Petra ČEFERIN | Architect, Associate Professor
Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljuljana, Slovenia Petra.Ceferin@fa.uni-lj.si
Abstract
The central question of this conference is the question of the connection between architecture and art. In this paper I will focus on the question that the problem of connection between architecture and art implicitly presupposes. This is the question: what each of these practices is;
what is architecture and what is art?
In response to this question I propose the following hypothesis: both art and architecture are creative practices. As such they produce objects of a special kind. They are trans-situational and trans-temporal objects; that is, objects that pierce the given temporal and spatial or cultural determination, that persist in different times and different cultures as something significant for art/architecture and society. In developing this hypothesis I will limit myself to the practice of architecture.
1
As the starting point for defining architecture I take two definitions that only appear to be in opposition. The first one was posited by Kenneth Frampton as the starting point for his theory of tectonics, and which goes as follows: architecture is a thing, that is to say, it is something material.1
The second is the definition Jacques Lacan outlined in his seminar Ethics of Psychoanalysis, from the chapter on creation. At first sight it seems that it states exactly the opposite. He defined
1 For Frampton's conceptualization of products of architecture as things and his definition of architecture as something material see Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel a l'Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” in Labour, Work and Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2002), pp. 93–95 et.al., and Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge-Mass./London: MIT Press and Chicago: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1996).
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
118 architecture as something that is organised around the void.1 But this void, as Lacan made clear, isn't something null. Rather, it is the mark of a human presence in the world. It produces material effects in the world.
My thesis is, that in order to address the question of what architecture is, one has to think these two definitions together. This leads us to the following result: architecture is a material thing that is made of the void. This also means: its materiality, the materiality of architecture as a thing, is a special kind of materiality.
2
I will try to show now that architecture produces its own special kind of objects, which are things, by constructing joints, architectural joints. With this statement I subscribe to an established view in architecture, according to which architecture is the art of constructing, or the art of building.
This view is advocated also by Frampton, who in his theory of tectonics describes a structural joint as “the fundamental nexus around which a building comes into being, that is to say, comes to be articulated as a presence in itself.”2 Thus in architecture a structural or generic joint isn’t simply a connection. But it is, according to Frampton, the fundamental architectural element. It is, if I quote him once more, a point of ontological condensation.3
What does this mean? It means that an architectural joint is that key architectural element, around which architecture as a thing is articulated. In a joint, with a joint, architecture itself is present, both corporally and materially. Of course, this happens if the joint is well articulated.
A well articulated joint, an architectural joint is the way in which architecture is made, and it is the way in which it appears in the world. And I would argue that it appears in the form of joints of various scales, from the details of structural joints, that is small scale joints, to the large scale of what I call a gigantic joint, with which I mean the connection between a building and its context.
In my presentation I will present a small joint, a detail of a structural joint. Using an example of such a joint, I will try to show how this special materiality is produced and appears with a joint or through a joint. This is the materiality of architecture as a thing. That is, the materiality in which the void takes effect.
3
1 In Lacan's words: "To put it briefly, primitive architecture can be defined as something organised around emptiness.
That is also the authentic impression that the forms of a cathedral like Saint Mark's give us, and it is the true meaning of all architecture." In the English translation two terms are used for the French term le/un vide, void and emptiness.
We will turn to the French original (and its Slovenian translation) where only one term is used (le/un vide); within the context we find it appropriate to use the term void. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalyis. Seminar VII, 1959-1960, edited by J.-A- Miller, transl. D. Porter, Tavistock/Routledge, 1992, pp. 135-136.
2 Frampton, “Rappel a l'Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” p. 95.
3 Ibid.
119 As an illustrative example I will use a structural detail of a church and community centre in Viikki, Finland, designed by the Finnish architectural firm JKMM.1
Here we see six wooden structural elements, four vertical and two horizontal, and at the same time we don't see simply these six connected elements. We see also something else: we see before us, as we would probably all agree, a successful architectural solution.
1 “Viikki Church,” JKMM Architects, accessed December 26, 2015, http://www.jkmm.fi/selected_work/12-viikki-church.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
120 In what is this successful architectural solution?
As ‘objectively’ speaking there is nothing else in front of us but six connected elements, there is only one answer to this question: a successful architectural solution is contained precisely in the way these elements are connected. In short, in the joint.
So, how does this connection work? What is being produced in it?
