Mon, 09 Jan 2006

Organic architecture revived?

By Cornelie Unger-Leistner

ALFTER (NNA) - In what could become a breakthrough for organic architecture, the first professor in the subject was appointed by the Alanus University of Arts and Social Science last December.

In his inaugural lecture, the newly appointed incumbent of the chair of organic architecture, Prof. Pieter van der Ree from Holland, emphasised the importance of the new post: “As far as I am aware, this is the first such post in the hundred years or so that organic architecture has existed.” It was due to the Alanus University, and Prof. Nikolaus von Kaisenberg in particular, as well as to the “generous funding” from the Iona Foundation in Amsterdam that it had been possible to establish the chair.

The Dutch architect had come to public attention through his travelling exhibition on organic architecture which was shown in various European cities, the University said in a press statement.

In his lecture, Prof. van der Ree placed organic architecture in the context of the architectural streams of past and present. “In all modesty,” van der Ree said, he would attempt to lay the “intellectual foundation” for the new chair.

Organic architecture had experienced a real boom in the 1970s and had died down again with the death of its leading proponents and inspirational personalities such as Rex Raab, Nikolaus Ruff and Arne Klingborn. The mainstream of architecture was now moving in a different direction, van der Ree emphasised. In his lecture he clearly differentiated the working methods of organic architecture from mainstream architectural thinking.

Many buildings were designed today which no longer stood in any direct relationship to their use. The design process itself had become a highly complex procedure which had to integrate a great deal of technical knowledge as well as statutory and financial constraints. The materials used no longer came from the immediate environment but often from many different parts of the world. This meant that the building process had largely become divorced from its origins and objectives.

As a consequence the building as such was presented in specialist journals as an “autonomous object”; perfect pictures presented supreme technical performance. “People are mostly not evident in these images and the effect of these buildings on their users is largely ignored,” van der Ree said. But buildings were not autonomous objects nor, indeed, “machines”, as they had been called by the famous architect Le Corbusier. “On the contrary, they should be considered as 'organs' which have a specific task to fulfil in a highly differentiated fabric consisting of natural, social and cultural connections. They must facilitate, support and express these life processes,” van der Ree emphasised.

The building in itself was not the important element but the processes which occurred between people and architecture and between architecture and the environment. Organic architecture had to endeavour to develop a feeling for this living context. The ecological crisis meant that there was a growing interest in the influence of buildings on nature. Here ecological architecture had performed a valuable services in recent years. In building biology, buildings tended to be seen as “organisms”.

Van der Ree drew a parallel in his lecture between the activity of building and of human thinking. The content and type of thinking was also reflected in architecture. “Every building is based on considerations and ideas and the nature of these ideas is expressed in the architectural language of forms.” These ideas, which were given a visible expression in architecture, in turn had an effect through the senses on the people using the building. In this way architecture was “closely interlinked with the inner life of people” and could be seen as reflecting human cultural history and development of consciousness. This could be seen by looking at the history of architecture, Prof. van der Ree said.

Building had started in the age of mythological consciousness. This was characterised by a thinking in images which were taken from the visible world but which transported spiritual content. Thus buildings transported meaning. The post-Christian styles still contained a “strong interconnection between technical building, æsthetic and religious elements.“ Not until the nineteenth century were these connections largely dissolved; stylistic trends concentrated “solely on beauty“ but no longer had content and in the technical building aspects, designs came to the fore which were purely technically based. This dichotomy had opened the way to Functionalism which attempted to base building purely on rational considerations.

One remarkable feature in this context were the purely geometric designs. “We have become so used to it, that we mostly assume without further question that this is indeed the most functional way of building. But that is not necessarily the case at all.“ Thus a flat roof in regions with a lot of rain was not necessarily more functional than a traditional roof structure. The origin of such designs therefore did not necessarily lie in the function but in a preference for geometric designs. But these were forms which originated in abstract thinking and also appealed to the latter, Prof. van der Ree said.

There had been various attempts since the 1970s to overcome this language reforms. Thus postmodernism had attempted to reintroduce “values of experience into architecture”. Deconstructivism had called the foundations of architecture into question at an even more profound level. The abstraction of thinking could be illustrated in the development of architecture, together with the attempt to overcome it.

For these reasons, organic architecture was more than simply “a matter of taste,” Prof. van der Ree said. It was directly connected with the developments explained earlier. A new kind of thinking was required, the thinking which in fact provided the basis for organic architecture, the thinking which worked with contexts and processes. The latter were characteristics of living nature and that is why one could also refer to “living or organic thinking”. In this context the concept or organic architecture was developed in various ways by individual architects. Organic architecture was by no means a uniform school. The common characteristic was "that they consider this architecture in the context of natural, social and cultural life.“

In the school which had developed out of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, and in Steiner’s works themselves, the interest in the reciprocal relationship between architecture and inner life assumed a key position. Here a central role was played by the principle of metamorphosis, which Steiner had taken from Goethe’s scientific writings and introduced into art and architecture in the early twentieth century.

NNA/end/ung/cva

Item: 060109-01EN 9 January 2006

Copyright 2006 News Network Anthroposophy Limited. All rights reserved. See http://www.nna-news.org/copyright/

More NNA reports at: http://www.nna-news.org/