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Mathematische Denkweise bei Fritz Haller (1)

von Hans Frei


In his Discourse on the Method (1637) the French philosopher René Descartes wrote that an urban settlement "a professional architect has freely planed on an open plain" is of much more perfection than an arrangement "that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led." As so often architecture is used here to explain an abstract philosophical construct. For Descartes rational thinking is only possible if chances are excluded. By that he took over an opinion generally shared among architects: that the plan is the tool of architectural design par excellence. The free plan makes ‚tabula rasa' so that an architectural idea can be developed unobstructed according to its own logic. Already in the Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti characterized an architect as someone who knows to express himself by plans. Likewise LC claimed almost 500 years later that the plan is the generator of architecture and all can be deduced from it. LC literally: "Without plan there is only chaos and randomness".

What Descartes and the architects however didn't consider enough was the fact that it would have been possible in the 17th century to plan a town in mountainous landscape as artful and rational as one in the flatland. Triangulation methods were known since the antic times. In the times of Descartes the large-scale land surveying was attempted to furnish the planning in the emerging national states with important topographic data. Within the framework of these enterprises engineers (and architects) learned to deal with maps. Exactly because they were able to calculate topographical chances their military and infrastructural constructs in the mountainsscape were considered often more interesting than those in the plain.

Seen from this point of view the book about the power stations in the Canton of Grisons (Die Kraftwerkbauten im Kanton Graubünden, 1991) by Conradin Clavout and Jürg Ragettli is more than just an inventory of important cultural testimonies. One can read it also as a discours on form - a form that seems to follow in the mountains different rules and that allows - as the authors suggest in their foreword - "new experiences of architecture in general". This promise is honored especially by the photos shot by Christian Kerez.

Treasury of a Minor Architecture

Significantly Conradin Clavuot, Jürg Ragettli and Christian Kerez belonged in the 1980s to the core group of the so-called "analogues architects". To be ranked among them one has had to study at the ETH in Zurich in the studio of Fabio Reinhard. There Miroslav Šik was anxious to establish analogy as a designing method based exclusively on stylistic references to the major architecture of the masters and the minor architecture of the region. By that the analogues were in opposition to the monotone functionalism of modernists as well as to the happy eclecticism of postmodernists. Instead of seeking academic reputation, they worked hard on an architectural language that should be understood by the big public. Their intention was to intensify analogically the built forms so that identity and authenticity could move into architecture again.
They would have loved nothing better than to present their elaborated tableaus in a football stadium, where the public, stimulated by the speeches of Šik over loudspeakers, would have burst into storms of enthusiasm.

In 1988 the time has come. The analogous could presented their studio works in an exhibition and an accompanying catalogue. But strangely enough the big public failed to appear. As much the analogous might have provoked the academics by their preferences for the vernacular, the very protagonists and recipients of that culture kept to be rather indifferent towards the figurative processing of their building tradition.

One of the first stations of the exhibition was the Art Museum in Chur. The contact was made by Clavuot and Ragettli who just have begun their research on the power plants in the Grisons. The power plants seemed to be exactly what they needed to connect the analogous design method with the building tradition of their region. If the big public couldn't understand immediately the stylistic references of analogous architects then it was reasonable to open first the treasury of regional architecture und to get out all the treasures of the analogue method already realized in the region.

The Discontinuous Ensemble!

As it happens now and then, the treasury contained not exactly what was expected. Although the stylistic references turned out to be a nice-to-have, they were only circumstantial for the electricity generating systems in its entiety. What Kerez recorded with his large format camera was a big variety of singular buildings that stylistically have nothing in common at all: a small transformation house that looks like a chapel, a monumental dam, a brutalistic water overflow, a self-conscious central of the electricity society to name only a few examples. All these objects were staged un-dramatically. The sky is always the same regular light ceiling. All landscapes are devoid of people and limited to the immediate surroundings of the built objects. Architects like Nicolaus Hartmann (1880-1956) were only called in if the buildings are determined to human purposes. Remarkably many of the isolated objects are connected to the outer world by thin wires. Others have fat pressure pipes copulating with their surroundings. Often buildings are connected underground by galleries, caverns and shafts. Entering this subterraneous world as opened up by the photos, we suddenly find us suddenly in absolutely overwhelming settings. Clean high-tech meets rugged rock as in a science-fiction movie. Or risky flying buttresses open extra high spaces looking like they have been built under the direction of an unknown gothic master.

