et cetera: DSDHA

DSDHA stands for the names of the London architects whose work we introduce to you in the first article. They have already handled an astonishing variety of commissions, at both the small and the large scale. They leave much in the design process open, often working with the principle of layering that does not reveal absolutely everything, also allows the unforeseen and, at times, can be clearly ambiguous. “A table is a table” is the name of one of the seven children’s stories by author Peter Bichsel that date from 1969 – and that, like fairy tales, are only ostensibly intended for children. The protagonist of the little story is plagued by a serious philosophical question: are things really the way we see them and name them? The old man calls his bed “bed” and his chair “chair” – and is himself surprised about this: “Why actually? The French call the bed ‘lit’, the table ‘table’, they call the picture ‘tableau’ and the chair ‘chaise’ and they still understand each other. And the Chinese also understand each other also.” “Why isn’t the bed called picture?” thought the man and smiled, then he laughed and laughed until the neighbours knocked on the wall and called out “quiet!” On looking more closely what seemed simple turns out to be difficult, what appears clear is ambiguous. So a building can at one and the same time be an “image” of itself or of the archetype that it represents. In Weil am Rhein we encounter a building that, while it is called a “house” in fact is not a house at all – but consists of an entire stack of houses. These look the way every child imagines a house and make the entire “Vitra House” into an artfully multiplied image of itself. Fortunately conditions become somewhat clearer in the heart of Switzerland: a village is a village – on Walensee the same as in the French-speaking part of the country. But just a moment: the houses in Answiesen, the bank and the little village shop only seem to be grouped around a functioning peaceful village square. In fact they are all stage sets among which soldiers shoot, fight and use smoke gas and rubber bullets. A special kind of authenticity is the most important element in villages for military exercises: they are genuinely false. At least a school is a school, one might think – also in the university context. This is not entirely the case in eastern Switzerland where, since its completion, the new tripartite sports hall of St Gallen University has never been used as such. Instead it contains several seminar rooms and classrooms that were included as provisional facilities in the competition brief, were erected at the very start and are to remain standing for three years. Therefore until 2011 the hall is not a hall. Bichsel’s story has a sad ending: the man gives the things new names and invents his own language – with the result that nobody understands him anymore. We hope for the opposite: that this issue succeeds in surprising, in showing what lies beneath the surface of things, and in describing and explaining the substance behind the appearance.

The editors