Koen Deprez


Leafing through Space


Chapter 1
Message from the Universe

7 March 2006

From:
Koen Deprez
Galgstraat 127
1600 Sint-Pieters-Leeuw
Belgium

To:
Adolf Loos
Beatrixgasse 26
III Vienna
Austria

Dear Mr Loos, dear Adolf,

It is twenty-five years since I first came across your essay Ornament and Crime. Together with your other memorable statement ‘Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument’, it made an extremely deep impression on me at the time. Furthermore, I have always considered the distinction you made between housing and architecture very enlightening – just as Wittgenstein, in an equally brilliant movement, draws a line between what is sayable and what is unsayable (that is only showable). I was inclined to believe you, and clung to the notion for a long time. However, that ribbon has now snapped, and my fall has left me in a very different place. As regards the tomb and the monument, I still broadly agree with you. But times change, and statements made a hundred years ago can have a very different impact when uttered today, and their value or misuse may have to be reassessed.
Adolf, I think it is fair to say that Ornament and Crime has all the features of a murder weapon. As the functional knives of modernity, ornament and crime were used to slash away the surplus flesh of a decaying culture. Certainly, Adolf, there was something to be said for that in Habsburg or Biedermeier Vienna. Many of your fin-de-siècle Viennese friends appear to have responded to the decay in very different ways. Otto Weininger committed suicide early on. Freud was the lord of the symbolic link, and Klimt confirmed it in paint. Wittgenstein wrote most of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus during the First World War, on the front, and thought he had finally put an end to philosophers’ waffling.
Within modern architectural thinking, Ornament and Crime has grown into an unprecedentedly powerful -ism, and that is never a good thing. Wittgenstein behaved differently. He corrected himself while he was still alive, at a point where the Tractatus could have become an institution. After completing the Kundmanngasse dwelling for his sister in 1929, he returned to philosophy, partly because he had come to the conclusion that the Tractatus contained some serious errors. The dogmatic certainties of the Tractatus now had to make way for a questioning philosophy. It was no accident that he returned to Cambridge just as the Kundmanngasse dwelling was completed.

Adolf, what does your essay on ornament and crime mean in a very different age, for instance my own? And what if today’s architects use the same knife to make similar incisions in a very different world?
Today’s world is a realm in which people like living within bare walls – as though everyone has now become ascetic and has only now understood what life really is. If I were to send you a random illustration of such a space, I am sure you would be delighted with it, proud that Ornament and Crime has proved such a reliable instrument and the blade long enough to stand the test of time.
In my view, ascetic design has degenerated into fetishism and lifestyle. Following in their architects’ footsteps, modern dwellers, like so many parrots, have continued to sing the praises of minimalism, whiteness, purity. But Adolf, opposition to these ideas is starting to emerge, and oddly enough it is coming from dwellers themselves – not so much consciously as in the flesh of which they are physically made. Modern people’s bodies, in which the twentieth century made so many incisions, are now starting to rebel, and this can be seen on the surface of their skins. Body tattoos are now being used as drawing boards for coded protest. Today’s architect is a writer who draws on raw flesh, but at the same time is a needle-and-ink artist. In my view, the individual writing of tattoos can be read as a modern-day novel. With the flesh of desperation and the only architecture still remaining to them – their skins – dwellers are using monstrous creatures, demonic butterflies, statements in the clefts of their buttocks or huge signs in strategically mustered genital areas in an attempt to cast off the yoke of ascetic architecture. The architecture that until very recently claimed to protect them from all that was unreal has misled them. Human flesh has never really been able to tolerate the skin of bare cement that is used to produce the architecture of emptiness, or the muteness that such walls exude. Nor has it ever been able to withstand the excess of light that modern structures need in order to survive. In modern dwellings, every corner is vacuumed with natural light. The character of the dark corner is disguised by an iron mask, becomes an architectural taboo, is given a red card and is sent off the pitch. Every summer, large-windowed modern dwellings choke on their limitless greed for more and more light, and every winter their gaping glass mouths let in the freezing cold. Every day the surrounding landscape is devoured and spat out again, and fresh photons are sucked out of the environment like some light-flavoured set menu.

