Tyler_Architecture_Theory_Fall-2010: September 2010

Hi all, Friday, tomorrow, we will be watching a video documenting the discussion between Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog on the challenge of preserving Nazi architecture and theories behind it by Marc Wigley. Here below is the transcript of their discussion. Please read it and see you tomorrow. Srdjan

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TRANSCRIPT

Discussion between Mark Wigley (MW), Rem Koolhaas (RK) and Jacque Herzog (JH):

MW: On the one hand these lectures are very specific to this building but on the other hand they jump immediately to bigger questions. For example, if contemporary art works so well here that raises questions as to the way in which it is working in other locations. For if it is very at home within a Nazi aura making machine then one must wonder what kind of aura machines are operating everywhere else. Like-wise it seems to me this can also be translated to the city and what you call, Jacque, the menace that every city comes from.

I guess this will be a continuation of the discussion between these two intellectuals with the small difference that I am sitting in between them and there is a group of people in front.

But Jacque do you accept this last claim that contemporary art fits too well here?

RK: I am not saying it fits too well. I am saying it is getting an unacknowledged boost from the architecture.

JH: I actually totally agree. But this space goes well with actually any art. I have seen other shows here, that Rem did not mention in his presentation. Very intimate events or formats that may even surprise with the scale of this building. The space also works well with media art.

However, whether the aura and frisson, that you mentioned Rem, are substantial or just a decoration I don’t know. I am also not sure it is so important to make this distinction. I think it is an important part of the building and all of us here, in my opinion, have to admit that when you come into this building, history always comes with us.

This was a Nazi building and that makes this building somehow different. I am sure that many artists who have done exhibitions here have found the history that surrounds this building a huge challenge. I know every building is different and every building is a huge challenge for an artist, but I am sure that this history is always in the background. I think the Haus der Kunst is an important player and that is why I said what I said in my presentation. I think that expanding the space for art would perhaps be stronger than commercializing it.

Maybe we can also talk about what kind of programming or what kind of function goes well with this frisson, this aura or this very special feeling we get in this building.

MW: Maybe I am not hearing it very well but it seems to me that at the beginning of your statement, Jacque, the city is menaced by simulation and you are happy that reality makes a return. It also seems that art is on the side of reality vs. simulation. If I listen to the end of Rem’s presentation art is fitting very well here because it seems on the side of simulation and it is getting a boost from the simulation machinery here.

JH: Sorry I have to make this a bit more precise. Simulation is part of that reality. Simulation has always existed. I say that about the royal tradition and so that if you look at the Odeonsplatz or the Feldherrnhalle it is somehow a beautiful place but it is almost one to one taken from Florence. It is a very early example of what tourist architecture is doing today or what the Nazi’s did a bit more brutally. I am saying that this is part of that specific history. I allocate reality to history and to something that is an ongoing process.

RK: I think that maybe we should explain to the public about our collaboration. In this collaboration Chris Dercon participates as a major point of the triangle. We have reached a point where Chris is convinced (and he will be able to better articulate the reasons for this) that in order to maintain the Haus der Kunst as a Kunsthalle and in order to maintain its independence and self supporting qualities, it is intelligent to use the newly liberated wing for commercial purposes. It could therefore be used not as an aura making machine, but as a money making machine. Jacque, however is deeply convinced that the new wing should be dedicated to art.

I have a position that is not yet on one side nor on the other. The question that worries me greatly is whether the full earnestness of so much contemporary art combined with the full earnestness of this building, in a scale that would be doubled, would actually still lead to a serious result? Or would it be in danger of leading to a kind of pastiche of earnestness by means of pastiche of authoritarianism of the building. That is really my dilemma in the whole thing.

JH: I can understand that.

RK: I can not imagine anything more sinister than to treat the empty ring as a Dia Foundation with some kind of Walter de Maria on display.

JH: I only mentioned the Dia because Chris can clearly not run the new wing like he does the other, they also do not have a collection. My only point is I would make the place for art and generate the whole discussion of what kind of art that could be.

I am also not saying I would move out all commercial use. It has commercial surfaces, it has the P1 and it also has bars. I only think that we should think this commercial side in a more open way and maybe we can find areas to think about. Why not think of the street in front or the tunnel? Is the tunnel something that should survive in the next 20 or 30 years? There are other places where we could insert or introduce art, rather than just bringing it back to commercial means. If you maintain the commercial programming in the west-wing that is also a kind of preservation.

