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IMMATERIALITY IN ARCHITECTURE

ABSTRACT

This essay is written from a pedagogical point of view. The objective is to promote the

further research and debate, from an interdisciplinary field.

To reach the objective, we bring together what –at first sight- are unrelated findings and

facts; several examples taken from books, movies and exhibitions, plus experiences on

the field. This will help to the understanding of a difficult thematic, in times where the

materials of last generation seem to be the only reason for the global architecture.

We shall try to demonstrate that immaterial architecture is more a state of mind than a

tectonic quality.

1.- INTRODUCTION

Architecture theory leans towards abstraction, virtuality, immateriality, the representation

of what is not tangible; while the practice of it remains based on materials properties.

Immateriality in architecture recalls an analogy between software design and architecture;

even virtual reality as a reduction of the physical and immaterial worlds.

The term is also related to the architecture in a state of “disappearance”, a building

simplified and reduced to its essential elements; lightness, transparency.

But we find the term to be extensive to other situations, histories, feelings, experiences,

that cannot be seen, and are independent from the materialities of the buildings or cities:

the building sinthezised in an intangible state that cannot be directly possessed in its own

possibility, directly seen or reproduced. What users cannot see but feel, experience,

inside-outside a building, or in urban spaces, is a type of understanding that stands

outside the methodological observation.

The physical environment (from buildings to small objects) is shown here as the

presentation of the self. As soon as they are invested of meaning, they are part of people’s

identity. Though not everybody has the same sensitivity, there is the distinction between

the objects perceived and what they are perceived as; they must be dependent for its

existence on the perceiver. The rest, on a phenomenological Kantian’s stand, is a

construction of the imagination through the user’s experience. The creative mind acts

upon sensory impressions, and combine them with concepts of time and space, because

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without sensibility no object could be perceptible. In a second stage, the mind applies to

experience all thoughts categories (quantity, relations, tectonics, cause and effect,

necessities, possibilities, etc): an idea has been born. Any further judgement would be

mere guess.1

We shall already see, the ability of users to provide meaning to the non fixed structures

through personalization and affection. “In the case of housing, giving meaning becomes

particularly important because of the emotional, personal and symbolic connontation of

the house and the primacy of these aspects in shaping its form as well as the important

psycho-social consequences of the house”. (Rapoport, 1968 quoting himself in The

Meaning of the Built Environment. P. 22.1982).

Nevertheless, when all fixed and non fixed structures disappear -even literally- human

relationships and cultural manifestations are still emphasized without any building at all.

We use the term “space” closer to “place”. Technically, as human geography states, space

refers to an abstract geometrical extension and place describes our experience of being in

the world and adding a space meaning, memories, cultural expectations, feelings.

When the - not so courteous - first person shows up, it has arisen as a personal

expression, from my own architect feelings when being personally involved in the

mentioned examples. And, by means of keeping the sense of the story as a continuous

situation, sometimes the present tense is used.

Various examples -let us say cases- are developed, trying to find an explicit way to

determine what immateriality in architecture is. So, this paper is not a manifesto for a

complete and accepted definition of the concept; it has no specific end, only the intention

to achieve further investigations. Finally, the text is divided in four sections and we try

not to conclude, but allow further thoughts that tempt to the reflection on the qualitative

experience of places.

“I assume, for the moment, that physical elements of the environment do encode

information that people decode. In effect, while people filter this information and

interpret it, the actual physical elements guide and channel these responses”. (Amos

Rapoport, p.19, 1982)

2.- ARTISTIC MANIFESTATIONS

Analysis of artistic manifestations in theatre, exhibitions, paintings, books, movies, will

help us understand the importance of the ephimeral; that social spaces are never neutral

and they contain memories of the inhabitants. Many authors have treated it, some of them

with ingenious creations. We have selected what we consider is representative of the

problematic. And of course, the list is endless…

Approaching the House of Usher.

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The well known Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is an

excellent example to illuminate our topic. Poe was influenced by John Locke’s

Empiricism, in the idea that all knowledge was gained by experiences through the senses.

