Monday / Tuesday / Friday
Füchsel baldachin in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, SMASHUP studio winter 2020. Anna-Elina Pieber
14.00–18.00
Design Studio MArch
13
Michelle Howard Luciano Parodi
CMT
CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY
SMASHUP TOO is the second part of a yearlong project that seeks to unearth what architecture has ceased to offer: the savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity and redundancy1 of the Gothic cathedral, and with it a more Thus, though savage, changeful, naturalistic, groconnected approach to our critically tesque, rigid and redundant, Gothic cathedrals were endangered environment. also inherently sustainable and intimately connected Too often, when something has to the place in which they dwelled. Indeed, the Gothic ceased to function in line with our cathedrals of the Middle Ages were usually scaled to expectations, whether it is a smart- house every citizen of the town and, contrary to sucphone or a shopping mall, it is dis- ceeding superlative edifices, they were erected by an carded rather than renovated. Even ambitious citizenry rather than the reigning monarch or the greatest works of architecture ruling party. In this respect, they not only represented have fallen prey to this tendency, a shared ambition and civic pride, but also a dwelling and the multitude of ruins above within which all could shelter. and beneath the earth attest to In the Middle Ages, when the average life expectancy our aversion to repair. was 43 years and the whole town could be wiped out by But this was not always so. a fire or an invading (Gothic) horde in a matter of days, To start from scratch on virgin the building of a cathedral represented an extraordinary ground would have seemed a collective ambition. Now more than ever, such collective strange and curious undertak- ambition is needed if we are to enable the Earth to remain ing in the Middle Ages. Existing a good dwelling.2 church buildings would have RIGIDITY/SMASHUP TOO perceives all entities as provided not only a connection to the ideas and building tech- elastic, exchanging mutual influences and energies, and niques of their forebears, but exerting attractive powers. also valuable building materiCHANGEFULNESS/SMASHUP TOO supercharges als and good, solid foundations. Even an awe-inspiring arguments to bounce against taste, preconceived ideas, addition would never have prejudice and laissez-faire politics. been considered as having 1 These were the terms NATURALISM/SMASHUP TOO is not that, in 1852, John Ruskin “finished” a building, but rather as part of an ongoing aggressive or threatening; it confronts strong used to lovingly describe propositions with one another and asks them The Nature of Gothic process of maintenance. Architecture in the second not only to coexist but to improve. volume of three of The SAVAGENESS/SMASHUP TOO is antifragile.3 GROTESQUENESS/SMASHUP TOO wears the badge of imperfection with pride. REDUNDANCE/SMASHUP TOO is a dialogue between balance and awareness, flying buttresses, custom-made tools and stereotomy …
Stones of Venice, entitled The Sea Stories, published between 1851 and 1853, Smith, Elder & Co., London. 2 To paraphrase Bruno Taut: Die Erde eine gute Wohnung, in: Die Volkswohnung. Zeitschrift für Wohnungsbau und Siedlungswesen 1, no. 4, 1919, p. 45–48. 3 Term coined by Nassim Taleb: Antifragile. Things that gain from disorder, Penguin Random House Trade, 2014.
