Architecture and its shadow Reflections on past, present and future incarnations of the artist-architect If thinking is ever useless, thinking about art has been completely useless to many architects and architecture students over the last ten years or so. There has been little to no contact, no debate, no mutual exploitation and no affection worth mentioning between artists and architects for at least a generation. What there has been can only be characterized as reciprocal indifference and suspiciousness. Art and architecture have been engaged on separate trajectories; the artistic one vastly more complex and multifarious than the architectural one. And – let’s be honest – architects, who have been immersed in technique and gripped by the enthralling new design potentials offered by computers, have mostly ignored art. Now that appeal is slackening; the techniques are no longer so new, so different and so seemingly original. They don’t inspire the same amount of new ideas anymore, which was what they were most useful for, after all. Using a computer, and all that this entails for the design, construction and building processes of architecture, has become normal. The generation of architects who were particularly involved with the exploration of digital techniques is likely to choose one of two options currently open to it: they explore how digital practice translates into built practice (in other words, focus on realizing project) or they can find new references, requiring them to investigate and identify other sources for possible new approaches to architectural design. While either option – or even a tentative combination of both choices – will do fine for those architects who, now in their thirties and forties, rode the crest of the digital wave, what about the generation following them? Where will they look to find the next burning questions? This is not to say that architecture itself is too uninteresting to sustain itself; on the contrary, the rich and well-preserved history of architecture will always be there for architects to steal from. But it is a characteristic of architecture that it looks beyond itself; of the all the arts architecture is the least solipsistic. Perhaps because its raison d’etre is so fundamentally evident – when all is said and done, buildings do supply a basic human need – architects, in order to develop their field, must engage issues outside it. When it comes to architecture and art, the question is whether art can once again lay claim to the architect’s attention? Not as a metaphor, but as a practice. The artist-architect has been out of the picture for some time now. Le Corbusier, spending all his mornings privately painting, left behind some uncomfortable questions. What does it mean for an architect to be half an artist? Must we see the paintings, drawings or sculptures produced in the architect’s ‘spare time’ as the purer products of the architect’s persona, untainted by client pressure, the compromises of building and sordid business concerns? Or do they constitute a kind of practice models, which is how Le Corbusier’s paintings are generally considered: as formal studies, in which he explored shapes and the relations between them. This is, however, exactly how Le Corbusier did not wish his matutinal labors at the back of the apartment in the Rue Nungesser et Coli to be viewed. Had he wanted his art to be perceived as a servant to his architecture, he would not have chosen to separate his public architectural and private painterly activities so ostentatiously. Yet, it is striking that this architect, committed to longstanding and consistent formal experimentation, achieved a far more diverse, innovative and volumetrically rich oeuvre than any of his contemporaries. Mies van der Rohe, for instance, whose pastimes were gin and cigars, was far more repetitive and only ever invented about five details and one way of putting together a building: namely by stacking it. Of course, all kinds of interpretations can, and have been, imposed upon Le Corbusier’s artworks, but in a sort of involuntary way – like the traces left behind by a perpetrator, the artworks are analyzed as forensic evidence, betraying certain obsessions, character traits and behaviors. Few contemporary architects have wanted to assume this mantle; the so-called ‘paper architecture’ of the 1970s and 1980s avoided the artist-architect label by being presented as architecture, though unbuilt. This mimicked the position in art that had, since Duchamp, become widespread: that ‘anything could be art’. Aldo Rossi’s archetypal dream fragments of the antique, Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp’s sexy skyscrapers, Zaha Hadid’s graphic jagged landscapes – they were not produced in secret by the alter ego of an architect who would normally be occupied doing completely different work; no, this was their architectural work. The paper works were considered as architectural manifestoes and conveyed ideas, storylines and principles, rather than being formal, compositional studies. The conceptual leap from architecture-and-art to architecture-as-art did not occur in a vacuum; galleries for this specific type of work emerged in the late 1970-s to early 1980-s, such as the Max Protetch Gallery in New York, the Aedes Gallery in Berlin, and the Luce van Rooy gallery in Amsterdam, trying to define a new niche in the art market, and building work was scarce in any case, especially for non-corporate, inexperienced, experimental architects. It is fair to say that, in principle, the paper architects did not abandon their paper stance when they began to build. Even if their paper output would perhaps decrease or the mediums used would sometimes