Construction by ATPRESS

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Elevation

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Section through the building Floor plan

Image information Description: Floor plan Type: Drawing Credit: Richard Rogers Partnership Copyright: The Artist File ref: 99_0125_1_W

Image information Description: Section through the building Type: Drawing Credit: Richard Rogers Partnership Copyright: The Artist File ref: 99_0136_1_W

Image information Description: Elevation Type: Drawing Credit: Richard Rogers Partnership Copyright: The Artist File ref: 99_0166_1_W

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A expressão neoconcreto é uma tomada de posição em face da arte não-figurativa “geométrica”(neoplasticismo, construtivismo, suprematismo, Escola de Ulm) e particularmente em face da arte concreta levada a uma perigosa exacerbação racionalista. Trabalhando no campo da pintura, escultura, gravura e literatura, os artistas que participam desta I Exposição Neoconcreta encontraram-se, por força de suas experiências, na contingência de rever as posições teóricas adotadas até aqui em face da arte concreta, uma vez que nenhuma delas “compreende” satisfatoriamente as possibilidades expressivas abertas por estas experiências.

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Nascida com o cubismo, de uma reação à dissolvência impressionista da linguagem pictórica, era natural que a arte dita geométrica se colocasse numa posição diametralmente oposta às facilidades técnicas e alusivas da pintura corrente. As novas conquistas da física e da mecânica, abrindo uma perspectiva ampla para o pensamento objetivo, incentivariam, nos continuadores dessa revolução, a tendência à racionalização cada vez maior dos processos e dos propósitos da pintura. Uma noção mecanicista de construção invadiria a linguagem dos pintores e dos escultores, gerando, por sua vez, reações igualmente extremistas, de caráter retrógrado como o realismo mágico ou irracionalista como Dadá e o surrealismo. Não resta dúvida, entretanto, que, por trás de suas teorias que consagravam a objetividade da ciência e a precisão da mecânica, os verdadeiros artistas - como é o caso, por exemplo, de Mondrian ou Pevsner - construíam sua obra e, no corpo-a-corpo com a expressão, superaram, muitas vezes, os limites impostos pela teoria. Mas a obra desses artistas tem sido até hoje interpretada na base dos princípios teóricos, que essa obra mesma negou. Propomos uma reinterpretação do neoplasticismo, do construtivismo e dos demais movimentos afins, na base de suas conquistas de expressão e dando prevalência à obra sobre a teoria. Se pretendermos entender a pintura de Mondrian pelas suas teorias, seremos obrigados a escolher entre as duas. Ou bem a profecia de uma total integração da arte na vida cotidiana parece-nos possível e vemos na obra de Mondrian os primeiros passos nesse sentido ou essa integração nos parece cada vez mais remota e a sua obra se nos mostra frustrada.

Ou bem a vertical e a horizontal são mesmo os ritmos fundamentais do universo e a obra de Mondrian é a aplicação desse princípio universal ou o princípio é falho e sua obra se revela fundada sobre uma ilusão. Mas a verdade é que a obra de Mondrian aí está, viva e fecunda, acima dessas contradições teóricas. De nada nos servirá ver em Mondrian o destrutor da superfície, do plano e da linha, se não atentamos para o novo espaço que essa destruição construiu. O mesmo se pode dizer de Vantongerloo ou de Pevsner. Não importam que equações matemáticas estão na raiz de urna escultura ou de um quadro de Vantongerloo, desde que só à experiência direta da percepção a obra entrega a “significação” de seus ritmos e de suas cores. Se Pevsner partiu ou não de figuras da geometria descritiva é uma questão sem interesse em face do novo espaço que as suas esculturas fazem nascer e da expressão cósmico-orgânica que, através dele, suas formas revelam. Terá interesse cultural específico determinar as aproximações entre os objetos artísticos e os instrumentos científicos, entre a intuição do artista e o pensamento objetivo do físico e do engenheiro. Mas, do ponto de vista estético, a obra começa a interessar precisamente pelo que nela há que transcende essas aproximações exteriores: pelo universo de significações existenciais que ela a um tempo funda e revela. Malevitch, por ter reconhecido o primado da “pura sensibilidade na arte”, salvou as suas definições teóricas das limitações do racionalismo e do mecanicismo, dando a sua pintura uma dimensão transcendente que lhe garante hoje uma notável atualidade. Mas Malevitch pagou caro pela coragem de se opor, simultaneamente, ao figurativismo e à abstração mecanicista, tendo sido considerado até hoje, por certos teóricos racionalistas, corno um ingênuo que não compreendera 1bem o verdadeiro sentido da nova plástica. Na verdade, Malevitch já exprimia, dentro da pintura “geométrica” uma insatisfação, uma vontade de transcendência do racional e do sensorial que hoje se manifesta de maneira irreprimível. O neoconcreto, nascido de uma necessidade de exprimir a complexa realidade do homem moderno dentro da linguagem estrutural da nova plástica, nega a validez das atitudes cientificistas e positivistas em arte e repõe o problema da expressão, incorporando as novas dimensões “verbais” criadas pela arte não-figurativa construtiva. O racionalismo rouba à arte toda a autonomia e substitui as qualidades intransferíveis da obra de arte por noções da objetividade científica:

assim os conceitos de forma, espaço, tempo, estrutura - que na linguagem das artes estão ligados a uma significação existencial, emotiva, afetiva - são confundidos com a aplicação teórica que deles faz a ciência. Na verdade, em nome de preconceitos que hoje a filosofia denuncia (M. Merleau-Ponty, E. Cassirer, S. Langer) - e que ruem em todos os campos, a começar pela biologia moderna, que supera o mecanismo pavloviano - os concretos racionalistas ainda vêem o homem como uma máquina entre máquinas e procuram limitar a arte à expressão dessa realidade teórica.

