meaning, presence and absence is interesting in this quotation because it could give us a trace of what Eisen-man is doing with his work. If everything that Eisenman physically creates should be established by presence that implies history and what he physically not creates should

be established by absence that implies memory, we should suggest to perform a formal, objective analyses of what is not there, instead of what is there in order to get a glimpse of the artist’s subjective memory and consciousness. At the same time this quotation can be understood in a temporal context, wherein history is interrupted in its flux by a stand-still by memory. As it turns out, there are several subjective interpreta-tions of this very quotation, the truth for Eisenman lies probably in none of them all. The point to be made is that Eisenman expresses his awareness of history and memory in both his writing and his drawing.

READ THIS This could take us back to the purposes of all these archaeologies and philosophical engagements. The main purpose is that Eisenman wants his work to be read inten-sively by all ‘readers’. This public should be divided into two groups of interest. The first group is the majority of the public. It applies to whoever is not really interested in architecture. The huge amounts of physically translated information should activate one’s brain to a search for ones own history and memories when one takes time to encoun-ter a work properly and interprets the work in a personal manner; one should be persuaded to perceive the building in order to create one’s own story with it. The second group is the more architecturally engaged group which tries to un-derstand and analyse a building when it gets in. Eisenman lays out all that has influenced him in the design, by the four archaeologies mentioned earlier++++. He also lays out the philosophical discourse for the ones that are interested in it and are receptive for it. It takes intensive reading of both his designs and writings to obtain a general impression of Eisenman’s own interpretations, questions, hesitations and convictions. Each of his buildings or writings could be and should me seen as a lecture of his in a series yet to be concluded. This piece has brought up with what material Eisen-man is working, and for what purposes. His archaeologies, his awareness of temporality, his and others’ theories and so on, all add up to the subjective, distorted narratives of memory and history, of fiction and reality, by subjective distorted theories. Eisenman tries to employ his readers as students in order to tell them the results of his research, experiences, doubts, struggles, and searches to the answers of questions not to be answered. The complexity lies in the amount of influences, and in the fact that Eisenman does not only tell narratives of the 4 levels of archaeology, also narrates the philosophical convictions. All these influences are hard to untangle from each other, they are all interrelat-ed. Understanding each project in total is impossible; trying to do so is a challenge….

Beyond the Surface - February2009 21


12. S. Allen, Practice architec-ture, technique and represen-tation, Amsterdam, Overseas PA, 2000, p. 68

13. P. Eisenman, The city of artificial excavations; New York, Rizzoli I P, 1994

23

Exploring Steven Holl Jeroen van Rijsbergen

On a cold Sunday in January I took the late afternoon train to visit the Sarphatis-traat Offices in Amsterdam, designed by Steven Holl. I planned to see the creation by daylight and at dusk. Leaving metro station Weesperplein, I set of running along the busy Sarphatistraat, to finally reach number 410. The gate was closed and an unfriendly ‘No entry’ hung on the fence. I couldn’t get a glimpse of the building part Steven Holl designed. On the other building corner the building finally exposed itself, although partly. The perforated copper seemed transparent and gave view to the tree behind it. It gave the façade a mysterious look.

The dusk has almost begun when I reach the other side of the Singelgracht. The offices become completely visible for me; this is where I came for! Its perforated elements attract the attention in the composition, which reminds me on form stud-ies I did in the bachelor. In their frameworks suddenly subtle lightened vases with tulips appear. Behind the other windows it remains vague: it all comes over as a still life.

After a trip with tram 10 to KNSM-island I came back one hour later. At that time darkness fell over the Singelgracht and the windows were lit brightly. The build-ing had changed to a show-box. The façade with all its depth seemed flat now: everything was focused on the interior. It gave the view of a lived through living room. The only elements missing were the inhabitants.

I left the site with an incomplete feeling, curious how it would look when it’s fully in use.

Now, what kind of concept is this –the ‘intertwining?’ It is, I suggest, a symbolical or metaphorical concept: a hermeneutic concept which comes from the inherent poet-izing of radical phenomenological thinking. It is a concept genuinely grounded in our experience of the elemental, the primordial.

David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision 1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty analyzed during his study of phenomenological philosophy the entwining of the senses with the spirit and the world. He describes how the body and the consciousness are related to the world, and how we can perceive the world and the objects in it. Steven Holl has similarities with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This essay deals about this similarities and focuseson the ideas used for the design of the Kiasma Museum.

1. S Holl, Intertwining, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, p. 176.


The Bodily Perception of

Architecture

Jeroen van Rijsbergen

Maurice Merleau-Ponty In Phenomenon of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the theme of the ambiguity of the human and the world. In his study he wants to focus on the original con-nection between the human and the world. ‘The world is never totally knowable. (...) The world cannot be reduced to visibility: it’s visible as well as invisible.’ Here he explains that the world is still in genesis, it’s never finished. That’s why we never have the world visible totally.Merleau-Ponty says, ‘We are on the world, which means we stand out to the world and the objects, but our body is connected to the world. If we want to understand the way in which humanity is positioned into the world, we have to go back to the first experience’ 2 We have to go back to the things themselves, back to the world before this world was thought, represented or captured in notions. The world was there already before understanding of it could start. Merleau-Ponty describes this as the following: ‘The world is what we see (…) Nev-ertheless we have to learn seeing her.’ With this he explains that only what we see is comparable with our knowledge. If that is the case, we have to take possession of it. Merleau-Ponty makes clear the concept of the human and the way they see the world. He states: ‘When we look at things in an objective way, we cannot see the phenomenon behind it. It’s either present or absent.’

‘The world is not the completeness of sand, stone, water and flesh, but she is the web itself of the perceptions based on it.’ This means that the world is not made of single elements but it is the combination of them that makes it. Merleau-Ponty calls this combination ‘la chair du monde’. He describes this chair (flesh3) as an element of being, as the object or subject and also of the visible or invisible. The flesh is not only the body; the body is also the web of phenomenology and the retraction of it. As an example Merleau-Ponty uses the phenomenon of touching one hand with the other. This makes clear the two appearances of our body: the tactile experience and the touching experience. The relation between the two hands is also reversible: the touching hand can be felt as touched and the feeling hand as feeling hand. But I cannot feel my own feeling and I cannot touch my own touching. This phenomenon is the main feature of flesh.4 In his writings Merleau-Ponty says that it’s not right that talking about perception is more interesting than perception itself. According to him perception is underestimated. He shows that assumptions like the identity of depth in relation to breadth and height are misconceptions that prevent a potential rich experience.1

Body Merleau-Ponty states in his study that the body is im-portant for the perception of what we see and experience: ‘Perception is an activity which only happens through my body which is in the world. Through my body I live the world, it lets me perceive the world without itself.’In our thinking there is often a separation between the body and the consciousness. The perception is addressed to the domain of the body and the reflection to that of the con-sciousness. The way in which we perceive and interpret the world by perception and reflection is related to the fact that besides having the body we essentially are a body.This makes that our thinking is dependent on our body. It is the physical experience that makes us human. The relation between the body, the consciousness and the world around it gives us the perception of the world. This perception is determined through the place of the body in space and time. According to Merleau-Ponty a person gives meaning to the world out of his body, because ‘through the place of the body in space and time the perception is determined.’ This means that our perception is dependent on the quality of our body. Merleau-Ponty describes in his manuscript The Visible and the Invisible a new conception for the human body; the so called chiasm, which can be translated with crossing-over. This term indicates the combining of two elements. These are the subjective experience and the objective existence. His term for this new conception of the body is ‘flesh’. ‘It is the ultimate notion which provides access to subjective experience and objective existence.’ 4 ‘The chi-asm is the element which constitutes both us and the world. It is a primary element that enables us to understand the meaning of humanity.’5 Through the chiasm we can grasp the humanity.

Steven Holl Steven Holl has used the way of thinking of Merleau-Ponty in his way of working. He compares phenomenology with architecture: while phenomenology deals about the study of essences, architecture is capable of placing these essences to the background. Form, space and light are the instruments that together can be used to get a higher experi-ence in architecture. 1 Where we can watch paintings and leave them after-wards, where music can be turned off when we don’t like it, architecture doesn’t offer this opportunities; architecture is around us. Architecture offers a strong relation with com-bining materials, textures, colors and light. Together they form the crossing of something flat and a three-dimensional space.The merging of differences in depth together with their qualities in material and light forms the basis for a so called intertwining perception. Holl says ‘we must

2. M. Merleau-Ponty, C. Smith, Phenomenology of Perception: an introduction, USA, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2002, p. 544.

3. www.mythosandlogos.com/MerleauPonty.html (December 2008).

4. M. Merleau-Ponty, edited by C. Lefort, A. Lingis, trans-lated by H. E. Barnes, The Visible and the Invisible, USA, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p.344.