I am not saying we should not have any commerce. I think that the future of museums and how you can maintain state run museums is so complex and interesting and therefore in a way also where the money comes from to secure it in the next few years. How much land is owned by the city? What is the relationship with the park? Can we not do something there that generates money and makes that building more commercially and socially interesting?

I am not saying this should just be a temple.

MW: But if I understand you right at this moment of the conversation you are testing the possibility that art defines the second wing, Chris is testing the possibility that commerce defines that wing, Rem says he is trying to do neither.

Of course for the audience it will be hard for them to understand the difference between art and commerce today. However this does bring up the question of symmetry. I suppose by allowing Chris to take his second position and you the third you are trying to resist the symmetry between Jacque and Rem. But there is also the symmetry of the building. I wondered if, in your investigation, you see the symmetry of this building as useful in terms of an intelligent thinking of both art and preservation or do you think it is a problem? At first glance it seems incredibly useful.

RK: Almost too easy! I think the crucial thing to understand is that, again speaking for myself, we are torn in a very interesting dilemma. I think Chris knew and knows that Jacque and I have a long standing and interesting working relationship. We have collaborated before. None of our collaborations have been very successful though so Chris knew that he was offering us an opportunity to collaborate.

[Laughter]

For that reason we accepted it. Even though I think that deep down we both thought that two architects for a kind of simple preservation effort was a little bit much and perhaps was also burdening the effort with an overdose of consideration and perhaps intelligence. Yet we are all too refined to use the symmetry of the building as an obvious art form or model for the outcome.

MW: Well as a friend of both of yours Chris Dercon may take great pleasure in the possibility that you might fail!

I want to test the theory a little bit that I mentioned before. If the architect is a public intellectual, which I think is the role of the architect and if in fact the most intelligent gestures of the architect have to do with the question of preservation (which I think is the case) and not just here in this building, because it seems to be a building that needs preservation, but I mean in each and every time you have made a beautiful building the beauty of it has come from a particular, maybe unstated, but a particular concept of preservation. In that sense, my theory would be that one preservation pattern can never be interesting. But, what actually makes it work and what produces the beauty and intelligence is competing, alternative preservation theories. It seems to be that one of the potentials of this overdose of intelligence is to incubate strong but contrary patterns. There seems to be a more syncopated rhythm between different preservation strategies. Each preservation strategy exposing the one before. To take an obvious example, wouldn’t you say the night club here is a historical monument?

RK: Yeah

MW: So wouldn’t you say it would be a crime to destroy it [P1] - either in the name of art or in the name of commerce?

JH: It would rather be a pity than a crime.

RK: The paradoxical effect of being here and the paradoxical effect of being here as part of a section that is dedicated to ideology and therefore the paradoxical effect of having to operate in this framework of course means that we take the Nazi aspect much more seriously then we need to or perhaps should do. In the same way I have a kind of accumulative resistance against the implications of today including the film of the sponsors etc. I am really wondering what we are asked to celebrate. Are we supposed to be in awe of Nazi ingenuity? Are we supposed to be an efficiency? Or are we the people who are supposed to liberate Munich of its latent tendencies?

I rarely have such a strong instinct that I would like to do something deeply ignorant. Therefore perhaps the nightclub is a fantastic example of an ignorant and energetic intervention and perhaps it is therefore also interesting to look at it as a prototype. It really in that context that I thought and think that some degree of self supporting activity can actually be a very constructive element and can also help demystify the whole earnestness that, without wanting to, we are supporting.

JH: I think part of the problem is that we are faced with a building, which is actually almost alright. It is working very well for art and there is not a real problem. It is an interesting object to talk about and to reveal all these psychological things, like aura and the construction of aura and reality and the fake. Like always when you go deeper into something, substance or being you can talk all of this stuff through but at the end you have a headache.

I think that the mystification happened after the war. Not in your sense Rem, but in a way that the people were just too weak to put things on the table and really face up to what the museum should become in the future. It was hard to even make a clear decision like, yes it should continue to be a place for art. Munich, as I tried to explain in my presentation, has moved really into the model of a southern city, laissez fair, jois de vivre, and I see Munich very much as the place that has a lot of bars and champagne. It has good looking girls and good looking guys and fashion stores every where. Do we want to have more of that in the Haus der Kunst do we want to have a schicki-micki restaurant and all of that?

