The Power of 1:1
Architecture is hard to exhibit. One can never show the actual building (yet alone a city) in an exhibition, solely its representations must suffice. This in turn asks much of the exhibition’s viewers: reading and contemplating over drawings, photographs and models they must first piece together what it is they are looking at.
Wolf Prix, when asked on Austria’s public radio which building serves him as an inspiration, referred to Le Corbusier’s monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette. For the listeners to better understand why specifically this building, the interviewer asked him to describe it more closely. Prix answered: “If I could fully describe the building’s effects and experiences in words, you wouldn’t have to build it anymore.”
London’s architecture scene has embraced an interesting answer to this age old problem: the pavilion. On the one side are the Serpentine Gallery’s summer pavilions as well as the AA’s Design & Make pavilions and on the other are two exhibitions that have recently caught my eye. Both the V&A’s “1:1 architects build small spaces” curated by Abraham Thomas and “Psycho Buildings” an exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery employ a pavilion’s scale to bring immediate architectural effects into an exhibition setting. In this post I want to cover the first of the two exhibitions.
In “1:1 Architects build small spaces” Abraham Thomas has invited 19 architects to submit designs for pavilions to be built in and around the V&A. The goal was an architecture exhibition featuring full-scale accessible structures. After asking the architects a series of questions about their design process and ambitions for their small space, seven were finally chosen to be realised by the museum. To justify his selection Thomas refers among others extensively to Juhani Pallasmaa’s theories.
Pallasmaa has expressed his concern that architecture has lost its connection with the body, that it has lost its potential for tactility and sensuous curiosity. In “The Eyes of the Skin” Pallasmaa writes:
The privileging of the sense of sight over the other senses is an inarguable theme in Western thought, and it is also an evident bias in the architecture of our century. […] The problems arise from the isolation of the eye outside its natural interaction with other sense modalities, and from the elimination and suppression of other senses, which increasingly reduce and restrict the experience of the world into the sphere of vision. [p. 39]
In the V&A’s exhibition Thomas asks us to close our eyes when in the pavilions to allow all our senses to intake the spaces. This has lead the architects to carefully select the wood that will be utilised in their structures. Besides its haptic qualities the wood was selected based on the smell it will give to the small space. In the real life context of the exhibition, however, this smell was quickly over powered by the odeur of the other exhibition goer’s feet, as one had to take off one’s shoes to go into some of the pavilions.
On first sight Pallasmaa’s arguments seem very strong. He has a good point in underlining the over dominance of the visual in our culture, calling it the hegemonic eye. On second thought however, one could just as easily find arguments for the hegemonic ear. After all it is music that is employed in shopping malls to lull us into buying more and make us want to get the most out of our shopping spree. Electronics and kitchen utensils are not selected merrily on the basis of their slick exterior design that speaks to the eye, but arguably more so by their sound: No one wants to be distracted by a computer cooling itself, or the oven heavily blow hot air when baking — no matter how good it looks next to the fridge. Can we imagine the success of the iPod if it would have had bad sound quality? And is it not music, with its orchestras, music halls, ‘Festspiele’ and philharmonics that gets by far the biggest sum of hegemonic funding?
In the Louvre when contemplating over the Mona Lisa my neighbour’s smell — even if unspeakably hideous — will not affect the painting’s classification as master piece. Why then should it influence my judgement on architecture?
Architecture is designed through abstract representations — models, drawings, renderings, and material samples. Which all have their fair share of influence on the progression of the architectural discourse. In my opinion Pallasmaa’s arguments can be used to make a point on the power of 1:1. Just as Prix said “if I could completely describe it, I don’t need to build it”. To a certain extend small spaces in scale 1:1 allow architectural effects to be explored in a much more immediate and also quicker way than abstractions could ever do. This is true for an architectural exhibition just as much as for the design process. Abraham Thomas’ show at the V&A is a good example of this.
Although I disagree with parts of his argument, Pallasmaa’s writing functions as a reminder to include haptic and material effects into architectural evaluation and design goals, emphasising architecture as a holistic experience not just a geometric exercise. It made me think about the power Marina Abramovic’s sandwich installation, where people had to squeeze their way into the exhibition passed a naked couple, would have as a possible architectural effect:
