·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
DEGRÉ ZÉRO
There is a well-rooted idea in architecture which argues that
architecture’s degree zero is a minimal architecture, an almost-nothing –
large glass windows, straight, white walls, some columns and . . . that’s
it ; an abstract architecture, one without design, without tics, without
style. But if less is more – which supposes that less is far from being
nothing, that it is already charged, already more – then what should
be done in order to truly obtain less? What must be done to escape
this invisible charge or wriggle free of it and begin afresh? Degree
zero is, of course, made up of absences, but it equally tries to avoid any
form of sophistication, any bourgeois expression of refinement. If, as
Roland Barthes suggests, degree zero is what allows us to evade or avoid
(déjouer) the prescriptions fixed by a code,1 then what can be done to
reconquer and rediscover our lost innocence?
In architecture, just as in literature, it would probably require
struggling with the terrorizing codes, a reaction rather than an action.
It would require breaking, or at least cracking, the strong, naturally
assertive architectural figures that perpetuate a way of being through
the spaces they create as well as the ideas they carry.
1. A New Beginning
In the middle of our life’s journey
I found myself in a dark wood,
in which the way ahead was lost. 2
Just as Dante discovered, there comes a day in our lives when we realize
that our days are numbered. It is an unpredictable countdown, yet its
irreversibility is clearly perceived. The moment arrives when «what one
did, lived and wrote seems to be repeated material that is condemned
to repetition, to the weariness of repetition», 3 and we see, suddenly and
with clarity, our «future, until death, as an endless routine».4 This is the
place from which the idea of effecting a complete and radical change
in one’s life emerges: an act of retreat, a retirement from the world
and from urbane life, a desire for an inversion of an all-too-familiar
landscape. It is a desire for change that sparks a moment of crisis
halfway though life.
In this active rupture without concessions, what often counts is not the
theatricality of the act but its permanence – its capacity to generate
a new force of life. This pilgrimage to a new continent demands, as a
result, continuous effort in order to prevent falling back into old habits.
It involves a total reorganization of everyday life and its set of rituals in
order to accustom both the mind and the body to their new situation.
It also involves the important task of choosing a place and a space. This
retreat, which is the realization of a fantasy we carry inside ourselves
1
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
for many years, brings with it the idea of an absolute appropriation of
space.
One could suggest that this voluntary retreat would need a specific
place: an island, a beautiful tree at the edge of a stream, a topographic
fold – a place in which one feels well. Yet at the same time, this place of
retreat equally aspires to be an abstract, a-topical space: an open field
with an undifferentiated horizon.
2. Texas
Somewhere in Texas at the beginning of the 1980s a lady asked
Lars Lerup to design a house for her. At the time Lerup was still an
architecture professor at University of California at Berkeley. It would
be years before he later moved to Houston and discovered its hypnotic
force. The client, who was the owner of a large Texas ranch, had
discovered that her husband was cheating on her and wanted Lerup to
design a house just for her. The house was to be hidden away from the
central house, and free from what Lerup later described as any male
memories : «[She] needs a place of her own. She wants her independence;
she has been a wife and a mother for a long time. She needs a refuge,
a place to hide, a domain where she can guide meaning and invent a
world that is her own.»5 She wanted to escape the matrimonial world
– husband, children, relatives – what Zorba the Greek called «the full
catastrophy».