I have doubts but it might help generate money. So the kind of entertainment or the kind of commercial function would need to be seriously discussed or thought about. Like the possible use for art. In a way it is more about programming than architecture. Like we both said over lunch do you really feel like we would like to or need to make any kind of architectural intervention? At the moment there is no such thing that would tempt you to – like lets do this or lets do that. That is very telling I think.

MW: Architects never smile so the architect is a sort of earnest figure - and you are surely two of the most earnest of all! But you are managing to generate a theory that perhaps the greatest enemy here is to be earnest. I could help that argument a bit.

Surely the whole building is a kind of night club; it was a sort of efficient stage-set. It was not by accident the architect of this building was good with ocean liners and interior decoration and furniture etc. and not by chance could the whole thing be simply undone by a curtain – the lightest element of all. But, what kind of theatre went on in this place?

Precisely by denouncing modern art as degenerate, modern art was given the most serious credentials it ever got. It became the most earnest thing you could ever imagine, because it started to represent the opposite - that which evil dislikes. So, it became virtuous beyond belief. Even works of so called “modern art” that were produced by the least earnest gestures, for example Dada’s work. Therefore work that is by its nature as little earnest as possible and that does not take seriously any institution (even the human body) was made earnest by the fear of this place. You could therefore make an argument that it would be interesting to do something with the west wing that takes the earnestness away.

JH: if you wanted to be not earnest you could bring Nazi art back because this would really make you laugh. So art in being earnest is in contrast with Nazi art. That is just a forced earnestness which is of course different.

MW: To take the most unsubtle example it would seem that the way to face the Swastika is to simply remove half of it. This leaves the Swastika permanently visible to anyone who has half an interest in that figure. It also demonstrates, however, how small that figure was and how pathetic it was. So, it could be then that if one wing of the building is earnestly restored, a whole series of not so earnest, playful, more frivolous gestures could be used. I mean it is possible. But it sounds as though you are leaning more towards the commerce side?

RK: It is not really being on a side. There is another thing I wanted to say and that is that the whole construction is unbelievably interesting but it is in a way putting too much of a burden on the two of us. I mean this in the sense that typically and I think that is true in this kind of thing, there is a commission and that commission is defined in terms of its aim.

In a way I sometimes feel like a kind of observed laboratory animal who is supposed to come up with an aim single handedly. I think that in that sense perhaps this could be a rare productive launch of architects in search of an aim. This is an aim that we are simply structurally unable to, or in my case, unwilling to provide. I can play with an aim or endorse or undermine an aim but I don’t want to provide an aim. That is why we are very happy that Chris has a vision, because that vision is an aim. This is also true even if that vision is kind of articulated as having no choice but to turn that half into a money making apparatus so that the good half can survive.

JH: Maybe I can add to this. I think the commercialness and the non commercialness is not a very interesting discussion. You mentioned something very interesting. You showed the whole time line of the short and long distances of what we produce and what we preserve and said that sooner or later these two moments in time come together. Then you said that we have to think about how long something lasts and that we have to think eventually we project or anticipate almost historical figures. This is very close to the idea of simulation that I mentioned in my speech.

I think that what I personally find interesting and what we have been thinking about in our practice, is that we have to see that preservation is part of the project of modernity. It is especially part of the strategies of contemporary architects. So, between projecting and preserving and between making a distinction between modern or not modern, existing and not existing these boundaries have blurred and sometimes this is stupid because you have to make a difference and I clearly made a case for that in my speech.

On the other hand I think that Rem seems to be very seductive and I can only speak for ourselves that the idea of the Schloss reconstruction and the Dresden reconstruction and all of these reconstruction issues are highly interesting and can be really a much more interesting topic than it has been in the past when it was always approached to be morally correct. To have a dialectic approach - this is old this new; I always hated that - the kind of Scarpa approach produces a very nice aesthetic but I think we are beyond that and the Haus der Kunst really offers an opportunity to really leave out any taboos.

RK: I think that is a very good point.

JH: I think that for the two of us it is much more interesting to think of the Haus der Kunst as a master plan idea, where it involves the street at the front, the park at the back and the waterfall on the side. All these ingredients can be played with rather than just talking about whether we reveal the Nazi crosses and all of that. A much larger sense we discuss reality or transformation of reality.

