KADK Buildings People Change
Author Pavel Bouse Tutors Robert Gasner Coordinator Robert Gasner (roga@kadk.dk)
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Disasters of Change
Author: Pavel Bouse Tutor: Robert Gassner
Buildings People Change
Having had received the title as topic for a short article left me admittedly in a slight confusion. A confusion which, however, became an incentive for much broader and fruitful thinking. The ostensible disorder of the aforementioned triad encourages us to organize the individual pieces into a satisfactory line up. Nevertheless, any attempt to organize these words in a specific semantic logic would be a mere abstraction, a simplified logic, which in its (semantic) definiteness disregards all the other possible iterations and thence the very complex relations in between the individual notions. A process of change, on the other hand, is something we cannot avoid in either of the cases; nor in buildings, or in people. What seems to be more interesting, however, is the process of reasoning behind it; the desire to act, and from there its aftereffects. This short essay tries to illuminate the different understandings and their limits within the range of the introduced threesome.
The absence echoed throughout the empty lobbies, hallways, and study rooms, but quietly. Nevertheless, it was the very same absence that triggered the pursuit for the perfect melody. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
Following the text of an anthropologist Frida Hastrup, who writes about the disasters in Tsunami - affected villages of South India, a certain absence can be dealt with either through mourning or melancholia.1 However, as she points out, unlike mourning, the melancholia is still able to engage us in relation to what is or what is to come. When Ernst Tugendhat, who spent his early childhood in one of the architectural jewels designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, talks about his first steps in the meadow beneath their villa in Brno, even after almost
eighty years he seems utterly troubled with the harm he caused to a little turtle as he had accidently thrown it onto a rock and broke its carapace. Nevertheless, the remorse is quickly replaced by the happy memories of his loving father, and realizing how wonderful relationship they have had together. When Zdena, a middle aged woman dealing with health issues through all of her life, reminisces about her enjoyable childhood spent in the villa Tugendhat during the 1970s, at that time a rehabilitation center for young children, she cannot help herself
1. Sigmund Freud, quoted in: Frida Hastrup, “Materialisation of Disaster; Recovering Lost Plots in a Tsunami-Affected Village in South India,� ed. Frida Hastrup (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 2006).
The silence and emptiness was ubiquitous. Extensive hallways where instruments, tossed away as misfit toys, lingered with their finest tones, reluctant to leave. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
to shed a tear over the classmates she has not seen ever since. Even the first inhabitants of the Berlin’s Plattenbau in former East Berlin can barely express their utmost feelings of satisfaction when they got there an apartment after spending literally months on a waiting list in order to get one. The melancholic tone in the people’s reminiscence, as it seems, is keeping rather an open relation to the past, or to something which is no longer present. A childhood lived through, a lost friend or fami-
ly member, a feeling or sound that is long vanished; they all describe certain absence which however, when related to a particular object, standing, in a way, outside of both history and present, can address different ideas about its future. It seems almost as if the building or the artifact changes just as much as our understanding and our ideas about it do. We assign meanings to things on the basis of lived memories, which we, perhaps unconsciously, tend to keep alive, vivid and colorful.
An openness in meaning can easily become an opportunity as it is the missing factor or absence that engages us in future actions. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
As Walter Benjamin describes in his essay On the Concept of History, “the image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us”2. It is no coincidence that the ideas of happiness or enjoyable memories are inextricably bound up with the desire to redeem what is already gone. Thus, although the social, economic, and political conditions in which the previously discussed projects came into being are nothing less than beyond comparison, the com-
mon friction between the villa Tugendhat and the Berlin Plattenbau appears to be the (non)agreement between the past generations and the ones that were (or are) to come, seeking new meanings and opportunities. Benjamin infers that every new coming generation comes in with a certain messianic power on which the past has a claim. The feeling of absence, having the utmost capacity to direct us towards the presence and future as it provokes one’s desire, is something that appears to be utterly relative.3 In that
2. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin; Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940).
However, not every intention, no matter how noble, is to be met with enthusiasm of other people. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
sense, it is natural that different generations derive from different circumstances and values, which inevitably have an effect on how they understand and eventually articulate the past as it flashes up in moments of danger. In contrast to the Plattenbau in Berlin, the Tugendhat villa, being listed in 1969, and thus unfortunately being ‘arrested’ for several years in a state of decay, was never considered or portrayed as undesirable after the fall of communism twenty
years later. Thus, the absolute restoration of the building, even without preserving its original function, always seemed to be a matter of course that no one would have imagined to be questioned. The government’s funding undoubtedly helped to save this extraordinary structure with even more interesting history, however, overcoming the dramatic events by turning it into a museum appears to dismiss any possibility to maneuver within a recognizable horizon of expectation. Being open for public now, one may say,
3. Frida Hastrup Mikkel Bille, “An Anthropology of Absence,” in An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. Mikkel Bille et al. (Copenhagen, Denmark: Springer Science + Business Media, 2010).
