Structure as Space: Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jürg Conzett and His Partners 9781902902012

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Structure as Space Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jurg Conzett and His Partners

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Structure as Space Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jurg Conzett and His Partners

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As perhaps at no time before the Turbine Hall's creation, Behrens - together with the young clique of artists, architects, engineers and critics who commented on, admired and cannibalized it (such as Walter Gropius with the Fagus Factory, or Mies van der Rohe with the interior facade of the Turbine Hall)'° - realized that the reception of a work of architecture could stimulate the most disparate sensibilities and the most contradictory reactions. Although Behrens summons the eye as a witness and defends the 'effect', his instructions for reading the building cast such a sophisticated light on a wide range of assumptions - cultural, technical, compositional and poetic - that we might genuinely wonder where such contradictions could possibly have Gome from. The Turbine Hall excited the spirits of architects, engineers, critics and historians in the years we tend to think of as the incubation period of the modern movement, a period generally seen, not without understandable hesitation, as lasting until the early 1920s. The problems posed then regarding how we should understand the artistic qualities of architecture, or the contribution of labour, expertise and sensibility to the aesthetic fruition of a work, or the collaboration of the user in recreating its aesthetic experience, or simply comprehending it - all these problems have endured even if they are periodically proposed afresh and reformulated almost out of all recognition, as if this 'recycling', this acknowledgement of their ambiguity, were essential to the functioning of architecture as an 'artistic institution' as we know it. In face of these questions of enduring ambiguity, the engineer, as a real presence, but even more as a fantasy figure, has consistently been the embodiment of architecture's desired or feared fate - the ethical straitjacket imposed by reality on artistic autonomy, or the agent of a disciplinary specificity which dissociates architecture, a 'mechnical art', from the other purely contemplative arts.2' Thus for the 'radical functionalists' of the ABC group such as Hannes Meyer or Mart Stam, or for Karel Teige, the architect, like the engineer, had effectively to become a scientist. The discipline had to be plucked from the shifting sands of art. 22 Le Corbusier, in his grandiloquent and ironic 'Defence of Architecture', takes issue with 'the avant-gardes of the Neue Sach/ichkeit' 23 who attempted to reduce the beautiful to an epiphenomenon of the useful. In Precisions, at the threshold of the 1930s, he uses the opposing figures of the engineer and the builder as a framework on which to elaborate the most extreme reflections on his aesthetic vision. The engineer is depicted as the 'blind' agent of technical and scientific progress: To be an engineer is to analyse and to apply calculations; a builder makes a synthesis and creates. Notice this: engineers, admirable in their painstaking

tasks, bent over their slide rules, are generally in revolt against the children they create. They believe in them only as operative mechanisms. They do not recognize thinking entities in them. They don't know their works, they submit to them." Le Corbusier seems to suggest that a creative undertaking should be premised on reflection, something he saw as part of the architect's task. Unable to deny engineers' structural creativity (despite their 'revolt' against the 'children' they create), he takes aim instead at the lack of an expressive project that would confer upon the structural product of their calculations a form that would also speak 'semiotically' of its function. Because, for Le Corbusier during his ' Purist' period, the 'elegant solution' is - among other things - self-referential. Among all possible or hypothetical responses to a given problem, the 'elegant solution ' is whatever allows us to recognize both the whole and the parts, the nature of the problem under consideration and the generalizations that can be drawn from it; it is whatever surprises us by opening up new avenues of research and creativity. This broadly conforms to the definition of the elegant solution in mathematics proposed by Henri Poincare in his Science and Method, 2 ' which so fascinated the rationalist cohort of the French avant-garde. An echo of Poincare can be found, not altogether by chance, in a splendid passage from Urbanisme (The City of Tomorrow, 1926) discussing the issue of the viewer's cognition of a work. Le Corbusier writes: Behind the eye is that agile and generous, fecund, imaginative, logical and noble thing: the mind ... Here is a wonderful mechanism that each of us can set in motion: knowledge and creation. · We can create symphonies. To be soothed by certain forms, to realize how they were conceived, by what relationship they were brought together, how they answer a need which has become articulate, how they rank in one's personal scheme of chosen images. To measure, to compare indeed; to share with their creator his raptures and his torments.26 But Le Corbusier, who was himself accused of using scientific determinism - i.e. the very thing that he thought of as limiting, insuperably, the engineer's task - became more wary and discreet. Or else, like so many of his contemporaries, he simply became disoriented. Regardless of the contradiction, he would later attach to this aesthetic of rational hypothesis - almost semiotic or structuralist avant la lettre - another aesthetic, designed to titillate altogether different sensibilities. Design, dissect, give order to the emotive event, so as to explain it? An illusory exegesis! Words cannot have the subtlety of feeling. This is something unattainable, a definite mystery!'

This rhapsodic historical digression cannot pretend to be a considered contribution to the representations conditioning an understanding of the role and performance of the engineer, either among architects or the wider public; nor does it indicate how the engineer has gradually forged his mode of practice, with attendant consequences for the status of his work and achievements. Yet these ideas serve to contextualize the opinion of Antoine Picon in his introduction to L'art de /'ingenieur, ' 0 in which he says that engineers themselves 'contribute towards reinforcing this strange conception of a practice that is almost involuntarily artistic'. Proposing the notion of ' an art of limits' , he explains: .. . it seems as if engineers are in reality trying to negotiate a compromise between the rejection of a conventional artistic process and the simultaneous desire to create. The tension this provokes may well be the basis of the art of the contemporary engineer, an art whose ambiguity often finds its manifest counterpart in the resultant object, the chosen system· or the technical performance of the work an art of limits because its most successful products are invariably located on the boundary between two worlds that the conventions of the industrial era have taught us to think of as separate.'° After more than a hundred years of promiscuous coexistence, of exposure to the architect's desire for admiration, to his exaggerations and his eternal quest for fresh beginnings, the engineer has gradually carved out an image for himself that is in some senses defined in opposition to the practices and prerogatives of the architect. This is not the place to weigh this historical 'difference' in the balance, but we can at least attempt to trace its outline. The example of two of today's most exciting engineers, Santiago Calatrava and Jurg Conzett, will serve to give focus to our enquiry. In his training, research and professional life, the engineer accumulates knowledge, integrating, through his scientific work, the different strands of specialist expertise at his disposal. He can call on specialists in metalwork, as well as concrete, timber and glass; still others will advise on civil construction and consolidating works; on vaulting, articulated structures, surveying, materials, site management or calculations. Even as a general expert, the engineer relies constantly on specialist knowledge, collected in 'state-ofthe-art' manual$ and information standards. In his collaborations with the generalist architect, the engineer will as a rule (and with some relief) adapt himself to an undertaking whose creative impulse - the leap in the dark - is, even on a structural level, the preserve of the architect. It is the architect who is master of the approximate, of analogical thought, of formal and material metaphor, of the heuristic approach, of trial and error, of conjecture and refutation, of falsification and abduction. The engineer, on the other hand, has the virtuoso role of reducing approxi-

mation to a defined typology, of turning experiment into proven experience. Under the rubric 'Invention', the encyclopedic L'art de l'ingenieur declares, 'It is often supposed that invention is a matter of suddenly coming up with something completely new, such as a bicycle.' (This, I would say, is what architects implicitly believe in any case.) 'In the domain of structures', it continues, 'very few inventions of this kind exist. Patents are equally rare. In most cases, invention involves adapting existing knowledge and experience, conceiving of new combinations based on familiar material or structural elements, replacing one material or type of structure with another.' 30 The engineer, we understand, therefore deduces and adapts. In architecture an enthusiasm for invention often exists in inverse proportion to the supplicant's grasp of structural realities. The engineer, on the other hand, is 'formatted' by his solid technical training: for him, new forms can only be justified by new typologies. Consequently he must indulge his amour-propre elsewhere, applying himself to ensuring that the workshops are operating at peak efficiency, to reducing the need for manual work or maintenance, to improving safety and materials, to refining calculating instruments and so on. When Christian Menn was asked 30 years ago why new highway bridges tended to be less spectacular than their predecessors, he answered that research was no longer forcibly directed towards achieving an economy of materials and slender, subtle structures. Instead the beauty of the solution was to be sought in the process of assembly, in the programming and procedures adopted to save time and energy. So, for example, the construction technique for slightly inclined bridges, which makes use of the slipperiness of graphite to slide the different prefabricated sections towards the determined position with the minimum of effort, seemed more important to him than producing beautiful, anaemic creations that would send architects, with their residual structural romanticism, into transports of delight." This episode suggests a new engineering aesthetic, entirely addressed to concept or process,"' an aesthetic in confrontation with the ephemerality of conceptual art, the practice of the Happening - minus the relish of provocation or transgression, obviously, since 'the god A + B' (as Cesar Daly, in a toast, once playfully designated engineer and architect respectively) will nev,e r be mistaken for 'the goddess fantasy'. 33 A recent example of this wholly conceptual approach is the renovation of the reinforced-concrete bridge at Dorenaz in the Valais (1933), an early work by the engineer Alexandre Sarrasin. The bridge was long neglected, with disturbing traces of carbonization and, even worse, outdated safety

