Heaven and Earth   
Festschrift to Honor Karsten Harries

Vol. 12, No. 1
August 2007
 
 







 
     
Conceptional design
and editing:
  Eduard Führ
Organisation,
editorial assistant and layout:
 
  Ehrengard Heinzig
 

Karsten Harries
 


CV

"The Bavarian Rococo Church Between Faith and Aestheticism"
New Haven, 1983 (Yale University press New Haven and London)
from the "Virtual Archive of texts and papers on the theory and history of architecture  (D.A.T.A.)"
digitalized by kind permission of Yale University Press
 



 
 
Editorial
 
   

Karsten Harries' Theory of Architecture
Ludger Schwarte   Architecture, the Event of Representation.
On Karsten Harries' Architectural Philosophy
Achim Hahn   Dimensions of Imagination (for Karsten Harries)
David Kolb   Borders and Centers in an Age of Mobility
David Seamon
& Enku Mulugeta Assefa
  Karsten Harries' Natural Symbols as a Means for Interpreting Architecture: Inside and Outside in Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto's Villa Maeira
James McQuillan   Karsten Harries: Beyond Care – An Architecture of Love
Hagi Kenaan   The Ground's Hidden Surface
   

Theory of Architecture
Gunter Dittmar   The (Endless) Question of Architecture
 
Robert Alan Hahn   Heidegger, Anaximander, and the Greek Temple
David Summers   Horizons, or Infinities without End
Eduard Führ   Field and World.
The Phenomenality of Phenomenons in Architecture
 
David Leatherbarrow   Architecture, Ecology, and Ethics
Dalibor Vesely   From Typology to Hermeneutics in Architectural Design
 
Mohammad Reza Shirazi   Of Space and Language
Burkhard Biella   "Thierischer als jedes Thier" – An Attempt at Heaven and Earth, Architecture, Utopia und Terror in Twelve Steps
Heidi Helmhold   "Invisible Houses" – Two Artists' Positions
   

Psychological and Mental Aspects of Architectural Theory
Harald Deinsberger   Living and Housing Structures between Introversion and Extraversion
David Greusel
& Eric Jacobsen
& Michael Metzger
  Architecture as Moral Art:
Surveying the Moral Dimension of Architecture
Christian Holl   Illusions of Immaculateness
Kenneth Frampton   Intimations of Tactility
Excerpts from a Fragmentary Polemic
   

Landscape and Earth
Rolf Kühn   Earth and Landscape
From a Radically Phenomenological Point of View
Hans Friesen   The Development and The Relations of Town and Country in Europe
A Cultural-Philosophical Reflection on the Two Lebensraums of Man
Arie D. Graafland   The Composition of the Garden and the Choreography of the Body
   

Time and History of Architecture
Juhani Pallasmaa   The Space of Time – Mental Time in Architecture
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann   The American Voice.
German Historians of Art and Architecture in Exile in the United States
Joseph Rykwert   On the High-Tech Style
Katharina Fleischmann   Telling Stories by Embassies?! National Representation by Architecture – The Example of the Indian Embassy in Berlin
Diana Soeiro   Spatial Belonging – Living in the Architectural Space
Andreas Degkwitz   Closing the Gap between Cultures –
The Building of the Information, Communication and Media Center Cottbus (ICMC/IKMZ)
   




Heaven and Earth
   
Karsten Harries
"South Shore", chalk on paper

"Langhorne Pavillion"
Architectural Design: Edward F. Knowles




abstracts:

   



Karsten Harries' Theory of Architecture

     
___Ludger Schwarte
Basel
Architecture, the Event of Representation
On Karsten Harries' Architectural Philosophy


Karsten Harries claims that architecture itself is not a form of celebration, but rather an invitation to celebrate, an occasion for the sensorial unification of oppositions, the scene where an ideal community may gain presence. With this approach, Harries has produced a visionary contribution to the preparation of architectonic events.
 

