| Title |
A Study on the Complex Perception of Architecture by Herzog and de Meuron |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5659/JAIK.2022.38.1.109 |
| Keywords |
Minimal Art; Pop Art; Materiality of Literal Object; Image of Screen; Complex Perception |
| Abstract |
Herzog and de Meuron discussed the ways that fine art influenced their architecture; they both acknowledged generic boundaries while
emphasizing their interest in anti-formalism and superficial images. They also compared their work to the Minimal Art and Pop Art movements
that prevailed in the 1960s. In Minimal Art, artists worked with materiality and phenomenological perception. Additionally, Joseph Beuys’s
influence on Herzog and de Meuron is apparent in the way they treated materials as a process of accommodating natural changes over time. One
can also rightly compare the facades of Herzog and de Meuron’s buildings to Pop Art screens. In Pop Art, the screen acts as a floating sign by
repeating an image that has no referential depth. According to Hal Foster, one observes the Pop collapse of the phenomenological into the
imaginary in Herzog and de Meuron’s architecture. Notably, the characteristics of individual art movements appear in a complex way in their
architecture. This study explores three ways in which one can observe Minimal and Pop dialectics. Regarding their architectural approach, it
ensures that a material’s surface reflects an image by disturbing one’s perception of its physical properties of hiding or distorting the materials’
weight or structural properties, rendering a screen-like image. By juxtaposing material substances and the pop image, their architecture encourages
an ambivalent perception between materiality and immateriality. Lastly, the minimal forms they employ create its own kind of flat wide screen,
upon which they place repeated patterns. Such characteristics are the result of Herzog and de Meuron’s strategy to reinterpret conventional
materiality and juxtapose objects and images. These results were based on the specificity of the architectural conditions. As one moves away from
an object, one’s perception of the building shifts from interpreting the object as an image to a physical object. In describing this phenomenon,
Foster used a negative nuanced phrase: “the pop collapse of the phenomenological.” However, when recast into architectural conditions, one can
interpret the same phenomenon as “a pop transformation of the phenomenological thing” or as “a phenomenological transformation of the pop.” |