On October 25, a lecture by the architect and philosopher Alexander Rappaport took place at the Moscow School of Architecture MARCH. We publish her record with small abbreviations:
"Unsolved problems of architecture" symbolically means for me that we are now in an era or in a time when architecture is facing a radical change in its foundations, its methods, its paradigms, its ethics, its aesthetics, poetics, organizational forms and everything else. Although it is generally accepted that architecture is a traditional art, and in this it differs from many other arts, I think that this time, in the 21st century, architecture will have to spend a lot of effort to both preserve these traditions and radically revise them. Because a lot of architectural traditions are illusory, false, hypocritical. It does not correspond to any reality at all, as well as the very concept of "architecture", which practically means nothing to us today.
This situation itself is quite stereotypical these days, but every time we come close to it, we find ourselves in the position of a person who decided to come to the MARSH school. It was with the greatest difficulty that I found her here at Artplay. Where to go - it is not known which door is open, which is closed - it is not known. And most importantly, which is characteristic: no one in the nearest kilometer knows about the existence of this MARSH school and how to go to it. The same can be said about architecture. Whoever is asked what it is, no one, I think, knows.
I proceed from the fact that architecture is transformed from a building art into an anthropological art.
Architecture provides a person not with buildings and structures, as it was commonly thought, but with meanings.
The totality of these meanings constitutes culture. So, culture for me is a collection of meanings, and architecture is one of the spheres that these meanings produce, retain, preserve and change.
The next question of any normal person will be the question of what is meaning. There are many answers to this question, but there is no single answer. What is the meaning of the meaning is still not clear. There are several approaches to this issue. And many of them, as a rule, are based on linguistics and understand meaning as the meaning of some conventional sign, form or term. But these attempts to develop a theory of meaning have reached a dead end, turned out to be tautological, or lead nowhere.
Trying to somehow clarify the situation for myself, I came to the conclusion that meaning is the program of the human brain that is put into it at birth. And throughout our history - the history of our life on earth, both of individuals and of the human race - we gradually reveal and rebuild those meanings that are "innate" to us.
It seems to me that the meanings of the words of the language, mathematical meanings, musical meanings, choreographic and architectural meanings are "innate" to us. Moreover, architectural meanings make up a large and significant part of the meanings that our consciousness, our culture and all of our humanity have at their disposal.
However, it so happened in history that architectural meanings for many millennia were gradually obscured by linguistic and verbal meanings. Verbal means "built on the verbal language."
And the architecture turned out to be covered with words, flooded with all sorts of speeches, ideologies.
And today to discover architecture means to perform an archaeological action, to unearth it from under the so-called cultural layers with which it is covered. Incidentally, this metaphor is very close to reality in archaeological practice. Many architectural monuments are dug out from under the so-called cultural layers, that is, from under the garbage. Words of ideological interpretations, in turn, filled the architecture.
In addition, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the meanings are related without discussing their changes and origin, that is, outside the genetic paradigm. At best, meanings are understood or not, but no one considers the process of the origin of meanings, the degeneration of meanings, the genesis of meanings. And meanings, among other things, although everything is embedded in our consciousness, they are still endowed with the ability to live and develop. Their fate includes birth, degeneration, oblivion, degradation. Architecture from this point of view is an extremely illustrative example.
We know four epochs in the life of mankind, when architecture appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared into nowhere.
She appeared in Ancient Egypt and almost disappeared, then she reappeared in Mediterranean antiquity and is still held in the minds of some fans of the classics. Then architecture broke out into Gothic and quickly fizzled out. And, finally, in the 20th century, she again made a strong leap forward, appeared in the avant-garde and modernism, and now it is destroyed before our eyes like fireworks.
No one knows why these architectural flares appeared or why they disappear. One could be upset about the architecture, but, looking closer, we will understand that the language just as suddenly appeared and just as little by little disappears, being replaced by some kind of technical semiotic systems. A person also appeared once, but can disappear. In this sense, architecture can be considered initially humane, since it experiences the fate of man and humanity: birth, dawn, dying. Oswald Spengler once wrote about this quite expressively.
We are now in a state of dying architecture.
When 90% of architectural activity is the duplication of dead stamps. Replicated carrion, which is sweetened with grace, smoothness, brilliance, purity and correctness of its forms. I call it "architectural consumer goods", and I myself am amazed at how quickly the ideals of modernism and functionalism turned into this consumer goods, but in my opinion, this cannot happen for a long time.
After 100 years, a massive aversion to modern architecture will begin.
She will cause the most convulsive attacks of madness, hatred, vandalism. And the more we manage to build, the more difficult it will be for our great-grandchildren to destroy it, hide it somewhere, hide it, be ashamed of it and ashamed of our generation, which did not notice this deadness.
Not everyone will agree with me, but many still think about these words as partly justified spiritual and professional provocation. But these topics are complex and require different excursions into different areas, so I would like to talk about something more descriptive. Namely, about the internal and external. It seems to me that the category of internal and external is consonant with the current architectural intuition, and the architectural situation.
Internal and external - the categories are not very new and are used a lot, but Vitruvius bypasses them, and all my life I mentally tried to resist Vitruvius, although its role in the development, and even more so in the dying of architecture, is difficult to overestimate.
Vitruvius introduced the famous triad: "benefit, strength, beauty." But in architecture there is no benefit, no strength, and perhaps no beauty. Benefits belong to the building, not its architecture, the strength of building structures, and beauty - after all, it changes with changing tastes - is it worth attributing to its architecture as well? I am trying to find other triads, one of them is norm, scale, substance.
Lately, I've been trying most of all to uncover the meaning of the substance, but now it's time to work on the category of scale. In part, I will try to do this today, at the same time touching on the category of "structure", which is part of another triad - space, time, structure.
This is another triad, but in discussing the category of "space" in it, I am just trying to show that this category was overestimated at the beginning of the 20th century, then it was struck by a kind of inflation, and that now it is looking for a connection with the category of time in order to make up for its substantial emptiness. But this process is long.
The success of the “space” category was caused at the beginning of the 20th century, in particular, by some manic hatred of time in the form of a denial of history, which is why space floated to the surface. This is a special story related to constructivist radicalism, vulgar Marxism, project ideology, totalitarianism and other important things that I will talk about today.