Não concebemos a obra de arte nem como “máquina” nem como “objeto”, mas como um quasicorpus, isto é, um ser cuja realidade não se esgota nas relações exteriores de seus elementos; um ser que, decomponível em partes pela análise, só se dá plenamente à abordagem direta, fenomenológica. Acreditamos que a obra de arte supera o mecanismo material sobre o qual repousa, não por alguma virtude extraterrena: supera-o por transcender essas relações mecânicas (que a Gestalt objetiva) e por criar para si uma significação tácita (M. Pority) que emerge nela pela primeira vez. Se tivéssemos que buscar um símile para a obra de arte, não o poderíamos encontrar, portanto, nem na máquina nem no objeto tomados objetivamente, mas, como S. Lanoer e W. leidlé, nos organismos vivos. Essa comparação, entretanto, ainda não bastaria para expressar a realidade específica do, organismo estético. É porque a obra de arte não se limita a ocupar um lugar no espaço objetivo – mas o transcende ao fundar nele uma significação nova que as noções objetivas de tempo, espaço, forma, estrutura, cor etc não são suficientes para compreender a obra de arte, para dar conta de sua “realidade”. A dificuldade de uma terminologia precisa para exprimir um mundo que não se rende a noções levou a crítica de arte ao uso indiscriminado de palavras que traem a complexidade da obra criada.

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A influência da tecnologia e da ciência também aqui se manifestou, a ponto de hoje, invertendo-se os papéis, certos artistas, ofuscados por essa terminologia, tentarem fazer arte partindo dessas noções objetivas para aplicá-las como método criativo. Inevitavelmente, os artistas que assim procedem apenas ilustram noções a priori, limitados que estão por um método que já lhe prescreve, de antemão, o resultado do trabalho. Furtando-se à criação espontânea, intuitiva, reduzindo-se a um corpo objetivo num espaço objetivo, o artista concreto racionalista, com seus quadros, apenas solicita de si e do espectador uma reação de estímulo e reflexo: fala ao olho como instrumento e não olho como um modo humano de ter o mundo e se dar a ele; fala ao olho máquina e não ao olho-corpo.

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É porque a obra de arte transcende o espaço mecânico que, nela, as noções de causa e efeito perdem qualquer validez, e as noções de tempo, espaço, forma, cor estão de tal modo integradas - pelo fato mesmo de que não preexistiam, como noções, à obra - que seria impossível falar delas como de termos decomponíveis. A arte neoconcreta, afirmando a integração absoluta desses elementos, acredita que o vocabulário “geométrico” que utiliza pode assumir a expressão de realidades humanas complexas, tal como o provam muitas das obras de Mondrian, Malevitch, Pevsner, Gabo, Sofia Taueber-Arp etc. Se mesmo esses a tistas às vezes confundiam o conceito de forma-mecânica com o de forma-expressiva, urge esclarecer que, na linguagem da arte, as formas ditas geométricas perdem o caráter objetivo da geometria para se fazerem veículo da imaginação. A Gestalt, sendo ainda uma psicologia causalista, também é insuficiente para nos fazer compreender esse fenômeno que dissolve o espaço e a forma corno realidades causalmente determináveis e os dá como tempo - como espacialização da obra. Entenda-se por espacialização da obra o fato de que ela está sempre se fazendo presente, está sempre recomeçando o impulso que a gerou e de que ela era já a origem. E se essa descrição nos remete igualmente à experiência primeira plena - do real, é que a arte neoconcreta não pretende nada menos que reacender essa experiência. A arte neoconcreta funda um novo “espaço” expressivo. Essa posição é igualmente válida para a poesia neoconcreta que denuncia, na poesia concreta, o mesmo objetivismo mecanicista da pintura. Os poetas concretos racionalistas também puseram como ideal de sua arte a imitação da

máquina. Também para eles o espaço e o tempo não são mais que relações exteriores entre palavras-objeto. Ora, se assim é, a página se reduz a um espaço gráfico e a palavra a um elemento desse espaço. Como na pintura, o visual aqui se reduz ao ótico e o poema não ultrapassa a dimensão gráfica. A poesia neoconcreta rejeita tais noções espúrias e, fiel à natureza mesma da linguagem, afirma o poema como um ser temporal. No tempo e não no espaço a palavra desdobra a sua complexa natureza significativa.

A página na poesia neoconcreta é a espacialização do tempo verbal: é pausa, silêncio, tempo. Não se trata, evidentemente, de voltar ao conceito de tempo da poesia discursiva, porque enquanto nesta a linguagem flui em sucessão, na poesia neoconcreta a linguagem se abre em duração. Conseqüentemente, ao contrário do concretismo racionalista, que toma a palavra como objeto e a transforma em mero sinal ótico, a poesia neoconcreta devolve-a à sua condição de “verbo”, isto é, de modo humano de presentação do real. Na poesia neoconcreta a linguagem não escorre: dura. Por sua vez, a prosa neoconcreta, abrindo um novo campo para as experiências expressivas, recupera a linguagem como fluxo, superando suas co tingências sintáticas e dando um sentido novo, mais amplo, a certas soluções tidas até aqui equivocadamente como poesia. É assim que, na pintura como na poesia, na prosa como na escultura e na gravura, a arte neoconcreta reafirma a independência da criação artística em face do conhecimento prático (moral, política, indústria etc). Os participantes desta I Exposição Neoconcreta não constituem um “grupo”. Não os ligam princípios dogmáticos. A afinidade evidente das pesquisas que realizam em vários campos os aproximou e os reuniu aqui. O compromisso que os prende, prende-os primeiramente cada um à sua experiência, e eles estarão juntos enquanto dure a afinidade profunda que os aproximou.

