who are we building for - the '68s
thenon-dividing concept of space
human being, construction and nature
organic order and mathematical nature
picture and image
the straight line
Who are we building for? At architecture schools the generation of 1968 emphasised the social relevance of building. To this end, the previously undisputed role model function of the masters of modernism such as Le Corbusier, Mies van derRohe and Karl Moser had to be questioned from the ground up. Functionalist design methods and abstract composition were replaced by structuralist thinking and theories of psychological perception. This rebellion against all established concepts of architecture, including modernism, ended in an architecture of shapelessness. As part of this student rebellion myself, I graduated from the ETH deeply insecure and lacking confidence in the power and significance of form as such
For reasons that still escape me today, I bought a copper plate and a burin and - clueless about the technique - tried to cut in figures. The result: an intaglio plate that I couldn't put on paper. Sibylle Heusser, then assistant to Professor Paul Hofer at the ETH, referred me to Pietro Sarto and his printing studio in St.-Prex on Lake Geneva. This marked the beginning of several sojourns in the artists' community: working at the printing presses during the day, watercolouring in the Vaud plateau in between, and extensive discussions about the meaning and significance of everything visual in the evening, based on the unique collection of the Atelier de St.-Prex and the Cuendet Foundation with originals by Rembrandt, Melan and Piranese. It was the closeness to these fantastic originals that allowed me to understand the deeper meaning of depictions, including architectural ones. I owe much to Pietro Sarto, Edmond Quinche and Michel Duplain for an understanding of space that knows no bounds. Architecture education in schools is limited to finite and geometrically disciplined spatial divisions, which allow safe handling of geometries using the laws of proportion.
Nature tends to play a minor role in architectural drafts. In modernism, it was often stencilled in as a kind of plan of itself or as a virtuously scribbled signature between the elegant straight lines of the perspectives. One of the exceptions is the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In order to develop its organising power, his architecture virtually demands the presence of nature. His houses seem to grow out of the organic elements of topography, landscape and flora. In his "Natural House", Frank Lloyd Wright succeeded in transferring the indispensable interface between nature in its deeper essence and architecture from the drawing to the finished building. Piranese, on the other hand, integrated the destructive vitality of nature in his Vedute as a "subversive" element that contributes to the decay of the buildings, but also romanticises them. He thus achieved a fantastic combination of bookish archaeological inventory, interpretation, speculation and allegory, an amalgam of past, present and future. The incomparably virtuosic and turbulent skies, reaching into infinity, lend these depictions a metaphysical dimension. Such qualities of architectural representations have always fascinated me. Today's hyper-realistic visualisations seem stale and powerless in comparison. Engraving on copper or drawing on paper requires imagination and an overall view. As it is in walking, one step must betaken after the other. Nowadays, with digital copy-paste techniques or AI, we try to take all the steps at once. However, conceptual thinking requires a strong organising means of expression so that the basic idea can be put together in adisciplined way to form a coherent design. Was Piranese a precise and patient creator? The opposite was the case. The often impetuous Piranese needed the meticulous work on copper to discipline himself.
The human being in relation to nature has occupied our thoughts in Western culture since ancient times. In the history of human development, nature has been an inspiration for beauty and perfection, but also a teacher and a danger. In the course of history, this nature has been increasingly domesticated and implanted into our neighbourhoods as modern urban greenery or recently, in visions of the future, grown as vertical retort plants on facades. These trends may perhaps represent a biological substitute. But they can in no way replace what nature evokes in our senses and perceptions. In my photographic recordings of olive groves, for example, I was particularly fascinated by this archaic intertwining of natural forms and man-made objects. On a copper plate the acid etching process can only be controlled to a certain extent and develops natural forms that can be used to depict vegetation, generated automatically, so to speak. Developers of computer games know that rational forms such as buildings, cities and robots are much easier to shape and move around in the digital world than organic forms such as plants, human hair or natural landscapes. Working with copper has twice earned me a Swiss Federal Art Scholarship, awarded by a jury in presence of the architect Mario Botta. And it was only thanks to these scholarships that I was able to spend two years in Rome at the Swiss Institute to study antiquity and the Baroque in depth.
Do present architecture students who have grown up in the digital world still understand the fundamental difference between a hand drawing and a plot, picture and image, original and clone? Today, images are heaps of data that can only be made visible with a decoding programme. They appear in various sizes and qualities on a screen and can be printed out if required. Even the earliest traces of human depictions, such as the imprint of a hand on a cave wall, the skilfully applied outline of an animal or an incised figure on stone, show individual handwritten signatures. As evidence of early craftsmanship, they were created by material subtraction or material application.
In the case of the engraving technique, the line and figure become existant by physical pressure. The hand-guided chisel cuts the curve from the dynamics of the forces of movement comparable to the trace of a skier in fresh snow. And the straight line becomes what it actually is, a special case of a curve. In engraving curvilinearity remains the normal case. In nature the straight line only occurs as an approximation. In the building process or when pruning trees (taille sévère), the straight edge had to be literally fought for using technical aids such as string marks, rulers and templates or bearings. Straight lines and edges, dimensional precision, proportion gauges and mathematical calculationare are tools of advanced civilisations. It is therefore all the more astonishing that the straight line, once conquered during the Greek classical period and the Renaissance, had to make way for curved, complex lines in the Baroque era, the age of the flourishing exact sciences.
