ASSIMILATION  

The absorption and integration of people, ideas, or culture into a wider society or culture.
The process of becoming similar to something.
The process of taking in and fully understanding information or ideas.

According to the Oxford Dictionary.

Since its foundation in 1865 by British banker Thomas Sutherland, the Hongkong  and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) has changed its headquarters four times. Curiously, all four headquarters were built in the same plot at Victoria Bay in Hong Kong; each version was demolished and replaced with a new building and new branding strategy to reflect Hong Kong’s shifting identity from colonial economy to a significant participant in the global free market.

The first version, a neoclassical building in the fashion of its European contemporaries, opened the road to a full assimilation of western architecture in the area, becoming one of the main examples of the neoclassical style in the Far East. Twenty years later, the building was demolished and replaced by a larger project  in the Victorian style, following the trend of colonial architecture in the British Empire. This headquarters would last until 1934, when Hong Kong became an important player in the proto-globalized economy, consequently requiring a larger and more modern building. More than ten stories high, the new Art Deco headquarters stylistically mirrored its North American counterparts. Finally, rushing to be assimilated by growing global capitalism during the 1970’s, Hong Kong developed into a major international financial centre. Once again, the building proved insufficient, and in 1978, was torn down and replaced with their current headquarters by Foster+Partners in 1986. The project became one of the most explicit examples of a developing region’s eagerness to be assimilated into an external idea of a global market, adopting the skyscraper as a symbol of the emerging economy in Asia.

The HSBC headquarters enacts two conditions of assimilation in architecture: as the physical presence of a foreign reigning power—in the case of the first neoclassical and Victorian versions —or as a voluntary desire to be perceived as part of a global identity, culminating in the current techno-corporate tower by Foster+Partners. Assimilation is a double-edged process, actively used by both the ones who wish to assimilate and by those who wish to be assimilated.

In this short issue, a heterogeneous group has shared their views on assimilation, using different media and distinct approaches to address the duality of this process. David Bergé tackles the role of infrastructure in the making of a contemporary idea of a society’s identity by conjuring a notorious Roman road curator, Asli Çiçek takes us into her personal miniature’s world and explores how this representation technique has been used by a myriad of different cultures, Louis De Belle shares his enticing captures on vernacular assimilation, Dennis Lagermann dissects a pivotal moment in the making of European identity, and Nile Greenberg raises the possibility of a charged ubiquity in Mies’ Patio House.

Although Assimilation, like the remaining Building Identity processes of Appropriation, Rejection, and Conciliation, has been a constant throughout history, its specific duplicity highlights its relevance in the current moment, as the number of forces, of wills, which influence our perspectives and decision-making seem to be at an all-time high. With this issue, we share with you a number of suggestions of how Assimilation relates to architecture, and we open the doors onto new perceptions of our Identities.



This interview is the first of a series of four on Building Identities. In this series we will present a questionnaire -loosely based on a set of identity questionnaires composed during the 80’s and 90’s- which intends to assess the perception the interviewees have of the society they are inserted in and of their own role in the building of this society’s identity.

Our first interviewee is Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke, an architect, architecture historian, editor and professor of architecture history.

 

In your opinion What are the defining traces of contemporary society’s identity? Either in a global or local context.

In the western context, the only one I can claim any familiarity with: an extreme degree of self-absorption, with the attendant prevalence of identity politics and primary emotional reactions, such as indignation or outrage, over rationality. I find it striking how genuine and crucial emancipatory movements — regarding such issues as all aspects of identity — have transformed into issues that are so easily manipulated by both consumerism and populism, all while humanity as a whole is facing literally existential threats.

How do you position yourself towards these traces?

I’m conflicted, as I recognize the potential value and variety — as well as necessity — of the trends outlined above, and the potential of new technologies and media to radically change the ways in which we think, interact, and do research. So I try to engage with these questions, critically and to the best of my limited ability — see also question the fourth question.

Is Architecture relevant to the building of the identity of a society? In which way? or Why not?

Historically, architecture has legitimized its existence by proclaiming its capacity to express the identity of society. The fact that buildings are rooted in the soil, often built at least partly from locally available materials, and accommodate customs that can be alleged to be local or particular to a given society, has been used since Vitruvius to argue for the necessity of architecture, and the need for architecture to reflect the values of society. The fact that this argument has been so pervasive, has probably to do with the fact that buildings are essential to our sense of place, and that many monuments express some notion of political or social order. However, neither ‘function’ is a prerogative of architecture — our sense of place, for instance, is as much informed by ‘architecture’ as by ‘non-architectural’ buildings, by landscapes, smells and sounds, languages and accents, and social interactions and events. So I believe that this slippage — turning a very generic sense of how buildings define a particular place in a specific society — or in the life of a random group of individuals — into a prerogative and legitimation of architecture, should be viewed very critically. I do think that the work of the last decade or so of architects and planners to think about, and work with design and planning processes, regulations, real estate development, user participation etc is very relevant, and reflects and possibly transforms processes in society, also because they engage with collectives, as opposed to either individuals or abstract entities such as ‘the city’ (as in city branding through architecture), ‘the region’ or ‘the country’.