Amílcar de Castro Ferreira Gullar Franz Weissmann Lygia Clark Lygia Pape Reynaldo Jardim Theon Spanúdis NeoConcretism Exhibition catalogue / 1959-1961, Banerj Art Gallery, September 1984. Note the modern layout of the Sunday Supplement of the Jornal do Brasil, published on March 23, 1959. EN version available

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Luis

Gonzaga

Bahia

Brazil

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Art

Museum

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construction,

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Bardi,

1968,

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Paulo,

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under construction

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under construction

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Tate Modern London, UK Competition 1994-1995, project 1995-1997, realization 1998-2000

Eleven stations at Tate Modern

The following text was prepared for the occasion of the Opening Exhibition at Tate Modern: Herzog & de Meuron – 11 Stations at Tate Modern, curated by Theodora Vischer, in collaboration with Käthe Walser at Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, London, UK from 12 May to 26 November 2000. North entrance concourse: The north entrance is a space that is more than simply a zone of passage. Its sloping ceiling stretches out between two mighty architectural elements: the brick tower on one side and the turbine hall on the other. The glass shaft of the escalator is a body of light that suffuses floor and ceiling; it is akin to the light beam on the roof of the museum and the bay windows in the turbine hall.The properties of this area, so close to one of the Tate Modern’s main entrances, make it an ideal and multipurpose exhibition space that is the perfect complement to the other galleries. It has therefore logically become the base camp of our exhibition. Ordinarily, in exhibitions of architecture, the buildings themselves are absent and therefore communicated by proxy in models, plans, films and other documents. This time the building in question is present and can be fully experienced in all its sensuality. Instead of plans and documents, the building itself is on view. The exhibition is designed as a stroll in and around the building with fourteen stations and one base camp. Here in the base camp, a large architectural model of the Tate Modern, a projection and statements by the architects introduce the project and place it within the framework of Herzog & de Meuron’s oeuvre as a whole. The stations in and around the building are located in places that typify a specific characteristic or feature of the architecture.

Statements:It is exciting for us to deal with existing structures because the attendant constraints demand a very different kind of creative energy. In the future this will be an increasingly important issue in European cities. You cannot always start from scratch. We think this is the challenge of the Tate Modern as a hybrid of tradition, Art Deco and super modernism: it is a contemporary building, a building for everybody, a building of the 21st century. And when you don’t start from scratch, you need specific architectural strategies that are not primarily motivated by taste or stylistic preferences. Such preferences tend to exclude rather than include something. Our strategy was to accept the physical power of Bankside’s massive mountain-like brick building and to even enhance it rather than breaking it or trying to diminish it. This is a kind of Aikido strategy where you use your enemy’s energy for your own purposes. Instead of fighting it you take all the energy and shape it in an unexpected and new way. The ramp:The ramp is one of the main architectural modifications involved in converting this industrial building, once closed to the public, into a museum that daily attracts thousands of visitors. Already outside the building the ramp begins to descend into the ground so that visitors immediately recognize it as the west-side entrance. The ramp is not only an entrance but a prominent meeting point, like the tower to the north and the gate to the south, which will be opened to the public in a later building phase. The location acts as a meeting point due to an architectural strategy which does not treat the gigantic complex, originally built by Giles Gilbert Scott, as a closed shell, but has instead transformed it into a landscape with different topographies that visitors can approach and use from all four directions. The ramp, as one of these topographies, takes visitors down to the base level of the building, the floor of the turbine hall, situated below the water level of the Thames. The turbine hall is the area that establishes the link between inside and outside. The hall runs like a street through the entire length and height of the building. The new façade of the museum rises to the left, revealing its interior structure at a single glance: entrance, shop, cafeteria, educational facilities, auditorium, concourses and exhibition spaces. The façade on the other side is not see-through at present; the rooms behind them will be made accessible in a later building phase.

