1. Contexte, non-contexte

Selon Aires Mateus : “Les projets ne sont pas écrits dans un contexte mais dans ses possibilités de transformation”, note Manuel Aires Mateus. “Le concept central de ce projet, à Bordeaux, est l’espace et la relation à la religion”, poursuit-il. Le dessin reste donc quasiment inchangé. Sacrilège ! Un architecte en France qui ne fait pas du contexte un dogme !

Selon Hans Kollhoff : “Pour les contextualistes, un bâtiment est un moyen d’homogénéisation d’une situation existante. Ils vont même jusqu’à ne donner droit d’exister à un bâtiment qu’à travers le contexte. C’est une attitude que j’ai eue pendant longtemps. Mais j’ai changé à cause de la question de l’espace. Comment pouvez-vous définir les espaces majeurs d’un bâtiment en regardant ce qui l’entoure ? Le bâtiment doit avoir son existence propre, qui vient du programme, des nécessités fonctionnelles.”

Selon Valerio Olgiati : “Nous débutons par la photo d'une exposition de mon travail à l'Ecole polytechnique de Zurich. Vous voyez des maquettes blanches, comparables car toutes à la même échelle : 1/33. Il n'y a pas de contexte. Les bâtiments sont pour ainsi dire arrachés hors de terre, tels des arbres déracinés. Je commence par ce cliché, car je suis convaincu qu'il est possible de faire une architecture qui ne soit pas essentiellement contextuelle. Au cours de ces vingt dernières années, la question de la contextualité est devenue une contrainte incontournable. Elle est désormais un positionnement moral déterminant toutes les prémisses d'un projet. Les architectes ne réalisent plus que des projets en réaction à leur environnement. Pour ma part, je pense que l'architecture peut se développer à partir d'une idée, d'une pensée, et qu'une idée n'a pas fondamentalement à être liée au contexte. Comme exemples historiques, je peux citer les temples ou les églises ou encore les étables, presque toujours non contextuels. Ce sont pourtant, la plupart du temps, de magnifiques bâtiments. Nés d'une idée, ils ne réagissent pas uniquement et exclusivement à des objectifs contextuels, économiques, techniques et fonctionnels. Je suis convaincu qu'il est possible et même nécessaire de concevoir aujourd'hui un projet à partir d'une idée et de créer des bâtiments susceptibles de correspondre à l'intelligence culturelle de l'époque actuelle.”

2. “La Seconde main. Ou le travail de la citation”

Learning Center EPFL. Lausanne. Valerio Olgiati

Taj Mahal. India

3. Où se situe le barycentre de la culture architecturale ?

Architectural prizes and events since WWII

Western formatting, a legacy to jeopardize?
Pli 02 - Format(s). Julien Borrel. September 2016

“And yet, if the East and the West would have each on its side and independently developed distinct scientific civilization, what would be our society like and how much would be they be different from what they now are? This is the kind of question I usually ask myself.” (1)

Thus Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965) questions himself, surprised to have seen the Japanese civilization weakening from the growth of the phenomenon of globalization, facing the Western hegemony carrier of scientific and technical innovations. Commonly associated to the economic field, globalization also exerts a significant impact on our own cultures by promoting the birth of a universal civilization (2). However, to consider this cultural levelling is a chance is forgetting it destroys the distinctions between territories and people. In an era where the degree of hardship remains low, the enlargement or even the erasure of borders participates in the upheaval of the spatio–cultural features such as we know them. Every tradition is then made available for immediate consumption to the rest of humanity, transforming the exercise of architecture throughout the world since several decades.

With the development of mass transportation, the great names of modern architecture roam the globe and initiate cultural transfers which will occur, particularly during the second half of the 20th century. Today a new school of designers appeared. It groups architects predisposed to the hybridization of Western paradigms generally inherited from modernity combined with the contributions of their local traditions. For example, the winner of the Pritzker Prize of 2012 reflects the ability to design an architecture at the crossroads of several cultures. Wang Shu will first build his career around traditional practices such as calligraphy, reading, Chinese poetry. To consider the precepts of an architectural modernity which seems anachronistic will allow the architect to take an upstreaming regionalist stand in his country. From this dual teaching results a noticeable blend in its projects, mainly by space devices and the materiality that it implements. For the moment Wang Shu’s example remains atypical, but there will be many designers who will know how to handle this new language in the coming years.

At the same time the phenomenon of globalization resulted in the standardization of the representation of architectural work mediums. It is not only the concepts, intangible elements of our profession, that internationalized themselves but also the techniques that are associated. Whether one evokes the formats or the drawing tools, it is the entire design–representation process that is standardized. A4 sheets, Rotring and CAD (Computer Aided Design) software / CAD (Computer Assisted Drawing) are used daily in any point of the Earth and sometimes we forget that this panel of instruments constitute products of Westernization. In an article written for the magazine Bungeishunjū, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki takes the antithesis and imagine an original hypothesis. What if the inventor of the pen was a Japanese or a Chinese from the past? “It is obvious that it would have provided, not a metal pen, but a brush. […] And if the paper, the Chinese ink and the brush would have been developed in this way, the metal pen and Western ink would have never known their current vogue, proponents of Latin characters would have found no hearing, and ideographs and kana would have been the subject of a unanimous and strong predilection” (3). We can try to raise the almost infinite effects induced by successive exports from the West. Trying it make one aware that it will be difficult to go back. It is not an issue to complain about the circumstances of the events, but rather to understand what hides behind the contemporary architect tool palette.

A revolutionary design method is imposing itself subtly to the world of architecture: the Building Information Modeling. It initiates a considerable paradigm shift since drawing disappears for the benefit of the digital model. We don’t handle plans but views, no traits but objects. Let us proceed to the hegemony of the Autodesk Group on the software issue and let’s pay attention to a quartet with unparalleled influence. United States, Germany, Britain and France are discussing the ‘level of detail ’ that should be adopted on the basis of scales of representation. However, their views differ and rise the risk of seeing itself in the world as a model derived from a Western consensus thus blocking other practices, techniques and more discrete measures. This monopoly situation is by the way exacerbated by the multiplication of international competitions, since architects are now accustomed to the use of long networks of globalization to be exported. Unconsciously or not, the supervisor becomes an actor in Western formatting by distributing its methods by responding to calls from the far reaches of the globe. In contrast, excessive universalization cannot constitute a stopgap, some extra–Western agencies depart voluntarily from processes standardized assuming traditional processes to design buildings. This is the case of the Indian agency Studio Mumbai. Its members do not work with comic figures, but with models in scale 1:1, true components of the future building. This method greatly stands away from the description of objects that will be produced in another place and by others. This use of archaic tools, varied formats as well as design processes and collaborative construction forms an initial response to the problem of the increase in intercontinental standards imposed in the practice of architecture.

With a perpetual cultures upgrade, globalization contributes to the flattening of the world. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1914–2009) still defends the idea that “Man cannot escape the clutches of its own culture, which reaches to the roots of his nervous system and shapes its perception of the world” (4). On this Earth, what would go for one could not apply to all. Therefore, the choice of overall planning synonymous with social and cultural levelling seems unsustainable. At the same time, flows and mobility development participated in the shortening of the Earth’s surface. The man’s playground increasing smaller, the challenge now is to stop traveling around the world. It is becoming urgent to initiate a reverse process towards a more authentic anchorage between the human, its territory and its own culture. This needy link to its environment is probably our chance. Hopefully, it naturally acts as a safeguard to channel developers who are likely to drift at the discretion of the powerful globalization networks. In other words, the architect is able to consciously place the cursor away from global to approach local. The environmental crisis seems to be a solid track to influence this report of strength since it encourages taking account of the local context and returning to the primary and ancestral common sense. In sum, the questioning of Western formatting is a prerequisite to fight the constant uprooting imposed by the logic of globalization. Potential danger of this heritage as well as the emergence of an anti–globalization trend appear as two underlying conditions to reverse our gaze and finally cease to impose this “great sharing between us, Westerners and them, the others” (5). The architect must familiarize themselves with these issues; more than just a matter of architecture, it is a social debate which applies to the designer.

1. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. L’éloge de l’ombre. Aurillac: POF, 1933.
2. Ricoeur Paul. “Civilisation universelle et cultures nationales” in Spirit 29, n°10, 1961.
3. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. L’éloge de l’ombre. Aurillac: POF, 1933.
4. Hall Edward T. La dimension cachée. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971.
5. Latour Bruno. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte, 1991.

Julien Borrel

+33 (0)669373793borrel.archi@gmail.com

+33 (0)669373793
borrel.archi@gmail.com