Excerpt from the nexus section.
Tetra Pak, or an Architecture of the Background
by Roger Riewe
Tetra Pak
For the most part we use open materials, materials that are not occupied by or subject to a meaning. Open materials are for us those materials that cannot per se be connected with nature or ecology, or not those materials that are automatically associated with the past because they were deliberately used in the past as a medium of meaning in order to present and misuse architecture as an instrument of power. Where we do use materials that bear a certain meaning we change their form by taking them apart, deconstructing them and putting them together in a new way in order to deprive them of their meaning. By using materials without a meaning or that are relatively poor in meaning the perception of the viewer is not bound to certain attempts at interpretation, as would happen with materials that convey meaning. Creating a material surface that is neutral in terms of meaning, which acquires, to a certain extent, an immaterial character, allows much space for perception, not only through the depth of the surface or, as Jean-François Lyotard puts it, to allow it be seen that there is something invisible in the visible.
Architecture is background.
With these premises we choose the appropriate material for each commission with a great deal of care, also taking into account the ways of working it. Thus it can happen that materials that are usually seen as belonging to the area of low tech are used with a high level of technical expenditure, similar to the application in the area of high tech but with the important difference that the aestheticisation takes place on different levels. In high tech it becomes a formal element, as a result of which high tech becomes a style, whereas in low tech, in contrast, the aestheticisation, inasmuch as one can speak of it at all, is not celebrated; it has a minor, project-related, contextual meaning. Sol LeWitt: New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. There is nothing worse than seeing art that wallows in gaudy baubles [...]. The danger is, I think, in making the physicality of the materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work (another kind of expressionism).
Thus, for example, it is certainly significant that in our buildings for the Institutes for Computer Science and Electronics a rough in situ concrete surface was made without construction joints and that the facade was not made of pre-cast elements.
Equally it was also important to us that the facade of the Innsbruck Railway Station building should not be erected using a pre-cast construction system but with in situ concrete as the perception of and the effect achieved by these different construction methods are very different. That the facade in Innsbruck was ultimately made with a special concrete technology (self-compacting concrete) and with the first use of pigmentation on this scale was a consequence of our design requirements. What we attempted was not under any circumstances to give the technology used a special value or to celebrate it. Using the same approach in 1992 we built the thinnest facade in the field of Austrian housing and in 1994 used the first thermal glazing in office building to be filled with heavy gases.
What applies to the materials and the execution is also a premise for the details and detailing. The details never assert themselves in the foreground; they play a minor role that is, nevertheless, important in the overall context of the project. The development of the details in the planning phase demands a great deal of time, as the contextuality in the overall concept must be considered as well as the formation of the detail as an individual element. At the same time and this is perhaps the most difficult thing about this process we also take into account local levels of construction and specialist skills. This is not intended to imply that good architecture can only be made where there are specialist skilled workers of a particular standard. Le Corbusier s La Tourette, Peter Märkli s Haus für Skulpturen in Giornico in Switzerland or Max Bill s Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, to cite just a few examples, prove the opposite. Hereby we are dealing with a very specific form of the glocal, that is an overlay of a supra-local, indeed globally shaped, approach and local circumstances. In the future we will have to examine the question whether, particularly in the area of cultural studies, the term glocal for our architecture and our approach is too vague or even wrongly connoted and whether our approach to architecture could be better described by the term eurocal. |
