Stekanja

The Worlds of Art and Science
Reality and Experience in Architecture and Art

Juhani Pallasmaa

Human culture has deviced three approaches for the search of meaning in our existence: religion, science and art. The first seeks meaning through faith, the second through rational knowledge and the third through sensory experience and emotional encounter. These are independent paths of search, which cannot be fused, regardless of such attempts in history. Whereas scientific thought progresses and differentiates, artistic thought seeks a return back to the undifferentiated and experientially integrated understanding of the world. Science and art are distinct views of the world and differing categories of understanding and representing it. Yet, art and architecture have been moving towards the realm of science, first through geometric and proportional aspirations and today particularly through digitalization and algoritmic generation of structures and forms. Artistic imagination seeks expressions that can mediate the complexities of human experiential encounters with the world through poetic images. ”If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows, which are open on the whole world” (Jean-Paul Sartre).

Since the Enlightment there have been repeated efforts to turn architecture from an artistic and cultural endeavour into a scientific and fully rationalized practice. In today’s materialist culture architecture is increasingly reduced to a techno-economic service. However, as Alvar Aalto argued, architecture contains a far too complex interaction of conflicting and irreconcileable requirements to be rationally resolved. Architecture calls for a poetic vision of a better world and a synthesizing capacity which can fuse facts and dreams, technology and art, science and poetic sensibility into an integrated entity. This is always more a personal and existential confessions than a completely rational solution to a given problem.

Appearances and Phenomena

Michael McGarry

Both metaphor and representation involve relational engagements between two conditions; the interest here is the imaginative stretch between these two conditions. Stretch meaning both reach and gap, a lacuna where phenomena surface such that they can be viewed. The figure is the instrument of discovery and knowledge, through our presence real or imagined or through the simulated presence of others or indeed other figures, correspondences direct or vicarious. George Moore painted his Views of Westport House in 1761, some twenty-one years before the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon facilitated aerial viewing. Moore’s views reveal an unseen landscape, a phenomenon, predicated on the figural agency of the House. His two views negotiate between figure and ground, aspect and prospect, front and back, far and near, presence and absence, with viewer and object in correspondence and presaging later work, notably Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog and Gerhard Richter’s Betty. The spatial sensibility in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is similar, grounded in picture making, figural agency, and the phenomena of appearances. Frank Stella wrote that “the aim of art was to create space, space in which the subjects of painting can live”1. That presence and hence figuration spans media and disciplines confirms that existence is spatial, the vital correspondence.

1. 1

   Stel­la, Frank. 1986. Work­ing Space. Cam­bridge and Lon­don: Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

The Diagram as an Abstract Map

Georges Teyssot

Whether graph or chart, the architectural diagram is today an ubiquitous presence. As graphic inscription of abstraction in space, since the 1990s, the notion of diagram has been so much extended that now it nearly encompasses every aspect of design. To think of the diagram as an architecture of ideas, or, more classically, the idea of architecture, means to be still ensconced in some sort of platonic conceptions. To avoid this trap, a first step would be to turn to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the diagram as an abstract map, and to show how the model acquires its meaning, specifically when confronted with biological paradigms.