Tesis:
El retorno de la imagen figurativa a la materia arquitectónica a finales del siglo XX. Herzog & de Meuron 1.979 - 1.999 = The return of figurative image to Architectural matter at the end of 2Oth century: Herzog & de Meuron 1979-99
- Autor: CHACÓN PÉREZ, Carlos
- Título: El retorno de la imagen figurativa a la materia arquitectónica a finales del siglo XX. Herzog & de Meuron 1.979 - 1.999 = The return of figurative image to Architectural matter at the end of 2Oth century: Herzog & de Meuron 1979-99
- Fecha: 2022
- Materia:
- Escuela: E.T.S. DE ARQUITECTURA
- Departamentos: PROYECTOS ARQUITECTONICOS
- Acceso electrónico: https://oa.upm.es/72356/
- Director/a 1º: SORIANO PELÁEZ, Federico
- Resumen: Novelty. At the moment of the arrival of digitalization at the beginning of 1980’s, the use of complex textures and images on matter was limited to craftsmanship. Since “Ornament and crime”, this handmade complexity had been labeled as a waste of resources and energy by the avant-garde and therefore abandoned for a long period by Architecture, and was related to classical approaches on natural materials like wood and stone. The arrival of computational and mathematical procedures to a strong research on automatic processes and the exploration of simulated or artificially created matter. Nevertheless its categorization as decoration by functionalist architects managed to keep it as a non-spread phenomena. The arrival of scanning devices, and printing technologies controlled by a computer, facilitated the use of images from texts, photographs or self-generated textures, leaking since then constantly and powerfully into Architecture, however this process has not yet explored fully the wide range of potential images available, and in Architecture is basically enclosed into abstract texturing.
The fact that Herzog & de Meuron seek along their whole career collaborations with artists as a way to widen their discipline range and, at the same time, to introduce fresh distortions by selected experts, creates from 1989 to 1999 the perfect environment for experimentation also with photographical images, starting with a shy abstract texturing and reaching its highest point with the use of figurative content.
Although the fusion between visual information and Architecture had been in close relationship along history through mythology and religion, when Herzog & de Meuron started their career in 1978, a modern understanding of the capitalist twentieth machine, focused on labeling it as a decoration overlayed on a surface, or as a perverse effect of commercial capitalism related activities.
In 1978 the context boosted by Minimalism, Pop art, Conceptual art, video art and architectural post modernism built the background for a new research to grow, that Herzog & de Meuron and particularly to which Jacques Herzog due to his beginnings as artist, was particularly sensitive.
The sequence of projects researched on this thesis frames a series of printing on different materials that constitutes the birth of a new material, overcoming both the ornamental perspective and the postmodern understanding and becoming a new lexical, with new grammar for Architectural Design. It doesn’t belong to Postmodern Architecture approaches nor to Post-modern or minimalist perspectives. The fact that it stays as an in-between field allows us from a Rorty point of view to call it a new language.
Consequence. The field of Architecture generally collaborates with other disciplines from a control and management position, hence ornament is overlaid on buildings as excessive decoration which is demeaning to the infrastructure or as unimportant ornament. This happens because both languages are always under a hierarchy. If image is above tectonics it is considered postmodern, if it’s the opposite then images are considered as decoration. This thesis tries to prove that when the collaboration is essential for both languages and balanced, a new language comes to life.
Evidence. The sequence of projects and the discovery and validation of an own language.