Wall and Place Candela Oliva Varier
There is a stone wall and a square window located on a thin strip of land on the shores of Lake Geneva, surrounded by the Rhone valley and the Alps, in the city of Corseaux, Switzerland. It belongs to the garden of Ville Le Lac, a small house built in 1924 and designed by Le Corbusier. The house belongs to an early modern movement, and as such it meets many of the points that would define the international style: free plan, fenĂŞtre en longeur, roof garden. However, it is the wall and the opening at the east end of the lot that is interesting for our matter. Dark and secluded, it seems like a concession that the architect could not resist to make, a corner for one to sit down and look at the views (the best in the house) framed by the glassless window. Almost devoured by vegetation, the wall is far from the antiseptic feel that the house next to it was pursuing. In an ideological context where control of the environment was the ultimate mystical experience, the garden corner has the humility of a localist attitude, a regard for the particular qualities of that lot in Lake Geneva.
The apparently naive gesture of designing a 10 metre long wall with a 1,50 x 1,20 m opening, half-enclosing the garden, is really full of intention. It is essentially a boundary, according to Heidegger “not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that, from which something begins its presencing� (1).
1. Martin Heidegger, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975) p. 159
The wall creates a distinction between inside and outside, which corresponds to the opposition man-made / nature. As Norberg-Schulz would explain (applying Heidegger’s phenomenological principles to architecture in a direct way), the understanding of in / out, as well as more complex spatial principles like centralization, direction and rhythm, is a premise to grasp the most important aspect of the phenomena of place: character (2). The genius loci of the lake, its spirit or its particular atmosphere, is in fact the “opposite” that we have to come to terms with in order to dwell its shore. And this coming to terms is the ultimate intention of architecture. The wall concretizes the spatial properties of the site, turning it into a place. It symbolizes Le Corbusier’s understanding of the landscape, and water, mountain, trees, acquire cultural value through the garden corner. The architecture is no less than uncovering the hidden meanings in the Swiss landscape.
As much as Heidegger was concerned with post-war architecture’s lack of attention for the character of its locations, encouraged by the functionalist premises of the Modern Movement, architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton took the baton forty years later. He named this crisis of dwelling the “phenomena of universal placelessness” (3), and put the blame on the dominating mass media culture. Making a sharp distinction between “culture” and “civilization”, Frampton believes
2. Christian Norberg-Schulz, in “The Phenomenon of Place” from Architectural Association Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1976) 3. Kenneth Frampton, in “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, from The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 2002)
that modernity (or more accurately, modernization) has brought disastrous effects, like nuclear war, but also a blind faith in pure technique. He will defend an identitygiving culture that may discreetly appeal to universal technique, in the strategy of Critical Regionalism. Culture and identity, instead of “character”, is what defines a place now. As for the relevance of the understanding of place, both Heidegger and Frampton make claims to higher values based on their own interpretation. The German phenomenologist shows that etymologically the word “building” is very close to the archaic forms of “being”, “cultivating” and “dwelling” , from which he deducts that dwelling is our way of being on earth. The mere fact of existing makes us dwellers, and that implies an almost mystical relationship with our places. Frampton’s justification is more practical, even political: he is concerned about the “endless processal flux of the Megalopolis” (4), a placeless city without boundaries. A critical regionalist posture would fight this phenomenon, engaging in an architecture of resistance.
Frampton backs Heidegger’s theories on the relevance of the architectural enclosure or boundary, and names the result of it “place-form”. However, Frampton defines boundary in a totally different way: it is a mediator between “the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular
4. Kenneth Frampton, in “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, from The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 2002) p. 21
place (5)”. The difference between both thoughts is minimal, however they spring from opposite attitudes: Heidegger recognizes supreme value in the spirit of place, and all architectural actions should be attempts to enhance it by concretizing it into physical matter, and therefore making it intelligible to us. It is technique at the service of natural qualities. Frampton, on the other hand, tries to mediate between universal technique and local, “organic” knowledge. In fact, he defines the window as the most delicate point where these two forces meet, having the capacity to inscribe architecture within the character of a region.
Then, does the window in the garden wall at Ville Le Lac qualify as a critical mediator? It certainly has generic dimensions, and it is placed at a regular distance from the ground, perfect to enjoy the views while sitting in the garden corner. Yet, it has no glass or carpentry; it is a mere cutting in the stone wall with no climate control function whatsoever, only a frame for the views. This makes sense, as the window is only separating to open-air spaces: the “inside” that complements its “outside” is only conceptual. In fact, the distinction in / out is created by the wall and reinforced by the window. Therefore, to some extent, the piece of wall at the side of the Petite Maison is conciliating the universality of the building system and modulation of a wall and a window, and the poetry of the unfinished element, separating two pieces of nature while being degraded by moss and the pass of time, merely pointing at the view of
5. Idem, p. 25
Lake Geneva. The modern movement, even in its rigid functionalist side that both thinkers implicitly criticize, is embedded with small acts of regionalism / localism.
These acts are sometimes flirtatious concessions to regionalism, like in the case discussed here, but there are many cases (specifically in the so-called second generation modernists) where a synergic union between universality and localism takes place. Architecture historian Michelangelo Sabatino believes there was an appropriation of the vernacular by Italian modernism. Like Heidegger, he identifies the “local” with the craftsman techniques, almost unconscious, long established customs, and states that in the 20th century there was a synthesis of the collective expression of industrial production modes and the individual identity of the artisan’s ethos (6). But Italy was only one of the many places where this happened. After all, we could turn the tables and say that the greater merit of the modern movement, and what prevails today, was the introduction of a critical component into the long established customs of each region. By introducing the search for “the greatest possible convenience and the greatest possible cleanliness” (7), in terms of volumetric relationships, masses, flows, construction methods, etc, modernism was testing the adequacy of regional architecture to the new machine age, in a word of universal
6.MIchelangelo Sabatino, in “Ghosts and Barbarians: the Vernacular in Italian Modern Architecture and Design”, from Journal of Design History, Vol. 21 No.4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 7. Otto Wagner, in Modern Architecture: a Guidebook for his Students to this Field of Art (California: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1988)
knowledge (reviled later through Frampton’s Megalopolis).
However, we could go a step further to realize that the opposition “functional vs vernacular” is not entirely clear. A deep study on the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 reveals that the question that was truly at debate was whether the roots of Scandinavian rationalism could lie in vernacular construction (8). Bruno Zevi after pointed out that the spirit of the “1930 revolution” aimed to dissociate modern architecture from cubism and purism, to give room to a new organicism made of lively and elastic forms (9). Then, if functionalism can also lie in the artisan’s method, shaped by centuries of history, to what extent can we oppose rationalism and localism, and think of critical regionalism as something new and different?
The true absurdity of this opposition is clear when we notice that even the works that are most detached from its context are subject to the passage of time. In fact, time sublimates in the shape of moss, cracks, humidity, oxidation and general corruption of the physical matter, and this happens in different ways depending on the atmospheric conditions of the location. Everything that we build is ultimately affected by regional phenomena. And perhaps that is precisely why we find ruins extremely poetic: the genius loci always takes over.
9. Bruno Zevi, in Erik Gunnar Asplund (Buenos Aires, Editorial Infinito. 1957) p. 62