Kahn

Program is nothing

Interview of H+S

from DETAIL

 

Glass and Colour – An Interview with Matthias Sauerbruch

 

Detail: The name Sauerbruch and Hutton immediately conjures an image of colour- extremely colourful architecture perhaps. Colour has become your trademark. Is that deliberate, or does a label like that bother you?

 

Sauerbruch: Colour has certainly become an architectural means of expression for us, just as brickwork, concrete or other materials have for other architects. I imagine that will remain so in the future, regardless of the kind of projects we undertake. Colour is, if you like, one of our passions; but it's only part of the picture. There are other elements as well, which may not be apparent at first sight.

 

Detail: Where does this passion for colour come from?

 

Sauerbruch: That's hard to say. In my case, it's part of my biography. My father was a painter, and from an early age I was interested in painting and art, The use of colour in our architecture, though, was something we came upon by chance. At the end of the 1980s, when we founded our office in England, a lot of our work involved the conversion of small terraced houses. In many cases, the constructional scope was very limited, since most of the clients had only a small budget at their disposal. At some point, we realized that it was possible to exert a great influence on the spatial effect of even relatively small rooms through the use of colour. For example, you can dissolve the strict angularity of a corner situation with the aid of two colours that are strongly contrasted with each other or that have different degrees of luminance. If you apply this knowledge in a strategic way, a sense of breadth and spaciousness can be achieved where it doesn't exist, physically speaking. We continued to experiment with colour and later used it on planar surfaces; for instance, to lend a facade a visually three-dimensional quality.

 

Detail.' At what point does colour enter the design process?

 

Sauerbruch: It varies from project to project, but usually a basic idea emerges fairly soon as to what colour will play a role - in the facade, say, or at a certain point in the building. Reaching a decision in favour of a specific colour or combination of colours is normally a lengthy process, however. In the case of the Federal German Ministry for the Environment in Dessau, which will be completed in the near future, we applied various spots or patches of colour to the facade in the first competition model. They looked a bit like sliding shutters. The idea came from the office complex in Berlin built for the GSW housing developers and from the photonics centre in Adlershof, where the sun- shading elements are coloured. The ultimate outcome of all this was a coloured glass cladding that is used to conceal functional elements such as night-time ventilation flaps, or that acts as a lining to solid walls. The colour spectrum that runs round the building is subtly differentiated and resulted quite simply from the spatial configuration. We attempted to respond to the different spatial forms with different colours and to reflect the specific context. It was a long development process, which ran parallel to the almost seven-year planning period.

 

Detail: Do you develop your own colour concepts, or do you have a colour consultant?

 

Sauerbruch: No, we do it ourselves.

 

Detail.' Based on what criteria ?

 

Sauerbruch: By a process of exclusion: trial and error. Our colour concepts are not derived from a theory like the one drawn up by Johannes Itten, which is based on special colour groups and luminance values. In our case, it's a visual process, a bit like painting: you study an elevation or a model as if it were a canvas and begin to compose, and you carry on until you have the feeling that it's right. At the beginning, we have a general idea and approach the final concept via a number of variations, using sketches and ever larger models. That usually takes place shortly before the tendering phase. Then we do a facade layout. In the case of the Environment Ministry building, which has a facade roughly one kilometer long if you count the external and the courtyard faces, we first had a model built at 1:200 and actually applied colour to every area. We then repeated this to a scale of 1:75 with colour samples from the Natural Colour System (NCS) range; and after tendering and the award of contracts, we obtained the samples from the firm. A further difficulty was the fact that when you put a coating on the rear face of glazing, the green tone of the glass has a strong influence on the coloration even in the case of so-called "white" flint glass. Red shades appear much duller, for example. We had to try out some colours four or five times to achieve a satisfactory result on the outside.

 

Detail: A striking feature of your work is that you use colour very often in combination with glass. At Adlershof, for example, you seem to play quite consciously with the aesthetic potential of reflections.

 

Sauerbruch: In some cases, reflections provide an additional spatial-material dimension. In the recently finished police station and fire-brigade building in the parliamentary district of Berlin, the reflecting surface of the glass cladding lends the structure a certain lightness, which forms a pleasing contrast to the dull brick surfaces of the rather heavy existing building. A further aspect, of course, is the durability of the applied colour. Coating glass on its rear face produces a lovely colour finish for facades that is lightfast, protected against the weather and durable.

 

Detail: How do you apply your colour concepts to internal spaces?

 

Sauerbruch: That depends on the individual project. For example, the research building in Biberach, which we completed roughly a year ago, has a striking coloured skin externally, whereas internally, the coloration is relatively subdued. There are certain areas of colour, of course; at the same time, the so-called "white walls" are often not really white, but have a light, restrained coloration. What is more, the colour of the facade usually radiates through the windows of the laboratories. In the factory in Magdeburg, on the other hand, there is a more pervasive colour concept. The exterior of the building and the inside of the entrance area are extremely colourful. The foyer-like space is the only collective place where everyone can come together - for exhibitions or receptions, for example. The coloration is meant to signify a public realm and a sense of community.

 

Detail,' Let's go back to the facade in Biberach for a moment Is it true that the striking coloration is based on a molecular structure?