Paper in German

___Achim Hahn
Dresden
 
Dimensions of Imagination
(for Karsten Harries)


Mein Thema war die Einbildungskraft, Imagination oder Phantasie. Sie gehört zu den menschlichen Grundvermögen. Wie sie innerhalb der Architekturtheorie fruchtbar gemacht werden kann, dies habe ich eher als eine Aufgabe zu formulieren versucht, als es schon zeigen können. Bei der uns heute geläufigen Rede vom „Entwerfen in Bildern“ scheint es mir angebracht, diese Frage zunächst hinsichtlich ihrer angemessenen Tiefe und Fruchtbarkeit zu stellen, um sie gleich richtig in den Blick zu nehmen. Karsten Harries ist diesen Weg gegangen. Die Architekturtheorie ist seit den Tagen des Vitruv weiterhin angewiesen auf die großen und bleibenden Erkenntnisse der Philosophie, der Ethik, Ästhetik und der Metaphysik.
 

Paper in German

___David Kolb
Eugene, Oregon
Borders and Centers in an Age of Mobility

A centerless sprawl of development replaces the older opposition of cities to small country towns. In some places the sprawl pulls itself together into Edge Cities; in others it just spreads. Its economic, social, and political difficulties are well known. Sprawl, coupled with current design and building practices brings a global uniformity that to many it is a prime example of modern and postmodern "placelessness." In response to uniformity and formless sprawl, many theorists urge the creation of resistant places. In this essay I contrast and criticize two such strategies, Kenneth Frampton's bounded enclaves, and Karsten Harries' centered communities. Can their proposals succeed in a mixed pluralistic world of mobile people and equally mobile styles and references?
 

Paper in English

 

___David Seamon
& Enku Mulugeta Assefa
Manhattan, Kansas USA
Karsten Harries' Natural Symbols as a Means for Interpreting Architecture: Inside and Outside in Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto's Villa Maeira


This article uses two seminal 20th-century houses – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea – to examine the natural symbol of inside and outside, which for Karsten Harries (1988, 1993, 1997) is one important lived relationship sustaining successful architecture and place.
“[T]o hold that there is nothing that transcends human beings and speaks to them, that reality itself is mute and meaningless, means nihilism. If there is to be an alternative to nihilism, it must be possible to make some sense of and learn to listen to the language of things.” Karsten Harries (1997, p. 133)
 

Paper in English

___James McQuillan
Gaborone, Botswana
 

Karsten Harries:
Beyond Care – An Architecture of Love


Karsten Harries has written that Heidegger tried to see beyond the question of homelessness in 1951, and yet, Harries repeats that the situation has now changed. This transformation has several notable aspects, but the one that Harries has not commented upon is that of love. If one opens any contemporary work on architecture, the question of beauty and love is absent, as if our contemporaries have never known such concepts, and even if they do, feel compelled to ignore them.
However the compass needle is now turning, and in the hands of de Botton and Pérez-Gomez, their recent works indicate that their perspectives are widening. Both celebrate the concept of love in architecture – that architecture is not exclusively the call to provide shelter, but meaningful shelter. Their recent works demand answers from us all, and this paper represents one such answer.
 

Paper in English

___Hagi Kenaan
Tel Aviv
 
The Ground's Hidden Surface


"Working in philosophy – like work in architecture…" Wittgenstein writes, "is really more a working on oneself… on one's ways of seeing things." This paper shares a similar intuition. It is written with the conviction that an understanding of the nature of the visual is crucial for architectural theory. Hence, in responding to Karsten Harries's call for "a new postpostmodern geocentrism", the paper examines the implications which such a geocentrism might carry for our understanding of the visuality of our world. The paper argues that the ground is a crucial dimension of the visual and yet one that easily eludes our thinking precisely because of the non-frontal manner in which it meets our gaze. Furthermore, it shows that the concrete ground in which the human body is implanted is a constitutive condition for the possibility of the visual. Ground's surface not only supports the stable posture of bodies, not only marks the place where seeing reaches its end, but is a concrete condition that makes our seeing possible. Recognizing the importance of the ground's visual role, a new range of questions opens up: What kind of spectatorship – of gaze – is called for by the unique visuality of the ground's surface? How can an architectural object acknowledge its own horizontal projection, its shadow? What would it mean for architecture to respond to the non-frontal dimension of the visual space? How can architecture allow the hidden surface of the ground to become part of the way we live?
 

