Zeitschrift
UmBau 23
Diffus im Fokus - Focus on Blur
Blur Blur Blur
While the Summa Theologica counts clarity as one of three conditions of beauty, the Protrepticus tells us that beauty depends on blurred vision: „For if one were able to see as keenly as they say Lynceus did, who saw through walls and trees, how could one ever stand to look at people if one saw of what sort of bad things they are composed?“[1] Perhaps Aristotle was the first theorist of the „blur“, a concept that entered architecture theory about a decade ago.
24. Januar 2008 - Kari Jormakka
Before that time, the American avantgarde of deconstructivism was obsessed with the hyperarticulation of form and the European neominimalists with simple Platonic solids. Today, former deconstructivist Peter Eisenman blurs the conditions of the object and landscape into one heterogeneous space in his cultural center in Santiago de Compostela while Diller Scofidio, other exponents of „critical practice“ who in the past explored vision with Cartesian clarity, opted for invisibility in their Blur building in Switzerland. Post-neomodernist Jean Nouvel explores the de-definition of form in the Tokyo Guggenheim, which resembles a hill made of leaves, while one-time „minimalists“ Herzog & De Meuron built a translucent amoeba-shaped library in Cottbus, Germany.
Appropriately enough, the architecture of the blurred informe does not derive from a unified, well-articulated theory. A variety of philosophical influences and parallels could be identified, however. Like the „Weather projects“ by Olafur Eliasson, Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of „foam“ investigates atmospheric conditions, proposing a sort of expanded meteorology. Skins, spheres, networks, ambiance and air-conditioning replace the old focus on things, gravity, solidity and matter. The Blur building or the Biospheres would appear as perfect illustrations of Sloterdijk’s thesis, but does the concept of foam have broader implications for architecture? This is the question posed by Andreas Leo Findeisen in his paper below; he cautions against a too direct application of the foam theory as a formal recipe for making architecture.
In American architecture, the notion of the blur emerged from a reading of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.[2] Derrida’s critique of the Kantian concept of parergon in the Truth in Painting destabilized the status of limit and form by showing that the idea of an organic unity is contradictory. With his concepts of the rhizome and the fold, Deleuze provided an alternative to linear, hierarchical thinking and the possibility of dealing with complex and supple systems. Arne Winkelmann examines a project coming out of this discourse, Eisenman’s Jewish Memorial in Berlin, in detail. With reference to Deleuze’s notion of a-signifying diagram, Eisenman avoided symbolism and concentrated on the scaling and displacement of various topographical grids. The result is an amorphous field of stelae which, despite its rational appearance, exemplifies the potential in every closed system for instability and chaos. Winkelmann interprets the monument iconographically and finds it an apt symbol for the erosion of memory.
Eisenman’s formless field condition is a logical development from his earlier work which sought to displace authorship through algorithmic design processes that combined aleatorism with extreme determinism. In his contribution, Christian Junge looks at the desire not to design, arguing with reference to Georges Bataille and Rudolf Arnheim that it is incoherent to an architect or artist to attempt to produce something without form and concluding that the deterministic algorithms function best as investigative tools for a homo ludens.
Focusing on a different aspect of the same discourse, Philip Loskant observes that the fragmentation and collage, typical of deconstructivist architecture, echo the social and political tensions of the 1980s, while the more relaxed, „non-dialectical“ society of the 1990s is reflected in blurred designs. What is post-9/11 architecture, then, going to be? Instead of accepting the political, social, religious and ethnic polarization that seems to be getting more and more extreme, Loskant argues for a more extended blurring, one that is not limited to form but blurs diverse „minor languages“ into a culturally relevant hybrid.
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor languages was drawn from a diary entry by Franz Kafka, and this is not the only issue in the blur discourse that harks back to the classical avantgarde. The papers by Ingrid Böck and Thomas Mical relate the notion of diffuse form to Marcel Duchamp, the surrealists and the Bataillean informe.[3] Mical claims that of all that is concealed within representations of architecture, the condition of exteriority is the most difficult even though (or perhaps because) architecture is ultimately about the separation of a stable inside from an originary formless outside. He compares this always already blurred separation to the elusive border between being-in-itself and being-for-itself in Sartrean existentialism as well as the concept of the inframince in Duchamp’s theory. In this context, he analyzes works by Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Thomas Ruff, as well as architectural concepts of Diller Scofidio and Toyo Ito.