The big blank wall was nearly perfect, except for the cable drilled straight through it, and leading all the way to the backstage of the big auditorium. Pragmatism is not always the answer. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
it belongs to everyone and no one. However, that might be a slightly different story in the case of the extensively deteriorated modernistic neighborhood. In that sense, trying to bring a new life into a housing estate in East Berlin seems to be a noble idea, especially when one is trying to avoid the fate that has met the Pruitt-Igoe in St. Luis, a modernistic urban housing complex that was, due to several problems, torn down in 1972, or even more recently, the Heygate Estate in London which has ended up the same
- in the dustbin of history. Both of these projects have vanished after the plans for their rehabilitation were scrapped by the local authorities. In that sense, being unpopular or undesirable place to live in can easily become an opportunity to build up a sense of agency and plans for the future. On the other hand, the threats that emerge with such efforts, also introduced in the text of Mélanie Van Der Hoorn on ‘Consuming the Platte’ are imminent.4 Having not lost its original function or purpose, yet with
4. Melanie Van Der Hoorn, “Consuming the “Platte” in East Berlin: The New Popularity of Former Gdr Architecture,” Home Cultures 1, no. 2 (2004).
The individual ideas and needs were not yet able to find a resolution in between their conflicts, they were just left standing in rather humorous juxtapositions. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
its ostensible openness for understanding and variety of desires, it is inevitable to be found with conflicts between the original residents and the newcomers. The understanding of the complex relations between the introduced notions are far beyond the capacity of this text, but if there is any relation between the introduced notions I wish to draw upon, it is the subordination of the buildings to both; people, and the process of change. The change is something inevitable in
life, and there is no time without a consequence. Therefore, it is crucial for people to be able to deal with the lingering of the past. It is clear that the means for doing so are not about good or bad. Sometimes the melancholia is perhaps the last thing we have left. We turn to past in order to get a sense of the present. However, it is important to realize that by doing so, we might as well end up building on premises that are long expired and no longer valid. In that sense, there seems to be nothing wrong about
A strong images are usually vulerable in relation to the relentless forces of time as they often lack the tolerance to change. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
the decision to put the history to rest in favor of a progress. In either of the cases, the history cannot and should not leave us all cold hearted. It is obvious that the villa Tuggendhat is one step ahead in the evolution in time when compared to the Berlin Plattenbau. The decision how to take control of the past has been already made there. A building that served for various purposes and many different people during its years has been turned into an artifact; a museum that tries to reconstruct certain 5. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.�
histories just as much as it tries to erase others. Taking this into account, perhaps the general, yet very important lesson to remember for the Berlin Plattenbau, when dealing with its history, and thus by inclusion with values and ideas of different relevancies, is that the Messiah never comes only as a redeemer, but also as a subduer of the Antichrist.5 In other words, the singularity of a certain idea may result in an arrogant sense of isolation as it usually implies the exclusion of the ones rendered as undesirable and inconvenient.
Sometimes the deliberate discontinuities and differences in juxtapositions can allow for something much more interesting to be created. (Royal Danish Academy of Music, Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945)
On the other hand, the acceptance of relations and countless points of friction a conflict, as the age-long paradigm for between the notions of change, and ultimately a necessary incentive in the process of any strive for con- Buildings People Change sensus, is something we still struggle to cope with. Needless to say it requires both confidence and modesty to do so, but once we get that under our skin, not only we can more easily realize and appreciate inevitable historicities rather than outdated histories, but we might as well do the first step in understanding the complex
Bibliography: Reifarth, Dieter. “Haus Tugendhat.” Germany, Pandora Film Verleih: 116min., 2013 Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin; Selected Writings, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940. Hastrup, Frida. “Materialisation of Disaster; Recovering Lost Plots in a Tsunami-Affected Village in South India.” edited by Frida Hastrup. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 2006. Hoorn, Melanie Van Der. “Consuming the “Platte” in East Berlin: The New Popularity of Former Gdr Architecture.” Home Cultures 1, no. 2 (2004): 89-126. Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup. “An Anthropology of Absence.” In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, edited by Mikkel Bille et al. Copenhagen, Denmark: Springer Science + Business Media, 2010.
Images taken in: Radiohuset in Copenhagen (today Royal Danish Academy of Music), designed by Vilhelm Lauritzen, 1945
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