ODYSSEUS the ARCHITECT
A
Case for Nostalgia as Architectural ‘Modus Operandi’
and a Personal Philosophy of the Architectural
Approach.
Researched
and Written by Boris Bogdanovic
“Everything that is spiritual or intellectual in
the world has appeared through some accident, as after a shipwreck civilised
people find themselves with their suits, equipment and weapons on a remote
island…That is why all our ideas have the curious and tragic quality of objects
rescued from (a wreckage). They have on them also the mark of that forgotten
other world we once set out from, of the catastrophe that brought us here, and
of their constant vain endeavour to adapt themselves to the new world.” (Andric,
20:1992)
Architecture is a discipline of departures. Like all
figurative and metaphorical journeys of ‘spiritual’ and ‘intellectual’
proportion, it is initially instigated, subsequently moved and perpetually motivated
by a longing for the destination, whether predetermined or hypothetical. In
some ways, it is the inevitable ‘suffering’ for this place through practice and
thought that stimulates a continuous desire to cross such frequently
unfathomable distances. For all practices of expression (In this case
architecture) the guide and inspiration for the ‘odyssey’ are internally moved
yet externally validated stimuli, in other words, the essential ideas and elegiac
visions of the architect, that become the defining measures of his or her
quest. These are, as the author Ivo Andric suggests, the ‘suits, equipment and
weapons’ that travel with us and which save us if we are ever ‘shipwrecked’.
After all, the humanistic tradition permeating the ‘ego’ of contemporary
expression poetically maintains that ‘omnia me mecum porta’ – we carry
all we need within us. Our concepts and notions, according to Andric then, are
familiar items of personal belonging which however dramatically or gently
landed on the aforementioned shores survive in their potency and significance only
in reference to their owner. Their relevance is tied in with and informs the
being of the architect as distillations of her or his ‘self’. As both origin
and driving force, this initial montage of notions and points of embarkation
become simultaneously touchstones, milestones and talismans, whispering the
promise of resolve and conclusion. As such, though, they demand the placation
of the architect’s being as the root (In the words of that other popular credo
‘Gnothi se auton’ / to thy own self be true) through the difficultly reconciled
satisfaction of attaining that distant place and the resulting unknown. The
architectural journey then seems to be a paradox for some - ‘a looking back to
look forward’. It is a dogma, infused with nostalgia in its purest sense
– an aching longing to simultaneously return while making it ‘there’.
Nostalgia is an inevitable state for the ‘moving’ person
– traveller, adventurer, émigré and, arguably, architect for all four
individuals are creators of their own vocation. For them, it is only the
original, preliminary concepts at departure that moderates and reconciles the
difficult striving to reach and attain their final destination. For the
greatest epitome of the nostalgic impulse of the adventurer/architect, one must
look to ancient/mythological Greece. The author Milan Kundera states that it
was the “dawn of ancient Greek culture (that) brought the birth of the Odyssey,
the founding epic of nostalgia (for) Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all
time, is also the greatest nostalgic.” (7:2002) Odysseus, “rather than (choosing) ardent exploration of the
unknown (adventure)…chose the return. Rather than the infinite (for a adventure
never intends to finish), he chose the finite (for the return is a
reconciliation with the finitude of life).” (Kundera, 8:2002) Odysseus’
situation and response is a mode
of operation that explains the paradox of nostalgia, and – as he was the architect
of the Trojan Horse – elucidates
its relevance for his professional associates today, as individuals both
consoled and burdened by an inherent faith in their origin.
