textile tectonics
Lars Spubroek
In 1963, Richard Held and Alan Hein conducted a classic and rather merciless neurological experiment in which two kittens were raised from birth in a carousel. One kitten was able to move freely around a circular track, while the other was strapped in a suspended gondola, which was pulled by the free cat. As the young animals' brain tissues developed, their actions and perceptions were integrated into a coherent neurological system. The free cat was able to link the act of walking to its own perceptions, while for the other, action and vision were severed. After a number of weeks, the kittens were released from the carousel. The free cat moved and behaved normally, while the other stumbled and bumped into objects, and was afflicted with agnosia-a condition of mental blindness brought on by neurological rather than physiological causes. The second cat could not coordinate its movements with what it saw because in its experience, action and perception had never existed in the same continuum. The experiment by Held and Hein proved that these two faculties were inseparable-perception relied on action and action was only possible through perception.
This implies something quite fundamental for architecture, where the plan is typically thought of as the surface of action and the wall as the surface of perception. Reasoning through Held and Hein's experiment, architects cannot simply start with a plan and extrude it upward according to the vector of gravity to create a building or a space. Rather than accept this a priori distinction between floor and wall, action and perception, we must address the neurological continuum between these faculties and find the vector that connects them. I would argue that this link between action and perception, movement and image is the act of construction; it is the vector of tectonics. I want to connect the idea of vision as something in progress to the notion of architecture as a vector between the making and the made. As examples, I will discuss two projects that address this relationship between action and perception, and between the making and the made, through different tectonic strategies.
Currently, we are converting an old textile factory in the center of the city of Lille, France, into an arts complex that includes a school, exhibition spaces, artists' housing, a library, and even a Turkish bath next to a newly build concert hall with rehearsal studios and offices.
The project named Maison Folie (2000-03) reverses the distinction, coined by Gottfried Semper, between that which carries (structure, made of hard materials like wood) and that which is carried (soft, woven materials that provide infill between structure). In contrast to the Semperian model, in which the tectonic is assumed to be located at the corners of the building, in the case of the concert hall of the Maison Folie the edge is spread out and woven into a surface across the facade. The geometry of the building is modulated by movement and light: the surface transforms with the sun's varying positions, changing from reflective to transparent. One's experience of the building is contingent on where one stands and at what time of the day.
Another project we are building, the Son-O-House (2000-03), in the Netherlands, also illustrates the process of action becoming structure. We began by tracing the movements of people in their houses-habituated movements, practices, actions, and scripts. These were subdivided into three interrelated scales: movements of the limb, joint, and extremities. We then coded these three types of movements onto a strip of paper: for instance, when a hip movement (which always entails the movement of the whole body) was accompanied by a joint movement (like the flexure of an elbow or knee), the strip of paper was cut down the middle. Additional foot or hand movements were mapped by another cut. Each cut gave the paper a potential to bend sideways. We developed three such strips, each with their own patterns of cuts that were related to different choreographies or scripts. When we stapled these three strips together at the points where they were cut, we ended up with a very complex arabesque structure.
Here we get at the core of what I call soft constructivism. The interlaced arabesque of paper is not the a priori goal of design but the complex result of an analog computing process. Instead of following the planar extrusion method, we employ a process in which the elevation feeds information back to the plan, and vice versa. On its own, the strip of paper is a soft element that could not stand up, but in cooperation with others it gains a structural rigidity. In Semperian terms, it is a textile element that becomes tectonic. The relation between rigid and soft and the hierarchy between the carrier and carried are inverted.
In connecting this self-engineered diagram to the ground surface, one obtains an interlacing effect of continuities that curl away from one another, in an operation similar to the combing of hair. By reorganizing the sweeps or curls into groups oriented according to their original direction, one starts with continuity, but ends up with a system of segmentations and an object that might be described as post-blob. In stead of starting with an object that can stand up and deform it afterwards, here the curvature is the actual emergent property that constructs while it elevates.