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features, but it was also historically important and well crafted. Under these circumstances Eugen Bruhwiler, the engineer in charge of the renovat ion, was uneasy about any intervention t hat cou ld have altered the way people perceived or experienced the bridge. Surveying the structure with more sophisticated instruments than were available at the time of its construction, he concluded that several precise, almost imperceptible reinforcing operations, together with routine maintenance work, would obviate the need for the massive alterations that had been anticipated, so preserving the integrity of the bridge.34 In this example of engineering restoration, 'beauty' or aesthetic satisfaction consists in the quality and the 'immaterial' form of a project strategy that revolves around sophisticated techniques of measurement and calcu lation. In short, a quasi all-software, no-hardware project; all concept, no product. Antoine Picon, in the text quoted earlier, rightly says of the engineer that: the attitude of supreme detachment we readily accord him, as regards the desire to create or the quest for beauty, never fails to interest modern artists haunted by themes such as the death of art or its integration within a larger field of experimentation. To this effect, Picon cites as an example 'the process adopted by Andy Warhol, who opened a factory to churn out art objects as if they were automobiles, using the techniques of mass production'. 35 The yearning for engineering that periodically seizes the architect, the nostalgia for a beauty that arises naturally, involuntarily, for beauty as a simple corollary of 'pure calculation', all are manifestations of what may be considered the recurring palingenetic

dream (or nightmare) of the absorption of architecture into science, or its death as art.36 'Engineer, Hope of Architecture', to paraphrase the title of Oskar Kokoschka's famous drama. The intentions expressed by the most radical representatives of the 'Neue Sachlichkeit' have already been noted,3 ' but why should we not dream even now of an architecture that embraces conscious, rational thought and scientific systems and procedures? Why should we not hope for an architectural culture in which heroes and martyrs are supplanted by the disciplined subjects of Bachelard's cite scientifique38 - an alternative to the curse of Peter Pan that afflicts so many architects, causing them never to grow out of their urges to repeat avant-garde gestures to the end of time or, at least, up to and beyond the boundaries of kitsch. Charles S. Peirce would have charged the average contemporary engineer, on the other hand, with the defect of 'positivism', which promotes a restrictive, renunciatory notion of inquiry overvaluing the function of induction and undervaluing the generation of hypotheses. 30 As Peirce warns, 'Induction never can originate any idea whatever. No more can deduction. All the ideas of science come to it by the way of abduction. '•° Constructing hypotheses, being open to controlled and verifiable conjecture, proceeding on the basis of evidence and intuition ... abduction consists, among other things, in deriving 'from observation strong intimations of truth, wihout being able to specify what were the circumstances we had observed which conveyed these intimations'."' Peirce adds, 'But it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation.'" So as to avoid any further epistemological risks, I will refer you to Peirce himself for an example of abduction, specifically to the episode in which he relates how he unmasked the thief of his Tiffany watch and overcoat, and how, more skilfully still, he managed to recover the stolen goods from the house of the perpetrator himself."' Testing the viability of solutions with pencil sketches, trying out things on the basis of experience, and bringing into play, by modification or analogy, solutions that have been worked out by others - these are the architect's abductions and they are effective, even if the methods employed might horrify Peirce or a Sherlock Holmes. These are also the methods that have been tried in recent years by all those engineers who have connived with architects in their work. (The kind of collaboration that Peter Rice has left us moving testimonies to.) In the case of Jurg Conzett, it was a desire to 'muck in' (figuratively speaking) that prompted him, at the end of his engineering studies, to seek employment in the studio of Peter Zumthor, who was just then coming into his own. Conzett's intense involvement in the projects of many other (mainly Swiss) architects can be explained in the same way.

Above: Santiago Calatrava, sketch for Alamillo Bridge, Seville

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