Adolf, three years ago I read a book called The God Thinkable, Thinkable the God, by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans. On the back cover of the first edition is a photograph of a naked woman with her back half turned. Squatting and tattooed all over her body, she even seems to feel at ease: coded and doubly coded signs, symbols and figures in combination with elusive statements, and all of this on a magnificent body. The woman’s architecture in the form of a tattoo. Later on in Hermans’ novel the woman in the photograph turned out to be a police officer who was flayed halfway through the story. Her tattooed skin was displayed in public and then inflated with helium to a thousand times the original volume. Hermans’ novel as a secret code, summed up on a woman’s skin. This became apparent later when I used the book as a starting point for architectural work. I flayed entire passages and pages of text. I unhesitatingly accepted someone else’s book as a world of freedom, with rules and restrictions that emerged solely from this novel. The functionality of the plan lay hidden in the structure and narrative of the novel. There were no external conventions – the only thing that controlled me was the book. The novel no longer made compacts with the outside world – it was sufficient unto itself.
In this way I gradually inflated the book The God Thinkable, Thinkable the God into the Thinkable plan. Helium soon became oxygen, and function was purified by fiction. The inflated literary skin, tattooed with signs and messages, with references to hidden worlds, was now leaning gently against the interior walls of architecture. And believe me, Adolf, this was a natural touch, not a tour de force.

Yours sincerely,


Chapter 2
Message from the House

What follows is a description of parts of the house that I designed in the Belgian town of Izegem. Some of the spaces are presented here as though parts of the novel are being read aloud. In my opinion, Hermans’ novel The God Thinkable, Thinkable the God can also be understood in fragments. The fragments of the house described in this essay reflect an approach to design that was also used in the other parts of the house.

