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(Herzog’s example) 3. Two opposing factions have been fighting this debate for decades, which to this day pits Venturi’s arguments4 against the incomplete modern project
AUTONOMOUS ARCHITECTURE
1 Habermas Jurgen Modernity in Incomplete Project, essay originally delivered in a lecture in September 1980, subsequently at the New York Institute for Humanities in March 1981 and then published under the title “Modernity Versus Postmodernity” in the New German Critique 22 (1981), accessible by permission of the author at: http://course.sdu.edu.cn/G2S/eWebEditor/ uploadfile/20140304193156005.pdf.
2 The original: Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung um Entwicklung der Autonomen Architectur, Éditions Rolf Passer, Vienne-Leipzig, 1933, The French version was used: Éditions de la Villette ISNB 978-2-915456-82-0 “The Project of Modernity formulated in the 18th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality, and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic. ”Jurgen Habermas in “Modernity Incomplete Project”.
3 Jacques Herzog La Parte y el Todo. The Piece and the Entirety. In: Josep-Lluís Mateo (Ed.). Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme. Vol. No. 175, Barcelona, Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña. Association of Catalan Architects, 12.1987. pp. 10-17. Or: “We perceive architecture with all our senses. Language is not enough to describe it.” Jacques Herzog in History/Theory - Peter Eisenman, Kurt W. Forster, Jacques Herzog, and Philip Ursprung - The End of Theory? A Conversation
4 Central ideas “of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour; 1972; p. 13 by VENTURI, Robert - Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966. IBSN; ideas later expressed in VENTURI, Robert; BROWN, Denise Scott - Architecture as Signs and Systems For a Mannerist Time. Cambrigde / London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. IBSN 9780674015715
5 Reference to: “Octavio Paz, a fellow-traveller of modernity, noted already in the middle of the 1960s that “the avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those of 1917. We are experiencing the end of the idea of modern art”; p. 7 “I think that instead of giving up modernity and its projects as a lost cause, we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant programs which have tried to negate modernity.”; p. 12f
6 WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1922, French edition: Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1961. ISBN 2070707733 ; Proposition 7: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”; 4.1212 “What can be shown, cannot be said”
7 “Suivant la démonstration qu’en a donné Kaufmann, le principe nouveau d’autonomie trouvera au contraire à se manifester dans le système égalitaire des “pavillons”, lequel suppose que les éléments, et par exemple les différents “blocs” ou “unités” (d’habitation ou autres) conservent leur indépendance, leur liberté, leur autonomie, la raison qui préside à leur agencement”. Preface by Hubert Damish in the French edition of From Ledoux to Le Corbusier referred to in note 2.
8 Allowing the conceptual idea to be experienced and not merely serve as an illustration”; Conversation between Jacques Herzog and Theodora Vischer 1988
The idea that governs this text is simple: it is that the order and rigour that are so well evident in the work of Joana Mendes and André Campos, the Transport Coordination Centre in Chaves, in its composition, in the limited and synthetic formal means used, result from an understanding of architecture and the project based on the autonomy of the discipline.
The idea of autonomous architecture was clearly identified by Kaufmann in 1933, in the text “From Ledoux to Le Corbusier”, where Kaufmann suggests that autonomy is the first defining element of the modern movement, linking it to Emmanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and establishing the end of the 18th century as the beginning of the Modern movement in Architecture.2
In 1990, two centuries after Ledoux and in the midst of an era of well-established post-modernism, Jacques Herzog brought the subject of the discipline’s autonomy to his own architecture, arguing that he is only interested in expressing the discipline’s subject matters, which it expresses in a way that is unique to architecture, in the same way that Derek Jarman is only interested in putting on film what film can show in its own unique way (Herzog’s example) 3. Two opposing factions have been fighting this debate for decades, which to this day pits Venturi’s arguments4 against the incomplete modern project 5 .
These facts are significant because they define the stance of the Transport Coordination Centre of Joana Mendes and André Campos at the heart of a debate that is not yet settled, in the defence of a critical position for the discipline. I thus have no doubt that the authors of this centre in Chaves are interested in exploring and expanding the medium to which they dedicate themselves, but unlike those who seek to increase the communicative capacity of architecture alone, here that interest has an autonomous scope, the scope of what only architecture can communicate qualitatively, as Wittgenstein specifically defined in the fundamental proposition 7 of his Tractatus 6 .
It is not just the fact that the rectangular metal roof and the half-overlapping concrete volume of the Transport Coordination Centre seem to be the exact portrait of the pavilion-like and compositional independence to which Kaufmann refers 7, but also, and above all, that the thorough formal synthesis and geometrical precision to which it resorts are the means to intensify the experience, which only architecture can give to its users. Defining, designing and arranging the space, controlling the shadow and the light, shaping and defining the tactile character of the enveloping surfaces, has here been carried out with delicate efficiency and abstract rigour, “to allow the experience of the conceptual idea and not only to serve as an illustration”, as Herzog states 8 .
The Transport Coordination Centre, by Joana Mendes and André Campos, is a significant and coherent example of that autonomous architecture that interests us and with which we identify, in the same sense as that which Kaufmann gave to Ledoux and which Jacques Herzog supported.