This is a crucial consideration for the contemporary architect
as architecture - the architectural historian Josef Sarnitz asserts – has
a “necessity (for) continuous reflection upon origins, (as) the fundamental condition’s
of humanity’s being (are) an elementary constituent of artistic creation. It
gives impression to the fact that culture and art is never severed from life
and as such cannot be placed outside the reality that gives rise to it.” (7:2005)
Just as art and architecture cannot be isolated from life, neither can the
notions which instigated their creation be divorced from their maker. In
serving others, architect’s serve themselves and their latent quest to return
– in other words reconcile – inherent motions of thought with a
sense of public duty. The need to acknowledge an architect’s and architectural
practice’s nostalgic tendencies is unavoidable. If anything, a prevalent
tendency of recollection and reflection is instigated at an architect’s
professional origin – their architectural education – which goes on
to inform professional subconscious. According to the architectural critic
Juhanni Pallasmaa such commentaries on the importance of specific and subjective
roots for an architect, “touch upon the existential basis of architecture,
which is saturated by memories and experiences lost in childhood.” (65:2001)
Without a doubt it is at architectural schools, our discipline’s ‘childhood’
phase, that the foremost of conceptual commitments are made and a sense of a
tradition created. As architects educated and operating in the post-modern
context of the Western world, our heritage is of our own choosing and our
influences selective, resulting in a purely independent understanding of a personally
specific architectural tradition. In grappling with tradition and a nostalgia
for origins, we are faced with the reality that ours is, as the architect Alan
Colquhoun observes “(a) study of architecture as an autonomous discipline
– a discipline which incorporates into itself a set of aesthetic norms
that is the result of historical and cultural accumulation and which takes its
meaning from this.” (In Nesbitt, 209:1996)
It is not far-fetched then, to suppose that the
architectural modus operandi, at some level, is a seeking of a return, or at least
a reconnection with this first accumulation, the ‘primal move’ that generated a
desire for the architectonic journey. For the post-modern architect, design
becomes a mnemonic voyage in built form powered by nostalgia. This is not far
from the original meaning of the word, which, Kundera explains, is a split
etymology where “the Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos” while “algos means
‘suffering”, nostalgia “(therefore) is the suffering caused by an unappeased
yearning to return.” (6:2002) The nostalgic notion within the architectural
context is given even more credence when considered in other languages, for in
“Spanish, anoranza, comes from the verb anorar (to feel nostalgia)…itself
derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience;
to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the
pain of ignorance, of not knowing.” (Kundera, 6:2002) An architect’s nostalgia,
then, is a coincidental state of painfully eventuating ignorance motivated by
empowering prior knowledge. It is a malady of ‘aching waylessness’ or ‘aporia’
in the Greek Socratic sense, suggesting that an architectural nostalgia is not
only a claim for place and space, but greater intangibles such as time. In
German, the word nostalgia becomes even more descriptive of this pluralistic
quality of such architectural longing. Again it is Kundera who states that “the Germans rarely use the
Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the
desire of an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has
existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure)” (6:2002) Nostalgic
design becomes a word game – we build what we know and need or, if we do
not know or if it does not exist, we build for what we long for and again need,
and, therefore, in essence know when we discover. Such plurality, or at least
duality of the nostalgic architectural mode is a ‘Janus-faced’ instigator that
both reflects to ponder (historically) and directs to move (futuristically)
that empowers architectural practice. After all, as the preservation architect
Cevat Erder suggests, architecture must be “a bond…established with the future without condemning the
modern and without destroying the past.”(Erder, 1986:16) Equally so, an
architect’s own sense of being (Or at least being through practice) must be
self-critical. As useful as a longingly nostalgic approach to a personal
‘history’ is in comprehending intention and seeking motivation, it can also
encumber the design process, a fact that also applies when appreciating an
architect’s more ‘cosmic’ association with architectural historicism in style
and approach. Colquhoun comments on this weary relationship when he
states that “history provides both the ideas that are in need of criticism and
the material out of which this criticism is forged. An architecture that is
constantly aware of its own history, but constantly critical of the seductions
of history, is what we should aim for today.” (In Nesbitt, 209:1996)
In the liberal context of architecture’s late
post-modern plurality and a ‘l’esprit du temps’ of eclectically liberated responses, the architect is his own
scale and architecture, as referential or omniscient, micro or macrocosmic as
it wants to be is moderated only by the maker’s personally defined sense of
measure. A nostalgia, then, or at least, a socially conscious awareness of
specifically personal and more widely universal origins from which to depart
and which to return, become the morality of architectural practice. They become
ethical rules which inform the enduring and evolving traditions and habits of
the practitioner. For
such an architect, nostalgia activates a liminal response – questioning
the threshold of a inherent psychologically subconscious response.
BIBLIOGRAPHY /
Andric, Ivo, Signs / Bridges / Conversations with
Goya, London, Menard Press, 1992
Andric, Ivo, The Pasha’s Concubine and Other Tales,
New York, Borzoi Books, 1988
Barthes,
Roland, Mythologies,
London, Paladin Grafton Books, 1988
Carmel –
Arthur, Judith & Buzas, Stefan, Carlo Scarpa / Museo Canoviano, Passagno, London, Edition Axel Menges, 2002
Erder,
Cevat, Our Architectural Heritage / from Consciousness to Conservation /
Museums and Monuments XX, Paris, UNESCO, 1986
Kis, Danilo,
Early Sorrows / For Children and Sensitive Readers, New York, New Direction Books, 1998
Kundera,
Milan, Ignorance,
New York, Harper Perennial, 2002
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Architecture, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2005
Los, Sergio,
Carlo Scarpa / An Architectural Guide, Verona, Arsenale Editrice, 1995
Mastroyinnapolous,
Very Reverend Archimandrite, Elias, Nostalgia for Orthodoxy, Athens, ZOE / Brotherhood of
Theologians, 1959
Sarnitz, Josef, Otto Wagner,
2005, Taschen Publishing, New York
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Architecture, Toronto, YYZ Books, 2000
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Christopher, In Ruins, New York, Pantheon Books, 2001