 Are you conscious of your role, as an architectural historian, in the building of an architectural and social identity?

As a teacher of architectural history, I have increasingly become aware of that role. On the one hand, because so much of our historical patrimony has come into being through processes involving the construction of political or social identity — raising the question of exactly how and why architecture enables such construction, and to what extent it makes architecture complicit in sustaining particular power structures. On the other, because as an architectural historian we tell stories, and need to think not only of the subject and plot of our stories, but also who our audience is. It is more diverse, with more varied cultural and intellectual backgrounds than when I studied architecture, and it has also different political sensibilities, some more sophisticated than mine at their age, but also some less — the latter is especially true with regard to a sense of history, which in my experience has changed radically over the last 20 years. So we need to think about how to make these stories accessible, enticing, and relatable. In my view, this situation does not necessarily entail changing the curriculum per se — I do believe that we have to teach and research things we know something about, through our studies and lived experience, which in my case is the highly canonical European architectural history of circa the last 500 years. But it does challenge us to find new kinds of stories, and finding new ways of doing history, so our stories can become parts of other stories as well.

We would like to focus now on a specific Identity Building process: Assimilation. It is the first process, out if the four we proposed, we are approaching in this cycle. It entails two different motions: one by the ones who wish to be assimilated and another by the reigning identity which assimilates. How do you see this process and these two moments in the history of architecture, specifically in print?

I find assimilation a very problematic notion, as it implies — as in your question — a duality between a ‘reigning’ identity and another that wishes or has to ‘assimilate’. The preoccupation with assimilation is perhaps a side-effect of the astounding process by which the sophisticated deconstruction of ontologies such as identity as occurred in the 1980-90s has resulted in the reification of different identities over any consideration about what might actually be shared, and about what might be complex and ambiguous if it is not explicitly identified and flagged as such. At the same time, it should be granted that architecture opens itself to this question precisely because architecture exists as a cultural practise by its claim to embody the values of a society (cf. question 3). In that sense, architecture is almost by definition an attribute of a ‘reigning’ society — see the dedication of Vitruvius to Augustus. Piranesi suggested that the Roman empire fell because the more primitive people coveted its sophisticated architecture; no assimilation here, but conquest. But these are ultimately highly limited perspectives on very complicated historical processes, where roles often reverse and entangle. Again, here it is our task not to settle on one version of the story, but to keep doubting and asking questions.

This complexity is, I think, well illustrated by the role of print in the diffusion of architectural models. What does it mean when we encounter a Serlian portico in Peru, executed in painted wood? Of which of these two motions does it form part? The way we answer these questions tells us much about our implicit assumptions (for instance, about how we interpret and value sophistication), and the degree to which we want to believe that architecture is capable of exerting hegemony or authority.

 

 

Maarten Delbeke (°Bruges, 1970) studied architecture at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Ghent University, where he obtained his PhD in 2001. After the Scott Opler Fellowship in Architectural History (Worcester College, Oxford), he became a post-doctoral fellow with the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (F.W.O.). In 2005-6 he started teaching at the Universities of Ghent and Leiden. At Leiden he led the research project The Quest for the Legitimacy of Architecture 1750–1850, funded with a VIDI-grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (N.W.O.). In 2014 he became full professor at Ghent University. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Architectural Histories, the online open access journal of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).
Maarten Delbeke has been Visiting professor at Griffiths University, Australia (2013) and Visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal (2004). He has obtained several grants from the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome (B.H.I.R.) for research at the Belgian Academy in Rome. He is member of the advisory board for Architectural History, the journal of the SAHGB, and OverHolland (TU Delft), and a member and previously president of the Board of Directors of the CIAUD-ICASD, which publishes the architectural journal A+. He is a senior member of the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome. From 2006-2009 he was Field Editor at CAAReviews for Architecture and Urbanism until 1800. He is currently a Professor at the GTA ETH in Zürich.

“There are few things more foreign than our modern infrastructure. That is precisely what renders it so relevant, for its assimilation by the conquered peoples is key to peace keeping within the empire.”

 
Septimus Severus, Curator of the Roman Imperial Road System during part of the II century

 

 

David Bergé lives in Athens and Brussels and practices photography through the lens of the body. His work – taking the form of silent Walk Pieces, durational photo-installations, performances and publications – reveals and unfolds the layers and complexities of urban infrastructure. Recent presentations have taken place at Extra City, Antwerp; State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; and the Archiv der Avantgarden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD).  www.davidberge.be

The oldest surviving, full translation of Euclid’s Elements has been made by Adelard of Bath in XII century, from an Arabic version into Latin. The title page of the book is an illustration, which shows a woman, holding a compass over a table laid with other tools and few students watching her. All figures are placed frontally while the table top is seen from above. The rules of perspective are not respected but there is still a spatial depth to the depicted scene. The decisions of how to show what are precise, framed in the bowl of the letter P drawn in red. This type of drawing wasn’t unusual in the Middle Ages; the rather unusual element in the composition is the personification of Geometry as a woman ¹. The illustration itself is an example of ‘miniature paintings’. Their main characteristics are not being concerned with light, proportion within the context or representing the reality one to one. The description of miniature comes from minium in Latin for the lead, which was used to produce the red pigment to delineate the content of the illustration. The term also refers to miniatura in Italian, which, given the small sizes of these drawings in handwritten illuminated manuscripts, has become a fitting etymology as well.