MW: But in both points you are saying the tendencies would be towards taking the morality out of the equation and there is no longer a kind of unambiguous quasi ethical statement that historical reconstruction is bad; Especially if it has anything to do with decoration because that is secretly behind the idea. You could in theory restore anything as a modern architect, as long it was not decorated. If it was decorated then you are restoring something that is unacceptable, morally.

Therefore, both the idea of not being earnest and also the idea of not being so morally charged work together. This would mean that your combined intelligences would work against the kind of moral imperative in architecture. Therefore, if it is not moral it becomes legal.

I think that the reason that the very beautiful map you showed of the extent to which the extraordinary infrastructure of preservation internationally reveals how as you call it medieval our discipline is architects. The reason why it is so amazingly efficient internationally, is because it is in the law - it has the power of law. It seems to me, architects remain always as children and therefore think they can change the built environment and therefore change the images of society but the people who actually do that are lawyers because they have executive power from the city.

RK: Or Koreans.

MW: Or Koreans! The problem with the fact that architects are not allowed to smile, because if you do smile you get accused of being cynical - so it is important to never smile.

If it is a legal question then you can approach the things, such as the underpass and the trees on legal grounds on legal grounds. You could argue whose territory it is, the city’s or the building’s and so on. Couldn’t you not easily reconstruct the steps at the front of this building? There is no technical problems with we constructing the steps, it would just force people on the side walk to go up.

JH: I think that is an interesting point especially because you would leave the street as it is or at least part of the street. I was thinking of that today. It works like that with classical architecture too - you play with proportion or width. They used to make the path ways narrow to make the building look larger and other such tricks.

You can play with interesting architectural tools without being ideological. This also remains interesting like something is big, something is small, something is narrow and things like proportion and scale etc. But as I said this has to be done with an attitude without taboos that is not scared of being morally incorrect.

You want to make that place interesting for artists and for people to go to and interesting means the work looks good and also you have interesting spaces. You have all these architectural experiences and we have architecture’s more or less very classical tools like space, structure, surfaces etc. but they have not been used here. The current status of the museum is almost ok but it also has been weakened. On the issue whether each piece should be exactly reconstructed or almost exactly reconstructed - I don’t know.

We also mentioned this morning the 9/11 attack on the twin towers. We did not participate in this competition because we didn’t know what to do. But later I became aware that an exact reconstruction of those towers would really have been the most powerful statement and almost an artistic performance. Would we then have reconstructed them exactly as they were or would we have slightly manipulated aspects? The latter would probably have been the case.

I am not interested in doing exactly what the Nazi’s have done or what the twin towers were, but I would at least not want to exclude that possibility. All the designs that came up later were ridiculous compared to what the impact would have been of what the towers were. Because you could play with history and with the image of memory and that would be much stronger than any memorial that would leave 10 floors empty. All these hollow gestures of architecture are ridiculous. That perhaps is the point when I mentioned simulation and bringing in things that modernity have almost excluded but that we learn to deal with. Artists have brought in this strategy I don’t say this is good, but I don’t think it is something we should exclude in rethinking such a building.

RK: Sorry I simply don’t understand what you are implying or suggesting here.

JH: He asked about the stairs for example. Would I not be afraid to reconstruct them exactly as they were and I said I would probably not reconstruct them exactly as they were but we could play with material and with proportion. We would really talk about architecture…

RK: But what is the information with strategies that artists use.

JH: Artists have not excluded strategies of reconstruction or simulation or mimicking. They have involved this more in their daily process, in their sculptural practice.

MW: Well for me of course if you rebuild the stairs they will reach exactly the street, so the appearance will be such that the sort of 1960’s infrastructure would actually go underneath this building. It will have the effect of making this building an artifact. So it relates to the early discussion and of course 9/11 is the perfect example.

Maybe we could produce a formula where the more an architect feels his face must be earnest the more stupid the work. This is why you have been invited to this location because this is like a test laboratory for architects. Maybe you are the first two guinea pigs of 200 architects who will be called in to see if they can make an interesting observation on preservation and as long as the position is earnest, following Rem’s earlier argument, it is doomed to failure because it is doomed to have the work judged on moral grounds and there will never be a single moral position. So, the question is then how to replace morality with the law and with intelligence. But also with art it is not so much the question of whether we put art in that space but in which way would that space be in itself a work of art and a work of intelligence.