The Single-Family House :
Figure and Plan
The house Lerup designed, which he called Texas Zero, was
unfortunately never built. It was, however, published along two other
houses – the Nofamily House and Love/House – in his book Planned
Assaults. The three houses are calculated assaults against the singlefamily home, or in Lerup’s words, «part exploration, part attack, part
construction, part fiction».6 The three houses all attack what Lerup
called the single-family house figure, the totem of the American Dream,
but each in different ways. According to Lerup, the single-family home
is composed of two distinct components: the exterior image, that of a
child’s drawing – solid, complete and closed to the exterior – and the
plan, an ordered and coded assemblage comprising a two-car garage,
living room, dining room, master bedroom, master bath and the
children’s room.7
Texas Zero is the meeting point between a degree-zero research and
the endless open expanse of Texas, which is the quintessential place
of modernity and fresh starts. The site of the house is situated on
the edge between an open expanse and a stand of live oaks, above a
meandering river. The house, which seems to be in the process of either
construction or demolition, is a hybrid aggregate of a single-family
house, a county store and a Texas log house, all typical elements of this
part of the U.S. The assembled bricolage is a figure open to the Texas
wilderness «allowing the family to slip out through its cracks and the
client to breathe new life into the empty shell». 8
The Tripartite Figures
2
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
With Texas Zero, Lerup carried out a first inversion of his double
reading of the single-family house. Here it is the exterior image that
becomes an aggregate, an accumulation of distinctive and broken
qualities. The façade of a country store has become a protective
layer and a canopy, and half of a typical log house, with its chimney,
porch and “Louisiana”-type roof, is pasted at the back of the façade.
Meanwhile, the other component, the plan, looks, surprisingly, quite
stable, symmetrical and mute: unshaken in the face of the chaos and
the dramas of life, it is a neutral plan, one awaiting a new life that will
not let the old one inside.
Texas Zero : The Almost Found Object
3. Zero
Lerup’s description of the plan makes use of the short phrase «He has,
has he?»9 In this linguistic construction, in which the comma is used as
an axis of symmetry, there is an inversion of sense : «[T]he statement of
fact ‘He has’ is put in question by the syntactical reversion ‘has he?’.»10
While symmetry is used so often in architecture to create a hypnotizing
and converging effect, here the symmetry is convex, for it generates
inversion : instead of determining a focal point, it opens up toward a
question – it disperses, separates, distributes. The centre of the house is
no longer occupied by a television set – a receiving device – but by a set
of furniture that facilitates daily activities around it.
The symmetry of Texas Zero is not only geometric but also analogous.
One can brief ly describe the plan of the house by enumerating the
different symmetries and mechanisms of inversion:
∙ two black, concrete volumes in the shape of small houses are placed
on either side of the central space: the first is occupied by a kitchen,
while its counterpoint to the left of the central space accommodates the
bathroom ;
∙ inside this volumetric symmetry, an analogy of a different nature
is established between the devices and the use of each of the rooms:
«the symmetrical placement of washbasin and kitchen sink, toilet and
stove, bathtub and dishwasher, imply equivalence despite obvious
differences»11 ;
∙ two chimneys, both inclined in the same direction, run through the
parallel lateral walls of the central space: one is maintained by traction,
and the other by compression, both calling into question their very own
stability and reveal the inevitable inf luence of gravity ;
∙ along the same axis, an open-air sleeping porch is balanced
symmetrically by a glided cage for a pair of doves ;
∙ six columns – two with a square section, two tree trunks and two
round ones – are equally mirrored, with a spiral stair winding up one of
the round columns ;
∙ and finally, three pieces of furniture are placed along the axis of
symmetry : a hybrid sofa bed, a loveseat, or Which-Way Chair, and a very
large table, the Last Supper Table (the client always says, «This is the last
supper I will serve.») ; the table is where she both eats and works. The
three objects refer to ambiguous and hybrid uses.
