THE POETICS OF ARCHITECTURE & INTERNAL METHOD

Architects seem reluctant to delve into things poetic in architecture with any serious intent. Such matters are alluded to superficially only if they are useful to enhance a flashy presentation; to give it poetic prestige; an intellectual touch. In the same loose way, architects avoid theory too, preferring discussions on the identity of the work, its obvious characteristics, and their eulogistic explanations and rationales that highlight the unique, creative skill of the originator. Ideas of metaphor and intent, indeed poetic method and technique, have become too obscure, too vague and fanciful to take seriously, when attention can be grabbed by referencing the new technologies that sprout impressively slick and complex images for everyone to gaze at in utter dumbfounded astonishment that is equated to the amazement arising from true artistic quality.

Even the creator of the image can be baffled by this technological wonder, stimulating a burst of self-indulgent, pleasurable praise at the appearance of this bespoke beauty, its perfection, as if the work might have arisen from another; from a vague distance that is also interpreted as being similar to that mysterious silence experienced in great works of art: such is the separation that the new technologies place between an architect and his/her work. The idea of the thinking hand; the meandering, searching pencil; the pondering, emotional intelligence; has become an anachronism, all meaningless acts from another era, like sharpening a pencil rolled on the thumb, as Frank Lloyd Wright did. These mundane acts are seen as trite and irrelevant, 'horse-and-cart' asides when the flash names of slick, new programmes can be smartly spruiked with a pompous, almost arrogant understanding that is baffling to those who do not know them, let alone do not know how to manipulate them.

Architectural hands

"Grasshopper"

‘Grasshopper’ was the ‘in’ word at the last university presentation attended; it appeared to be mentioned by everyone as a mark of importance; a signifier of a certain standing marking one as a member of the elite group ‘in the know' - see NOTE below. The only ‘grasshopper’ technology that I am aware of is Elna’s first sewing machine, a 1937 design that still astonishes with its beautiful detailing and making. The machine is green and has been given the friendly nickname ‘grasshopper’ by the quilters who love its compact portability. It is certainly not this technology that is being referenced by the confident young architects who appear to know nothing of doubt and self-criticism, let alone having any interest in another's circumstance or the past. Robert Graves called the doubting act, the experience, ‘the reader over my shoulder’ - that constant standing back and assessing what one is doing as one is doing it; looking, reviewing, revising, checking, feeling, . . . the repeated reaching out for context and place as a test for true meaning and relevance to make sure one was not working in a private void of misguided indulgence.^

To get any understanding of poetics in architecture, one needs to do what architecture has always done – to reach out into other fields of understanding and develop ideas and concepts by way of analogy and parallel, using the different language to transform things that are architecturally difficult to grasp, a challenge to articulate. Architecture seen as ‘frozen music’ is one classic example. The 60s, 70s, and 80s was a period when many diverse fields were involved in architecture – semiology; archaeology; art history; linguistics; anthropology; and more. Sigfried Gideon drew on Einstein’s work in physics, with his title Space, Time and Architecture, (Harvard, 1941), a seminal work even though Einstein mocked it as an irrelevance. It was a publication that stimulated Bruno Zevi’s Architecture as Space, (Da Capo Press, 1948; translated 1957), yet another publication that was to become a landmark in architectural understanding. It was not until the Team 10 Primer, (MIT Press, 1968), that matters began to diversify. Aldo van Eyck’s ‘place, not space’ was to offer different channels of thinking that embraced the new interests. Van Eyck used the Dogon village as his inspiration to broaden and enrich architectural perceptions with the idea of ‘twin phenomena.’ The era offered a rich field for thoughts, ideas, experiment, and discussion.

Aldo van Eyck

Dogon Village (see note below)

This aspect of architecture is a gaping gap in today’s world of ME and ME that shuns the challenges of thinking on theory, concepts, metaphors, and ideas in architecture. Even quality architectural criticism has now come to be seen as gross negativism, an unnecessary, bitchy waste of time, a threat, when open praise and adulation can be so positive and promotionally advantageous. Anything critical seems to stimulate a negative ‘quid pro quo’ response rather than a considered debate – a discussion in which folk are prepared to change ideas and opinions, not merely throw them up and defend them to the unresolved, unsatisfactory end.#

Team 10 - the Otterlo Meeting of 1959 (also CIAM '59)

While nonchalantly browsing some ‘op’ shop shelves just a couple of weeks ago, a small book of essays was picked up; it looked interesting. The author was a Tasmanian, Christopher Koch, unknown to me. The first essay read was on his experience in the 60s world in the USA. He was at the heart of the drug experimentation, but kept to one side, observing. The writing was informative and intelligent, and proved to be an enjoyable read. It had been some time since writing had been found to be so engaging: the reading continued. It became clear that Koch’s ideas on the poetics of the novel held some relevance for architecture too.

Aldo van Eyck's Otterlo Circles

Christopher Koch Crossing the Gap Fourth Estate 2013


      Christopher Koch

p. 55-56

Didn’t I see, he said, that drugs opened doors to unknown levels of vision, and that if I wrote my work while taking them, I would produce insights and revelations I could never otherwise have?

No, I said, there was no short cut to vision for a writer. The vision had to be already in us; and drugs wouldn’t discover anything that wasn’t already there: they would only turn into static. Nor could we give up the mind’s control, since no worthwhile art could be produced where the intellect was crippled, where a space had entered the mind. I was opposed to that space.