Paper in English



Theory of Architecture                                                                
   
 
___Gunter Dittmar
Minneapolis
 
The (Endless) Question of Architecture


For many disciplines it is the role of a sub-discipline – Theory – to tend to and advance the field’s disciplinary structure and knowledge base through which it defines itself and its identity as a field. In architecture it would be the responsibility of academia, in particular scholarship in the theory of architecture, to explore and begin to evolve such a structure.
Yet, there is no such Theory in architecture, there exist only theories! They consist mostly of speculation, manifestos, or criticism; personal interpretations or positions on formal aspects influenced by prevailing ideologies, cultural issues, or stylistic concerns.
There is little that transcends time and place.
And so the question of architecture remains…
 

Paper in English



 

 
___Robert Alan Hahn
Carbondale
 

Heidegger, Anaximander, and the Greek Temple


In the Epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger asks us to reflect again on Hegel’s pronouncement that art can no longer count on the side of our highest vocation. Is it still possible for art to function as an essential and necessary way in which truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence? If art can no longer provide this truth, the question certainly remains why this is so. But, according to Heidegger, the truth of Hegel’s judgment has not yet been decided. No final verdict has been given. Why? Because “behind this verdict,” says Heidegger, “there stands Western thought since the Greeks, which thought corresponds to a truth of beings that has already happened.” Thus, for Heidegger, there is still a promise for the future because there was such a happening of truth in the past. For Hegel, the happening of the truth in the past was not the highest truth of being, just the highest truth available at that stage in history’s progress. And so, there is no need for Hegel, as there is for Heidegger, to seek a return to this philosophical Garden of Eden, this original and primordial accord. For Heidegger, who does not subscribe to the particular historical progress that Hegel identifies, the fact of Presocratic philosophy is the testimony to the highest truth of all time, since it is the truth of Being in all of its obfuscating disclosure. Since there was, long ago, a primordial accord for the earliest of earlycomers, there may still be yet a revival for the latest of the latecomers. But, what if Heidegger is mistaken in his attribution of this accord, named for Anaximander as to xreon (and for Heraclitus alêtheia, Parmenides eon, and so forth), Heidegger’s project seems to collapse.
The fragment of Anaximander testifies to a vision of nature’s self-regulating mechanism. There is a cosmic justice that appears in the cycles of nature. The justice appears, not as an arbitrary or contingent fact, but rather as to xreon, as “necessity” itself. Human being, and human meaning, find a place in this context. But Anaximander’s cosmic vision, as we explore here, is not the self-unfolding of Dasein, a truth that is revealed in human being. The truth for Anaximander reaches outward, it announces the origins of cosmology in which humans seek to grasp what is absolutely external to ourselves, while, at the same time, it affirms our capacity to do so. Anaximander invites us to reject a vision of Dasein’s self-disclosure, and embrace instead the metaphysically real that is outside myself.
Anaximander thus offers an example of a "Denken" which lacks "Geborgenheit". For Anaximander deconstructs the dome of the universe under which "Dasein" felt safe and "geborgen". His universe is no longer the warm cover of the mantle of the heavens, nor the safety of the goddess arching over mankind, but the unfathomable depth of the circling celestial bodies, wheels of cosmic fire somehow separated off from a more original, more primordial fire. The cosmos is not a dome, and not spherical, but is rather cylindrical, containing cylinders within cylinders. The cosmos is a living, growing – perhaps fire-breathing – tree. What then of Heidegger’s project in the light of the new horizon that appears from our re-thinking of Anaximander and the Greek temple?

