SUBJECTIVE SPIRIT AGAINST OBJECTIVE FORM or
THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE SPIRIT’
Alexandra Vougia discusses the notion of alienation in relation to architectural practice. Alexandra Vougia is a practicing architect and PhD researcher at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. As part of the MA HCT Debates held at the school every Friday during the second term. Alexandra was invited to be one of the visiting speakers to talk about an aspect of the topic she has been researching for her PhD dissertation. Alexandra is now in her final year of her doctoral research were she has been looking at the concept of estrangement as a device of architectural practice. During the first part of the talk she introduced the topic of her dissertation by looking at the very meaning of the word ‘estrangement’ and how the term translates differently when appliedto aesthetics, than when applied to architectural practice. During the talk, Hellerhof Housing Estate was used as an architectural example of a project whose premises set against individualised forms of alienation to promote an experience of collective dwelling. The interview focuses on the material Alexandra presented on the 30th of January at The Architectural Association to try to expand on those very notions of alienation when employed in architectural practice.
Interviewer:Elena Palacios Carral Interviewee: Alexandra Vougia
Elena Palacios Carral: I was very interested along your presentation about the difficulty of using the term estrangement directly applied to architecture. You then discussed that in order to talk about the notion of estrangement in architectural terms one needs to first translate the word into ‘alienation’. I was wondering if you could expand more about this conflict in terms of thinking about them architecturally? Alexandra Vougia: Well, issues of translation mostly lie to the first part of my analysis which is what has happened in arts on aesthetic alienation which I term estrangement and then the social alienation which is theorised as alienation. This is pretty much straight forward when discussed about the term in philosophy and political economy etc, but issues of translation mostly arise because the first definition was in Russian by Viktor Shklovsky, and then in German by Bertolt Brecht. They are completely different languages, Russian and German, so it’s difficult to somehow establish a proper explicit relation between the two terms. For example, Shklovsky who was apparently the first to coin the term, seems like he was more close to estrangement. But Brecht did genealogies based on social alienation. In my thesis I think I refer to aesthetic alienation as estrangement and the social alienation as alienation so I don’t have to specify more each time. I think it’s a dual approach when you start to think about the concept of estrangement and architecture because on the one hand, as I said in the presentation, you can have projects which are good open projects and then you can actually estrange form in a very directly critical way because you know that the projects don’t really exist. So you can shift and distort form more than you can do with actual architecture. This part of the thesis is covered by The Co-op series from Hannes Meyer which has been analysed by applying, let’s say, the ‘Brechtian’ alienation and estrangement effect by Michael Hays for example, but not his actual projects. He is not referring to the whole Co-op series but he is
referring to the entries for the competition for the St Peter School building. So he thinks that these two projects apply in a very explicit way the ‘Brechtian’ effect of estrangement. I don’t focus only on these two projects, I am mostly interested in the cooperative series because in their work he puts, let’s say, collective subject as the designer, the producer, the consumer, so he kind of tackles conditions of social alienation through the making cooperative of the whole production process of the cooperative series. On the second hand it has a more causal effect in that you have a socialist politics that want to tackle social alienation, I mean here distortion of form has nothing to do with it, It is a pretty straight forward project; you have the socialist politics and then the architecture that is trying somehow through its programme and design to tackle conditions of social alienation.
landscapes where the figures cannot really communicate with each other. So I asked, how can a movie discuss the very current contemporary critical themes? And then I went to the instrumentalization of form into estrangement as a device, and then back to architecture.
EPC: How is that you began to question the notion of alienation in architecture? And why is that you believe it is worth looking at the term today?
AV: It is actually a quote from Georg Simmel, but it is exactly as you say. Mostly, Simmel has written within a discourse of modernity about this conflict and struggle between subjective spirit or individual and objective form, which are let’s say objectified cultural forms and that can also be translated as the struggle between the individual and the collective. I think exactly because it is a struggle between the individual and the collective is a key into the readings of both Meyer and Mart Stam. Left wing architects were very much into this dialectic or into exploring lets saythis dialectic relation between individual and collective.This is why the public housing projects are not literal but a very direct translation of the experimentation of this, because you have to design at both levels - at the level of individual housing but then also the planning which involves the collective experience.
