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| (c) Filip Dujardin (source) |
JIA 建築家大会 – 岡山2014/9/25-27
基調講演<建築の再コスモス化は可能か>
オギュスタン．ベルク
(英訳/English version)
The Japanese Institute of
Architects 2014 Congress, Okayama
Keynote lecture
Can we recosmize architecture ?
Augustin BERQUE
1. Cosmicity and the origin of architecture
A dozen years ago, Rem Koolhaas
ended a writing about what he has dubbed junkspace
with the following sentence: “The cosmetic is the new cosmic”.[1]
Though not dealing with literature, but with architecture and urban space, this
text was in itself a perfect sample of junkspace, with not a single indented
line in fifteen pages and no perceivable structuring of the prose, constituted
with a rambling of assertions such as the following: “It [i.e. junkspace]
replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition.
More and more,
more is more” (p. 176), “Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code” (p. 177),
“There is no form, only proliferation” (p.
177), “Junkspace is a web without a spider” (p. 179), “The idea that a
profession [i.e. architects] once dictated, or at least presumed to predict,
people’s movements now seems laughable, or worse: unthinkable” (p. 181), “a politics of systematic disarray” (p. 183),
and so on. Needless to comment, this “politics of systematic disarray” was the
author’s own claimed and acclaimed
practice not only of writing, but of building.
Now,
how has it come possible to exalt junkspace in such a way, deliberately
endorsing a “politics of systematic disarray”, “while – as Koolhaas himself writes p. 177 –
whole millennia [had] worked in favor of permanence, axialities, relationships
and proportions”?
As
seen from Japan, the above question may at first appear a bit off the mark, since
Japanese spatiality has traditionally exalted, on the contrary, asymmetry and impermanence
– mujô 無常, ukiyo浮世, to say nothing of Kamo no Chômei’s famous opening lines of An Account of my Hut (Hôjôki) : “The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the
same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not
of long duration. So in the world are man and his dwellings (ゆく河の流れは絶えずして、しかももとの水にあらず。よどみに浮かぶうたかたは、かつ消えかつ結びて、久しくとどまりたるためしなし。世の中にある人とすみかと、またかくのごとし)”[2]. This tendency[3]
is still alive, as can be witnessed by the postmodern favour of kaosu (chaos) during the bubble years in
Japan. Yet, we should not confuse the
traditional spatiality of Japanese culture with chaos or junkspace. It had its
proper order, which can immediately be felt, for example, in what remains of machinami 町並み, which can be translated with
“street array” or “town array”. Needless to say, such an array is precisely the contrary of
the disarray of junkspace.
As
a matter of fact, before the reign of junkspace, all human cultures, in their
respective worlds, have had their proper way of arranging space and thus create
their own spatiality. This is what we can call spatial array. The English word array
comes from the old French verb arreyer,
which meant to arrange, dispose orderly, and also adorn, outfit, dress. Array
has much in common with the Greek kosmos
and with the Latin mundus, save the
acceptation of “world”. The common
fundamental meaning of kosmos, mundus and array is that of order, an order which encompasses both the
disposition of things into a certain spatial array, of people into a certain society,
and the adornment of the human body – thus making a world (as for kosmos and mundus), that is the contrary of chaos.
Hence
the etymological link between the two adjectives cosmic and cosmetic,
which enables Koolhaas to end his text with the pun “The cosmetic is the new
cosmic”. Nowadays, this is indeed no more than a playing on words, because
these two adjective relate to two antithetic dimensions – a fundamental and
universal order on the one hand, a superficial and vain adornment on the other
hand – , but the fact is that in traditional societies, these two dimensions
were integrated into one and the same cosmicity,
that of a certain world: a kosmos. That
is to say that the cosmetic referred to the cosmic, and the cosmic was
expressed through the cosmetic, in a mutual relationship.