Locke stated that mind was a “tabula rasa” (a paper in white, without ideas) where

knowledge was imprinted. Man’s senses allow him to learn from the external world

(experience) and inner reflexion also provides ideas as part of the world within us. It is

opposite to Rationalism that states man has innate ideas (inborn knowledge).

This theory was sustained by Romantic writers of the 19th Century.

In this story, a man is visiting a former good school companion, after many years since he

has not seen him. And this is his first impression at arriving his house (fig 01):

“with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I

say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because

poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images

of the desolate or terrible”……..”with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to

no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium-

“……. “What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?”

(p. 171)

After this glooming impression, reinforced by the decaying and pestilent landscape which

creates a peculiar atmosphere “that had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had

reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn” (p. 172), he

arrives at the unsatisfactory conclusion “that while, beyond doubt, there are

combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting

us”.(p.171)

Here we see how his five senses, including smell, collaborate in the perception. The

black, white and grays are seen outside and inside; the description of the stone textures

are accurate in the analogy: “the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this

there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has

rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of

external air” (p.173); the pestilent smell, the inquietude of silence …..

Trying to recover himself, he decides to rationalize the whole situation: “shaking off my

spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the

building”. So, a tiny description of fungus, fissures, textures, goes on and he finally

arrives at the conclusion that the house is closely related to the decay of the family, as a

collateral issue for the only line of blood maintained in the family for centuries. His

extreme thought is to personify the house in Mr Roderick Usher –the owner- “upon the

vacant eyes windows” and his unhealthy body.

Locke’s idea that the objects themselves also produce in us sensations, that are not in the

objects but constitute the qualities – the underlaying substratum- we associate with them,

is implied in the impression the man suffers while walking in the dark, intricate passages

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of the house. The familiar objects he knows since childhood, are not familiar anymore,

they look hostile and depressing: “Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I

know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While

the objects around me …….were but matters to which….I have been accustomed from my

infancy –while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this- I still wondered

to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up……….I

felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable

gloom hung over and pervaded all.” (p. 173).

The same construction of feelings and posterior ideas arises from Mr R. Usher, who

explains that “He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the

dwelling” (p.175). For fear, he has not ventured through the house, in many years.

The form and substance of the house had influences over his spirit and the morale of his

existence. Like the writer, Mr R. Usher at last looks for a rational explanation : “He

admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus

afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin –to the

severe and long continued illness….- of a tenderly beloved sister” (p.175)

Regardless the phylosophical background, the story is a clear example of immateriality in

architecture, in the sense we take. And we want to emphasize the importance of the

environment and objects in all scales. After finding the clues of imminent death even

before entering the house, the writer wonders how his imagination could torture him

beyond the sublime?.

Fig. 01.The Usher House. (Picture downloaded from the Web)

The Psychogeographers’ works

New experimentations in the visual field have been always supported, or even initiated by

technological developments. And derived in the resurgence and expansion of the theory

of psychogeography.2 Recently the theory has been manifested in other practical ways

and tangible interpretation of ideas, as the Situationists group, who brings projects to a

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more popular audience. The mapping is not a standard representation of a territory, but is

committed to the “mental mapping” of physical civic spaces. It is a new kind of

cartography, of versions of places as they exist in our minds influenced by our emotions.

It rebuilds the way the urban environment is represented by the inclusion of geo-

coordinates, graffitis, demolitions, mass media communications, etc.

The everyday elements that make these places what they are, and make them

recognizable are not shown in an institutional map. Psychogeographists remind us that

these places might be passed along, but the feeling, the emotional effects, are left out,

outside in the city or inside a house or public building. The theory is complemented by

the web, being it an analogy to “derive” through the city: “In 1992 the British author

Sadie Plant wrote that, "to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or

buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons

for movement other than those for which an environment was designed." (excerpt from

Virtual Museum Canada. http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Photos/html/en/sm-

essay.html)

Exploring on the stage and streets

In a similar scope of work, Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s3 creates a kind of “antispectacle”,

based on the idea that stage performance does not exist without the viewer’s

participation. So, the performance is not hermetic, but something incomplete that needs

the viewer to be itself.