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Hidden spaces: The power station, as designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, was organized in three parallel spaces, each of which served a specific function. The boiler house was installed to the north facing the Thames, the huge turbines were placed in the middle, and the switch house lay to the south. The latter still contains switching stations today, which have been supplied with electricity produced outside London since 1982, when the power station was decommissioned. In a later building phase, the switch house will also be incorporated in the new museum complex. The window affords a view of the room under the transformers, which is presently in disuse. Probably the most dramatic spatial composition in the former power station lies directly behind this room. It consists of three cylindrical spaces, arranged like a three-leaf clover, which once housed the oil tanks. This spatial composition will one day be accessed directly from the garden opposite to the south. The ground-level rooms, now containing the transformers, will be directly related to the gardens. These rooms and the floors above them could, for example, house a Department of Design and Architecture, a library or other exhibition spaces and seminar rooms. Upon completion of the second building phase, the turbine hall will reveal its full potential as a covered street. The soft hum of the ventilation, now required to cool the transformers, will then be eliminated. The platform: The platform is a remnant of the flooring that once stretched the entire length of the turbine hall. The removal of this flooring allows visitors to experience the extraordinary scale and dimensions of the turbine hall in their entirety. Today the platform is like a bridge between the former boiler house to the north, containing the galleries, and the switch house to the south, which will be converted into additional exhibition space in a second building phase. The platform is conceived not only as a bridge between two wings of the building but also as an instrument that explicitly and effectively addresses the urban surroundings. The promenade along the Thames moves straight into the centre of the Tate Modern through the north entrance. From there, the path will cross the platform, pass through the gate to the switch house, and lead to the new Tate Garden to the south and on to Southwark. This makes the platform an important crossroads not only for the building itself but for the entire neighborhood as well. The platform is a piece of urban topography and therefore also a suitable meeting point, like the ramp to the west of the turbine hall. The Turbine Hall: From the platform, visitors look out over the vast space of the turbine hall. Like a covered plaza or galleria, it is open to everyone – to people who have come in order to visit the galleries or to take a look at the semi-annual installations created by artists specifically for this space or to simply share in the lively atmosphere. The façade of the actual museum rises on the north side of the turbine hall. The new museum occupies the site of what was once an open-work steel structure with no floors or ceilings, in which countless boilers and other machines were installed. This steel structure has been replaced by the new, seven-storey museum. Its façade, adjoining the turbine hall, looks to visitors like a gigantic screen showing the Tate Modern’s varied programmed of events and exhibitions. The bay windows, elongated glass bodies of light, afford an interior view of the museum and its exhibition activities. The bay windows are also architectural bodies that break up the mighty, vertical steel supports of the façade and generate an optical instability. Depending on lighting conditions, the brightly illuminated glass bodies may seem to be suspended in front of the façade, thereby clearly toning down the monumentality of the industrial architecture. The bay windows belong to the same architectural family as the light beam placed atop the heavy brick body of the former power station and visible from afar. The stairway: The stairway connecting all seven stories of the museum tract functionally complements the other two vertical transport systems: the lifts and the escalators. However, it plays an entirely different role as well. The heavy steel construction with its flush, wooden handrail, its continuous band of light and its distinctively compact proportions adapted to human movement represents an independent piece of architecture. The balcony-like landings offer visitors surprising, unanticipated vistas and spatial impressions between the storeis. While travelling the stairs, one feels disengaged from the stream of museum-goers, the rhythm of one’s steps changes and slows down in response to the height of the treads and the placement of the landings. The bay windows: The bay windows are self-contained, architectural spaces with more intimate proportions and a different scale than the adjacent concourses or galleries. They provide moments of rest and contemplation or merely a place to stop between gallery visits. They are also convenient meeting places as well as offering breathtaking views of the people and works of art in the turbine hall. Seen from the turbine hall, the bay windows look like floating bodies of light and also like vitrines with people sitting on benches, relaxing, waiting for someone or about to move on to the next exhibition. The bay windows belong to the same architectural family as the light beam placed outside atop the heavy brick body of the former power station: a landmark visible from afar. Galleries: In gallery design there are two extremes: there is the highly specific gallery, which usually tends to be too spectacular, too sculptural, too individualistic, and there is the supermarket, developed to give good orientation and an overview that puts everything in the same light. We have tried to take the best things from both poles: from the supermarket and from a highly specific venue, like the Soane Museum. Dimensions and scale: There are three floors of exhibition spaces, none of which is privileged. There is no main level with large, high rooms for monumental works, and a different storey for smaller formats, like photographs or drawings. All of the spaces are at least five meters high and some are significantly higher, like the top-lit galleries on the fifth floor and the double-height gallery on level

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3, which raises the entire 12-metre length of the former cathedral window in Scott’s brick shell. This vertical room with its dramatic dimensions is not only an exciting experience for tired visitors; it also offers undreamt and unprecedented installation potential in a museum context. The spatial variety is considerable; almost all of the rooms are different in size and proportion. In addition, walls can be added or removed at certain places, allowing dimensions and scale to be tailored to the needs of special installations. The construction of these temporary walls is no different from that of the other walls. Lighting: Lighting is a decisive factor in the perception of art works. Slightly different in every room, it alternates between daylight, artificial illumination and a mixture of both. The artificial illumination comes from glass panels set flush with the ceiling; potential variations in adjusting the coloring and intensity are almost unlimited. This necessitates considerable machinery and technical facilities concealed above the plaster ceiling. Visible are only the light, the space and, above all, the works of art on display. The natural illumination reveals the seasons of the year and the daily weather: sunshine, passing clouds or rain. The fenestration is defined by the immense cathedral windows, placed by Scott in the brick shell. The layout of floors and walls has been designed to establish direct contact between the gigantic windows and the galleries in order to provide an optimally self-evident, direct link between interior and exterior. In the rooms where the light comes in laterally through these wall-height windows, visitors can look out on the London backdrop and also get their bearings in relation to the building. There are no lateral windows on level 5 since the floor lies above the cathedral windows. Daylight falls directly from above through glass panels placed flush with the plaster ceiling. They are almost identical to the glass panels for artificial lighting in the two floors below, so that visitors will barely notice the difference at first glance. In the large and high central galleries on level 5, the walls end at the top in broad strips of glass so that the rooms are flooded with daylight. The light enters the exhibition spaces through the glass front of the light beam that can be seen from afar, hovering on top of the Tate Modern. Inside, visitors sense what the light is like outside as it comes in through the luminous opaque bands of glass without interfering with the perception of the works of art. Design: Although the galleries vary in size and proportion, they are basically uniform. They are all plain, rectangular rooms – ordinary and self-evident, on one hand, and yet of spectacular impact, on the other. The astonishing views of London are, of course, spectacular. But spectacular and unusual are also the radical simplicity and directness of the architectural measures that produce the impression of self-evidence. There are no connecting joints between walls and floors or floors and ceiling. The ceilings are flat and unarticulated. The oak floors are unfinished and add an unexpected sensuality to the rooms, while the dark concrete floor on level 5 forms an unaccustomed contrast with the works of art, especially those of classical Modernism. The cast-iron grids for ventilation, set into the flooring, look as if they were part of the former power station. As a whole, one has the impression that the exhibitions spaces have always been there, like the brick façades, the chimney or the turbine hall. This impression is, of course, deceptive. In the interior of the building everything has been re-invented and re-conceived but the new and old building components have been interrelated and attuned to each other in such a way that they are indistinguishable. Something new has emerged that is more exciting than the pure preservation of a given structure and more complex than a completely new building. The chimney: The chimney performed an important function in the former power plant since all the flues from the boilers were gathered into it. The load-bearing structure of the chimney, centered on the boiler house side of the power station, is separate from the rest of the building. In a second building phase, the chimney will be converted into an observation tower with two staircases and two lifts. At a height of 93metres, it will afford a breathtaking view of all London. Looking at the chimney from outside, one realizes that technical and functional requirements do not entirely explain its architecture. The chimney was primarily designed as an urban landmark that transcends exclusively functional purposes and enters into a dialogue with St. Paul’s on the opposite shore of the Thames. The vertical symmetry of the chimney is a direct response to the central dome of the cathedral.

