Architecture
ludwig leo | ausschnitt

hollway road | london
jarmark europa | warschau
used city | neapel
bäckerei | berlin

narkomfin | moisei ginzburg
pro forma | smith & others
self-build | walter segal

leergut | empty good

das blatt
text index

Shifting the View

Preface by Margaret Crawford

This book addresses one of the most significant absences in the architectural discourse today: knowledge about ordinary human experiences. The authors’ interests in understanding a broad range of activities, situations, and places led them to devise new modes of representation to document and analyze them. Without inventing anything, they adapted and manipulated the conventional techniques of architectural description—photographs, plans, sections, and axonometrics—to a new end. Their documentary techniques reveal a new world of experience—a reality that everyone knows intimately but that, in the absence of adequate representational tools, was conceptually invisible to architects. This underlines the centrality of representation to architectural thinking. These drawings provide information, grounded in sustained observation, to illuminate the multiple ways in which people utilize ordinary spaces. The clarity and specificity of the documentation provides an almost ethnographic level of description of how ordinary interior and urban spaces function.

Although the authors have modestly limited their claims to the process of documentation, their work has, I think, more far reaching implications. It proposes not only new ways of looking and recording but also new objects of scrutiny and new ways of thinking about architecture and urban space. The drawings themselves, minimally expressing the objective physical realities of lived experience, are surprisingly suggestive, conjuring up limitless scenarios of human use and activities. Such acts of “disinterested scrutiny”, almost inevitably, lead to a new attitude toward design, based on discovering and working with what's already there rather than imposing preexisting ideas. This knowledge creates an informed position from which to approach design, giving architects a different, and more appropriate form of authority than they currently possess.

This book adds important new voices to a growing discussion of the ordinary and everyday aspects of life as inspiration for architecture. It is also usable; for architects and students the techniques demonstrated will serve as entry points into a rich repository of physical and human meanings.

Documentation of the Commonplace

The Everyday is rapidly emerging as the new field of interest among architects today. We believe that this interest could lead to a radical shift in the practice of architecture; but first of all there is fieldwork that needs to be done. As the director Robert Bresson writes: “Ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas. Go to the persons and objects directly.” This book is a collection of the work we have done in the last ten years, in which we have done just that: gone to places and people directly, and documented what we have found—both the personal world we inhabit, and the observed habits of others. We have called this the documentation of the commonplace. It is a way of putting the facts of the particular—the nuts and bolts of the Everyday—onto the table. With these facts, we can talk about the Everyday not as theory, but with an insight that can actually change how we make architecture.

Toward the end of our studies, we became increasingly interested in the investigation and mapping of existing places and situations. This way of working brought up new questions about the relationship between documentation and design. Convention dictated that these investigations be treated as the prelude to the real work of design, a gathering of raw material rather than creative work in its own right. However, the information gathered through the investigation had revealed a much more complex world, a world of people and things, full of contradictions. These could not be readily reconciled with the nature of design teaching, with its preference for form, rigor, and abstraction. The translation from investigation to design therefore became increasingly problematic: the complexity of the new understanding made it very difficult to formulate an “idea” for a design without jettisoning the very complexity that had been gathered through the investigation. For this reason, the value of such investigations is often questioned, being seen as a hindrance to the creativity of the architect. For us it was the opposite: although the design process seemed at first to become less focused, architecture had become important to us as part of the world we knew.

It was only after finishing our studies that we came to understand the potential that documentation offered for the practice of architecture, and to realize that this potential could only be realized if documentation could exist on its own terms, as the disinterested scrutiny of a place; disinterested in the sense that it was not necessarily motivated by an architect’s intention to change it. Documented material did not need to be immediately used in design, but could become a fund of information about our surroundings. This opened up a new perspective in which documentation and design could be “coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.”

This change had much to do with the experience of living in Berlin in the unique period after the fall of the Wall, an experience that led us to continue the questioning of the roles of architect and planner that had begun during our studies. On the one hand there was the day-to-day experience of living in East Berlin; on the other hand there was the flood of urban and architectural planning—soon to be followed by the spectacle of its construction—which grafted a new urban vision onto the center of the city. The scale and thoroughness of the transformation forced us to confront the extent to which the planning and design process occupied a parallel world, detached from any personal experience of the city. What was the point of the demolition and the con-struction happening all over the city? Had the real focus of the planning become the logistical feat of getting it done, rather than the city that resulted? How much of the existing city structure had to be destroyed to get it done? The lack of common ground between this planning and our experience encouraged us to continue to search for an alternative way of working. We were interested in finding the potential for change within the existing city, a planning that could coexist with “the concrete diversity of a realistic order of things.” To this end we started to document everyday life as we experienced it.

Encountering the unfamiliar was perhaps a necessary part of this process. Certainly for us the initial encounter with East Berlin after the opening of the Wall was decisive; also important were the visits to England, Italy, and Russia that provoked several of the documents in this book. Yet for us the most powerful work of the architect is, in the end, the work of the insider, who works with an insight into the familiar that others lack. To learn to approach one's own surroundings with the openness and curiosity of a stranger, to detect richness within the familiar, and to find a way to act effectively as an architect within this everyday world: this was the challenge and the potential offered by documentation.

Early documents were literal records, measurements of commonplace situations that we had previously considered too banal to scrutinize. From these first investigations, we moved on to consider how events are linked or woven together within the city. Commonplace interested us both in its meaning of ordinariness and in its underlying sense of a place in the city held in common. As we did this, our focus moved away from form towards the way a place was used, which often turned out to be extremely complex. To understand the complete pattern of use, it was important to spend lengths of time in one place, “to dig oneself in.” As a result, the temporal dimension, often given scant attention due to the architect’s overriding interest in three-dimensional space, became increasingly significant to us, and called for experimentation with techniques such as film to document how a place or building is used over time. It is not so important whether the documented places are old or new; much more important is the question of an inherent modernity, found in the way they are able to accommodate a contemporary pattern of use. Documentation is a way to detect this.

The primary platform for this work was Das Blatt, a blueprinted sheet that we published periodically between 1993 and 1995. The putting together of the work into a finished document, like the cutting of a film, was a way to give a clearly communicable form to what we had observed; it was often at this point that we discovered underlying themes that had been hidden in the details of the work. Because of the importance to us of the finished document, we have included in this book, wherever possible, small scale reproductions of complete documents. Only in cases where too much information would have been lost through reduction have we reformatted the original documents.

The value of documentation lies in both the collection of local knowledge and, at a more abstract level, in the themes and ideas that have emerged in the course of making the documents. We have introduced some of these themes into the second part of the book, in order to give a sense of this process. We are not trying to define a design method—the field is still too new and open for that—but rather to indicate how documentation can be much more than just the gathering of information. The shift of the view has the potential to shift the way that we practice architecture.

Towards an Architecture of the Commonplace

In this book we wish to suggest that the first and most important step towards an architecture of the commonplace is the practice of documentation itself. As Benjamin writes, “only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power that it commands.” Flying over a landscape is not the same thing. The assembled documents should therefore be seen as examples of the practice of documentation, not necessarily of what to document. The choice of what to document has been intuitive rather than scientific; looking back at what we have chosen, we could say that these places constitute for us part of the vitality and excitement of the city. However, we make no claims for our collection being more than one version of the commonplace.

With this caveat in mind, we wish to suggest a second step: that documentation changes our work as architects. The hand of an architect is not generally evident in what we have documented; one should therefore be wary of drawing too direct a relationship between such places and a work of architecture. We established, through the process of documentation, a fund of material and experience. We did not go to the place with a theme in mind: themes emerged as a result of the time spent at the place, and later in the making of the document. The drawings and sketches were initially more concrete than abstract; we did not want to represent an idea, or feeling about the place, but rather to record and communicate facts about the things we had observed. A general theme or motif of the document emerged at a later point, after the facts were laid down—layers and passage at Temple Station; levels in the landscape at Scardovari; appropriation of public space in Naples, for example. The themes revealed to us hidden structures and relationships that are key to understanding the qualities and potential of a place. As we made more documents, the appearance of similar themes in different contexts and the gradually discovered relationships between themes began to map out the territory that we wished to occupy as practicing architects.

Although it is anchored in the precise observation of the world, documentation requires imaginative choices. This allows documentation to overlap with the creative process of designing in a provocative way. While the process of documentation is characterized by a shift from the very specific towards the more thematic, in design the process is reversed: an idea is gradually made concrete. At the level of themes there can be a cross-over, where documentation can inform design without resorting to over-simplistic formal relationships.  As a way of moving toward an architecture of the commonplace, documentation could be part of learning to be an architect, and then become an unobtrusive part of architectural practice: a way to tune our existing design sense and to evaluate designs once they are in use. We assume, however, such a practice would be rather different than what is usual today: less subject to the influence of magazine images and borrowed ideas, and more skillful at exploiting the potential of an existing situation. An architecture of the commonplace could accept the competence and autonomy of the user, and provide a suggestive framework for the events of daily life.