The spatial structure is imagined from a point of view, as the viewer is not stationary in

relationship to the scene; contrary to conventional settings, the spatial aspects are altered

because the different proximities affect the perspective angles. Position is not a sensation

per se and only thought can define the space based on the coordinates position is located.

To accomplisth the effects, he uses large-scale technologies of amplification, usually

reverved for corporate events.

The results are transpositions between interior and exterior space; the public discourse

broken in words that follow the participants -until they stay quiet- written in their bodies

or words on buildings that stand as a repository of history (fig 02); the public shadows

project and overlap on buildings, everything in a evocation of a social space inside a

dynamic agora. All elements have no hierarchy and confuse the boundaries between

writings-arts-architecture.

“Indeed, even the now vast literature on the so-called ‘architecture’ of cyberspace

invokes immateriality, event-scenes, information atmospheres, trans-localities, forms of

transitional or experiential ‘space’, and what might be called ‘haptic’ rather than merely

‘optic’ perspectives”. (Tim Druckrey)

By creativity in optic means and public participation, the theatrical work is converted into

intangible architecture where the main objective is people’s impressions. To this respect,

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Lozano Hemmer reports that people sometimes feel embarassment when their shadows

mix, usually the participant needs a place of his own. (fig 03)

Fig 02 (downloaded from the web)

Fig 03 (downloaded from the web)

Immateriality and myth in a Kusturica’s film.

A literal example of immateriality in architecture is taken from the “ethno cinema”4,

precisely a scene in Emir Kusturica’s movie “Times of the Gypsies”.

In this case, the arrangement of furniture (fig 04) and family relationships strongly

trascend the house that harbors them, which is transformed into an useless “shell”, when

the old Gypsie grandmother’s son, in a contemptuous reaction, rises the house with a

cable and leaves it suspending, floating in a carnivalesque context, atop its original

location.

Curiously, what the “interior space” has been , does not lose its spatial quality and family

relationships added to the Gypsies negotiations, are kept in day-to-dayness, regardless of

the house pending on their heads. It is funny to discover that the pet, a turkey, does not

take the opportunity to escape. It just keep on bouncing among furnitures…….

The movie also features folks beliefs; Kusturica blends reality with fantasy in a barroque

atmosphere. Continuing with the example, Perhan, the teenager character, when

explaining how limestone (a construction material) is made, to the Gypsie girl Azra, he

coldly first exposes technology “The temperature is the most important element. If you

can keep the fire hot, the limestone won’t bake properly. Fire is the heart of it…………”

(See Goran Gocic, page 13). Immediately, he changes the argument and explains it under

a Myth: “Grandma says that limestone is the brother of Mother Stone. But Mother Forest

and Mother Stone quarrelled. Mother Forest then bit off Mother Stone’s breast. That is

why lime is as white as milk.” (See Goran Gocic, page 13).

Perhan has related experience to myth. It is obvious that for the minimal element in a

construction, one may apply a mythical meaning that is beyond tectonics. Thy myth is the

vehicle for a normative rule: the house construction.

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Fig. 04 Scene from “Times of the Gypsies” (downloaded from Kusturica’s web page)

The pet also is part of the human relationships

A picture and two famous painting to illustrate concepts.

There are many possible representations for the purposes exposed here, but we recur to

two paintings and one picture only, as they are very significative. They are mostly linked

to section 2. In Magritte’s paintings, the rose (fig 05) reminds us the almost complete

occupation of the interior space, the room is there, but is hidden; the rose is highly

sensitive for the viewer, in its color, texture, and smell. These Magritte’s domestic

objects (fig 06) are out of context too, what immerses us in a kind of uncertainty; they

invade the space we suppose interior –but we are not sure- as the walls are the sky, or a

representation of it, given the corners are materialized. The opposite situation is shown

on Mottar’s picture, New York 1959 (fig 07). The building provides the frame and people

provide the materiality. In a strict sense, the building has no materiality. People is the

building’s soul.

Fig 05 (downloaded from the

web)

Fig 06 (downloaded from the web)

Fig 07 (downloaded from the

web)

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3.- TWO CLIENTS’ CASES

The materialization of a dream.