So, internally and externally. For an architect, “interior and exterior” usually means interior and exterior.
Not so long ago I had a lucky chance to write an afterword to an interesting book by your teacher Sergei Valerievich Sitar. I called my review "A look at the world from the outside and from the inside." This name was born by chance, in a struggle with the editor, who asked me to name the afterword somehow meaningful, and this is how this "Look at the world from outside and from within" was born. And only now I understand that I stumbled upon a topic here that for many years Sergey Valerievich and me both unites and separates. For he looked at architecture through the eyes of a scientist, which, in my opinion, corresponds to a view from the outside, while architecture is not a science, and if he looks, he sees the world mainly from the inside.
So, interior and exterior, but in fact, interior and exterior are not reduced to interior and exterior. Although the very concepts of interior and exterior are extremely interesting. Well, at least, for example, that metamorphosis of architectural fantasy that lives in interiors and exteriors is interesting. There was a time when buildings on the outside were more or less stereotyped, and inside each room opened up a whole world! And now we see extraordinary cities, that is, buildings in cities of intricate shapes, kinks, curvatures, double spirals, etc., and inside there is an absolute stereotype of rooms and offices with computer desks.
The dissolution of the interior in the urban space is partly due to the apotheosis of the modern style. Functionalism as a style spread to both urban planning and architecture, captured all space - external and internal, and the border between interior and exterior began to disappear. In the end, this resulted in a mania for glass enclosing surfaces that destroyed the old massive wall. But the deeper reason, in my opinion, is not in new materials - metal and glass (they became a consequence), but in this stylistic universality of modernism.
Architecture, having escaped from interiors, moved on to gigantic plastic volumes.
One involuntarily ponders how it happens in history that the interior sometimes blooms with such a mysterious or intricate flower, then it is schematized into a box, then it makes the building wriggle in a dance. It remains to consider all this as the whims of a dying reason.
But in order to understand the substantial meaning of the interior and exterior, we must move on to some other categories. We must take into account the scale of the internal and external. This is where the category of scale comes into play. Moving from the interior to the urban environment, we find ourselves from the inner to the outer - leaving the city into the landscape, this outer expands until it reaches the size of the entire earth's surface. But the maximum scale of the external is transcendence. The transcendent is something absolutely external, distant and unattainable. What do you think in architecture is such an absolutely external instance?
It is possible that it is precisely the style that is transcendental to architecture.
And at first glance, this turns all our ideas upside down, since at one time we were used to almost equating architecture with style. Style is born from some other worlds together with architecture, but, dying, it leaves architecture behind and here architecture for the first time appears before us as a naked problem.
The birth of new architecture at the beginning of the 20th century took place under the slogans of a struggle against style, first with all old, historical styles, and finally with style as such. They decided to replace it with "method".
This is where it becomes clear that the very struggle with style at the beginning of the 20th century was a struggle with the transcendental principle, specifically - with God.
Probably, in the word "method" or "way" there was something more earthly, immanent ?, handicraft. And the style went somewhere in the distance, to the sky.
Last year, while working on the topic "style and environment", I realized that style has its own metaphysics of death, that style is something close to death, as "transcendence" in relation to life. And the avant-garde was a life-building art, he believed that he was building life, and death generally dropped out of his field of vision, because death is not projected - either it comes by itself, or it is carried out with the help of violence against life, killing the latter.
In the ideology of life-building, the question of death was not comprehended, and this ideology did not notice that the construction of a new life kills the old life.
But it turned out that this murder of the old life was partly suicide - and the new life turned out to be stillborn as a result. This is the historical paradox of the avant-garde that we have so far managed to overlook.
Modernism as a style flashed with the ability to die and pacify, and architects can now be ranked among the guild of priests of pacification and dying. And in order to finish with death, it remains to recall that architecture was born in the closest connection with funeral rites, that death, in a sense, gave birth to architecture, and architecture gave birth to new life - life in the presence of death, but unlike the civil war in the symbolic, but not a physical sense.
Science is another transcendental authority in architectural thinking and practice. Science is also transcendental to the world and, to some extent, to the fact that there is architecture in the world. That European science, which was born in the XVI-XVII centuries and which today is implanted in architectural and other educational institutions, is built on the presumption of independent contemplation of the laws of nature. Scientists contemplate the world without wanting anything, demanding nothing from it. In architecture, therefore, we see a different eternity than in science, the eternity of science and architecture do not coincide. Although the human world is all created from intentions, that is, desires, aspirations and science, having lost these intentions, became the first of the significant triumphs of the "dehumanization" of the world, and architecture, albeit with transcendental power and with the memory of death, still humanized this world.
Science established rationalism in the world, rationalism fertilized the bureaucracy, and the deadly disease of rational organization spread throughout all organized communities, especially, of course, in large cities - megalopolises. The rational organization of life and cities narrowed the range of meanings that the rural community lived with, while simultaneously expanding it in new directions - technical and scientific creativity.
The result was that architecture began to writhe in convulsions of meaninglessness.
As a source of meaning, architecture somehow failed to connect with the meanings of the technical organization of life - its rigid norms, numerical parameters and directives. The Constructivists saw this as the beginning of a new life, but it turned out that they had a kind of enthusiasm for myopia.
Science and technology, contrary to their hopes, ultimately turned out to be transcendental to architecture.
The third kind of transcendence is consciousness itself.
This is the least thoughtful question, I allow myself to ponder it in my leisure hours: consciousness - as transcendental to architecture. There is a contradictory situation here. It would seem that consciousness is an instrument of transcendence, because consciousness generates these meanings. But if we accept the hypothesis that we use innate patterns of meanings, then this innateness is as transcendental as the divine descent of meanings to earth.
The Egyptians hardly developed the Egyptian style in laboratories, research, doctoral dissertations.
He descended from above, fell so accurately and firmly that to this day it only causes our surprise. And no matter how much we are carried away by the Egyptian style, it is becoming clearer that we ourselves cannot invent or design our own style. More precisely, we cannot evoke a new style from consciousness until conditions are ripe for this, independent of our will.
Synthesis of style is impossible. That is why I say that only the Lord God can save architecture.