 

Sauerbruch: Yes, that is really true. On the Internet, we found an electron-microscope image of a substance made by the client and enlarged it even more. To be quite honest, though, we changed the colours a lot, and bit by bit the structure as well. Symbolically, I find the notion of delving into a molecular world something very beautiful; and it's also related to the research people, who are concerned the whole time with microscopic views and immerse themselves in things at quite a different scale. Only those who are aware of this connection will get the point; for the average observer, it's simply a colour composition.

 

Detail: And how do the research people accept the actual facade? Don't they have to put up with coloured light internally because of the coloured glass?

 

Sauerbruch: The body of the glass is not coloured. The surface is printed with a grid of dots. The coloration is relatively restrained, and the coating itself is not permeable to light, or hardly so, The shadows cast by the grid of dots have no colour, therefore. Naturally, colour reflections do occur, so that the light internally has a slight but very subdued coloration.

 

Detail.: And this coloration doesn't disturb the users? What are their reactions?

 

Sauerbruoh: The reactions go both ways, of course. Some people are disturbed by the coloration, but the majority like it. In the police station and fire-brigade complex in Berlin, which I mentioned earlier, the entire facade is in a fairly intense red and green. Laid over the windows is a louver structure, and when this is closed, even the windows gleam in a red tone, rather like a night bar. When the louvres are tipped open, however, the space is entirely white again. Anyone

 

Detail.' Is the glass treated differently there? What kinds of coloured glass did you use - coated, enameled, with layers of film - and what experience do you have of their use?

 

Sauerbruch: In principle, the same technology was used in both projects; but in the case of the fire station, the printing was somewhat denser and the colours are more intense, so that the reflections are also stronger. Here again, though, the light that falls through the printed glass is not colored. It is the printed layer itself that radiates, In the showroom for the Zumtobel Staff lighting concern, in contrast, we used real coloured glass - laminated glass with a coloured film adhesively fixed between the layers. Here, the light entering from outside through the glass really is coloured. In this case, it was intentional; we wanted to create a stark contrast between the ingress of daylight from outside and the artificial lighting from the lamps in the exhibition. At night, therefore, the effect is reversed: when the lighting is turned on internally, the facade becomes an illuminated box or lantern.

 

Detail: In the case of the fire station, what is the technical purpose of the glass skin with louvres set outside the facade?

 

Sauerbruch: In the first instance, it provides sun shading, as well as wind screening for the open windows to the rear, It is net really a thermal buffer, though, as in the facade of the GSW building in Berlin or in the photonics centre.

 

Detail: Is it possible to open the louvres individually?

 

Sauerbruch: In the case of the police station, they can be adjusted individually for every window - in other words, over the entire window area. The casements behind the glass skin can be opened according to a certain rhythm.

 

Detail: How did the colour scheme come about?

 

Sauerbruch: It was a free composition, whereby red represents the fire-brigade and green the police.

 

Detail: Don't the inclined coloured louvres diminish the exploitation of daylight within the building ?

 

Sauerbruch: The windows are quite generously dimensioned in relation to the room sizes, so that this problem doesn't really arise. In the case of the Environment Ministry building, we made detailed studies for the window sizes. The proportion of the glazing area is an important aspect if one is talking about ecological forms of construction, We made a precise analysis of how small a window may be to ensure an optimum illumination of the workplaces yet at the same time to keep heat losses in winter and thermal gains in summer to a minimum. The outcome of these studies was about 40 per cent externally and 65 per cent internally. Solar screening here consists of highly reflecting, coated louvres, which also function as light deflectors. From an ecological point of view, it was important to ensure a good balance between the building volume and the floor area, thereby reducing the area of the facade.

 

Detail, We're now into the realm of ecology. Can you say a little more about your solar concept or the ecological concept for the Ministry for the Environment?

 

Sauerbruch: The Environment Ministry began as an extremely ambitious project. As early as the competition stage, the participants were required to develop prototypical measures. Later, many of our suggestions were rejected, although they were solutions that are generally regarded among architects as having a positive effect: the double-skin facade, for example. There are specialists in the ministry who investigate all these matters on a scientific basis, but the clients themselves - the building authorities and the ministry - reacted somewhat conservatively because of negative experiences they had had in the past. I can understand that; taxpayers' money is involved, after all. Ultimately, therefore, the concepts are not as new as one might have wished.

 

Detail: Do you think an opportunity was missed here, in such an important project as the Ministry for the Environment, to make the public - and architects - more sensitive to ecological forms of construction?

 

Sauerbruch: No. You can't say that. On the contrary, there are numerous examples here of an ecologically meaningful approach to construction. It's just that one can't claim it was done for the first time in this scheme.

 

Detail.' What are the distinguishing features of the ecological concept as implemented?

 

Sauerbruch: First of all, the high level of thermal insulation. We exceeded the levels defined by the insulation regulations valid at that time by 50 per cent, and the energy-saving requirements by roughly 30 per cent. We also exploited regenerative forms of energy - from photovoltaic and solar-heating systems, for example. In addition, the cooling plant for the canteen is run on solar energy, and there is a small cogenerating unit for electricity and heating that is operated with fuel cells (as a demonstration model). The most spectacular measure, though, is the geothermal heat-exchange plant. External air is drawn in and pretreated thermally via a roughly five-kilometer-long pipe system laid in the ground. In this way, the building is supplied with cool air in summer and warm air in winter. As far as I'm aware, it's the largest installation of its kind in the world. I should also mention that the federal authorities participated in a plant that produces gas from waste matter, from which electricity is generated for the Environment Ministry building.