From a psychological point of view, Gaston Bachelard states that is not enough to

consider the house as an object. Walls may lose importance, liberating the interior space.

“A house that has been experienced is not an inert box”… “Inhabited space trascends

geometrical space” (Gaston Bachelard, 1994).

“The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows us to

dream in peace. ….Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives

direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced

daydreaming, reconstitute themselves in a new daydream,…..” (pag 6, Gaston

Bachelard. The emphasis on words is original from the author).

Let us remind Jorge Luis Borges' story, "The Circular Ruins". It develops the idea of

recursivity, repetition. The circle notion and recursivity are not only given in the

architectural conformations shown in the story, but also in the actions that happen inside

the same story. At the end, the narrator informs us that the magician is the dream of other,

and that these recurrent processes of dreams happen infinitely. Suddenly, the use of the

term "circular" becomes highly significant, it becomes much more complex, in its

definition.

Borges should have liked Sir Edwards James’ neverending house. Sr James was an

eccentric, noble English man who lived more than twenty years in Xilitla, a lost village in

the west of Mexico. One day, he was bathing in a stream’s pond, in the jungle, when

suddenly, he was covered by vermillion butterflies. Moved by this fantastic situation, he

built the house of his oniric imagination in that very place. The house is the

materialization of Hescher’s drawings (fig 08), there is no rational order, stairways leads

to anywhere, the roof opens and mixes with nature, sculptures are located inside-

outside…. Currently, it has become part of the vegetation that wraps –in words of Axel

Cipollini- the non-house. It is a never-finished house whose boundaries are not defined,

as exterior-interior space combine in a whole vision. The attention of its creation was on

the richness of the details; there is no rule for the generation of the building, the process

is hidden to the observer.

Sometimes it is not so easy to build the house of our dreams. Or maybe I should say,

sometimes the house never materializes in the expectation of the owner’s dream.

My client, Mr C., living in Southern California, has tried for years to follow the rules of

the City Hall, Zoning and Building departments, submitting plans for a remodelation and

enlargement of his house. He has his own dream, shared with all the members of his

family. He took out the drywall, exposing the studs, to figure out the house’s secrets. He

removed wires, opened trenches, exposed beams…. What was left intact is the small

visitors’ bathroom. Here, he has written notes for his family, with love and affection,

promising a remodelated house that will be the concretion of the family’s desires. His

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words have been corresponded by his family, the bathroom’s walls have become the

media of many beautiful written hopes and good wishes.

It seems a paradox, to open the house’s body while trying to reconstruct it at the same

time. What is worst, following the technical architecture and engineering plans. After

more than one year of approved plans, I have contacted Mr C. again, and asked him if he

was done with the construction. He said he was on route again “after many incredible

delays”, and he would try to continue………what was never begun!. (fig 09) It is a

concrete situation that comes from an abstract matter; in other words, the subconscious

continuation of the conscious life.

The completion of the house means the end of the dream. As in Sir James’ case, this is a

neverending house. The construction is an excuse for the family illusions, a combination

of sensory data with their beliefs and expectations. They have this particular way to

approach the problem, and prefer to rent another house where to live, just to keep their

recursive story alive.

Fig 08. (Picture belonging to Mario Cipollini)

Fig 09 (Personal picture)

The Taken House.

The theory of “settlement patterns” implies that patterns of cultural behavior are related

to social, productive and in some societies to cosmological order in multiple scales and

hierarchies. What we suppose is placed randomly, could be essential and a consequence

of a cultural need. In the 70’s Amos Rapoport extends the theory from the city to the

minimum objects. His book “Human Aspects of Urban Form” explains space meaning-

organization at several scales and meaning in connection with materials, forms and

details. He enlights the importance of the subliminal perception and consequently,

different groups have differing images of environmental qualities and spaces.

Now, could these meaningful objects be invasive enough at the point of hiding the house?

