John Dennys Memorial Lecture: John Dennys was involved with the AA over a period of 27 years - as a student, lecturer, member of Council, and President. On his death in 1973, a visiting lectureship was established to mark his interest in education. Jos Rafael Moneo identifies fragmentation and minimalism as the guiding principles in today's architecture. Presenting a selection of his own projects he explores the relationship between the idea of fragmentation and the destruction of repetition. Throughout his career Moneo has demonstrated a tremendous range. His built projects include art museums, residential buildings, a railway station, an airport, factory, hotel, and city hall. As a writer and critic he has devoted almost as much time to education as he has to design. He has taught at the schools of architecture of both Madrid and Barcelona University, and for five years was the chairman of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard GSD. In 1996 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize.
NB: Sound cuts out after 75 mins, lecture cuts out shortly after.
Transcription:
John Dennys Memorial lecture.
Mohsen Mostafavi introduces Rafael Moneo.
RAFAEL MONEO: Let’s start rapidly telling about my gratefulness to Mohsen Mostafavi for inviting me to give this first John Dennys memorial lecture. It is always rewarding to be in london and to be in this school. I am quite aware of how important this school was and is, and therefore to have this opportunity to share with you where my thoughts are and what are the intentions behind my projects is what I will try to do today. I will read first some comments, or statements that will allow me to explain more clearly what I am trying to do with some of my latest works. I brought those works in which I am working at the moment, because they represent, or illustrate better the thesis I’m trying to sustain.
I would say that fragmentation is the most characteristic architectural feature, matched only by an almost symmetrically oriented phenomenon of minimalist expression. Opening any architectural magazine in whatever part of the world, one sees that architects’ interest oscillates between these two poles, either a scattered, broken structure where sharp and pointed planes are committed in an intense dance, ignoring whatever geometrical mandate, or frozen solid mass—with pleasure in a careful handling of the material—does attempting to accomplish all the duties architecture had in the past. It could be said that the scope of recent architecture falls within these two categories, allowing one to speak of fragmentation as the latest expression of organicism, and minimalism as those who have flourished by the sites planted by Mies van der Rohe. two attitudes that without doubt, could be considered as antagonistically opposed and yet bound in what I believe characterizes most of our architecture today in a relentless fear of form. As a matter of fact, form, something that used to be the core of the entire architectural discourse, is censored, and as a result, most of today’s architecture is dictated by these two main trends fragmentation and minimalism which I will try to examine very briefly now, keeping in mind that some alternative is still possible, and that is the territory in which I will like to move. I realize that fragmentation is too broad a concept. I am also aware of how appealing fragmented vision is, when sciences are unable to establish the unitarian model to look at nature and when society stretches more and more towards a diversity, which makes inevitable reference to a fragmented, broken world. Fragmentation is for us a formal metaphor to describe the reality around us and therefore, seeing things in such a way, one would be tempted to say that the fragmented architecture mirrors today’s world, falling once more in this inescapable trap of the third gaze to justify our world. I would like to carry the issue a bit further and to remind you today when and how fragmentation started to take over in the realm of form. The origins of fragmentation are uncertain, some kinds of what we understand as a broken form appear in the work of artists like Giulio Romano or later in architects like Fischer Von Erlach in projects such as the Karlskirche, but for our purposes, the first clear evidence of the fragmentation is found in Piranesi’s drawings of the Campo Marzio. This shows a clear understanding of the significance of the destruction of the sense of unity which was deliberately pursued after the Renaissance. It has been emphasized repeatedly that what Piranesi sought was the potential of form liberation. Tafuri has written beautiful and illuminating pages on him and I wouldn’t dare to challenge his worlds, so I will quote him directly: “the definitive laws of the first organicism” describing Piranesi’s drawings of Campo Marzio, “encountered among the organic absurd by an ocean of found fragments dissolves the city’s oldest memory as place of form.” Against whatever version of the city, and therefore the architecture as nature, Piranesi emphasizes its artificiality producing a collision of forms and figures that cannot be seen as an organic whole. I quote again: “the exasperated articulation and deformation of the compositions don’t belong any more to an ‘ars combinatoria.’ The encounter of the geometrical monads isn’t regulated by any preestablished harmony.” Piranesi’s attempt is to manifest the birth, necessary and terrifying, of an architect working beyond meaning, outside of any symbolic system. Piranesi discovered what Tafuri has called “autorità del linguaggio”, the authority of language. “The objective is to show the absolute arbitrariness of architectural writing is aline condition to any natural origin.” The idea of coherence, the idea of organic form is demolished once and forever. Curiously, and as Tafuri underlined, Piranesi rejects any idea of norm, thus rejecting what became the starting point of twentieth century avant gardes, the avant garde started from looking to establish new norms, new languages, able to produce universal understanding. Against any idea of a consistent composition, piranesi is looking for what Tafuri called “la logica della decomposizione,” the logic of decomposition. Tafuri’s writing is quite compelling, and I would quote him once more, talking about Piranesi, he speaks of “the absolute void, the silence of the thing alone, the tautological affirmation of the pure signs.” For better or worse, the nineteenth century forgot the Piranesian agenda. Its positivism led to a search for rules and norms abandoning those first steps of anxious freedom found in Piranesi’s work. Architectural theoreticians were attracted by establishing norms and ‘partis’ and as a result, nineteenth century architecture became a collection of types. Only perhaps with some British architects interested in the picturesque did the idea of fragmentation survive. But it was always an indulgent appraisal of the visual qualities what prevailed, the mass of the single building is broken, trying to accommodate it with the diversity manifested in nature and so, avoiding any allusion to authority or power. But things changed with the arrival of twentieth century. A distinguished professor of this institution, Robin Evans, has written illuminated pages on this subject. He distinguished three major approaches for fragmentation in this century: the period in the 1910s and 20s, when faceting and fragmentation came to architecture as a revolutionary impulse, borrowed from cubist painting; secondly the postwar years, when it appeared fragmentation) as a way of humanizing modern architecture; thirdly, the present day, when it is said to signal the end of humanism and the end of modernism. Evans, promptly introduced the concept that fragmentation makes some allusion to the broken form to which the piece we call fragment belongs. This allows me to make an observation that I feel is crucial. We should recognize that in much of today’s collage-oriented art and architecture, it is the nostalgia of unity that dominates the world. Architects, encountering opposed and contradictory forms, are enjoying the fiction that they are living throughout time, and therefore feel themselves to be manipulating all of history. Evan’s observations are indeed pertinent, and I would like to expand on the sources he mentioned. Besides the cubist source, I believe we should look at the avant-garde trend known as neoplasticism, as well as some others. The neoplasticists saw the essence of reality, reaching beyond appearance and seeking to explain what was behind form. The individual components of the real world became important in their purest state, the building was understood as the result of assembling the elements, planes and lines, enlivened and energized by colours. As the scientists explained what is behind matter, artists and architects became intrigued with the discovery of the true components, and the true structure with which to build. A painter such as Mondrian, or an architect such as Rietveld will indeed allow us to speak of a world fragmented and discontinuous and yet not broken. The idea of fragment as a broken reality seems to belong more to the Dadá artists, who saw the world as something that resists the description. Things and their representation are valued in themselves without any meaning. Therefore they are able to appear unconnected, unrelated, without an attempt to be recognized as belonging to a broader meaningful world. The Tafurian words about Piranesi are pertinent when we are thinking of Dadá. it is not the appropriate time here for establishing the ties between Dadaism and Surrealism, and yet, it could be stated that the surrealist seized upon the fragmented condition of our thoughts and feelings with their belief that our dreams produce our most genuine expression. In between both trends, an artist like Kurt Schwitters allow us to develop a complete theory of fragmentation. Certain attempts to translate the figurative artist’s experience into architectural language occur, and we should also recognize that fragmentation was present in the project of the Russian constructivist architects. It can be said that the architecture of the 20th century remained bound to the ideas of coherence and consistent form which today we consider to be related with the Classical world. The longing for new language, capable of representing the new spirit of the 20th century was the goal of the avant garde. The subtle fragmentation that Robin Evans identifies in what he calls the architecture of humanism, represented in the world of architects like Aalto and Scharoun, was clearly an exception, and one can see that architecture in the middle of the century was not concerned with the idea of fragmentation. Fragmentation in the way we know it today came later. It could be said that the issue of fragmentation entered the contemporary discourse for the first time in ‘Collage City,’ (1978) the work of Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter. Rowe and Koetter’s comments