It is unquestionably the language and style of 19th century philosophy -- its dignified and earnest tone, exemplified here by August Schmarsow’s text -- which is perhaps best described as the style of the “treatise”, that prompts me to open this is (post-)post-modern post in a somewhat offhanded and irreverent manner.
For “The Essence of Architectural Creation” seems to bear the mark of “having ample time”. Ample time to ponder, write, gradually develop one’s thoughts by circumventing, then momentarily entering, circumventing again the main idea -- and this endlessly. It’s as if the author needed to warm up the reader’s mind, carefully and, not without elegant prose and pontification, slowly - like food subjected to the “frozen” setting in a microwave oven.
Like marshmallows, Schmarsow’s essay may be fun to play with (not that I would want to burn it, I do not subscribe to mankind's consterning tradition of the libricide), but harder to digest. Unlike marshmallows and many architectural structures (at least in their design and exception made of bunkers and forts), it is strenuous to penetrate. (A positive outcome of this reading, however, was to inspire the idea of a performance in which the performer reads a list of names while pushing as many marshmallows as possible into his or her mouth.)
Burnt Schmarshmallows in Space - Pennsylvania, Summer 2012
(Titled inspired by Tom Sanders, because otherwise people might not know what these are)
Such a style seems to find roots farther back in time --- in Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (1762) for instance, or in David Hume’s work, or John Locke’s. It was perhaps a writer-philosopher’s emancipation from the dogma of the almighty, omniscient Church and a newly acquired freedom of expression that gave him or her (but more often “him”) a hall pass to expound. And expound. And expound some more. There were less distractions then, and perhaps the reader’s mind was more readily available. (No instagram, incoming text message, email, fax, phone call, or telegram - maybe a letter deposited by the mail person and the sound of a horse-drawn carriage moving away, ah, and the gentle distraction of a chamber quartet, or piano should the reader find him or herself endowed with privileged circumstances). There is, it seems, an unspoken, underlying fascination for the intellect, celebrated in the form of lengthy and, at times, obscure writings. Freedom of expression, gained in those times at the price of political and social struggles, needed to be exalted, quite literally, in the form of voluminous discourses. There was the corollary notion that anyone could understand them: the child of the Lumieres was gifted with the ability to read, think and respond critically. This was an almost naive fascination - as if these authors were saying “how wonderful: now I can think and write freely about all these matters”. Long texts and argumentation, sometimes assertions, became the tangible - readable - embodiment of the mind’s propensity to think and debate. As glorious as this seems, I impatiently wait for the Lumieres (and its heirs) - like the blinding headlights of a car - to pass.
Schmarsow, like Hildebrandt or Vischer, falls into this category. Granted, it is a category that I built and from which I disassociate myself. I am not a child of the Lumieres. I am one of contradiction with little hope for dialectics - just bare post-Dada paradox, world wars, terrorism, corruption, Rwanda, Bosnia. No vertical or horizontal axis for me, just obliques. My belief in and connection to these streams of thought has been severed. And belief may be what we need to sustain attention. I am distracted by (or perhaps, more accurately: “invested simultaneously in”) emails, websites, assignments, ten different books and PDFs which I have given up trying to finish. I attempt to stay but fail - le mal de ce siecle qui commence? - with Schmarsow. I read the words, understand each one of them, I understand them in the context of a sentence, a paragraph even, but, beyond that, I fail to grasp where the author is going. I know he’s discussing the continuity of architecture from the Caribbean hut to the Reichstag. And spatial constructs. I know. But I want him to make his point quickly -- and such is not the way of the homo nineteenthcenturyus. Perhaps Schmarsow does make the point, but then makes it over, and over again -- at which point I start to wonder if I ever got it the first time. I am overwhelmed by a form out of which I feel pressed to squeeze content. And so I read on, increasingly alienated by a text from which I presuppose that I am to gain, at the very least, some new insight. Perhaps expecting gain of this kind is a mistake. Here, gain may, in fact, come from staying with. “Just hear me out”, old Schmarsow seems to be whispering, urging me to stretch the limits of my empathy. But the marshmallows render the communication almost unintelligible. And then, in a process of mimicry and derision, I, in turn, start to expound. To stay (or be) with Schmarsow, is all I ask.
My hermeticism could be tempered, and maybe forgiven, by the following comments.
The first relates to Matisse’s mural commission for the American collector Albert Barnes in the 1930’s which was hailed as one of the most successful mergings of architecture and painting of the 20th century. Of course, the merging itself is nothing new. One needs only to look back at Pompeii - the style that became known as “grotto” due to the fact that Pompeian palaces had been covered, caved-in, by Vesuvius’ lava. The art critic Brian O’Doherty writes about these mergers in “Inside the White Cube” and shows, for instance, how architecture for a long time - from the Baroque to the Victorian era - paid attention to, integrated, the ceiling. It was only in the 20th century that the ceilings became a bland, neutral space, catering no longer to trompe l’oeil or bas relief but to technology: light fixtures and cables. A sore thumb, an outcast - le laisse pour compte - of, in Schmarsow’s words, the “art of space”, or “a space filled with a life of its own” (p. 291).
The second involves the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (whom we studied in 282A last fall) renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. In 1983, Wodiczko, who grew up in communist Poland shared an intriguing take on architecture (it bears, in my view, the scars of the massive and oppressive quality of Stalinist habitats):
“In the process of our socialization, the very first contact with a public building is no less important than the moment of social confrontation with the father, through which our sexual role and place in society [are] constructed. Early socialization through patriarchal sexual discipline is extended by the later socialization through the institutional architecturalization of our bodies. Thus the spirit of the father never dies, continuously living as it does in the building which was, is, and will be embodying, structuring, mastering, representing, and reproducing his ‘eternal’ and ‘universal’ presence as a patriarchal wisdom-body of power.”
Long preambule. Below I have included my notes. This could be a way for readers to stay with me.
- … contrasts the views of the historian and the philosopher, or “aesthetician” (p. 281) on the matter of architecture. For the former it is the basis of all human development, for the other, it is bound to laws of function and therefore, unlike the fine arts, it is not a free art. Schmarsow seems to take the side of the historian here (p. 282)
- Art of dressing - Gottfried Semper
p. 283 “what is truly essential is …”
- As a peaceful citizen of the small world of the spinning top which has been turned upside down by … (I am that citizen and Schmarsow “spins me round like a record round round” and upside down)
- p. 284 middle: “architecture” after ...
suggests we go back in time to a sort of pre-historic vision of architecture
link between primitive and contemporary architecture, Gottfried Semper, for instance, does not recognize the affiliation. find a common ground between newer and older or vernacular types of architecture.
- architecture / music (OK, yes, but please: no more analogies between the arts, how is that helpful? do musicians make analogies with architecture?)
- caribbean hut to reichstag > historical, cultural uniformism, universalism
spatial constructs: affirms an aesthetic pov vs a XX pov
the creatress of space. ah, so here is where I get lost, I lose my own self - in this mapless space of words, perhaps.
- architecture as the extension of the sense of body with the visual sense > think: Bruce Nauman's claustrophobic structures...
- "every spatial creation is first and foremost the enclosing of a subject" > every textual creation is the enclosure of a subject.
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