 

Constructional biology, or the selection of building materials, also forms part of the ecological concept in terms of primary energy. It's a discipline that's still in its infancy; for although it is possible to speak about concrete, aluminum, glass or timber in general, one has to differentiate between various kinds of cement, glass manufacturing processes, recycled or newly extracted aluminum - to mention just a few things. The whole team received advice from consultants in these matters. In collaboration with the Society for Ecological Building, we drew up a catalogue of measures on the basis of which a timber facade was specified for the building, That was just one aspect. The fact that a timber structure was used and not just wood cladding is something rather spectacular for a four-storey office building of this size. In the process, we also learned that timber is not without its problems as a building material: at the end of its life, when it ultimately becomes a waste product, it is difficult to dispose of wood if it has been treated with a preservative. We also had to specify that the timber should come from native forests; otherwise the whole ecological advantage would have been lost through transport. We at least attempted to do something in this direction. The same applies to the paint, the flooring and other finishing materials, which bear the "Blue Angel" sign (a quality seal issued by the Ministry for the Environment). Where that is not the case, we relied on our consultants and on test results. In general, materials were selected from the standpoint that they should require a minimum of energy for their processing, installation and disposal and that they should be safe in terms of building biology.

 

Detail  Would you say that the extra costs involved in this scheme were economically justifiable?

 

Sauerbruch: Since we were able to set the life of the building at 50 years in our calculations, all the measures we implemented were economically justifiable. I see that as a positive sign, even if a developer would certainly not accept this argument, because he reckons on an amodization period of seven to ten years for his buildings and tends to ignore the operating costs. The results are all the more a point of reference, however. for people who wish to advance the cause of sustainability.

 

Detail: While we're on the subject of the life of a building, sustainability would seem to be an important aspect for you. Some of your other developments, such as the GSW in Berlin, contain elements of solar technology, even ff not to the extent of the ministry building. At the same time, your designs are strongly oriented to current tastes. Does that not contradict the idea of sustainability?

 

Sauerbruch: I have no problem with that. In the history of art and architecture, it's nothing new for a building to be very much a child of its time and yet to survive. In that respect, the question of contemporarily or fashionableness has nothing to do with quality. Quite different criteria are involved in that: how well does a building function; does it contribute something to the urban environment; what are its spatial qualities; how well proportioned is it or how well crafted? And all that is independent of the time from which it dates.

 

Detail: Not all modern architecture is as dependent on current trends as your buildings are, though. Don't you think that a building may be erected - like the experimental factory in Magdeburg - that creates a tremendous splash at the beginning, but that one can't stand in ten years?

 

Sauerbruch: I can't preclude that possibility, but quite honestly, I don't find it so terrible. If the building is used and fulfils its function, its users must like it to a certain extent because it makes sense to them. What is more, a structure with a striking character is likely to promote a good relationship with its users. A building that has a certain profile, which provides a sense of orientation and that can be viewed critically is, to my mind, far better than a completely neutral object where you have to search for the identity or character.

 

Detail. Aren’t you afraid that in a few years time, someone will come along and paint everything white or brown or whatever, and your colour concept will be completely ruined as a result?

 

Sauerbruch: That can happen, of course, but we are not so uptight about our architecture. It's a bit like bringing up a child. At some point, he or she becomes an independent person and will be prepared to follow parental guidance only to a certain extent. I experienced something of this kind as a project architect for OMA at Checkpoint Charlie. The building, with amenities for Allied forces, was handed over on 1 November 1989; but after the fall of the Berlin Wall, its purpose was gone - in part, at least. Six months later, it was converted without us. Today, it houses a supermarket, a function that ironically formed part of a provocative concept we considered for the time after the fall of the Wall. Even if that was not really conceivable at the time, it turned out that way, and today it's a quite different building. But it still exerts an enormous sense of power and immediacy, particularly the upper part, and one can still recognize it as a fine piece of architecture.

 

Detail: Then you do not define the individuality of your buildings through their coloration.

 

Sauerbruch: That's certainly one element. If you were to take the colour away, a lot of the character would be missing. It would be a great pity if one of our buildings were painted over at a later date. Maybe it would be worse than it was before, but it would still be a building that, one hopes, fulfils its function.

 

Detail: I imagine that colour is greatly appreciated by the public at large. Do you see the use of colour as a means of making modern architecture popular with lay people?

 

Sauerbruch: Colour is a very emotional element to which most people react in some way or other. To that extent, you're right. Colour used on buildings tends to make the man in the street take notice of an urban development where he might otherwise not. If it were possible to affect more people positively through the use of colour, that would be fine with us. After all, we don't build things for ourselves, but for our clients and the users, and beyond that, for the city or the built environment in which they stand.

 

Detail.' Could you imagine designing an entirely monochrome building one day?