 

Paper in English

___David Summers
Charlottesville
Horizons, or Infinities without End


In the Preface to Being and Time, Martin Heidegger summarizes the aim of the investigation upon which he and the reader are about to embark – an investigation Heidegger himself never completed – as “the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being”. His first English translators, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, immediately warn the English-speaking reader in a note that for Heidegger the word “horizon” has meanings they will find unfamiliar. “We tend to think”, they write, “of a horizon as something which we may widen or extend or go beyond; Heidegger, however, seems to think of it as something which we can neither widen nor go beyond, but which provides the limits for certain intellectual activities performed ‘within’ it”. Time, we might rephrase Heidegger to say, is the one condition – the horizon – beyond which we cannot go, under which the question of Being must inevitably and always be asked.
This paper explores the intellectual and art historical precedents for these modern understandings of horizon.
 

Paper in English

 

 
___Eduard Führ
Cottbus
 

Field and World.
The Phenomenality of Phenomenons in Architecture


Im Rückgriff auf Wahrnehmungspsychologie und –physiologie geht der Autor der Frage nach, was eigentlich die Phänomenalität von Architektur ist, wie sie entsteht und worin sie besteht.
 

Paper in German


 

 
   
___David Leatherbarrow
Philadelphia
 
Architecture, Ecology, and Ethics


Two visions of our common world compete with one another in contemporary architecture. The first assumes that the city or the urban environment presents us with what is common, and commonly held to be good. Contrasting sharply with this notion is the idea that the environment is what we all share, that the natural world is the comprehensive framework of what all people and things hold in common. Behind these visions are two interpretations of human existence; in the first, there is the world-view normally called anthropocentrism (which puts man at the center of things), in the second, biocentrism (which puts man in the context of other living things, as if there were no center but a widely extended range). The conflict between these alternate conceptions takes institutional form in the opposition between individual experience and scientific understanding, still more broadly, between subjectivity and objectivity. In architecture the corresponding distinction would be between art and nature, the first seen as a domain of unpredictability and originality, the second of regularity or law.
Yet, I suspect that anyone who gives this alternative more than a little thought would realize the choice is a false one – at least in our field. In truth, architecture cannot be either artificial or natural because each built work is necessarily both. For this reason, I think, we are compelled to seek ways of avoiding the choice, at least of not being disoriented by it, of not reducing architecture to either, as strident versions of formalism (art for its own sake) and environmentalism so often do. Escaping the alternative is not simple, however, for ways of balancing these two views are far from clear. Nor is it immediately apparent how manifestations of the two – the city and nature – can exist as aspects of one continuum.
 

Paper in English

___Dalibor Vesely
London
From Typology to Hermeneutics in Architectural Design


The interest in typology as a new design strategy was probably one of the most influential challenges in the post second world war development of architecture. In a situation dominated mostly by a narrow modernist agenda, based on structural and functional determinism, typology appeared as a healthy corrective to the deterministic vision of architectural order and even more to a growing relativism of design principles and values. However the new, more subtle and critical thinking, did not in the end change the naïve objectivism of most modern trends. What brought typology on the scene and to such a relative prominence?
 

Paper in English

 



 

___M. Reza Shirazi
Cottbus
 
Of Space and Language


Undoubtedly, architectural thoughts of Martin Heidegger have affected theory of architecture during last decades and his influence on architects and architectural theory is not limited to phenomenology, but other attitudes such as post-structuralism, deconstruction, as well as folding and virtual architecture. However, discussion on the architectural features of Heideggerian thought is mostly based on “Building Dwelling Thinking” and concentrates on his refers to the Greek temple in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and also his interpretations of the concepts such as “thing”, “gathering”, and “poetical” in his texts entitled “The Thing”, “Language” and “…Poetically Man Dwells…”. Here, I will try to focus on his later text “Art and Space” and show how he elaborates his unique notion on space and place referring to his previous thoughts and discussions.
 

Paper in English

___Burkhard Biella
Duisburg
"Thierischer als jedes Thier"
An Attempt at Heaven and Earth,
Architecture, Utopia und Terror in Twelve Steps


Im Lichte des Himmels bauen wir an und auf der Erde; dem Dunkel des Himmels verdankt sich mancher Traum, der den Entwurf des Neuen, einer besseren Welt auch, initiierte ebenso wie Visionen von Destruktion und Vernichtung. Diese Zusammenhänge umkreist und durchkreuzt der vorliegende Versuch, der vor allem die Utopie, um die es in Zeiten der Spaßgesellschaft merklich still geworden ist, dem (politischen) Denken als Korrektiv gegen inspirationslose und lobbyabhängige Polittechnokratie wieder ans Herz legen will. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Architektur, die neben der Literatur als die utopische Kunst schlechthin gelten kann, denn selbst das Gebaute noch enthält ein „Stückchen Utopie“.

