the desire to shape
unaesthetic art
sketching as design method
the essence of form
technology and nature as shaper
the conquest of the world
Where does the human urge to shape our surroundings beyond utility come from? Why do we want to find ourselves represented in forms? How malleable are we ourselves through the shape of our surroundings? What exactly can form tell us? I am convinced that we also think in forms, not only in words. Louis Kahn's distinction between form and design has constantly accompanied me in my work. In his conceptualisation man-made forms always include meaning, but not designs.
During my first years of study, the writer and art critic Paul Nizon, who now lives in Paris, was invited to ETH as a guest lecturer, as so called "writer in residence", in 1969/70. His seminar entitled "Kunst unästhetisch, Traktanden zum Thema Architektur undKunst" ("Art unaesthetic, treatises on architecture and art") dealt with the deeper motivations of artistic creation, but also with the decoding of forms in art and architecture in an unconventional, lateral-thinking and associative way. As his assistant, I helped to prepare the seminars, laying out the "bait for thought" around which the discussions would then crystallise. Sounds complicated, but it was simple. For a seminar on the topic "City of the Living - City of the Dead", for example, slides of the Jewish cemetery in Prague, Mexican death cult and the zigzag aesthetics of a Chrysler Building were juxtaposed as "bait". In the discussion, an attempt was then made to decipher the design features of these fundamentally different expressions of human existence in order to trace back the process and prerequisites of their creation. Forms can never be understood in isolation from their embedding in a specific cultural context, a primal existential feeling or specific conditions of creation. This hidden dimension behind the superficially visible form in art and architecture has preoccupied me ever since. In the Louvre, I sketch the same works again and again, not because I can't understand their shape, but to better understand the hidden meaning behind them.
I regard my frequent visits to the Louvre as a spiritual retreat. With regard to famous artists, I am often more interested in sketches, notations, concept studies - in short, all the preliminary stages of a work - than the masterpiece itself. They allow an unadulterated insight into the creative process, so to speak. When sketching in the Louvre, I am aware that I am drawing works of art or artefacts of others. All these museum artefacts have already undergone a human process of creation, are tainted with the style of their time and are the result of an individual way of seeing and technique of representation. By adding a kind of picture frame to pictorial objects, I sketch as if through the window of someone else's home.
Drawing as a means of searching for hidden dimensions allows us to comprehend the creative process and illustrates how intense and inescapable the compulsion for order is in the creative process of art and architecture. An artistic representation can only communicate thanks to concise outlines, pictorial levels, compositional relationships and also a comprehensible narrative. For example, it was only through sketching that I realised how strongly the compositional principles of modern abstract art were already consciously or unconsciously anticipated in the pictures of classical figurative painting. In architecture, modernism's reference back to the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods is much more obvious.
Looking at a simple Mesopotamian clay figure, one realises, beyond any art historical consideration, how existential the urge to create is in the history of mankind. Thousands of years ago, someone formed an artefact with their hands from the material of their surroundings and used it in everyday life. These moments touch me deeply because I can sense the person behind the artefact, who I don't know what he looked like or how he lived. But in the moulding of the object I feel close to him.
I have always greatly appreciated working together with smart engineers or specialists finding in the form finding process, especially when there were no comparable projects to start from. Whether it was a cable car, theatre, protective structure or exposed elevator system, it was always the functional and technical influencing factors that I put at the beginning of the search for a form. Whilemost of the more than eighty architects taking part in the Malta competition conceived buildings with protective functions, I came to the conclusion that a no-building structure " consisting of a 3 mm thick membrane would do it.
In modernity, form follows function. It should therefore be possible to decipher the function from the form. In cultural history, this only seems possible to a limited extent. The nowadays existing remains served often a ritual ceremony ora display of power and were built with durable materials. They represent a metaphysical, rationally intangible building programme shaped by the human imagination. In a world where everything has to have an explanation, I find it reassuring that we can often only speculate about the function of objects from early civilisations. Forms that make an impression on us, even if we don't know their meaning, remain in us engraved for years and and might reappear at some point in a design. This is the only way I can explain the astonishing similarity in the formal language between the temple complex of Hagar Qim and Ronchamp. We know that LeCorbusier visited Malta and certainly the temple complex of Ggantija on one of his trips to the Orient.
I love children's drawings and am always impressed by how people gradually take possession of life through form. All the early stages of development can be traced in children's drawings. Children's drawings also include moulding with sand or modelling clay. At an early stage, a child draws an indecipherable ball, but tells a story about it. Later, a kind of self-recognition is added. Then appears the family, usually in the form of cephalopods. And finally, these are placed in an environment in which the child's own house and room play an important role. The shapes are initially abstract, adapted to children's motor skills: circling balls, straight lines, crosses. The square and more complex shapes come later in development. I have always admired the concentration and perseverance with which children clearly outline shapes, meticulously colour them in and carefully place them on the page. Children's drawings only lose their naive innocence when they are superimposed and depicted in perspective. The kitschy formal language of commercial imagery makes its entrance. Only at an older age do we realise how valuable this unadulterated expressiveness of the early drawings was and how carefree and imaginative one could handle forms in the childhood years.