One strategy would be to make a space for art on that side that doesn’t actually produce this frisson, doesn’t give a boost, but actually makes the contemporary work look stupid.

If for example you designed a museum whose primary purpose was to make the work of contemporary artist’s art look stupid you will have done a wonderful service for architecture…

RK: …and for man kind.

MW: …and for mankind in general. And of course for the younger generation of artists it would more efficiently carry out the necessary killing off of the parents.

RK: Chris are you still there? There is another interesting scenario, which is to use the empty part of the museum as a repository for the future abandoned private museums of the current generation of private collectors. It is a kind of preemptive preservation. It is not difficult to foresee the kind of tragic situation that the children of the collectors don’t show the same respect and infinity to art as their parents did and will either want to sell and no longer maintain the very expensive spaces.

What I think is that at least they have a certain freshness or topicality and somehow I think that is a kind of fundamental difference between Jacque and myself - simply a more skeptical view of the energy and intelligence of art at this moment.

MW: In a moment in time art becomes more and more beautiful to rich people as it becomes more and more expensive so that to look at an art object that becomes beautiful over night you are talking about a strategy that tries to look at the end game to that. Which would be a case of preemptive preservation actually setting up a preservation strategy for the ruins of the art museums.

RK: Could be yeah.

MW: I think there was a time in which architects were able to make the work of artists look stupid and we have lost that ability primarily through giving away a lot of trade secrets. Too many artists operate as architects, so they have managed to work with inside strategies. Both of you have helped artists by making extraordinary spaces for them. Are you not tempted to help their demise or to make their work seem partial?

I think your resistance to the Dia concept is the definition of a kind of religious space for worshipping works and that kind of thing. But it could be something else it could be a space in which it would be extraordinarily difficult for art to look.

JH: But that is also boring - we know that. I mean Guggenheim has done that. I mean the Frank Lloyd Wright building was an act against art. It probably didn’t work at that time but it works perfectly well now and artists can install his or her work in that building. So you can do it anywhere. I think Rem’s proposal for the Hermitage where it looks like a brigand looks very nice but does it work really? That is a different story.

I think that contemporary art can deal with any kind of space and that makes it so difficult to say we do it this or that way. I think it is also good that art can go anywhere and that is why it would be of course the most stupid thing to renovate this wing perfectly back to the Nazi time, because then it would be perfect too without any art. Even if I say it should be art rather than a high class bar it should be clearly thought through what kind of art space.

RK: I think there is one thing that I am a bit critical of in your description of your alternative. You mention bar and restaurants and I think that is not necessarily the dimension that we have to think about when we talk about an institution or a space that accommodates a number of contemporary urgencies. It can deliver an environment that can somehow stimulate those needs and that can create both very smooth and very technical, if necessary, conditions that could respond to a real social need (even if it is not a kind of working class social need) but maybe a middle class social need.

So, to limit it to bars and restaurants is a bit too facile. I think the unique thing about Munich is that it is much more original and ambitious than it seems. The more I come here the more I realize that there is a very high caliber of perfectionism operating very well disguised as comfort and conservatism. Perhaps it is possible to extract from that something that legitimately has real energy and has real potential to generate income and therefore maintain the survival of a very radical institution rather than have us wring our hands about what we should do about the Nazi building.

JH: I totally agree but then we should not only limit ourselves to say this is a bar or art but we should also not limit ourselves to say this should be in that building because we have the park on that side and the street on this side and it has other places where the future of that building and that institution can be discussed.

MW: I think in this moment we should make the transition to listening to some questions from the audience. I just want to make the observation that what is happening in this discussion, and I don’t know if this is discussion number 200 of 300…

RK: It is number 5

MW: But at this moment the enemy shifts from the responsibility from handling guilt, which relates to the Nazi’s and allows a much bigger guilt of those who allowed the Nazis to be what they were and what in a sense what they still are. The responsibility now moves from that to what seems to be smaller, more technical questions of art, the law, the city, the clients and so on.