 

Sauerbruch: We have just completed the town hall in Hennigsdorf, which is relatively monochrome for our standards. It is in quite subdued tones, with the exception of the council chamber, which is in a dark red. The absence of colour became almost an accusation that was leveled against us. The client felt a bit cheated, because we normally create boldly coloured architecture. In the case of Hennigsdorf, however, which is a small industrial town in Brandenburg, the specific situation and history of the place seemed to demand greater restraint, We wanted to create a building that radiated a sense of openness and dignity. In the period immediately following the fall of communism, many buildings were created that I would call "gaudy" rather than colourful. We thought the use of materials like oak and bricks were more appropriate to this assignment and the context. We are not intent on using colour in every conceivable situation. We seek to match the prevailing conditions.

 

Detail: How important are different materials for your architecture? Do you always rely on materials of a similar kind, or is there a greater variety?

 

Sauerbruch: Where colour is involved, one is limited, of course. Coating technologies have developed enormously, but painted finishes last for a maximum of ten years. With stove-enameled glass, on the other hand, the durability and lightfastness are fairly high. That's why we try as far as possible, where facades are concerned, to use materials that have a relative constancy. We use glass a lot not only for its reflecting surface, but because it has a beautiful quality and is durable. Problems arise when coloured metals are used and special sections have to be recoated or painted, because they cannot be precoated and then bent to shape as in the manufacturing process. When we use natural materials in conjunction with coloured surfaces, we try to use products that have a certain haptic quality and are contrasted with the neutral, coloured surface, Stone, wood and ceramics are examples of this. I also find the combination of coloured surfaces and wood very attractive.

 

Detail: Thank you very much for this interview, Matthias Sauerbruch was interviewed by Christian Schi Rich in Munich.

 

 

Matthias Sauerbruch, architect

1995 Professor at the University of Technology, Berlin;

since 2001 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart

1989 Practice with Louisa Hutton in London

1993 Sauerbruch Hutton Architects in Berlin

Paz, Octavio--Craftsmanship

from Marco's product design course

 

Paz, Octavio
Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship
from: Convergences: essays on art and literature.
1st ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1987.

 

 

Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship

 

  In its rightful place. Not fallen from above, but emerged from below. Other, the color of burnt honey. Sun color buried a thousand years ago and dug up yesterday. Fresh green and orange stripes cross its still-warm body. Circles, frets: remains of a scattered alphabet? Pregnant woman's belly, bird's neck. If the palm of your hand covers and uncovers its mouth, it answers you in a low murmur, a bubble of gushing water; if you rap its haunch with your knuckles, it gives a laugh of little silver coins falling on stones. It can speak in many tongues, the language of clay and matter, that of air flowing down between the walls of the ravine, that of washerwomen as they do their laundry, that of the sky when it grows angry, that of rain. A baked clay vessel Don't put it in the glass display case full of rare objects. It would show up badly. Its beauty is allied with the liquid it contains and the thirst it quenches. Its beauty is corporeal: I see it, touch it, smell it, hear it. If it is empty, it must be filled; if it is full, it must be emptied. I take it by the turned handle as I would take a woman by the arm, I lift it up, I tilt it over a pitcher into which I pour milk or pulque---lunar liquids that open and close the doors of dawn and dark, of waking and sleeping. It is not an object to contemplate, but one for pouring something to drink.

 

  A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a huipil of coarse cotton cloth, a wooden bowl--handsome objects not in spite of but because of their usefulness. Their beauty is an added quality, like the scent and color of flowers. Their beauty is inseparable from their function: they are handsome because they are useful. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful. This distinction is more recent than is generally believed: many of the objects gathered together in our museums and private collections belonged to that world in which beauty was not an isolated and self-sufficient value. Society was divided into two great realms, the profane and the sacred. In both, beauty was subordinate, in the one case to usefulness and in the other to magic. Utensil, talisman, symbol: beauty was the aura surrounding the object, the consequence--nearly always involuntary—of the secret relation between its making and its meaning. Making: how a thing is made; meaning: what it is made for. Today all these objects, torn from their historical context, their specific function, and their original significance, take on in our eyes the appearance of enigmatic divinities and command our adoration. The transition from the cathedral, the palace, the nomad's tent, the boudoir of the courtesan, and the witch's cave to the museum was a magico-religious transmutation: objects turned into icons. This idolatry began in the Renaissance and, from the eighteenth century on, has been one of the religions of the West (the other being politics). We find Sor Juana In~s de la Cruz, at the height of the Baroque era, already poking gentle fun at the aesthetic superstition: "A woman's hand," she says, "is white and beautiful because it is a thing of flesh and bone, not ivory or silver; I esteem it not because it gleams but because it grasps."

  The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born of the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church. The mission of the artist was to transmute the object; that of the revolutionary leader, to transform human nature. Picasso and Stalin. The process has been twofold: in the realm of politics, ideas have been turned into ideologies, and ideologies into idolatries; objects of art, in turn, have become idols, and idols have been transformed into ideas. We view works of art with the same absorption as the sage of antiquity contemplated the starry sky (though with less profit): like heavenly bodies, these paintings and sculptures are pure ideas. The religion of art is a Neoplatonism that dares not speak its name--except when it is a holy war against heretics and infidels. The history of modern art may be divided into two currents: the contemplative and the combative. Tendencies such as Cubism and Abstractionism belong to the former current; movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, to the latter. Mysticism; crusade.