Böck, by contrast, concentrates on the work of one office, R&Sie, which she reads through Bataille’s concept of the informe and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of BwO, or body without organs. In their design for a Contemporary Art Museum in Bangkok, for example, R&Sie start with the local pollution problem, proposing a structure with an electrostatically charged facade that collects dust from the air. The pollution collected will change the appearance of the building constantly, filter the light in the interior and even modify local climate. For Böck, such projects are examples of how formless, highly sensual material operates across and through a surface, disabling the imposition of form.
In an even broader historical perspective, the contemporary concern with the blur, with diffusity and formlessness can be set in a context reaching even further back than Bataille. In his paper, Manfred Russo traces an evolutionary line from Hegel via Wölfflin and Riegl to Boccioni, and then to Giedion and Benjamin, and finally to Sloterdijk’s foam and Lyotard’s postmodern sublime. Of course, even the original conceptions of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and others in the eighteenth century, already operate beyond the formal, providing a basis for Romanticism. Wulf Walter Böttger sketches out some main themes in the aesthetic theories of the Romantics, including Schelling, Caspar David Friedrich and Novalis, in order to analyse contemporary projects by Olafur Eliasson and Jun Aoki. In the Snow Foundation building (1999) in Yasuduka, Niigata, for example, Aoki turns the building itself into a large container, a third of which is filled in the wintertime with snow that then cools the air in the summer. Here, architecture functions less as a formal composition than as climatic mechanism that also produces unique visual experiences.
In the paper that closes this issue of UmBau, Markus Jatsch looks into the psychological conditions of perception to better understand the impact of the work by artists James Turrell, Dan Graham, Heinz Mack and others. Basing his theoretical arguments on Roman Ingarden, Nelson Goodman and Franz Xaver Baier, Jatsch predicts that in the future architecture will no longer be judged by its aesthetic appearance but by the measure to which it opens up new reality. He expects architecture to become more of an „anarchitecture“ which instead of constructing isolated, self-sufficient objects will concentrate on the production of semi-finished structures that are more about the constitution of their environment and viewers than about their own definition.
The editors thank Andreas Leo Findeisen (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Jeffrey Kipnis (The Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University), Martin Prinzhorn (University of Vienna) and Andreas Ruby (textbild, Cologne) for their cooperation on the review board for this issue.
Appropriately enough, the architecture of the blurred informe does not derive from a unified, well-articulated theory. A variety of philosophical influences and parallels could be identified, however. Like the „Weather projects“ by Olafur Eliasson, Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of „foam“ investigates atmospheric conditions, proposing a sort of expanded meteorology. Skins, spheres, networks, ambiance and air-conditioning replace the old focus on things, gravity, solidity and matter. The Blur building or the Biospheres would appear as perfect illustrations of Sloterdijk’s thesis, but does the concept of foam have broader implications for architecture? This is the question posed by Andreas Leo Findeisen in his paper below; he cautions against a too direct application of the foam theory as a formal recipe for making architecture.
In American architecture, the notion of the blur emerged from a reading of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.[2] Derrida’s critique of the Kantian concept of parergon in the Truth in Painting destabilized the status of limit and form by showing that the idea of an organic unity is contradictory. With his concepts of the rhizome and the fold, Deleuze provided an alternative to linear, hierarchical thinking and the possibility of dealing with complex and supple systems. Arne Winkelmann examines a project coming out of this discourse, Eisenman’s Jewish Memorial in Berlin, in detail. With reference to Deleuze’s notion of a-signifying diagram, Eisenman avoided symbolism and concentrated on the scaling and displacement of various topographical grids. The result is an amorphous field of stelae which, despite its rational appearance, exemplifies the potential in every closed system for instability and chaos. Winkelmann interprets the monument iconographically and finds it an apt symbol for the erosion of memory.
Eisenman’s formless field condition is a logical development from his earlier work which sought to displace authorship through algorithmic design processes that combined aleatorism with extreme determinism. In his contribution, Christian Junge looks at the desire not to design, arguing with reference to Georges Bataille and Rudolf Arnheim that it is incoherent to an architect or artist to attempt to produce something without form and concluding that the deterministic algorithms function best as investigative tools for a homo ludens.