The last thing that can be said about transcendence is, perhaps, an accident. This strange thing, it would seem, itself lies in the world of the immanent - a stone that we stumbled over, but also … transcendental because it is always unpredictable. Something is happening to us that does not fit in with our plans, with our projects, with our logic.
All this reasoning is actually not too closely related to our everyday ideas about the external and internal in architecture. After all, the inside is not always fenced off with a wall. For example, a person sitting under a lampshade is also inside some kind of space, and this space has no exterior at all. And the urban environment also has no exterior - it is all internal. And, finally, the physical model of the Universe, which previously seemed to us to be external, now turned out to be more internal than external. At first glance, there are no direct connections between external and internal in architectural experience and in scientific or philosophical thinking, but if architecture is in fact a field of universal meanings, then such connections should be and, most likely, they are hidden. And in this I am ready to agree with Sergei Sitar. Part of the challenge for architecture theory today is to uncover these connections.
All this falls into the category of time, which can also be divided into internal and external. Internal time, as a rule, is called "now", "now", "now". And there is an external time called "yesterday", "in the past", "tomorrow", "in the future." But there are also categories in which space and time are fused and in which it is difficult to oppose the internal and the external. Experience is one of these phenomena. Experience cannot be external.
No one learns from other people's mistakes and achievements. Experience is something that is only your own.
This is what we did with our own hands. A special case is the paradoxes of the so-called "advanced experience", which was the subject of the exhibition at VDNKh, or attempts to adopt advanced experience from abroad. But experience is not contemplated at exhibitions and is not adopted - it is only experienced. External experience cannot become internal, but meaning can be gleaned from the outside, enter into consciousness, become experience and be completed in the external.
I am trying to understand what happens in our minds when the inside becomes outside. For example, how an idea becomes a work. After all, we all more or less know that at first it is born inside, like some kind of lump of completely incomprehensible material, matter, like some speck, a lump. And then it starts to turn into something. And at first it lives inside us, as both internal, because it is within us, and as external, because it came to us from the outside. We say: "the thought came to mind."
What happens to this amorphous lump of unclear, embryonic meaning, which unfolds into something that can be contemplated, considered a thing, construction, composition. I don’t know if everyone and always had this experience. I remember how at first I was looking for new meanings in the finished form of architectural images in magazines. The drama of the birth of meaning and its transformation into an articulated structure came much later.
How this sympathy itself occurs is not always clear to us, just like history, when this meaning grows, expands, articulates, constructs, schematizes - and, finally, is expressed in the form of a drawing, a model that can be looked at from all sides and be surprised.
A model for any architect is a unique ability to see the meaning he himself has given birth to. This is a fantastic experience. The genesis of an external object, a project, from a tiny inner lump inside our consciousness, the growth of meaning and its expansion is still the greatest mystery. I think that such a birth and growth of meaning is inherent not only in architecture. But in painting the artist always sees that he is painting … He always leaves some kind of trace, which is already this external object, and he constantly communicates with it. And for an architect it happens discretely.
The sculptor sculpts and this process is continuous, in contrast to architecture, which works with rigid materials and discrete appearance and disappearance of its object.
Such a flickering, flickering type of consciousness in an architect.
And at the same time, there is a constant change of positions from the internal to the external - in the internal position, consciousness is, as it were, merged with meaning and it is not always clear whether you are doing something, or whether this meaning unfolds itself and drags you along. And then the situation changes and you look at the matter from the outside and no longer depend on what was done, and what was done broke away from you and became independent. This is the secret of space, time and the life of creative consciousness.
And so, this turns out to be a strange dialectic or a contradiction between the external and the internal.
The meaning that enters our consciousness from the outside, at a certain stage, receives an external existence.
The external gives birth to another external - through the internal.
We turn out to be an intermediate link in the movement of some cosmic forces, which first throw in us a state of dissatisfaction and desire, then we turn on the energy of labor and risky search - and finally an object appears that begins to live its own life.
I think that in a hundred or two hundred years, architects will understand that their professional intuition is the ability to resonate in a way. The ability to resonate to semantic structures in their eternal development is a unique, specific ability of an architect. The meanings enter into a kind of associative connections. But these are not logical connections, but rather connections like acoustic interactions. Meanings are superimposed on each other both in perception and in memory, and sometimes they extinguish each other - this is a phenomenon of reverberation, and sometimes they intensify - this is a phenomenon of semantic resonance. Sometimes it can lead to disaster, like a march on a bridge. In modern architecture, an example of such a resonance is provided by the total use of rectangular grids. This leads either to a gradual fading of their meaning, or to complete semantic annihilation, to meaninglessness of the environment.
This is partly why I see in architecture a possible savior of humanity from meaningless existence.
The problem is too serious to be treated as just a theory. It will be a matter of life and death for a new humanity. And architects as professionals will be able to turn their ideas into objects with some kind of inner instinct (and not feeling), communicating with other people and with their minds, listening to them with their semantic parameters and experiencing these semantic resonances.
Recently it became clear to me that architecture as an art is not needed by anyone separately and is infinitely necessary for everyone at once.
Diogenes of Sinop, who lived in a barrel, could do without architecture. A writer, a philosopher will do without architecture - he sits in his little room, heats up the stove, puts geraniums on the window, gives the cat something to eat - and he is satisfied.
But humanity cannot do this. In order to survive, humanity needs architecture, and not soaring in a vacuum, but terrestrial, gravitational, heavy, with endless separations of the internal and external and their endless closures both in this-worldly now and in the other-worldly eternity, including in history, which daily from an internal state becomes an external event, while remaining internal.
I thought about the meaning of the two types of blindness that modern architecture creates. Blindness is the loss of sight of the ability to see objects. The first way to do this is through glass. Glass as things, as an object is not visible. Why we like it or like it - I'm afraid to speak with certainty - is still not clear to the end, although the conjecture about style as a boundary breaker still deserves development.
But there is also geometry. Geometric shapes are invisible because they are speculative. Neither points, nor lines, nor planes can be seen: they are incorporeal and exist only in abstract thinking. We see not these abstract concepts, but the conventional signs of the drawing, which also has a thickness. And when an architectural structure gives rise to a clear geometric figure, the meaning shifts from the sphere of objects of life (houses proper) into the sphere of abstract and illusory light geometry of lines and planes.