This
relation can still be seen nowadays in some societies, for instance in the body
paintings of the Aborigines in Australia, which express the very cosmicity or
integration of their proper world. In
ancient Rome, it was magnified and celebrated at each foundation of a new city,
especially by way of boring a hole
called mundus, which established a
link between the world of the living and that of the dead, and also made that
city the navel of its own world. This is
the far-off origin of the mediaeval saying that “all roads lead to Rome”[4],
since Rome was the centre of the Roman world (mundus). That same word mundus
also had the meaning of dressing and adorning the human body, especially
that of women (mundus muliebris), and
this also concerned the house, in the sense of cleaning and housekeeping. An
orderly and meaningful correspondence was thus established between the
microcosm (the body, the house) and the macrocosm (the world). Except the sense
of sacred hole (mundus), the same can
be said about the Greek word kosmos
and variously derived notions, for instance kosmètès,
which, at the scale of the macrocosm, could designate the supreme god Zeus, and
at that of the microcosm, a perfumer or a barber.
This
cosmicity was directly embodied by architecture, especially that of temples.
The Latin word templum, the root of
which relates to the idea of cutting out (temnein
in Greek), originally means a portion of space delineated in the sky by the
stick of an augur, and projected down onto the ground as a sacred enclosure (temenos in Greek) at the time of the
founding of a city. Hence the meaning of temple, that is, a particular space
establishing a correspondence between the earth and the sky. This sacred
correspondence, symbolically expressed by the architecture of the temple, is
the original meaning of the Greek word summetria,
which, as Didier Laroque reminds us, was “not ‘symmetry’ in the debased sense
which we nowadays give currently to that word [but an] exact correspondence in
form, size and position of opposed parts [and a] regular distribution of parts,
similar objects on each side of an axis, around a centre”.[5]
That is, nothing else than the symbolic array – the cosmicity – projecting the
order of the sky (kosmos) itself into an
orderly human world.
The
very idea of architecture comes from this cosmic array of the Greek temple, in
the original correspondence of the sky with the human world: “Architecture is
that which uncovers an archè, the
first element, order. Architecture is that which founds the origin”.[6] And this origin is nothing else than a
correspondence – a common measure, summetria
– between sky and earth, the macrocosm and the microcosm, nature and the
human.
2. Kosmos and (not only human)
values
Architecture, of course, is not only
symbolical ; it is necessarily also technical. Yet, opposing the technical
to the symbolical is a modern distinction which in itself partakes in the
disarray which has led to junkspace. In the cosmic array of a human world,
technique and symbol go hand in hand; and this is precisely why architecture is
cosmophanic : it makes this kosmos appear (phainein) evidently not only through its symbolicity, but, at the
same time, through its technicality.
In
his famous text Bauen wohnen denken
(Building inhabiting thinking), Heidegger has shown that “Pro-ducing (hervorbringen) is called in Greek tiktô. The root tek of this verb can also be found in the word technè, technique. For the Greeks, this word signified neither art
nor craft, but really : to make something appear as this or that, in such and
such a way, among present things. The Greeks think of technè, pro-duction, from this ‘making appear’”.[7]
Now,
making something appear as such and such a thing is also the fundamental
function of a symbol. The difference is that technique deals with the material
aspect of things, and symbol with their immaterial meaning, but they both have
the same source; that is, that which Watsuji Tetsurô, in his famous book Fûdo (1935), has dubbed fûdosei 風土性 (mediance), and defined as “the structural
moment of human existence (ningen sonzai
no kôzô keiki 人間存在の構造契機)”.[8]
Let
us here first comment on one of the main implications of this “structural
moment”. Moment here should be
understood not as a small part of time, but, like in mechanics, as a power of
moving produced by the combination of two forces – here individual Being on the
one hand, and milieu on the other hand. What then is a milieu? Watsuji here establishes a fundamental distinction between milieu
(fûdo 風土) and the natural environment (shizen kankyô 自然環境). Environment, he writes, is a
thing that modern science has abstracted from the concrete ground of human
existence – that is, mediance – in order
to make it an object, whereas milieu precisely supposes the selfhood or
subjecthood (shutaisei 主体性) of human existence in order to be
what it is: a dynamic “half” of the structural moment he calls mediance.
