Transportable Environments 3

Robert Kronenburg, Filiz Klassen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134288786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The latest volume in this popular series of books which explores the theoretical basis for temporary and transportable structures where permanence is either not possible or desirable. The book provides insight into the wide range of uses of these structures, the varied forms they take and the concerns and ideas for future development, focusing on portability, adaptability, sustainability of the built environment, and technical innovations. A wide range of designed solutions identify and define contemporary directions in design theory and practice.

With international examples throughout, this book will be of interest and value to all those involved in the areas of building design, building component manufacture and urban design.

Theory, History and Context

Polyphilo’s Thresholds: Alternatives for Nomadic Dwelling

Alberto Pérez-Gómez
McGill University

Over the centuries, nomadic life has offered humanity real possibilities for fulfilment, revealing to the individual a sense of participation in the cultural order and the natural world. Whether for the bedouin in the desert or the Christian pilgrim in the Middle Ages, enacting our condition of passerby upon the face of the earth by walking and belonging to no permanent physical place held a profound significance. The man-made structures that made this possible, such as the tent, the icon or the tabernacle, were imbued with genuine symbolism, touching all orders of life from the social and political to the religious. Our own project of mobility and contemporary cosmopolitanism only appears as new and revolutionary when seen against a civilization obsessed with permanence and predictability, a civilization that believes its destiny is to dominate and possess an external reality transformed into natural resources, while consciously or subconsciously concealing mortality and the ultimate ephemerality of all things human, from personal belongings to the powers of the mightiest empire. This dominant world-view is a relatively recent phenomenon.

It is important to recall that prior to the nineteenth century in Europe, much care was given to ephemeral structures in cities, such as triumphal arches, tableaux vivants and the like, built for specific religious or political celebrations. These singular events, lasting one or a few days, which revealed a political order through the transformed city, were universally significant for the inhabitants, conveying a sense of purpose and a general existential orientation. In a similar way to permanent architecture, ephemeral structures are capable of revealing a ‘poetic image’, one that affects us primarily through our vision and yet is fully sensuous, synaesthetic, thus capable of seducing and elevating us to understand our embodied consciousness’s participation in wholeness. In addition, traditional architectural theories, which after Vitruvius privileged formal, monumental representations of geometrical order, always did so cognizant of the ephemeral condition of human life on earth, seeking to reconcile our human capacity for stability and precision that seemed to reflect the character of the eternal cosmos, with an openness to the gift of death.

During the last two centuries, our Western cultures have become increasingly obsessed with positive reason, excluding poetry and mythical stories as illegitimate forms of knowledge. Early democratic systems freed the individual from traditional, often oppressive, political orders, yet they also forced humanity to confront the abyss of nihilism. The reaction was a new and radicalized attachment to private property, to ethnic groups or nationalistic institutions, and to the production of historicist or technological architecture: ossified monuments with an inherent capacity to be transformed into ideological ‘symbols’, becoming potentially destructive and contributing eventually to the horrific genocidal wars of the twentieth century. It must be acknowledged that the political and epistemological revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed much to the physical freedom and comfort of the individual, the new voyeur and consumer of the metropolis. Yet they also tended to conceal the very nature of the human condition, its fundamental uncertainty, which, as a mediaeval Japanese poet once said, is what makes life wonderful and worth living.

Once Western humanity became fully modern, embracing the values of a progressive history between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the possibility of placelessness became real and, with it, nomadic life could become a potential nightmare. The genius of place, associated to the linguistic reality of traditional cultures, slowly vanished from our experience, progressively substituted by the isotropic, homogeneous space-time of technology. Seeking to solidify a historical reality into a stable and predictable ground for action, a crucial yet most difficult endeavour without the aid of the imagination, architects were often called to produce nostalgic monuments on the basis of ideological programmes such as liberalism, fascism, communism, all issuing from the ideals of the French Revolution. The result: historicist traces like the neo-Greek or Roman forms of Nazism, or the pseudo-scientific forms of international corporate architecture. Architecture embodies political values which tend to become repressive, and this has traditionally been implemented through heaviness and monumentality. Today, after the shortcomings of globalization have become more evident and our world struggles with its political and economic crises, it is only fair to seek alternatives.