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This paragraph subtitle refers to a Julio Cortazar’s story, “The taken house” (La Casa

Tomada in its original Spanish language), in which strange intruders –never mentioned

who they were- are taking two brothers’ house, little by little, until the brothers have to

leave the house, without even attempting to fight. Cortazar says that the interpretation of

the story must be based on his dream, about a strange presence (his own fears) in his own

house that is pushing him towards different areas of the house.

We want to expose here the example of another client’s house in a historical area of

Southern California, where the objects - antiques – are embodied of so much importance

and accumulate in such a quantity that the house does not maintain its home quality and

becomes a simple container (fig 10). Contrarily to the previous example, the house

contains inaccessible subespaces and loses its direct relationship with the inhabitant; it

"dematerializes" hiding under the heaped objects that block hallways, furniture, windows.

Mrs M, the owner, lives alone and has been denounced by their neighbours who are

unable to stand the situation and the City has sent inspectors, not only for the objects that

spread even outside, but because the same house is a victim of constant partial changes

(additions, demolitions) since long ago, of which I am witness for having double checked

my personal pictures with those of the City Hall files.

As long as it was an astonishing –direct- impression for me, I had to ask personally to

Mrs. M. for this particular environment, she briefly explains that “I don’t have a place

where to put my antiques, someday I’ll have to rent a store…”. Then, I entertained myself

looking for an object to buy and she suggested that maybe I should not take any, because

“this is the way you begin, and then it becomes a sickness”. This compulsion pushes Mrs

M. to sleep in a very reduced place, she also cannot use one of the tubs –covered by the

objects of her affection-, and finally a small place is left for the toilette and stove.

I have investigated this tendency to cover the spaces, in housings of Mexican families in

Los Angeles. The study shows that the cultural manifestation is intimately related with

the Mexican folkloric art and it ascends to the Aztecs. To the objects it is added the

symbolic and religious value of the altars. In the example of the picture, the landlady

decides to settle her altar inside a fireplace; she places a mirror behind, what expands the

image infinitely. The window (see upper left) is blocked too, and finally we lose the

notion of the materialized house.(fig 11)

The building dematerializacion is the consequence of hiding walls literally, blocking

spaces, windows, and also for lack of perspective or its deformation. The experience is

given through the random location of objects; then the observer is in motion through the

space and when he/she is relatively close a subtle inverted form of movement parallax

(the effect of varying linear perspective) might occur. The objects pattern location can be

startling chaotic due to the close proximity of the observer who is incapable of

comprehending the totality. By contrast, elements located far distant from the observer

can appear coherent and organized, due to his ability to comprehend more of the totality

of the elements. This chaotic space form, is defined by us as a non Euclidian order and

we understand it as an unconscious cultural manifestation that expresses the idea of the

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cult to the object that contains fragments of the past. Though valuable or not objects, they

are the concretion of value for their owners.

This chaotic morphology, is a metaphor for Borges’ labyrinths. The idea of labyrinth and

chaos does not depend on the construction of the buildings, but on the psychological state

of mind. A person could feel in a labyrinth or chaotic space even in the vastness of the

desert. On the other hand, a person can rationalize its own place amidst the chaos with no

need of a standard house. Then, space becomes a dimension of the self and has no longer

an objective category, but a subjective and relative one while its geometry does not

change…..

Fig 10 (Personal picture)

Fig 11. See the blocked window in the

upper left corner and the alter below and on

top of the fireplace (Personal picture)

4.- FURTHER THOUGHTS

Tectonics perception and literal immateriality.

Parallelly to the works of Rapoport, those of the architectural ethnologist and

anthropologist Nold Egenter, were developed based on the theory that the architecture is

characterized fundamentally for being a meta-language. His procedure spreads to an

universalism of the architecture; he states that what man builds in an ample sense is not

primarily related to aesthetics but with man.

The biggest difference with the posture of Rapoport, is that the anthropological

architecture is not based on aesthetics or culture, but in the man whose constructive

behavior in the habitat, does not come from standardized necessities inside a productive

process, but rather it is immersed, from the beginnings, into theoretical reasonings inside

the field of the architecture.