transform – models, prints or books would take over the role of drawings and paintings – the fundamental selfsameness of their art and their architecture would remain. No architect after Le Corbusier and his generation has been inclined to produce two separate oeuvres. Le Corbusier, much as he saw himself as a tragic, misunderstood individual, was always part of some movement or other – from the group surrounding his art school in Switzerland to the Purists and then the later CIAM get-togethers. Le Corbusier’s artwork may have even been partly motivated by his desire to found a kind of brotherhood, a sort of club or movement of artists all reading the same books, believing the same ideas, wanting to change the world along the same principles – and competing against the rival movements of Cubism and Surrealism, of course. The sense of being part of an artistic community, of being involved in what is happening and collectively engaging with ‘the new’ holds a powerful appeal. A person’s position is stronger within a group; this dynamic is compelling on its own. So why don’t architects have more of those kinds of artistic alliances nowadays? The Viennese architect groups Haus Rucker Co and Coop Himmelblau were still operating in this tradition in the 1970s when they launched their performance-related works. They were doing the same sort of thing as artists were doing at that time, namely staging public theatrical displays reflecting on urban alienation. Of today’s architects, maybe only Diller and Scofidio have worked with the same approaches, concepts and mediums as the artists of their time and milieu, resulting in a large body of work that has been shown and staged around the world. Yet these artist-architects, while in tune with their contemporaries in the fine arts, differ crucially from Le Corbusier in the role ascribed to their artworks. There is none of the ambiguity surrounding Le Corbusier’s publicly announced private painterly persona, which gives rise to the persistent questions as to the precise meaning of his artwork and its hierarchical relation to his architecture. The ‘artworks’ of Coop Himmelblau and Diller and Scofidio (which at the same time formed their architectural works) were as unambiguously public as any building could be; there was never the faintest suggestion that these installations and performances were practice models for architecture. But, in a sense, perhaps they were; rather than constituting experiments with lines, planes, volumes, the horizontal, vertical and diagonal conditions of architecture, these artworks broached new potentials for architecture by addressing its performative and mediatic qualities. As the work of Diller and Scofidio – and Coop Himmelblau before them – evolves in the direction of more conventional built architecture, it will be interesting to see if and how the relation between the artwork and the architecture work will continue. It will also be interesting to see if perhaps the public-private schism that was absent before will emerge when buildings become the more prominent public part of their oeuvre. There are two more important points concerning the legacy of the artist-architect, and these pertain to questions of production and productivity. A very efficient way of dealing with the artist-architect legacy is by splitting up the tasks. Solitary mornings in the atelier are definitely out of the question for today’s global architect. So instead of working him or herself into the ground by trying to do all things at once, why don’t architects take on an artist next to themselves? This is the strategy deployed by Herzog and De Meuron, who work with the artist Remy Zaugg. There is a generosity implicit in this tactic, as well as a hint of traditionalism, that is reminiscent of the role of the artist as embellisher of buildings. But, as with the artist-architect, the exact nature of the working process of the combination of artist and architect is secretive; we simply don’t know what’s going on in the studio and we are not likely to find out soon. The working relationship of artist and architect has plenty of scope for development, as can be seen for instance from the way it is being practiced today by Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio. Lastly is the issue of productivity. Is architectural output simply a matter greed, luck or diligence? Is the size of an oeuvre insignificant, a pragmatic statistic or is a size meaningful after all? Certainly, many artists have thought the latter. Working in series is one of the most significant aspects of the legacy of the modern-day artist-architect. It seems that in the course of the 20th century the academic tradition of carefully positioning the masterpiece was to a large extent replaced by the production of series of works. Like Picasso, Le Corbusier made sure that the stream of still lifes and reclining nudes never ended. Bottles, guitars and round, springy breasts occur again and again in countless variations. For Le Corbusier, profusion really mattered. And, what’s more, he managed to be almost as prolific as an architect as he was as an artist – the question is whether this was because he was encouraged and enabled to do so by his artistic production. Did doggedly continuing to paint one canvas after the other teach him to do the same thing with buildings? It is possible, likely even, that the painterly experiments stimulated his architectural prolificacy. Unlike Utzon, who is known for an exquisite but small oeuvre of singular masterpieces, Le Corbusier left behind a serial architecture, made up of sequences of buildings on various themes and motives. This part of the legacy of the artist-architect must be one of the hardest