5. S. Holl, Steven Holl: thought, matter and experi-ence 1998-2002, El Croquis, Mexico, Arquitectos Publish-ing, 2002, p. 181.


The Bodily Perception of Architecture - Jeroen van Rijsbergen

consider space, light, color, geometry, detail and material in an intwining continuum.’ Perception cannot be divided into separated terms as geometry and sensation. It is the very combination of present elements that offers the enmeshed experience.1

Body ‘The body is the very essence of our being and our spa-tial perceptions.’6 Holl considers the body as the essential feature of the architects’ conception of space. The way he uses material, color, light and emphasizes the details of a building makes it understandable in a phenomenological way. Approaching to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy, for the architect the body is not only the way we exist in the world but also the subject of the architectur-al perception. The body experiences the space. It is through the body that one is able to connect himself to the space. ‘Space is only perceived when a subject describes it.’ Holl mentions. Holl says that an architect makes a building in his body to study it. Movement, balance, scale and distance are per-ceived by the body in unconsciousness as a tension in the muscles. When there is a correlation between the building and the body of the perceiver, ‘the experience reflects the physical perception of the maker.’ Architecture is a direct connection between the body of the architect and the body of the inhabitant or visitor. The understanding of built things means for Steven Holl the unconsciousness touching of an object or building with someones body and the projection of someone’s physical body on the space in question. ‘We feel satisfaction and protection when the body discovers its resonance in space.’ For Holl every situation on earth gives another starting point for a design. His architecture is always connected to the situation. Holl wants to find the first concept of a proj-ect in which the essence of the unique architectonic pos-sibilities is present. He develops this in conceptual figures, which are very important in the process. These figures lead to the essence of the architectonic work: the presence of an organic connection between concept and shape. For Steven Holl this is the way to develop new ideas in architecture. Holl is able to bring us together in new ways so that our bodies start moving and the place with them. He stresses the importance of the presence of people, of the body in a building or space. Only through the presence of a moving person the architectural space is perceivable. Only then the building is really finished.

6. S. Holl, Twofold meaning, Tokyo, Kenchiku Bunka Vol. 52 No. 610, 1997, p. 182

Fig. 1. The crossing inside building Fig. 2. The lines of city, culture and nature in relation to the Kiasma Museum





Fig. 3, 4 & 5. Changing perspectives while walking through the building

Perception is the essence of things, we only have access to the things and the world through the intermediary of our body. When an architectonic work is successfully connected to the situation, a so called ‘third condition’ will develop. This condition is joined with expression and idea of situa-tion.’ Steven Holl says.

Kiasma Museum The design of The Kiasma Museum is developed accord-ing to the chiasmatic relationship between the body and the world, as Merleau-Ponty describes this. Kiasma is the Greek word for crossing over. The design of the building is based on a diagram of a crossing called ‘chiasmic inter-twining.’ The buildings’ shape is divided into two volumes that cross each other. Inside the building one can really experience this crossing: two routings overlap here, each to its own part of the building. See figure 1.

Situation The Kiasma Museum is embedded in the centre of the Finnish capital. It is clear that, with choosing this situation, Steven Holl gives the building a unique starting point for the design. This is because the building is placed on the crossing where three primary elements come together. See figure 2.

a) The line of nature is stressed by the fact that Helsinki is situated on a northern longitude. Due to the open connec-tion with the Toolo Bay, horizontal light can easily be re-flected towards the museum. In the middle of the building a warped wall catches all the low horizontal light. The water of Toolo Bay is extended through the building and ends in a pond on the westside. In this pond the light can be reflected out of the museum into the night. Visitors are invited to enter the building by the glowing light that comes out of the building on the westside. This effect is established by sandblasted glass that spreads the light.

b) Secondly the museum is connected with a line of culture. Along Toolo Bay another cultural institution is located, named Finlandia Hall. The Kiasma Museum is placed in such way that it follows the horizontally orien-tated shape of the Finlandia Hall.

c) At last the cities grid is used in the design. The cities grid system can be found in the central part of Helsinki. The Kiasma Museum is located just outside this grid, on the border with the northern part of the city. The basic theme of the museum is about the exhibition of artworks in particular spaces and the performance of the viewer that experiences it. Because of this The Kiasma Museum contains a wide range of spatial experiences.

7. S. Holl, Parallax, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2000, p. 384.

8. www.kiasma.fi/index.php?id=326&L=1 (January 2009).

Fig. 6. The stairs with their curved shapes

Fig. 7. White walls and ceil-ings for the ultimate focus on the artworks

Fig. 8. A sand-cast brass handle, designed as a hand shake Fig. 9. A sand-cast alu-minium light fitting

TiBeyond the Surface - February 200928


Movement When we walk through a space, the perspectives we see are moving with us. The objects that are close to us are shifting more than the objects far away from us. This phe-nomenon is called ‘parallax.’7 In The Kiasma Museum this sense of movement is a major design issue. In the building there is an overlap of perspectives between orthogonal and curved spaces. This overlap results in a fluid movement of the body through the building. This is showed in picture 3, 4 and 5. With every step the visitor makes, the perspec-tive changes. By walking through the building, the body redefines the space. Steven Holl has worked with the spatial element of the curved shape of the building, the ramp and the light effects in it to investigate the experience of the moving body. The curved walls give the building a poetic view. In figure 6 the curves look like the number eight: a continuous line which forces the visitor to continue its way through the museum.

Materiality The exhibition rooms are generally rectangular with one curved wall. This type of shape offers a quiet atmosphere for the artworks to be exhibited.1 The walls and ceilings are white plastered. This color makes the walls neutral which distracts the attention from them and gives way to a total focus on the artworks. Steven Holl has inserted the artwork within the space. In this way the architectural space is being connected with the exhibition and experiencing of the art-works. The floors are made of dark grey coloured concrete. Skirting boards are left away, this to keep the simplicity of the white walls. Together they embody a roughness that is typical for contemporary art to show them to advantage8 as figure 7 shows.

Light The museum contains 25 galleries that all have some-thing to do with natural light. Because of the difference in entering the rooms, the light has a wide range of qualities. There have been used shading devices for the glazing to give each gallery its own atmosphere. Steven Holl de-scribes it as follows: ‘In the journey from one room to the other we experience the transformation of light as data.’6

In most of the exhibition rooms the light enters from the roof. This is a way to keep the attention to the exhibited works. In this way visitors cannot be distracted by the outside world on the background. Most of the glass is sand-blasted, which results in a so called prismatic surface that refracts the entering light beautifully. This spread of the light results in a quieter atmosphere in the rooms where the artworks are exposed. The other glazed walls of the build-ing are steel curtain walls.



Details Details as the toilet furniture, fittings and door handles are all designed by Steven Holl. He considers door handles as the hand shakes of the building. The door handles are made of sandblasted steel. This makes them more inviting to open. The steel gives more weight to the door and might indicate that behind the door there is another interesting exhibition: a trick to let people move through the building. See figures 8 and 9. The windows have frames made of steel which are placed mainly in the direction of the routing through the building: also a decision to lead visitors to the right way in the museum: see figure 5. The doors of the rooms are painted yellow while the info desk and cloakroom are made red. In the café and museum shop the ceiling has a reddish brown paint. All these colors are used as contrast with the overload of white plaster, to make them recognizable for visitors.

Conclusion The Kiasma Museum in Helsinki is the ultimate example of a building that can be experienced with the per-ceiver’s body. Steven Holl translated the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty in this architectonic work. Careful use of details and materials resulted in a dynamic, spatial built form that answers the rich location where it is situated. The building has the shape of two hands clasping each other, an architectonic way for inviting the public. The Kiasma Museum shows that architecture, art and culture are not separated disciplines but can work together inside the city. It has resulted in the ultimate synthesis of building and landscape: a Kiasma.

31

Berlin…... Mike Schäfer

June 2006, Berlin. It was a sunny day. A friend of mine and me raced on our rental bike towards the Jewish Museum. We were in Berlin for two days and because we both study architecture we planned to see as much architecture as possible. I turn the street left and saw the museum standing at the left side of the street.

I don’t like it!

Don’t get me wrong, the material composition and detailing are on a high level. But the shape, the windows, the relation to me. I just can’t grasp it. It does not affect me the way a building of that reputation is supposed to affect me. After checking the exterior I entered the building and got faced with three different routings through the building.

Wow!

The three hallways all look great. Their perspectives are strange, guessing their dimensions are almost impossible, but that gives the hallway a great spatiality. I choose to take the right hallway, towards a big massive door. Opening it is easier said than done, but after showing some muscle the door opens for me. A dark room now lies in front of me. Curious as I am, I enter. Cold, dark, humid. I feel discomforted in here. The closing door erases the last rays of light.

Where am I? I can’t see a thing!