It is crucial, nevertheless, that the project for a new nomadism be understood in the full context of our postmodern existence. In a true Nietzschean spirit we may believe that the strong values of traditional cultures, such as nationalism or ethnicity, should be weakened. Our architecture, however, must remain the repository of memories that allow for further action. This is crucial in a world increasingly reduced to a global village, in which religions and myths are no longer an intersubjective ground of being. It is not enough to resolve a technical problem of portability or sustainability, or simply to declare that the alternative to globalization is cultural nomadism in a post-traditional environment. We may abhor the monumental heaviness of old architecture, affirming as it did theocentric or false political values. Yet it is imperative that once we embrace ‘lightness’ as an alternative, we become fully aware of its implications, stepping outside a dialectic. The issue is not merely to oppose sedentary and historical to nomadic and ahistorical. As architects or designers we are called to envision a better future, our projects necessarily retain a utopian vector as part of their ethical dimension. Whether we design an ephemeral or a permanent structure, this ethical imperative is primary. In order to embrace it, we must understand that the ephemeral object must simultaneously offer a dwelling place and therefore, paradoxically, be memorable. And this is indeed the difficulty. Ephemeral architecture needs to be critical in the same measure as, say, the architecture of a museum: opening our being to death, while celebrating our human capacity to think the eternal. It doesn’t do this merely by being technically responsible, built with light or recycled materials. For human life, even at its most precarious, seeks play and well-being, and never merely survival.

In my book Polyphilo or the Dark Forest Revisited (1992), I dealt with these issues in the form of a love story, a story of delayed material fulfilment that celebrates our human condition outside a simple dialectic, a condition characterized as ‘bitter-sweet’ by the Greek poets who invented Eros/Amor, the divinity of love, neither perpetually fulfilled nor perennially lustful. It is a story that celebrates the nomadic condition of modern technological man, caught in the liminal place of a fully carnal body and homogeneous mental space, always in transit, always crossing a threshold, travelling for the sake of the trip, rather than in view of a known destination. This narrative is also a theory of architecture as poetic image, suggesting alternatives to architectural practices based primarily on instrumental methodologies.

Instrumental theories have been dominant for two centuries. Most recent ones postulate the use of computers with a complete disregard for history and embodied consciousness (with its oriented spatial-ity). Leaving behind the computer’s utilitarian justification as a tool that might improve the efficiency of architectural production, these theories claim the tool’s capacity to generate ‘new forms’, totally ‘other’ from our traditional ‘orthogonal’ building practices. Indeed, recent powerful software packages are now capable of treating surface as the primary element in design, allowing for unimaginable configurations that are at once structurally sound and open up an infinity of formal possibilities. These instrumental processes are necessarily dependent on mathematical models, themselves designed by computer engineers working with specific economic interests in mind; extrapolated to architecture, they often become an empty exercise in formal manipulation. Fuelled by a host of technological dreams or nightmares, architects soon forget the importance of our spatial engagement (verticality) in this inescapable and particular form of bodily consciousness, with the world that defines our humanity, our historicity and gravity (the ‘real world’ of bodily experience into which we are born, and which includes our sensuous bond to the earth and all that is not human).

The reality of architecture is infinitely complex, both shifting with history and culture, yet also remaining the same, analogous to the human condition which demands that we continually address the same basic questions to come to terms with mortality and the possibility of transcendence opened up by language, while expecting diverse answers which are appropriate to specific times and places. Architecture possesses its own ‘universe of discourse’, and over the centuries has seemed capable of offering humanity far more than a technical solution to pragmatic necessity. Architecture and the design of the environment configure the ‘limits’ of human culture; they open a clearing for all the great achievements of art and civilization. Our technological world, obsessed by infinite progress and the obliteration of limits, is often sceptical about architecture having any meaning at all other than providing shelter. Yet our dreams are always set in place, and our understanding of others and ourselves could simply not be without architecture. We know architecture allows us to think and to imagine, it opens up the ‘space of desire’ that allows us to be ‘at home’ while remaining always ‘incomplete’ and open to our personal death, this being our most durable human characteristic. Without limits we simply cannot be human. Even cyberspace could not ‘appear’ if we were not first and foremost mortal, self-conscious bodies already engaged with the world through direction and gravity. We don’t merely have a body, we are our bodies.