This
means that both the human being and the milieu (which necessarily supposes the
social link between humans) cannot exist without each other; they co-imply each
other. This radically differentiates the milieu from the environment, because
the latter does not suppose the human in order to be what it is. Watsuji
probably derived this idea from the findings of the great naturalist Jakob von
Uexküll, whom he may have heard of through Heidegger during his stay in Germany
(1927-1928). Indeed Uexküll, who profoundly influenced Heidegger at that time,
had similarly established a fundamental distinction between what he called Umwelt (milieu or ambient world) on the
one hand, and Umgebung on the other
hand, i.e. the objective data (Gebung)
of the environment. Umwelt corresponds
to what Watsuji calls fûdo, and Umgebung to shizen kankyô. The only difference is that Watsuji deals with the
human, while Uexküll deals with the living in general; and consequently,
whereas Watsuji uses the historical method of the humanities, Uexküll uses the
experimental method of the natural sciences. Yet, the founding principle of
both approaches is the selfhood of the concerned being, were it animal or human.
Owing
to the structural moment of mediance – i.e. to the co-implication of milieu and
Being –, the milieu is fraught with values, which are proper to the concerned
being. Uexküll calls such values Ton,
and analyzes a series of these, positive or negative; e.g. Esston (value as food), Hinderniston
(value as obstacle), Schutzton (value as shelter), Wohnton (value as dwelling), etc. All
this depends on the concerned animal, since different species will feed in
different ways, hide in different ways, etc. This means that food, obstacles, shelters,
dwellings etc. do not exist in themselves as such, but only through their
relationship with a certain species. The species and its milieu qualify each
other, and properly exist in this reciprocity.
From
this, and through experimentation, Uexküll deduced an absolute principle: whatever
the environment (Umgebung), a milieu
(Umwelt) is necessarily the best possible
as for the concerned species: “Optimale,
d.h. denkbar günstige Umwelt und pessimale Umgebung wird als allgemeine
Regel gelten können (An optimal milieu,
that is the most favourable one can think of, and a pessimal environment, this may be considered as a general rule)”.[9]
Though
human values are considerably more elaborated than those of other living
beings, the same principle also applies to human milieux. Each culture creates
its proper milieu, whichever the environment. Similar environments will be
interpreted differently by different societies, and as bad as may be the
environment, the resulting milieux will necessarily be the best suited to the
corresponding societies. This is exactly the rule discovered by Uexküll: pessimale
Umgebung, optimale Umwelt.
This rule has indeed be discovered by
modern science with its own experimental methods, but in fact, it had already
been formulated long before as an ontological principle by Plato in the last
few lines of the Timaeus, where it is said that “thus the world was born,
visible living containing all the visible living, (…) the biggest, best, most
beautiful and most perfect (ho kosmos
houtô, zôon horaton ta horata periechon,, (…) megistos kai aristos kallistos te
kai teleôtatos gegonen)”.[10]
Of course, Plato had no idea of what Uexküll and Watsuji, two millennia later, have dubbed mesology (Umweltlehre,
fûdoron) ; that is, the study of milieu, which is distinct from ecology, the
study of the environment. Yet this sentence contains in fact the three basic
principles of mesology. First, that the milieu (here called kosmos) is “living” (zôon); and indeed, the milieu is living
inasmuch as it partakes in the structural moment of the existence of a living
being (whereas the greater part of the environment, e.g. stones, air and water,
is not alive). Second, that the milieu is “visible” (horaton); and indeed, the milieu is what is perceived by a certain
living being (whereas many aspects of the environment, though existing
physically, are not perceived by living beings, who all perceive only some
specific aspects of it). And third, since the milieu is the best suited to the
concerned living being, it appears as endowed with superlative qualities (megistos kai aristos kallistos te kai
teleôtatos).[11]
In
the case of human realities, this entails that the milieu is fraught with the three
basic human qualities (and of course, their contraries as well): the Good, the
Beautiful and the True, which respectively found ethics, aesthetics and either religion
or science. Moreover, it entails that these three qualities imply each other and
must not be separated, otherwise the array of the world will be disarrayed, and
by definition decosmized (cease to exist as a world, and become a chaos).
Now,
this is exactly what, little by little, has been brought forth by modernity,
and – revealed in and by architecture,
precisely because architecture is “that which founds the origin” – , finally
has engendered junkspace. Let us now
analyze this process.
