“ARIADNE ICH LIEBE DICH:” WEAVING A DESIRED ARCHITECT
In today’s context of environmental catastrophes caused by an excessive cult of the all powerful Man as measure of all things - an age defined as the anthropocene - every call for future architectural scenarios should always start by questioning and rethinking the position of the person who generates these architectures. Especially when how we know this figure today bears witness to a rampant world making, such that it is hard to imagine this world without all encompassing concrete and the environmental drama it brought forth. It is here that the desired architect has to take responsibility so that one may move again without reproducing conditions for future catastrophes. In order to shift the way how the architect relates to the world and to be sustainable, it is imperative that we understand the archetype of ‘the’ architect and radically rethink this notion of his position so that she is able to humbly interact with the world she is fundamentally a part of: the desired architect does not create world, but creates for and with this world.
The already conceptualised (western) architectural figures are scarce, but persistent. There is the architect from the christian tradition: God, or Le Grand Architecte de l’Univers. Closely connected to this notion is the starchitect, a figure that fits the logic of excessive humanism and late stage-capitalism, but predates both. He is built on the foundational framework of the renaissance which formed the figure of the almighty architect-as-individual (cf. Alberti, Palladio) and is, in essence, a secularised Grand Architecte de l’Univers. It is he who - as if he were a deity - has a hold on the world and renders it malleable through architectural plans and models. He who - as if he were a hero - endeavours to solve the world-as-chaos through rationalisation. He is the architect-god who wants to make the world fit his personal phantasy, who thrusts a future ideal upon the contemporary condition and hovers above as a Holy Ghost, just as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe towers above his model of the Crown Hall Building.
This philosophy is so constitutive in the architectural experience that every architect is in some way or another a secularised Grand Architecte de l’Univers, throwing - seemingly withdrawn from it - buildings upon a world that doesn’t necessarily need those. In the anthropocene pouring concrete is the grandest of gestures and every freestanding dwelling or new building (how ever small) a decadent cathedral. All of them pyramids rising “above confusion, towers above it, [...] an edifying monument, one that turns meaning into a one-way stream,”1 as Denis Hollier writes in Against Architecture. It is the pyramid arrogantly pretending the complexity of the world appears as straightforward to “the divine eye of being”2 of the architect. The question thus becomes which architectural figure generates not the pretension of the pyramid, but a more precarious and humble architecture. Who allows for solutions to the environmental catastrophe without becoming the breeding ground for another?
In Against Architecture Hollier describes the pyramid’s counterpart: the labyrinth “in which sense is always threatened but nonsense is never triumphant.”3 It is the mythological figure of Ariadne - a mortal - that successfully errs through the labyrinth with her thread, establishing a weave that leaves the world without concrete. She doesn’t destroy hedges to pave ways for routes she coincidentally might want to take, but rethinks the routes themselves. Her weave is thus a relational one since “here we must think of Ariadne’s thread as itself weaving the labyrinth.”4 It listens to the world through and with which it is woven and as such doesn’t claim that complexity endures simplicity. Within this architecture “one is not faced with an alternative between labyrinth and pyramid. Each implies the other.”5 Ariadne’s strength is that she denies nor prefers the possibility of the pyramid in her labyrinth but does weave it as possibility, never falling into environmental nihilism, but merely suggesting answers without closing oneself off for other possibilities.
Ariadne, as decentered architect, does not believe in the human that can do anything it imagines, for not everything should be possible nor should it all be ours and as such thinks of herself as radically woven inside the fabric that is world. Ariadne affirms the world-as-labyrinth fully and weaves not against, but with. She answers not primarily to clients - her first client Theseus forgets her on an island, effectively abandoning her - but to the labyrinth itself, nor to plots since she doesn’t succumb to ownership of land. She stays with the trouble, not to will solutions, but to desire them and as such circumvents the pitfalls of clarity created by pyramids that wants to go out of the labyrinth: “To will the future (and not to desire it), to submit it to planning and projects, to wish to construct it, is to lock oneself into a devalorized present that is airless and unlivable.”6
Only when the desired architect ceases to be influenced by Le Grand Architecte de l’Univers and learns to radically weave architecture with the world, can the question of Desired Spaces be posed. For only then will she have taken responsibility for the constitutive architectural figure that facilitated environmental catastrophe and will she have decentered herself as architect. Only then will the desired architect weave structures that allow for sustainable reversibility, renewal and regeneration. Ariadne’s architecture is one that doesn’t reproduce catastrophic conditions of the pyramid that claim to know all, but designs potentiality as potentiality. It is an architecture that is conceptualised as weave, or maybe even as a single thread conscious of its own precariousness and mindful of the world it runs through: future scenarios for an (un-)built environment that are truly to be desired.
Elias D’hollander
1 Denis Hollier, “The labyrinth, the pyramid, and the labyrinth,” in: Against architecture: the writings of Georges Bataille, transl. Betsy Wing (Massachussets: MIT Press, 1992), 70.
2 Hollier, The labyrinth, 72-73.
3 Hollier, The labyrinth, 69.
4 Hollier, The labyrinth, 59.
5 Hollier, The labyrinth, 73.
6 Hollier, The labyrinth, 60-61.