Slowly my eyes adjust to the dark. I’m not alone in the room, I see more people struggling with the lack of light. The room is not completely dark for me anymore, but it has a strange feeling of gray. Like the light is present in the room, but too afraid to show itself. When I look up I see the light entering through an opening in the ceiling. Finally some light, unreachable, but present. Suddenly flashes of movies, pictures, stories ap-pear. Flashes of horror, WWII, Jews, trains. Flashes of holocausts.

Why do I get these images?

I came to the museum to check the architecture, not to learn about the holocaust. But somehow all I can think of is the horrors that happened in WWII. What a museum, what a room, what an experience.

I like it!


When I think about architecture, images come to my mind. Many of these images are connected to my training and work as an architect. They contain the professional knowledge about architecture that I have gathered over the years. Some of the other images have to do with my child-hood. There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of differ-ent moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walked along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly room in the house.(…) Now I feel like going on and talking about the door handles that came after the handle on my aunt’s garden gate, about the ground and the floors, about soft asphalt warmed by the sun, about the flagstones covered with chestnut leaves in the autumn, and about the doors that closed in such different ways, one replete and dignified, another with a thin, cheap clatter, others hard, implacable, and intimidating… Memories like these contain the deepest architectural experience that I know. 1

1. P. Zumthor, Thinking archi-tecture, Basel, Birkhäuser-Publishers for architecture, 2006 Second edition, p.7-8

MemoryPeter Zumthor and the Phenomenology of Transsubjectivity

Mike Schäfer


Memory The introduction text comes from a lecture given by Peter Zumthor in 1988. There he started his lecture with a personal memory from his childhood. A memory that con-tains a detailed description of his environment, the objects and the materials. But in this text we also find a deeper meaning behind the environment, the objects and the materials. He talked about different moods, heavy doors, intimidating doors, dark corridors, brightly rooms. Moods of protections, safety and fear. These memories and moods are important for Zumthor. It is, as he calls, ‘the deepest architectural experience’ that he knows. Memories are very important for us in the past, present and future. They shape our personality and are the cradle of our future decisions. In architecture experience, memories shape environments by the past experiences of a person. They are personal and different for everyone. Memories like described by Zumthor should be strange for us. We didn’t live them, so we can’t know about them. But yet we understand his story of moods. We recognize some details from our own memories, even while memories are personal and different for everyone. So what is this common under-standing of these memories, this universal understanding of moods? And how does Zumthor uses this understanding in his architecture?

TranssubjectivityWe can find these phenomena of the universal in the writ-ings of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In his book The Poetic of Space he describes this phenomena of the universal understanding, as ‘transsubjectivity’2. To un-derstand this transsubjectivity we first need to know more about what Bachelard calls the ‘poetic image.’3 About the poetic image Bachelard writes: ‘Consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object. But seize its specific reality.’4 Bachelard is not talking about an image like a picture or a movie, but about the essence of the image, the feelings behind it. To illustrate the poetic image we can think of an image which is common to us all: alone in the dark. When young we all had a moment when we were alone in the dark. Some experienced it at home in their bedroom, others outside in a forest. Yet we all felt alone, scared. Fear overcame us, numbed us, forcing us to hide away, or run as fast as we could without looking back. It are these feelings that are at the ‘specific reality’ of an image. So it are the feelings, triggered by the image of be-ing alone in the dark that is the poetic image. To understand where the poetic image begins, Bachelard writes: ‘a sudden image, a flare-up of being in the imagination. A direct product of the heart, soul and being of man apprehended in his actuality’5 and: ‘the images comes before knowledge.’6 The image manifests itself quick and, triggered by any-

thing, comes without warning. These images are simple, you don’t see the form or details, you experience the basics, the feelings, the specific reality. The moment the image enters the mind is the moment the image takes its form. So the poetic image is an ‘image’ of the essence that comes quickly, it is the mood as described in the memories of Zumthor. It is a simple image and in this simplicity we find the cause of the transsubjectivity.

This crisis of the simple level of a new image, contains the entire paradox of a phenomenology of the imagination, which is: how can an image, at times very unusual, appear to be a concentration of the entire psyche? How-with no preparation- can this singular, short-lived, event consti-tute by the appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other minds in other heard, despite all the barriers of common sense, all the disciplined school content in their immobility? (…) The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression it is youthful language.7

The simplicity is the linking part in transsubjectivity, it is the language everyone understands. What happens afterwards, the forming of the image, is different for each person, but the simple image is not. These simple images come from within our self, they’re the basic feelings within the essence of mankind (happiness, joy, fear, sad, etc.). Feelings we all experience throughout our lives in different situations. Because we all understand these feelings, we can all understand the simple images, the poetic images. And this is why we can all understand the memories as Zumthor describes them and the architectural translations of these memories in his buildings. Now that we understand the principles of transsubjectiv-ity, we can focus on the fact how Zumthor implies these principles in reality. But before we can do that, there is one last step left. We first need to find out how we can become aware of the phenomena ‘transsubjectivity’ In The Poetic of Space Bachelard writes about understanding transsub-jectivity by saying: ‘this cannot be understood, through the habits of subjective reference alone (…) because the poetic image is essentially variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive.’8 So working with the poetic im-age means understanding the variable factor. To do this, one must understand the essence of the being and be aware of the origin of the poetic image. Like told before ‘The image manifests itself quick and, triggered by anything, comes without warning out of the heart and soul before they’re given to the mind.’ The heart and soul are the origin of the poetic image, while the essence is the feelings behind that image. So the speed of their creation and the fact that their origin lies within the heart and soul, and not in the rational

2. G. Bachelard, Poetics of space: the classical look at how we experience intimate places, Boston, Beacon press, 1994, p. XIX

3. Ibid.,

4. Ibid.,

5. Ibid., p. XVIII

6. Ibid., p. XX

7. Ibid., p. XVIII-XIX

8. Ibid,. p. XIX

Memory - Mike Schäfer


mind, together with the fact that the essence is about feel-ings, makes the poetic image a variable product and not a fixed product that produces the same outcome every time. No, it is different for each person and every moment. Fur-ther on Bachelard write: ‘the creative consciousness must systematically be associated with the most fleeting product of that consciousness, the poetic image.’9 In short, what Bachelard calls: ‘the act of creative consciousness’10 is, as the name already suggests, being conscious of the poetic image. Being aware of the feelings an image can summon, being aware of the origin, of its speed of appearance, of the variational essence. In the beginning of this essay, Zumthor writes about a door handle: ‘That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of differ-ent moods and smells.’11 A perfect example, to show that Zumthor is aware of the variational essence of the poetic image of the door handle. It is not the door handle specifi-cally that he is aware of. No, he is focusing on the entrance. The matter of coming inside or going outside. The thresh-old between interior and exterior. He knows that you leave one world behind and that you exchange it for another world. And by being aware of this, we find the creative consciousness in Zumthor work. He understands that the transition factor of an entrance needs to be designed to its function, not just to the transition, but to the function where the transition leads to.

Entrance In practice we can find a comparison of two different entrances in The Bruder Klaus Chapel (Wachendorf, Ger-many) and The Saint Benedict Chapel (Graubünden, Swit-zerland). Both of these buildings are chapels; places for peace and serenity. The difference between the two chapels is that The Saint Benedict Chapel is meant for a gathering of people to pray, while The Bruder Klaus Chapel is meant to pray alone. This difference in function can be seen in the two entrances. The Saint Benedict Chapel has an invit-ing entrance. It is coming out of the building towards you. Stairs and railings are guiding you towards the door. The materials are soft and friendly: all gestures to invite the people inside the chapel. The entrance of The Bruder Klaus Chapel on the other hand, is focusing on the individual. The door is thick like a vault door; force has to be used to enter the chapel. The triangle shaped door has been made to only let one person enter; it is the barrier between the sheltered inner space and the outdoor: massive and small. The differences in function can even be found in the de-tail of the door handle itself. In The Saint Benedict Chapel the cast iron door handle resembles a handle like the ones that can be found in old doors. Door handles that needed big keys to open. They bring back memories, memories of old houses or barns. Memories that mostly bring up

9. Ibid,. p. XIX

10. Ibid,. p. XIX

11. P. Zumthor, Thinking archi-tecture, p. 7-8

Fig. 1. The Bruder Klaus Chapel Fig. 2. The Saint Benedict Chapel



feelings of home, a place where you are welcome, safe and happy, just as the chapel is trying to be. The door handle of The Bruder Klaus Chapel is different; it’s a lever that adds to the idea of a vault door. While opening the heavy door, you hear the sound of the steel mechanics squeaking as you push the lever down. It gives us memories of protection and safety, just as the chapel tries to be.

