Architecture is an artform which serves commonplace utilitarian functions. But even architecture does not arise from the realities of use and usefulness, but from mental images outside the realm of utility. The impact of the art of architecture derives from the ontology of inhabiting space, and its task is to frame and structure our being-­in-the-world and give it specific meanings. We inhabit our world and this particular way of habitation is given its fundamental sense through a pre-understanding of existence as projected by constructions of architecture. Architectural constructions frame the world and make it understandable for us.

Art in general has an interestingly dualistic relation with technology. Various artforms accept and utilize inventions of technology, but ultimately, they turn their back to technological rationality and utility. The most ingenious construction technique remains mere engineering skill if the structure is unable to direct our view to the enigma of human existence behind technical rationality and unless it creates a metaphor of human being-in-the-world. Fundamentally, art turns technology and rationality as such useless.

In Alvar Aalto's view architecture is not at all an area of technology; it is a form of `arch-technology', in other words, the art of architecture always returns technique to its ahistorical, archaic mental and bodily connections. The oldest is always fused into the newest. Generally speaking, the common view of art as a probe for future is a grave misunderstanding.

Time is an essential dimension in art - I venture to say that it is the most important dimension - but not as a duration or futurism, but as a mental regression to earlier, more archaic and undifferentiated modes of consciousness. A momentary reconstruction of the evolution of the human mind takes place in artistic experience.

Utility

and

Uselessness

 
   
   
   

Newness

and

Eternity
   

30

'If you want to find something new, you have to study what is oldest', my professor Aulis Blomstedt taught me wisely forty years ago.

The central ingredient of art is time, not as a narrative, duration or futuristic interest, but as an archeology of collective and biological memory. Myths store the earliest experiences and mental themes of the human mind. Even the most radical art derives its strongest impact from the echo of this timeless mental soil and images of supra-individual memory.

   

31

The time of art is regressive time - in the words of Jean Genet: `In order to achieve significance, every work of art has to patiently and carefully descend the stairs of millennia, and fuse, if possible, into the timeless night populated by the dead, in a manner which allows the dead to identify themselves in this work.'11

T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, one of the great works of poetry, is a splendid example of the way in which a creative mind, aware of tradition, combines ingredients from completely different sources. The temporal origins and boundaries of images loose their meaning in this creative fusion. Wasteland, as all great works of art, is an archeological excavation of images. The poem cross-connects historical images of timeless myths with the commonplace life in the poet's own time. The poem combines references from the Bible to Ovid, from Vergil to Dante, from Sheakespeare to Wagner, Baudelaire to Hesse. The poetic work begins with a motto quoted from Petronius' Satyricon and ends in the reiteration of the final incantation of the Upanisad.

All great works are collaborations, which invite the deep memories of culture to surface through their imagery. In his book The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera argues that all good books are always wiser than their writers, because good writers listen to the wisdom of the novel. In the same way, great buildings are wiser than their architect, because they are products of a collaborative effort between the individual creator and the entire history of the discipline.
   
   
   

Art

and

Emotion
   

33

Also the artform of architecture mediates and evokes existential feelings and sensations. Architecture of our time has, however, normalized emotions and usually completely eliminates such extremes of the scale of emotions as sorrow and bliss, melancholy and ecstasy.
   

34

 
   

35

The buildings of Michelangelo, on the other hand, represent an architecture of melancholy and sorrow. But his buildings are not symbols of melancholy, they actually morn.

These are buildings that have fallen in melancholy - or more precisely - we lend these buildings our own sensation of metaphysical melancholia.
   

36

In the same way, the buildings of Louis Kahn are not metaphysical symbols; they are a form of metaphysical meditation through the medium of architecture, that leads us to recognize boundaries of our own existence and to deliberate on the essence of life. They direct us to experience our very existence with a unique intensity.
   

37

Similarly, the masterpieces of early modernity do not represent optimism and love of life through architectural symbolization.
   

38

Even decades after these buildings were conceived, they evoke and maintain these positive sensations; they awake and bring forth the hope sprouting in our soul.
   