3. The acosmy brought forth by dualism
As Watsuji writes, mediance is the
concrete ground (gutaiteki jiban 具体的地盤)[12]
from which one abstracts the natural environment in order to make it a
scientific object. Now, since the ontological structure of mediance co-implies
(implies reciprocally) both a certain being and its milieu, this is to say that
the concerned being is also abstracted as a subject from this concrete ground. This
is precisely what was meant by Descartes when he wrote the following in the Discourse on method: “I knew thereby
that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is only thinking,
and which, in order to be, needs not any place, nor depends on any material
thing”.[13]
These few lines are the birth certificate of modern dualism, which, at the same
time and reciprocally, gave rise to the modern individual subject on the one
hand, and to the modern discrete object on the other hand, both abstracted from
their common concrete ground: the structural moment of human existence, i.e.
mediance.
By
the same token, this double abstraction was the ontological foundation of
modernity, which, little by little, was to express itself on the surface of the
Earth, ipso facto converted into an
objectified Umgebung. No more a
milieu but, as said Descartes, a pure material extensio, that is a neutral object devoid of any ontological link
with the subject’s existence.
Now,
architecture is that which, through a combination of technique and symbol,
builds a properly human abode on the Earth; that is, concretely, by
constructing adequate buildings in particular places. Then what happens in
architecture when the ontological link between place and Being is cut by
dualism? Two specifically modern events:
- First, architecture looses its
concrete ground (mediance), which is replaced by the abstraction of what Mies
van der Rohe has dubbed universal space.
Universal space is the architectural translation of one of the founding
principles of classic-modern physics: Newton’s absolute space, which is
homogeneous (the same everywhere), isotropic (the same in all directions), and
infinite. That is, the exact contrary of concrete milieux, which necessarily
are heterogeneous (since all concrete places are different and singular),
anisotropic (since, concretely, up is not down, forward is not backward, and
right is not left), and finite (since, everywhere on this planet, there necessarily
is a horizon). The resulting architecture is that which Philip Johnson has
called the international style:
everywhere the same forms.
- Second, the architectural
expression of the cosmic array of the three basic human values (the Good, the
Beautiful, the True) is disarrayed and torn apart. The Beautiful, embodied in
the ornament, is torn apart from the Good and the True, and the ornament is discarded
as a lie – both bad and false, a mere cosmetic devoid of any cosmicity. As said
Adolf Loos, ornament is a crime. According to Laroque, this death sentence of
the ornament, and by the same token the disarray of architecture, was
symbolically foreboded as soon as the XVIIIth century in Piranesi’s famous engravings Campo Marzio, which show the ruins of
ancient Roman monuments (including the ruins of their ornaments): “Piranesi did
not represent ruins of architecture, but the ruin of architecture”.[14]
If
ornament is a lie, then where is the True? The modern answer is clear: in
matter and function. This is nothing else than the essence of mechanism, which
itself was entailed by dualism. Indeed, if selfhood is concentrated in the
modern subject alone, then the rest of the world becomes a mere objectal
machine. This principle was first expressed by Descartes’ conception of the animal machine (i.e. the animal as a
machine), but its consequences are much wider and more profound. Its means
indeed that the whole milieu has ceased to be alive, ipso facto ceasing to be a milieu and becoming a mere mechanical environment.
Translated into city planning and architectural terms, this engendered the
Athens Charter and Le Corbusier’s declaration: “Une maison est une machine à
habiter” (A house is a machine for living in). You just have to employ matter
adequately to the function, and the result will be architecture, since, as
Louis Sullivan certified, “form follows function”.
As
we have seen, this all started in the ontological abstraction of both the
subject and the object from the concrete ground of mediance. From thereon, the
True was to be sought for analytically, in the machinery of ever simpler material
elements. This entailed reductionism: the complex
must be reduced to the simplex. And
since the physical is simpler than the biological, and the biological simpler
than the human, you have to reduce the human to the biological, and the
biological to the physical (including the chemical). The simpler the truer!
This principle – the lex parsimoniae – dates
back to Occam’s razor, in the XIVth century.