Texas Zero : Plan
Texas Zero : Axis of Equipment
3
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
The symmetrical mechanism aims to produce a degree-zero plan, or
to create a neutralization of the house’s usage codes and syntax. It
defines a zero point, a point that is both a point of mutual cancellation
as well as a point of relation to a dynamic totality in which the parts
are in opposition, in a position of clear and marked difference.12
Thus, Lerup says, «the ground of the common elements has been
neutralized, familiar as they are, and importantly so, the elements,
freed from conventional use, gain new significance and an openness to
interpretation and appreciation».13
And as for the Last Supper Table, well, it doesn’t fool anyone, because
although the question here is about a new beginning, of a new
departure or a new adventure, it is also about a new phase of life, the
one that directly precedes the end. In this sense, the table reveals
the true programme of the house, because, as Barthes has stated, the
problem is not so much how not to age, but how to reach old age alive.14
Texas Zero
4. Tokyo
In 1984, at the same time that Lerup was working on Texas Zero,
Toyo Ito completed a small house in Tokyo–Shinjuku, the Silver Hut,
a house that is both a light yurt and a bunker. This time, there is no
adulterous affair involved, but there is still a rupture and the need for a
new beginning. The client of this house was Ito himself, and the house
served as his residence for over twenty years.15 It was built on the same
parcel as the White U, a home Ito had built for his sister eight years
earlier. The highly visible differences between the two houses, situated
less than ten metres one from the other, manifest an important and
radical change in Ito’s professional life.
Before starting his own practice, Ito worked for several years in
Kiyonori Kikutake’s office. In the years following his departure,
the production of his small practice was highly inf luenced by the
architecture of the great Japanese masters of that time, especially
Shinohara, and dealt mainly with space as abstraction. The White U
was, in a way, the culmination of this research : a continuous space
without partitions, changing at every step. But the 1980s were a
period of great transformation in Japan when buildings were built
and demolished at an astonishing rhythm. Ito has said, «It was a
horrible social phenomenon, in which architecture itself had became
a consumer good. I questioned whether architecture could actually
survive in this environment without being completely absorbed by
consumer culture.»16 Ito tells us that the Japanese architectural scene
of that period was dominated by two main groups : «[O]n the one hand,
there was the excessively prominent band of architects and designers
who had thoroughly penetrated into and assimilated with consumer
culture. On the other side, there were the great masters, who continued
to maintain a detached, aloof attitude, insisting that architecture was
architecture, regardless the circumstances. I found the work of both
groups equally uninteresting.»17
Silver Hut and White U : Plan
4
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
Built during this moment of doubt and interrogation, the Silver Hut
expresses Ito’s interest in the vacant intellectual space found in the gap
between the two approaches. But rather than being a synthesis of the
two approaches, it is instead a dialogue involving both while refusing
and maintaining a certain distance from them. It also expresses a
double response of attraction and repulsion toward the consumer
culture of that period. Trying to avoid any form of sophistication,
he turned away from purely architectural questions by exploring the
relations between architecture, daily life and the metropolis, which he
perceived as an abstract and undifferentiated environment rather than
as a physical context : «I sense a kind of weakness in many pioneering
designers who, while aspiring toward the avant-garde of modern
architecture, seem ultimately to have reverted to the world of Japanese
refinement. After the house in Kasama, I thought about changing my
method, and it might be said that I have been instinctively avoiding
sophistication. However, from 1980 on, in constantly thinking about
the theme of re-conceiving architecture in terms of the actions of daily
life, I concluded that my aim should be architecture that resembles the
existing conditions and ref lects human actions in space, so that the
question of comfort, as a minimisation of pressure on the human body,
will be manifest as a disorderly stack of absorbing spaces.»18
The Silver Hut manifests with great force the contradictions that Ito
was struggling with at that time. Its structure is based on a residential
grid that Ito called Dom-ino, a very simple framework based on Le
Corbusier’s model that was designed in such as way as to allow it to be
assembled according to the wishes of the client. The house is organized
not around a living room, but around an exterior covered space, with
the various other rooms gathered around it. It is, like Lerup’s assault
houses, a “nofamily” house ; it produces a suspended space of liberty
and refuses the coded spatial composition of the typical family home.