Sound The squeaking of the lever, to open the door, brings us to another example, in the way Zumthor is aware of ‘the cre-ative act.’ In Thinking Architecture Zumthor speaks about a memory from his past:

…what always comes first to my mind are the sounds when I was a boy, the noises my mother made in the kitchen. They made me feel happy. If I was in the front room I knew my mother was at home because I could hear her banging about with pots and pans and what have you.12

In this memory Zumthor speaks about sounds, and even more important, about the feelings these sounds invokes. Like told in his memory of the entrance of his aunt’s gar-den, ‘I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet.’13 Here he links the sound of the path to the approaching into a world of moods. He also links sound to feelings like not being alone, or to a door that is offering protection, because its sounds ‘heavy.’ A good example, to illustrate how con-scious Zumthor uses sound in his design, is The Thermal Baths in Vals (Germany). The thermal baths are designed as a place that ´focuses on the quiet, primary experience of bathing, cleansing, relaxing in the water.´14 To emphasize these atmospheres, Zumthor uses the qualities of sound. These qualities of sound show us that the sound of water echoes between the hard stone walls of the thermal baths. The splatter of water of someone slowly walking into a bath, ´the unique acoustics of bubbling water in a world of stone.´15 These sounds show us the composition of the thermal baths. The echoing gives us the feeling where in-side a mountain, where we are, it’s quiet and peaceful. The splatter of water reminds us we are not alone; someone else is also relaxing inside the ‘mountain.’

Light The water in these baths, not only reminds us we are not alone. It also reflects the light that enters through an open-ing between the roof and the wall, back at the wall. The reflection dances on the wall, because of the moving water. Here the light, just like the sound, emphasizes the atmo-spheres in the baths. Another example, where light plays an important role in the making of an atmosphere, is The Kolumba Museum in Cologne. This museum is ‘a shadow


12. P. Zumthor, Atmospheres, Basel, Birkhäuser-Publishers for architecture, 2006 Second edition, p.29

13. Ibid.

14. Therme bad in vals www.therme-vals.ch/zumthor (2005)

15. Ibid.

Fig. 3. Thermal Baths Vals

Fig. 4. Kolumba Museum


16. Project Description in the Catalogue of the International Architecture Biennale Venice 2002, www.kolumba.de (1997)

17. Ibid.

18. P.Zumthor, Atmospheres, p.45

19. Idib., p. 51


the difference in brightness between the niche and the halls as great as I remembered it, and I was disappointed by the dull light on the wall paneling. This difference between the reality and my memories did not surprise me. I have never been a good observer, and I have never really wanted to be.19

In these memories, Zumthor speaks about a place he visited in the past that he remembers with beautiful details. But in fact, when he visited the place again, these beautiful details weren’t there. He replaced the real memories with a romantic version of it. But to create a romantic version, in the first place there must be a quality in that space. Maybe it was a sunny day in June, maybe it was the presence of his wife or maybe he just had a wonderful day. It will be some-thing we never know, nor it’s importance what it was. What really matters is that there where qualities in that environ-ment that recalled memories by Zumthor. Memories that replaced the real environment by a strong romantic version of it. This is a process that happens when strong memories are invoked. These memories are emphasized and create an atmosphere. For a museum, a church, a theater or other functions that possess big symbolic value, the imposing of memories, and the emphasizing of those memories, at-tributes to the desired atmosphere. These buildings need to leave an impression. That’s why the memories are strongly present. But the bar Zumthor visited has a different func-tion. Normally a bar has no big symbolic value, no need to leave a big impression. A bar needs to host and entertain guests. It needs a comforting atmosphere; it must be a place where you meet people and enjoy a drink. Here the func-tion asks for a reserved imposing of atmospheres, by means of memories. Here the atmosphere comes from the people, the interaction. If we look at a house, we see an atmosphere of domestic, safety and intimacy. Strong impressions have no place in a home. The house is a place of neutrality. So memories stay reserved and attribute to an atmosphere, they don’t create one. Now we can see the importance of the balance between the function and the quality of imposing an atmosphere. This balance is not a fixed given. It is variable, even per-sonal. Its function determines what to impose or reserve, to conduct or to find out yourself. An example to illustrate the importance of this balance is The Saint Benedict Chapel. This chapel presents an inviting, warm and peaceful atmo-sphere. An atmosphere we also find around the entrance door. Like told before, it is a wooden door with an iron cast handle. The wood is somewhat weathered on the lower part and vertically ornamented to give it texture. If you are not aware of the phenomenology of the entrance, you will pass it without notice. But when you leave the chapel you leave

museum which will evolve only in the course of the day and the seasons.’16 It is to show the gothic ruins of an old church, on which the museum is build on top off. Zumthor idea for the museum is to ‘allow the visitors to immerse themselves in the presence of their memories and offers them their own experiences on their way.’17 The light only penetrates the building by the ‘filtered wall.’ This filtered light, and the evolving character of the light, always change the experience of the gothic ruins. In this way visitors are aware of the ruins. The light makes the ruins changing, moving, alive. They give the visitor the feeling they are liv-ing the memory; they are a part of it.

Balance The details of the entrance, the qualities of sounds and the awareness given by light, are only a few examples of how Zumthor uses specific elements to invoke memories. Memories that are accomplished by feelings. Memories that create a specific atmosphere. But one part, and maybe the most important part, is still missing: balance. The balance between the function and the quality of imposing an atmo-sphere. Before we go into detail, we first need to under-stand what this balance means and why it is important. To illustrate, Zumthor recalls a memory of a bar that he and his wife visited in the past:

Entering through the narrow porch, which, as it turned out, was build from the inside behind the main door like a wooden shed, we found ourselves in a large high-ceilinged, hall-like room, it’s walls and ceiling lined with dark, mat, gleaming wood: regularly placed frames and panels, wain-scoting, cornices, indented joists resting on brackets with ornamental scrolls. The atmosphere of the room seemed dark, even gloomy, until our eyes grew accustomed to the light. The gloom soon gave way to a mood of gentleness. The daylight entering through the tall, rhythmically placed windows lit up certain sections of the room, while other parts, which did not benefit from the reflection of the light from the paneling, lay withdrawn in half-shadow. As soon as I entered the room my eye was caught by an extension in the centre of the long outer wall, a semi-circular bulge large enough to accommodate five tables along the curved wall by the windows. The floor of the room-height niche was on a slightly higher level than the rest of the hall. No doubt about it, I thought, this was where I wanted to sit.18

After a while Zumthor revisited the bar again and wrote:

I revisited the hall with the niche in the end wall that I liked so much and which I tried to describe earlier. I was no longer sure whether the floor of the niche was really on a higher level than the rest of the hall. It was not. Nor was


with the feeling of a warm inviting and peaceful place. If you start to think where these feelings come from, you start to think of memories that are invoked by your visit. Memo-ries triggered by the appearance of the door (of course the door is not the only element that adds to these memories, but to keep the example clear, we focus mainly on the door). So here we find a beautiful balance in the effect. The door creates an atmosphere, without consciously being present. A more present door is the door of The Bruder Klaus Chapel. This church invokes stronger feelings than The Saint Benedict Chapel. Here the heavy and thick ‘vault door,’ the dramatized small and dark entrance leading to a big middle space that shows light from above and ‘stars’ around us and the smell of fire and the sound of raindrops on the floor add to the feeling of protection, sanctuary and serenity. Like told before the door is heavy and must be opened with a lever. Here the door is much more present. The balance is different now, here you’re more aware of the door and its meaning. This because the function needs a strong reaction of the visitor.

Memory So is the balance in the work of Zumthor right? This is a question we can’t answer together, but must be answered by yourself. Me personally, I have been to The Bruder Klaus Chapel, and I left it with strong memories and strong feelings. The journey began at the car and ended in the cha-pel; a theatric journey where the buildings shrink and grow at every corner. Until the point I stood inside the chapel, numbed by the serenity and tranquility of the place, it just stopped raining. All the classical elements were present in the chapel: fire, water, earth and wind. A woman was pray-ing. This sight, the atmosphere, the serenity of that place; it made me humble. Although the chapel, and especially the inside, was the reason I came to the church, I couldn’t disturb the serenity of the place by making a photo. It felt wrong to take this moment away from the praying woman, this moment of peace and serenity. As I write about my memories of the chapel, I realize the danger of romanticizing my memories in the way Zumthor described before. To be honest I don’t think that is the case, nor do I care about it. I believe Zumthor succeeded in creat-ing a balance necessary for that place. The Bruder Klaus Chapel needs to invoke strong memories and feelings, for it is its function to create a strong sense of serenity and tranquility. Just as The Saint Benedict Chapel posseses al-most hidden memories, for it needs to be inviting and open, almost domestic. If Zumthor really succeeded in creating a balance, for me it would come clear after visiting The Bruder Klaus Chapel a second time. But Zumthor’s story of his second visit makes me reluctant to go back soon. For now, I will live on, on the memories inside of me.


39

Memory of the Visible and the Invisible.