 

   For the ancients, the movement of the stars and planets was the image of perfection: to see the celestial harmony was to hear it, and to hear it was to understand it. This religious and philosophical vision reappears in our conception of art. For us, paintings and sculptures are not beautiful or ugly objects but intellectual and sensible entities, spiritual realities, forms in which Ideas are made manifest. Before the aesthetic revolution, the value of works of art was related to another value: the link between beauty and meaning. Objects of art were things that were sensible forms that were signs. The meaning of a work was plural, but all its meanings were related to an ultimate signifier in which meaning and being were conjoined in an indissoluble knot: divinity. The modern transposition: for us the artistic object is an autonomous and self-sufficient reality; its ultimate meaning does not lie beyond the work but within it. This meaning lies beyond--or falls short of--meaning; it no longer possesses any referent whatsoever. Like the Christian divinity, Jackson Pollock's paintings do not mean: they are.

 

  In modem works of art, meaning dissipates in the radiation of being. The act of seeing is transformed into an intellectual operation that is also a magical rite: to see is to understand and to understand is to commune. Side by side with divinity and its devotees are its theologians, the art critics. Their excogitations are no less abstruse than those of medieval Scholastics and Byzantine doctors of divinity, though their logic is less rigorous. The questions that aroused the passions of Origen, Albertus Magnus. Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas reappear in the quarrels of our art critics,  though in a disguised and trivialized form. Nor does the resemblance end there: to the divinities and the theologians  who explain them we must add the martyrs. In the twentieth century we have seen the Soviet state persecute poets and artists with the same ferocity as that shown by the Dominicans in extirpating the Albigensian heresy.

 

It is only natural that the exaltation and sanctification of  the work of art should have given rise to periodic rebellions and profanations: removing the fetish from its niche, painting it in garish colors, parading it through the streets with the ears and tail of a donkey, dragging it in the dirt, poking holes in it and showing that it is full of sawdust, that it is nothing and no one and means nothing--and then setting it back on its throne. "What art needs is a sound thrashing," the Dadaist Huelsenbeck once said in a moment of exasperation. He was right, except that the bruises left on the Dadaist object by the beating were like decorations on the chests of generals: they lent respectability. Our museums are full to overflowing with antiworks of art and works of antiart. More astute than Rome, the religion of art has absorbed all the schisms.

 

   I don't deny that the contemplation of three sardines on a plate or of a triangle and a rectangle may enrich us spiritually; I merely affirm that the repetition of this act soon degenerates into a tedious ritual. That is why the Futurists, faced with the Neoplatonism of the Cubists, sought to reintroduce the subject into the work of art. It was a healthy reaction on their part, and at the same time a naive one. The Surrealists, possessed of greater perspicacity, insisted that the work of art should say something. Since reducing the work to its content or message would have been stupid, they eagerly embraced a notion that Freud had launched: latent content. What a work of art says is not its manifest content but what it says without saying anything: that which lies behind forms, colors, words. This was a way of loosening, without undoing altogether, the theological knot between being and meaning in order to preserve, insofar as possible, the ambiguous relation between the two terms.

 

  Marcel Duchamp was the most radical of all: the work passes by way of the senses but it does not linger in them. The work is not a thing; it is a fan of signs that, as it opens and closes, alternately reveals and conceals its meaning. The work of art is a secret sign exchanged between meaning and meaninglessness. This attitude has its danger—one that Duchamp (almost) always escaped: one may fall off on the other side and be left with the concept and without the art, with the trouvaille and without the thing itself. This is what has happened to his imitators. One might add that frequently they end up without either the art or the concept. It scarcely bears repeating that art is not concept: art is a thing of the senses. Speculating about a pseudo concept is more boring than contemplating a still life. The modern religion of art turns round and round in circles without ever finding the road to salvation; it goes from the negation of meaning through the object, to the negation of the object through meaning.

 

 

 

  The industrial revolution was the other side of the coin of the artistic revolution. The ever-increasing production of identical and more and more perfect utensils was the exact counterpart of the consecration of the work of art as a unique object. Like museums, our houses became filled to overflowing with clever gadgets. Precise, obedient, mute, anonymous instruments.

 

 In the beginning, aesthetic concerns played almost no role at all in the production of useful objects. Or rather, these concerns led to results quite different from those their manufacturers had imagined. The ugliness of many objects from the prehistory of industrial design— an ugliness not without charm--stems from the fact that the "artistic" element, generally borrowed from the academic art of the period, was superimposed upon the object itself. The result was not always unfortunate, and many of these objects--those of the Victorian era and also of the so-called modern style--belong to the same family as the sirens and sphinxes of the Baroque period. This family was ruled by what might be called the aesthetics of incongruity. In general, the evolution of the indstrial object for daily use has followed that of artistic styles. Almost invariably, industrial design has been a derivation-sometimes a caricature, sometimes a felicitous copy--of the artistic vogue of the moment. It has lagged behind contemporary art and has imitated styles at a time when they had already lost their initial novelty and were becoming aesthetic cliches.