 

Having grown up in Istanbul and long before I acquired my architectural formation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich I had seen countless mosaics in similar fashion, narrating -mostly- biblical stories in byzantine churches and colourful miniature drawings depicting scenes of the Ottoman court life or the cities concurred by sultans. All these drawings were fascinating to the eyes of a child in their narrative qualities rather than representing reality accurately. They left some space for imagination since they have been made through choices on how to represent each object in a scene in the best way- even if it would create an impossible composition in terms of reality.

 

In youthful attempts of liberating myself from my Turkish roots and becoming ‘as European as possible’ I took a big detour via what I found necessary to appropriate, among others also the ‘European’ techniques of drawing until, several years later, I came back to recognise the qualities of this object related thinking of miniature drawings. I also had to discover that the miniature drawing commonly associated with islamic cultures, had actually a much longer history, of which a considerable part belongs to Christian imagery in gospels. In medieval times the masters of these illustrations were Armenians who have been influenced by the Byzantine art and later reigned by the Ottoman Empire.

Mixed with the elaborate Persian craftsmanship of the miniature paintings this form of art reached a refinement in the XV and XVI centuries, which is to be seen in several chronicles of campaigns of Sultans or the daily life in Topkapı Palace. This period coincides with two important moments of European history: the invention of printing press in 1450 by Gutenberg and the establishment of the geometric rules for accurate representations of reality during Renaissance. Both meant the disappearance of miniature painting from the European tradition, first causing the replacement of handwritten manuscripts with printed books and the latter by the improvements in perspective drawings both technically and artistically achieved by masters such as Da Vinci, Della Francesca, Dürer and Van Eyck. The differences in attitude between the search for perfection in perspective drawing and the subjectivity of miniature paintings become unmissable if the etching of the Perspective Machine of Dürer is viewed next to any illustration from Chronicle of Stages of Iraq and Persia Campaign by Matrakçı Nasuh ² .

 

Both worked around same time slot but are entirely different in their aims. Dürer looks for methods to measure and project a scene onto canvas. He even creates a tool for that and meticulously observes the scene to ‘re-construct’ it. His contemporary, the miniaturist, takes every piece of building on its own right, turns them around the way they should be seen. The space left in between them loses its direction and overall scenery is made in the way the miniaturist wants us to see it. The movement between the buildings or interiors doesn’t follow one direction, some of the pieces are seen from above, others in elevation or in perspective. Colours replace the game of light, but the seeming flatness of the illustration bears more depth than seen by the first glance.

Evidently the topics differ between islamic and christian narratives even if islamic miniature drawing has taken over some stylistic notions from christian traditions. Nonetheless, a crucial change of attitude is also perceivable. While the Renaissance increasingly emphasised the authorship of the artist, the islamic miniature paintings were mostly attributed and unsigned. Also human figures are absent in the city depictions of illustrators such as Nasuh.

Both these withdrawals are related to the sufi tradition which doesn’t put value on the human life since it describes it as temporary, hence not worth to be represented. This marks perhaps the value of the controversial issue about cultural assimilation: the Ottoman miniature painting grew further in its own way, despite stylistic miscellany fed by other cultures. When two centuries later the Ottoman Empire entered a messy Westernisation process mainly by mocking and importing European ways of life the miniature paintings became an eclectic mixture between correct perspectives and stylistic habits. More elaborate, elegant pieces were produced in the far away Indian court, showing beautiful architectures with scenes generous on narratives and human figures. The quality of miniature being a subjective interpretation of a scene and letting objects relate to themselves rather than one absolute composition survived in those paintings until XIX century.

 Despite the freedom these miniature drawings offer in the representation of reality my interest lays more in the way of thinking that comes along with it. During architectural studies various skills are taught, which help to communicate the architectural statements, suggestions. Those skills remain only mediums to provide solutions to problems if they are not mixed with personal fascinations; but architecture made without fascinations remains flat and generic on whichever scale it is produced. As solution-oriented approach always hits its limits to deal with the complexities of the world the aspect of fascination feeds the drive to create instead of to solve. I operate in a niche of architecture where the coherent atmosphere surrounding objects, artefacts is more important than a solution-based approach. My projects are usually categorised as scenography but I cherish more the definition of exhibition architecture. For a long time scenography has been a term only in theatre where a scene is watched from a static position of the spectator. In his Ten Books of Architecture Vitruvius describes skēnographia as the representation of buildings in perspective, their façade and sides on one drawing. The term also includes the design and painting of a scenery supporting a narrative; the setting consisting of representational or abstract elements, the creation of dramatic effects by steering artificial light and design of costumes. But the spectator remains on his chair, the actors move on the stage.