The Delft Faculty of Architecture BuildingAlex Den-Hsien Chen

the red fire every students passion the white smoke every students dreams i was therei am part of it it is part of me the passions and dreams still there so instantly is it gone i was watching i was lost i was crying i was like a homeless child

time has passed by my memory still there

the same old smell the same old site

building might be torn down will anyone reminiscence of it

what is going to stand there maybe I won’t be able to see it in person

maybe nobody cares but it will always be part of my memory

a giant has just awaken from sleepwinds sweep away the leaves and dusts on him

he stands up again like new there are a few tasks waiting for him to do

he is even stronger than ever before and will never fall down again

The presence of light is the most fundamental connect-ing force of the universe. At the time of the decoupling of light and matter the universe becomes transparent to light.1 Light is one of the most influential elements, which is indispensible to everyday life on earth. Light is a very im-portant aspect for the comprehension of one’s environment and it can change our way to perceive things in different points of view. Light enables people to see things clearly, but it can also blind a person when it is intensified. Light is intangible. People can find light evidently when it is trapped in dust, smoke or water droplets, as well as when someone stands under the sun. One can see their shadow extending out from their feet because without the light there is no shadow.

The light is a very important element of the church architecture. Church architecture especially is having the strongest relationship with working with light. In churches the light is the crucial element on the right spot to stress the power of God and the poetic sense of the space. Light not only has a spiritual meaning in the church, but it is also a tool to shape the space lyrically. Therefore the light praises the religion (God and church) into a poetic space.

1. S. Holl, Parallax, New York, Birkhauser, 2000, p. 111


Language of LightsSpeaking Poetically in Religious Light

Alex Den-Hsein Chen

Light has been used differently in the modern churches nowadays. There are not too many restrictions on the sym-metry form and decoration or boundaries of belief. There-fore, this essay have four very good examples of modern churches; The Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle designed by Steven Holl, The Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamps by Le Corbusier, La Tourette in Lyon also designed by Le Corbusier and The Church of Light in Osaka by Tadao Ando; each architect and each piece of architecture shows a different interpretation of light to provide the concepts that those four examples are trying to show. I am going to talk about these three architects; Steven Holl, Le Corbusier and Tadao Ando. They are all from a different cultural background and country and they all have made successful designs for the modern church. They all have their own way of interpreting the relation of God as light. This essay shows how they are revealing the light with spiritual meaning within the spaces of the churches they designed.

‘Natural light is an essential force interlocked with time. The sun arcs through the sky each day at a different angle; the season’s change plays out in the vessel of the house like a volumetric sundial.’2 Also, light is about timing. The moment of light in different seasons of the year, time of day is all very different. In many great artist works the beauty of light is seen to change the natural or artificial beauty of things into different perspectives in different time periods. All that these artists are trying to do is just to catch a mo-ment of the light. They are showing the viewers how light, as an alternative tool, can carve into the objects or intro-duce a sense of mystery in the moment of experience. Light transforms the space into different perspectives in time. ‘Light’ is an important element in churches and its related typologies, as it is often referenced to God and his supreme wisdom that gives people the absolute ability to be inevitably moved by His presence. In most of the tradition-al Gothic churches, natural light tends to penetrate through rose windows from high above and through the iconic stained glasses from the sides. As a result, the spaces inside the church are defined by the sources of light. At the first God made the heaven and the earth. And the earth was waste and without form; and it was dark on the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God was moving on the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God, looking on the light, saw that it was good: and God made a division between the light and the dark, naming the light, Day, and the dark, Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.3

From this, one may deduce that the spatial experience of church architecture must act according to the Holy Bible and the religious doctrine clues or traces explore Christ’s decree with to the god country’s imagination. However, ‘the light’ as a symbol of the God incarnation, the way light is introduced in the church construction, may be regarded as the glorious god arrival. It obtains sanctifying using of light, which becomes perceivable when processing through the spatial atmosphere.

Steven HollChapel of St. Ignatius (Alternative light) The Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle University has a very clear concept for alternative light. The building is conceived as a stone box containing seven bottles of light. The fundamental concept of the seven light bottles is a metaphor for God creating the earth in six days and ‘on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made’.4 The entire church is lit by the seven light bottles which reflect the light into space. Each bottle works like a lens, spreading light on a field. The light in the bottles and the light on the field and lens are mixed up together and each of the colors of the lenses and fields are compensating each other. The different colors of lights are shaping the space of the church. The church space can be seen as a very private and individual dialogue of a visitor with each space and with the whole church. This approach of seven different elements combined into one complex experience of light is an alternative to the tradi-tional way of receiving light in churches.

2. S. Holl, House: Black Swan Theory, NY, Princeton Archi-tectural, 2007, p. 12

3. Bible, The Old Testament, Genesis, New International Version, Gen. 1:1-5

4. Bible, The Old Testament, Genesis, New International Version, Gen. 2:2

Fig. 1. Concept drawing of Chapel of St. Ignatius


Language of Lights - Alex Den-Hsien Chen

Also, a spiritual life is a series of light and darkness that comes from the manifestation of the divine. The design of the chapel incorporates skylights and pigmentation to create seven different qualities of light corresponding to different programmatic elements:1. Procession – natural sunlight 2. Narthex – red field with green lens3. Nave – yellow field with blue lens; blue field with yellow lens 4. Blessed Sacr ament – orange field with purple lens 5. Choir – green field with red lens 6. Reconciliation Chapel – purple field with orange lens 7. Bell Tower and pond – projecting reflecting night light

The shining light through the stained glass of traditional churches tells the story of Christ and the light also plays an important role behind the story. ‘This then is the message which we have heard of Him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’5 The light is telling the visitors the story of God and is leading them to him. The light is also God. Light can come from different sources. The sun is the source of natural light. Reflections of light are another form of light source. ‘Not all light is the same. There is light that is produced and there is light that is reflected. The sun produces light. The moon reflects light. Without the sun the moon would be dark. And so it is with Gods church. The church is not the light…the church does not produce the light…the church only reflects the light of Jesus Christ.’6

In The Chapel of St. Ignatius the sun does not shine directly into the chapel. The architect is expanding the prin-ciple of the stained glass windows beyond the traditional way of expressing the spiritual meaning through stories. He is using seven bottles with different colors to reflect the light. The natural white light has been added the color of the wall which differentiates each space and different themes of the space in the chapel. This is an abstract way of telling the story of God in a poetic and spatial sense.

The gleam of mineral colors and flashing facets of crystals. Gems to be sought and set; to forever play with light to mans delight, in never-ending beams of purest green, or red or blue or yellow, and all that lives between.7

Every person has a different interpretation of his/her perceptions of God. The color is just a metaphor of God playing different roles or forms in everyone’s life. The es-sence of God is never changed although the forms or colors may be different. After all, they all from the same sources which the natural light.

The seven bottles of light are not only embodied in the metaphor on the spiritual level, but they are also extend-ing the idea of the application of light within the interior environment. The lights and the reflected lights are for the aim of different qualities and both specifically emphasize to each space in the chapel. Each of the colored light volumes reflects another aspect of Catholic worship.

Le Corbusier Notre-Dame-du- Haut (Maternal light)Notre-Dame-du-Haut is the most notable modern church in the world. Conveying the architectural statement of Le Corbusier, it rejects traditional decorative elements like paintings and sculptures of biblical stories and figures in favor of more abstract symbols of religion. ‘Here we will build a monument dedicated to nature and we will make it our lives purpose.’8 The chapel is also a magnificent work of art, in which the architecture, the sculpture, the painting and the poetry converge. The interior of the chapel is like the womb, offering warmth, silence and peace. Once visitors enter the church, the thickness of the wall has completely cut off the worries from the outside world. The walls have isolated the inner space of the church into the different world. The architecture itself is a protecting shelter for the people within the church. The light perme-ates the church spaces in various ways. The colored glass and the curving ceiling are adding the richness and spe-cial effect to the natural light. The way in which the light shines through colored windows brings the color into the church, which makes the space more lively and vivid; the colors especially stand out more on the white background. The gradation in light effect of the light through the gap between the curved ceiling and the thick wall seems like the sunrise at the horizon.

