The connection between minimalism and the work of Herzog & de Meuron is evident in works like the Goetz Art Gallery in Munich (1992). For this project, it could be said that the architects pursued no other goal than to isolate a piece of pure abstract space. Here a work of art could offer itself to us in all its splendor – an inert, neutral atmosphere with the capacity to display art of the late twentieth century. But what did such an atmosphere look like? How to present or represent it? These questions led to another: what does the solid that contains it look like? Form the very start of their career, Herzog & de Meuron had diligently pursued the goal of transforming the abstract, generic solid into a building. Because of the eternal question of architecture, which leads one to think of i... (查看原文)
Again the floor plan, opaque and hermetic, excludes movement. The passages that connect the spaces must be understood as inevitable perforations that make it possible for us to move from one to another, in a way not too much unlike the passage through a diaphragm that physicists call osmosis. This has nothing to do with traditional corridors. We have before us an architectural object that in a way could be described as organic. The sections clarify these points and help us appreciate the way space is used: the mechanisms are almost always closer to subdivision than to grouping. Two more observations are in order. One has to do with the floor plan: as in the Stone House, the division of spaces is not carried out through known elements, and there is a constant effort to eliminate any possibl... (查看原文)
In examining his work so far, we have witnessed a process of dismantling and recomposing that at some point made us invoke Morandi’s still lifes to explain his architecture. As we have seen in numerous projects in the course of his career, Gehry’s is an architecture dominated by sculptural and visual qualities, even picturesque ones if you will. The Tract House, the Winton Guest House, the Schnable House, or the Sirmai-Peterson House could serve to illustrate this. But in Vitra, Gehry suddenly discards such ways of thinking out and producing architecture. This, I believe, can no longer be called a fragmentary architecture, but a unitary, continuous, and mobile one. (查看原文)
Contributing to the new unity is the cloak of stucco that wraps the whole building. Gone is the diversity of materials of other Gehry buildings. Here it is harder to identify, pull apart, and isolate the pieces, the elements that were so clearly discernible in his other projects. This project is much more complex. Moreover, white stucco and zinc are manipulated in such a way that it is hard to distinguish between interior and exterior and between vertical and horizontal. Since the elements that form it are not easily identifiable, the building comes across as pure spatial reality. We can draw certain parralles with avant-garde sculptures; that is, where the sculptor - Pevsner or Naum Gabo, for example, or even a certain Moore or recent Stella – tries to show us that it is possible to mold ... (查看原文)
I will refrain from establishing references that would lead us to read this work on an expressionist note, taking the works of Scharoun and some of his colleagues in the thirties as precedents. Neither will I dwell on some less fortunate features, such as the entrance canopy, in which Gehry takes advantage of his previous experience, simply transferring to Vitra elements he has used in other projects. Nevertheless, Vitra would not have been possible without the architectural knowledge of a mature Gehry. In Vitra he deliberately ventures into new territory, abandoning what he has already explored. And yet the architecture of Vitra is the child of prior experience, even where it deliberately forgets it. Throughout his career Gehry has worked with freedom, but in Vitra his freedom is not a me... (查看原文)
Need we say that there is nothing farther from the architecture of Vitra than simplification and mechanical repetition? The freedom that Gehry has exercised in the course of his career presents itself at Vitra in all its splendour. It is manifested in the spaces contained within, so distant from all that can be understood as conventional. So distant, too, from Siza’s work, which originates in the plan to be strengthened in the section. Gehry didn’t start out here by drawing the interior, or the section, as Aalto surely did with the church of Imatra. In effect Aalto was explaining the dissociation of interior and exterior that has always been present in architecture. Gehry here doesn’t distinguish between interior and exterior, and it’s not easy for his to decide which to give preference to... (查看原文)
International acclaim of Siza’s work let to numerous commissions abroad. A project for the rehabilitation of a Berlin block, namely the Schlesisches Tor (1980-1984) in the Kreuzberg district, confronted him with a familiar problem: social housing. So it was that with brilliant mastery he resolved in the plan the corner of a very consolidated block of the Turkish quarter. Everything seems to be entrusted to the facades, which come across as pliable both inside and out, thereby eliminating intersections and the encounters dictated by geometry. But the promising plan falls short in terms of architecture. The facades become strange when subjected to strict German codes and overuse of standard elements. Siza seems to be aware of this, and decides to turn the bulk of his attention to the buildin... (查看原文)
What went wrong in this project? Why is it that a subtle floor plan came to nothing in the actual construction? I think it’s because there was no room for accident, no chance of a unique intervention, in the particular environment of Kreuzberg. Siza did try – in the undulating facades, in the unnecessary pointed canopy that strikes too sharp a contrast with the rounded corner, in the building’s unusual encounter with the adjacent buildings, and so on. But the image of norm prevails in the end, and Siza knows it. We have seen him tackle similar commissions very gracefully in his country, but there he counted on accidents and turned necessity into virtue and conflicts into allies. Nothing of that takes place here. When accidents are invented fictions and become artificial mechanisms of archi... (查看原文)
If we consider the sudden appearance of a near-Venturian canopy, the exaggerated breaks in the corridors, the oblique windows, the conventional frames, and if we remember what Siza's career has been before this, his virtuous design abilities, we know these are play times and that Siza indulges in drawing architecture with his left hand. We all know that he could do it with his right hand, but maybe some wouldn't forgive him for it. (查看原文)
As Eisenman noticed early on his career, this architectural proposal that leads to an abstract and distant object-....-does not produce a build reality that is identifiable, visible, and thus nameable. Of course knowing this was most disturbing, and Eisenman felt obliged to introduce the concept of "process", this idea being that a project must be read in terms of the sequence in time that has made it possible. (查看原文)
