Thomas Hirschhorn: The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival. The Ambassador's Diary (original) (raw)

This examination of the Rotterdam Kunsthal, completed in 1992 to the designs of Rem Koolhaas, Fuminori Hoshino and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in consultation with Cecil Balmond of Ove Arup Associates, was instigated by my appreciation of Koolhaas's use of the formal repertoire (or more precisely, a selection of some of the formal repertoires) of Modern architecture as a point of departure in that of his own work. From Koolhaas's writing as well as from that by others, it is clear that this strategy manifests a fundamental presupposition of this architect's polemic: it asserts the genetic relationship between the spatial strategies of Modern architecture and urbanism and the present condition of globalization, while simultaneously asserting the irreparable ideological rupture between these two regimes. Jonathan Crary asserts the centrality of this paradoxical condition to Koolhaas's work: " In particular, what animates the thought of Koolhaas is how the obvious recognition of the obsolescence of the modern (as a style, strategy, affect, hope) is inseparable from an understanding of the overwhelming persistence and continuity of modernization (and of neo-capitalism). In other words, for him the vicissitudes of the city, of architecture, of experience in the past few decades are the sign not of a new era in which modernity has somehow been exceeded, but rather a phase characterized by a shifting and reorganization of ongoing currents of rationalization. " (Crary, " Notes on Koolhaas and Modernization " , ANY 9, p. 14) Embracing but at the same time challenging Crary's valuable insights a bit, I will argue that for Koolhaas, the " obsolescence " of the modern, in its manifestation as Modern architecture, does not appear to have led to its extinction or even sterility " as a style [or a] strategy ". On the contrary, the " overwhelming persistence and continuity of modernization " —on into its present mutation as globalization-is encoded within the Kunsthal, through a set of precise deformations to the normative formal conditions of Modern architecture. Certainly, the Kunsthal exhibits elements of the Corbusian plan libre, especially in the free-standing, round-sectioned cast-in-place concrete columns which terminate in the planar underside of the ramped roof garden's cast-in-place concrete slab. As Kenneth Frampton has observed, the Kunsthal's sectional warping of a normally horizontal slab to form the floor of its auditorium recalls Le Corbusier's unbuilt Congress Hall for Strasbourg of 1964 (Frampton, Domus 747, pp. 43-46). One could also enlist the Villa Savoye and the Carpenter Center into the Kunsthal's Corbusian genealogy. The building also exhibits some elements of the Miesian syntax in the two exoskeletal steel roof beams recalling IIT, the single free-standing cruciform column at the south portico, and the parapet fascia on the south and east façades which both evoke the Berlin National Gallery. But the Kunsthal is much less interesting for what of Modern architecture has been appropriated than for the ways in which those appropriations have been transformed. For the purpose of this conference, concerned as it is with viewing and reviewing the tectonic, I will focus on specific strategies of the Kunsthal's architectural form, tectonic strategies, material deployments, and subjective spatial experience which mark it as a reification of the " shifting and reorganization of.. .(Modernist) rationalization. "