Are we enjoying this non-seeing, blindness, or are we suffering from it?
This is a historical question. While - enjoy. The time will come, perhaps we will begin to suffer. And who will tell when? Here, after all, as in the famous aporia of antiquity. When do grains of sand turn into a heap? One grain of sand is not a heap, two is not a heap, N plus one is not a heap. And when - a bunch? This paradox, in my opinion, is one of the main paradoxes of historical change. When does good turn into a nightmare? What day? What minute? This question poses a paradox, but does not give an answer. Grains of sand never form a heap. Glass and geometric objects will never make us completely blind.
Summing up, I want to repeat once again that the theory of the architecture of the future, which is being born today, will apparently have a completely different image and character. The architect will be immersed in the mystery of the life of meanings and the mystery of their transition from internal states of consciousness to external ones and some kind of connection of a person's stay in the world, inside and outside some spaces and times. These reflections will preserve the familiar image of the interior and exterior, building and environment, but the meaning of these images will be expanded, since their interpretation in individual experience and consciousness will give rise to completely new combinations. And if in the future humanity will be able to overcome the dreary feeling of the limitedness of the earth's surface as a lack of freedom, then only in the inexhaustibility of these combinations. Architecture will become something like a bodily and spatially experienced game - from a small number of known and eternal structures, adding up an inexhaustible number of semantic individuations.
We abandoned modernism as a style, and came to the category of environment, but the environment returned us to the history from which modernism escaped. And history is no longer a history of styles, but some other history of traces of random events. But we fail to design the environment in the same way as we fail to design the style - the environment does not obey the means of geometric composition, the environment lives not only in space, but also in time, traces of time. The environment, like style, has become a paradox of immanent transcendence precisely because it has absorbed time over which we have no control. To solve this problem means to somehow master time, as we once took possession of space and to find in time those scales of external and internal, from which we tried to get rid of like a nightmare at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Will we be able to solve this problem in the 21st century? - that's the question.
I think I've said enough. If you have any questions, they can help me add something.
Sergey Sitar:
The topic of innateness seemed unexpected to me. It is clear that this is a big topic in the field of European thought in general, in the field of theory: is there something that can be called innate ideas? Kant, of course, bases his entire system on the categories of the innate. But for some reason I remembered, first of all, the very sympathetic Roman historical philosopher Seneca, who said that the meaning of human activity is to understand one's nature. Understand what is innate to a person. This thesis undoubtedly evokes solidarity and agreement. But on the other hand, he introduces the theme of fatalism. It turns out that, for some, one is innate, for another - another.
Alexander Rappaport:
I assume that everyone is innate to the same thing.
Sergey Sitar:
One well-known politician said that it is inherent in some to rule, others inherent in obeying. And nothing can be done about it. And experience, in general, also shows that all people are different, everyone strives for different things. How do you answer this question? And where did you get the confidence that everyone is innately the same?
Alexander Rappaport:
Well, first of all, those who are destined to rule have to obey themselves more. This is how life works. I came to this from thinking about the language. Take Plato's thought about the nature of knowledge as remembering ideas. The idea is the meaning. Where does it come from? The Platonic meaning was recalled from the phenomenology of the written sign, the word. As long as the word was only spoken, his independent stay outside of speech was not obvious. Writing made such an eternal dwelling of the word, independent of speech, obvious. But the word itself does not mean anything, it is some kind of empty sound or graphic sign. And the meaning is remembered behind this word. And the relation of meaning to the word was unclear.
I was trying to figure out how to interpret this in, say, biblical traditions. And he began to read the first lines of the Old Testament. There the Lord creates heaven, earth. And then: "And the Lord said: Let there be light." What do you mean, said? Whom did you say? What language did you speak? Rather, he even ordered. There was no one yet, who was there to talk to? At that time, the language did not carry a communicative function. So he ordered. Who? To myself? Heaven and earth? Make light.
Thousands of years later the Evangelist John said: "In the beginning was the word." Explicit reflection on the second verse of the Old Testament, on the fact that the Lord has already said something. Once he said, it was God, and God was a word, and God had a word … The Word was God, then up to Florensky and Losev this topic continued to develop and be discussed all the time.
Innateness does not mean, in my understanding, something strictly physiological. It means the transcendental appearance of something on the horizon of being - the existence already given to us. This given existence has a horizon, and on this horizon meanings appear. Meaning is implicitly present in this mythology of Creation as something preceding everything, as a singular moment, as what we call the Big Bang.
I think that all human meanings are innate in the same way, but their fate is different. For example, when a baby begins to see the world, he begins to behave like a computer, endowed with the ability to recognize patterns. And the first image that he recognizes is the eyes of the mother. And the eyes of the mother meet the eyes of the baby, the baby is filled with love for the mother, the mother with love for the baby. I call this love at first sight.
And a simple question came to my mind, is there love of the last look?
Just before death, a second before death, does a person also possess some innate ability to recognize semantic structures. He understands that everything: now everything will be over, this is the last second. Ambrose Bierce has a story where a person stretches the last second of his existence into a flight of some kind of metaphorical mixture of visual images. It is on the bank of the river, and the bridge suddenly mixes with the river, everything starts to revolve, some chaotic mess appears, and again everything disintegrates, creeps apart.
Sometimes it seems to me that architecture is the prototype of the last meaning that opens up to man before the threshold of eternity.
But architects are happy people, they live somewhere in the middle of these big singular points of beginnings and ends. The end and the beginning are two other categories, which, again, could be essential for us in relation to the internal and the external, because the end and the beginning are, of course, external, external categories. And that which inside always comes from the middle, from the heart, from the depths, like smoke or evaporation: the past and the future are drawn into its existence. This is all rather incomprehensible, but wonderful. We hardly have to strive to explain this, but it is desirable that we know how to use it in our imagination and thinking.
Sergey Sitar:
Is it possible to formulate that it is rather necessary to consider that something is innate to all of humanity than to each individual person? Or not?
Alexander Rappaport:
I would say to each individual person, and to all of humanity, probably, too. It seems to me that it is impossible to think of a person and humanity separately, there is some kind of ontological error in this. I do not know the experience of universal consciousness in noospheres, inospheres of Being and Otherness. But what is in the human mind works twice: on the one hand, it already contains meanings, and on the other, the mechanisms of their re-archiving.