Architecture and design, operating at the limits of language, between nature and culture, between that which can be articulated in words and the unspoken and obscure, communicates to us the possibility of recognizing ourselves as complete, in order to dwell poetically on earth and thus be wholly human. The products of architecture have been manifold, ranging from the daidala of classical antiquity to the gnomons, machinae and buildings which Vitruvius names as the three manifestations of the discipline, from the gardens and ephemeral architecture of the Baroque period to the built and unbuilt ‘architecture of resistance’ of modernity such as Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, Gaudi’s Casa Batlo or Hejduk’s ephemeral ‘masques’. This recognition is not merely one of semantic equivalence; rather it occurs in experience, and as in a poem, its ‘meaning’ is inseparable from the experience of the poem itself. As an ‘erotic’ event, it overflows any reductive paraphrasing, overwhelms the spectator-participant, and has the capacity to change one’s life. In order to propitiate such events the designer must necessarily engage language, a story capable of modulating intended actions (projects) in view of ethical imperatives, always specific to each task at hand. The practice that emerges with such a theory can never be an instrumental application, but rather appears as a ‘verb’, as a process that is never neutral and should be valorized. This process in fact erodes the boundaries between the artistic disciplines concerned with space and is not constrained by the specificity of the material or size of the designed object.

This has been the story of an architecture of resistance since Piranesi, passing through John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Greenaway. From the moment when the traditional divisions among the fine arts were subverted, first in epistemology and eventually in practice, between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the most significant works that ‘construct’ a mysterious depth, a significant spa-tiality, belong within my story. The book Polyphilo tells a story as a sequence of visits to some of these works, as a revelation for the man in transit, ephemeral truths that disclose and conceal simultaneously, maintaining a tension between the absence of gods and our desire and capacity to wait.

Polyphilo’s plot is based on an older treatise, a most significant work in the European tradition of architectural theories, one that merits a short exposition and helps explain my own project. The original is entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Colonna, 1499), published in Venice in the late fifteenth century. The Hypnerotomachia is very different from other Italian Renaissance treatises on architecture with their rational emphasis and interest in mathematical principles, such as Alberti’s De re aedificatoria or, later on, Palladio’s Quattro libri. It is a Neoplatonic narrative articulating architectural meaning in relation to our human search for erotic fulfilment, a basic description of the human condition, equally applicable to the contemporary nomad. The interest of architecture is presented as a search for unity, an alchemical quest, through making. Architectural meaning is experienced as a sense of completion/order by the nomadic architect, in the mind’s eye, before it is articulated in words or mathematical ratios, just as architecture is made, and its principles are ‘found’ rather than imposed from a concept, as a prescriptive recipe.

The story is a dream within a dream. Poliphilo dreams about being in a threatening dark forest and narrates the myriad things he saw, a veritable strife for love, which is the meaning of the Greek words in the title. In an erotic trance which is both fulfilment and the infra-thin space of perpetual expectation, he tells of many ancient marvels, architectural monuments, most of them in ruins, encountered in his search for Polia, his beloved. In this vein, always thirsty, he describes a pyramid and obelisks, a great horse, a magnificent elephant concealing the tombs of a king and a queen, a hollow colossus, and a triumphal gateway with its harmonic measurements and ornamentation (Figure 1.1). After suffering a major scare behind the threshold, passing the test of a frightening labyrinth, he is brought back to life by a wonderful encounter with five nymphs, embodying the five senses. They show him several fountains and he partially quenches his thirst by drinking...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration Credits
• Foreword
• Theory, History and Context
• Design
• Technology
• Projects
• Biographies
• Selected Bibliography