“...man -as always- not only perceives, but integrates the spatial structure defined by

buildings and reproduces this structures in other contexts, thinks with it, works with it. If

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we manage to show that this type of spatial structure, generated by buildings, influences

man along an anthropological continuum and lives in our language, in our thoughts,

keeps the arts living and even supports originally metaphysical ideas, then in new ways

we could reconstruct cultural history on the basis of the “object architecture”....

architectural anthropology thus constructs a new macrotheoretical approach”. (Egenter,

1992). This way, the initial perception of the material would be joined to a spiritual

criteria.

But, tectonics –as an expression of the materials properties- has become a term with a

blurry definition, while affected by humanism. Where the Gypsie Perhan sees the myth,

the recent evolution of materials involves robotics, genetics, biology, etc.5 A

reconstruction like this, as an anthropological continuum, brings much more complex

considerations than aesthetical judgements.

Let us illustrate the concept with the Jewish Zarco family’s house description, in the

words of Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts (1507-1530 AD): “Can a house possess a body,

a soul?…….As manuscript illuminators, Uncle Abraham and I had often modeled biblical

dwellings on our home. For its walls we applied a milky ceruse, and to approximate the

low and sagging chestnut wood ceilings which creaked alarmingly…….we applied the

rich brown made from vinegar, silver filings, honey and alum. The sandy floor tiles which

scratched one’s feet were given a moderated vermillion obtained from a marriage of

quicksilver and sulphur”. (The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, page 27).6 It is clear that for

him –and his Master uncle- the house was a privilege for their five senses and had a

mystical meaning even in its organic materials; see that he also mentions “dwellings” on

their home, giving subspaces the category of homes inside the main house.7

In consequence, immateriality in architecture is primarily based on human perceptions,

memories and feelings, and then on the tectonics of the building and its parts, since they

influence in them.. And we must be aware that the standard habits, inclinations,

perceptions, and activities in one culture whith its own collective memory, may seem

exotic to other. In this context, there is no “appropriateness”. Spatial patterns can be

attractive for many or be highly controversial, up to sickening, for others.

We link this idea with Terry M. Mikiten concepts of declarative knowledge, as one form

of knowledge in contemporary cognitive science. Two ideas are linked, and when

memory of one member of the pair is activated, the two ideas come to the surface

together and can be responsible for strong emotional experiences. Clusters of linked

concepts are called association networks or conceptual structures. Intuition, would be the

cause of mental processes that create and store concepts and links between them. So,

memory is accompanied with perception and thought. Everyday experience is defined as

perceiving something, remembering it, thinking about it. (Mikiten, 1995).8

People is considered to have both short-term and long-term memory. All sensory

experiences first pass through short-term memory and are held there. Then, they are

converted for long-term storage in a process called consolidation. When we enter a

building, or stay in an urban place, and suddenly we feel the “something else”, here it

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comes the relationship among ideas we find familiar. Sometimes, it is very obscure to

understand and we pass through the metaphorical understanding that tries to characterize

the unknown in another recognizable concepts.

One important condition for it, is that different locations (places) in the same space will

differ in the quality of their sensibility. William James (1890) explains it simply in this

analogy: “If the skin felt everywhere exactly alike, a foot-bath could be distinguished

from a total immersion, as being smaller, but never distinguished from a wet face. The

local-signs are indispensable; two points which have the same local-sign will always be

felt as the same point. We do not judge them two unless we have discerned their

sensations to be different.”

A similar situation happened with the Berlin Wall. Though not an architecture building in

itself, it had promoted different situations (places and sentiments) along the years. In his

interview with Hans Obrist, Architect Rem Koolhaas expresses his feelings on the Berlin

Wall. And he was surprised to discover that a wall with one important historical meaning

was different in many locations.

“That was one of the most exciting things: it was one wall that always assumed a

different condition…… In permanent transformation. It was also very contextual, because

on each side it had a different character; it would adjust itself to different

circumstances.” (fig 12/13)

Two aspects of the Berlin Wall:

Fig 12. Berlin Wall in 1963: Fetcher’s

memorial. (copyright James B. Obson)

Fig 13. Berlin Wall in1999: A German sofa

creates a new place next to the wall. Artists:

Bali Tollak and Wolfgang Denning. (copyright Heiko Burkhardt)

Koolhaas had his own reflections. When submitting a proposal involving the wall space,

he was shocked by the wall lack of remanents as a living memory. This time the

impression comes from the emptiness.

