ANTI-OBJECT
the demands of contemporary industry – were already present in my early youth. That is to say, the school in Königsberg where I studied was encircled by the old gothic cathedral, the campus of the old university where Immanuel Kant had taught a hundred years previously, and the chapel with the grave of the great philosopher. We boys would always read the curious gold epitaph on Kant’s grave on the anniversary of his death, ‘The starry heavens above and the moral law within me’. So there were two different tendencies in my youth: on the one hand romanticism, on the other two or three architectural solutions, sensational at the time, in which I used steel, reinforced concrete, an abundance of glass and a variety of intense colours. 3 Taut made it his life’s objective to translate the philosophy of Kant into architecture. This philosophy was based on an awareness of dichotomies – Kant searched for them everywhere, avoiding all facile preestablished notions of harmony. This set him apart both from Descartes, who preceded him, and from later philosophers such as Hegel. Kant proposed a distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world, between the objects of our experience and ‘things-in-themselves’, which are unknowable as they exist apart from perception. Taut saw himself as torn between romanticism and objectivism, between visionary tendencies and a faith in technology. Kant would no doubt have characterised this as the reflection of a more fundamental dichotomy between subject and object. The world as envisioned by classicism was a collection of objects ruled by a rigorous order, existing independently of the subject. This dichotomy came to trouble architects with the classical revival during the Renaissance. The Renaissance technique of perspective was considered to be part of the same conceptual framework as the neoclassical approach, which was to govern architecture through geometry. As a mathematically based method of drawing, perspective induces a rigorous geometrical composition.
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MAKING A CONNECTION
Yet it contains an inherent contradiction: it introduces into space an extremely subjective and singular viewpoint. At a stroke, the objectivity of the neoclassical world is destroyed. The dichotomy between consciousness and object is exposed, expressed in the disparity between the space depicted through perspective and the space actually experienced by the subject. At the centre of the perspective, the disparity is so small it can be ignored. However, on the margins of the drawing it takes the form of an enormous distortion. If the subject begins to move and shift his viewpoint, the static spatial perception achieved through perspective is rendered practically useless. This shows how complex an operation the perception of three-dimensional space really is. The only way to eliminate the dichotomy between subject and object is through stage-set architecture, in the style of Leon Battista Alberti. As long as the subject remains in front of the flat, two-dimensional facade, he is able to disregard the dichotomy, and architecture is able to assume the guise of objectivity. The dichotomy between subject and object has frequently troubled architects in the past, causing the pendulum to swing between styles, between object/ objectivity and subject/subjectivity. The Renaissance was a period when architecture was object-oriented, conceived as a rigorous and transparent structure based on mathematical proportions. When a subject was introduced into the space, this was revealed as an illusion. The rigorous composition and proportions existed only when seen from upon high, from a godlike viewpoint. The moment the viewpoint was lowered to ground level all geometries lost their effect. Premised on this human viewpoint, design became a matter of deciding how to distort and deform architecture effectively. Architecture gradually became more subject-oriented. The painstakingly transparent structures of the Renaissance were transformed into distorted, exaggerated objects, that is, baroque architecture. Design came to be based, not on geometry, but on perceptual effect. Instead of the rigorous circles and spheres favoured by classicism, space was organised
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