The
problem is that the real deployment of Being on the Earth went exactly the
other way round. The simplex became ever more complex, not the reverse. The
physical planet progressively engendered a biological (ecological) biosphere,
which in its turn engendered a human ecumene – that is, the total sum of human
milieux, adding technical and symbolical systems to the ecosystems. The ecumene
is eco-techno-symbolical, not only ecological like the biosphere, which already
was not only physico-chemical like the planet. This is to say that reductionism
is ontologically a lie. To begin with, animals are not machines; as Uexküll put
it, they are subjects, not objects. With all the more reason, a house is not a
machine; it is an aspect of human mediance, and therefore, if functional it
must be, it should be as a structural moment of our own existence. Much more
than a machine, a house is an aspect of human Being.
The
same for architecture in general. The simpler is nor the truer, the question is
not so simple. When coupled with mechanism, Mies van der Rohe’s superb
principle “less is more” has nothing to do with, say, Rikyu’s principle of wabi, according to which deprivation
becomes a source of both ethic and aesthetic richness; it ends up in a mere
impoverishment in both aesthetical and ethical terms, inevitably bringing forth
Robert Venturi’s condemnation: “less is bore”. Human beings cannot live in mere
parallelepipeds, because human life exceeds geometry. It needs architecture.
Indeed,
as Charles Jencks told us in 1977 in The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture, we know that “Modern architecture
died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3.32pm (or thereabouts)",
when the buildings of the large housing complex of Pruitt-Igoe started to be
dynamited. That is, nearly half a century ago. But is it really so? For
certain, postmodern architecture did liberate form, which had been enslaved by
function. Ornament came back to the front of the stage, and beautiful forms
flourished everywhere. Yet most of these were only formal forms, mere aesthetic
katachi 形 disconnected from any ethical kata 型, and arbitrarily dropping their
singular sugata 姿 anywhere, without the least
consideration for a common composition. The postmodern thus became the golden
age of what I called E.T. architecture:
an architecture coming down from the stars – a starchitecture, so to say – and landing freely in any place on
Earth.
In
fact, postmodern architecture did not overturn at all the founding principle of
modern architecture, that is, the abstraction of Being from place. On the
contrary, it was a peroration of that same principle, substituting to the
modern motto “Everywhere the same form!” the outbidder motto “Anywhere any
form!” – which, far from rediscovering placeness, was on the contrary a further
negation of place. A good illustration of this attitude may be found in Takamatsu
Shin’s practice, who, it is said, made a point of not setting foot on the site
of a future building, preferring to design its form on a white sheet in his
studio, and letting his subordinates take the necessary measures on site. From
this resulted such E.T. architecture as that of the building Syntax, in Kyôto. A derisive name
indeed, since there is no syntax at all between this building and its
surroundings. It looks like the flying robot Great Mazinger, landing there
fortuitously, as it might have anywhere else.
What
resulted from this double punch of modern then postmodern architecture against
placeness is junkspace: completely decosmized forms proliferating all over the
Earth. Facing this phenomenon, we may choose between two attitudes:
- One may, like Koolhaas himself,
ratify junkspace, and outbid E.T. architecture with ever more Alien
architecture, playing derisively with the most basic markers of earthliness,
such as gravity. From this principle result purely cosmetic katachi like the enormous De Rotterdam, which evokes a set of
skittles on the brink of tumbling down; or like what the Pekinese have
nicknamed “the big underpants” (dà kùchă 大裤衩),
the headquarters of the Chinese television (CCTV), since indeed they look like
a pair of stretched long johns with a big overhanging ass, again on the brink
of tumbling down.
- Or one may, on the contrary,
search for a solution to this disarray of architecture. This is what I shall
try to do in the following section.
4. Overcoming acosmy in architecture
Let us stress first that there is no
architectural recipe for solving the problem, because it is not only an
architectural problem. Architecture here is only an expression of something
wider and deeper. Basically, the problem is an ontological one, and it
underlies all the aspects of our present civilisation. And just as it took
three centuries before the modern movement in architecture fully expressed the
ontological principles of dualism and the placelessness of the modern
individual subject, it may take a long time before we overcome the junkspace
which these ontological principles entailed at last. What seems to be certain
is that, if we cling to these ontological principles, which were those of
modernity as a whole, things cannot but get worse and worse, ending in a
complete chaos. Yet we cannot go back to pre-modernity, by rejecting only these
principles; we have to overcome them.