Generally one can observe, that the topography became the main generator of form the more the buildings are determined to hydraulic and electro technical purposes, the more the technical systems are expanded and the higher their arms reach. The mountainscape lends its body to the artificial organs and supplies them with all the potentialities they need for they specific purposes. Conversely the implanted artificial organs make visible the potentialities inherent in the mountainscape. As works of Land Art, they are ambassadors representing their context. Even if one refuses these interventions into the mountainscape as indecent one has at least to admit that they are a top-of-the-line product of human culture. Only a few buildings in the urbanized flatland can be compared for example with the Albigna dam. It is as if its form is trimmed by the surrounding mountainscape to its peak form.

The Context is the Text

The mountainscape anyhow. It is a form by itself and shouldn't be discounted as a sort of grotesque and ruinous anti-form. In particular architects in the tradition of Eugène Violllet-le-Duc und Bruno Taut tend to see it as something imperfect that has to be improved by architecture. But in fact the mountainscape results from endless interactions of geological, biological and meteorological systems. It is an extremely productive in producing formal singularities. Nothing is without a cause; everything is of use for something. Each crack, each drop, the smallest change in temperature can be the impact for something new. There is no reason to separate form from such things as content, space, structure or context. Rather form is the very amalgam of all these heterogeneous aspects characterizing it. Insofar the 'tabula rasa', which Descartes considered the necessary requirement for reasonable thinking and planning, means nothing but the sterilization of form.

Under extreme conditions- say above a certain level above sea level - form takes on some aspects we aren't supposed to recognize under 'normal' conditions. The engineers of the power plants had no other choice than to modify all the parts of their systems in analogy with the natural systems. Analogy is understood here in the original, Pythagorean way: to establish logically regulated conditions between two foreign systems. "Fuck context" won't work here. Such an attitude might pass through for flatland urbanism where "context" is first of all coined by property rights. As soon as a parcel of land is foreseen as a building zone, the landlords expect that it will be developed by public infrastructures exactly in the same way as all the adjacent plots. Only after it is publically equipped they seize their rights and make on it whatever they want. Flatland urbanists might wish back the picturesque ensembles of the past. It doesn't help. At last the curse of our cities is the property transforming the context - that is the common - into something private - that is in something isolated. Down here we can't escape fragmentation. But the ensembles of the electricity producing system are of a totally different kind. While by property rights divide what is common, the mountainscape connects what is divided. Singularities here aren't planned out of nothing, but are emerging out of the context and so the product of the common.

Conclusion Oberrealta

There are many ways to take the power plants in the Grisons as the origin of a new architecture. The most direct way leads to a small chapel built in Oberrealta. It was built at the beginning of the 18th century in honor of Saint Nepomuk was built. It was situated on the very edge of a plateau high above the valley where the Hinter Rhine flows. St. Nepomuk, the patron saint of the waters, should preserve the valley from floodings. At the end of the 19th century, in the course of the extension of the water power plants, the Hinter Rhine was embedded on long distance into a channel. By that the risk of further floods has gone in all probability and Saint Nepomuk wasn't necessary anymore. The small chapel collapsed. Eventually the architect Rudolf Fontana was commissioned to reconstruct the old chapel as a testimony of the deep affinity of rural life and topography. The still existing fragments of the walls were demolished to the ground and surrounded by new walls out of concrete. Also the roof with an inclination of 45° was poured in concrete.

Stylistically the new envelope has nothing in common with the former chapel whose virtual volume it encloses. Towards the village there is an open door above which a mathematical "+"-sign - not a chritian cross - is embedded in the concrete. Opposite of it a very narrow window is situated with a funnel-like embrasure in direction of the valley. Because its narrowness it doesn't frame a view over the landscape. Rather it looks like a display of an instrument measuring environmental values.

Little more is preserved than the relationship between the object on the edge of the plateau and the river down in the valley. But its meaning has changed completely. Cold rationality has taken the place of firmly held belief. One banks on the capabilities of rational beings and hasn't to beg for metaphysical power anymore to mind further catastrophes. It is no coincidence that the architect in charge of the project in the office of Fontana was Christian Kerez. For the minimalistic envelop of the chapel is nothing but the sequel of what the constructors of the power plants have done. One shouldn't consider this as a betrayal of analogue method, but rather as an attempt to turn it from its head on its feet again. It is based on regulated relationships between two foreign systems: the natural and the technical, belief and ratio. What matters are analogues relationships between parts and the whole as well as the whole and the context, not superficial resemblances. For the project in Oberrealta no one single photo of the power plants used as a reference to be copied and alienated. Rather all photos together were the trigger that something new could emerge out of the fundaments of the context.


(First published in: Stephan Kunst, Köbi Gantenbein (Ed.): Ansichtssache. 150 Jahre Architekturfotographie in Graubünden. Chur: Bündner Kunstmuseum, 2013, S.187-208.


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