Kommentar von Wolfgang Pauser
Kommentar von Wolfgang Pauser
A lawyer would define a public building as one that is commissioned by a local authority or other legal body in public law and that houses an authoritative administration. From the architect’s viewpoint other questions arise. How is our notion and the reality of “public” presently changing? How can architecture, as one of the important forms in which the notion of “public” is made visible, react to such changes?
The standard description of “public” is undergoing a crisis. While major international companies such as IBM rise to become important international players in world politics, the nation state, and along with it its institutions, is losing importance. The larger a business is, the more its central activity can accurately be described as administration. And vice versa the state attempts to privatise its administration or at least to make it resemble the customer service department of a business. Economic organisations become public and operate by means of “public relations”, politics becomes increasingly economics-based and wants to “market itself better”. Politics is increasingly reduced to self-marketing policies in terms of location, business and party politics. This convergence –that extends as far as a swapping of roles – of the traditional opponents “public administration” and “private economy subject” emerges all the more clearly because the media have become the real area of action and competition for both politics and business concerns
Today “public” primarily means the media public. For both political and economic systems the media are no longer a suitable instrument to produce the traditional concept of public that is a presupposition of the concept of democracy. Since they media no longer live from selling news but from offering an advertising environment, and they must be paid not by the consumers but by those who insert the advertisements, to ensure their survival they must focus their content on publishing the commercial function of their production and not on the function of producing a public realm. The kind of public realm that the political, democratic-moral and intellectual discourse still likes to refer to has increasingly become a fiction. Symptomatically, those who nowadays refer to the “the public realm” are fringe groups who are most lacking in media attention and recognition, much the same applies to the senior political functionaries who deliver sermons in order to support their functionally weakened performance in a self-legitimising way.
Thanks to pluralism all that remains are part publics. People not only receive different media, they also interpret their contents according to increasingly incompatible codes. It is not information shared with each other as the basis of a common, rational, decision about the common good, arrived at through discussion, that is the determinant of the postmodern communication scenario that has taken the place of the good old public realm, but a delight in the processs of media consumption on the one hand and the advertising profit from media production on the other.
As a substrate of democracy the public realm has always had a partly fictional character. With the functional differentiation of society into more or less closed part systems, this fictional character has merely been strengthened and made evident. The public realm continues to exist as a discourse fragment, as the invocatory formula of itself, as the expressive self-thematic gesture of the candidates who wish to succeed it. It also exists in legal forms and in institutions – and not least of all in buildings that can be observed and entered by everybody: educational facilities, ministeries, public offices.
If democracy requires at least a belief in the existence of the public realm as a continuing source of its legitimacy, and if the media can contribute less and less to the preservation of this fiction as a driving force, is architecture, as the manifestation, presentation and concrete form of the public realm, presented with a higher task and with greater demands? Can and ought the design of public buildings compensate for the crisis of the concept of the public realm, or represent it, and if so, how?
One has hardly formulated such questions, before one encounters the problem that the architectural type of the “public building” finds itself in a historical crisis that is at least as dramatic as that experienced by the other media of the public realm. Not only how a public building should be conceived, but also how it is interpreted ex post, is extremely dependant on the changes of political formations and (self) interpretations. For serfs a mediaeval castle appeared dark and threatening, an example of the architecture of domination in the worst sense, whereas knights and romantics could perceive it in a far friendlier context of interpretation.
To measure the central importance of changes in the design of public buildings in the history of social forms, one only has to call to mind the break lines. For instance the transition from castle to palace and the development of the facade associated with it not only demonstrated a new technique of domination but also, at the same time, induced it; the courtly facade was not only a form of expression but also the starting point for the replacement of force by power. The architecture of war gave way to the architecture of persuasion, the dominating building was no longer threatening but seduced people to identify with it. Power, understood as deferred, scattered, subtle, concealed and aesthetically translated force could, thanks to this shift towards the imaginary, gain additional effectiveness and “exert its effect” into the “furthest corner of the empire” without needing constant actualisation through acts of violence. In the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault one can read how great the contribution made by the medium of architecture to the formation of the modern subject that has internalised domination as reasonable self-control actually is. The public building is – then as now – the mirror and agent of collective self-interpretation in a single figure.
In the transition from the feudal to bourgeois public realm the facade was initially preserved but a civil code was inscribed in it. The invention of the “nation” as a construct of collective self-purification and self-presentation accompanies the use of the facade for the depiction of history. Historicism is the name given to the style whose forms refer not to a ruler, but to the collective subject, “the people”, as medium, heir and producer of its own culture and history.
Historicism can be understood as a transitional stage between the genuinely aristocratic facade architecture and the “abolition of the façade” which, as the delayed revolutionary impulse of the bourgeoisie, more clearly depicted the latter’s democratic understanding of the state. In contrast to the “display front” modernism presented an ethos of production, function, transparency and economy in the medium of building. The intention was that strict rationalism should demonstrate that nothing about it is “mere” appearance – this was its own programmatic blindness.
As a work of architecture is also always a response to the existing historical architecture, one must remember that, in addition to the furore about ridding facades of ornament (misleadingly and mythologically associated with the name of Adolf Loos), there is also a second myth about the birth of modern architecture: for the early Expressionists the issue was not the abolition of ornament, but, on the contrary, its totalisation. As symbols of the “crystal“ geometry, smoothness, serial regularity and proportional structuring were the harbingers of an essentially aestheticised social utopia.
