“Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody?
Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?”
Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus

It is as if each and every project registers the all-important fact that architecture, if it is to live up to its own concept, is historically constituted as a convergence of different forms of knowledge and experience, strata of reference, and modes of ideality and reality. It therefore follows that inner necessity while responding to external contingency: architecture as an empirical object, overcoming its empirical tyranny; architecture as thought.
A thought which is a relationship with oneself and with the world as well as a relationship with the other: therefore, it already has a spatial character at the same time. Architecture is for itself and in itself, thus architecture itself. And yet, appropriating other types of knowledge, know-how, expertise, ways of doing and making, a chameleon-like adaptation is an inevitable part of the architect’s modus operandi.
Consider Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan, or Virilio and the Atlantic Wall to mention only a few extreme examples. And then, of course, there are the positivists, who adopted natural science or mathematical models, etc. as an ideal type. Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Luigi Nervi, et al. are among the most admired of this genre. More recently, Shigeru Ban in Hanover and Metz followed the example of Frei Otto at a constantly diminishing distance. Zaha Hadid began her path by producing drawings close to the Russian Constructivists, until a moment arrived, much later, in which her drawing language took off and became independent of its „origins“ and she made it all her own.
Imitation is an inevitable part of learning. Cezanne’s drawings based on Rubens could provide a paradigm for such a practice. Indeed, Cezanne was moved to tears reading Balzac’s novel Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu and said he himself was Frenhofer. Balzac imagined a painter who wants to express life itself by colour alone, and keep his masterpiece hidden. When Frenhofer dies, his friends find nothing but a chaos of colours, of elusive lines, a whole wall of painting.
In certain traditional Chinese paintings imitation is, on the contrary, a mandatory part of every new painting, which sometimes takes the form of a dialogue with a distant predecessor.
Different architects have forged different methods to achieve their objectives, to discover or invent their individuality. Others have maintained with the classical tradition that it is far better to make a good copy of a masterpiece than to attempt the unknown new; for them, the original is the monster.

Resistance, Tradition and Technology

In the practice of the Russian Biomechanical Theatre around Vsevolod Meyerhold, there was much that was borrowed from the machine workshops of the time. Technical drawings provided the anti-dote against too much „style“ in the production of the conventional theatre. While in Meyerhold’s practice, resistance against tradition was maybe the greatest of the motivations, others have sought to find a wind-channel to blow them forward in time: “NOX: Machining Architecture”, published by Thames & Hudson in 2004 (German edition: DVA Munich) presents an odd picture. It is as if all that happened in science and technology from Lars Spuybroek’s perspective inevitably led to a single possible conclusion: the NOX architectural practice, where buildings progress in a kind of biomorphic evolution towards the invention of a new formal and spatial repertory.
Speaking of the theory of evolution, Mark Twain remarked that it was as if a piece of paint on top of the Eiffel Tower believed the entire edifice was built in order to support it at the top. We are treated to a summary of the history of architecture from Gottfried Semper to Frederick Kiesler… and NOX. We are introduced to an empirical interpretation of phenomenology, a short version of Klein’s history of mathematics and, finally, a history of science as nothing but an argument which celebrates the inevitability, rationality, and complexity of the NOX modes of production. The devotees of shape inspired by biomorphic figures and, above all, by computations are many. But the choice of a project is not an involuntary act. On the contrary, it is inscribed in a cultural, economic, and symbolic discourse. A project will often embody a desire of long duration. As Mayakovsky alluded to in his poem “Pro Eto” (About That), and then wrote elsewhere „we have solved the problem of bread, we have solved the problem of peace. Yet, this most cardinal problem of love we have not solved.“
The logic of genetic engineering is a fascinating advance in working out the mechanisms of biological production and reproduction. The development of the L-system (or Lindenmayer system, a formal grammar for modelling growth processes) provides, no doubt, an exciting new instrument to generate forms, shapes, and structures. But what is it that is imitated, and to what end? It remains to be decided independently of any scientific claims. For those who are working in the field of biology, not even the making of a singular cell is entirely clear - let alone the multiplication of cells. Or, as Einstein once remarked: “„As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality“. (from: Geometry and Experience, expanded form of an address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on Jan 27 1921). The epistemological difference is just as fundamental in the exact sciences as in the humanities. Those who are committed to Convention, Construction, Intuition, or Concept as the principal sources of certainty in their field are bound to act differently. Imagination deforms; it colours our reality. Concerning technology, the need to apply technology to overcome technology is ever more present in our life, if the external life is to remain in equilibrium with the inner life. We have created the possibility of an artificial world to such an extent that our human capacity to remain relatively free and deliberate in our choice of action has outstripped itself.
Lars Spuybroek (NOX) followed the idea of biotechnology, which attempts to fuse a body with a synthetic infrastructure. In this concept, the body is a fluid system of differences. We met nearly nine years ago at a conference organized by Witte de With, a centre of contemporary art in Rotterdam, in the context of an exhibition of Frederick Kiesler’s works. Lars Spuybroek and Greg Lynn were invited because of certain physiognomic, biomorphic resemblances between certain projects of theirs and Kiesler’s, and they spoke eloquently about their affinities and differences. Above all we felt a different kind of motivation in the contemporary world which has, at times, succeeded in overcoming Kiesler’s technical limitations in realizing his new morphology with a compatible typology.
Paradoxically, Kiesler acquired his reputation with an innovative stage set for Karel Capek’s W.U.R. (Kurfürstendamm Theatre, Berlin, 1923), which introduced the term of „robot“. Not only was it linguistically close to the Czech word for „work“ but it was also an echo of the ancient myth of the Golem of Prague and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Kiesler was inspired by Norman Bell Geddes’s designs as much as by Patrick Geddes, a student of Huxley’s, who managed to apply the insights of biology to urban planning. Kiesler modelled some of his charts on Geddes’s „thinking machines“ and acknowledged the fundamental concept of „biotechnology“.
By now we are all marked by the spectre of the machine. Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” (Wahlverwandtschaften) were inspired by a chemical process, which he applied to the relationship of two couples. Just as theoretical physics and physicists and the Copenhagen Interpretation inspired Michel Houellebecq and, in particular, Niels Bohr (a brilliant Danish physicist who developed quantum theory followed by the principles of „correspondence“ and „complementarities“ in which the wave and the particle are different aspects of the same reality), they have served as a model for his novel “Les Particules élémentaires”. In fact OULIPO – L’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature - a group of writers have, since their beginnings in 1960, come to consider numerical systems and Kabbalistic geometry (the correspondence of letters to numbers) and gained profound insights into the nature and character of literary language. It is inscribed in the Modern and Romantic traditions to imagine a world tragically unknowable in itself and, therefore, accessible only in terms of our own projections.

The Unnaturalness of Mutation

The device of taking a natural process as a point of departure is by now a common practice, but transmutations are subject to the desires and thought processes of the designer. In fact, natural mutation is extremely rare; you have to breed millions of flies to arrive at a mutation.
Unlike the architecture of the ancients, contemporary architecture has been given, ever since the French Revolution, to hitherto unknown mimetic tendencies. The picturesque, the neo-Gothic made constant appeal to existing models, the tree-like hut, the ruin, etc. In the absence of internal criteria, it is inevitable that exterior considerations will become dominant in the conception of a project. Above all, there is a desire to respond in visual terms, mimetically, in a very different cultural context – and even more so when the need to bridge the gap between the cultural origin of the work and its destination is larger than usual.
Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Capitol could not have been conceived in the terms in which it was finally cast without being profoundly inspired by the Mogul and earlier cultural monuments of Northern India. Even the Himalaya range in the background has played its part in the scale and massing of this project. Just as Louis Khan’s Dhaka Parliament has much in common with his other projects, such as the Exeter library, but takes its shape and scale in view of the environment in which it was built. At its best, architecture is relatively free of mimetic and metaphoric tendencies, even when such metaphors may offer an initial impetus and play an important role in the early stages of inception. The classical orders themselves have become elements in the grammar of architecture not before they where free of their mimetic „origin“, as Semper so beautifully demonstrated.
Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV in Beijing and Steven Holl’s Museum of Architecture in Nanjing (3000 times smaller) have a strategy of assimilation in common. Koolhaas has adopted sculptural shapes, which echo Nogushi’s efforts without entering a proper dialogue. Holl has opted for a study of Chinese spatial effects, in particular the constantly shifting point of view which determines depth and relationships in space. The search for an image that may correspond with the host culture is guided by a phantasm concerning the „other“. Peter Eisenman adopted the I Ching as a principal device in designing the Guangdong Museum in Southern China, employing a classical Chinese method of divination as a compositional device.

Nature and Symmetry

Soon after the 17th century, the era of scientific revolution, Scottish philosophers Addison, Shaftsbury, and Hume and French philosophers Voltaire and Diderot, paradoxically, made it impossible to believe in a rational canon of proportions and timeless aesthetic laws. Aesthetic judgment has become problematic. As a synthetic judgment a priori, it resists theory and comprehensive understanding, and is almost impossible to apply. Yet, we somehow feel that a symmetrical arrangement is conducive to a desire for a just world, but it only appears to have an effect on rare individuals.
Following the French Revolution, the appeal to „Nature“ has become paramount. Not only in the English gardens and parks but also in searching naturalistic equivalents to architectural elements in the construction of the neo-Gothic style. From then on, thanks to mechanical reproduction, the spread of vegetal mimesis to what is generally known as „Art Nouveau” was a relatively short step. Floral, vegetal motifs have flooded all fields of design. At the beginning of the last century, machine production made it relatively inexpensive and therefore marketable. Industrial design was the new discipline; it demanded the exact opposite of this tendency; the norms and ideal of the machine inspired P Behrens and others to come up with a new sobriety of design. Will this generation - thanks to new mechanical devices – re-introduce vegetal, floral patterns in the disguise of „technical details”?
NOX has produced an admirable body of work, which made use of certain analogies and similarities between body movements and the events of perception and the environment. They have been inspired by a new technical complexity far beyond and ahead of Robert Venturi, which was based on Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Lars Spuybroek encourages us to expect a greater determination in exercising his freedom with respect to a given project. Poetics and physics are interchangeable ever since Aristotle, but it requires an imaginative leap in moving from one to the other. Projects are bound to be futuristic, poised as they are between the realm of nature and that of grace, in the realm of the machine. Today’s machine science is capable of fabricating a new power. The technical equipment of the industrial world and, thus, our capacity for projecting an artificial environment, are vast. That’s why the promise of machine-like architecture is so ambiguous and problematic. In their highest form, machines are no more than a protocol. The promise of an unlimited capacity of computation does have a mechanical dimension but it does not settle any contradictions or inconsistencies in our mathematics.
It occurs on the scale of individual oeuvres as much as that of our collective culture. Here we are concerned with a few examples in order to pose the issue in the form of certain questions, observations, and remarks. Originally, the term „mimetic desire“ refers to the difficulties human beings have in forming their desires. As a result, they often shape their desire on the basis of a model adopted from those happy few who have acted upon theirs. Anticipating such a situation affects our modes of response; it requires a certain irony, a critical distance from a spontaneous belief in the existence of the world in which we live; we simply take it for granted with all it contains. As we suspend our belief, we create an instant of contemplation, and pure intuition becomes possible.

Aus der Ausgabe 10-2005