Overcoming
modernity (kindai no chôkoku 近代の超克), as we know, was chanted by the
Kyôto school of philosophy (Kyôto gakuha 京都学派) before 1945, around Nishida
Kitarô. Did it really overcome the ontological principles of modernity? I think
not. It only overturned the Western modern
paradigm, founded on the double principle of substantial Being and Aristotelian
logic (the logic of the subject, shugo no
ronri 主語の論理), into its
opposite, a paradigm founded on the double principle of absolute nothingness (zettai mu 絶対無) and a logic of the predicate (jutsugo no ronri 述語の論理), also called logic of place (basho no ronri 場所の論理). Correlatively, the world was
equated with the predicate and with absolute nothingness. That is, it was
absolutized. Concretely, yet logically enough, this amounted historically to
the absolutization of the Japanese world, that is to a pure ethnocentrism, in
the form of Tennoism and ultranationalism. Far from overcoming modernity, this
all ended in war and defeat.[15]
Clearly,
overturning the principles of modernity into their opposites is not the
solution. On the other hand, as we have
seen, these principles have eventually produced junkspace, and they lead us to
chaos. Now, a third way is possible, overcoming this fruitless alternative. For
mesology (Umweltlehre, fûdoron),
reality is neither on the side of the subject, nor on the side of the
predicate, but is a dynamic combination of both. This I call trajection (tsûtai 通態). It can be represented with the formula r = S/P, which is read “reality (r) is the subject (S)
taken as a predicate (P)”. This may at
first look like the classical predication “S is P” in logic, but it is much
more general, since in this process, S (something) is not only “predicated” in
a certain way (P) verbally, but more fundamentally through the senses, action,
mind (and only last, in the case of the human, words) of a certain being. Thus,
S becomes the reality S/P : S as P.
Trajection
amounts to the process which Uexküll called Tönung:
that which produces the Ton proper to
the various aspects of the Umwelt of
a certain species (e.g., as we have seen, Esston,
Schutzton etc.); in other words, the reality (S/P) of a certain Umwelt for the concerned being. It also amounts to what Heidegger, in Bauen wohnen denken, calls hervorbringen (pro-ducing), i.e. “making
appear”. That is, making S appear as P. For example, in the milieu of a cow,
making grass (S) appear as food (P), which is not the case in the milieu of a
dog – although it is exactly the same grass in the same environment. Grass in
itself is not food (it is only grass), but in the milieu of a cow, it is
trajected into food. In that milieu, it exists really as food (S/P).
In
a concrete milieu (Umwelt, fûdo), then,
reality is trajective (S/P), and it
necessarily depends on a certain interpreter (I), that is, on the living being
who interprets S as P. Dogs, for example, interpret grass (S) in another way
(P) than cows do, and therefore do not live in the same milieu as cows,
although they objectively are in the same environment.
This
is to say that reality is not binary (S-P), but ternary (S-I-P). Concretely,
things do not exist in themselves (S); neither are they mere representations
(P) in the mind of I; they necessarily suppose the three terms S, I, P.
It
follows that what architecture has to deal with is S-I-P: the concrete and
trajective abode of Humankind on the Earth. Fundamentally, S is the Earth, or
nature; P is our world (the way we interpret S); and we (e.g. the architect, or
the inhabitant) are I, in the trinity S-I-P. It should be clear, then, that the
essential function of architecture is nothing else than what Uexküll called Tönung, and Heidegger hervorbringen; that is, the trajection
of the Earth (S) as our world (P), thus pro-ducing the reality of our milieu
(S/P).
From
this ensue two principles:
- First, architecture must
necessarily refer to the Earth (S). For building a human world (P), it must
rise from the ground (S), not come down from the stars of mere representations
(P), like E.T. architecture arbitrarily and irresponsibly does. Yet founding on (founding P on S) is not reducing to (reducing P to
S); on the contrary, it is an assumption of S into P. If, ultimately,
architecture has to refer to the Earth, this does not mean at all that it must
be enslaved by ecology (that is, by the Umgebung
: S). Just like evolution and history have eventually done, it must combine
creatively ecosystems with technical and symbolic systems – which basically are
ways (P) of interpreting the Umgebung (S)
into the reality of an Umwelt (S/P).
- Second, on the other hand,
architecture should not be limited to a game of forms (P). Unlike
poststructuralism and its metabasism (pretending to be done with the ground),
it has to preserve reference, and
cannot be satisfied with only difference.[16] That is, architecture cannot stop at katachi (mere beautiful forms), it must
found its forms in certain types (kata)
inherited from the history of a certain society, with its proper aesthetical
and ethical values, and it must found
its types in a certain milieu (fûdo),
which itself is founded on the Earth (nature). E.T. architecture – in other
words, junkspace architecture – does exactly the contrary.
The
above two principles are in fact nothing else than two different expressions of
the same principle of reality (S/P). Reality needs both S as a ground, and P as
an opening. Only by respecting both ground
and opening can we think of overcoming, someday, the disarray of the vain alternative
between the exaltation of S (modernity) and that of P (the postmodern,
poststructuralism and the like). By creatively balancing S and P, the Earth and
our world, we can hope to recosmize architecture, little by little but durably.
And we must do it, because, as the
modern natural sciences have taught us, together with history, ethics and
aesthetics, there is no possible life, in the long run, without a properly
arrayed milieu. [17]
Palaiseau, 14
september 2014.
[1] Rem KOOLHAAS,
« Junkspace », October,
vol. 100, Obsolescence (Spring 2002), 275-190, p. 190.
[2] English translation by Donald KEENE,
Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 199.
[3] Which I have tried to grasp in Vivre l’espace au Japon (Paris: PUF,
1981 ; 日本語訳『空間の日本文化』、筑摩書房、1985); Du geste à la cité. Formes
urbaines et lien social au Japon (Paris: Gallimard, 1993 ; 日本語訳『都市の日本』、筑摩書房、1995) ; Le sens de l’espace au Japon. Vivre, penser, bâtir (with Maurice
Sauzet, Paris: Arguments, 2004).
[4] Which appears in Latin in
Alain de Lille’s Liber Parabolarum
(1175), in the form Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam (A
thousand roads lead men forever to Rome).
[5]
Didier LAROQUE, Le temple. L’ordre de la
Terre et du Ciel, essai sur
l’architecture, Paris : Bayard, 2002, p. 81.
[6]
LAROQUE, op. cit., p. 14.
[7]
Martin HEIDEGGER, Essais et conférences,
Paris : Gallimard, 1958, p. 190.
[8]
WATSUJI Tetsurô, Fûdo. Ningengakuteki kôsatsu, Tokyo : Iwanami, 1979 (1935), p. 3.
[9] Jakob von UEXKÜLL, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und
Menschen. Bedeutungslehre, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956 (1934), p. 29.
[10]
PLATON, Timée, Critias, Paris :
Les Belles Lettres, 1985 (1925), p. 228.
[11] I have detailed these questions in Écoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains, Paris: Belin, 2000 (日本語訳『風土学序説』、筑摩書房, 2002), and Poétique de la Terre. Histoire naturelle et
histoire humaine, essai de mésologie, Paris : Belin, 2014.
[12]
WATSUJI, op. cit. p. 3.
[13] René
DESCARTES, Discours de la méthode,
Paris : Flammarion, 2008 (1637), p. 38-39.
[14]
Didier LAROQUE, Le discours de Piranèse.
L’ornement sublime et le suspens de l’architecture, Paris : Éditions
de la Passion, 1999, 4th cover.
[15] See about this A. BERQUE (ed.) Logique du lieu et dépassement de la
modernité, Bruxelles: Ousia, 2000, 2 vol.
[16] On this, see Catherine BELSEY, Poststructuralism. A very short introduction,
Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 10.
[17] More
on these perspectives in my La mésologie,
pourquoi et pour quoi faire ?, Paris : Presses Universitaires de
Paris Ouest, 2014.