CMY

The concourses: The concourses on the exhibition floors are an important source of orientation. They provide views of the turbine hall through the bay windows; they house the vertical transport systems, the stairs and lifts; and they provide access to the individual galleries. In keeping with their function, they are clearly set off from the galleries and designed as open spaces. The ventilation system, concealed above the plaster ceilings in the exhibitions spaces, is visible in the concourses, as if the ceiling had receded to open up the view overhead. Although the concourses are almost identical in size, they each have a character of their own. The concourse on the third floor hovers directly above the platform in the turbine hall. On the fourth floor, the concourse yields to the track for the crane, and on the fifth floor, part of the concourse ducks under the mighty steel beams of the turbine hall. The sweeping steps, which follow the rhythm of the ceiling, are an inviting place to stop and rest. The clerestory: The view into the clerestory is a backstage view of the lighting facilities on the fifth level. The galleries on this floor lie above Scott’s huge cathedral windows so that daylight can be supplied only from above, via the light beam. Conservation and the different needs of individual works of art call for maximum precision in lighting control. For this reason the glazing in the clerestory must satisfy certain requirements. It must be translucent to prevent direct sunlight and shadows, but without unduly reducing the intensity or distorting the color of the daylight. Two sets of blinds are installed between the panes of glass: one to adjust the intensity of the light, the other to darken the galleries completely. The clerestory also provides artificial illumination; the lighting elements which have been installed are designed to duplicate the coloring of daylight. The light beam: From the very beginning, when we first started thinking about the project during the competition in 1994, we entertained the idea of a huge body of light hovering above the heavy brick structure of the former power station. This body of light was to pour daylight into the galleries on the top floor of the museum and, at night, the direction of the artificial illumination would be reversed and magically shine into the London skies. The idea of the light beam proved to be a key element for the development of the other parts of the complex within the overall architectural and urban concept of the Tate Modern. In terms of city planning, the conspicuously horizontal shape of the light beam forms a distinctive equipoise to the vertical thrust of the brick tower, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott as a counterpoint to St. Paul’s Cathedral just across the river. Scott’s intention of explicitly responding to Christopher Wren’s building has been accentuated and updated by the luminous beam of light. Like the cathedral, Bankside has now become a public site accessible to all of the people in this city. Landscape: Given the architectural strategy of transforming the Bankside Power Station into a landscape accessible and open to the public from all four directions, the gardens are important topographical sites that mediate between the space of the city and the building. The gardens blur the distinction between inside and outside. Thus the ramp on the west side is a salient feature of both the gardens in the West court as well as the turbine hall. The plaza that spreads out between the riverside promenade and the chimney extends into the turbine hall where it becomes the platform. Bankside gardens (north): The spacious Bankside Gardens are divided into three areas. A plaza is centered in front of the north entrance to the Tate Modern and framed by stands of birch trees. To the west the arboretum, a lawn dotted with groups of foreign birch trees, offers a site of rest and repose. The garden on the east side of the plaza, with its smaller groups of birches, forms the transition to the domestic scale of the adjoining buildings. The gravel, used throughout as the ground covering, has been chosen to match the color of the brick façade of the building. Like different aggregate states, it may be loose, bonded, or rolled into the asphalt. The soft surface texture of the gravel links the plaza with the lawns and, at the same time, suggests an extension of the riverbank. The groves of domestic birch trees resemble the wooded growth along riverbanks. But birches are also pioneer trees that thrive on fallow urban and industrial lands and therefore symbolize the transformation of abandoned terrain. The groups of foreign birches planted on the lawns challenge the accustomed image of this tree with their bark of different colors - snow white, salmon, grey or black. West court: The landscaping of the West Court mediates between the expansive, open area of the Bankside Gardens and the framed spaces of the South Terraces. The visitors' ramp leading into the turbine hall is placed in the centre. To the north, in front of the restaurant, outdoor seating on a stepped slope is marked by evenly planted groups of birches. The arrangement of these multi-stem trees is related to the groups of birches in the Bankside Gardens, while the single-stem birches to the south of the ramp reflect the single plantings in the South Terraces. South terraces: In contrast to the Bankside Gardens, which respond specifically to the expansiveness of the river, the South Terraces are divided into two clearly defined gardens surrounded by hedges. The introspective, contemplative character of these spaces invites visitors to rest or play. The hedges, consisting of coniferous yew trees, white flowering quince and white apple blossom shrubs, blossom at different times thereby are mirroring the seasons of the year. Old and new maples, linden trees and plane trees along the southern border along with the topographical design of the lawns heighten the spatial effect of the gardens. Thousands of yellow and white daffodils bloom on the lawns in spring. They are planted in squares, but this geometry will fade in years to come. Herzog & de Meuron, 2000

> www.tate.org.uk

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THIS EXHIBITION IS AN ACCUSATION:

The Grammar of Display According to Lina Bo Bardi

Roger M. Buergel

Until she really got what? By looking through the 'structure', the reinforced concrete of the derelict factory space, Bo Bardi was able to access the site's psychic resonances. And while the particular value of these resonances emanated from a typical weekend feel of pleasure and boredom - as well as from a sense of place in a community of mostly migrant workers from the Brazilian Northeast and Europe - the actual material condition of the space seemed to matter, too. The social energy perceived and celebrated by Bo Bardi was a result of the precarious condition of the once solid structure. Dysfunctionality kicked off happiness.

