(107) Peter Behrens, Festhalle of the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Cologne: the monumental Dioscuri group above the main portal, 1914, photograph. Source: www.deutsche-digitalebibliothek.de © 2015 VBK Wien
prenticeship with Behrens – Le Corbusier isolates one of the Dioscuri and brings both horse and man back to life.” [114] Le Corbusier’s short apprenticeship in Behrens’s office lasted five months during a period in 1910–11; he worked alongside Mies van de Rohe who worked for Behrens from October 1908 to January 1912 and Walter Gropius who worked there from 1907 (or 1908) to March 1910. [115] For Frampton, the sculptural group of the League of Nations headquarter also symbolizes Le Corbusier’s fascination with the dual nature of mankind as half human and half divine being. [116] In any case, Behrens’s embassy building in St. Petersburg has been turned into an Intourist office, and the sculpture of the Dioscuri has been replaced by a company emblem. Nearby is the Riding Academy (1804–07) designed by Giacomo Quarenghi, a neo-Palladian architect who established classicism in Imperial Russia. Similar to Behrens’s German Embassy, Quarenghi’s cavalry school also features a monumental porticus and two sculptures of the Dioscuri, though they are set on both sides of the monumental flight of steps, similar to the Dioscuri at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. Both Behrens’s and Quarenghi’s designs of classicizing monuments establish a new identity by means of architecture.
[114] [115] [116]
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Frampton, Le Corbusier, 201. Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, 166. Jean Petit, Le Corbusier Lui-même (Geneva: Rousseau, 1970), 22–3; J. P. Robert, “Pseudonymes,” in Le Corbusier: une encyclopédie, ed. by Jacques Lucan (Paris: Spadem, 1987), 316–7.
CHAPTER 4: TRAJECTORY
Junkspace as the End of the Typical and the Generic
The Typical and the Generic
Koolhaas’s proposal for the Dutch Embassy questions the very notion of identity and character, and outlines a different interpretation of national architecture. He projects a layer of typical historical signs of the city, by staging them as events both in history and in the itinerary within the building. The constantly changing spatial means and surprise moments achieve the uniqueness and complexity of the curving trajectory. Similarly, in “Junk Space” he argues that, instead of stable configurations, “successive transformations mock the word ‘plan.’ There is zero loyalty – and zero tolerance – towards configuration, no ‘original’ condition; architecture has turned into a time-lapse sequence to reveal a ‘permanent evolution.’” [117] By coining the term zero-degree architecture, Koolhaas alludes to Roland Barthes concept of zero-degree writing, which defines writing as a compromise between freedom and a memory. [118] Barthes proposes zero-degree writing as a kind of writing without rhetoric. He claims that even if the writer makes the most self-conscious and determined attempts at writing freely with a neutral voice, automatic reflexes replace the free choice of words. The author thereby gradually becomes a prisoner and imitator of the words of others as well as of his own words. Zero-degree architecture represents “the plan without qualities” because it has, like the male protagonist in Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities, no unique qualities. [119] Equally, Koolhaas’s expression of “the generic city” means “the city without (unique) qualities.” Though connected to twentieth-century European literature, the plan without qualities is a typical American invention. Referring to a dualism between Europe and America, the typical plan is the essence of the New World. It represents “the discovery and subsequent mastery of a new architecture (often proclaimed but never realized at the scale of the Typical Plan).” [120] Hence, he formulates a theory that negotiates with the conceptual qualities of the unplanned, claiming that “it is zero-degree architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity. It belongs to the New World.” [121] Beside the two references to America, the term zero-degree implies the notion of America as the [117] [118]
Koolhaas, “Junk Space,” 167. Emphasis added by I.B. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 55. [119] Koolhaas, “Typical Plan,” 336. [120] Ibid. [121] Ibid., 335.
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JUNKSPACE AS THE END OF THE TYPICAL AND THE GENERIC