"What I wanted to say is not that I have no respect for people who write books, because we have since the beginning written a lot. We have always felt the need for an intellectual and conceptual approach which uses the word and involves the word. But we said it for totally different reasons. I want to point out, once again, how important it is that a discipline is just what it is. Poetry is poetry, architecture is architecture, literature is literature, painting is painting, photography is photography. We don't- we're not so interested in things about things, illustrative things, narrative things, because they use something else to exist. And especially talking about architecture, the great thing, as everybody knows here, when you are facing a piece of architecture, a new one or an old one, the sheer experience, the immediate physical experience is what counts and what makes this piece of architecture survive. Whether it's fragile and made out of paper and wood like the old Japanese imperial palace which lasted centuries even if it's not very solid or whether it's a comtemporary building or whether it's an old medieval church. And this immediate sensation which involves all the senses we have, it's very key today that we are not involved in only visual senses, reading, so as to speak, architecture, but really living it is what we continue to underscore. We try to teach this to our students and we try to realize it in our work.
"I think it's very important that things come on the table, you lay them out like you are cooking. The project and the program is laid out, then one option is of course that you start to play with this and then you do all these possible things, you know, which are sometimes very ridiculous or childish, then sometimes it leads to really unexpected qualities, and sometimes you have to reject it and start again. So, you know, there is really no recipes in how you do architecture, but once it's there, the analytical potential of what you've done is very important. If you cannot somehow try to understand that what you've done seems to attract you for this or that reason, that it has a real coherence or it has a real complexity in it - that, you can talk about. But before, you could not talk about. Before, you cannot say well I do this, then I do this, then I do this, then I do this - this will lead to some kind of boring and architecturally worthless thing. But once it's there, you could say why it potentially is interesting or why not, and we have that dialogue. I mean we are training ourselves, we want to, you know, trigger these discussions in the same way as I did now. I could perhaps do a lecture using mostly the same projects and tell you totally different things, you know. And that is more important for me than to say or to insist on saying this building or this project belongs to this or that category and I would love you to see it this or that way. I think that's not interesting, and then we come back to the very first statement I made, it's not interesting because the only thing that is interesting is you who go there, and you like it or you don't like it. Because in a generation or two generations, people don't use the building anymore, and it's worthless because people also don't care about it, it disappears, and that's ok. But some of the greatest buildings survive, because people love them. Because people just love them, and that's much stronger than someone telling you it's interesting, important, because of this, this, this and this. Because nobody cares about what you explain to them. It's like a love affair, it is or it is not. Nobody has to explain.
"Maybe it's more interesting to hear from you, about what you believe is our value system. I don't think that I have a value system per se... I think it's important that architecture appeals to the different senses, you know, and not just to the visual one or to... but I couldn't put this on the table, up front... maybe the gentleman in the blue cloak could give you further explanation, he seems to have a value system. Yah, that's exactly... yah maybe you have a value system. That's exactly the point, this kind of ideological preconception which I think is really the reason why there is so much bad architecture.
"I again say something dangerous, but somehow, architecture is like nature. Let's say a tree is here, a house is here, and some just see this is a tree, this is a house, and that's it, and that's fine- there's no problem with this. If you like, you can see more, if there is more. You can smell it, you can take a fruit, you can whatever, you know, and the house may offer you other opportunities, you may discover other beauties or other advantages or even smell or even whatever, and that's what it is. I mean it's interesting to do- complexities define what it is, that if you look at it more carefully, you discover something that goes beyond. Let's say advertisement is not complex, advertisement can be analysed in a way that- it's an interesting analysis but advertisement has a clear purpose, it tells you you should smoke this or that brand or you should whatever - but that's it. There's a clear message. Architecture has no clear message. No message at all. And art has no message. If you look at a piece of red paint on the wall and you just see it is a piece of red paint, but if you look more carefully maybe there is more. And what you see more is not what the artist wants to tell you but it is what you see in that piece, and that's much more interesting than what the artist wants to tell you. Or what the architect wants to tell you. Or what the stupid book wants to tell you. Because it's about power, the book is about power, and it wants to tell you how important the author is who has written the book. Whereas poetry is never about power, it's just about this or that poem. That's it."
I'm actually taking a break from binging on Supernatural. Well... I never knew or probed much into Herzog and De Meuron's works... but I really enjoyed this talk. Mostly the beginning pre-slide show talk and the ending QnA session where I got the above excerpt from. The rest of the time, I was trying to keep awake, as it is with all talks about works. But from the way he speaks about architecture, about doing it, experiencing it, it really hit something in me. It cheered me up a little. I think, all the good architects, they have something in common. Like all the great writers... they always hit the same note, somehow, some way. Just my opinion. And on we go.
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