 

Paper in German

 

 
___Heidi Helmhold
Cologne
Invisible Houses
Two Artists' Positions


In The Ethical Function of Architecture Karsten Harries develops his theory of Two Houses. A house is built with real, visible matter, but contains an Invisible House. From a phenomenological viewpoint the Invisible House is the spiritual architect of the form, aesthetical conception and interior of physical architecture, in the sense of Martin Heidegger’s worldliness (Welthaftigkeit) as reified in his house in the Black Forest (Schwarzwaldhaus). In this vein I present two positions of the contemporary art scene, exemplified by the Himmelstreppe (Stairs to heaven) built by Munich-based artist Hans Jörg Voth during 1985-1988 in Mârhâ, Morocco; and the installation Beyond My Chair, by Shanghai-based artist Rolf Kluenter, inspired by his time in Nepal und presented during the Sixth Shanghai-Biennale 2006.
Both artists deal with Invisible Houses, but in different ways. In Voth’s Himmelstreppe the Invisible House acts at the same time as a disruptive and constructive influence. The staircase constructed in the desert of Morocco follows the principles of Euclidian precision architecture, verticalizing space and landscape as is characteristic of a sedentary culture. This contrasts with the life style of the nomadic Berbers in that area and their conception of architecture and space. Living in tents means to live in horizontal space, in intense social relations and in local transitions. The Invisible House inscribed in the black tent of the Berbers is that of smooth space (Deleuze/Guattari). The Himmelstreppe conflicted with the Invisible House of the nomads, and has remained a source of irritation. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus: there is an inherent conflict between an arborescent and a rhizomatic conception of space.
At first glance Beyond My Chair seems to be an installation from a village in the Himalayas. But behind the strange appearance of the chair lies the strange appearance of Nepal's disrupted political culture. The concrete material everyday routines of a traditional culture are blended with the insignia of an overthrown royal dynasty, in 2001. In Beyond My Chair two Invisible Houses are colliding.

 

Paper in German

 



Psychological and Mental Aspects of Architectural Theory

   
 
___Harald Deinsberger
Graz
Living and Housing Structures
between Introversion and Extraversion


Der Mensch als wohnendes Individuum befindet sich in einem stetigen Spannungsfeld zwischen Introversion und Extraversion, d. h.

  • zwischen dem Rückzug in die Intim- oder Privatsphäre und der Öffnung nach außen, zur Umwelt respektive Öffentlichkeit,

  • zwischen dem Bedürfnis nach Schutz, sowohl in physiologischer als auch in psychologischer Hinsicht, und dem Bedürfnis nach Kontakt bzw. Interaktion auf mehreren Ebenen wie beispielsweise der wahrnehmungsbezogenen, der sozialen, der bio-physiologisch, der gestalttherapeutischen, der handlungstheoretischen etc.,

  • zwischen kontemplativen, auf die eigene Person konzentrierten Phasen und kommunikativen, auf Sozialkontakt, Geselligkeit oder Gemeinschaftlichkeit gerichteten Phasen.

Wenn nun diesen bipolar divergierenden Phasen des Menschen im Zuge der Konzipierung von Wohnbaustrukturen Rechnung getragen werden soll, so ist klar, dass sie dort wie auch in den baulich-räumlichen Gegebenheiten des Wohnungsumfeldes eine Entsprechung finden müssen. Im Idealfall findet sich eine positive Kongruenz zwischen den Verhaltens-/Benutzungsstrukturen und den räumlich-physischen Strukturen.
Doch wie kann eine solche positive Kongruenz beschrieben werden? Und welche Konsequenzen haben negative Formen der Kongruenz?
Wie gestaltet sich generell die Beziehung Mensch-Wohnung-Umfeld unter diesem Spannungsfeld? Und welche Rolle spielen dabei die wohnbaustrukturellen Parameter, die der Art und Intensität dieser Beziehung zugrunde liegen?
 