5. Bible, The Old Testament, John, New International Ver-sion, John. 1:5

6. Pastor Lassman, Reflect the Light of Jesus, Isaiah 60:1-6, Listen

7. F. L. Wright, An Ameri-can Architecture, ed. Edgar Kaufmann (New York: Horizon Press, 1955), p. 96.

8. Le Corbusier , Ronchamp Chapel, Ronchamp by 1955

Fig. 2. Interior space of the light bottle Fig.3. Color glass window of Notre-Dame-du- Haut



The shell has been put on walls which are absurdly but practically thick. Inside them however are reinforced concrete columns. The shell will rest on these columns but it will not touch the wall. A horizontal crack of light of 10cm wide will amaze. The place is truly astounding, very impressive.9

Sometimes direct and other times indirect, the light falls into the space through different ways, enlightening the spir-itual sense of the space. The most dramatic feature is the tiny slit of light between the top of the wall and the roof. The ‘hovering’ effect of the roof seems almost magical and heightens the drama of its curvilinear shape. Light first reflects on the ceiling, then on the walls and later the light fills the whole space. Instantly, the indoor space emanates a religious, mystical atmosphere. ‘Everything is white, inside and out.’ However, the brightness of the whitewash is heightened by several vivid touches of color, such as those splashed on the enameled door to the south. Both inside and outside the chapel, color is present to accentuate the white stippled surfaces, against which color stands out sharply: ‘in order to truly perceive white, carefully ordered polychrome forms must also be present.’10 The light entering through various little light ap-ertures into the space creates a mystical sense with the light change effect in different spaces. The light has softened the entire shape and the inner space. The church ingeniously combines the architecture form and the light into one. The peaceful and softness of the maternal light are making the visitors feel relieved. Not only just the light brings the warmth feeling in the space of the church; also the thickness of the wall protects the inner world which is completely isolated from the outside world.

Le Couvent de La Tourette (Moving light)‘To dwell in the silence of men of prayer and study and to construct a church for them.’11 Le Couvent de La Tourette has been built in Dominican architecture characters in many parts with religious meaning and spaces that are mainly provided for the priests’ meditation and pray. ‘I can’t build churches for men who don’t live there.’12 Al-though nowadays the church becomes a conference centre for the elderly and the public, it won’t change the essence of the space. Light and shadow are moving within the space and constantly change in the church for all time. Light is the most dramatic and dynamic movement within the space contrast with such a peaceful place for the priests. There are many different sizes of vertical windows and the different window sizes allow people to have different perceptions and impressions. As a result of varied sizes of windows, different casting light and reflecting light fills the building.

‘Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.’13 With understanding of this concept, Le Corbusier articulated his architecture in a manner that modified light through its interaction with surface texture and color in this priory. It has a deep religious meaning to the use the light. The light is coming from the sky where most people believe it is the place where God lives. Back into the ground the train-ing monks can understand and feel that God is touching and passing by different sizes of lights which are coming thought vertical windows. Vertical windows are one of the representing examples to use vertical versus horizontal ele-ments. The overall building structure represents the same idea as well because the landscape, where the building is standing on, is flat like a horizontal line, and the building is placed high along the top line of the building. Therefore, Le Corbusier kept it the horizontal form.

Light and shade are the loudspeakers of this architecture of truth, tranquility and strength. Nothing further could add to it.14



9. Le Corbusier, Ronchamp Chapel, Ronchamp by 1955

10. D. Pauly, Le Corbusier: la chapelle de Ronchamp, Bos-ton, Birkhauser Verlag, 1997

11. P. Potie, Le Corbusier: Le Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette / The Monastery of Saint Marie de la Tourette, Basel : Birkhäuser, 2001

12. D. Gans, The Le Cor-busier Guide, New York, archi-tecture press, p. 100

13. The New York Times [obituary] (1965-08-28)

14. P. Potie, Le Corbusier: Le Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette / The Monastery of Saint Marie de la Tourette, Basel : Birkhäuser, 2001

Fig. 4. Interior space of Notre-Dame-du- Haut

Fig. 5. Interior space of Notre-Dame-du- Haut

Fig 6. Horizontal windows in La Tourette

Throughout his whole life, Le Corbusier has used vertical versus horizontal forms in his building structures. However, this La Tourette vertical versus horizontal form seems to have a deeper meaning than any other buildings he has designed. Even though there are no concrete reasons he has mentioned through out his life, most people agree and understand it as a representation of the relationship between God and the people. God’s love is shown from the sky directly to the people while the limited love of people is spread in a horizontal relationship. Le Corbusier use vertical lines to represent God’s love and horizontal lines to illustrate how people live with buildings. For the architect to showing these hidden religious meaning of his way of use of light and the different form and size of windows which are the essence to accomplish his ideas in such a great building. Time has made the light and shadow become one of the most dramatic movements in the church. Light has passed through the dynamics of horizontal and vertical windows which creates the lively shadow that is constantly moving in the space.

Tadao Ando Church of the Light (Purified light) This is one of the most famous buildings designed by Tadao Ando in Osaka, Japan. The Church of the Light has an interior creation with spiritual meaning. Symbols and signs in the interior design of the churches express the spiritual meaning. The only thing that is visible in the interior of the churches is texts and codes. These texts and codes can be analyzed to get the spiritual meaning of the churches. Theory of texts and codes in the space and archi-tecture semiotic is an alternative media to get the meaning of interior objects according to the visual. The meanings that can be derived from text and code analysis of the churches are simplicity, smoothness, integrity, philosophiz-ing with media of nature, disguising pattern with space and postmodern style.

It is necessary to return to the point where the interplay of light and dark reveals forms, and in this way to bring rich-ness back into architectural space. Yet, the richness and depth of darkness has disappeared from our consciousness, and the subtle nuances that light and darkness engender, their spatial resonance - these are almost forgotten. Today, when all is cast in homogeneous light, I am committed to pursuing the interrelationship of light and darkness. Light, whose beauty within darkness is as of jewels that one might cup in one’s hands; light that, hollowing out darkness and piercing our bodies, blows life into ‘place.’15

Nothingness which means less is more. The spaces and materials don’t need any extra definitions to empower them. The simple concrete geometry is shaping the basic form of the church without any additional adornment on the exterior. Its nothingness even shows on the way the church has been designed. To me Ando is present things in its original form and without any additional decorating or pol-ishing on the exterior. To keep the primitive of the materials for people has the most extent to creating their own imagi-nations. The natural lights without any color or texture adding become the most powerful theme in the church. The strong cross symbol of God which is also a metaphor of the religious meaning is emphasized by purified natural light.

If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.16

The almost shoe box shape creates an enclosed hemisphere yet welcoming reaction through the thin slice of openings of the concrete walls. The free standing concrete walls, which have a smooth surface, seem so weightless. Once in the church, the interior spaces are describing it to be like a cave which feels oddly airy but not claustro-phobic. ‘Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding’17 The interplay of light, shadow, the cool air, the silence and the solidity of the walls all combine to encourage a moment of clear-mindedness. People’s troubles are left at the entrance; the only thing that matters in that space is the people and their connection to a greater power. ‘Light has a great influence on human sensitivity. It reaches the depths of one’s heart and awakens something asleep there.’18 The unembellished light strikes into my mind and it is such a straight forward feeling. Light is like a knife that cuts the concrete wall into four parts. The striking light traverses the right middle of the wall and shines deep into every visitor’s mind.

15. R. Pare, Tadao Ando: The Colours of Light, Montréal, CCA

16. Archrecord, Tadao Ando Interview from Architectural Record, May 2002

17. Lao-tzu , Tao-te ching The Book of the Way and Its Power

18. M. Ishii, My World of Lights, Tokyo, ed. Libro, 1985

Fig. 7. Vertical windows in La Tourette



‘There are few openings in this space, since light displays its brilliance only against a back drop of darkness.’19 Light is the theme of this building, but at the same time, it creat-ing darkness was important because light becomes radiant only against the backdrop of a profound darkness. Here, nature is rendered extremely abstract. It is limited only to the light. Architectural space is purified. It uses the thick wall to create the spaces and the darkness.

I create enclosed spaces mainly by means of thick con-crete walls. The primary reason is to create a place for the individual, a zone for oneself within society. When the external factors of a city’s environment require the wall to be without openings, the interior must be especially full and satisfying.(...) At times walls manifest a power that bor-ders on the violent. They have the power to divide space, transfigure place, and create new domains. Walls are the most basic elements of architecture, but they can also be the most enriching.20

‘Nature- its presence reduced in the element of light- takes on an extremely abstract character, and -responding to this abstraction- the architecture grows pure with the daily passage of time.’21 The church offers both representational nature and abstract nature. A rectilinear patch of light is cast on the floor; natural materials that appeal to the senses are left in darkness. Our spirits soar. Moreover, light helps people recognize the human relationship to nature.

The purify light which Ando is using in The Church of Light is showing the natural appearance of the materials. Especially this natural light has not been adding any color or texture. It also is the focus of the whole space which emphasizes the power of the pureness even more perfectly.

Conclusion Even though these three architects are from differ-ent cultural backgrounds, these four modern churches are built for one same purpose: to give the religious space a more poetic sense. The architects are stressing the light in the architectural space they designed and thereby they are reflecting the meaning of religion at the same time.

Natural light is an essential force interlocked with time. The sun arcs through the sky each day at a different angle; the seasons change plays out in the vessel of the house like a volumetric sundial. Unexpected changing intensities and consistencies drive sunlight in the counterpoint of moving shadows. Black against white blurred against crisp, dis-solving against knife-sharp edges, the subtle music of light plays out in space.22

Light defines the way people perceive the physical world. Also, light can give spaces a different perspective meaning. It is very important that the right lighting enhanc-es and improves a space whereas poor lighting degrades. It is clear that light gives birth to the strongest metaphor and richest soul of architecture space. Within architecture, light seems like air flowing within the space: people know that light is in the space but people cannot feel it exists at the same time. Light is trapped within space and time. It becomes an integral part of the architecture despite the change in time.

