Kirchengast Nature Modern

The Place of Landscape in the Modern Movement
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-86859-917-6
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 256 Seiten

Reihe: Landscript

Natur ist nicht einfach nur „grün“ oder das „Andere der Kultur“. Sie ist ein geistiges Konzept. Das Mensch-Natur-Verhältnis erhält konkrete Form, indem es sich architektonisch artikuliert. Wie stellt sich ein modernes Naturverhältnis bei Protagonisten des sogenannten International Style und der „Nachkriegsmoderne“ in Untersuchungen renommierter Forscher dar? Wird Natur in der gebauten Umwelt überhaupt erst sichtbar und welche Impulse fließen zurück auf das zugrunde liegende Naturverständnis? Der vierte Band der Reihe Landscript lenkt einen neuen Blick auf vermeintlich bekannte architektonische Projekte, über deren Naturbezug wenig oder nur in Disziplinen wie der Gartengeschichte nachgedacht wurde. Erlaubt ein kulturwissenschaftlich getragener Zugang vom Standpunkt der Architektur aus schließlich eine neue Epochenbeschreibung des „modernen Grünraums“? Übt dieser noch Einfluss auf das gegenwärtige Bauen aus?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kirchengast, Albert

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur

Leseproben

Neutra’s Nature Sandy Isenstadt Nature in a Neutra house: Julius Shulman’s iconic photograph of the Tremaine House, Montecito, California, 1950. “Nature” as a system of interests and activities is one of the chief creations of the civilized man.—1 The violent spark that started architecture in the first place, as Vitruvius presumed; the sky-hook suspension conjured by Procopius; divine emanations reaching through lithic boughs to brighten Suger’s spirit; Godgranted inspiration pulsing in the veins of Renaissance Genius; the universality and constancy to principle that Laugier’s Muse pointed toward; numbing vastness and unplumbed profundity for Boullée; fragility and resilience, rhythms in scale and across time, all admired by Ruskin; nineteenth-century glimpses of function, utility, healing virtue and commercial resource, autonomy and interdependence, dynamic formal complexity tempered by unvarying correspondences; its infallibility as paradigm and paragon despite mercurial metamorphoses and perpetual unfolding: nature, beneath it all. Upon which ever-changing aspect of never-changing nature did Neutra, in turn, rest his architecture? In fact, although Neutra spoke often of it—Nature Near is the title of an essay collection, for example—nature is not quite onstage in his writings or, one might argue, even in his architecture. Despite countless references and all the green stuff pressed up against his walls of glass, Neutra is more interested in what he calls naturalism—“a return to nature, by the most up-to-date means,” as he defined it—than in nature itself.—2 To put it another way, Neutra is not interested in nature “out there” so much as he is concerned with the human perceptual organs that evolved in response to whatever is “out there.” His own definition makes this emphasis explicit: “What we here may briefly call nature comprises all the requirements and characteristics of live organisms,” with nature itself governed by a “‘supreme plan’—that of biological consistency and requirement.”—3 Neutra’s nature, then, is foremost a biological concept. Rush City Reformed, circa 1924. Rush City, Neutra’s version of the future metropolis, is organized around circulation and is lubricated by fluid transfers between modes of transportation. Nature is counterpoint to the well-organized, well-run city. Even this sharpened definition, however, is broader than his actual purview. He is fixed on the human senses in particular as mediating mechanisms between an outer world of physical phenomena and an inner world of mental functions that range from particles of sensation to cognitive chains. Architects, he argues, should direct their attention to the human body’s “wonderful organic reactivity … responsive to all influences and stimuli.”—4 For Neutra, the most intimate of sciences—the physiology of sensation—should be the polestar of architectural design. Moreover, Neutra’s interest in the senses is further confined to their laws of operation, following an Enlightenment-era conception of nature as a set of discoverable principles. But, whereas a central question during the Enlightenment was whether or not Man is a part of Nature or stands apart, Neutra is untroubled.—5 Instead, he focuses directly on the membrane between: an electro-chemical interface between a physiological organism—rather than, say, a moral one—and an outer environment conceived largely as a source of stimuli and considered in terms of its effect on the organism. He wrote, “All objects can and must be considered as food for our nervous consumption.”