On August 28, 2022, in the green Lullin Park in Genthod near Geneva, the “Open House” exhibition ended. She skilfully mixed ephemeral contextual artistic interventions and historic pavilions installed in a large field opening onto the Geneva harbor or in the high forests of a small grove downstream. The purpose of this event brings to its bedside some social themes that the twenty-first century questions: living temporarily, surviving in the destitution that migration engenders, moving one’s shelter to live elsewhere.
The notion of nomadism underlies the presentation of several installations. Whether it was Marcel Lachat’s famous “pirate bubble” which might colonize the city with its polymorphic polyester structure in the mid-1970s; the minimalist caravan by Eduard Böhtlingk which spreads its plastic wings to better generate volume without cluttering up the space of the road; the reinterpretation in polymer canvas of the Bedouin tent by the company Freeform which demonstrates by its model Manta that the memory of the desert can resurface to save lives that forced exile has endangered; or more trivially RHU (Relief Housing Unit), sorts of makeshift shelter kits that have been rolled out worldwide in more than 68,000 units.
All these light constructions refer to the notion of temporality for which a particular form of utilitarianism in the function of living is thus significant in a large part of the exhibition. This therefore invites us to look at the roots of the theoretical approach to architecture which was initiated in the first century BC by the famous Vitruvian trilogy: it postulated thatUtilities, Firmness et Beauty (1) were its three pillars. The first Utilitiesalready indicated this essential place that man took in the field of the formalization of the primitive shelter which one day became architecture.
However, “Open house” is intended above all to be an art exhibition, also offering the opportunity to question the notion of Beauty and, by a somewhat rhetorical digression, to address the ambiguous relationship between art and architecture. It is commonly accepted that there is on the one hand the “free arts” and on the other the “applied arts”, of which architecture is a part, so called by the fact that the author delegates his intellectual creation to other actors. At the origin of the arts, namely in Greek antiquity, the nine muses who appear in the Theogony of the poet Hesiod (VIIIe century before our era), the artistic concept of architecture does not yet exist and is therefore not personified by the graceful daughters of Zeus.
It’s in the XVIIIe century that we begin to develop a system that can compare the different arts beyond the simple list used until then. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the first to identify three categories: first, the fine arts (2), including sculpture and architecture (the plastic) as well as painting (painting); second, the speaking arts, including eloquence and poetry; thirdly, the Art of beautiful play of sensationsincluding music and color art.
Following him, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the philosopher who stubbornly sought to build an ordered system of all the knowledge of humanity, will distinguish five arts. In his aesthetics courses given between 1818 and 1829 (3), he will establish a classification according to two criteria: expressiveness and materiality. This method allows him to organize a double scale ranging from the least expressive but more material art to the most expressive but least material art, resulting in the following order: 1. architecture; 2. sculpture; 3. painting; 4. music; 5. poetry.
Without entering into this endless debate on the place of architecture in the classification of the arts, the “Open House” exhibition nevertheless gives it a good part: each of the objects presented makes it possible to weave links between the different artistic fields, thus confirming a necessary interdependence making it possible to go beyond the aesthetic canons of “déjà-vu”. At first glance, once morest the background of the skyline of international Geneva, the “Futuro” pavilion (1968) springs up, a sort of UFO in yellow plastic placed on the grass as if on lunar ground that Hergé would not deny. The Finnish project Matti Suuronen, heir to 1960s research on modular organic forms, takes us into a universe close to the dreamlike images of “2001 A Space Odyssey” (1968), with its concentrically positioned berths. It is distantly reminiscent of those that Stanley Kubrick stages for the fictional occupants of Discovery One, David Bowman and Frank Poole.
At a place called the Bains de Saugy, a utilitarian sculpture composed of thousands of wooden joists assembled by architecture students from the EPFL Alice laboratory, under the direction of Dieter Dietz and Daniel Zamarbide. The design of the elegant pavilion is part of a cycle of education at the polytechnic school called “Becoming Leman”, by offering access to the lake – a theme that might not be more current in relation to current reflections on the contours of Harbor. Beyond this relevant territorial approach, the project evokes some principles of traditional Japanese construction, but also the cuneiform scriptural imagination or certain very graphic compositions of Joseph Albers from the 1920s.
Finally, we cannot conclude this short relationship without distinguishing the “Drop hammer house” from the Atelier van Lieshout. On the meadow, a few cylindrical volumes in recycled steel are welded to tubes that connect them to create a form of organic habitat that Annette Tison and Talus Taylor would not deny (4). They are surmounted by a tower. The latter is in fact a “factory” which allows by “letting go of weight” to recompose recycled materials. The authors address the question of diversion, here boilers or cisterns whose almost playful assembly creates a spatial and plastic event. There is in the collective approach of the artist a deep questioning on the transformed material, mainly metal. There emerges from this work, which is at once heterogeneous, but unified by the presence of gray steel, an almost outdated beauty over which the benevolent shadow of Marcel Duchamp hovers.
+ d’infos
1) For the author of Antiquity, “Firmitas” is equivalent to solidity, or robustness, “Utilitas”, convenience, or utility, “Venustas”, beauty, or voluptuousness.
2) The fine arts (derived from the noun Bildmeaning “image”, and from the verb the imagewhich means “to form”), or “the arts of the expression of Ideas inintuition of the senses » », including sculpture and architecture (the plastic).
3) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art (course 1818-1829, published 1835-1837).
4) Annette Tison and Talus Taylor are the two creators of children’s books “Barbapapa” in the spring of 1970 in Paris. Annette Tison is an architect by training.
See the exhibition catalogue: Simon Lamunière (ed.), Open House, designing living spaces, Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2022.
