Our Need for Animated Architecture

2023 Essay for Arkus

When I was 14 years old, I spent a few summer weeks with an artist couple in the small village of Fox-Amphoux in Provence. They lived in a simple and beautiful farmhouse on the plain below the old village, vieux village, which, like a medieval castle, is strategically located atop a small hill. Although I was there ostensibly to improve my French, it rather quickly evolved into a coming-of-age, a rite of initiation into a way of life where art and life are one, inseparable from each other.

In addition to helping with the preparation of unforgettable provençal meals and various tasks on the farm with its ceramic kilns of various sizes, we socialized with the photographer Christer Strömholm. He had a large house in the old village, a stone house that internally followed the terrain and stepped down from room to room. Another Swede who contributed to Fox-Amphoux being called "Village des Suèdois" was the architect Wolfgang Hübner. Hübner was a lecturer at the School of Architecture in Lund in the 1960s and 70s and is best known for designing the Storkällan Chapel Crematorium in Nacka, a very beautiful example of an animated modernism, contemporary with Sigurd Lewerentz's now world-famous churches.

The encounter with Hübner and his house in Fox was an experience that left a deep impression on me and became decisive for my career choice. The house is a labyrinth of rooms and extends over several properties. The many entrances create an unclear hierarchy, the rooms are shifted, and functions are scattered throughout the house according to the qualities of the rooms rather than practical considerations. From the street, we entered directly into an airy room with marble floors and high French windows facing an atrium. The space had recently been completed and was part of the latest incorporated property. When asked what the room would be used for, the architect replied that he did not know, but it would be perfect as a gallery. We moved upwards and entered a room that currently housed the kitchen - a number of modules on wheels that could be moved around the house at the architect’s whim. His workspace was in an modern extension shooting out into the landscape, a high room with large studio windows opening onto the fig trees on the slope outside. Wandering around the house was like exploring a medieval castle, where spatiality and mass sometimes constituted equal parts of the volume. In a cave-like cellar vault far inside the embankment, there was a site-cast bath tub illuminated by candles as if it were a spa in a converted Romanesque monastery. Cats roamed freely along the corners, and in the encounter with all the exposed stone walls, I got the feeling that Hübner never intended to complete his work. It was more like a roll of sketch paper, whose ideas, when filled to the edges, could be rolled on and make room for new pencil strokes.

In an interview in the latest issue of the magazine Form, Rem Koolhaas puts forward the message that the architecture of the future will be shaped by collectives rather than individuals. It is perhaps somewhat surprising that someone who has exerted such a great influence on the world of architecture since the 1980s now wants to shift the focus to the intelligence of the collective. Although his office OMA has always been a melting pot of architects and intellectuals from all over the world, the projects where Koolhaas has been priciple designer are characterized by a complexity that is not as present in the office's other projects. But if Koolhaas, who with intellectual acuity has been able to decipher global trends and movements in architecture, sees the future in the sign of the collective, then we can probably be sure that this will become increasingly noticeable in the coming years.

We are thus moving towards a collectively and perhaps to a degree democratically designed architecture, whose goals are often formulated based on more complex criteria than ever before. Sweden has long been at the forefront of this development, with a dominance of a few large offices with hundreds of employees and a smeared ownership structure. Its main feature is a cooperative and faceless architecture that interestingly transforms the client's requirements for flexible gross floor area into an all-powerful and all-encompassing pragmatism. This can be expressed in facades whose seemingly rhythmic play is laconically interrupted by recently added needs for ventilation, sanitary facilities, or other secondary functions. A pragmatism that perhaps in the end hinders rather than helps, when we, in half a century, are to judge whether the building, which is then threatened with demolition or extensive reconstruction as a result of future needs, according to the principles of restoration, should be judged based on its architectural merits rather than its capacity to accommodate a certain varied program. If the Swedish model is the role model for a collectively designed living environment, I cannot help but wonder if this development is really beneficial.

I belong to a group that was taught by architecture and art historians who highlighted architecture that broke new ground by virtue of its uniqueness and artistic rigor. Then, during my studies in Copenhagen, I had almost forgotten Wolfgang Hübner until an image on the cover of an issue of the Swedish magazine Arkitektur appeared in a lecture led by one of the professors. The picture depicted the gallery space I had visited ten years earlier and a narrow stone staircase with a minimal railing of wrought iron. Suddenly the circle was closed, and I realized that the house I experienced in Provence one afternoon that summer was in fact a contribution to architectural history. An animated modernist's renovated townhouse had been lifted into professional admiration.

Who is writing the history of future architecture today? Where is there space for the soulful and expressive architect with form and material as primary means of expression? Spatial experiences that give rise to heightened presence are measurable only as unnecessary costs in the general contractor's calculation. A sad consequence of the Social Democrats' decision to build one million new homes in Sweden in the 1960’s and 70’s  was that the architect lost his role as the leading figure of the construction site. Today, the only solution seems to be to become one's own developer and thus take over the financial consequences of one's uniqueness. But what kind of society rushes to erase the human need for animated buildings? Where standardised industrially produced houses can become worthy of preservation only by virtue of their age, architecture must dare to be mysterious and contradictory. "The power of the nutcase" lies in its unpredictability. Or as Martin Videgård puts it in a video under the glass floor in Tham & Videgård's distantly playful exhibition at ArkDes in 2023: "The inexplicable in art is its greatest opportunity." And perhaps also a future story about a house that became architectural history.