Paper in German

 

___David Greusel
& Eric Jacobsen
& Michael Metzger
Kansas City / Pasadena /
Annapolis
 
Architecture as Moral Art:
Surveying the Moral Dimension of Architecture


Based on a presentation given at the national convention of the American Institute of Architects in 2005 and 2006, and at three regional conferences, the authors have collected survey data from a broad sample of North American architects on the moral dimensions of architecture. The survey measures architect's preferences along 40 distinct "tensions" in design (between, for example, the desire to renovate versus the desire to start anew). This paper will discuss the tensions and their meanings, display the results of the surveys, and will draw out specific observations from the aggregated results. This paper will assert that there is a distinct moral dimension in architecture which exceeds building code requirements that buildings be safe for human occupancy. The survey results will assist the authors in exploring some of the nuances of this assertion as they find expression in actual practice.
 

Paper in English

___Christian Holl
Stuttgart
Illusions of Immaculateness


The allurement of immaculateness, either in geometric forms or in perfect surfaces, has not lost its attraction. Even in the layout and design of cities we trust its promise to free us from contradictions and to resolve complexity. But the urban reality is far from keeping this promise. Possibly this is exactly the character of immaculateness: it refers to something we might wish, albeit unattainable. Hence it can be used to exercise power over others, who then have to subordinate themselves to a future end or ambition. This paper argues that we have to find ways to free architecture and urban design from this notion of future perfection. To achieve this it is not sufficient to stage a formal counterdesign, which eventually makes use of the same mechanism as its object of criticism. Instead we should use the idea of a cyclical time and periodically mutating architecture to understand the simultaneity of spaces aborning and in decay, within which freedom can unfold. This concept of space is far closer to modern society’s complexity than that of a beautified cityscape.
 

Paper in German

 

___Kenneth Frampton
New York
Intimations of Tactility
Excerpts from a Fragmentary Polemic


This polemic is both fragmentary and dialectical. Thus while it moves to resist the forces of reaction, this by no mean assures immunity against absorption or against those aspects, lying latent within, that would tend to gravitate towards the reactionary in their turn. Nonetheless it seeks to return architecture, or for that matter all plastic art, to a more concrete and tactile poetic. It looks towards the enactment of a mythic condition that is lived as well as imagined. In this regard, the vulgar opposition between the figurative and the abstract, the decorative and the spatial, and above all between the historicist and the modernist, seems irrelevant to its concerns, for as Lissitzky wrote in 1923, beyond the constraints of perspective and the pathos of a false vernacular: “We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies.
 

Paper in English

 



Landscape and Earth                                                                 
   
 
___Rolf Kühn
Freiburg i. Br.
 

Earth and Landscape
From a Radically Phenomenological Point of View


In rein phänomenologischer Sichtweise bildet unsere Leiblichkeit mit der Erde eine ursprüngliche Einheit, die hier im Zusammenhang mit der Widerständigkeit des Bodens und unserer Bewegungsmöglichkeit analysiert wird. Mit zusätzlichem Blick auf eine mögliche „Metaphysik der Geographie“, wie sie die Tradition seit der Antike kannte, werden außerdem zur Illustration dieser radikal phänomenologischen Beschreibung einer leiblichen Elementarästhetik auch die Beispiele der Japanischen Gärten und der Landschaftsmalerei von Kaspar David Friedrich herangezogen. Insgesamt soll dadurch ein deskriptiver Rahmen für jede Art von gelebter Räumlichkeit umrissen werden, wie sie der Bezug zu Kosmos und Architektur beinhaltet.
 