Here we have just six connected elements. Their joint, the specific way according to which these elements are connected, isn't present as some additional, seventh element. We can’t see the connection as such. We can’t see the joint itself. The joint is present only in its material effect – in the way that we see or are able to see the connection of the six elements as a successful architectural solution, as the materialisation of architecture.
The joint disappears, so to speak, in the solution and comes to life as the solution itself. It has a paradoxical status: it is present as absent. This present absence is precisely that void around which architecture is organised. We can’t see the joint – in that sense it is absent. And it is present in the sense that it produces material effects: it causes us to see the six wooden elements as a body of architecture. Although ‘objectively’ speaking there is nothing else before us but six wooden elements that are interconnected.
As the result of a good articulation, that is a successful construction of an architectural joint, we get an object, which is also ‘something else’ than itself – it is also ‘something else’ than the six wooden elements from which it is composed – without actually, as I have to emphasize, being
‘something else’. If I repeat once again, ‘objectively’ speaking there is nothing else before us but six pieces of wood that are connected.
So, the operation of constructing joints is not an operation of adding parts and elements in accordance with a simple formula: 1+1=2. In order to define architectural joints, we have to leave behind the elementary logic of mathematical addition. We can describe the operation of architectural construction only by an inequation, 1+1≠2. Or in our case: 1+1+1+1+1+1≠6.
This happens if the connection of elements is successfully articulated, if the joint is good. If the connection is poorly articulated – if elements are badly connected – we see only the elements and a failed attempt to connect them. In this case there is no architecture present, only a technical, structural detail.
If the joint is successful, however, things become more complex. As the result of a successful construction we get an object of a special kind. This is an object that is Two in One. More precisely, this is an object that is One, which is split in itself. In short: we get an object with an inner difference. This is an architectural object, a successful architectural solution.
I will further explain this with the help of what is generally understood as a successful architectural solution. Such a solution can be a structural detail, a small joint, and it can also be a building
121 (which is itself constructed of joints of elements and materials). Now I will take a building as an example of a successful architectural object.
4
A generally accepted view is that there is a difference between a mere building and a building that is an architectural object. Just like most of us would agree that there is a difference between a mere text and a work of literature. The crucial question, however, is how to understand this difference that differentiates an architectural object from a mere building.
One established way of understanding an architectural object is, that it is a built structure that we can enter and use in various ways. According to this view an architectural object is first of all a response to various technical utilitarian demands such as functionality, firmness and structural stability, resistance to climate and the impacts of weather, as well as the sustainability of the materials and technologies employed, the economy of the building scheme and similar. However, an architectural object should also be designed according to a certain aesthetic scheme, it has to be beautiful. It is distinguished by a supplement or surplus of the aesthetic. According to this understanding, the aesthetic supplement is that which makes a building-architectural object different from a building as a ‘pure utilitarian object’.
The second established understanding of an architectural object is that it is an object whose primary function is to address or instigate our sensual perception and express an idea of architecture. In tune with this view, an architectural object is an aesthetic object, one essentially no different from an art object, like a sculpture. Its specificity lies only in the fact that it can also be used in some way – for instance, it can be inhabited. According to this view an architectural object is therefore an aesthetic object with a supplement of some utilitarian value. This is what differentiates an architectural object from objects produced by the ‘pure art’.
My thesis, however, is that for an architectural object a difference of a utilitarian and an aesthetic object is indeed constitutive. But this difference doesn’t appear as a supplement to the produced object – either the supplement of the aesthetic on the utilitarian object, or the supplement of the utilitarian on the aesthetic object. Rather, we can talk about an architectural object – about architecture as a thing – only when the difference of the aesthetic and the utilitarian is intrinsic to the object itself.
So, an architectural thing is Two at the same time, but this Two isn’t simply the sum in the sense of: ‘utilitarian object plus an aesthetic supplement’ or ‘aesthetic object plus a supplement of the utilitarian’. The simultaneity of Two in One is the result of an architectural joint. And an architectural joint is a joint that at the same time connects and separates the Two. It is their joint, which is at the same time also their difference, the inner difference. On this difference, from this difference an architectural object is made. To put it briefly: an architectural thing is an object with an inner difference. Because of its inner difference it is an object of a special kind – one that is always also ‘something else than what it is – without actually being something else’.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
122 5
A good architect is one that succeeds in creating Two in One. Or, which means the same, one that succeeds in creating an object with an inner difference. We can’t see this difference – there is a single object in front of us. And yet this difference isn’t something null. For architecture it is absolutely crucial. If an architect doesn’t succeed to articulate this inner difference, we get only a utilitarian object with an aesthetic cover, or an aestheticized object that with its spectacular form obscures the fact that it is nothing but a utilitarian object.