39

Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium is not only a metaphor of healing; even today it offers the promise of a better future.
   

40

The invisible cities of Italo Calvino enrich the urban geography of the world in the same way as the material cities built through the labour of thousands of hands.
   

41

The commonplace and desolate rooms of Edward Hopper, or the shabby room in Arles painted by Vincent van Gogh, are as full of life and affect as the 'real' rooms in which we live. The 'Zone' in Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker, that exudes an air of inexplicable threat and disaster, is certainly more real in our experience than the actual anonymous industrial area in Estonia where the film was actually shot, because the landscape pictured by Tarkovsky contains more significant human meanings than its physical original. The mysterious 'Room' searched for by 'the Writer' and 'the Scientist' under the guidance of Stalker, is finally disclosed as a very ordinary room, but the imagination of the travellers, as well as of the viewer of the film, has turned it into a metaphor and centre point of metaphysical significance and threat.
   
   
   

Boundaries

of

Self
   
  In the text that he wrote in memory of Herbert Read in 1990, Salman Rushdie writes about the weakening of the boundary between the world and the self that takes place in artistic experience: 'Literature is made at the boundary between self and the world', he writes, `and during the creative act this borderline softens, turns penetrable and allows the world to flow into the artist and the artist flow into the world'.12
   

43

All art articulates the boundary surface between the self and the world both in the experience of the artist and the viewer. In this sense, architecture is not only a shelter for the body, but it is also the contour of the consciousness, and an externalization of the mind. Architecture, or the entire world constructed by man with its cities, tools and objects, has its mental ground and counterpart.
   

44

The geometries and hierarchies expressed by the built environment, as well as the countless value choices that they reflect, are always mental structures before their materialization in the physical environment. Our most commonplace acts give evidence of inner mental landscapes, as inevitably as the rituals and monuments that we hold at highest esteem. Precisely, our most commonplace acts, to which we place least amount of conscious attention and embellishment, provide most conclusive evidence of the state of our mind. A landscape wounded by acts of man, fragmentation of the city scape, and insensible buildings are all external monuments of an alienation and shattering of the human inner space.
   

45

'In accordance with the Almighty, we make everything in our own image, because we do not have a more reliable model; the objects produced by us describe us better than any confessions of faith',13 writes Joseph Brodsky in his book Watermarks, that analyses touchingly the writer's experiences of Venice.'Architecture is constructed mental space', as my late friend, architect Keijo Petäjä used to say. When experiencing a negative attitude toward life or a sense of gloom and anxiety, too often projected by environments of our time, we are usually unwilling and incapable of identifying our own mental landscape in it. If we could learn to interpret the unintentional message of environment and architecture, we would certainly understand better both ourselves and the problems of our fanatically materialist and irrational collective mind. A psychoanalysis of the environment could cast light on the mental ground of our paradoxical behavior, such as adoration of individuality and the simultaneous unconditional subordination to conditioned values. Today's regressive attitudes of architecture, for instance, in the case of current Collegiate Gothic in American Universities, calls for an urgent analysis. No doubt, the return back to historicist nostalgia hides a mental rejection and an incapability of integrating the self with the world.George Nelson an American architect-designer friend of mine, who died 15 years ago, foresaw the fall of the Nazi Empire through reading the unconscious hidden messages of Nazi stone architecture. He understood that the message which made most observes believe in the thousand year future of the Third Reich, in fact, signified an unconscious fortification against self-destruction14.
   
   
  next part
   
 

Notes

 

11 Jean Genet, L'atelier d’Alberto Giacometti. Marc Barbezat, L'Arbalét 1963, as quoted in Juhana Blomstedt, Muodon arvo.

12 Salman Rushdie, 'Eikö mikään ole pyhää? (Isn't anything sacred?), Parnasso 1: 1996. Helsinki, 1996, p. 8.

13 Joseph Brodsky, Veden peili (Watermark). Tammi, Helsinki, 1994, p. 55-56.

14 Letter of George Nelson to the writer 31 .8.1982.