to follow up, but if pursued with zest and playfulness, at the same time puts much of the pressures and strains of architecture in perspective. After all, if any building is just one in a whole chain, who cares about a few little failings here and there? Taking all these possible readings and interpretations into consideration, the question remains: is there a future for the artist-architect? At first sight, that future seems nonexistent. Besides digitalization, architecture has been in thrall to ‘research’ in recent years. Slowly but steadily the production of representations of buildings has been replaced by the production of visualizations of analyses. The analytical powers of architects have been let loose on all types of information, often containing nothing but the most tenuous connection to an interpretation of architecture as design of a structural nature. Moreover, today, poetic notions are useless in view of the highly specific, public, relational systems that work within a global economy. Taking a new look at the convergence of spatial and socio-economic structures raises specific questions, such as; what are the spatial and structural characteristics of our intensified late-Capitalist systems of production and consumption? How can we envisage these systems to change the living and working environment? In order to develop a specifically architectural perspective on those new types of conditions, architects have become accustomed to using information from sociological, economic, geographical and humanitarian sources as well as ways of seeing inherent in the architectural discipline itself. Ostensibly, therefore, architecture seems to have radically turned its back on art. It is not even anti-art, which after all is an artistic stance. The two have just drifted apart. This affected us too, for from this point onwards, having arrived at the current moment in time, we must abandon our quasi-objective bird’s eye view of the evolving relationship between art and architecture and lay our own cards on the table. When discussing questions in the here and now, as practitioners, we can’t lay claim to an unbiased position and thus in fairness can only describe processes that we have undergone ourselves, experiences that have immersed us, more or less suddenly. We, like many of our peers, steered our interest and skills in the direction of subject matters preceding design, on the one hand consciously attempting to regain some of the terrain lost to the growing influence of ‘policy makers’ on the profession, and, on the other hand, intuitively responding to the experimental potential of newly available new techniques, mediums and processes. It was interesting, and a challenge, to think up new ways to structure the innate step by step process of architecture. In MOVE we wrote: “Designing with computational techniques involves abandoning the traditional hierarchy of a design approach that begins with the plan. Today, we begin with a point. A point in three-dimensional space. The architectural drawing, a scaled-down, two-dimensional representation of an aspect of a building, is obsolete.” Thus, as the superseded drawing tables were carted out of the studio, we took it upon ourselves to analyze a location, or a city, with respect to its hardware, software, techniques, imagination and effects. We taught ourselves to map our findings with the use of specific techniques. This newly developed investigative architecture was concerned with tracing patterns, user groups, and the various virtual and infrastructural ways in which people distribute themselves over the earth. We steeped ourselves in clockwise planning; relating occupation to time of day. However, interestingly and perhaps unexpectedly, these dispassionate, increasingly depersonalized manifestations of architecture have also in the last few years fascinated certain artists, such as Tobias Rehberger and Aconci Vito whose works may either be read as a wicked play on the ubiquitous world of ‘design’, or a perfected version of it. Thus, however resolutely architecture may try to turn its back on art, like a shadow, it cannot be shaken off. Circuitously, art itself has sought to close the gap again. Another area which continually confronts architecture with this pervasive shadow is that of museum and exhibition design. Recently, all over the world museums have been commissioned that were explicitly required to be landmarks. In fact, almost every single competition today requests a landmark or icon building. Cities use architecture to compete with each other to attract companies and population groups that can contribute to their economy. They want to provide all the facilities a discerning urban audience requires, but these museums are also intended to present an image that the city hopes will make it a magnet for attention. The art world itself has accepted that some of the new icon-museums not just compete with art, but win from it; instead of neutral settings for art, these museums dictate which art and artists can fill them. In this way, whether competing to design landmark museums, or simply taking part in some of the many exhibitions, publications and conferences on architecture, architects are continuously confronted with questions of display and representation – questions that underline the intimate entanglement that persists between art and architecture, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Consequently, as a profession, we find ourselves in a pressing dilemma. Contemporary architects are expected to fulfil two contradictory roles at once; that of scientific-minded ‘researcher’ and that of the producer of compelling, surprising and unique icons. Naturally, we all choose