Monday / Tuesday / Friday 14.00—18.00
Design Studio BArch2 Wolfgang Tschapeller Werner Skvara
No, we do not! The entire architecture industry is on autopilot. Yes, there is the distrust I have towards the elements of buildings; I question the necessity of floors, closets, drawers, box-like forms, the convention of windows and the agreement on doors, the contracts on rooms and the articles on ceilings, the punctuation marks of wallpaper and paint. Hans Hollein did away with all that when he said that architecture is about keeping the human body at an operating temperature of 37°C. This is quite an open and generous definition of architecture; at the same time, it is a surprising and incredibly precise statement that renders architecture entirely independent from its own history. From now on, we do not need buildings anymore. We are free. It’s not about building anymore. We don’t need buildings; yes, there is a contradiction, Hollein’s mobile office was an envelope, but then again, it was about the thinnest possible envelope, suggesting the complete annulment of the envelope, pointing towards “situations”1 or “moments” rather than space, towards zones of conditioned fluid matter stabilized by the psychic vibrations of the beings breathing from it, an ephemeral psychoclimatic figuration. Look at the photographs: it’s not even a membrane, it is a hue, a change in colour; maybe it is not even there, maybe it is effected by the old photographs dying. Floors, walls and enclosures are gone.
Esther + Bob, INTRA SPACE, 2017
5
ADP
ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION
And then, who are we, me; us, the unstable bodies?2 Are we still the exquisitely isolated, well tempered corpse living – in book 3, chapter 2 – in between the letters of Vitruvius’ fantasies? Are we products of software, hardware, optical devices … and human stimulation? Do we have holographic friends? Or can we refer to Solaris,3 the mysterious intelligence embodied in an ocean, which, upon human stimulation, produces illusive beings out of traces of human memory? Or can we agree to be part of a conglomeration, a companion species,4 a montage of ourselves and of humans or humanoids, machines, possibly animals, especially dogs, and maybe others? And then, will our operating temperature still be 37°C?
1 Situations, explained by the ituationist International (SI) as “an S integrated ensemble of b ehavior in time”, Guy Debord, “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation,” in: Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of P ublica Secrets, 2006). 2
Christina Jauernik
3 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (Warsaw: MON, 1961); Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (USSR, 166), 1972
4 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).