The second time I went there, a Saturday, the atmosphere was different - no longer the elegant and solitary Hennebiquen structure, but happy people, children, mothers, parents and OAPs [old age persons] went from one shed to another. Kids ran, youngsters played football in rain falling through broken roofs, laughing as they kicked the ball through the water. Mothers barbecued and made sandwiches at the entrance of Rua Clécia; there was a puppet theatre near it, full of children. I thought, it has to continue like this, with so much happiness. I returned many times, Saturday and Sundays, until I really got it…4

Bo Bardi's most mature and extensive work hardly belongs to the sphere of art and culture proper. SESC Fábrica da Pompéia is a huge recreational complex on the outskirts of São Paulo, built on an old factory constructed in the early twentieth century in the style of François Hennebique, a pioneer of reinforced-concrete engineering.3 With an area of 16,500 square metres (and a floor area of 23,500 square metres), its size corresponds to that of a small industrial village. From 1977 till 1986, in a period of slow and painful transition from the rigidities of military rule to the ambiguities of an inexperienced democracy, Bo Bardi worked on this site in many different capacities - first as a planner, architect and designer, and later as its administrator, programme manager and exhibition organiser. She shaped the site in almost every regard while allowing herself, in turn, to be shaped and informed by this evolving sprawl of planned and spontaneous activities:

The festivities for the inauguration of the Pompéia Factory were planned by Bo Bardi down to minutiae like the colour of food. For the opening period she conceived of an exhibition for which people were supposed to bring 'all kinds of objects forgotten or rejected by "civilisation''',8 while the gym towers were celebrated with an exhibition about the history of football in Brazil - a colourful dream of documentary material, devotional objects, players' shirts and banners from all teams, 'even the most mediocre' ones.9 Later exhibitions by Bo Bardi at the Factory included 'Mil brinquedos para a criança brasileira' ('A Thousand Toys for Brazilian Kids', 1980) and 'Design no Brazil: História e realidade' ('Design in Brazil: History and Reality', 1982). There is a common tune to these proposals: an unconcealed emphasis on radical inclusiveness ('all things'), on the material unconscious ('objects forgotten or rejected') and on what might be called the psychic texture of objects (ask any football fan about his or her team scarf or any child about his or her favourite toy). A similar

On the remaining plot of land, Bo Bardi erected a Brutalist, deliberately ugly complex of two high towers and a tall fake chimney, all built in raw concrete.6 In contrast to the old factory space, this complex enters into open competition with the urban environment. Quite literally, its own towers face the city, with its high-rises, eye to eye. While the compact tower houses a swimming pool in the basement and four gyms stacked upon one another, the smaller tower, arranged in a pattern that is a foil to the pattern on the larger tower, contains the staircase and the facilities. The towers are connected on each floor by Y- or V-shaped bridges or gangways, the spatial design of which is reminiscent of the expressive constructivism of Liubov Popova. And although Bo Bardi toyed with the idea of painting the cement in bright colours she finally abstained from it, reserving colour for the door and window frames, or for the ventilating tubes - for elements, that is, which help to punctuate the grey, bunkerish mass. To get to the gym or back to the showers and changing rooms, the athletes, mostly adolescents, have to cross the open, weather-exposed gangways, thus undergoing a kind of rite of passage that purifies them and readies them for the excitement and exuberance of play. The architecture's own playfulness becomes evident with the correlation of each of the gym's floors to the colour code and name of a season - a football team thus meets in 'winter' - and with the spectacular details of the gaping apertures in the walls, with their violently irregular but also somewhat organic shapes. Contrary to most gym spaces, the outside world is not closed off. It is confronted or challenged from within the arena. The violent thrill that accompanies every animated game, the momentous fantasy of annihilating one's adversary, is subtly diverted toward the megalopolis outside: São Paulo, or, in Bo Bardi's words, 'the world champion of self-destruction'.7

The Pompéia Factory was conceived with a capacity of up to 15,000 visitors per day. Bo Bardi decided to keep the old complex of brick buildings, preserving the industrial memory, but took out the partition walls to create a fluid interior space. This open space comprises a temporary exhibition area; a more solid, almost sculptural unit with a library and a videotheque; and, next to it, a multi-use space around a longish, elegantly-shaped lake - an allusion to the São Francisco River, the artery of the Brazilian Northeast. The spatial layout not only corresponds to but actually favours the arbitrary ways in which people circulate if they are not governed by definite destinations, aims or intents, while a multiplicity of architectural details, like the shells in the cement floor or the line of textiles suspended above the restaurant, disrupt the perception of a unified totality. The second part of the factory complex houses a grand foyer leading onto a theatre for 1,200 people, and a workshop area for making ceramics and other crafs. This workshop area follows a different spatial grammar. Lush openness is scaled down in favour of a labyrinthine wall-system built from raw bricks that slightly protects the respective working areas. However, these differences in structuring divisions of consciousness seem insubstantial. They are subordinated to a general rhythm - a rhythm that is less a matter of architectural composition (which is, by its very nature, static) but that originates from the imponderable ways in which space is practised. The rhythm therefore varies according to the intensity of lived experience.

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Learning from Bo Bardi today entails conceiving of institutions in terms of their self-perforation, their own undoing. They have to learn how to dramatise their key dilemma - namely, what counts as teachable and why. Attempting to epitomise the gold-standard of legitimate knowledge in a world of crumbling canons is ridiculous. Attempting to epitomise contemporary sexiness is worse. A methodology is needed that addresses audiences as neither consumers nor infants, but as partners.