—6 An intervening tissue, sandwiched between inside and out, is as much of nature as Neutra needs to propel his design thinking. Neutra’s best-known theoretical pronouncement, Survival Through Design (1954), concentrates on the mismatch between the novel material conditions wrought by modernity and humankind’s obsolete organs of observation. Its first topic—indeed, its first word—is “nature.” Simply put, the human perceptual apparatus evolved over millennia to accord with a natural, that is, a preindustrial and preurban, world, but the prior two centuries had produced “an entirely new environment … the man-made setting,” which overwhelms and confounds our antique sensory equipment. Consequently, urban incongruities and modern dissonance jangled midcentury nerves and resulted in millions upon millions of “mental cases,” in contrast with the gradual accommodations needed for non-man-made settings.—7 Whereas in most interpretations of nature, mankind fits—comfortably or not—within a larger nature, for Neutra a vestige of nature in the form of the human body fits uncomfortably within a wholly man-made environment. Under these conditions, inner self and outer world—the product, respectively, of old biology and new technology—came unglued. Eventually, even the original operational principles of the human sensory apparatus could be superseded by dynamic, judiciously designed responses to changing conditions. Neutra believed that humanity would evolve to accord with the man-made environment, through processes of random mutation. Ultimately, technology would guide evolution itself to harmonize with an artificial world, as the scientific frontier shifted from manufacturing to human biology. One day, he mused, architects would play physiology like a keyboard, designing not buildings but stimulus-response chords to elicit specific somatic or psychic states.—8 Just as the mechanical arts had earlier been rationalized to transform the built environment, so biology, if sufficiently understood, could transform the self, leading to a new and far more plastic understanding of architecture. Nature “out there” is replaceable, Neutra makes clear, but only when scientifically minded designers have learned how to artificially substitute for it, an inevitability still some time in the future. Neutra envisions, therefore, a new mandate for the architect: to shape and scale man-made external stimuli to suit nature-made human sensory capacities. Survival is the aim; Design is the means; Nature, in any sense of the larger organic world, is already lost. Only its residue—evident in physiological mechanisms forged by evolution for a setting that no longer existed and organisms ill-equipped to deal with a world of their own making—is left. To be sure, the springs of Neutra’s notions of nature are deep. He was employed in a nursery as a young man and worked for Gustav Ammann—a Swiss landscape architect and student of Carl Foerster, a German plant breeder. He fondly recalled reading Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry, a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman featuring a love of nature, retreat from the city, and a stint at landscape painting. He easily transferred his botanical observations to a sensitivity for humanity’s “roots and blooms,” and learned that the world’s “natural physiognomy” was increasingly infused with a “cultural character.”—9 He carefully read Goethe’s work in the natural sciences, including his color theory, and absorbed the poet’s dynamic view of botany, particularly noting the importance of vision, both literal and aesthetic.—10 In a convincing recent study, Volker Welter argues that Neutra’s experience in the military before and during the First World War shaped his view of nature in a very specific way, leading him to the idea of an immersive environment that demanded, or at least rewarded vigilant attention. In the wartime setting, Neutra learned to read landscape closely, to interact with it intimately, to understand its spatial cues, to see it not as a scientist, but through an explicitly subjective set of concerns that, however specific to a given situation, is nonetheless a universal viewpoint. Indeed, “viewpoint” precisely captures the idea of an individual sensing him- or herself at the center of a larger environment.—11 However, as Raymond Williams wrote, “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language” and has meaning only in regard to other terms.—12 The synchronic context of Neutra’s nature is equally as important as its diachronic roots. Here, Neutra’s views of nature will be set in relation to his views of society, the body, and architecture. These terms are crucial for Neutra, who, synthetic both by disposition and profession, aspired toward seeing the interrelationship of phenomena and, in this regard, ought to be noted in histories of holism, ecology, and “organic wholeness,” which were just then emerging. For example, J.C. Smuts—who coined the term “holistic” in 1926—argued that the sciences of biology and physiology in particular were displacing classical physics and its mechanistic universe with complex new ideas of an interactive and “dynamic organic whole,” concepts sympathetic with Neutra’s own.—13 Yet, even as Neutra insists on the interrelationship of the body, society, architecture, and nature, he retains the dichotomy of inner and outer worlds. Briefly, the inner world is congruent with the body and its perceptual equipment; the body evolved in response to an...

Über Autor(innen)

Albert Kirchengast (Hg.)

Albert Kirchengast (eds.)