This is not an accidental shift, because I personally feel that Chris in his work on the first wing shows that the field of architecture is perfectly prepared to be extraordinarily thoughtful and intelligent about the question of memory in relationship to architecture and fascism. I think the real challenge for us is the challenge we face in our relationship to cultural property in general, to the law, to the art market and so on. That’s why I think this project is a good trigger to thinking about these bigger issues, which is why I think at the end we were talking about those things.

But as both speakers like Munich a lot I think this would be a good time for the people of Munich to ask questions.

Audience: I would like to ask Mark to widen the topic of the discussion to the issues which were presented this afternoon when we talked about ideology and architecture in connection with North Korea. This is especially interesting as we have two architects on the podium who are currently building in China which is also a totalitarian state. Therefore, I would like to make two precise questions. One to Jacque Herzog; you said that architecture could be branded by ideologies but is never in itself ideological so maybe you could give us some insight into your experience in China and how your building there is branded with political meanings. And I would like to know from Rem Koolhaas (I don’t know if you listened to the presentation by the North Korean architect) but I would love to know how far your pragmatic approach to political conditions would fit with the ideas of architecture, which were developed by Kinyo Yung and presented this afternoon.

RK: Who are you?

Audience: I am an architect teaching in Nuremberg right now.

JH: Clearly the building that we do in China is not ideological to the same degree as we talked about here that was presented by our North Korean colleague this afternoon. He presented architecture and art that was meant to be in the services of a very specific ideology. But we can of course ask ourself whether behind the freedom we had in China somehow does not show a hidden ideology or a hidden reason. We got the freedom to express the readiness and generosity of contemporary China showing that they are open to any form of expression. So this question of what is ideology and can we get rid of it or can we liberate ourselves from is in this or that way is very wide. I think actually it is not actually a fruit for discussion.

RK: Let me say something. We are the first generation of architects whose professional life coincides with globalization. So, I think we are the first generation of architects, who have a choice to build or not build in different territories and to put its faith in different experiments or efforts or be hosts or guests in various political environments.

We very deliberately took part in the CCTV competition not as a pragmatic move, as I might add and I would like to make a very strong point of this that we are probably the least pragmatic people in the world but we took part as part of what I might call call an ideological approach. We were extremely aware that the world is at this moment moving in a very accelerated way. There are a number of tensions, conflicts, convergences but what we see is a sky with clouds that move unbelievably fast. In that speed we took care to identify which degree of participation we thought was legitimate and even positive.

Therefore, I don’t hesitate to say that it is not so much that we are pragmatically collaborating with the authoritative government of China, but that we believe that on the whole the modernization of China is managed with a degree of intelligence. It has been unbelievably successful in moving people away from poverty in a very short time and also creating a vast and unexpected amount of room to maneuver for the Chinese. This freedom is perhaps far from the kind of freedom of expression that we are used to but anyone who has been in China has also observed an enormous amount of expression that unfold freely.

Therefore, at the very moment that we had to choose between the competition for Ground Zero and the competition for the head quarters for CCTV, we chose to participate in the definition of the expression of Chinese media. It was not a random decision. I had been studying China for 10 years; I had been there in a very thorough way, I have many Chinese friends and I generally knew how Chinese society was evolving. My gamble and we were deeply aware it was gamble that could go wrong or an assessment even that could go wrong. But my assessment was that on the whole it was intelligent to participate in this particular effort because through our participation we might raise slightly the issue of media in China and emphasize the importance of media in China. In a way by projecting a modern image we could contribute to a more modern reality. Let me put it that way.

It is way too early to see if we are vindicated but perhaps affected. What used to be called Central China Television will now be split in two parts. One part Central Television, which remains the old style propagandistic Chinese television and the other one China television which is a more modern BBC-like television actually is an initial sign that our assessment was maybe not far wrong.

MW: As a foot note I would disagree with your first comment that you wanted to widen the discussion because I am convinced the discussion of specific architecture for specific regime is a much narrower and not very problematic issue. The situation in North Korea seems to be very straight forward and very clear and not at all problematic.

Perhaps designing the headquarters for a German automobile company using, what appear to be state of the art techniques, poses many more complex dilemmas I think. It seems rather straight forward and of course what you are seeing in North Korea is a reworking of an old concept of a total work of art at the scale of a nation. And yes of course you have every reason to be nervous about that but you have every reason to be nervous about institutional and governmental forms that are precisely de-territorialized and globalized in their capacity so that one can never read the art. In other words the art is there but it is not visible as such. Architects contribute to these constructions of these de-territorialized systems of authoritarian control and are never asked to defend that decision.