Ito’s house accepts and assumes the urban and semi-independent
lifestyle of its inhabitants : «In today’s reality, a family restaurant
probably has a greater sense of family togetherness than a dining room
in a house, and the fresh food corner in a department store or a local
24-hour convenience store probably play the role of a kitchen and
refrigerator more than the ones in a house.»19
The small room of Ito’s daughter is the only space situated on the upper
f loor. The spatial acceptance of her independence shows Ito’s attention
to and interest in the figure of the young, emancipated, nomadic Tokyo
girl, the main protagonist of the consumerist metropolis. This small
space, a sort of low-tech capsule (note the small portholes that open
with the handle of a car window), anticipates his Pao installation, for it
is a light tent that is both a celebration and a critique of the fetishistic
objects of Tokyo’s girls : «[I]t symbolically represents the relationship
between my architecture and the consumerist city. That is to say, it
manifests a critical view towards lifestyles that are fully immersed in the
spaces of consumption, but at the same time it cannot conceal my own
attraction to the freedom and freshness offered by such lifestyles.»20
Silver Hut : Axonometric View
Silver Hut : Ground Floor Plan
Silver Hut : Daughter’s room
5
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
5. Newark
Retreat is, as in Ito’s double response, a paradox. It bears within it an
absolute, uncompromising need for retirement and, at the same time,
the total impossibility of its realization. It is a radical yet ambivalent
attitude.
Lenore Beadsman and Rick Vigorous are the two protagonists of The
Broom of the System, a novel written by David Foster Wallace in 1987.
During hours passed together in bed, Lenore, who has a mind-numbing
job as a switchboard operator in a publishing house, asks Rick, her
boyfriend and co-director of the firm, to read to her the short-story
manuscripts he receives. Among them, one particularly funny, stupid,
brilliant and catastrophic story tells the tale of a man and a woman who
meet and fall in love during a group-therapy session :
«The man is handsome and jutting-jawed, and also as a rule very
nice, but he has a problem with incredible f lashes of temper that
he can’t control. His emotions get hold of him and he can’t control
them, and he gets insanely and irrationally angry, sometimes. The
woman is achingly lovely and as sweet and kind a person as one
could ever hope to imagine, but she suffers from horrible periods
of melancholy which can be held at bay only by massive overeating
and excessive sleep, and so she eats Fritos and Hostess Cupcakes all
the time, and sleeps far too much, and weighs a lot, although she’s
still very pretty anyway.»
«Can you please move your arm a little?»
[...]
«...[A]s a college student [the group psychologist] had had a
nervous breakdown during the GRE’s and hadn’t done well and
hadn’t gotten into Harvard Graduate School and had had to go to
N.Y.U. and had had horrible experiences and several breakdowns
in New York City, and as a result just hates cities, and collective
societal units in general, a really pathological hatred, and thinks
society and group pressures are at the root of all the problems
of everybody who comes to see him, and he tries unceasingly but
subtly to get all his patients to leave the city and move out into this
series of isolated cabins deep in the woods...»
[...]
«And the [handsome and jutting-jawed] man and the [achingly
lovely] woman fall madly in love, and start hanging around
together, and the man’s temper begins miraculously to moderate,
and the woman’s melancholy begins to moderate also and she stops
sleeping all the time and also stops eating junk food and slims
down and becomes so incredibly beautiful it makes your eyes water,
and they decide to get married...»
6
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
[...]
«[A]nd so they take the psychologist’s advice and buy a cabin
way out in the woods several hours’ drive from anything, and the
man quits his job as an architect, at which he’d been enormously
brilliant and successful when he wasn’t having temper problems,
and the woman quits her job designing clothes for full-figured
women, and they get married and move out to their cabin and live
alone, and, it’s not too subtly implied, have simply incredible sex
all the time, in the cabin and the woods and the trees, and for a
living they begin to write collaborative novels about the triumph
of strong pure human emotion over the evil group-pressures of
contemporary collective society.»
[...]
«Killer story, so far.»
«Just wait. And they go back into the woods as before, and for a
few years everything is great, unbelievably great. But then, like tiny
cracks in a beautiful sculpture, little by little, their old emotional
troubles begin to manifest themselves in tiny ways. The man
sometimes gets unreasonably angry at meaningless things, and this
sometimes makes the woman melancholy, and an ominous empty
Frito bag or two begin to appear in the wastebasket, and she puts
on a little weight.»21
Here it is probably unnecessary to describe the decomposition process
in detail. In short: two children are born, both of whom are subject
to serious epileptic crises each time they cry, and this generates
comings and goings to the city in search for treatments and anti-crying
medicines, leading to bursts of anger on the man’s part because of the
steep price of the medicines, and to melancholic depression in the
woman that prove more and more severe. In the end there is a dramatic
car accident :
«Holy shit.»
