 |
| beauty and waste in the architecture exhebition 2005 Rotterdam |
"We look for materials which are as breathtakingly beautiful as the cherry blossom in Japan, as dense and compact as the rock formations of the Alps or as mysterious and unfathomable as the surface of the oceans. We look for materials which are as intelligent, versatile and complex as natural phenomena, in other words materials which don't just appeal to the eyes of the astounded art critic, but are also really efficient and appeal to all our senses – not just vision but also hearing, smell, taste and touch." Jaques Herzog
Amazingly or perhaps revealingly Herzog and de Meuron don't rely on computer software but prefer the concrete process with sketches and models made of plasterboard, wire, Styrodur and Plexiglas. In other words models, models, models which seamlessly merge into numerous photos of building sites...full page arial photographs indicating the relationship are shown too and the drawing; all of them simple black and white line drawings, highly precise and in each case indicating scale.
For a long time Herzog and De Meuron have been interested in the scent of buildings. The experience of architecture is not purely visual or spatial. They even went so far as to collaborate with a perfumist on the creation of a series of olfactory objects. And why not? If fashion designers can design a perfume then why not also architects? On the occasion of the exhibition "Beauty and Waste in the Architecture of Herzog & De Meuron" at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, they have created a limited edition perfume called “Rotterdam”, which lists Rhine water, dog, hashish, algae, vin chaud, fur and tangerine among its components. And guess what, it smells great.
Some people might see this as the next step in architects' rise to the status of style icons. If you can't afford a Comme des Garçons dress or a Helmut Lang suit you can always distinguish yourself by wearing the perfume. Now, if you can't afford a building, not only can you buy the coffee table book, you can also get the perfume to wear yourself or to give your apartment a touch of Herzog & De Meuron. I think it’s fun and I can't wait until Zaha Hadid launches her own cosmetics line.
via ivarhagendoorn
I love Herzog and De Meuron, but I always forget that their process and thinking are sometimes very different form other Architects. It's all very personal and unique, they make the whole process tangible and almost scientific, like inventors. They also love the sensuality of architecture, making it as much about the physical as they possibly can, something I admire. All of this reminded me of the extract in their monograph where they talk about the sensation of architecture;
the very basic question “What is architecture?” Among the different people, we wanted to ask a child, we wanted to ask an artist; and we also wanted to talk with a philosopher.
Our philosophical interview, which took place four years ago, was with the then 96-year-old Hans Georg Gadamer, who studied under Martin Heidegger and became one of the greatest figures in German philosophy in the twentieth century. The interview was especially interesting because Gadamer’s words sounded as if from another time and world, a period when architecture had a kind of unbroken quality about it and a now lost sense of the real. We asked Gadamer to describe what he saw architecture to be in the most general terms, and without reference to any specific architectural works. In his response he did not offer any theoretical explanations but instead told us a story from his childhood, growing up in the town of Breslau.
In the home of his parents, which was one of the Gründerzeit middle-class villas in the town, there was a wonderful parquet floor in the formal reception room, which the children (including the young Hans Georg) were not allowed to enter except on special occasions like Christmas. Describing the piano and billiard table that stood on this bare floor, Gadamer spoke of this surface as something magical – a wonderful wooden floor, immaculately well kept and polished so that it filled the space with the smell of wax. Every once in a while a friend of his father’s would come to visit, and because it was often raining in Breslau, he would enter carrying his dripping raincoat and umbrella. The man, like his father a professor at the university, always appeared to be immersed in his own thoughts and would, upon entering the forbidden room, always place his coat and soaking umbrella right down on the magical floor. As a child, Hans Georg would be horrified that a friend of his father’s would do such a thing. He still vividly remembers the image of the polished wooden floor decorated with water droplets from the sodden umbrella.
In the home of his parents, which was one of the Gründerzeit middle-class villas in the town, there was a wonderful parquet floor in the formal reception room, which the children (including the young Hans Georg) were not allowed to enter except on special occasions like Christmas. Describing the piano and billiard table that stood on this bare floor, Gadamer spoke of this surface as something magical – a wonderful wooden floor, immaculately well kept and polished so that it filled the space with the smell of wax. Every once in a while a friend of his father’s would come to visit, and because it was often raining in Breslau, he would enter carrying his dripping raincoat and umbrella. The man, like his father a professor at the university, always appeared to be immersed in his own thoughts and would, upon entering the forbidden room, always place his coat and soaking umbrella right down on the magical floor. As a child, Hans Georg would be horrified that a friend of his father’s would do such a thing. He still vividly remembers the image of the polished wooden floor decorated with water droplets from the sodden umbrella.
I often think of the Gadamer story because of its idea of the real. Gadamer’s floor describes a concept of reality that does not exist anymore – the artisanal and traditional background of the floor itself has been lost for quite some time – but what makes this surface so interesting is its architectural potential for today. In this sense, Gadamer’s floor can become an emblem for a very powerful design strategy in its emphasis on materiality, gravity and maintenance, and its focus on the floor as a floor."
"One of the most important architectural elements that makes Tate Modern in London such a successful building with artists, curators, and the visiting public is the wooden floor that we introduced on almost all of its levels. Irregular and untreated, the oak floor planks are simply nailed down onto their joists – brutal and beautiful at the same time. It is both rough like a piece of industrial architecture and soft like fashion designer Vivian Westwood’s hyper-sophisticated fabrics.
We wanted to introduce a specific floor surface so as to ground or root people within this huge building, to exaggerate the sense they have in standing up vertically in front of the works of art. So, unlike Gadamer’s parquet, the Tate Modern floor is an intellectual rather than an artisanal product. We were not interested in the nostalgia of revitalizing long-gone methods of traditional production, but we are interested in the physical result, in the physical reality of traditional architecture.
To achieve this sense of the real, we developed and tested full-scale mock-ups of almost every major detail in the building as part of a process driven by thinking, discussing and trying, rather than rehearsing individually the necessary technical skills."
Architects are essentially inventors. I think this prototype, life size model approach therefore makes perfect sense. I suppose it's just expensive.