to balance both positions. But how sustainable is this? In our view, the practice of ambiguity is fast reaching its limits. For this reason, we decided to point a future generation of architects in a new direction. With them, the exploration of architecture as research was counterbalanced by another trajectory: we simultaneously, at first mostly outside of UN Studio and inside the various school of architecture where we taught and visited, started to investigate with students ways of once again renewing the relationship between architecture and art. In 2002 we visited three different educational institutes (UCLA, Princeton and the Staedelschule) and instructed the students, over the course of a week, a semester and a year to produce architectural, diagrammatic, analyses of works of art. Each student researched an artist of their own choice on the basis of questions, such as: what is known about the artist with respect to his/her relationship to the audience and the artistic field; which materials does the artist use; how is specific work of this artist constructed; how is the work perceived; how does the work evoke certain effects? In this way, this particular research mimicked the approach of the current forms of architectural research, focusing likewise on questions of hardware (geometry, construction, framing etc.) and software (flux, lifestyle rituals, refection, light, etc.). The analyses are disconnected from any form of art historical discourse. Meaningful interpretations are deliberately avoided; underlying theories and significations are ignored. The analyses are, moreover, not recorded in text, but with the aid of, largely digital, visual techniques. By analyzing art in a way normally reserved to architectural subjects, a completely different notion of the relationship between art and architecture comes to the fore, acknowledging the complexity of each subject. After all, would it not be disingenuous to continue to view art as ‘free’ and medium-specific, a pleasant or raw source of inspiration for architecture? As many artists have demonstrated with their works, the processes of production and reception surrounding art are forceful; issues of market, value and institutional placement make artists at least as susceptible to commerce as architects. Although the introduction of this type of art analysis was new, we were not forcing our students to take a complete leap into the unknown, since there was a link to the diagrammatic design technique, which we had been practicing for many years. In architecture, diagrams have been introduced as part of a technique that promotes a proliferating, generating and instrumentalising approach to design. The essence of the diagrammatic technique is that it introduces into a work qualities that are unspoken, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic - qualities that can be physical, structural, spatial or technical. The diagram is an 'abstract machine', without fixed meaning. In contrast to an icon or symbol the abstract machine does not represent , does not refer back, but it generates new objects, situations and ideas. The origin of this particular meaning of the architectural diagram is found in Deleuze’s “Logic of Sensation”, in a passage in which the way in which Francis Bacon constructs a painting is described: “Roughly, the law of the diagram, according to Francis Bacon, is the following: one begins with a figurative form, a diagram intervenes and confuses it and a form a completely different nature emerges from the diagram, which is called the Figure” . (G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, Paris, 1981). Deleuze cites two examples from Bacon: Painting (1946) began with the representation of a bird, which gradually transformed into the image of a man with an umbrella, and, portraits in “the paint changes from one contour into the other”, causing specific zones within the painting each to develop their own logic. It could be argued, that bearing in mind the enormous influence of Deleuze on the generation of architects emerging in the 1990-s shows that, at least for some architects, ourselves among them, the affiliation with art was still very much alive, albeit taking on a more abstracted, intellectualized form. We have many times been asked if the diagram is a genuine design instrument, or a simply a means of communication. Probably it is both. The diagram is often used to quantify and qualify information in such a way that a specific problem is highlighted. But at the same time, the diagram that we are looking for does something else as well: it discloses a hidden reality, which exists parallel to the more familiar, obvious patterns that it is based upon. And, in looking for that secondary meaning we are on familiar art historical ground again. The discovery of those visual moments when one reality level falls into the next was made many centuries ago, yet is constantly subject to new interpretations. We were, for example, struck by a new potential for this type of double take when we considered the moment when the digital camera moves on automatically from one captured moment to the next half-captured one: the image that results is partly generated by the framing of the previous instant, which was conscious, partly by the unexpected and uncontrollable behaviour of the ingredients framed in that instant and partly by the automatic mechanism of the camera. In recent projects, such as the Defense offices in Almere and the Galleria Department Store in Seoul, we activated this mechanism in the facades, which generate multiple images that are subject to transformation all the time, dependent upon the viewer and the light moving along the elevations. Caroline Bos