Yet precisely this static position of the spectator watching a scene is the main reason why I refer to my practice as making ‘exhibition architecture’. In an exhibition the spectator moves and the main figures of the narrative stay on their assigned positions. Architecture, being different than painting and in its nature closer to the sculpture, requires the movement of the human to be fully experienced. While designing architectural spaces this idea of movement starts usually with circulation diagrams, sketchily spreading arrows over floor plans. It is not different while designing exhibition spaces: there is an entrance, an exit and a narrative path to be followed in between. Yet like walking between the buildings in a city also in exhibitions every piece can be approached from various directions and experienced differently. This very banal recognition of movement through the space and its ever-changing perception defines my approach to the (museum) space: rather than making rooms I work with elements which don’t only give a background to the exhibits but also refer to themselves. The narrative of the exhibition has to happen in between those and remains an open, ‘undecided plane’. This approach grows almost naturally with my personal fascination for the miniature paintings and perhaps it indicates a certain assimilation  of methods lying far from my discipline.

 

 

Nevertheless, in cultural production (to which architecture certainly belongs) nothing comes without the confrontation and processing of the already existing. Obviously much of the education concerning cultural production involves acquired knowledge both theoretical and practical. Thereby knowledge can be described as a sum of what is known, but what is known is not only what is learned. There are many things we know before we learn others, things we experience and forget, fascinations which are related to memories and memories, which create fascinations. The beauty of knowledge lays in its perpetual character and the formation, change, interpretation or adaptation of ‘the known’. All our senses contribute to the notion of knowledge, associations mingle with our perception; as a result identity emerges from revisiting our personal and global history.

¹The personification of Geometry as a woman alludes to an older allegorical imagery of the seven liberal arts represented as women, defined by Martianus Capella in the V century in his encyclopaedic work  ‘De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii’ (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury) ²Matrakçı Nasuh (1480-1564) has joined the campaign to Irak and Persia (1520-1537) and the conquest of Moldavia by Suleiman I. He documented all cities, landscapes they passed through during the campaign. His depictions are without human figures and according to many records very accurate even if the architectural drawings seem very simplistic at first sight. Nasuh’s other works include the Sum of History and Suleimanname, the latter documenting the the court life in Topkapı Palace during Suleiman I’s reign.

Aslı Çiçek graduated from the architecture and design department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. During and after her studies she worked for architecture offices in Germany, Austria, Netherlands and Belgium before she founded her own practice in 2014, focusing on exhibition architecture. As a guest professor she runs the master graduation studio Narrative Space and Materiality at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint Lucas Brussels. She has published several articles on architecture and art and is part of the editorial board of Oase Journal for Architecture. She is based in Brussels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louis De Belle (b.1988 in Milano) studied at the Politecnico di Milano (BA) and Bauhaus–Universität Weimar (MFA). His works have been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Libèration and The Independent. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums such as The Royal Albert Hall in London and the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin. He lives and works between Milano and Berlin.

Introduction

On August 24th, anno domini 410, northern swashbucklers have decapitated the mother of the world and left the Italian cities as parts of a corpse. Over the following centuries the grandeur of the ancients became tales to be told on the hearth fire and the ruins of the old world, aqueducts and forums, ramrod-straight roads and statues were no more than silent witness of a gracious past, furnishing the landscape. Powerless, except for keeping their secrets. Conquered by barbarians, the identity of the proud Roman citizen, ruler of the world, was cut off.

These admittingly pathetic lines are an attempt to give an impression of the melancholy that may have captured the Italian cities at the beginning of the middle ages. In the aftermath of this, many generations since the fall of Rome, Venice, Genoa, Pisa and many more Italian cities either became a republic of their own or independent capsules within the Byzantine or Frankian empires. But, regardless of their new independent status, the built architecture of this time reveals that the city-states presented a lack of a clearly defined own identity under the dominion of Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, northern Italy became a hub for the trade between Asia and Europe, giving rise to successful and assertive merchant families, who could afford to employ stone-masons and master-builders from abroad. But this also meant that these paid workers brought their own ways of how to build. Which may be the reason, why edifices of those regions and time display a conglomerate of Gothic and Byzantine influences alongside fragments of Roman heritage, like the sacral Cathedral of Pisa (Fig. 1) or the profane Doge`s Palace of Venice.

For the citizens of italy, this may have resulted in a strange situation. Wealth and self-confidence had raised the demand for independence, while the borrowed identity of recently built edifices somehow conveyed a kind of dominance. At the same time, the remains of a greater past still were present in the surrounding environment and so the idea may have appeared to rather step in line with the ancient heritage.

In Search for Harmony (Raising the Dead)

On the verge of Renaissance, Ciriaco de Pizzicoli, who is said to have been one of the first archeologists, started to investigate on the remains of the great ancients. Although Ciriaco and his mecenas Cardinal Bessarion were more drawn towards Greek tradition, they affirmed the image of the Roman citizens as “good-natured people” and the perpetuation of Hellenism within the Roman Empire (Lamers, 2016, p.109)¹. Ciriaco referred to built artefacts rather than written documents because he deemed them to be more reliable than parchment (Mangani, 2017)². But other than the interwoven fabric of mysticism and passed-on experience about material properties of the elaborate gothic canon, suitable to praise the Lord but not to serve Man, these artefacts were still silent. So all Ciriaco could do in order to distinguish the regional Italian city-states from imported canons of form was to draft and sketch, to copy motifs and to measure geometric relations. In the expelling of medieval dogmatism from this seemingly superficial investigation, a deeper sense was presumed to be found in the ancient proportionality.

Alberti took up Ciriaco`s thread and developed his instrumentis mathematicis for further investigation (Fig. 2). He distinguished between the beauty (pulcheritudo) that comes from within, touching the soul of the observer from decoration (ornamentis), which at best may cover a flaw. Other than the contemporary understanding of beauty, this reduction on purely geometrical relationality was not superficial at all. This beauty was seen as the result of a harmony living within proportions. All these forms had to have a meaning but the sense they were supposed to make had to be re-established. And so Alberti posed the question:

 

And now again, what can be the Reason, that just at this Time all Italy should be fired with a Kind of Emulation to put on quite a new Face?³

He leaves the answer to this question open, but he answers it in exemplifying the aesthetics of antiquity as defined in fixed ratios and measurable proportionality.

So, in order to not simply raise the dead, but to make them talk how to revitalize this touch of the soul, Alberti created a first step towards the assimilation of Classical identity. In this respect, his lineamenta were nothing less than the invention of a level of information on which all the individual fragments of ancient artifacts could become identical. With only two elements, the line and the circular arc, he established a space of comparability on which the secret of beauty could be deciphered.

Constituting Identity

Today, it seems to be a commonplace that with the appearance of the lineamenta, the plan was invented and the modern Architect emerged. William of Sens, Gerhard von Rile and Peter Parler, three medieval Architects, famous characters of their time, would probably disagree. These were all distinguished personalities. Gerhard von Rile left us “Riss F” (Fig. 3), the oldest still existing elevation of the Cologne Cathedral, Peter Parler handled many construction sites at the same time, among them the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, the Charles Bridge, and the Church of St. Barbara in Kutna Hora.

 

But if it is not the person of the Architect or the ability to draw plans, what has changed? The three mentioned medieval builders, although they would probably suit the modern image of “the Architect” by far better than these weird eccentrics of Renaissance, were born as sons of a mason, raised in a mason-family, educated as an apprentice to a master of the brotherhood of masons, and consequently, becoming fellow guild members. Their identity was a gift to the cradle and a cage for life.

Quite unlike Alberti, who was an illegitimate merchant son from Genoa. He had acquired his knowledge in schools and not as a family member within a brotherhood. He had to develop his individuality before he could start to constitute identity. So, a part of his writings is basically about defining himself as an Architect. He reframed the image of the Architect under a new premise, stating that an Architect should have clarified and solved all questions concerning a particular building in advance, including those of detailed geometrical solutions. Furthermore, he should keep an overview of how to finish the construction within a manageable time frame.

 

 

Yet, it appears to be a bit bold to state that with the lineamenta the building would have become a mere copy of the plan. This idea is probably based on a cite of Alberti, where he says that it is possible to find the same lines on a large number of buildings. But Renaissance did not actually produce identical buildings. It seems more likely to assume that on the informational level of the lineamenta the identity between parts of buildings, is being revealed. Alberti had a name for this. He called these identical parts membra and explicitly related those to the limbs of living beings. And this is exactly why thinking about the seemingly superficial beauty of things becomes so important to Alberti and his successors. They expected to find the secrets of the harmony of life in the geometrical relations of the ancient artefacts. Alberti also found a name for this and he called it concinnitas, the harmony that resides in between proportions. The lineamenta, identical to each other on an elementary level, were identical to the morphisms, found in artefacts and at the same time served as blueprints to create new artefacts and perpetuate the dignity of the great ancients. The bearers of beauty, the keepers of the secret of concinnitas are identical parts, while every building remains to be an individual. Technically, buildings of Renaissance had been facsimile, similar enough to keep a certain identity while each one is as individual as any corpus. Like Alberti was relating the parts of buildings to limbs of beings, the sketch of the Vitruvian Man fusing the circle and the square displays identity only on the level of geometry (Fig. 5). Giving a hypothesis, one could say that Renaissance pushed identity from the medieval cage for life to the level of information by assimilation of the morphisms of ancient Rome.

 

 

To Serve and to Comfort

Just as Ciriaco was interested in finding clues to human dignity by examining ancient artefacts, Alberti was interested in extracting a new sense from the meaning of the alphabet of ancient forms and in order to comfort human needs. So it seems hardly surprising that Alberti opposed the Vitruvian virtues “firmitas, utilitas, venustas” with his own categorization in order to get to the bottom of identity as comfort. His own categories maintain the trisection of the spectrum of building requirements, but he replaces durability by necessity, utility by commodity, and attraction by pleasure (voluptas).

In this span of utilizing the same membra on the informational level for individual buildings, the assimilation of identity enters into a kind of double relation. On the one hand ancient forms have been assimilated into Renaissance Architecture to establish an identity, which lies in between the Italian city states and the heritage of the Roman Empire in distinction to medieval mysticism. On the other hand, the regional and local building techniques and traditions were assimilated to establish an identity based on Italian ars vivendi under the purpose of giving comfort.

 

¹Lamers, Hans (2016). Greece Reinvented: Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy. Leiden: Brill.
²Mangani, G. Ciriaco d’Ancona e l’invenzione della tradizione classica, in: In Limine, pp 93-108, (2017) IULM, Milano http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni/libri/978-88-6969-168-3/ciriaco-dancona-e-linvenzione-della-tradizione-cla/ (Acc. 07/2018)
³(Alberti, 1755, p 563)

Dennis Lagemann is a Doctoral Candidate in Architecture. He holds a Diploma of Engineering in Architecture and a Master’s degree of Science in Architecture. He conducted additional studies in Philosophy and Mathematics at the Department of Arts & Design in Wuppertal and at ETH Zurich. He was teaching CAD- and FEM-systems, worked as a teaching assistant in Urban Design and Constructive Design until 2013.
On the practical side, he worked for Bernd Kniess Architekten on multiple housing and exhibition projects in Cologne, Dusseldorf and Berlin.
In his research activities, Dennis was a member of PEM-Research-Group at the Chair of Structural Design at the University of Wuppertal, where he became a Doctoral Candidate in Computational Design. From 2015 on he is participating in the scientific discourse about computation in Architecture and giving talks at conferences, including ACADIA, CAADRIA and ArchTheo. He is now located in Zurich at ETH / ITA / CAAD. His main research interest lies on the question how historical and contemporary notions of space, time and information are being addressed in Architecture.

The design for an architect’s early house carries an inordinate weight in his/her biography. I view these inaugural projects as portraits of a person and of a career beyond, imbuing them with myth, projecting details and always giving them the benefit of the doubt. One could say that the success of these houses depends on the success of the careers beyond. Even houses which are inadequate, non-functional or generally bad are still analyzed with precision and admired from broad angles. These works are important to analyze because, in their inadequacy and inexactitude, they often reveal underlying biases as well as the references that have been assimilated into the project.

Mies van der Rohe’s early work, the Patio Houses and the variations drawn from 1931 to 1938, have had an outsized influence on a select group of architects. Mies himself used the typology as an architectural brief while teaching at the Bauhaus: student’s would draw over and over again hundreds of variations, embedding the tendencies and tone of the Patio Houses into his pupils ¹. The real assignment of all this repetition was “to judge ‘what good architecture is.’”² The Patio House is useful to articulate this question because it utilizes a narrow set of design techniques: a high walled rectangular district, a flat roof held by columns, an enclosure of orthogonal glass walls, interior partitions to divide spaces and furniture (often designed by Mies and Lilly Reich) to define the functions.

In an essay by Iñaki Abalos on the Patio House, House for Zarathustra, he argues that the Patio House is an act of self-construction. Abalos focuses on the clarity by which Mies renders the subject within. An Übermensch lives inside, it is an urban man, it is a godless house, a place of reflection. The occupant wears hand-stitched leather shoes, a man who needs to be close to the Agora. In the end, Abalos says that “Mies was creating a self-portrait, was offering his own person as a project.”³

As an architectural assignment the Patio Houses has two end-goals, one presented by Mies van der Rohe, another by Inaki Abalos. Mies chose the house as a way to learn “what good architecture is,” but Abalos’ reading is to use the house as an act of “self-construction.” These two assignments are also the question many architects intend to answer in their early houses; what good architecture is and who the subject within this new definition of space is.

Mies’ Patio Houses we’re never realized by him but we have a fair doppelganger in Philip Johnson’s 9 Ash St. house, otherwise known as Johnson’s “Thesis House.” He built the house for himself during his formal schooling at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, after he’d already been the successful architecture curator at MoMA. In my opinion, Johnson’s design for 9 Ash Street is a direct assimilation of Mies’ concept of the home. Johnson assimilated the Patio House with clarity and would go on to further advance Mies’ agenda and career with his own Mies-like practice ⁴. The house is incredibly inattentive to its neighbors, a protected precinct with a high wall, but within the wall is the garden with a one bedroom home along the all glass wall dividing the precinct.

In a 1943 issue of Architect Forum, the unknown author makes two statements 1) 9 Ash Street “is probably the best example” of Mies’ attitude towards architecture and 2) “Few people would be at ease in so disciplined a background for everyday living. But the architect, as we have seen, was not concerned with the requirements of anybody except himself.”⁵ Even in this newspaper’s description the author lays out the two points that Mies and Abalos are interested in, the architectural quality and the subject rendered by the building: Philip Johnson himself.

Another resurgence of this brief would be Rem Koolhaas’ Patio Villa in 1984, otherwise known as A House for Two Friends. At the height of postmodernity Rem’s provocative approach was to reconstruct modernism with the same fervor and literalness as his peers we’re doing with Rome. Koolhaas was at the peak of his Miesian fantasies; Friedrichstrasse Housing in 1980 (which directly credits the Patio Houses in S,M,L,XL), Casa Palestra at the Milan Triennial in 1985-1986, the Video Bus Stop in 1991 and Nexus World Housing in 1991.

Patio Villa also bears a name that sounds like a colloquial name for the group of Mies Patio House designs. The design itself is an inversion of Miesan principles, placing a patio as an object inside the house which serves multiple levels. One of OMA’s primary contributions to architectural discourse was translations of openness in plan, to section⁶. In S,M,L,XL the house is titled A Dutch Section, referring to the house’s location on a dyke, the house introduces for one of the first times, the planometric openness of Mies’ patio house to a section. It seems that Rem was struggling to assimilate and articulate his project as a variation of the Patio House, but the site and constraints pushed the project to explore early in his career how to achieve the clarity of Mies’ houses in multi-level spaces. These constraints led to a series of dramatic experiments, the most clear being an direct uphill path from the parking area, through the house, up the stair next to the patio to an outside boardwalk leading towards the woods. Rem’s desire to achieve the Patio House type along with the constraints of the site led to a radical redefinition of architecture, especially in section. The subject within is also clearly stated as A House for Two Friends while, within the project, photos feature a nude person in the shower.Ryue Nishizawa’s would also take on the Patio House brief in his project Weekend House in 1997. A crisp, low black box, the house is a single story with three patios within the boundary. This house displays many Miesian tropes, an extruded column grid, a suppression of verticality, a low chimney, intense planarity between the floor and ceiling, and an incredible openness throughout making the project nearly partition-less.

While Nishizawa had been practicing with Kazuyo Sejima for over 10 years, the Weekend House is the first project in establishing the Office of Ryue Nishizawa, a separate office from Sejima. In this respect it is fascinating that even later in his career, Nishizawa chooses to introduce himself to the world with an incredibly direct reference to Mies’ Patio House. Like the Mies house, the design is incredibly internalized, creating a unique set of rules within the boundaries of the house that establish a universe with its own rules and sense of gravity. The rules begin with a rigid and dense 2.4m square column grid which has an endless effect in the small house. Within that dense grid are the introduction of courtyards as spaces of division rather than connection. Unlike Mies’ or Rem’s house, private spaces are separated with the use of the courtyards rather than with partitions, which establish an entirely different sense of continuity then the other houses. Beyond the articulation of a specific definition of good architecture, the subject within also emerges. A natural person, extracted to the countryside, but restricted to an ideal set of nature presented in the courtyards, a miniaturization of nature to the scale of domestic furniture. Many of these techniques of architecture and the subject become distinct to Nishizawa’s practice.
In 2001-2003, Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros, design Casa Mora. Abalos and Herreros had worked on many projects and this is an exception in this list, but simultaneous to this project, Iñaki was writing his essay on the subject of self-construction in Mies Patio Houses, published in 2001. Casa Mora remains unbuilt but is presented in a series of plans with an almost identical proportion to Mies’ House with Three Courtyards. The house explicitly rejects Mies’ style of free plan, but strongly preserves the lack of hierarchy between domestic parts by introducing a stack of rectangular rooms that all share one dimension. The courtyards in the project are indistinguishable from the interior rooms- the hierarchies of facade, window, and patio are rendered neutral. Like Mies’ project, the intense orthogonal rigidity of the architecture elements actually creates dynamic and flowing circulation paths. To further the effect of openness, Abalos and Herreros show a furniture plan with all of the walls removed. The plan appears to be an almost functioning plan (at least by Mies’ standards)- the beds are far enough apart to ensure privacy, the kitchen appears far from the bedroom, but diagonal to the dining room, etc. Suddenly a deeply Miesan aura emerges- a house described only in exterior boundary and the minimum elements of life within.
Only a few years after, OFFICE KGDVS projects an extension to a house which they call a Summer House, designed and built from 2004-2006. It is their first house design which they widely publish (though it is their 7th project), and it marks a distinct switch from other previous approaches by the introduction of a more literal take on Mies’ Patio House. The extension has a simple articulation – a roof resisting on a rectangular wall forming a large patio, a continuous set of square concrete pavers, and a glass partition dividing conditioned space from unconditioned. One of unique additions is the removal of columns entirely and replacing them with mirrored structural glass panels, the width of one paver. It appears that OFFICE’s decisions to add mirror to the structural glass, rather then to emphasize the transparency, directly addresses the chromium plated columns of the Patio Houses. The concrete paver grid which is seamless from inside to outside is denser than Mies, but combined with the extended roof it produces the most convincing version so far of what the Patio House continuity would have felt like. Another notable detail is the 1m grid of black steel posts which circulate around the entire court like Mies’ brick wall, including the interior face of the existing house. The most intriguing part of this lightweight wall is the way it corrects the geometry of the irregular shaped courtyard- insisting on a rectangle instead of existing shape. OFFICE’s project is a sort of Patio House dropped into an irregular lot, scaling the exterior wall until it would fit maximally, but remain orthogonal. In the leftovers spaces between the rectangular patio and the existing wall are the necessary functions of the courtyard. This initial strategy embodies what will become a trademark of OFFICE KGDVS, geometric correction, distortion and thereby the creation of a sharp edge. The subject within (though the client is rumored to be Maarten van Severen) is a distinctly urban man. The literalness of the pavers, the metal ceiling, the single tree, you can imagine the clothing of the occupant, an urbanite, this time wearing Common Projects instead of Mies’ leather shoes.
Detlef Mertins, a Mies scholar, writes that “Mies wanted every person, like every building, to be free to realise their own immanent identity for him, the aim of order was to bring together self-generated individualities without impinging on that freedom⁷” What I doubt is that Mies’ intended his Bauhaus house brief to become an act of self-generation for architects themselves. It’s a meta assignment, that through assimilating the Patio House into their practice, different architects would be able to achieve the distinct goals of their own definitions of architecture. The Patio Houses do not describe just one man, but now serve as the medium for describing other people. The house clearly looms as a heavy burden for many architects: Johnson, Koolhaas, Nishizawa, Abalos Herreros and Geers and van Severen. There are other variations of the project: Valerio Olgiati’s Villa Alem, Smiljan Radic’s house, The Smithson’s Solar Pavilion, Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, 51n4e Arteconomy and many more.

The Patio House has been fully assimilated into architectural practice and as we lay multiple readings from different authors on top of this project, the Patio House eventually disappears. But by recognizing the subject of assimilation we see distinct readings of Mies’ project of individualization and a case of assimilation so deeply ingrained in architecture that it becomes a medium of expression itself. When a reference point achieves this kind of unanimity, it loses its wholeness, but also produces one definition of a medium within architecture. In one sense the Patio House now has more in common with oil on canvas then it does with a country house. Through the narrow set of architectural tools (the wall, the precinct, the glass, the grid etc), a young architect can prioritize, research into what makes good architecture and defines a subject within. Combined, the answers to these two questions can define the author of the house, a self-portrait in a Patio House.

P.S.
A letter to myself inaugurating this piece of research:

“I find myself in a curious position: I’m in the middle of designing my first house, holding all the anxiety of the inaugural project, and I have a narrow obsession trying to realize aspects of Mies van der Rohe’s House with Three Patios. Late into the realization of this house, it occurs to me that I am not the only architect who had dwelled on this reference for their inaugural house. I can’t shake the feeling and deep desire to realize an American variation of the Patio House. In this case, the house is defined by the massive roof sitting on top of a garden wall. A 1 foot thick double stud forms the edge of the house, never turning a corner, never forming a prism. A tall privacy fence delineates the patio and instead of a garage, merely a square paved platform to park on. The interior lacks hierarchy, a large space, adjoined by bedrooms, and office and a bathroom… There are many details in the planning of this house that relate directly to the Patio Houses. Maybe what I’m feeling is the pent up Miesian utopia presented by the Patio House itself. The feeling appears to lie dormant in many architects, waiting for the moment to realize it. Having this feeling does not automatically absorb me into this elite group, but instead gives me immense caution, approaching the project with the same reference point is a dangerous point of entry.”

^1. Mies, Detlef Mertins, 2014, Phaidon Press Limited. Pg.196
^2. Mertins, Pg. 197
^3. The Good Life, Zarathustra’s House, Inaki Abalos, First Published 2001 by Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2017, Park Books. Pg. 44
^4.Johnson had already been a long time Mies advocate, commissioning him and Lilly Reich to design his apartment in New York in 1930-31.
^5.Houses, Unknown Author, The Architectural Forum, December 1943. Pg. 91
^6.Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect, Markus Heidingsfelder, 2008.
^7.Modernity Unbound: Other HIstories of Architectural Modernity, Same Difference, Detlef Mertins, 2011, AA Publications. Pg. 142.

 

Nile Greenberg is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. The forthcoming book, The Advanced School of Collective Feeling, will be published by Park Books in 2018, co-authored by Nile and Matthew Kennedy.
Before founding NILE, Nile Greenberg worked at MOS Architects, SO – IL, and Leong Leong in New York and Los Angeles. His past experience focused on cultural, public and residential architecture. He holds a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University.