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The Salt of Architecture Six weeks ago I mentioned to a close friend and colleague of mine, that I would be talking on a symposium in Washington. He asked for the subject of the symposium and I was confident enough to answer: „Architecture and Alchemy“.
He looked at me, as if he had just discovered a serious kind of mental derangement. The experience loosened my hand how to write this paper. To walk through that gap. As the world of alchemy is, –and not without reason, associated with the twilight
of secret laboratories and mysterious codes, isn’t it an impossible mission
and finally an unhonourable effort to direct the so called light of reason on
the glowing fire of alchemical art? I want to start by quoting Fritz Neumeyer (Professor for Architecture Theory at the TU Berlin), who – knowing me and my concerns- established the title to my work "The Salt of Architecture“. I quote – from a publication on the Berlin architect Benedict Tonon -: " One of the finer habits that the architecture of Modernity has developed is that from time to time it sheds the straight-jacket of its formal and functional cloak which history has tailored to an all too close fit. The history of anthropomorphic representation, beginning in the days of antiquity and using the human body to express and characterize architectural manifestations, describes just one such process of architecture shedding its skin. (....) Modernity’s confidence in formal design did not rest- and this is a fact frequently overlooked- unilaterally on Cartesian geometry and modern idealism with its mathematically derived concept of the cosmos. Even an artist like Mies van der Rohe, whose buildings appear so „square“ in body and spirit, entertained – not just in the early nineteentwenties – a strong interest in the organic, collecting the pertinent books which represented the state of the art of looking at things in terms of formal expression in the flora and fauna of Nature." I have at least one of the books in my office that Fritz Neumeyer is referring
to: Karl Blossfeldt, the well known German photographer of the nineteen twenties. It is not at all difficult to imagine I would say. Changing profession and becoming priest the signs would drastically convert into: "Relate to the invisible". Of course, the musée imaginaire“, the unconscious, collective field of knowledge, within which the architect finds forms, has been the field of interest of many architects in the last thirty or forty years. Such encyclopedean museum houses a Kaleidoscope of built images. So what then does an architect do, who is interested in the invisible? The architect feels at home while reading books by Marco Frascari, where finding such wonderful modest sentences as: "The task of the architect is to make visible what is invisible“ Then, to make visible, the so prepared architect looks for a reasonable structure, plan and detailing which all together at the same time should also be an explicit sign, a signature, for the meaningful construing of the building. This sign, this nature of signature of the architect not only relates to the project itself, to the city and the social demands, but to his or her being in the world. This is not a praise for the artist-architect, in the sense of a freely imagining creator. But a praise for the architect-urbanist, who transcends the functional and pragmatic needs of a building into a meaningful relationship with the city and art. As signs are unfortunately loosing there value for the sake of a globalized media society, the architect – though of course not only he- struggles with representation. If then architects make there way through images of microcosms and macrocosms, why should the designs lack functionality? Various artists of the late 20th century started to relate their work to primary materials and alchemical images, often combined with serious interest in natural science. Such interest in material and body is exaggerated and strange? If there is anything strange it is the disappearance of the creation of an enveloping myth, but such is likely to be the cause of the shift. Interest in the human being as an image creator leads quite naturally to interest in the images of the body and the different values that have been given to "flesh and stone“. I suppose we are all lucky not to be valued to often against the ideal body of the Renaissance, nor the machine like figures of Schlemmer and the Bauhaus. We are very unlucky to be continuously confronted with the market driven images of female or male body dolls. Remarking on the qualities of the human body at the dawn of the 21st century hopefully means accepting individuality and looking for a representation that includes and does not exclude human nature.
Over centuries or I am tempted to say over thousands of years salt played an important role in religion, culture and state economy. The salt tax was one of the first taxes ever invented and before the French revolution it also was the most oppressing one to French farmers. In modern chemistry a salt is defined as a compound formed from an acid by the
replacement of all or a part of it‘s hydrogen by a metal or a base. The characteristic
reaction is:
When animal skin is covered with thick layers of salt the same capacity is employed. The salt dries the tissue through osmosis and by binding the cell water. According to Paracelsius and related to alchemical terms salt is an ash, an ash of that which remains in the process of combustion. The Swiss doctor introduced the idea of three primary elements into the cosmos of alchemy: sulfur- mercury and salt Salt, more precise it’s alkali components, have the nature to –violently - attract water, they "burn“ water. Using the process of osmosis already antiquity was aware of the effects of salt on meat, animal or human skin. It was used for thousands of years for the preservation of food and helped for the mummification procedures in Egypt. Salt has therefore been conceived as a purifying agent. Conceiving salt as a matter that kept natural goods "in shape“ while preserving it from decay, salt was seen as "what holds matter together“ and therefore compared with the soul. Somewhere I even red that Paracelsius perceived salt as the "stone of wisdom“, the goal of all studies. If this is true it would be some truly democratic wisdom, as we would all have the same potential. The common salt crystal is called a pure, perfect cube and we value the pure
and relate it to the sacred. You certainly know the German artist Josef Beuys and may have heard of Beuys lifelong interest in alchemy. I quote from the catalogue Thinking is form / The drawings of Joseph Beuys: "The importance of antroposophy is evident in the small ink drawing Untitled ( Evolution ). (...) Going from left to right, the diagram traces the narrowing path from the early age of myth to the time of Christ, through the age of reason. (...) In the lower left of the Untitled ( Evolution ), the usual formulation of Beuy’s sculpture theory – the passage from chaos to form – is presented in an alchemical context: sulfur, mercury, and salt, the three universals in alchemy, make up the three stages of the sculptural process. Sulfur signifies energy, and salt, with it’s crystalline composition, form. The two are mediated by mercury, the element of movement and the spirit.“ Beuys used the salt crystal to explain what he called the "death zone“ of modern society. The salt crystal as an absolute ideal form, without movement and in this way without warmth represented for Beuys the spiritual desolation of modern man! As an end-product of combustion it meant to be an extra without life, but at the same time with some mysterious potentiality of a fertilizer. So what is the relation between the "pure“ and the "sacred“? One really famous example of the distorted value of the notion of "pure“ can be explained by reminding the research that Gottfried Semper, German architect and art historian of the 19th.century published on the Greek temples. Semper showed that the Greek temple in Antiquity was colorfully painted. But nevertheless the mythos of the pure Greek white architecture is happily surviving. I will return to Beuys for some more warmth and movement soon, but first fertilize this ground with some salt from the Old Testament. One of the strong images of salt in the Old Testament, where salt is seen as a gift of god, but here as a punishment, is Lots wife.Lots wife found herself being forced into a salt pillar while being tempted to look back on her past, the city of Sodom. May be one has listened to that story to often, but if I imagine anybody I know turned into a salt pillar,- the image is just outstanding. The pillar of salt suggests both: permanence and curse. The salt pillar might stand for the making permanent of an unconsciousness that refuses a call. Lot’s wife by looking back to a life of security traps in a life negating spell. To help such person, -just in case, you might carry some sweet water, while the solution of such treatment: salt water can be used for respiratory therapy. Walking at a sea shore, tiny salt water drops enter the lung and because of their electrolytic potential they activate the blood circulation in the lung. Both fire and salt are of dynamic nature and produce change, their nature is
a creative negativity. However, fire has the power to consume and to destroy
and salt carries the idea of suffering. Though in the second image no salt grain is mentioned but a grain of wheat, the image somehow is similar. A communion is attained by "dying to self“, a baptismal turn to life. The grain of wheat it seems to me, dies not in the real sense but it dies in it’s being a grain, it becomes a plant, a product not only of it’s own but of earth, water and sun. Beyond the struggles of Lots wife here the religious symbolism of salt is one of brotherhood, sacrifice, permanence and the union, that Yahweh made with David. Remember how Beuys used the salt crystal as an image of the "death zone“, the purest crystal as the coldest point, a point of desolation of modern man from spirituality. One does not have to quote Nietzsche now to prove that Beuys is in good companionship with his image. Unfortunately the term "pure“ became distorted and confused in a somehow life negating sense. Indeed who wouldn’t be attracted by the ennobling potentiality of the word? An indigenous country is called culturally "pure“, a concept should be developed with greater consequence, an idea should be explained while getting rid of unnecessary details. We value "the pure“ to mark boundaries or keep boundaries clear. The boundaries of bookpages are supposed to be clear and pure while in the Middle Ages a book without illuminations and images at the edges would have been called a poor book. One is led to believe in a colorful light to enlighten the white of Modernity. If some time ago "Architecture has reached it’s end“, the negativity has to become a creative, a slightly salty one. My praise as Marco Frascari would say is for "Monsters in Architecture“ and for anthropomorphism in architectural theory. My very personal signature as an architect is the salt and hopefully I have thrown some light on the story without spoiling the pleasure of the fire. Talking all the time about fire, you might already imagine my architecture to look really wild. But being an outdoor and nature lover, fire makes me feel and associate some careful and thoughtful detailed preparation. As Beuys has chosen fat in order to learn from and with a material all kind of different structures, form and chaos, I choose the salt as a material that should be valued in all variety of manifestations. As an architect, which is of course different from being an artist, the project itself with the various problems of orientation, urban integration and spatial images, has to be the subject of attention, not a theoretical idea. To integrate my ideas as artist in my architectural work, means also this care for the specification of the project as for the characteristic of each material and joint. There is a lot of warmth in this continuos taking care. Just sometimes, articulating a strange enigmatic joint happens a little salto mortale, demonstrating that the imagination was led beyond the known, may be a monster has been born. To relate my theory to the practice and to end my talk I am showing some slides of a single family house I finished last year in Berlin- Frohnau. The house consists today of two– not perfect- cubes of different high and size,
one with a pleasant 40 m² roof terrace at it’s top. You will find the overlapping of two circles on the entrance door of the house, a detail that you might be familiar with. Being a meaningful architectural demonstration it is ontological. Besides it is a reference to Marco Frascari and the cover of his book "Monsters of Architecture“. Another example for a detail that refers to the two cubes of the plan and to
the "Salt of Architecture“ are the larch lasts, that you find on the entire
facade and in section are cubes of 25 x 25 mm. Thank you for your attention. |
In fact there are lines of tiny cubes forming a second skin to the house.