AV: Well, I think that it is still ongoing. I mean it is a term that I think is still valid today because nothing has actually changed and I am interested in the particular era which is early Modernism in which capitalism and market economy was something more straight forward then so it was somehow easier to grasp, but I am trying to find ways within a contemporary context. [In the thesis] I am not going to have the contemporary context but I think we are still within the same period, it is just that everything is more complex. I think if we look backwards we can extract information that we can take advantage of for questions that are valid today, so this is how I think I am interested in alienation. But how is that I began to question the notion of alienation? I actually began from the other standpoint, from estrangement. From watching movies I began to question, how is that other artistic languages can discuss social alienation? It is so easy for other cultural forms to express that. In particular, I was watching ‘Stranger than Paradise’ that shot is in black and white, set in deserted
EPC: I was very intrigued by the title of your presentation “subjective spirit against objective form or the objectification of the spirit” It seems to me that just by analysing the sentence, the first part ‘subjective spirit against objective form’ talks about how they are opposing ‘notions’, and then the subtitle ‘the objectification of the spirit’ combines them into what seems to be a conflicting sentence. Could you expand on what do you mean by this?
EPC: You talked about the Hellerhof Housing Estate as ‘an attack against the alienating conditions of an individualised life, instead promoting an experience of collective dwelling’ but at the same time if I understand correctly, your PhD dissertation focuses on artistic and architectural projects that operate as strategies of alienation. So, how would you talk about alienation as an architectural strategy?
Fig 1. Ilse Bing, Aerial view of Types A, C, D and E housing units, Hellerhof Housing Estate, Frankfurt am Main, 1930 - Collection: Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
AV: I think actually it is the exact opposite, strategies against alienation. Even artistic ones for example. Brecht’s position, which is more straight forward and very much pedagogical because it had the political intention. He thought that contemporary conditions of capitalism had an estranging effect in the way we see. So the theatre had to alienate in order to de-alienate the audience. It is a kind of twist, you alienate in order to work against social alienation, it is this kind of cycle or spiral. In architecture, as I said, it cannot of course be as straight forward. The Hellerhof Estate has nothing to do with this kind of device of estrangement that is a strategic instrument used to disrupt how we usually perceive things. So Hellerhof Estate is not working as a device of estrangement it is just trying through an actual design proposal to proffer something for collective experience, that would then actually try to resolve the social conditions of alienation.
EPC: (refer to fig 1) The photograph you referred to along your presentation is very powerful. The photograph captures apparently what are two very different forms of living in a single shot. While the Housing Estate by Stam (right hand) shows a more collective approach on its design, the project next to it (on the left side) depicts a more ‘traditional’ understanding of home based around the idea of the family or at least formally. How would you talk about alienation in realtion to form in these two apparently contrasting examples? AV: Well, this is why I said sometimes there is more to architecture than form. The other project is also a Housing Estate but was done in the early 1900 so it was around ten to twenty years before. It was not that much older but it has pitched roofs and somehow another kind of expression. The thing is that
for example housing projects kept on being built in Germany but because of the narrative and return to the folklore they came back to the use of to the pitch roofs. I think that to understand the importance of Hellerhof you also need to go a bit deeper and this is why it was more interesting for me to read the plans and understand what it has to propose in terms of the family unit in relation to the other project which was sometimes for larger family units with no hierarchy whatsoever in the plan. As far as I remember there were three or four equally sized rooms and one kitchen and one bathroom whereas for Mart Stam he tried to incorporate proper heating conditions, proper ventilation conditions which the other one did not. And of course Mart Stam, uh I mean, The Hellerhof was addressed to the modern nuclear family with two children. I think the formal aspect is also a delicate discussion, this appeal to formal articulation of architecture during the early twenties and thirties because in Germany architectural form is pretty much embedded in political discourse at that period. The very beginning of modernism at that time is highly related to the leftist while the pitch roof is to right hand discourse, but is not necessarily as such so I wouldn’t judge the two projects only by the formal articulation and expression. I think it is important to read the plans rather that formal elements. Also within the overall Frankfurt movement you can see also a lot of changes within modernism and within such a small time lapse because they started in the twenties but they had to leave in the nineteenth thirties for the Soviet Union. Within six years you can see the physical problems of making the flat smaller or making the volumes completely linear so you can see that even within what we would generally call architectural modernism you can really find the differences that reflect not social changes but factors that inform and influence the design and go beyond architecture.
Photograph taken on the 30th of January 2015 at Alexandra Vougia’s talk ‘Subjective Spirit against Objective form or The Objectification of The Spirit’ in The Soft Room at The Architectural Association School of Architecture