 

   Contemporary design has endeavored in other ways--its own--to find a compromise between usefulness and aesthetics. At times it has managed to do so, but the result has been paradoxical. The aesthetic ideal of functional art is based on the principle that the usefulness of an object increases in direct proportion to the paring down of its materiality. The simplification of forms may be expressed by the following equation: the minimum of presence equals the maximum of efficiency. This aesthetic is borrowed from the world of mathematics: the elegance of an equation lies in the simplicity and necessity of its solution. The ideal of design is invisibility: the less visible a functional object, the more beautiful it is. A curious transposition of Arab fairy tales and legends to a world ruled by science and the notions of utility and maximum efficiency: the designer dreams of objects that, like genies, are intangible servants. This is the contrary of the work of craftsmanship, a physical presence that enters us through our senses and in which the principle of usefulness is constantly violated in favor of tradition, imagination, and even sheer caprice. The beauty of industrial design is of a conceptual order; if it expresses anything at all, it is the accuracy of a formula. It is the sign of a function. Its rationality makes it fall within an either/ or dichotomy: either it is good for something or it isn't. In the second case it goes into the trash bin. The handmade object does not charm us simply because of its usefulness. It lives in complicity with our senses, and that is why it is so hard to get rid of it--it is like throwing a friend out of the house.

 

  There is a time when the industrial object at last becomes a presence with an aesthetic value: when it becomes useless. It then becomes a symbol or an emblem. The locomotive whose praises Whitman sings is a machine that has come to a halt and no longer transports in its cars either passengers or freight: it is a motionless monument to speed. Whitman's disciples--Valery Larbaud and the kahan Futurists--extolled the beauty of locomotives and railroads at the very moment when other means of transportation--airplanes, automobiles--were beginning to take their place. The locomotives of these poets are the equivalent of the artificial ruins of the eighteenth century: they are a complement to the landscape. The cult of the machine is a naturalism a rebours: a usefulness that becomes a useless beauty, an organ without a function. By way of ruins, history turns back into nature, whether we stand before the crumbled stones of Nineveh or a locomotive graveyard in Pennsylvania. Our fondness for machines and apparatuses fallen into disuse not only constitutes one more proof of humanity's incurable nostalgia for the past, but also reveals a rift in the modern sensibility: our inability to associate beauty and usefulness. Here is a double damnation: the religion of art forbids us to consider the useful beautiful; the cult of utility leads us to conceive of beauty not as a presence but as a function. This may explain why technology has been such a poor source of myths: aviation is the realization of an age-old dream that appears in all societies, but it has not created figures comparable to Icarus and Phaethon.

 

   The industrial object tends to disappear as a form and become one with its function. Its being is its meaning, and its meaning is to be useful. It lies at the other extreme from the work of art. Craftsmanship is a mediation; its forms are not governed by the economy of function but by pleasure, which is always wasteful expenditure and has no rules. The industrial object forbids the superfluous; the work of craftsmanship delights in embellishments. Its predilection for decoration violates the principle of usefulness. The decoration of the craft object ordinarily has no function whatsoever, so the industrial designer, obeying his implacable aesthetic, does away with it. The persistence and proliferation of ornamentation in handicrafts reveal an intermediate zone between utility and aesthetic contemplation. In craftsmanship there is a continuous movement back and forth between usefulness and beauty; this back-and-forth motion has a name: pleasure. Things are pleasing because they are useful and beautiful. The copulative conjunction (and) defines craftsmanship, just as the disjunctive defines art and technology: utility or beauty. The hand made object satisfies a need no less imperative than hunger and thirst: the need to take delight in the things we see and touch, whatever their everyday uses. This need is not reducible to the mathematical ideal that rules industrial design, nor is it reducible to the rigor of the religion of art. The pleasure that works of craftsmanship give us has its source in a double transgression: against the cult of utility and against the religion of art.

 

  Made by hand, the craft object bears the fingerprints, real or metaphorical, of the person who fashioned it. These fingerprints are not the equivalent of the artist's signature, for they are not a name. Nor are they a mark or brand. They are a sign: the almost invisible scar commemorating our original brotherhood and sisterhood. Made by hand, the craft object is made for hands. Not only can we see it; we can also finger it, feel it. We see the work of art but we do not touch it. The religious taboo that forbids us to touch saints--"you'll burn your hands if you touch the Tabernacle," we were told as children--also applies to paintings and sculptures. Our relation to the industrial object is functional; our relation to the work of art is semireligious; our relation to the work of craftsmanship is corporeal. In reality, this last is not a relation but a contact. The transpersonal nature of craftsmanship finds direct and immediate expression in sensation: the body is participation. To feel is primarily to feel something or someone not ourselves. And above all, to feel with someone. Even to feel itself, the body seeks another body. We feel through others. The physical and bodily ties that bind us to others are no less powerful than the legal, economic, and religious ties that unite us. Craftsmanship is a sign that expresses society not as work (technique) or as symbol (art, religion) but as shared physical life.

 

   The pitcher of water or wine in the middle of the table is a point of convergence, a little sun that unites everyone present. But my wife can transform into a flower vase that pitcher pouring forth our drink at the table. Personal sensibility and imagination divert the object from its ordinary function and create a break in its meaning: it is no longer a recipient to contain liquid but one in which to display a carnation. This diversion and break link the object to an other realm of sensibility: imagination. This imagination is social: the carnation in the pitcher is also a metaphorical sun shared with everyone. In its perpetual movement back and forth between beauty and utility, pleasure and service, the work of craftsmanship teaches us lessons in sociability. At fiestas and ceremonies its radiation is still more intense and total. At fiestas the collectivity communes with itself, and this communion takes place through ritual objects that almost always are handmade objects. If fiesta is participation in primordial time---the collectivity literally shares out among its members, like sacred bread, the date being commemorated--craftsmanship is a sort of fiesta of the object: it transforms a utensil into a sign of participation.

 

 

 

   The artist of old wanted to be like his predecessors, to make himself worthy of them through imitation. The modern artist wants to be different; his homage to tradition is to deny it. When he seeks a tradition, he looks for it outside the West, in the art of primitives or other civilizations. Because they fall outside the tradition of the West, the archaism of the primitive and the antiquity of the Sumerian or Mayan object are paradoxical forms of novelty. The aesthetics of change requires that each work of art be new and different from those preceding it; novelty in turn implies the negation of immediate tradition. Tradition be comes a succession of abrupt breaks. The delirium of change also rules industrial production, though for different reasons: each new object, the result of a new process, ousts the object preceding it. The history of craftsmanship is not a succession of inventions or of unique (or supposedly unique) works. In reality, craftsmanship does not have a history, if we conceive of history as being an uninterrupted series of changes. There is not a break but a continuity between its past and its present. The modern artist has embarked upon the conquest of eternity, and the designer upon that of the future; the artisan allows himself to be vanquished by time. Traditional but not historical, linked to the past but bearing no date, the craft object teaches us to be wary of the mirages of history and the illusions of the future. The artisan seeks not to conquer time but to be one with its flow. Through repetitions that are imperceptible but real variations, his works endure--and hence survive the fashionable object.

 

   Industrial design tends to be impersonal. It is subject to the tyranny of function, and its beauty is rooted in that subjection. Yet functional beauty is fully realized only in geometry, and only in geometry are truth and beauty one and the same; in the arts strictly speaking, beauty is born of necessary infringement of the rules. Beauty---or rather art  is a violation of functionality. Taken together, these trespasses constitute what we call a style. The ideal of the designer, if he is consistent, ought to be the absence of style--forms reduced to their function--whereas the ideal of the artist should be a style that begins and ends in each of his works. (Perhaps this is what Mallarme and Joyce were aiming at.) No work of art, however, begins and ends in itself each is a language at once personal and collective: a style, a manner. Styles are communal. Every work of art is at once a deviation from and a confirmation of the style of its time and place: by violating the canons of that style, it validates them. Again, craftsmanship lies at a midpoint: like design, it is anonymous; like the work of art, it is a style. In contradistinction to design, the craft object is anonymous yet not impersonal; in contradistinction to the work of art, it brings out the collective nature of style and shows us that the vainglorious I of the artist is a we.

 

  Technology is international; its constructions, methods, and products are the same everywhere. By suppressing national and regional particularities and peculiarities, it impoverishes the world. By spreading all over the globe, technology has become the most powerful agent yet of historical entropy. The negative character of its action may be summed up in a phrase: it makes things uniform but does not unify. It levels the differences between cultures and national styles, but it does not do away with the rivalries and hatreds between peoples and states. After transforming rivals into identical twins, it arms both of them with the same weapons. The danger of technology does not lie solely in the death-dealing nature of many of its inventions, but in the fact that it threatens the very essence of the historical process. By putting an end to the diversity of societies and cultures, it puts an end to history itself. It is the amazing variety of societies that produces history: the clashes and encounters between different groups and cultures, between alien ideas and techniques. There is no doubt an analogy between the historical process and the twofold phenomenon that biologists call inbreeding and outbreeding, and that anthropologists call endogamy and exogamy. The great civilizations have been syntheses of different and contradictory cultures. Where a civilization has not been forced to confront the threat and undergo the stimulation of another civilization--as was the case in pre-Columbian America up until the sixteenth century—its destiny is to mark time and go in circles. The experience of the other is the secret of change--and of life.

 

   Modern technology has brought about a great many profound transformations, but all in the same direction and with the same import: the extirpation of the other. By leaving the aggressiveness of the human species intact and by making its members uniform, it has lent added strength to the causes tending toward its extinction. Craftsmanship, on the other hand, is not even national in scope: it is local. Heedless of boundaries and systems of government, it outlives republics and empires; the pottery, basketwork, and musical instruments seen in the frescoes of Bonampak have survived Mayan priests, Aztec warriors, colonial friars, and Mexican presidents. They will also survive American tourists. Craftsmen have no country; they are from their village. What is more, they are from their neighborhood and their family. Craftsmen defend us from the unification of technology and its geometrical deserts. By preserving differences, they safeguard the fecundity of history.

 

  The craftsman does not define himself in terms of either his nationality or his religion. He is not loyal to an idea or image but to a practice: his craft. A workshop is a social microcosm governed by laws of its own. The craftsman seldom works by himself, nor is his work exaggeratedly specialized as in industry. His workday is not ruled by a rigid time schedule but by a rhythm linked more to his body and sensibility than to the abstract necessities of production. As the craftsman works he may talk with others and sometimes sing. His boss is not an invisible bigwig but an old man who is his master and almost always a relative of his, or at least a neighbor. It is revealing that, despite its markedly collectivist character, the craft workshop has not served as a model for any of the great utopias of the West, From Campanella's City of the Sun to Fourier's Phalanstery to Marx's Communist society, the prototypes of the perfect social man have not been craftsmen but priest-sages, philosopher-gardeners, and the worker of the world in whom praxis and science are conjoined. Of course I do not believe that the craft workshop is an image of perfection. Yet I think that its very lack of perfection points to how we might humanize our society: its imperfection is that of men and women, not of systems. Because of its size and the number of persons who compose it, a community of craftsmen favors a democratic way of life; its organization is hierarchical but not authoritarian, and its hierarchy is founded not on power but on skill: masters, journeymen, apprentices. Finally, craftwork is an occupation that involves both play and creation. After giving us a lesson in sensibility and imagination, craftsmanship gives us one in politics.

 

 

 

  Until recently, it was commonly believed that crafts were doomed to disappear, industry having usurped their place. Precisely the opposite is happening today: for better or worse, handcrafted articles now play an appreciable role in world trade. The products of Afghanistan and the Sudan are sold in the same department stores as the newest creations straight from the Italian or Japanese industrial designer's board. This renaissance is most notable in the industrialized countries and affects both consumer and producer, in places where the concentration of industry is greatest--in Massachusetts, for example--we are witness to the resurrection of the old trades of potter, carpenter, glassblower; many young people sick and tired of modern society have returned to craftwork. In those countries dominated (at the wrong time in their development) by the fanaticism of industrialization, there has been a revival of craftwork. Often, national governments encourage handicrafts. This phenomenon is disturbing, insofar as government subsidies are usually forthcoming for commercial reasons. The craftsmen who today are the object of the paternalism of official planners were only yesterday threatened by projects for their country's modernization drawn up by the very same bureaucrats, intoxicated by economic theories learned in Moscow, London, or New York. Bureaucracies are the natural enemies of the craftsman, and whenever they set out to "orient" him, they blunt his sensibility, mutilate his imagination, and degrade his handiwork.

 

  The return of craftwork in the United States and Western Europe is one of the symptoms of the great change in contemporary sensibility. We find here yet another expression of the criticism of the abstract religion of progress and of the quantitative vision of humanity and nature. To experience the disillusionment of progress, it is necessary, to be sure, to have experienced progress. It is not likely that underdeveloped countries share this disillusionment, even if the ruinous nature of industrial super productivity is increasingly evident. Nobody learns from someone else's experience. Yet how can we not see what the belief in infinite progress has led to? If every civilization ends in a pile of ruins--a heap of broken statues, fallen columns, texts ripped to shreds--those of industrial society are doubly impressive, because they are immense and premature. Our ruins are beginning to be more awesome than our constructions and threaten to bury us alive. This is why the popularity of craftwork is a sign of health, as is the return to Thoreau and Blake or the rediscovery of Fourier. Our senses, our instinct, our imagination are always a step ahead of our reason. Criticism of our civilization began with the Romantic poets, at the very dawn of the industrial era. The poetry of the twentieth century took up the Romantic revolt and sank its roots even deeper, but only recently has this spiritual rebellion penetrated the minds and hearts of the majority. Modern society is beginning to doubt the very principles on which it was founded two centuries ago, and is trying to change course. Let us hope that it is not too late.

 

   The fate awaiting the work of art is the air-conditioned eternity of the museum; that awaiting the industrial object is the trash bin. Craftwork escapes the museum, and when it does end up in its showcases, it acquits itself with honor: rather than, a unique object, it is merely a sample. It is a captive example, not an idol. Craftsmanship does not go hand in hand with time, nor does it seek to conquer it. Experts periodically examine the inroads of death on art works: cracks in paintings, lines that have blurred, changes of color, the leprosy that eats away both the wall paintings of Ajanta and Leonardo's canvases. As a material thing, the work of art is not eternal. And as an idea? Ideas too grow old and die. But artists very often forget that their work holds the secret of true time: not empty eternity but the life of the instant. The work of art, moreover, has the power to fecundate human spirits and to be reborn, even as negation, in the works that are its descendants. For the industrial object there is no resurrection; it disappears as rapidly as it appears. If it left no trace whatsoever it would be truly perfect; unfortunately it has a body, and once it has ceased to be useful, it becomes mere refuse difficult to dispose of. The indecency of trash is no less pathetic than the indecency of the false eternity of the museum. Craftsmanship does not aspire to last for millennia, but at the same time it seeks no early death. It follows the course of time from day to day, it flows along with us, it very slowly wastes away, it neither looks for death nor denies it. It accepts it. Between the time without time of the museum and the accelerated time of technology, the work of craftsmanship is the pulse of human time. It is a useful object but also a handsome one; an object that endures through time yet meets its end and resigns itself to so doing; an object that is not unique like the work of art, but replaceable by another object similar yet not identical. Craftwork teaches us to die, and by so doing teaches us to live.

Cambridge, Mass., December 7, 1973