How does this happen?
Well, for another thousand years, neuropsychologists will probably puzzle over this. But we already see and feel that this is happening. Locke, in my opinion, was mistaken in thinking that human consciousness is an empty, white board. What is the white board? There is a very complex mechanism of recognition, memorization, discrimination and even intentional presence. I like something, I don't like something right away, we are afraid of something, we are drawn to something. The baby learns the world at a tremendous speed and practically without mistakes. This is a mystery, and it touches us every time we understand something, and in response to understanding, our face breaks into a smile.
Sergey Sitar:
Another short question. There was such an interesting collision: Plato believed that the ideas of artificial objects - manufactured, they also exist. But his followers, the Platonists, said that ideas can be presented as existing only for natural things of nature. In your opinion, the knowledge that can be recalled will be augmented by these technical ideas, or we revolve around one thing.
Alexander Rappaport:
This is a difficult question. But I don't know if we can always tell the difference between replenishment and replay. In order to know exactly whether a local innovation is a replenishment or a reproduction, it is necessary to have a sufficiently powerful distinguishing apparatus and a memory apparatus.
In the past few centuries, we have been living in a situation of rapid technical creativity of new things, knowledge and ideas, but how long this rapid growth will last, we do not know and it is possible that it will slow down over time, and the number of new ideas and things in relation to those already accumulated meanings will be reduced. The problem is rather to keep these old meanings, and not to throw them in the trash as unnecessary. We will remember and have already begun to realize that we have thrown out something very valuable. I hope that the reserves of our consciousness will help us to restore the untimely thrown and forgotten.
I make a distinction between architecture and design based on memory. Design does not value the past; it sends things to the trash heap. Architecture, it seems, by its very nature, always exists in three times - in the functional now, the historical past and the future, and in eternity.
On the other hand, the distinction between the artificial and the natural is still an open problem of ontology. In mathematics, for example, there is a problem: is there a largest prime number? Does it already exist, is it a prime number, or is it generated by those who are looking for it? Why should we seek something that does not exist? This search in itself, from the point of view of constructivist mathematics, is the construction, the construction of this number. On the other hand, it is a search for its existence, independent of our activities. The number both exists and does not exist. In this sense, the roof, column, window as structural objects both exist and do not exist.
Louis Kahn, an idealist, intuition and logician, asked this question - "What does the window want?" It seemed to him that this was not at all a stupid question, and there are things that, being made by our hands, have their own will and intentions.
Another question is whether this architectural ontology will be limited in any way. Or in building and designing, we will always make mistakes and rebuild: this is a matter of an eschatological perspective. If the life of mankind and nature is finite, then it can be expected that, in the end, a further insurmountable maximum of the possible will be reached. But here a new problem appears - the heavenly bliss of inactivity. It is wittily posed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This is a problem rather of theology, and his answer - the eternal bliss of inaction is existence in Glory, is not very clear to me.
When my students asked what understanding is, I say: understanding is the smile of comprehending meaning. She is happiness.
I said: happy is a person who, a second before his death, still managed to understand something. Here, he thereby himself plunges into a happy state. If humanity in its history manages to achieve such a total smile of understanding, then death itself will not be afraid of it already. Because understanding is stronger … The happiness of understanding is stronger than the prospect of dying, it seems to me. And in architecture I see something similar to this bliss of the last glance.
Our language is not well suited to discussing such substances, but, roughly speaking, there is no need to despair. Don't make trouble out of your problem, as they say. Now, playing solitaire is good, but to think about whether all solitaire games are being played is not always necessary, although mathematicians are most likely interested in this.
Evgeny Ass:
I would like to return to the architectural aspect of your lecture. An intriguing question about the transcendence of style and meaning … Is style meaning?
Alexander Rappaport:
Yes, absolutely. For everything is meaning. Everything that is given to our consciousness - everything is meaning.
Evgeny Ass:
No, I mean, in the context of what you were talking about, a structure is emerging in which, in fact, architecture is a product of meaning, a meaning-generating instrument of the world. And thus style is a meaning-generating mechanism in architecture.
Alexander Rappaport:
Yes Yes. Correctly. Exactly. Some meanings can generate others or spread. This is precisely what architecture is remarkable for, although the process of these mutual generation of meaning is still poorly understood by us.
Evgeny Ass:
Does the current situation imply the absence of meaning-making?
Alexander Rappaport:
No, there is no lack of meaning. But there is a slowdown in the generation of meaning and a predominance of the spread or expansion of meanings, known as replication. Style once spread, and meaning spread with it. Now there is a paradoxical situation - forms are spreading without style, and thus the phenomenon of spreading meaninglessness arises. We sometimes spread carrion, that is, nonsense.
I do not quite agree with Walter Benjamin, who saw the loss of aura in replication, here Arthur Koestler is closer to me, who doubted it. Records of great pianists do not lose this aura. But there is a process of spreading meanings, which prevents the generation of meanings, and this is a kind of property of the rapid expansion of technology, which will surely slow down over time.
Evgeny Ass:
It is very interesting. You know, living in carrion, I really want to understand where, in fact, the product of decay is, and some comments on this. Because, young people, they are learning …
Alexander Rappaport:
No, not all carrion is flesh, not all rot. But it is necessary to distinguish between the living and the dead, although for this it is sometimes necessary to overcome seductive illusions. Children calmly mistake the carousel horses for live horses. But over time, this illusion disappears.
Evgeny Ass:
I'm just wondering how style and meaning-making live in today's culture, which you sentenced, well, put a fat cross on it and then, after 100 years, promised the birth of new meanings.
Alexander Rappaport:
No, they are already being born. I think they are born everywhere. Although in biology we see that new species do not appear. Why? And almost everyone is dying out. Perhaps extinction occurs faster than the emergence of new species, or some higher principle of selection is manifested here, which so far spares us, and many other living creatures do not spare. About 200 languages die out a year. New languages, with the exception of computer ones, are not being born. But has it always been this way? And will it always be that way? I don’t know, I don’t know. There is no need to despair. Incidentally, this principle of "not falling into despair" is also professed by Ilya Prigogine, the theorist of chaos and order.