Focusing on a different aspect of the same discourse, Philip Loskant observes that the fragmentation and collage, typical of deconstructivist architecture, echo the social and political tensions of the 1980s, while the more relaxed, „non-dialectical“ society of the 1990s is reflected in blurred designs. What is post-9/11 architecture, then, going to be? Instead of accepting the political, social, religious and ethnic polarization that seems to be getting more and more extreme, Loskant argues for a more extended blurring, one that is not limited to form but blurs diverse „minor languages“ into a culturally relevant hybrid.
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor languages was drawn from a diary entry by Franz Kafka, and this is not the only issue in the blur discourse that harks back to the classical avantgarde. The papers by Ingrid Böck and Thomas Mical relate the notion of diffuse form to Marcel Duchamp, the surrealists and the Bataillean informe.[3] Mical claims that of all that is concealed within representations of architecture, the condition of exteriority is the most difficult even though (or perhaps because) architecture is ultimately about the separation of a stable inside from an originary formless outside. He compares this always already blurred separation to the elusive border between being-in-itself and being-for-itself in Sartrean existentialism as well as the concept of the inframince in Duchamp’s theory. In this context, he analyzes works by Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Thomas Ruff, as well as architectural concepts of Diller Scofidio and Toyo Ito.
Böck, by contrast, concentrates on the work of one office, R&Sie, which she reads through Bataille’s concept of the informe and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of BwO, or body without organs. In their design for a Contemporary Art Museum in Bangkok, for example, R&Sie start with the local pollution problem, proposing a structure with an electrostatically charged facade that collects dust from the air. The pollution collected will change the appearance of the building constantly, filter the light in the interior and even modify local climate. For Böck, such projects are examples of how formless, highly sensual material operates across and through a surface, disabling the imposition of form.
In an even broader historical perspective, the contemporary concern with the blur, with diffusity and formlessness can be set in a context reaching even further back than Bataille. In his paper, Manfred Russo traces an evolutionary line from Hegel via Wölfflin and Riegl to Boccioni, and then to Giedion and Benjamin, and finally to Sloterdijk’s foam and Lyotard’s postmodern sublime. Of course, even the original conceptions of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and others in the eighteenth century, already operate beyond the formal, providing a basis for Romanticism. Wulf Walter Böttger sketches out some main themes in the aesthetic theories of the Romantics, including Schelling, Caspar David Friedrich and Novalis, in order to analyse contemporary projects by Olafur Eliasson and Jun Aoki. In the Snow Foundation building (1999) in Yasuduka, Niigata, for example, Aoki turns the building itself into a large container, a third of which is filled in the wintertime with snow that then cools the air in the summer. Here, architecture functions less as a formal composition than as climatic mechanism that also produces unique visual experiences.
In the paper that closes this issue of UmBau, Markus Jatsch looks into the psychological conditions of perception to better understand the impact of the work by artists James Turrell, Dan Graham, Heinz Mack and others. Basing his theoretical arguments on Roman Ingarden, Nelson Goodman and Franz Xaver Baier, Jatsch predicts that in the future architecture will no longer be judged by its aesthetic appearance but by the measure to which it opens up new reality. He expects architecture to become more of an „anarchitecture“ which instead of constructing isolated, self-sufficient objects will concentrate on the production of semi-finished structures that are more about the constitution of their environment and viewers than about their own definition.
The editors thank Andreas Leo Findeisen (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Jeffrey Kipnis (The Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University), Martin Prinzhorn (University of Vienna) and Andreas Ruby (textbild, Cologne) for their cooperation on the review board for this issue.
[1] S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, 39,8c, 91, 3, 2; Aristotle, Protrepticus.
[2] Sloterdijk, Peter, Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004; Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Tr. Tom Comley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Derrida, Jacques, Truth in Painting, tr. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
[3] For a discussion, see Bois, Yve-Alain, and Krauss, Rosalind E., Formless, A User's Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997.
[2] Sloterdijk, Peter, Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004; Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Tr. Tom Comley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Derrida, Jacques, Truth in Painting, tr. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
[3] For a discussion, see Bois, Yve-Alain, and Krauss, Rosalind E., Formless, A User's Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997.
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