Junk for Code

architecture: mimesis & critique

Over at philosophical conversations there has been a few posts on Heidegger and his ideas of dwelling and building.

How about mimesis? Can it be applied to architecture? If mimesis is seen as a faithful copying or imitation of a given reality, then no. Architecture is not like a documentary photograph.

But if mimesis is seen in terms of affinities and correspondences, then there is no longer any reason for disconnecting architecture from minesis. A house, for isntance, represents a basic experience that is structured on the inside/outside distinction. The house draws a line between what is private and what is public. A building discloses a world.

Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin, 1999

What of critique? Can we talk of a critical architecture? Can it be oppositional? Say dealing with reality in another way than the commercial one of our urban developers?

Can architecture by making use of mimesis ---consciously or unconsciously---develop strategies by which it can represent itself as critical architecture? I mean something more than highbrow architecture as art. I mean something along the lines of the way that it deals with social reality.

How about this? Building a Jewish Museum in what was the capital of the Third Reich. Is that not fraught with historical reverberation and emotional ambivalence?

the basic form is is a zizag with a number of voids. These voids ae 5 stories high. As visitors follow the zig zag pattern through the museum as dictated by the layout of the building they are repeatedly confronted by these voids.

The voids are accessible nowhere and appear to be meaningless or senseless. They are just cold gloomy depths. The flowing movement breaks down.

Visitors have to enter the zig zag of the Jewish Museum through the old Berlin museum, which provides a link to new complex through the basment.

The Jewish Museum itself, from the outside, is an enigmatic and impenetrable volume.

Does this not begin to give an account of the fatal mutual involvement of German and Jewish culture in terms of a critical mimesis? One based on a number of voids within a zig zag?

A silence, an absence of words within the tortorous line of history.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 4, 2004 09:13 PM | TrackBack