Your question brings us back to the category of scale - this is a scale-transcendental ethical question: what is there, in perspective?
The situation today is such that we still like our carrion.
We love this carrion, perhaps because against its background we experience our existence with greater convexity.
And architects willingly, especially designers, reproduce it. But designers have an advantageous position: they do not spare the destruction of their creations. It's not a pity to throw out the old vacuum cleaner - we will buy a new one. And architects have a strange maniacal love for paternal coffins and old stones. What to do about it? This is a different semantic complex.
It now seems to have begun to revive: Arkhnadzor is fighting to preserve old buildings. But practically this cult of old architecture now, in part, rests on tourism, on the cult of income, money … On the senseless migration of rich pensioners indulging in contemplation - however, if we consider this contemplation as a desire for love of the last glance, then perhaps all this makes sense … The only question is what they receive, and whether instead of contemplation they should not have only spectacles, for our world is the world of bread and circuses.
There is another meaning - a kind of sentimental melancholy, but its nature is complex - after all, it can be born as a shadow cast into existence by the meaninglessness and death of the new architecture, and not be restored to its past meaning.
But this will end and will end soon, and the problem is not when we will wait for this - but in having time to do at least something before that, to lay bridges and steps somewhere, so as not to stumble at the moment when it all starts to crumble and fall.
In this I see the ethos of modern architectural professional consciousness: to be in time.
And further, we will not think far, further what will happen with this, it is not clear. Other generations will think about it. We don't have to think for everyone. We are obliged to think in due time. In our time, such intuitions and such frontiers are available to thinking and feeling. And then there will be completely different. What, I don't know.
Evgeny Ass:
When you say that in some future, it is not known how distant, architecture will resonate with the reverberation of meanings - does it not resonate today?
Alexander Rappaport:
Resonates. Resonates. And without this resonance, neither I would have these thoughts, nor the mass of other people whom I know and with whom we are in many ways in common.
Evgeny Ass:
Then today, or the meanings are not so reverberant, or the resonance is not correct?
Alexander Rappaport:
But today it resembles not a jazz Jam Session, but some kind of karaoke, where everyone sings one song. It's just that the distribution of these resonances is still quite random. But this has always been the case - someone worried about flying machines when the majority thought only about horse racing.
Evgeny Ass:
But is this the point?
Alexander Rappaport:
Meanings too, of course, all meanings, yes. But here in the world of meanings there are so many paradoxes, differentiation and diversity that one word “meaning” cannot give an answer to the question.
Evgeny Ass:
That is, it must be understood that in the future the meanings will be better, as it were.
Alexander Rappaport:
No, the meanings are all equally good. Or not good and not bad, As it is said in one fairy tale - "I am a bird, but whether it is good or bad - judge for yourself." For this, meaning exists as a meaning, which does not predetermine its value in all situations. Therefore, life remains interesting and stressful. Perhaps everything will be different in paradise, I don’t know. But I believe in the resources of semantic growth and semantic discoveries.
They will be different, they will be in a different relationship with thinking, existence. They will treat death and love differently. They will take a person out of hallucinatory and euphoric trances. I do not know what will happen. There's a lot there. There will be fewer madmen, madmen who are now free. I would like to believe in such a miracle that the meaningfulness of existence will grow.
I only see that the struggle between meanings and drug trance is growing stronger today.
But I cannot answer all the questions that arise in this process, I do some work, I think, I get some results that seem significant to me, and I share them with you. Tomorrow I will ask new questions - in this process there are no such highest points of view, from which, "from above, you can see everything."
But in myself, for example, I feel a stupor. I could not design anything from scratch today from scratch.
I am bound by the shadow of the reproduction of carrion.
Before a blank slate, I give in, I feel that the reproduction of the carrion begins here. Only reconstruction seems to me to be a living activity. The euphoria of playing standard patterns does not give me pleasure. And once it did. In my student projects, that was all.
Sergey Skuratov:
Why do you think that what has come down to us is not carrion? And why is what we are doing is carrion. On what basis do you consider everything that is in the past, as it were, to be living matter and what we do is dead. Where is the difference, why you are so … Is this difference somewhere inside you, inside each person? That is, it is a kind of cumulative experience of mankind: at what moment will quantity cease to be quantity and go into another quality. Golden antelope, remember? Here, she beat her hoof. Until he said "enough," did the gold turn into bread? Here's the same thing.
Alexander Rappaport:
This is a very difficult question - but how to get rid of these meanings. I'm not alone. We are all going through these waves of change. Yesterday the Stalinist Empire style seemed to me something dead, today it miraculously comes to life. The past returns and submits us to its power. We can only share these meanings, but neither we nor anyone in history had any proof of our innocence. And this is not so much a misfortune as a testimony of our freedom. It is important not only to participate in these vibrations - but also to see them as if from the outside - to understand that we should realize the very process of these vibrations as a struggle between the living and the dead, although we cannot give a final answer to the question of where the living ends and the dead begin. We are given only to experience and painfully (or joyfully) experience this question.
Recently I was driving around Leningrad: I saw a building that was built in the early sixties on the Moika - a kindergarten near New Holland. It was simple and purely geometric. In those years, I saw in this small geometric volume a wonderful sense of modernity. Now I look at him, I think how he is useless here around New Holland Delamot. Why? The senses retain their own outline, but at the same time change their color. This is a problem of internal transformation of meanings in consciousness, analogous to the transformation of a semantic embryo into an articulated plan.
Once upon a time I did not like the brick five-story buildings of Khrushchev. When I look at them now, I think: "Here is a house in which you can love." And in a new luxurious glass house this is no longer possible. Why? What do we even call dead? We use the epithet "dead" outside of relation to creatures, we say: "stillborn music", stillborn verse, film. That is, the idea, the meaning of death, is present in our semantic field, and we can hardly get rid of it, since it constitutes pole to pole of life. Everyone, of course, understands and relates it to things in different ways. But it seems to me that we are now caught up in the inertia of the spread of stillborn patterns. Yes, and they were alive in their time, but their meaning dried up, evaporated, transformed and we do not have time to notice it. That is, there is still the same problem of time, desynchronization of semantic processes and their understanding.