In spite of his lifestyle and the appearance of his work, Francis Bacon agreed with Koch, noting that drugs did not aid the artistic process - (in interview with David Sylvester). The point is clear: there is no mystic shortcut to good writing, painting, or architecture.

p. 150

The aims of the novels and short stories I’m talking about are also essentially poetic – in the essential, not the superficial sense of that term. Such works tend to do two things at once: they tell a story, and they work through extended metaphors – which are not decorations, but organic to the narrative itself, and which set up echoes, like multiple themes in a symphony. This is why their endings in particular are symphonic, and can move people so deeply . . . This attention to structure and metaphor, if one wants to be stringent about it, means that poetic fiction is not merely classifiable by cadence or by richness of writing, but by internal method.

Here one is reminded of Kandinsky’s ‘internal necessity,’ and Sullivan’s organic decoration and the idea of a building as an interrelated, integrated whole.

p. 151

Works of poetic fiction end by saying what cannot be said through direct statement, or even through reference. . . . It is the nature of the poetic novel, as well as of all real poetry, to attempt to express the impossible and never quite achieve it. Were it ever fully achieved, there would be no further need to write, as Faulkner himself recognised in an earlier part of the Paris Review statement:

In my opinion if I could write all my work again, I would do it better; which is the healthiest condition for the artist . . . that’s why he keeps on working, trying again – he believes each time he will bring it off.

and for the architect too:

One recalls the question put to Frank Lloyd Wright:

“Which is your best project?”

“My next one.”

Wright’s responses could always be seen to be bluntly, almost rudely arrogant, like the advice given to a client:

“Mr. Wright, the roof is leaking onto my antique dining room table!”

“Then shift the table.”

What appears to be an architect’s disrespect for the client’s problem with the ‘art,’ is really just good advice. What else might be the best first action to try to save the table? Likewise, the “My next one” response embodies the same thinking as Faulkner’s rather than any assumption of inherent, bespoke brilliance.

The traditional world has always understood that, if the mysteries of this world could be said, they would have been: as Faulkner said, that's why we keep trying again and again.


      Christopher Koch

p. 152

Time was the enemy, but also the source of the buried, unlivable life they yearned for, constantly bearing them backwards; but for Faulkner, as for Conrad, the need was also to freeze present time so that just for a moment, ‘for the space of a breath’, all was grasped, all was seen, the minute and the marvellous and the fearful made deathless and comprehensible forever. Faulkner’s novels live for these timeless moments of pause; that hiatus only possible in art, when the flux is arrested: the electric halt of the Spanish flamenco dancer; the heartrending stillness of the figures on ‘s Grecian urn.

One has to ponder the impact of time in architecture, not only the wonder of the moment, but also of the occasion, that movement of the feeling body through space and place, and the dance of the eyes over surfaces and light.

One thinks of le Corbusier’s statement:

Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: light and shade reveal these forms.

One should perhaps add time to this quote.

p. 154

I’ve always been impressed by a story about the T’ang poet Po Chű-I, one of the greatest poets in any literature, who is loved in China as no other poet except Tu Fu and Li Po are loved. He used to read his poems to an old washer-woman; and if she didn’t understand them, he rewrote them until she did. This is the norm to which literature must constantly return.

- one could add architecture too.

Architecture needs to move away from its identity as smart, bespoke creativity – the making of something uniquely different for the astonishment and adulation of all.


      Christopher Koch (16 July 1932 – 23 September 2013) 

The concepts of the poetic novel in literature can apply to architecture and its ambitions only if one gives them space and time for reflection and inclusion. The sense of ‘internal method’ needs more thought too: might this apply to the work and to the artist/architect?

p.67

There is a pattern in everything, and that the ego-centred West adopted Hesse as a mentor in the sixties was a sure indicator of its spiritual situation. The exploration of the ego, seen then as the key to wisdom, does not seem to have brought the enlightenment or happiness it was supposed to do. Perhaps Hell is not other people,* but the unrelieved contemplation of the self.
* (Jean-Paul Sartre).

 NOTE

Grasshopper is a visual programming language and environment that runs within the Rhinoceros 3D computer-aided design (CAD) application. The program was created by David Rutten at Robert McNeel & Associates. Programs are created by dragging components onto a canvas. The outputs to these components are then connected to the inputs of subsequent components.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_3D

First published 1958

A 1958 Koch novel

LEARNING FROM THE DOGON VILLAGE

 A STUDY ON THE CONCEPT OF "TWINPHENOMENA" IN ALDO VAN EYCK'S ARCHITECTURAL THOUGHT : THROUGH HIS TREATISES ON THE DOGON VILLAGES

Yoshitsuna KUTSUKI

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to make a thematic explication of Aldo van Eyck's architectural thought through his treatises on the Dogon villages. The analysis consists of three chapters as follows: Chapter 2 illustrates his principal concerns with Dogon villages whose features are described as being "anthropomorphic" and "twin-ness". Chapter 3 illustrates his unique understanding about them with his concepts such as "identification", "twinphenomena", and "interiorization". In Chapter 4, through analyzing his diagram "the Otterlo Circles", it is explicated that he intends to meet "ourselves" through pursuing "archaic" essence of human beings which remains the same in all places and ages.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/aija/70/596/70_KJ00004390317/_article/-char/en

:consider twinphenomena; interiorization; archaic essence - sadly, all that seems to be of interest today is Grasshopper, and the unrelieved contemplation of the self.

P.S.

The top illustration is from the sketch ‘Play Brubeck’ by Peter Smithson

It was published in Team 10 Primer with the following caption:
“Ideogram of net of human relations. P.D.S.
A constellation with different values of different parts in an immensely complicated web crossing and recrossing. Brubeck! a pattern can emerge”

http://www.team10online.org/

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See sidebar: CLEVER PEOPLE SELF-DOUBT

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This sign seen in Dubai sums up the circumstance: