just before the future - competition entry for the Belgian Pavilion in Venice for the Architecture Biennale in Venice - www.1907.be
Hacking with primes
Next to being contingently construction date and volume of the Belgian Pavilion in Venice, nineteen hundred and seven is also necessarily the two hundred and ninety-first prime number: a natural number that only has itself and one as natural number divisors. Prime numbers are the building blocks of the natural numbers as every element can we written as a unique product of prime factors. Prime numbers are often used as keys for the secret codes in cryptography. Knowing the key is often not enough to solve the code but it is an essential first step to ever decode the cipher.
Nineteen-o-seven’s primality makes it a most suitable key to solving the riddle of the Belgian competition for the 2008 Architecture Biennale in Venice: “How can architecture be exposed on a scale of one to one?” The competition asks for a project that will provide the pavilion with a new function and destination, yet in a strong congruence with the historic role and purpose of the construction. The unstated difficulty is how to devise an architecture for the purpose of an exhibition without reducing it to décor. How can architecture have an intrinsic function and destination if it is an exhibit too?
Nineteen-o-seven as a historical key
To solve this riddle, we embark on a journey to the past, back to the year of the construction of the pavilion. In 1907, Einstein’s three decisive contributions to science were only two years old and their extreme significance was not recognised as yet; quantum packets where still a ludicrous fantasy made up after a night of drinking for their inventor Max Planck and young Anton Webern’s first compositions were beating high against as yet unbroken walls of tonality. England and Germany were gradually scaling up a weapon’s race that would lead to the most murderous war in history while Russia was still recovering both from a failed revolution that prefigured the next one in 1914 and a defeat at sea by a modern Japanese fleet. The romantic era is fading fast while the futurist manifestos that would radically shape and summarise the imagination of the 20th century are still unborn.
In 1907, maybe, the 20th century hadn’t been decided yet. William Gibson probably concurs: in his novel “All Tomorrow’s Parties he tells the tale of an exciting future time in which the implementation on a large scale of machines allowing 3D replication of objects at a distance is about reshape economy, politics and culture in an unrecognisable way. In the course of the book, he chooses 1911 as a similar “historical nodal point”, a point where all histories come together and an irreversible change occurs in a system, a paradigmatic shift at a world scale. Once the jump to the next system is made and the “historical nodal point” has tied the knot, the system is strongly determined until it reaches a new instability.
Nineteen-o-seven is therefore situated just before the current period in which we live, a period of constant anticipation of what will come next, in which the present has been replaced by a life “just before the future”, a dynamic that post-modernism has certainly failed to tackle in reality. This project’s name refers to the unstable yet immensely creative period just before our current world was decisively shaped and to the constant anticipation of the future with which we have lived every since. The purpose of the project is to provide an architectural space in which this anticipation can be regained and reappropriated by the imagination of the users.
If anything characterises the evolution of how we deal with our senses, the parallel between Wagner’s opera ideology and the iPod is striking and shows that the outputs of technology are driven by something more profound than just the leaps in technical prowess. Wagner was the first composer to ask complete silence of his public and to hide the orchestra from the viewers. Before him, talking and walking around while the opera played was a natural thing to do, something completely unimaginable now. The romantic guitar of the 1850’s was about half the size of the guitars of the start of the 20th century, yet was used to accompany singing in cafés where silence was not something that could be asked. The distillation and extraction of art out of the social context in which it is produced met with an enormous success and is even present in pop or rock concerts where the shouting and dancing of the public is only permissible because the volume capacity of the band amplifier systems will most certainly be able to silence them. The dynamic of this extraction of art is accompanied by an irritation of the senses at what one could call social noise. This “social noise” was first covered as much as possible at social events at which art was produced but now the perception “social noise” is also reduced by the use of portable devices like iPods that cushion one’s sensate experience from the surrounding “social noise”. This evolution of the experience and use of senses has profound consequences on architecture at the most basic level as this strongly determines the users’ relations to their spatiotemporal environment.
Architecture is anticipation: just before the future
noumenon’s proposal for the 1907 competition sets out to show architecture in four dimensions and with a strong emphasis on the social and technical conditions of its production and their intrinsic beauty. In the main room of the pavilion, two giant tilted machine tables with robot-driven water sprays host alternating blocks of porcelain clay. Trough the effect of moist and gravity the smooth surface of the clay is carved and inscribed by contingent horizontal patterns . The blocks of clay are then first dried in one of the side rooms and after that carved into tiles and baked in the other side room. The varied porcelain tiles are varnished and installed in the back room where they hang from an intricate net of steel cables. This production process starts before the exhibition and continues from the opening on. Once the backroom is completely furnished with tiles, work is continued in the main room. In the last week of the exhibition, the titles machine tables are moved away to give way to a completely main room with tiles hanging on all of its walls. The back room is the central locus of anticipation and once it is finished functions as a one-on-one prototype of what is to come in the main room as the tiles start being installed there.
Through most of the exhibition, the process unfolding gives the space both a destination and a function, as it is a building site with an unfinished project that may compel to the imagination of the visitors. Once, in the last two weeks of the Biennale, the technical and social activities of construction/refurbishment have been terminated, the newly and fully tiled walls of the main room and back room are left functionless but at the disposal of all possible uses by a public that has possibly anticipated and imagined what the space would become. Outside of the strict narrows of functionality but in the calm rectangular spaces provided with alluring tiled patterns, one will wish conversation and mingling - for no other reason than the pleasure of it - will be on schedule and that in a project in which the social context of creation of the building has not been hidden, social tissues will find a perfect place to thrive.
1907m4 is a sequence of architectural events taking place in a prime volume
Nineteen-o-seven is a prime number only divisible by one and itself and this project leaves the volume as is, using it in time but not reshaping it and focuses instead on contact surfaces: the walls to be tiled, the senses of visitors and the surfaces of porcelain clay moisturized by the passing sprinkler heads as they are encrypted and inscribed by the forces of gravity and friction: bas-relief scribbles telling an undecipherable tale - something rather close to human history watched closely..
Space-time is lived trough the two dimensions of our main contact surface: the skin and our sensate environment is preconditioned by our relationship to others. Architecture is the space where these relationships are facilitated and can flourish, where senses are rich and refined and receive vibrant information and are not so highly tuned that they can only accept what has been prepared for them exclusively but actively engage into the unknown and unpredictable, yet familiar, sequence of events that shape social life. Where senses are not to be controlled or cajoled but are let loose into the anticipation of what will come next.
Credits:
Carl de Smet
Pierre de Gelder - www.1000heroes.com