Paper in German

___Hans Friesen
Cottbus
The Development and the Relations of Town and Country in Europe – A Cultural-Philosophical Reflection on the Two Lebensraums of Man


Zwei grundsätzliche Weisen des menschlichen „In-der-Welt-Seins“ sind das ländliche und das städtische Leben. Stadt und Land werden vom Menschen als Lebensräume voneinander getrennt und unterschiedlich gestaltet. Die Abtrennung der Stadt vom Land ist in der Geschichte vorzugsweise durch gesicherte Grenzlinien vorgenommen worden. Diese Grenzen, die seit dem Beginn des menschlichen Sesshaftwerdens vor rund 12000 Jahren (Hamm, 1982, 20) insbesondere als „physische“ errichtet wurden, werden in den letzten 200 Jahren immer weiter entmaterialisiert und existieren heute weitgehend nur noch als „vorgestellte“, wie Leonardo Benevolo (1995, 4) gesagt hat. Die nur vorgestellte Grenze bekräftigt ebenso wie die physische einen Unterschied, der wesentlich für das menschliche Leben zu sein scheint und aus diesem Grunde auch nicht aufgehoben werden sollte. In diesem Aufsatz wird in 6 Teilschritten die Geschichte, die Gegenwart und die Zukunft der Landschaft und der Stadt in Europa untersucht und dabei die These vertreten, dass Stadt und Land einen Unterschied bilden, der im Sinne eines „komplementären Gegensatzes“ verstanden werden muss. Danach dürfen die gegensätzlichen Seiten sich nicht ausschließen, sondern müssen sich vielmehr ergänzen.
 

Paper in German

 

 
___Arie D. Graafland
Delft
The Composition of the Garden
and the Choreography of the Body


Do gardens and ballets form an expression of a particular historical period? And if that is indeed so, then what is the meaning of the Baroque garden? This essay explores the significance of palace and gardens of Versailles. I will try to resolve the dualism of description and explanation by overlaying Versailles, quite literally, with an analogous structure, a ballet. This additional level offers us more insight into the meaning of the palace and its grounds. The exercise consists of superimposing the choreography for the Balet Comique de la Royne by Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, which dates from 1581, upon the somewhat later gardens of Le Nôtre and the Sun King.
 

Paper in English

 



Time and History of Architecture

   
 
___Juhani Pallasmaa
Helsinki
The Space of Time – Mental Time in Architecture


Modern architectural theory introduced the idea that architecture takes place in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, primarily through the movement of the perceiver. Time is embedded, however, in the mental constitution of architecture. Karsten Harries writes: “Architecture is not only about domesticating space. It is also a deep defence against the terror of time.” Indeed, in addition to domesticating space for human habitation, architecture also articulates time; it gives the measureless, placeless and infinite space its experiential human measure and meaning, and it also gives endless natural time its human scale.
Time enters artistic making and perception as a psychic regression to an earlier, archaic mode of undifferentiated perception and oceanic consciousness. The common view of art and architecture as projections of a futuristic interest and aspiration for novelty is thus erroneous. Instead of alienating us from the sense of continuity, art defends the historicity of culture and human experience. The origins of fundamental architectural pleasures are concealed in our very historicity as biological and cultural beings; aesthetic judgement echoes an evolutionary and existential past.
Besides, all architectural works are collaborations, not only with numerous experts and craftsmen, but collaboration with the tacit wisdom of architecture, and the accumulation of unconceptualized existential knowledge embedded in the constructed world itself. Joseph Brodsky, the poet, argues: “When one writes verse, one’s most immediate audience is not one’s own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors.”
 

Paper in English

   
 
___Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Princeton
The American Voice. German Historians of Art and Architecture in Exile in the United States


There is no single voice, no unified history of art history in the United States, but many histories. Even if we concentrate on art history in academic institutions, instead of museums or the trade, there is no single story to be told. And this situation applies not only to the topic of this paper, namely art historians from Germany who worked in exile in the United States, but goes far back beyond the period 1933-1945 marked by the Third Reich. German-speaking art historians in the United States expressed themselves in a wide variety of ways. Not every one of their voices spoke clearly, or, to put it more accurately, not everyone was heard. There are scholars who only expressed themselves in part, because they either intentionally or unintentionally did not give voice to the full range of their intellectual interests when they were in the United States. There are also voices which remained unheard, or were heard by only a few people. The history of German art history in exile in America is therefore a history of partially as well as fully heard voices, of heard and unheard expressions. And this situation has had perhaps unexpected consequences for the further development of art history in America.
Karsten Harries, coming from the discipline of philosophy, is of course a huge exception to the point discussed in this essay: someone who found his voice in the United States, and used it to reflect perceptively on art and architecture.
 

