Metropolis

STRATEGIES OF ESTRANGEMENT SEMINAR

Ilka & Andreas Ruby

The concept of estrangement (German: Verfremdung) was introduced in the late 1920s by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht in his "Theory of Epic Theatre" as a means to counter the traditional concept of "empathy" (German: Einfühlung) that formed the dramatic goal of theatre since Aristotle. "To estrange a character or action means first and foremost
to strip it of anything that appears evident, familiar and understandable about it and to arouse curiosity and astonishment about it instead." This estrangement was to cause a critical reflectivity in the viewer towards what he or she sees on stage, rather than passively empathising with
the fate of the play's heros. Ultimately, Brecht understood estrangement as an artistic technique to symbolically counter the effects of alienation ("Entfremdung") that according to Karl Marx characterised the default mode of relationships of the late-capitalist individual to its physical and social environment. Much of contemporary architecture seems to inscribe itself in this lineage in that it uses various atmospheric, narrative or formal scenarios to estrange the familiar appearance of a program. We will discuss various strategies of estrangement, not only from architecture, but also from contemporary art, advertising, music videos and the likes.

The simulation of depth on the surface is a recurrent theme in the recent development of Berlin. The Wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1995 showed impressively how manipulating the surface expression of a building can totally change its entire meaning. With a very different agenda, this effect had been staged in the virtual reconstruction of the Schloss in 1993. In a way, this giant textile print
of the building's historic fassade held from behind by a scaffolding construction introduced a prototype of a new urban typology: the textile curtain wall. The loose urban fabric of Berlin - dubbed by many as the city's unique potential - is since then increasingly stuffed with rather literal pieces of fabric. Giant foils of high-tech textile materials wrap the void spaces of unoccupied lots, construction sites, or old buildings which are not ment to be seen.

The most dramatic expression of this developement so far is to be seen at Leipziger Platz where the unbuilt parcels within the square's octogonal shape are filled with deceptively realistic replicas of the missing buildings. These "built boards" not only show the architectural properties of the buildings to come, but they also simulate potential commercial uses by picturing brand names framed within the printed store displays - window shopping has never been more abstract. In an attempt to polish over the failure of an urban policy aimed at restauring the city's past, these monumental 2,5-D constructions only serve to monumentalise the horror vacui of which its creators seem to suffer. While Berlin's "real" architecture of the past decades, which is generally seen as a huge yet equally vain effort of retrodevelopment, this new "virtual" architecture surprisingly brings Berlin back to the forefront of the avant-guarde.

Indeed we can find a whole series of European cities like Barcelona, Rome, Moscow, Vienna, Venice that in the past years have started to emulate Berlin's potemkinian fate. In those cities, printed architectural simulacra are mostly used on buildings which are under renovation. The motivation at work seems however equally Angst-driven: as if the sight of a building in transformation was unbearable, all the rubble and dirt of building is hidden behind a textile foil which carries the representation of that very building in perfect condition. Superimposed on this layer of architectural representation is often another layer with an advertisement. A subtle reprogrammation of the fassade takes place: While the renovatectural representation of the building), the fake fassade of the textile curtain wall reproduces the fassade, but now as a background layer for an advertisement. Clearly, the building's fassade, if intact, would not have been used as advertisment support since this would have decreased the living qualities of the rooms inside the building, blocking the view of the inhabitants to the outside. But as the performance of the building is already "damaged" due to the renovation, the hinderance is reinterpreted as potential - capital potential in this case. This temporal transformation proliferates the material levels of reference of architecture in often sophisticated ways. The first layer is normally the three-dimensional body of the building itself. The second layer is a scaffolding construction set in front of the actual fassade (under renovation) which itself is mostly invisible as it is fully covered by a textile foil featuring a printed reproduction of that fassade (in perfect condition). A third layer would be an advertisment which is printed on the same foil, but which spatially appears to be in front of the architectural representation, as if it was tied to the actual building's fassade like a banner.

This development begs for reflection on a number of levels. On the one hand we can see how a certain need for representation (that of the immaculate city, timeless and non-transforming) reverberates in many ways that are relevant to architecture: Firstly, a whole new building product market - large-scale advertisment printing has devinitely evolved as an industry - which influences and enlarges the material vocabulary of architecture. Secondly, this new material ecology of architecture updates earlier ideas like for instance the notion of the "decorated shed", as extrapolated in "Learning from Las Vegas" by Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour, or concept of media fassades, explored by Jean Nouvel, Toyo Ito and others in the 1980s. Thirdly, the textile materialisation of these "analogue" media fassades produce a surprising flash-back to Gottfried Semper's thesis that the origin of architecture is not the wall, but the tent, which defined textile as a prime material condition of architecture. And last but not least, the concept of fassade and volume as fundamental architectural concepts are re-negotiated, its functions put in question and meanings redefined.