What to do about it? Is it a tragedy or just a challenge? In life, there are wars, and how to relate to the phenomenon of war. It is meaningless, it is absurd, but at the same time it is one of the main semantic structures of mankind.
What do I call deadness? Discussing this problem, I began to come to the conclusion that architecture has always lived with positive ideals, such as a spire, a dome, a flat wall. They were symbols of order and light.
The architecture in general was all glowing - it was built on the ground, but depicted the Sky.
She evoked admiration, not problems. There was no intonation of questioning in architecture, in architecture there was always an exclamation mark: "Wow!" “Have you seen it? Villa Rotunda! Seagram Building, wow! " And it was all called "Beauty". And now we are approaching a certain line, when the sky has lost its mythical halo of eternal perfection, it was pierced by planes, rockets, Malevich's black square. It seems to me that the future of architecture lies in the return to Earth and its problems, questions - questions that the architecture of the past did not know.
And in the future of architecture, perhaps, there will be an era of doubts and questions and problems. Why are problems better than positive symbols? Because of problems, people do not cut each other's throats, but because of positive statements they cut and how. And if you have a problem, I have a problem, so what will we do? Let's sit and talk. Let's think about what to do. Problem and questioning are elements that bring people together.
Is the architecture of problematic situations possible, for example, in search of style. This is really a problem, mysterious, tempting, the answer to which I cannot find. How can we evade statements in favor of qualified doubts and uncertainties? After all, the very category of uncertainty is very constructive, isn't it?
Sergey Sitar:
It is used continuously.
Alexander Rappaport:
Used, used. In modern times, the ratio of uncertainties has even become a concept that has a huge positive, constructive meaning. Now, can architecture handle the uncertainty relation?
Evgeny Ass:
Already operating.
Sergey Skuratov:
No, no, I wanted to say that humanity is a bearer of uncertainty, and architects must give some definite solutions, they should be bearers of these definite decisions. It seems to me that in general all the problems are due to the fact that humanity has changed, and the relationship between man and nature has not changed.
The happiest, most perfect were the first people who walked on an empty planet, breathed the freshest air, killed deer, fished and were happy immensely, because there were few of them, they were valuable to each other. They did not fight each other. And today's humanity, it is not defined, because there is a lot of it and because it, in fact, interferes with itself. But some human values do not allow me to say: “You are bothering me. You are my enemy. You are my rival. You breathe my air. This uncertainty is actually quite definite and requires war. But humanity has become so humane and intelligent that it is looking for other ways to resolve this conflict. Is in such a global delusion. Because animals devour each other. This is how nature works.
Alexander Rappaport:
But not within the same species. And who knows, maybe we, with all our tragedies and problems, are in our own way the happiest of all generations, since we have become a problem for ourselves. For the first time, we have achieved reflexive existentiality, and this will stop us from the desire to devour our own kind. This is the principle of tolerance and auto-criticism.
Sergey Skuratov:
But the architects, they also devour each other a little. For some reason, they primarily devour their predecessors.
Alexander Rappaport:
Yes, an interesting thought.
This is undoubtedly the most interesting phenomenon in general, why suddenly, at the beginning of the last century, the style was hated with such fierce hatred. “Style, imitation - what a horror, what a nightmare! Modern - what a decline! Even Art Nouveau was cursed. Why such an intense hatred for the newly dominant architectural styles. Where does this hatred come from? This hatred is symmetrical to the positive striving to create something truly unconditional, indisputable. Perhaps this is the awakened passion to find oneself in its time, then exaggerated, but now more understandable.
It then turned into hatred for Time itself, as an all-devouring and powerful element. The avant-garde started from admiration for history and demanded freedom for itself, Mayakovsky suggested "to drive the nag of history." although he himself wrote that we are all a bit of a horse … Then the idea of space as a sphere of freedom was born, but it turned out that together with this freedom, space became a sphere of arbitrariness. This was the ideology of the constructive will of the masses, embodied in the revolutionary restructuring of the world. And what happened - mass murder and suicide.
And it seems to me that the problem is the way it was interpreted in the philosophical discourse of the late 19th century, the same Bergson and others - it becomes very constructive, it is not hopeless. The problem is the rational, intellectual and emotional mastering of uncertainty. Uncertainty should not be eliminated, but mastered, because the desire to eliminate uncertainty leads to the elimination of the carrier of this uncertainty. And then it turns out that the winners, having destroyed the carriers of uncertainty, inherited the same uncertainties from them.
Voice from the audience:
Can any connection be established between the dead in architecture, bad taste and vulgarity?
Alexander Rappaport:
What is vulgarity? Vulgarity is a form of hypocrisy. The vulgarity is the fear of semantic frankness. The vulgarity is the covering up of semantic frankness with some conventional forms. Including in architecture.
Voice from the audience:
Imitation?
Alexander Rappaport:
Not always imitation, because we can imitate good things. But there is a thin, elusive line between imitation and vulgarity. It is difficult to name who is posing as honesty and who is actually an honest person. It has been noticed that, for example, people professing some values prefer not to inform others about this confession aloud. Arthur Koestler has a wonderful essay on snobbery on this topic.
Voice from the audience:
And explain the dead in architecture.
Alexander Rappaport:
Yes, and the dead in architecture, of course, pretends to be alive, even more alive: Lenin was "more alive than all living things", this is Mayakovsky's formula. Having died, he became more alive than all the living. It was some kind of strange triumph of death, in the era of the new Middle Ages. And Mayakovsky did not throw words to the wind. Here, he wrote: "What is good and what is bad?" - began to teach good. Such strange formulas always came off his tongue. When Mandelstam once said to Mayakovsky: "Why are you reading poetry so loudly, you are not a Romanian orchestra?" - Mayakovsky was depressed. Mayakovsky was a constructivist, but a vulnerable person …
And Mandelstam, in my opinion, was not only a classic, but also a bearer of deep architectonic intuitions - which he expressed with particular force, for example, in "conversations about Dante." Incidentally, it was in poetry that the intonation of doubt and questioning turned out to be very strong. “I was given a body, what should I do with it?” - the same Mandelstam. But this was already with Pushkin.
Voice from the audience:
And here's another question. What is internal to architecture?