Paper in English

 

   
 
___Joseph Rykwert
Philadelphia / London
On the High-Tech Style


I take my cue from Karsten Harries’ discussion of Bavarian Rococo Churches: it accounts for a relatively limited period and region – the first half of the eighteenth century in South-Western Germany – during which a great many quite substantial ones were built. They have in common the contrast between relatively plain exteriors and interiors which shelter a riot of cunningly lit painted paradisal spectacles framed in much gold leaf and simulated marble. It is the tension which makes a style: ‘to communicate a state, an internal tension of pathos, by means of signs – and that means by the rhythm of such signs – that is the meaning of any style.’
In that spirit, I want to consider a recent phenomenon, one which is already closed. It was, if anything, briefer than the Bavarian Rococo – just over a quarter of a century. The style goes by the name of ‘High-tech’ and is considered primarily (or at any rate originally), a British phenomenon – with Parisian and other ‘colonies’.
 

Paper in English

 

___Katharina Fleischmann
Cottbus
Telling Stories by Embassies?! National Representation
by Architecture
– The Example of the Indian Embassy in Berlin


With the decision for Berlin as the capital of the united Germany in 1991, the city became the focal point of national representation. Not only Germany but also many other nations took the chance for national representation by architecture or embassy buildings. Embassies can be seen as representational buildings ‘par excellence’. On the one hand they take over functions of diplomatic delegations as representative offices, on the other hand they act as materialized representations of nations and states. Not just since the emergence of a public diplomacy, trying to reach the mainstream and not alone managerial elites by means of mass media, architecture, design and material vocabulary have important functions there.
On the example of the new built Indian embassy the article deals with the production of a national image by architecture as well as with the perception of the embassy building as a materialized national representation. A comparison of these two sides of embassy architecture shows if and how the intended messages of the embassy building are delivered.

 

Paper in German

 

   
 
___Diana Soeiro
Lissabon
Spatial Belonging
Living in the Architectural Space


During the 1960's and 1970's, Japan went through a huge economic change making several cities too small for a fast growing population. What is architecture's place in the city's space? Is architecture art? What is the relation between tradition and innovation, architecture and history? Occupied space vs. empty space? Does an architectural project always reflect a political project?
These questions will be approached using two articles by the Japanese architects Shinohara Kazuo (1925-2006) and Andô Tadao (b. 1941). The first focuses on the architectural role of residential architecture in urban sites (the "eternal" presence in space, functional architecture vs. architecture as art, non-functional space as void, style (yoshiki) and personal creation, the "immeasurable" character of space). The second uses the "spatial prototype" concept to stress the importance of architecture as an access to "interior perspectives".
Both of them offer a similar solution emphasizing personal space over a chaotic urban environment.
 

Paper in English

 

___Andreas Degkwitz
Cottbus
Closing the Gap between Cultures –
The Building of the Information, Communication and
Media Center Cottbus (ICMC/IKMZ)


The ICMC/IKMZ-Building of the Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus (BTU Cottbus) housing the library and the multimedia center of the university is a 32 meter high reinforced concrete construction covered by a double-shell, glass façade embossed with stylized graffiti. The ground plan of the building has a curved outline resembling a clover leaf. The amazing external architecture continues internally with a spiral staircase extending from the 1st to the 6th floor, and a striking color scheme (in vibrant yellow, green, magenta, red and blue) for parts of the floor covering and walls. The concept of the building allows a flexible and open use which consciously allows for many work and communication forms. The colorful and transparent shape of the building is symbolizing the new media age and as well it’s an intermediary between the organizational-technical service features and a very sensual design.
 

Paper in English

 




 





 


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