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“We thought that the zone of the Wall could eventually be a park, a kind of preserved

condition in the entire city. I've been appalled ever since that the first thing that

disappeared after the Wall fell was any trace of it.”

And what is more, he explicity feels that the City has kept, somehow, the Nazi spirit in

his buildings and to exorcise them is not enough with the construction of new buildings.

Is it a kind of immateriality in architecture that goes beyond the existence of buildings

that generated it?

“For instance, their conversion of the Reichstag is at least as strange as the emphasis on

Prussian building, because these are two forms of innocence or naïveté, and to think that

in the Reichstag you can exorcise the spirits with a new sort of dome is a sort of very

polite gesture and a very compromised esthetic……..realizing that they actually have to

inhabit Nazi buildings as their new ministries, with the anxieties that emanate from that,

that demand exorcism, but do glass and steel still drive out evil spirits?”.

Koolhaas concludes that the whole Berlin, is scary. This is his feeling extended to the city

in the comprehension of its buildings.

“That's the whole point, Berlin is very scary. And somehow everything that tries to cover

it up, either by an Ersatz past or by a kind of Ersatz exorcism (which is what modernity is

doing), is equally implausible. I also believe that the monumental production of

monuments is not going to work either, because that's part of an "official exorcism.”

Finally, he admits to be an admirer of the aesthetics of emptiness, which can be so

appalling as the built environment.

“The Berlin Wall as architecture was for me the first spectacular revelation in

architecture of how absence can be stronger than presence. For me, it is not necessarily

connected to loss in a metaphysical sense, but more connected to an issue of efficiency,

where I think that the great thing about Berlin is that it showed for me how (and this is

my own campaign against architecture) entirely "missing urban presences or entirely

erased architectural entities nevertheless generate what can be called an urban

condition….. For me, the important thing is not to replace it, but to cultivate it. This is a

kind of post-architectural city, and now it's becoming an architectural city. For me that's

a drama, not some kind of stylistic error.”

The threat to familiar atmospheres -integrated by places, spaces, buildings, materials- is

also a threat to identity, to the collective memory which keeps a group's consciousness

and feeds its spatiality, as a liminal experience needed in order to survive as social

beings.

However, we can see that the group’s spatiality, though in a mutant atmosphere,

continues in the aftermaths of earthquakes and wars. As the scene in Kusturica’s film,

the image makes us reflect: if streets and buildings are reduced to an architecture of

desolation, the urban space suddenly empties, people organize their own place following

15

their needs and feelings, in the environment that was left. Emptiness is affected by its

history, its atmosphere and the presence –or absence- of life. (fig 12) It seems that there is

a geographic sensibility, that affects relationships and sometimes, walls are not needed.9

To disappear does not mean to be eliminated.

So, is this the literal concept for immateriality in architecture? The mental counterpart of

the place-space-object, as the “ghost pain” is in the amputee?

Our aim as architects is try to capture the emotional fulfilling in the diversity of human

experiences without imposing any prior theoretical view. Then, designs must be

collaboratively developed with significant inputs from multiple disciplines to achieve the

appropriate immaterial architecture.

Fig 12. Chechenian woman selling sheep’s heads

amidst the ruins of Grozny. (Picture reproduced with Sergei Loiko’s permission)

REFERENCES

Adams, Neil.Visual Perception, Spatiality, and Imagery: Investigating a Paradigm for

Choreographic Realisation and Appreciation

http://www.ausdance.org.au/outside/resources/publications/rebooted/rebootedpdfs/Adam

s.pdf

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press Boston. Ed. 1994

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Las Ruinas Circulares” in Ficciones. Alianza Editorial, Madrid,

1998

16

Cipollini, Axel M. Oltremare Foto. Images. The Neverending House.

http://www.oltremarephoto.com/pages/siredward/siredward.html

Cortazar, Julio. “Casa Tomada” in Bestiario. Buenos Aires, Alfaguara, pag 107-111

