Speaks, Michael; Mendinis Love Letter from Holland; ANY 21; 1997

Instead of dismissing the Groninger as an empty-calorie one-off, would it not be more accurate to say that the Groninger is so innovative that it cannot be recognized within the context of normal architectural standards? Would it therefore not make more sense to see its excesses as the source of its innovations rather than as perversions of a moribund architectural landscape littered with semiological-formalist detritus? Something important occurred with Robert Venturis critique of modernism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Venturi not only called for a new relationship between architecture and the commercialism of the Las Vegas strip, rendering all resistant architecture ineffectual and obsolete, but for a new practice of architecture in which communication, rather than space, would be the essential, dening feature. Architects have been brought up on Space. During the last 40 years, theorists of modern architecture have focused on space as the essential ingredient that separates architecture from painting, sculpture, and literature Of course art and graphic design were employed by modernist masters, but they were always subservient to space. Architecture was prevented from adapting to the emergent communicational milieu within which it was learning to live. By the 1960s, space, the very thing that gave architecture its unique identity, had seriously begun to limit its ability to take an active role in urban life. Venturi implicitly understood this in his call for a more exible practice that could keep pace with the image-driven consumer culture emerging after the war. Things in excess of architecture serve to revitalize it. For Venturi, this included the many pop-vernacular architectures that had previously gone unrecognized by establishment critics and architects, as well as other practices such as literary criticism and graphic design, which he employed in his famous distinction between the decorated shed and the duck. This architecture of styles and signs is anti-spatial; it is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape. What we learned from Las Vegas was a new way of practicing and experiencing architecture. Architecture, or at least its cutting edge, had a new identity and would henceforth become a practice in which the production of space would be replaced by the production of meaning: abstract realities made visible by the Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) at EuraLille; the immaterial urban and suburban coding systems that have made Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk a force in the American city; and the sensual, unapologetically aesthetic forces that feed human desire and induce pleasure through the work of Frank Gehry. In contrast, ofces as different as those of Peter Eisenman and Robert Venturi, and critics as different as van Dijk and Charles Jencks are today gripped by this communicational identity, because it appears to offer critics and practitioners alike some measure of control in an urban milieu seemingly out of control. Rather than providing architecture with a means to shape and create new urban life, this communicational identity only reproduces what already exists. These architectures that no longer do, but mean, have become nothing more than a delivery mechanism for intellectual trends and fashions, which they mimic in their shapes and forms. Where urban stability is required, an architectural form that conveys or carries the meaning stability is employed; where complexity is required, buildings, whole city blocks, and entire landscapes take shape as soliton waves or diagrams of strange attractors. Due in large measure to Venturi, architectural innovation is today understood in terms of the messages or meanings communicated by new architectural shapes and forms. This was true of postmodernism, which, through classical forms, communicated the message of a blithe new post-urban stability. It was true of deconstructivism, which, through derridean-inected constructivist forms, communicated the message of theoretical avant-gardism to an intellectual elite who wanted to distinguish themselves from postmodernists. And it is also true of the newly emergent and variously articulated folded forms, which communicate the message of exible, apolitical coherency to a

generation bored with conict and ideological struggle. While the shapes, forms, and, indeed, the meanings conveyed by these communicational architectures have disappeared and emerged at what some consider an alarming rate, the practice of architecture has changed little in the last 20 years. It is thus no wonder that the Groningers innovations, which are of another nature, have gone unnoticed or that it has been mistaken for postmodernism by some (Mendinis pavilion), for deconstructivism (Coop Himmelb(l)aus pavilion), and for nothing more than pretty design by others still (Philippe Starcks pavilion). And precisely because it offers none of these, the Groninger Museum helps to frame the image of a kind of architectural practice importantly different from communicational architectures. If Venturis critique of architectures spatial identity led only to the establishment of communicational identity, then what identity might a new, more exible practice, intent on reestablishing itself as an active shaper of urban life, assume? What if architecture had no core essence by which to dene itself, no identity? What if architecture were not dened by some essential core, but was instead the name for a practice that does certain things? Bernard Cache proposes that architecture is the art of creating frames of probability that create the conditions for the emergence of new life. The causes of life always escape us, which is why we can only provide niches in which it can take place. Architecture rst isolates (by way of the wall), selects (using the device of the window) an interval from the external topography, and then arranges this interval in such a way as to increase the probability of an intended effect. Framing thus entails calculated cuttings and intercuttings that do not ensure, but only make more probable the emergence of the new. One never knows how the interval will be lled; otherwise, everything that is known about the interval would cross over to the side of the cause, and all one would have done is to dene a more restricted frame of probability. And if, by any chance, no indeterminacy remained in the interval, the cause would become identical to the effect and nothing new could happen at all. The greater the interval, gap, or hollow, the less control one has over the nal outcome, but the greater the probability of creating the new. Unlike communicational architecture, this new practice of architecture introduces the new by creating frames within which unpredictable urban life forms emerge. It is this singularity that Mendini has made visible with his design for the Groninger Museum. Mendini regards space as a sub-species of art. Refusing to take part in the overturn of one identity in favor of a new one, Mendini discards the burdensome manifesto form, preferring the aphorism, the poem, the pithy observation, the love letter to the world of architecture. For Mendini, signs are carriers of life itself, and not the meaning of life. The design object, Mendini says, is not a thing, but an existence that is made, an essence that is created, the creature of an articial nature. When we explicate signs, we unfold their power, their beauty, and their affect, and become implicated in a love affair. Ornament for Mendini is an interactive form. Modernism disparaged ornament as an unnecessary attachment to a core form or practice. But for Mendini ornament is a connector, an excess that leads not only from one form to another, but from one practice to another. Ornament allows all sorts of architectural becomings: architecture becoming cinematic, literature becoming architectural, cinema becoming literary, each exchanging something of itself for the other. According to Mendini, the designer of neo-modern buildings moves from one specialty to another, from fashion to architecture, performance, and painting, for what he is interested in is their common denominator, which is language, style. Mendinis neomodernist practice of framing ranges along a continuum, slipping from one locale or dimension to another by ornamental twists and folds. From the outset, Mendini argued that the foundation of the museum be the product of both the architecture and the museum policy. The aim was to create an object of great narrative complexity in which, as he says, there be no break between the buildings roles as museum of itself and as a museum of its component parts. Taken all together, interlocking planes, frames within frames, form a house of art, an articial museum/island oating in the aptly named Zwaaikom (Turnpool) of the Verbindingskanaal. It is a literal and metaphorical eddy where the new has the opportunity to become new again, to become something other than style, shape, or form. This is not so because Mendini has created or recreated the new, but because he has made visible something beautiful that was lost in the temporal muddle of our recent past. The Groninger Museum will not satisfy those like van Dijk, who are looking for a new style, shape, or form. Mendini does not create a new set of architecture images, and instead makes visible a new image of the architectural, and in so doing exposes urbanism itself to the affects of design. Whatever else may be said of about it, the Groninger Museum is an altogether beautiful and uninhibited architectural esh, a coloring architecture that lters and frames Hollands overabundance of planar landscapes to create a new Dutch singularity in which old provincial identities give way to a new globalism.