Purity is good, worthwhile and desirable. This generally agreed premise enables the advertising trade to use the notion of „purity“ to represent the superlative, the perfect - and not only in connection with cleanliness. In fact, many different positive qualities are associated with this concept, such as flawlessness and clarity, truth and perfection. There is something absolute about purity, and this includes an element of the exclusive, isolated and complete, close to sterility - and death. In architecture, purity is not connected with any established world of form but rather with a certain attitude determined by a striving for explicitness and idealism. This is associated with the need for the greatest possible degree of control: thus purity also has a political dimension, for control means power, including the power to define what purity means. We can, perhaps, imagine a kind of architecture based on pure geometry or pure functionality, and we can speak of pure construction or pure materiality; it is, however, hard to visualise pure architecture without disregarding the specific complexity of the discipline with its integrating, interdisciplinary essence. There are people who believe that those who strive for purity repudiate the complexity and contradictory character of life itself. For others, this polarisation, this mere contradiction, is less than satisfactory. To some, purity is much closer to being the sum and synthesis of everything that is relative and contradictory. To them, the quest for purity does not mean the rejection of complexity, but its annulment. It may be that dualism in the perception of the colour white is representative of this: is white a colour at all? Or is it the sum of all colours - as it were the colour of colours? Could it be that ambiguity, compromise and contamination are closer and more accessible than purity? How can we think of one without visualising the other? It is always purity that sets the standard, offers us a potential platform for contention and drives us forward through its very utopian absoluteness. And thus the best attempts to reach the ideal develop an impressive, almost alarming power and radicality, often connected with an uneasy presentiment of sublimity rather than a sense of beauty. Yet it is the latter that is the stronger of the two aesthetic perceptions. Some buildings that we perceive as pure develop a kind of strength and inner coherence which itself generates freedom. These buildings are strong; they are possessed of a self-evident naturalness, letting the incalculable imponderability of life flow over them and deriving from it an inner radiance. This, too, is illustrated by examples in this issue. The Editors

Thema

Christina von Braun
Die Macht des Reinen | Zum Begriff der Reinheit

Umfassende Reinheit Erweiterung Kantonsspital Basel

Anne Wermeille Mendonça
Eine monumentale Geste|Fussballstadion in Braga

Christian Kerez
Bilder und Räume

Klaus Jan Philipp
Reinheit der Farbe – Reinheit des Lebens | Die Farbe Weiss in der Architektur

Annette Spiro
Reine Erfindung | Das Haus der Künste von Oscar Niemeyer in São Paulo

Forum

Kolumne: Hans Frei
Bauten: Niederländische Botschaft in Berlin
EFH: Ferienhaus am Flumserberg
Bauten: parkings
Wettbewerb: Europäische Zentralbank, Frankfurt
Wettbewerb: Seniorenresidenz Spirgarten, Zürich-Altsetten Innenarchitektur – VSI..
ASAI: Architektonische Forschungsarbeit zu Ritual und Hygiene
Forum: Stadtabstriche
Forum: Forum de les Cultures 2004, Barcelona
Bücher: Metron, Planen und Bauen 1965 –2003
bauen +rechten
Beruf: Universität Luzern
Architekturausstellungen
Veranstaltungen |Wettbewerbe | Neuerscheinungen
Produkte
Vorschau | Impressum

werk-Material

Silvia Kistler Rudolf Vogt dipl.Architekten ETH/BSA/SIA: Neubau Bahnhofparking Biel, BE
Ueli Brauen & Doris Waelchli: Parking du Centre, Lausanne, VD