…tracing the path forward from the eternal void to the emergence of light and finally to the spending of light into matter, seems to sense intuitively these mysterious begin-nings.23

Light and architecture cannot be seen apart; each window opening is meant for some kind of purpose for the light to come into the space. God and church portray the purest image to the people. Architecture and light are the only embellishment to praise how beautiful they are. With-out light, architecture is only a dark, cold and meaningless space.



19. P. Drew, T. Ando, Church on the Water/Church of the Light: Tadao Ando, Phaidon, 1996

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. S. Holl, House: Black Swan Theory, NY, Princeton Architectural, 2007, p. 12

23. A. Tyng, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Archi-tecture, Wiley, 1984, p. 137

Fig. 8. interior of Church of Light

47

Ruined or Not? Erwin RuitenburgIn the early days of the fall I visited an old sanatorium in Belgium. I knew the building had a strange history and was waiting on a new purpose for a long time. It had been a hospital for tuberculosis patients, it was host for the Red Cross for several years and after that it served as a regular hospital. After a reorganisation of the hospital, the old sanato-rium was abandoned and now empty for over 20 years.To approach the building was a journey itself. The road was overgrown; the five-story building was hidden behind 20-year-old trees and bushes, which were not only growing around but also on top of the building. The road had become a small path, where branch-es had to be pushed aside to pass. The entrance of the building could be recognized from the old pictures, but was not much the same. Broken glass and broken tiles lay scat-tered on the floor, the lowered sealing was torn down and every piece of wall that could be reached by human arms was covered in graffiti. The central staircase had become a dangerous place, due to missing pieces in the floor. The wings with the old patient rooms were hard to enter, because the floor was covered with glass; there wasn’t a single win-dow in the building that wasn’t broken. There was even one section where you could see the traces of an uncontrolled fire, an exercise of local fire-man which got out of hand. The top floors were not covered only with glass, but also with small pools of water. They were now a nutritious soil for nature to take back its place.The strange part about the exploration of this young ruin was that I could imagine very easily what it used to be like. The rubbish could not prevent the building from still breath-ing something of its old solemnity and history. Walking through I could see patients lying in their beds, nurses walking through the corridors. In the operation room was a small group of doctors discussing the oncoming surgery, outside was a family impatiently wait-ing. The stage was the hospital as it is now, broken and nearly dead, but in my imagina-tion it could still be a hospital. There is no proof that my imagination was right nor that it was wrong. It could have been alike and it doesn’t matter if it really was like I saw it. My imagination recreated that old hospital; in my imagination I was, only for a moment, an architect.

It was an oak. It stood in the middle of the forest, but at the same time it had created its own territory, because no other tree could grow under its thick branches. Most of these branches reached out into the sky, aiming for the sun, the source of live. Other branches had gotten tired after all these years, had grown heavy and were now at rest on the ground. On the branches arose new life, because a series of different ferns and mosses grew here, and birds and squir-rels had found a save place to build their homes. All these branches came together in a central point, an immense trunk. This trunk was at the same time the begin-ning of the roots, going deep into the ground, anchoring the tree, steadfast in its place. On this trunk there were marks that showed the places where once other branches had been, smaller and bigger ones. The trunk could tell you about things in the past, about things that had once been. Inside this trunk was even more information. A cross section could tell the story of the past far more detailed. The annual rings could tell about the age of the tree and the speed of growth over different decades. It could show when diseases occurred, when branches died, when the tree suffered form a fire, when it flourished.


Exploring the ImaginaryA Journey through Experience, Memory and Time

Erwin Ruitenburg

Exploring experience It is a city. With different urban structures, different types of streets, different dwellings and different inhabit-ants. Each place, each mark refers back to a different time. The city hall from the 19th century, housing projects from the thirties, offices from the sixties, skyscrapers still under construction. It is a city with a memory, because it can tell the story of the past, or at least a part of that story. When you cross the city, like Calvino does in his book Invis-ible cities1, you can feel this story. Probably unconscious, unaware of the exact time-period, you feel the change of identity of the space you are in. It does not matter whether you can explain or understand the space, but you can feel you are moving through different sub-stories. If you would draw a straight line over a map and cross the city in this way, you would always find some marks of the past, which you do recognize. The newest parts and the very old are easily distinguished, the parts that are in between are one big blur. Difficult to tell whether it is from the 40’s or the 50’s, but you will settle with somewhere from that period. Overall you will get an impression of what the city is. You like it or you don’t. You summon up all the different emotions it evoked and you get one general feeling. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful, could be better, could be worse. But there is more to it than the age and feeling of the space. This age is only the facade of the story: there is more behind. The reasons, the consequences, the influence on everyday life you don’t experience. As a traveller you can only guess. As a resident of the city or the district, you know what really was there, you know people from the block, you have seen growth and deterioration. You lived through the changes, you were part of the process. And ev-eryone who experienced a certain place, whether inhabitant or reluctant traveller, has a different feeling and understand-ing of this same place. When you would wander through the city, or just have to go from here to there, the path you follow will be a sequence of different decisions. You choose to take this street, and not that one. With this you unconsciously value one place better then another, liking and disliking certain aspects. In his book The practice of everyday life, Michel de Certeau puts it into words like this:

The networks of these moving, intersecting writings com-pose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alternations of spaces.2

The story a city tells is also referred to as the collective memory of the city. This story circumscribes the charac-teristics of the city that are antropomorphically seen as properties. It speaks of the things the city wants and needs

to remember, almost like memorials. The collective is the sum of these different key-spaces of significance, and the rest of the city is filled with a blur of spaces that are used as a stuffing to give it an appropriate size. The question is ac-tually which aspects have more influence on the identity of the city: the few relics that are spasmodically maintained, or the grey mass that is arranged around it. The general concept of architecture is that space only gets its value from use.3 The human -or inhuman- activi-ties that take place in the space are the aspects that give significance to the space. Whatever the appearance, the reason of existence for that space lays in its occupants and their actions. The old saying ‘the beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’4 both does and does not apply to architecture. The impact of architecture on a human being is both related to the visible aspects as to the actions that took, take or will be taken place in a certain space. This impact is the key to memory, because it determines which information is stored and what will be forgotten. It determines how you look at the same event or place ten years after you were there. It determines the way you read a city, the way you interpret the relics, the memorials, the collective memory.

Exploring history Looking closer at a specific city you can see the differ-ent annual rings, running through the city. These rings can be read as different time-periods, of which the residue is scattered in different places all over town, holding their own pieces of information, pieces of history. You see differ-ent types of houses, different types of districts, originated from different times, an anthology of spaces, of stories, of experiences.

Rotterdam From a bird’s-eye view, there is one specific ring in the city Rotterdam that is inevitable to be read. It was created in the year 1940, and it has, unlike most of them, a name; the border of fire. After the bombing of the Germans in the Second World War, a fire destroyed most of the city centre. A few buildings were spared, the rest was erased. The resurrection of the city is still visible, sometimes the exact border as well. The ring reminds the city where it came from, what it had to endure and most of all which strength it generated to heal from this wound. The value of this historical aspect is important for the identity of the total city, but also for the people on an indi-vidual scale. It can give strength and hope in difficult times, when one is reminded of this event. The very few buildings that were spared from the fire in the city centre function as memorials for the horrific fire, remembering everyone who walks by of the strength the city displayed when it recov-ered; the city could not be taken completely: it survived on

1. I. Calvino, Invisible cities, London, Vintage books, 1974

2. M. de Certeau, Practice of everyday life, Berkeley, University of California press, 1988, p93.

3. See: Tschumi, Architecture and disjunction, Cambridge, The MIT press, 1996.

4. M. Wolfe Hungerford, Molly Bawn, 1878.


Exploring the Imaginary - Erwin Ruitenburg

its last breath. What happens now in this space is a different story. The scars cannot be erased, but a new centre was built on top of those scars. The activities that now take place there are the same as before the bombing, with one difference. All is new now, not historic anymore. But you can tell that it used to be different. And at the same time it is the same. Every place has a history that is different from another place, but there is always one similarity; they all change. Whether for better or for worse, in a horrific way or just not like it was supposed to, they all change, by every single act that takes place. Whenever you return to a place you have once been, no matter how long the time gap between these visits is; it will be different, different from what is was, different from your own memory. The movement of the Situationist International believed in this as well; the city is always changing, never the same. This movement developed a technique to discover the city by ‘rapid passage through varied ambiances,’ which is called dérive.5 The subject would leave his work, relations, leisure and everything else that influenced his behaviour behind, and lets himself be guided through the city by every attraction he saw. Tracking his movements and his motives gives information in the way the city is read by its occupants. One of this situationists, who was also a Dutch painter, was Constant Nieuwenhuys. He made a design for a utopic city, called New-Babylon, which was a city that was changing all the time. He explains this transformation of the city like this:

The sectors constantly change form and atmosphere ac-cording to the activities that are taking place there. Nobody can return to what was before, rediscover the place as he left it, the image he’d retained in his memory.6

Imaginary cities This New-Babylon, were everything changes, might not be a very realistic approach of a city, but it is an example were one characteristic is pulled to its extreme, the change. The other extreme would be a city where nothing changes. This would be a city where time plays a completely dif-ferent role, a city where yesterday, today and tomorrow are the same. In S,M,L,XL7 Rem Koolhaas describes an imaginary, maybe future, city, called The Generic City. It has no past, or rather ‘The Generic City had a past, once.’8 The annual rings of this city are erased, because they have no use, moreover ‘the presence of history only drags down its performance.’9 In this retrospect, it is almost like one of Calvino’s cities, Leonia,10 where everything is refashioned every day, so that all is new, and there are no residues of yesterday, there is only the new, the present. If you would imagine walking through this Generic

City, with imagination as the only possibility to do so, you could see only the visible and you can feel only the present. How things have become to what they are is not important, only what they are and why they are is of importance. It is a city of functionalism. Just like all cities, this city will tell a story. It tells the city came out of nowhere, and that it is very uncertain what the city will be tomorrow, because tomorrow they will not know what was today. Its most im-portant goal is renewal, its most important ambition to beat yesterday and to be better tomorrow. This functionalism has an immense drive on development, almost as if the past is a huge creature that is trying to devour this city. It is a city driven by fear that history will catch up with it. Walking through this city tells you about the people, the activities, the places. But these places only are, they do not relate to your memory of this place, because you don’t have any. They can evoke a feeling, and try to store it in an image in your head, but it can’t actually store. The malfunc-tion of the brain, or the simply erased past, ensure that you are not able to compare the situation with similar spaces from different periods. The ‘generic’ of this city ensures that almost every place is the same, so everything is of similar quality and there is no deviation. It ensures that you are not able to value the place, nor the experience, because there isn’t any reference.

Creating memory Architecture plays a significant role in the collective memory as well as in the individual memory. Architects can evoke certain feelings, enforce certain actions, allow or deny certain encounters. They can be reluctant to the history or meaning of the site, or they can decide to let their design tell the story of the site very accurate. They can also decide to change the appearance of the history; they can make it look as if the place had a completely different his-tory, an imaginary history, which did not happen at all. They have the power to create second hand memorials, to forge history. The way we create is the way we live. They way we re-member is the way we act. We base our arguments on what we know and what we feel. What we know is always based on what we remember. What we remember is influenced by what we feel in our memory. Just like places, our memory is always time-related, and it alters after years pass by. We need our past, because our remembrance provides us with the incitement to explore the present and future.

5. G.E. Debord, Theory of the Dérive, in Les Lèvres Nues #9 ,November 1956 http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/314 (januari 2009)

6. Written by Constant, for the exhibition catalogue published by Het Haags Gemeente-museum, The Hague, 1974. http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html (januari 2009)

7. R.Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, New York, Mo-nacelli Press, 1997, p1248.

8. Ibid., p1256.

9. Ibid., p1263.

10. I. Calvino, Invisible cities, London, Vintage books, 1974, p102.



Michel de Certeau points this out like this:

In fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localiz-able. Fragments of it come out in legends. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber. A memory is only a Prince Charming, who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleep-ing Beauty of our wordless stories. 11

The Prince Charming is needed for the Sleeping Beauty to come alive, as a memory is needed to bring alive our full experience of the present and future. Memory helps us to value and interpret events, people and places in the right way. Not to determine whether it is wrong or right, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but whether or not it was worth the experience. Memory is an anti-museum, because it is not locked away to be maintained for the future, but it is used and adopted every day again, as we live it. De Certeau em-phasizes that the spatial practices such as walking are very important to understand these issues of memory. Walking in the city and thus experiencing places is different for every single person. De Certeau refers to an analysis of spatial practices by Augoyard, where two stylistic figures are used to indicate the formal structure of these practices. These tropes are synecdoche and asyndeton. Synecdoche refers to the method were we store a part of a certain event, place or object in our head, where we mean the whole thing. The second trope is also of concern here, because this ‘Asyn-deton, by elision, creates a ‘less,’ opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics.’12 The decreases and gaps described here create a space for the memory to be filled up with its own version. In this way the image can very easily alter from its original form, and become something partially or com-pletely different. Here you can feel the process where a few key aspects get overvalued and become relics, where the rest is of no concern and can be filled up with anything you like. All the ‘bad’ is filtered out of this memory image and is restored into something more beautiful than it has ever really been. We overvalue the memory and in this way we recreate history in a way that it is our own, not the real. People act according to their memories in certain ways. They try to keep their memories vivid by saving relics that help them remember. These relics can be small items, like a photograph of your grandmother in her old collier, but they can, just as easy, be the old dwelling where you grew up, the school you taught for 15 years, the old city centre where you spend your youth. The street you used to live in is not allowed to change from the image, you have created in your head, of how it used to be. But this image of how you remember is never the same as it was in the past.

So everybody is an architect. Everybody creates his own history, because everybody remembers the people, the events and the buildings different from what they really were. Everybody tends to store memories in their head by remembering images. Images of what was, what used to be and, most of the time, also the place where those memories were created. This images change over time, alter from what they were into something different. Based on this al-tered images we make our decisions. We value everything, using what we already know, or at least think we know.

About that oak...The oak is what it is, nothing more or noth-ing less. As soon as we leave it behind, it becomes more; bigger, more damaged, more beautiful, or less. The image of the oak stays in our memory, it alters over time, but we need it to value everything else. The experience changes the way we perceive other trees; every experience influences later experiences. And the more you experience, the more memories you create, the more references you have in your judgement. Like an old man is always referred to as wise, we need the experiences, and the images that come forth of it, to grow old, and wise.



11. M. de Certeau, Practice of everyday life, Berkeley, University of California press, 1988, p108.

12.Ibid., p101.

Image Sources

EditorialNo images

Storytelling SurfacesThe Paradox of the Parts and the WholeNo images

Eisenman’s ArchaeologyNo images

The Bodily Experience of ArchitectureFig. 1. http://flickr.com/photos/dalbera/2752920610/sizes/l/in/photo-stream/ (January 2009)Fig. 2. F. Garofalo, Steven Holl, London, Thames and Hudson, 2003, p. 100.Fig. 3. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2293/1961084435_53093515f3.jpg?v=0 (January 2009)Fig. 4. http://flickr.com/photos/oldvainamoinen/2702692702/ (January 2009)Fig. 5. http://flickr.com/photos/dalbera/2752920544/sizes/l/ (January 2009)Fig. 6. F. Garofalo, Steven Holl, London, Thames and Hudson, 2003, p. 108.Fig. 7. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2350/2082489214_e25e8f2728.jpg?v=0 (January 2009)Fig. 8. E. Laaksonen, Kiasma: Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finnish Association of Architects, 1998, p. 60.Fig. 9. E. Laaksonen, Kiasma: Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finnish Association of Architects, 1998, p. 60.

Memory, Peter Zumthor and the Phenomenology of TranssubjectivityFig. 1. www.flickr.com; Seier+Seier+Seier, 2007Fig. 2. www.flickr.com; Ang morh; 2007Fig. 3. www.flickr.com; Schroman, 2008Fig. 4. www.flickr.com; Doctor Casino, 2008

Language of LightsSpeaking Poetically in Religious LightFig. 1. Steven Holl, Parallax, New York, Birkhauser, 2000Fig. 2. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2005/0327/portraits.htmlFig. 3. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/Corbu2.htmlFig. 4. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/Corbu2.htmlFig. 5. http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/mellin/arch671/winter2000/mchan/precedents/corbu-nave.JPGFig. 6. http://esarq2008.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/img_44291.jpgFig. 7. http://desfontaines.blog.lemonde.fr/files/la_tourette_grand_atri-um_1.JPGFig. 8. http://riainews.com/newsletter/admin/images/karina/Tadao%20Ando.JPG

Exploring the ImaginaryA Journey through Experience, Memory and TimeNo images


Stranger in a Syrian CityPhoto: Jan van Ballegooijen, 2008

Talking about Memory...Photo: Jelle van der Neut, 2008

Exploring Steven HollPhoto: Jeroen van Rijsbergen, 2009

Berlin...www.flickr.com; Ole Begemann, 2008

Memory of The Visible and The InvisibleThe Delft Faculty of Architecture BuildingPhoto: Alex Chen, 2008

Ruined or Not?Photo: Marcello Fantuz , 2007

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