Alexander Rappaport:
Lots of different things. Here is the interior, for example. The idea is in relation to the work. Let's say construction in relation to style. Imitation in relation to normativity. Norms are external. Their imitation is internal, and in the process of development it gradually returns outside, into the world of things. And the ability to perceive external norms and to admire them is, of course, also an internal ability. So as soon as you start thinking about the transitions of the internal and the external, you are farther and farther from the answers - for these reflections do not end in anything, but deeper and deeper into the essence of the matter, closer and closer to the essence of creative self-consciousness.
Voice from the audience:
Opposition to life and culture, right?
Alexander Rappaport:
Contrasting the living and the dead, I do not use the philosophical category of life now, although it is worth thinking about it. As soon as we reach such limits as the category of life, the universe of meanings and their universal interconnection, it becomes so powerful that analysis becomes almost powerless and, in order to avoid infinity, turns into a myth, into an ideology. I have always suspected that architecture is the embodiment of myth, but it is dangerous to get carried away with ideologies. This was what the architecture of the New Age was fond of. Nothing good came of it. How can these ends be reconciled?
Voice from the audience:
What is the difference between ideas and ideology?
Alexander Rappaport:
This is a philosophical question. I think that the idea is the Platonic essence of the thing, which in my opinion is the individual meaning. And ideology is a set of ideas, formulas, values, which is imputed, experienced, confessed or promoted as true or progressive. Such are the ideologies of technicism, communism, monism and the like.
Sergey Skuratov:
I had this question. Here, there is such a concept, a term: "pure architectural gesture", "clean understandable statement", "pure image". Does it belong to good, correct architecture? Or so, a slightly modern market product, a market quality that is inherent in architecture in order to make it easy to explain and, thus, well, it’s easy to sell or build certain relationships with society, or the consumer, and even sometimes with the customer. ?
Alexander Rappaport:
Pure means devoid of any overtones. But it is said that simplicity is worse than stealing. In the cult of cleanliness in design and architecture, sterility as a concept of hygiene extended to the entire sphere of forms and ended with the cult of geometric carrion. Another sad example of the cult of purity is racial purity.
But in architecture it is not so easy. The architectural ruins are an example of how a pure gesture is enriched with its somewhat dusty appearance. Purity is for us obscured by time and its omnipotence. And this is a typical temporal, that is, temporal, and not spatial polyphony of architectural thinking. But we do not cultivate polyphony in architecture. We are now rather living in the aesthetics of monophony. And although Robert Venturi tried to counter this monophony with something complex - he has not yet succeeded - the tendency to construct architecture from geometric schemes became an obstacle on this path.
Experiments in the field of polyphony are underway. But in them the semantic fabric becomes insignificant. Like Peter Eisenman, the canvas remains, and all meanings from this structure evaporate. Substantiality dissolves into logic. Therefore, logic, like technology, becomes deadly, and living thought - it seems to get along with them. It is incredibly interesting and difficult to understand oneself within and from within one's productive activity, but this is the intrigue. We are all at the dawn of understanding human nature and human life and culture.
Therefore, we always work somewhere in a locus, in some locus. Here, in this garden, I can grow dill. And what is going on with the mushrooms in the forest, sometimes I just don't know. So I, as a speaker, brought you this parsley and carrots to the market. And you ask, "Where is the meat?" It is also somewhere, so, wait, we will look, maybe we will find it in another place.
Sergey Sitar:
There are not places everywhere.
Alexander Rappaport:
I mean, in what places it is cultivated.
Sergey Sitar:
We are such a place …
Alexander Rappaport:
Yes, you are such a place.
Sergey Sitar:
We hope so.
Alexander Rappaport:
Yes, and I hope that I am such a place.
At the same time, I believe that the renaissance of architecture will not depend on architects. It will not come from within the profession, and not from science or even from ideology, but as a powerful demand from the outside. People will begin to demand architecture, yearn for it like clean air and clean water.
And by this time there should be people among the architects who will quietly say: “We know something about this. Look, we've got … Look how we're doing. Here, look here. " And the cry of the crowd: "Come on architecture!" - will begin sooner or later.
Sergey Sitar:
Is it still a quantitative problem, or is it still some kind of qualitative problem?
Alexander Rappaport:
In many areas of life, we have never done quantitative analysis. How many people lie to themselves on Earth? Of course, there are some, but how many are there? A little or all. Or almost everything, with a few exceptions.
Voice from the audience:
If time is considered as a physical quantity, then the variable depends on gravity, on the force of attraction. How does architecture depend on these categories? What are the mechanisms?
Alexander Rappaport:
I think straight. This is very similar to architecture and directly relates to the idea of time. This is weightlessness in paper space. Time flows differently near a heavy structure than near a light one. Stand in front of some powerful wall or such a light openwork skeleton, and in a few moments you will feel that time flows in you differently, here and there.
By the way, in a light construction, time flows out of you - outward. It kind of flows out of you. You absorb emptiness. Near a heavy structure, you become infected with its weight, and you begin a rather complicated and mysterious dialogue with this weight. But all this is not described, it is poorly visible in the projects, the expertise and criticism does not pay attention to it.
But in fact, the gravity itself … Even the imitation of gravity in a photo-method is very quickly exposed. You finally feel that no, this is not granite. It's plastic. The first time you fall into an illusion. Well, like any illusion. From something, from some kind of cold that emanates from it, from some obscure atmospheric glare, you suddenly begin to feel that, for example, you sat down on a stone. This is not an imitation of a stone. It is impossible to depict this, the severity is inconceivable, although Ladovsky demanded to imitate the severity, and he himself built everything from heavy stone.
A similar question in architecture arises also to blindness, to what cannot be seen at all, to the boundaries of figurativeness in architecture, because today's architecture has become a victim of visuality, making ninety percent the art of visual images. But the reason is only in the means - paper, drawing, photography, cinema.
I am convinced that the individual architecture that will be born will be sensitive to the internal flow of water hydraulics, the degree of dampness and earth and atmosphere. Alongside the poetics of space, the poetics of substance will arise. But humanity as a whole will demand from architecture the whole gamut of properties. For this is how meaningful humanity and the humanity of Homo sapiens are reproduced.