RK: I would also say that you have an enormous stake in the outcome. Not only of what happens in Korea but also what happens in China. Because you have that stake and I have that stake, I decided to take part in this particular place. There is another thing. I hate grandstanding and that is probably why I have such a robust reputation for cynicism but the things we refuse are the least visible part of our oeuvre.

Audience: Hello my name is Werner I am an art student. I have two questions. First of all I hear all the time Nazi architecture here but I think the image is Nazi architecture and the architecture is more an international style of new classicism like the Trocadero in Paris and the buildings of the government in Washington and the banks and courts in New York.

As a citizen of Munich I am very interested in urban function and I mean the Haus der Kunst is a building that is very isolated in this region of the city. On one side you have the park, which is one of the biggest city parks in the world. This is ignored in Munich and we don’t have one entrance which shows the importance of this park. The entrances to this park are ridiculous I would say. The Haus der Kunst is really in between these two main entrances these two big connection points in the city. The other big problem is the street in front with the tunnel and the stairs and I think the Haus der Kunst would function much better if the surrounding of this place would be more urban with shops and the other side of this building is terrible…

MW: I don’t mean to interrupt because I think that everything you are saying makes complete sense but it is not a question but the beginning of an answer and it seems to be totally in the spirit of Jacque’s call for a concern with the city and city decisions. So, it seems to me that the citizens of Munich could become enormously important collaborators with Chris Dercon in this vision. Literally it is a question not just of repositioning this building in history but it is almost more primitive than that it is repositioning this building in the city. And since the city is of course a communication system to reposition this building in the city is to communicate differently about the building and it could be that the real key decisions are quite small questions about traffic engineering or planting or legal decisions about the future and it doesn’t matter so much what happens in the wing. But I think it could be good to accept that point and take the last question beside you.

Audience: I think you have to accept the question that was called before about the political power and your icons as an instrument of this political power. I think it is not relating to a single project, I think it is a movement now. If you look, not just at China but also at places like Kazakhstan and see what architects like Foster and Erica and Moss are doing there, I think we have to think about it in the future.

But I will come back to Jacque’s point of the reconstruction of 9/11 and I think it is a serious question at the moment because all the heritage issues are going far away from the Charter of Venice where you have to see the different layers of the history of the building. We are already in an epoch of reconstruction.

It is not only the Braunkirche in Dresden, but not many people know that we are actually totally rebuilding the acropolis in Athens. I think that this is an actual phenomenon.

I think therefore in this movement the only proposal for the Haus der Kunst is to re-simulate the opening exhibition from the opening of the building to really show what was at the moment of the opening, just as a temporary installation maybe but why not thinking of this proposal?

MW: I think you had three questions. Firstly, you are asking the panel to take very seriously the question of the politics of the commission and I think from the answers it is clear that it was taken extraordinarily seriously and there is a great agreement with you.

The second point you make is the fact that reconstruction is a reality and I think yes, the Parthenon is the most amazing example, where the ruin is being rebuilt. They are even considering reconstructing the roof using the latest techniques. I think it is not a surprise that the world is in a reconstruction business but all of these reconstructions are being done with extraordinary intelligence and in each case there are a lot of experts involved. In almost every case there are positive results not negative as would have been predicted.

I think it is not a surprise that this historical development coincides with increasing expertise in the question of preservation on the part of architects. I think that again you are right.

On the last part I think it would be great to hear Jacque and Rem’s feeling about this terrorist proposal to reconstruct, not just the building, but the scene of the very first exhibition.

RK: But why?

JH: With Maurizio Catalan playing the Fuehrer!

RK: I think it is a question for Chris

[Laughter]

Chris Dercon: Thank you Rem for introducing me. We heard a lot tonight and in answer to your question we will take it into consideration because it is not the aim of the architects to tell us what to program; we should come up with the aims and we will take it into consideration.

Tyler_Architecture_Theory_Fall-2010

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Monday_September 27_Visit to Eastern State Penitentiary_10:10 am

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Built Ideologies_video

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Fall-2010 Tyler_Architecture Lecture Series Fall 2010

Monday_September 20 2010_Agenda