There are two good reasons, at least, to lay claim to the architectural legacy of Lina Bo Bardi, her technologies of display and her sense of spatial texture.1 The first reason is artistic: the formal stagnation that haunts contemporary exhibition design. While curators are willing to talk endlessly about mediation (and are taught in so many curatorial courses to do just that) the realm of display gets shamelessly neglected. Art is made to look as if it were tied to nothing but artistic production, while context gets reduced to mere text. The second reason is political: Bo Bardi is exceptional in her formal understanding of that equally vast and mysterious entity called 'the social'. Her poetics of sensual collaboration could be the antidote to the populist inclinations of Western art institutions (including their predilection for big exhibitions). Faced with the relative disappearance of their traditional constituency (the educated middle class) and simultaneously challenged by a curious mob of aesthetic illiterates, art institutions need to learn that cultural illiteracy will only be sustained by the business of mediation - at least as long as the latter is conceived to be primarily a service for unenlightened savages to which institutions eagerly 'reach out'. Bo Bardi, in contrast, took clues from Paulo Freire's 'pedagogy of the oppressed' - she based her work on the creative resources of the populace and advocated the democratisation of knowledge.2

Given Bo Bardi's biography, her embrace of the little festival of affects is easily comprehensible, and so is her aim to sustain its energy. After more than a decade of military rule in which her public engagement, like that of most Brazilian cultural figures, was severely restricted, she might have felt ready for a new beginning. Her sense of beginning must, however, have been tinged by another beginning a few decades earlier. In 1946 Bo Bardi migrated to Brazil, leaving post-War Italy physically behind while preserving the memory of the 'civiltà mussoliniana'. Educated in Milan, where she became a co-editor of the magazine domus in 1943, she must have been equally sensitive about modern architecture's stance when it came to vitalism, planning, progress and the New Man.5 Also on her sceptical mind in 1977, most likely, were the heated architectural debates that shaped the Brazil of the 1950s and early 60s - debates that were fuelled by the utopian dream of a new country with a planner's fantasy called Brasilia as its capital, which were laid to rest with the establishment of the US-backed military dictatorship in March 1964.

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In her love for Bahia, Bo Bardi chose an even more emphatic term for this immaterial entity than the 'spirit of a place'. She called it the 'popular soul' and - this was the exhibi tion's wager - she tried to convey it less by the objects themselves than by their appearance.12 Their appearance had to be revealed, not just their factual presence shown. In Bo Bardi's still acute memory, Italian Fascism had both vampirised and exorcised the popular soul. Under the Fascist regime, popular production or craft became 'irreversibly' transformed into folklore or kitsch, while genuine popular art was defined by its 'perfect reversibility'. While a kitsch object was thus defined as a psychic dead end that puts man's desire to rest, popular art kept the soul alert and ready to look for ever new and transformative ways to shape the world.13 The Bahia exhibition had to fight two enemies. One was folklore. The other was the naïveté of utopian design that had become dominant in Brazil in the 1950s and what this represented: the ludicrous fantasy that an underdeveloped country with feudal structures could be transformed overnight into an industrial society. Presenting the popular soul in action or revealing the reversibility of popular art called for a particular kind of display

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., p.323.↑

The open exhibition space in Ibirapuera Park, next to the biennial, was primarily structured by a system of freestanding walls, most of them elevated on pedestals in the shape of white cubes. The rather compact walls provided conspicuously solid support for the hand-crafed objects - which were, all in all, either rude or tiny and brittle. While the elevated walls were coloured in different shades, one particular wall was covered with gold leaf as if to mirror the spiritual radiance of the religious sculpture displayed in front of it. The ex-votos, on the other hand, were directly fixed onto a whitewashed brick wall. By drawing on the analogy between the bareness of the wall and the wooden rawness of those sculptures, their stubborn dumpiness was transformed into an almost heroic expression: it embodied resistance against the disenchantment of the world. The whitecube pedestals were scattered all over the space, serving larger-size objects like the carrancas and Orishas as pedestals. A few artificial trees were planted here and there, one adorned with weather vanes, while the entire floor was covered with pitanga leaves. In the background, before the row of Orishas, the exhibition was sealed off by a huge, long curtain. This device, reminiscent of display strategies practised by Lily Reich in the 1920s and 30s, provided the space with an air of privacy while simultaneously underscoring its highly theatrical décor. In short, the language of display spoke many different tongues and thus appealed to a multiplicity of perceptual registers. It spoke less about objects than out of them. The exhibition's true subject was indeed neither artistic form nor anthropology; it was, as its title suggests, the spirit of a place and its possible transposition.

The Bahia exhibition of 1959, conceived by Bo Bardi and Martim Gonçalves, looks retrospectively like a comment on, if not an answer to, the key question of how modern universalism could be reconciled with a local agenda. (And without questioning Hélio Oiticica's genius, it needs to be said that Bo Bardi pioneered her environmental aesthetics years before Oiticica built his Penetrávels, the labyrinthine environments he began to make in the late 1960s.) The show, according to its own definition, took an anthropological rather than aesthetic view on popular artefacts created in the Brazilian Northeast - a region defined by poverty, a high rate of illiteracy and a mode of production Bo Bardi characterised as 'pre-crafsmanship'10. In the Northeast, 'objects of desperate survival' were basically made out of garbage. One section of the exhibition was devoted to documentary photographs of the Afro-Brazilian religions macumba and candomblé. The photographs (by Pierre Verger and others) were informally mounted on a fragile wooden scaffolding - the material sensibility of which was closer to the consistency of the life depicted on them than to the institutional self-assuredness of, say, 'Family of Man', the exhibition Edward Steichen organised at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Among the artefacts were almost life-size statuettes of Orisha spirits; musical instruments; patchwork quilts made of reclaimed scraps of leftover cloth; fifós, or oil lamps, built from empty medicine bottles and pieces of tin plates; carrancas, or figureheads, from river boats of the São Francisco; ceramics; mats; hammocks; earthenware pans; pots for drinking water; and so on. 'I could say that this exhibition reveals above all the creative force of a people who do not give up under the severest conditions,' summarises Jorge Amado in an account written at that time.11

in which the object's essentially transitional character would be shown. This aim was achieved by a double operation. On the anthropological level the objects were linked to specific religious or labour practices. The photographs of Pierre Verger, for example, demonstrated their use in ritual. However, the objects were also paraded as being in excess of themselves, or, rather, as transcending any conceptual framework that would fix and guarantee their meaning. This was achieved by dislocating them into a deliberately artificial environment that highlighted their utter strangeness. This particular quality they had to borrow or even extract from modern art's claim to autonomy - a claim that was excessively stated, even propagated at the nearby biennial. The popular soul was, above all, volatile. Or, as Bo Bardi put it: 'To carefully search for the cultural bases of a country (whatever they may be: poor, miserable, popular) when they are real, does not mean to preserve the forms and materials, it means to evaluate the original creative possibilities.'14