«Indeed.»
« . . . . »
«A thoroughly, thoroughly troubled story. The product of a nastily
troubled little collegiate mind. And there were about twenty more
pages in which the huge beautiful woman lay in a pathetic foetal
position in an irreversible coma while the psychologist rationalised
the whole thing as due to collective-societal pressures too deep
and insidious even to be avoided by f light to the woods, and tried
to milk the comatose woman’s dead family’s remaining assets
through legal manoeuvres.»
«Mother of God.»
«Quite.»
«Are you going to use it?»
«Are you joking? It’s staggeringly long, longer than the whole next
issue will be. And ridiculously sad.»22
7
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
6. Rituals
The two houses, Texas Zero and the Silver Hut, don’t try to substitute
a stable world with a broken one, nor do they try to establish an
autonomous and hermetic territory. The two projects, which are,
moreover, very different from one another, play with the idea of a
porous retreat, and manifest the childish boat fantasy : a solitary
f loating along an endless and abstract stretch of water that nevertheless
affords glimpses of dry land, a close island with the fresh and securing
shadow of a coconut tree.
The boat fantasy also gives great importance to the process of
bricolage. Both houses produce their own pieces of furniture, madeto-measure works, without help, with the materials on board, by using
leftovers: what is on the boat is all there is. This bricolage is situated
far from the modernist vision of total design. It does not aim to
produce a coherent design that deals with the whole all at once, but
rather a complementary and additional one ; it acts upon daily rituals
and the epidermic interface we have with the world by using fragile,
recomposed, unfinished objects. The inclined architectural forms
(the chimneys and the façade of Texas Zero ; the geometric rupture of
the Silver Hut) – traces of troubled waters in a familiar chaos – take
the form of a refined poverty on the micro-scale of the furniture, the
oneiric objects of an unfinished house and unsatisfied desire, left
somewhere for the imagination to complete them.
INITIALLY PUBLISHED IN SAN ROCCO # 8,
«WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE PRIMITIVE HUT ?», WINTER 2013
8
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
Notes
(1) Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Édition du Seuil,
1953).
(2) Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I, 1292–93: «Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via
era smarrita.»
(3) Roland Barthes, La Préparation du roman I et II : Cours et séminaires
au Collège de France, 1978–1980 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003), 27.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Lars Lerup, Planned Assaults (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1987), 82.
(6) Ibid., 15.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Ibid., 19.
(9) This is a phrase often uttered by Bertie Wooster, a protagonist in
the series of short stories entitled Jeeves (1915–74) by the English
writer P. G. Wodehouse.
(10) Lerup, Planned Assaults, 84.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1973), 30.
(13) Lerup, Planned Assaults, 91.
(14) Barthes, Le Neutre: Cours et séminaires au Collège de France, 1977–1978
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 191.
(15) The Silver Hut was demolished in 2009 and rebuilt by Ito in 2011,
this time facing the sea on the island of Omishima as a part of the
Architecture Museum of Imabari.
(16) Toyo Ito, quoted in Koji Taki, «A Conversation with Toyo Ito», El
Croquis, no. 71 (1995), 23.
(17) Ibid.
(18) Toyo Ito, “Silver Hut” [1989], in Tarzans in the Media Forest
(London: A A Publications, 2011), 57.
(19) Toyo Ito, “Dismantling and Reconstituting the ‘House’ in a
Disordered City” [1988], in idem, Tarzans in the Media Forest, 69.
(20) Ito, Tarzans in the Media Forest, 182.
(21) David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (Newark: Penguin
Books, 2004), 136 –39.
(22) Ibid., 146 –47.
9