In this minimal difference the void, which is decisive for architecture, takes effect. The void works in the way – and this is essential – that we see, so to speak, in a perceptibly sensorial way, a building or a detail as a body of architecture, as the materialization of architecture.
This is why for such a building or a detail we can say that it has a double materiality: the ordinary materiality of building materials, wood, concrete, brick, steel, and the materiality of architecture itself. Both materialities are inseparably connected: there is only a single object in front of us, such as this structural detail (Fig.1). The materiality of architecture itself is ‘objectively’ speaking invisible. Yet it is more durable and enduring than the materiality of wood, concrete, bricks or steel. It is that which gives architectural objects that particular resistance to time and place, which is in an architectural product the trans-situational and trans-temporal. This is the materiality of architecture as a thing, which is the result of a successful articulation of the architectural joint. It is the materiality that is, as I said at the outset, composed of the void.
Philosopher Rado Riha defines the act of architectural construction very articulately when he says that it is a “radically materialistic variation of transubstantiation”.1 Radically materialistic because what in the case of religious ritual belongs to the order of faith and miracles, that is the conversion of bread and wine into a transcendent body, is in the case of the architectural construction a matter of worldly and rationally explainable activity. There is no miracle here, nor some unexplainable architectural talent. An act of architectural construction is an example of that creative way of working that is characteristic for human activity, that is, the way of working that is located in the sensorial, material world and its order of worldly knowledges.
6
This special way of working, that is, the making of a special kind of objects, is that which both art and architecture have in common. And they both appear in the world in the form of such objects of a special kind.
Both art and architecture are about constructing objects of a special kind, objects that are always also something else than what they are. The inner difference in those objects, their not being identical with themselves – their so to speak eternal ‘something else’ – is that which makes us
1 Rado Riha, "Arhitektura kot operacija z objektom", in Vid Zabel and Urška Jurman, eds., Arhitektura≠umetnost (to be published).
123 think and to which we keep returning. We keep returning in order to find out what it is that triggered our thinking and that we recognised as that which is essential for architecture/art. We keep returning in order to repeat this in our own work. Of course, not to repeat the object itself, but to repeat that which makes this object an architectural/art object – its inner difference. And thus its specific materiality – the materiality which is trans-situational and trans-temporal.
I suggested that a good architect is one who succeeds in constructing an object with an inner difference. But actually I should have said that this individual is simply an architect or simply an artist. I should have said that because only by constructing such an object does one reach that which as an architect/artist guides or drives him/her in his/her work. Only in this way does s/he confirm himself as an architect/artist – and an architect/artist is as long as s/he persists in (re)constructing such objects.
This (re)constructing is of course not only the constructing of details and buildings but it is also drawing, writing, composing, painting, etc. In this sense I understand Zvi Hecker’s idea that he
“draws because he has to think”.1 He has to think, because the thing of architecture, the object with an inner difference, forces him to do so. He has to think in order to be – be as an architect and an artist, that is, as a creative being, as the one who thinks. In the field of creative practices the thinking is inseparable from the making. The maker – an architect or an artist – has to think, and he also thinks in order to be that what he wants to be, that is, an architect or an artist. And this is why he draws, paints, designs, constructs objects with an inner difference.
This is what architecture, art and other creative practices are all about. They are about constructing objects of a special kind, which are always a response to their own time and situation, yet at the same time they also puncture the given time and situation. They puncture them with their specific, that is, potentially trans-situational and trans-temporal material presence. The material presence that is, if I return to the field of architecture, a result of constructing joints. That is to say, the creation of the Two in One, or, equally, the creation of One that is split in itself – One that is, because of its inner structure, always potentially something more and else than what it is.
With their materiality, in their material presence, such objects confirm that in this world and for this world something else and more is possible than merely that which ‘objectively’ exists in this world. That it is precisely this ‘something else and more’ which is essential. Thus they open the world into the world, which is not only the world as it is described today – the mechanism that develops according to some automatism in the face of which we have no power. Rather, it is the world as the territory for creative thinking and working. In short, a human world.
1 Zvi Hecker and Andreas Lepik (ed.), Sketches (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), p. 21.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
124 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1 Church and community centre in Viikki, Finland, designed by JKMM Architects; photo by Jussi Tiainen
Fig. 2 Church and community centre in Viikki, ceiling structure / structural details; photo by Kimmo Räisänen
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