tune can be already detected in Bo Bardi's early Brazilian exhibition activities, like the breathtaking installation of the 'Bahia no Ibirapuera' exhibition during the fifth Bienal de São Paulo in 1959, or the display she conceived for the exhibition 'Civilização do Nordeste' ('Civilisation of the Northeast') at the Museu de Arte Popular at the Solar do Unhão, in Salvador de Bahia in 1963. Historically, both exhibitions belong to the window of utopian dreaming that preceded the military dictatorship. The Bienal de São Paulo, from the moment of its inception in 1951, partook in this dream and, for better or worse, carried it along. It not only celebrated modern art in all its universalist splendour, but also fed the generation of Tropicália with a repertoire of forms that had to be devoured and 'vomited' (as Glauber Rocha put it) before being prepared for the artistic aims of a decidedly local modernism.

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Footnotes 1. The quote stems from Bo Bardi's 'Account Sixteenth Years Later', in Marcelo Carvalho FerrazandMarcelo Suzuki (ed.), L'Impasse del design. Lina Bo Bardi: L'esperienza nel Nordest del Brasile, Milan and São Paulo: Edizioni Charta and Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1995, p.5 (of the English insert). In 1980 Bo Bardi started editing material for this book, which was to become a testimony of her Northeastern period, which will be discussed further on in this text. In 1981 Bo Bardi stopped the editing, convinced that the whole undertaking would be of 'no use, all this is going to fall into a void' (p.1). Fortunately, the Instituto Bo Bardi, which fights for the preservation of Bo Bardi's legacy, continued and eventually finished the editing. From the account the book provides, it becomes clear that the research done from the late 1950s until 1964 was part of a larger collective effort that, like Glauber Rocha with his 'aesthetics of hunger', pursued an artistic agenda with the aim of aligning the practical, mostly raw aspects of this culture with a politics that sought to address the actual living conditions of its people. An excellent source that covers the wider history of this period in Bahia is Roger Sansi's Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). See in particular chapter 6, 'Modern Art and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Bahia'.↑ 2. Paulo Freire, born in 1921 in Recife, was a highly influential educational thinker whose programmes to teach and emancipate the illiterate poor became officially implemented in Brazil in the early 1960. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), a treatise about an education that was both modern and anti-colonial, he states that '[n]o pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption'. P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), New York: Continuum, 1970, p.54.↑ 3. SESC, or Social Service for Commerce, is a private non-profit organisation that promotes cultural and educational facilities all over Brazil.↑ 4. The quote comes from Olivia de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, Barcelona and São Paulo: Editorial Gustavo Gili and Romano Guerra Editora, 2006, p.205. The book, which is based on Oliveira's doctoral thesis, offers a particularly rich and careful account of Bo Bardi's architectural principles.↑ 5. Italy's finest architects, it is well known, supported the Fascist cause more or less openly. Razionalismo, Italy's most radical branch of modern architecture, was unambiguous about its Fascist leanings. And it was Pietro Maria Bardi, later Lina Bo's husband, who organised in 1931 in his gallery in Rome the second exhibition of 'Architettura Razionale', a show accompanied by a manifesto in open praise of the 'civiltà mussoliniana'. The point here is not to denounce the Italian architectural milieu of the 1930s and 40s, years in which Lina Bo finished her studies and started to work in association with Gio Ponti in Milan. It suffices to say that Lina Bo was in a privileged position to contemplate the sinister affair between advanced architecture and planning on the one side and an utterly perverted res publica on the other.↑ 6. The architectural language of progressive 'ugliness' with its bunkerish masses and unfinished surfaces is characteristic of the Paulista School (Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas and others). Its aesthetics were heavily inspired by Oscar Niemeyer's self-criticism in the late 1950s, when he condemned his own former striving for originality and surface appearance at the cost of architecture's social functioning. Bo Bardi explicitly stated: 'I want SESC to be even uglier than MASP.' Quoted in O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.203. It should also be mentioned that at the time SESC Pompéia was planned, the integration of the suburbs became part of the official line in urban politics. Selfmanagement models based on neighbourhood groups or participatory building sites were especially encouraged.↑ 7. Bo Bardi also called São Paulo a 'pile of bones'. Quoted in O. de Oliveira, ibid., p.245. Her sensitivity for questions of cultural heritage and its preservation drew her back to Salvador de Bahia in 1986, where she was invited by the mayor to intervene in the historic district around the Pelourinho. See L. Bo Bardi, 'Obra construida/Built Work' (text by O. de Oliveira), in 2G International Architecture Review, no.23/24, 2003, p.142.↑ 8. See O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.246.↑ 9. Ibid., p.248.↑ 10. See M. Carvalho Ferraz and M. Suzuki (ed.), L'Impasse del design, op. cit., p.1.↑ 11. Ibid., op. cit., p.5.↑ 12. What I have in mind here is an operation called 'cathexis' in Freudian discourse, by which an object assumes a particular value or embodies beauty primarily because it comes to symbolise a much-desired lost object. Kaja Silverman conceptualises the relation between appearance and visual affirmation in her book World Spectators. Any theory of display would have to start from this question: how can appearance be initiated from the side of the object rather than from that of the visitor? See K. Silverman, World Spectators, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.↑ 13. For Bo Bardi's concept of 'reversibility', see M. Carvalho Ferraz and M. Suzuki (ed.), L'Impasse del design, op. cit., p.4.↑ 14. Ibid., p.3.↑

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Bean Drop, 2008, Chris Burden