Present-day architecture of representation in the area of public buildings such as headquarters makes use of the same formal means that are generally closer to the the early Bauhaus than the later one. And, just as the size of buildings that determine the appearance of the city grows, their geometric form changes from the register of the functional to that of the large crystal as the sculptural embodiment of a mathematical generality that begs for general recognition. Today geometricisation targets total ornament, mathematics becomes the rationalisation for the portentous gesture of the aspiration to greatness, to sublimity in the cosmic sense of antiquity.
However, here the dominant materials and the geometrical approaches to the creation of form are very different. Completely glazed cubes are the most frequent and therefore most conventional solution to transforming functional architecture into huge crystals. Stone is regarded as the cultural adversary of glass. Max Dudler, for example, has devoted himself entirely to this material and in both the IBM building in Zurich as well well as in the Berlin Ministry of Traffic and Transport has understood how to pile it up in the form of majestic monoliths. In his ING&NNH office building in Budapest Erick van Egeraat plays with the contrast and combination of glass and stone.
Building forms that are developed from deconstructivism recall in a very different way the “crystalline” early Bauhaus and Taut’s “Gläserne Kette”– for example when Dominique Perrault packs the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in a facetted shell or Erick van Egeraat forms the ING headquarters in Budapest like an organically grown layering that is closer to Finsterlin and presents a geometry of rampant growth. What all these have in common, however, is the recourse to the “major form” as a formal universal law that gives the building form and structure, at one place solidly put together, at another as a symbol of the dynamics of development.
Whether it be in glass or stone what at first glance, thanks to the grid and geometry, seems like a rationalistic “functional building” immediately produces confusion through the feelings it evokes of magnificence, sublimity, size, sculpturality and curiosity. In Germany feelings of this kind, and in general feelings related to architecture that is supportive of the state, were for a long time taboo, for historical reasons. A reasonable administration had to present itself without any form of aesthetic excess in order to avoid being suspected of formal representation. Of course a “purely rationally” conceived building is nothing other than the embodiment of a utopia. For it is utopian to believe that one can simply abolish the imaginary. One can only deny it.
Let us return to the example of Max Dudler: his public buildings are so highly impressive through their aesthetic qualities, through their emphasis of form that they are repeatedly exposed to public debates and are suspected of functioning as a reviver of representational architecture. But what could they represent? What could one see if one looked “behind the facades”, what would be the imaginary, the identity of the public realm that makes it public appearance in them?
If we consult the new theories on the theme of the change to the public realm, they describe the differentiation of society into closed auto-poetic part systems that are an environment for each other. Politics, science, media, art are examples of such systems, each of which forms its own rules. For the system art, for instance, the number of persons who are in agreement is not relevant, for the system of politics in democracies this number is extremely relevant. Above these part systems there is no kind of higher, greater entity whatsoever, no Weltgeist (and certainly not a good one), no progressively growing reason, no evolutive purpose. No salvation apart from in the detail. Everything is demystified, but the part systems preserve themselves through internal mystification: the discourses in which they communicate about themselves must, for those who participate in them, appear bindingly meaningful.
In these current scenarios of the public realm even if it wanted to architecture could not represent the seat of power, as the pilot’s seat is empty; neither gods, heroes, the spirit of the people nor announcements of reason can be found to occupy his place. If architecture wanted to express a concept of public, it would be dependant on candidates that have long since been relegated to the attic of the history of political ideas.
Dudler avoids nostalgia of this kind about abdicated, and therefore all the more permanently and obtrusively invoked, fictions of the public realm just as adroitly as those of his colleagues who using the sensual excess of large-scale geometricisation present capital or power in an urban setting: architecture. Architecture that is concerned about architecture. If geometricising architecture is its own most pressing concern, then with this gesture it demonstrates the truth about the current understanding of public which consists of the functional differentiation of its part systems ( or at least sees itself in this way and acts accordingly).
The most striking present-day public buildings are not buildings that tell of the public realm but that tell publicly about the theme building. They show the figure of self-reference, of self-thematisation in that they turn the focus on their quality of being built, being formed, being wanted. Fractally inscribed in themselves are not only the grids in the grids, the forms in the forms: what is pushed in this architecture is the architectural per se. Stone. Block. Structure. Glass. Volumes. Boundary. Purpose. Form. Form. Form. An archaic tectonic, a monolith in an exploded drawing inhabited by spirit-air and light-brightness, geometry and calm.
These buildings often quote functionalism but they transfer its forms to the ornamental and sculptural. Conversely they seem to be purely aesthetic, almost sacred self-promotors, without in the process suffering the slightest damage to their real functionality.
The public buildings of the present-day, whether they be the headquarters of business concerns or ministries, are often the temple architecture of reason, so to speak, in which the real and the imaginary of the public realm can live together well, as their difference always remains recognisable. The great geometricisations show their built quality in a pointed way and thus refer to the framework of reference of architecture. Administration – whether of money or power – discharges its duties inside them, and nothing more. The spirit of the administration no longer has to shape the architecture and architecture must no longer mystify the administration. Ultimately, progress lies not in an increase of identification but of difference.