came immediately after a seminal text by Venturi and Rossi in a way I would think that Rowe and Koetter both in mind. In coincidence with some points of Venturi’s text, they celebrate anomaly, the breakage of established patterns and norms and, as did Rossi, they decide to broaden the architectural field, extending it to the realm of the city. Paradoxically, and as Robin Evan’s points out, ‘Collage City’ was in some ways a vendetta against a triumphant modern urbanism launched in what then appeared to be its first moment of vulnerability. Rowe’s ideology permeates the text. Collage techniques represents a symbol of democracy, more effective than the urbanism of the Classicist tradition, considered to be, as Robin Evans reminds us, as a sign of totalitarianism. So, diversity, the collision of different forms, is seen as the result of the different agents acting throughout time. Rowe’s eyes are without doubt, the eyes of somebody who enjoys the landscape of history. It is there, where he finds in architecture something that inevitably is charged with social and ideological meaning. So, what Rowe has learned from history, from the panorama of history, open to his eyes, started to be used as a procedure that promptly reached an extensive audience in the school. Fragmentation, therefore, can be understood as an architectural tool which captures time, it is the satisfactory and indulgent fiction of making history. In a way, what Colin Rowe is explaining is offering to architects is the fiction that manipulated encountered forms and architecture we are able to capture and to collapse time in our world. We were longing, or anguished by, is the fact that the work of architecture is produced in a precise moment, and that this moment is going to fix our world. Instead of that, if you believe that you are able to create those atmospheres that you find when walking in Rome, when this metaphor of the Collage City is so understandable, when the city is born taking roots from an existing city and yet encountering Renaissance and Baroque and contemporary and producing this sense of being surrounded by all history. This longing of history, it seems to me, it was long appreciated and very much clearly sold to the architects by the text, and explained the success of a text like that, in popularizing this mechanism and this method. Popularized through the 70s, the Rowe and Koetter’s historicist technique was to be rapidly overcome in the 80s. Obviously, those who saw fragmentation as the new gospel, were reacting to the excessiveness of postmodernism. This departure came by way of what was thought to be a new version of early modernism. Critics like Bruno Zevi had been continuously calling for the breakage of the box, which was the endeavour of many architects at this time. These claims of the 60s by the part of some architects, asking for the breakage of the box and extending the so-called freedom in Frank lloyd Wright’s architecture, that was the zenith of Western architecture was offered as the goal, the target, to be achieved.
Obviously, architects working under the pressure of fragmentation are not exactly that, but it should be recognised that this attempt of breaking the box was already present in those years, and therefore among those architects that were trying to overcome the close box—this close box that had become canonical in the hands of Mies van Der Rohe—fell the eyes of students and critics who sought to escape postmodernism. Probably nobody represents this departure better than Frank Gehry. On the other hand, fragmentation arrived from the hand of French philosophers who with deconstructivism were trying to dismantle the consistency of the canonical written text. The metaphor of the needed destruction of the text to posses it which is the best of the act of reading was rapidly absorbed by some architects and theoreticians who thought it could be useful to label the new architectural trend. Since the 80s the construction which in our simplified terms means fragmentation, has become both a new aesthetic ideology and a new architectural procedure. The dangerous attraction of the metaphor is quite understandable, the world around us is broken and heterogeneous, nothing suggests unity, scientific knowledge rejects any consistent description of the world around us, society, even more after the fall of communism has enjoyed emphasizing diversity; artists celebrate with their texts and their canvases an interrupted panorama in which reality is captured only fragmentarily. Why wouldn’t architects be able to do the same? Again, the old approach which supports the mandatory third gaze as the inevitable frame in which our work appears, offers the only reason for these new forms. This time, what the third gaze supports is a world without form, a world that resists being represented by recognizable images, in a way, the most important thing is to destroy the form, to recognize the iconoclastic condition in which we live. That is the point which deserves to be developed. Today, there is a fear of form, a fear to adopt new idols which once prevailed, rather than a pleasure in the act of destroying the existing ones. In my opinion, is not only the representation of energy that could be understood happens behind fragmentation, as much as this fear of being committed with icons. Is this let’s say quite profound fear of iconography what, it seems to me, explains this well doing and well being with fragmentation. We are today in a word that is faithful to this inevitable transformation.
I mentioned before the strength that minimalism has today. In the purity of the formal approaches, the minimalist are at the antipodes of fragmentation. The excesses implicit in fragmentation as breakage are forcefully condemned for those who try to condense in a single direct form all types of architecture. Yet, there is a remarkable coincidence, and that is that both are rejecting form. The simplicity of minimalist means again the abandonment of form. The ascription of whatever architectural program to a prismatic inocus volume seems a deliberate proposal to reject any commitment with a particular form. If Tafuri talks about the silence of leaving things to speak freely by themselves, now we can speak about the real silence coming from the mute condition of the primary forms. We are so close to the origins that the work doesn't exist yet. Construction then, becomes the primary and solitary way of expression. The continuity between form and material becomes a more substantial issue, and the transit from the material to the almost non existing form is the passage that architects celebrate. Some of the most brilliant recent works belong to this worthwhile attempts. Once we arrive to this point, I would like to question myself: are this two ways the only ways of doing architecture? This is the question I would like to answer with the projects i will show tonight. I want to recognize directly and frankly that it is impossible to return to the idea of an organic form, that what we have missed is the centre, that what we have missed is this sense of unity that we are longing for. That, is something that in my view should be forgotten. We have learned to look at architecture and cities thank in part to Venturi and many others with the less indulgent eye, able to see the diversity of the rich world around us, and thus, preventing any unitarian description or representation. That is difficult to think in the immanence of form, and therefore almost impossible, in answer to minimalism, to look for archetypal creation, something that architects should learn to live with. Equally we have forsaken the deterministic approach, men and women’s presence is essential to architectural events, thus denying the possibility of an idealistic world, dreamed by those utopians. The inevitable, and this is my point, presence of the designer in whatever architecture ought to be remarked, confirming their responsibility as well as their freedom. But the exercise of freedom can happen without building a formless world. This is the point that I would like to underline today. The architectural body can be manipulated with freedom, without being driven by fortuitous results which used to come with undiscriminated fragmentation. There is room for an architectural world liberated from symmetries, parties, authoritative axes and all those devices which characterize academicism and to which Beaux-Arts theoreticians try to transform in an articulate body of knowledge. That architects enjoy freedom within the boundaries of the principles of the visual discipline which we call architecture is what I would like to show throughout the presentation of my projects tonight. In all of them, I tried to respond to specific conditions with the help of architectural devices. It deals with an idea of form that accepts some limits dictated by the circumstances, asking for some architecturally foreseen answers that open the door to explore more precise architectural mechanisms. All projects have in common certain threshold in compactness. The issue of compactness is not a new one. To build maintaining the restrictions of a rather regular precinct always was a goal pursued by architects. Whoever builds know that to enclose the biggest volume in the smallest surface is desirable. There is a virtue in this intrinsic economy, true in the present as much as it was in the past. It is easy to find in Roman architecture for example plan strategies which consider the interior use of the space without missing the articulation of the different images adjusting them without missing their own idiosyncrasy to create the mosaic that defies conventional compositional devices. Muslim architecture also offers wonderful examples of compact architecture, where the perimeters of the muslim cities, in which muslim architects work, are able to receive the most diverse architecture, accommodating diverse figures without following the tyranny of the perspectival axis. Later, an architect like Scamozzi saw so clearly how the regular surface is able to be decomposed in a series of figures consisting of walls and courtyards, windows and stairs, lounges and rooms, filling with an admirable contiguity and continuity the space, without respecting a previously established parti. In recent times, Terragni has offered to us admirable tokens of an architecture which saturates the plan, enjoying the interstitial spaces and always ready to provide exciting architectural expression. Compactness, therefore, is not a discovery, but an enduring way of approaching architecture, that, in my view, deserves to be explored. The buildings I will show tonight have been conceived in an attempt to replace what could be called the urban fabric. All this projects are respectful of the site, all happen to be within an existing fabric, and also creating a new perception of the given conditions. Consequently, this built masses are often divided instead of being the result of a process of aggregation. I indeed like an architecture that explores division instead of addition, and therefore, it seems to be that there is still place to play with the ambiguity and the double edge that characterizes architecture that allowed the building to answer the outside world as well as the inside world, so refrained to the perhaps more contrived and more respectful enclosed mass, and yet manipulated the interior of this mass with entire freedom, to keep in mind this idea of division instead of aggregation.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, is a clear example of such an strategy, I didn’t see any other way of acting in this project but to use intensively the site. Houston is a city that doesn’t allow the perception of buildings except from the car, and that, in my view, prevented the possibility of considering the museum as an object to be enjoyed as a result of the walking experience. The building, thus, is split in a series of spaces connected throughput a hidden thread. The museum exploits the roof, both to enhance its own profile, as well as to provide light to the galleries below.
In Stockholm, the collection of rooms stand of Skeppsholmen island with great freedom, maintaining the pavillion like character of all the previous constructions, the rooms literally form packages whose compactness maintain the association with all the previous collections and gives to the building the scale I was looking for.
In Murcia, the building closes the space of a remarkable plaza, accepting the prismatic condition, yet the building itself breaks up, maintaining the rectangular perimeter emphasizing the fragmented collection of columns, which offered a renewed version of an old Spanish retablo, out of the traditional sense of order.