Druckrey, Tim. Relational Architecture: The work of Rafael-Lozano Hemmer

http://www.debalie.nl/dossierartikel.jsp;jsessionid=3A8713112FFA3E5BF20A2289A243

49A1?dossierid=16967&articleid=23409

Dubious Views. questioning institutional representations in tourism and

cartography. Virtual Museum Canada

http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Photos/html/en/sm-essay.html

Egenter, Nold. Architectural Anthropology. Structure and Method - an Introduction by

Nold Egenter 13th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

Mexico City/ Mexico Session >Architectural Anthropology August 4th 1993

Gocic, Goran. The Cinema of Emir Kusturica. Directors’ Cuts collection. Wallflower.

Mikiten, T.M. Intuition-based computing: A new kind of 'virtual reality' .Mathematics

and Computers in Simulation 40 (1995) 141-147

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Rem Koolhass. Cultivating Urban Emptiness. Interview with R.

Koolhass, published on line.

http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue4/i_koolhaas/i_koolhaas.html

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Barnes & Noble inc. New

York, 1999.

Rapoport, Amos. The Meaning of the Built Environment. A Nonverbal Communication

Approach. Sage Publications Inc. Beverly Hills, California. 1982

Sellars, Wilfrid. The Role of the Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience. In

Categories: A Colloquium, edited by Henry W. Johnstone, Jr. (Pennsylvania State

University, 1978), Edited in hypertext by Andrew Chrucky.

http://www.ditext.com/sellars/ikte.html#b2

Vermillion, Kerry; Mc Cumber, Quinn. Beyond Empiricism and Transcendentalism:

Historical Contexts for “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In American Literature

Research and Analysis Web Site

17

http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/PoeFall.htm#first%20paragraph

Williams, James. The Principles of Psychology. Chapter XX. Perceptions of Space.1890.

Paper developed for Internet by Christopher Green, Classics in the History of

Psychology. York University, Toronto, Ontario.

ENDNOTES

1 For further understanding on phenomenology, imagination and experience see Wilfred

Sellar’s essays on Kant.

2 Virtual Museum Canada provides this definition : “Psycho geography is defined in the

first volume of Situationist International as "the study of specific effects of the

geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of

individuals."

3 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in the City of México, 1967. He graduated in Physics

and Chemistry at the Concordia University, in Montreal. He is an electronic artist, and

makes High Tech interactive interventions in public spaces. Utilizing robotics,

projections, sounds, internet and cellular phones conexions, his installations are

“antimonuments”.

4 “Ethno cinema” is defined by Goran Gocic as a non-western art-house cinema with

strong elements of indigenous worldviews –with their respective cultural circles seen

together with artistic heritage, pre-modern costums and “exotic” settings.

5 The goats raised up by Nexia Biotechnologies, in Montreal, have a spider gen that

produces spider’s silk protein, to be developed in their milk. This protein is being used in

a new fiber, five times stronger than steel. At first, it should be applied for threads, then

for the construction industry. (National Geographic, january 2003) Character Perhan

should perceive the milk, not the strong fiber….

6 Berekiah Zarco’s nine manuscripts were found in 1990, by writer Richard Zimler, who

became his translator and published it as the novel “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon” (1998)

in a rearranged way, so it could be understood in current times. What interests in our text

is that the house description is coming from the real feelings of Berekiah, who was a

twenty years old kabbalist.

7 The notion of “homes” becomes literal in the cellar, which is used for secret Jewish

ceremonies; in the lemon tree outside that survives destruction and is almost sacred in its

fertility. He has the same feeling when entering a rabbi’s house and discovers a closet not

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bigger than three paces by three paces: he understands that he has just entered a sacred

place for ceremonies too. (In a closet space!)

8 In the story of the Usher House, the writer has many linked ideas that influence him: the

impression as a drug’s dream, the person of R. Usher in the materialization of the house

(or the contrary), the description of the stones, etc.

9 After Rotterdam bombing in the WWII, the poets took as their theme the city form from

city substance. It was inevitable due to the fact that the idea of the city as a material

object had vanished somewhere.