Rooms change as you walk round the house, but the strategy for dealing with this does not. The design of the house is legitimised by the novel. This is where my freedom as a designer lies. It is an attempt to escape from the compulsive manner in which architects too often work nowadays. Novels do not improve the world – they simply put another one in its place. What contemporary novels in general, and Hermans’ book in particular, have also taught me is that they have torn off the mask of modernity – that they reveal the face of our age far more clearly than modernity does. If the plan for Izegem has become a novelistic space after all, this is due to the qualities within architecture that were destroyed during the previous century by an excess of light. Novelistic spaces are thinkable – and what is thinkable is also possible.
The God Thinkable, Thinkable the God is not a story, but a velodrome full of words – words which shake off the meanings that pursue them, with analogies that manage to break away from the pack of logic.
Hermans must have had this circular oval in mind – no beginning or end, just an endless account of facts, over and over again. Could this be what he really meant? In the centre of the oval a noisy brass band, the mask of silence, a pistol and a final shot that never came!
Always returning and setting off again from the same point was one of the basic principles that lent structure to the Thinkable plan – just as the book shows. A circular course which at the very end brings you back to the beginning. The key and the lock merge. It is not the architecture that describes a circle, but the dwellers. Without dwellers there can be no oval. Without readers there can be no book. In the centre of the dwelling is a corridor, the Corridor of Analogies, the last station, a stopping place rather than a point of transit, and dedicated to the silence beyond language.
The Corridor of Analogies is about twenty-five metres long, and slices into the heart of the plan. On the left-hand side of the corridor is an anamorphosis, a floor-to-ceiling picture that can be read if you walk past it very closely. The picture is of ‘Amerigo Vespucci discovering America’. I believe it would also have fascinated Hermans. It shows Vespucci going ashore and seeing strange – or at least unfamiliar – things happening. To solve this problem, he attempts to understand whatever he cannot recognise by using the language of habit – but he fails. Hermans says about the book Thinkable: ‘This book has mainly been written to show that there is a great deal in our everyday lives that we do not understand, even though we pretend to.’
There are tiny doors in the anamorphosis wall, almost invisible and placed at equal intervals. Once they are open, vertically positioned door handles become visible. Handles that allow other doors to be opened and sometimes provide access to adjoining spaces. Handles that half conceal small etchings and, because of the polished brass, again form anamorphoses. In this demonic interplay, fifteen pictures from the Mutus Liber become visible. The Mutus Liber is one of the great classics of alchemy – a book without words, the Mute Book that contains nothing but pictures. This is a direct reference to Hermans’ novel, in which the La Muette (‘The Mute Woman’) metro station in Paris is the last stop. The terminus of language? ‘What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.’ Wittgenstein’s statement follows the Mutus Liber in an analogous fashion, only on the other side of the corridor. Opposite the anamorphosis wall is an equally large glass wall containing a series of cupboards. The seven main sentences from the Tractatus are engraved in the plinth. In architecture the plinth is the missing element – the transition from horizontal to vertical. The Tractatus is the book that forms the link between what can be clearly said and what is unsayable, only showable – the mystical. The Tractatus as plinth. The same plinth is the final element of the glass wall, which now turns out to be a vast cupboard. Through the reflecting veil on the other side we can see cupboards on the inside, but very strange ones. The black bar! These are sliced outlines of a bar that is reconstructed from details in the book and then expertly cut up again into cross sections of cupboards – a cupboard made for a cupboard, like tiny doors made for other doors. The Tractatus versus the Mutus Liber, captured in a single analogous thought.
Within their respective vocabularies, both Altus and Wittgenstein speak of the restrictions of language, and both end with the same ladder metaphor. The plan for the Thinkable project reveals from above that the Corridor of Analogies is actually a horizontal staircase with brittle glass steps. From the same position we can now also see that the corridor is coloured lapis lazuli or black and runs on into the adjacent spaces: the small bedroom and the Cabinet de Réflexion. At the point of contact between the Corridor, the Cabinet and the small bedroom is a spinning clergyman with a mitre and staff. Tattoos on canvas, movement provides direction.
All the dimensions in the Thinkable plan can be divided by three. In the book the number three has a special function: ‘the completeness of state’. Again viewed from above, we can now very clearly see two other colours and a material that further develops the plan of the rooms. The red in the space stands for the dogs’ home in the book. The white undeniably refers to the white bar, and the brass functions as ‘fool’s gold’. Within that configuration, the plan seems to evoke Jan Van Eyck’s painting Madonna with Canon Van der Paele. In fact, so does the book, bridging gaps between things that had long ceased to serve any purpose in memory. Text as the mask for image. The colours for the interior of the Thinkable project were chosen with reference to Van Eyck’s painting. Black-and-blue, red and white are three stages of alchemy, and I believe Van Eyck’s painted panel is convincing evidence of this. The painting can be red as a book, from left to right. Blue, red, white and brass as the only material in the role of the polished soldier from Thinkable’s army. In the margin, reduced to the picture frame, are signs and question marks.
In the Thinkable plan, anyone entering a space from another space always opens glass doors.
When you touch the brass handles of the glass doors, something happens in the palm of your hand. In the Thinkable plan, opening doors is equivalent to ‘deed and thought’. A small stamp in the door handle is pressed into your flesh without your being aware of it. The flesh recovers and the tattoo vanishes. Apart from Thinkable himself, his stamp-amulet is undoubtedly the main character in the book. Dwellers are dragged from one room to the next. In the plan, the opening and closing of doors functions like the turning of pages. The room is leafed through. In the Thinkable plan, leaving a room is exactly like moving on to the next page.
Something similar happens in the Cabinet de Réflexion, where concepts break free from their meanings. The small room is a good example of the way in which function is purified by fiction. The word V.I.T.R.I.O.L. appears in the margin at the top and is cut out of the ceiling in full. The toilet seat can be opened in a single movement, from right to left like a book, with the anus as an all-seeing eye, staring in the darkness. The mirror, designed like the toilet seat, functions here as itself, as a reflection. Double, from the Greek diploê, in the sense of a double thing. It is no accident that Thinkable’s main adversary is the diplomat of a double science.
Move from the black-and-blue zone to the red one. Another stamp, but the flesh recovers once more. On the right is a curtain, with a lace motif at the bottom – the publisher Van Oorschot’s emblem. It is well known that relations between the writer and the publisher were strained. The function of the sign is combined with the red velvet curtain, making the red appear somewhat stiff. The curtain seems to flow away at the bottom – rather as Van Eyck’s madonna averts her gaze in the painting.
The Hôtel-Dieu, the large White Room, Leukosis, Prudence, the Gold Room, Thinkable’s desk, which only exists on Saturdays, a winter garden, Hrdlgckjmnstr the whale, the Sword, trumped Spades or the monument to Thinkable, which is incorporated into the paving at Izegem – these are just some of the spaces that have not been mentioned in this essay. They, too, owe their existence to this novel, a main character called Thinkable rather than Principal, and a book in which everything becomes thinkable.

Translation: Kevin Cook, Bookmakers