In San Sebastian, the issue of compactness and fragmentation requires a more sophisticated explanation. Besides, it should be recognized that the material here, the glass, plays an important role, but altogether it seems to me that we offered an alternative approach, in both fragmented and minimalist views. One first glance could bring us to think in a fragmented structure, but a closer appraisal brings us to consider that the so-called fragments are carefully consolidated to create the spaces that we are looking for. There isn't any place for chance. On the other hand, compactness appears, as well as the generous program is involved in the pristine volumes. It’s simplicity will bring us to speak again of minimalism, but they are oriented by the geography and activated by the site. And the same could be said about the glass, which is carefully crafted to achieve the expression we wanted to achieve. But let me go to the images to make more clear this commitment with an architecture that still trusts in both the principles and mechanisms that architecture, as a discipline has explored throughout the times, without exclusively relying on what for a short period of time is considered a novelty.
The first project I am going to present is this museum in Houston. Houston is a very interesting city, very flat, this sense of infinite, of absence of relation to any geographical accident, to the entire grid quite an interest, but at the same time, in spite that everything seems to be quite friendly, the climate condition does the outdoors sensation not so pleasant. We ought to build something here, in this site, and then, even though the grid seems to give to the city a sense of indifference, the truth is that all the streets have its own character. Here is the Mies van der Rohe building, and we need to do something on the other side, happily, and unfortunately, on the other side of the street, without another connection than a passage underground.
[Summarized transcription of the presentation of projects]
Even though the first fantasies about the building where enjoying the idea of being discovered through walking, I felt that the building should be much more limited and defined by the borders of the site itself. Therefore once that this enclosure has been produced, the issue was how to activate this closed volume that was always going to be reached by car; to oriente it properly was my first concern. Everything was going to happen inside, and therefore I closed and I used completely the precint so answering to the city conditions. I tryed to produce this breakage of the roof, trying to capture with entire freedome the light for the different collection of rooms. From the very beginning, the variety of the collection was looking for this multiple and different rooms and in a way, there is a certain kind of analogy or relationship between what was happening downtown and this rich, diversified roof. On how it works, the building is longing for having natural light, being able at the same time to accommodate three main collections, one impressionist collection that was donated by a lady who wanted to keep it together, another one coming from other private collection, and some works of the museum. The attempt was to put them together, to be able to play with their double edge condition: what happens outdoors and what happens indoors, establishing strategies that allow the independent reading of the different spaces. There is an attempt to manipulate out of the restrictions impossed by the perimeter and allow rooms of different proportions to compose the plan. The floorplan is the masterplan. Two examples of Roman archtiecture: the house in Pompei and something in the North of Africa that shwed you how we are able to work with well defined elements. All those axis (on the plans) are workign without creating the tyranny of the perspective spaces. That was transferred somehow to some of those muslim architectures that I admire so much, the ability to subdivide the square with such freedom, and yet with such an ability to introduce figures, images and forms, that can be handled within that frame. This idea, of something beyond aggregation that is able to deal with complete forms without falling in this authoritarian idea of the organic body. There are also wonderful plans from Scamozzi that are not so far away from the muslim plans that we just saw. Two examples for a contemporary architect, Terragni's architecture would be able to contribute to this idea of not seeing architecture linearly, or perspectivally structured, yet being the result of this process of division, instead of adding throughout the perspectival axis. [Shows photographs of the models, plans and sections]. We are looking for the reading of many of the pieces as independent, as we have seen in the references. The main principles of light condition are shown in the sketch of the detail, this kind of room was studied before by someone like John Soane, then developed extensively. We introduced an element that produced a multiple reflection, so the light on all the walls happens to be quite even.
When explaining the building in Stockholm, something should be said about its wonderful site. We were given freedom in choosing where in the island we wanted to place the museum. I decided not just to take the shore, but taking advantage of the existent axe going through the island. Our building tries to maintain the pavillion like spirit of the island. The entire building is playing around this collections of rooms. Through the changes of dimensions of the rooms, it is produced a spatial sensation of affluence, that still will be felt once the building is completed. It has some resonances of Louis Kahn's architecture. It tries to show how with the same form you are able to get rid of repetition. The building could be read as fragmented, in a way, it's not regular and yet, it offers this family of regular cubes, able to enclose in the largest usable space the smallest outside perimeter, which I was looking for.
The next project that I would like to explore within the issue of fragmentation is a project that is under construction right now, just as the previous two. It's a provincial city in Murcia, the plaza enjoys this wonderful baroque cathedral of the beginning of the eighteenth century, and a beautiful palace. [Audio is lost].
Transcription by María José Orihuela, Architect, MA HCT at the Architectural Association.