Philosophy, for instance, ‘makes an architect high‐minded and not self‐assuming, but rather renders him courteous, just and honest without avariciousness’;35 this is a most valid piece of advice to architects even today.
Architecture and the Human Nature: Searching for a Sustainable Metaphor (2011)
I have called architecture an ‘impure’ and ‘messy’ discipline because it contains inherently irreconcilable ingredients, such as metaphysical, cultural and economic aspirations, functional, technical, and aesthetic objectives, etc. In fact, I cannot think of a more complex human activity, or artefact, than architecture. The conflicting aspirations that are an inseparable part of human architecture tend to turn our constructions towards irrationality. The great Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn once said to me in a private conversation: ‘The bird's nest is absolute functionalism because the bird is not conscious of its death’.36 Our actions, however, are deeply motivated by our suppressed fear of death. To condense the ‘illogical’ nature of architecture, we can say that architecture is at the same time the means and the end.
As Alvar Aalto claimed in the 1950s that only artistic vision can bring the thousands of conflicting ingredients in an architectural problem into a harmonious synthesis.37 Yet, in the perspective of sustainability, the various crucial qualities of this synthesis have to pass a critical evaluation and measurement. I am not preaching of a ‘scientific architecture’, I suggest an architecture that is grounded in the full existential understanding of human destiny, and this view certainly calls for a deeply lived vision more than scientific formulations. Our task is more ethical than technical. Architecture is not only engaged with today, it also expresses what we want to become. We build and dwell in accordance with our thoughts, fears and dreams.
Architecture is Constructed Mental Space
→ beauty; emotions; ideals; optimism; physical and mental landscape
Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought: Lived Space in Art and Architecture (2006)
‘Architecture is constructed mental space’, as my late friend architect Keijo Petäjä used to say. When experiencing a negative attitude towards life or a sense of gloom and anxiety, often projected by environments of our time, we are usually unwilling and incapable of identifying our own mental landscape in it. If we could learn to interpret the unintentional message of environment and architecture, we would certainly understand better both ourselves and the problems of our fanatically materialist and irrational collective mind better. A psychoanalysis of the environment could cast light on the mental ground of our paradoxical behaviour, such as adoration of individuality and the simultaneous unconditional subordination to conditioned values. The regressive attitudes in relation to architecture in the case of Collegiate Gothic in American universities, for instance, calls for an urgent analysis.
The disappearance of beauty in the environment cannot mean anything else but the disappearance of the capacity of idealization and reverence of human dignity and the loss of hope. Yet, man is able to construct only if he has hope; Hope is the Patron Saint of Architecture.
George Nelson an American architect‐designer, who died 15 years ago, foresaw the fall of the Nazi Empire already in the mid‐1930s through reading the unconscious hidden messages of Nazi stone architecture. He understood that the message which made most observers believe in the thousand‐year future of the Third Reich, in fact, signified an unconscious fortification against self‐destruction.38
Art as Representation and Reality
→ eyes; light
Between Art and Science: Reality and Experience in Architecture and Art (2018)
One of the central developments in the arts of the past 100 years has been its distancing from its mediating representational function to become an increasingly autonomous and independent reality of its own. In his book The Dehumanization of Art of 1925, José Ortega y Gasset presented a thought‐provoking idea concerning the shifting subject matter of art. In his view, the subject matter was first ‘things’ or events (as in the art of Caravaggio and Velázquez), then ‘sensations’ (as in the works of Cézanne and Picasso), and finally, ‘ideas’ (as in modern art).39 Ortega's view actually suggests that art has approached science in its new ideational quality. However, ‘The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity’, as Alberto Giacometti reminds us.40 The historical development of art encompasses the emergence of abstraction and autonomy, the pluralisation of conceptions of reality as well as the increasing prominence of multisensory practices and shifting away from pure retinality towards total embodiment. These orientations also include the questioning of the artist's unique creativity grounded in emotional reactions (Marcel Duchamp, automatism, conceptual art), disengagement of the work of art from its frame and base and its transformation into an environment or part thereof (landscape and land art) and, lastly, atmospheric works whose essence lies in their multi‐sensory, physical and emotive presence, rather than in representation. At the same time, art has accepted the multi‐sensory nature of human perception. In his works Richard Serra, for example, has activated the sense of weight, gravity and muscular experience, while James Turrell has articulated experiences of light, and enabled us to see ‘tactile light’ and ‘old light’, cosmic light that has travelled thousands of light years through outer space before hitting our retina; this experience even permits us to touch time and sense infinity and eternity.
A number of artists have also approached their field by means of scientific theories and methods, such as the members of the Light and Space Movement (most notably Robert Irwin and James Turrell), that emerged in the 1960s, and more recently the Islandic‐Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, a later member of this movement.
Olafur Eliasson is the artist who has fundamentally shaken up our ideas about artistic representation and communication. His works project their own experiential reality that is constituted in the viewer's act of encountering the work, without any mediating reference to other subjects. His works constitute their own reality, which takes place in the act of experiencing them. At the same time, Eliasson has doubtlessly taken the artistic experience further into the realm of scientific phenomena than other artists.
He collaborates in his studio of nearly 100 assistants with engineers, crafts people, architects, specialized technicians, archivists and administrators. For a number of years, he has been working on extremely large environmental works which play upon the viewers’ emotional state in a multisensory, peripheral, unconscious and atmospheric way not unlike natural or weather phenomena. The aim of such artistic experience is no longer an illusory, mediated image or reality, determined by the artist, but a phenomenon or process that takes place in the viewer's process of perception and experience by means of an experimental situation devised by the artist. Eliasson himself calls them ‘experimental setups’.41
The most famous of Eliasson's works to date, based on the experience of light and weather, and also the most archetypal in its simplicity, is The Weather Project (2003) in the huge Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. The work, which attracted more than two million visitors, consisted of an artificial sun shining inside a thin fog that created an extraordinary atmosphere. Eliasson's works produce alternative experiences that nevertheless possess the complexity and ultimate inexplicability of lived reality. His works are ‘reality machines’ of sorts, following Giacometti's call for an artistic reality of the same intensity as the lived reality. In the case of Eliasson's Weather Project, the experience was so enticing that visitors lay down on the floor as sun bathers spontaneously do on a beach.
Architecture, Reality and Self
