Heinz emigholz architecture as autobiography example

‘Architecture as Autobiography’: Lived Space in Heinz Emigholz’s Loos Ornamental’ Assembling Identities Conference Paper – 23 May 2013 The title of my paper for this morning’s panel is ‘Architecture as Autobiography’: Lived Space in Heinz Emigholz’s Loos Ornamental’. This paper will consider Heinz Emigholz’s attempt to construct a biography of Austrian architect Adolf Loos through a minimally mediated encounter between architecture and cinema in his 2009 film, Loos Ornamental. Loos Ornamental Dir. Heinz Emigholz, 2009 The film is part of Emigholz’s on-going series ‘Architecture as Autobiography’, a sub-category of a project started by Emigholz in 1984 under the title ‘Photography and Beyond’ which by now extends to more than thirty features. The ‘Architecture’ series also includes films on Rudolph Schindler, Louis Sullivan and Bruce Goff among several others. I will illustrate the paper with images taken from the film and a short clip of about 2 minutes, which demonstrates Emigholz’s filmic approach at the Villa Müller in Prague. Taking Emigholz’s series title as a starting point, my paper offers a way of approaching the autobiographical nature of the filmed architecture by suggesting that there is an aesthetic relationship between the film and Loos’s design. The film opens with the site of Loos’s birth, now a hotel bearing a plaque in his honour, documents Loos’s buildings in chronological order, and closes with a sequence at his grave-site. The architecture is filmed with the minimum of mediation: Emigholz uses long duration shots and static camera positions throughout, and provides no voiceover or non-diegetic sound, only including white-on-black inter-titles to tell us the name of the building, its location, the date of its construction, and the date it was filmed. On one level, then, the structure of the film presents ‘architecture as autobiography’ by combining the durational progression of the life, from Loos’s birthplace at the film’s start to his grave at its finish, with only the images of his architecture, which thus stand in for a life-story. However, beyond this deceptively simple structure, I will argue that the film’s aesthetic maps directly onto two predominant theoretical underpinnings of Loos’s work: the departure from ‘ornament’ and subsequent attention to material and surface; and his Raumplan (or space plan) – an approach to building design that focussed on ‘lived space’ and was concerned with the inter-relationships of the spaces that make up the interior of the building, a concern that was based on mobility and the circulatory movement of bodies through space. In making the architecture the material of autobiography, the central concern for Emigholz is: How do you film the space of architecture in such a way as to adequately represent the architect? By considering Loos Ornamental through the concept of ‘haptic visuality’, as discussed by Laura Marks and Giuliana Bruno, I will explore how, through its attention to surface and depth the film reproduces architectural space and thus embodies a Loosian identity. Loos famously remarked on his own pleasure and satisfaction that the interiors of his buildings could not be effectively represented in photographs. Adolf Loos, quoted in Colomina p. 270. And yet, Emigholz sets out to photograph the interiors in his film under the guiding desire to enable ‘a specially designed room to be mentally experienced as perfectly as possible [by the viewer] using sequences of filmic images’. Heinz Emigholz & Marc Ries, ‘Loos Ornamental. Heinz Emigholz, Marc Ries – A Dialogue’. Online [accessed 4 January 2013] <http://www.adolf-loos-film.com/about_dialog-en.html> The image sequences follow a similar pattern: a combination of external views provide distanced perspectives, enabling us to conceive the building in context with its surroundings. Fragmented closer range shots of the exterior highlight the structures of the building – stairs, windows and doorways – and the fabric of the facade, while interior shots seek to articulate the materials, the surfaces, and the interplay of spaces within the buildings. Of course there is a distinction between the still photographs to which Loos refers and the cinematography of Emigholz, but it is a distinction that is in part elided by the conspicuously photographic aesthetic of Loos Ornamental. The inability to effectively represent the interiors in photographs, as Loos saw it, derived from the fact that the spaces possess tactile as well as optical qualities. Consequently, the dilemma Emigholz is faced with is: ‘How do you film the experience, the lived space of architecture?’ Andrew Benjamin asserts that the Loosian haus serves as the ‘locus in which surfaces, spaces and circulation operate’. Andrew Benjamin, ‘Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos’, in The Journal of Architecture 11:1 (2006) pp. 1-36, p. 26. Online [accessed 4 March 2012] <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360600636099> For Benjamin, Loos’s approach to creating space begins with a ‘recognition that what is wanted is not mere space but the creation of ‘effects’ [...whereby] Effects are the work of surfaces that create spaces’ (Benjamin, pp. 24-25). Loos’s move away from ornament as an unnecessary addition to art was most famously articulated in his 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’, where he spoke of the urge to ornamentation in the modern era as a symptom of either criminality, or degeneracy. His departure from ornament results in a recognition, or elevation, of materials for their own sake. For discussions of Loos and ornament see primarily Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, CA: Adriane, 1998) pp. 167-76; also Akos Moravansky, ‘The Ornament: Salvation or Crime?’, in Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 285-332; and Christopher Long, ‘The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”’, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68:2, (2009), pp. 200-223, among others. He writes: ‘“We should keep in mind that noble material and fine craftsmanship not only make up for exquisiteness, but they are even superior in terms of opulence”’. This quote is taken from, Adolf Loos, ‘Hands Off!’, cited in Moravansky, p. 286. The use of ‘exquisite’ materials conveys, or ‘effects’, grandeur in the absence of superfluous and degenerate ornamentation. Hence, there is a central focus on material and cladding evident within the interiors on display in Loos Ornamental. Throughout the various buildings Emigholz’s camera dwells repeatedly on the richly veined marble and the varied tones and grains of the wood which Loos uses both as cladding and furniture. The emphasis Emigholz places on such footage reinforces the inherent tactility of the surface material in the construction of the spaces which it encloses. Laura U. Marks provides a useful way of approaching the cinematic encounter with tactility in her theory on haptic visuality. Marks derives her understanding of haptic visuality from the 19th century Austrian art critic Alois Reigle, who distinguished between haptic and optical images in the transition from pre- and early Roman art, to late Roman art. His argument turns on the idea that at this juncture in art history a shift occurs from objects depicted on a single plane, distinguished from that plane by colour and/or relief, to a greater representation of illusionistic depth and the depiction of three dimensionality. Here, ‘haptic’ refers to the tactile bond that exists between the plane and the object, contained on a single, unified surface, while the optical image denotes the appearance of spatial depth. For Marks, as such, ‘[h]aptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture’. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 162. ‘In haptic visuality’, she writes, ‘the eyes themselves function as organs of touch’ (Marks, p. 162). The images shown here highlight the concern with surface apparent in both Loos’s design, and Emigholz’s apprehension of that design on film. These images seem to speak specifically to this type of visuality. The object of the image is not immediately identifiable, as would be the case in a purely optical image, but rather, the viewer is taken in close to the surface; the surface of the marble, wood, the tiny folds in the fabric and tassels of the lampshade, fill the surface of the screen such that there is as little as possible separation between the viewer and the object under scrutiny. This is redoubled by the duration of the images (here shown as stills) which each last for several seconds, bringing us, as it were, into a prolonged contact with the materiality of the surface. The result is that we are drawn to the texture, to the ‘feel’ of the image, through the proximity of details that are perceived within touching distance. Marks suggests that ‘[H]aptic visuality involves the body more than is the case with optical visuality. Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body: thinking of cinema as haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole’ (Marks, p. 163). Here, Marks points us towards both the physicality of the spaces that these surfaces enclose, and in doing so, gestures towards an even greater sense of embodied viewing, at which we will arrive shortly. Loos’s Raumplan, his approach to spatial design, has at its fundament, an attention to habitation, a concern with bodies, with ‘living’ the space. As such, the Raumplan plays out the conjunction Benjamin notes in Loos, of surface, space and circulation. Loos discovered the greatest expression of this plan in the Villa Müller, built in Prague between 1928 and 1930. See Benjamin, p. 26. The configuration of space in the Loosian haus centres on a continuous structure of spaces interweaving and connecting through linking apertures and across different levels. What emerge as a result are spaces which convey a combination of stasis and movement – such as seating areas, open, connected rooms, and stairwells – and which activate viewing positions within the house. We find seating alcoves, such as the one in the Villa Müller (which we’ll see on the clip in a moment) in which the view is turned back inwards on the house, rather than to the exterior, and a view, like that from the living room, that affords visual access to the adjoining raised dining room and also through to the stairwell and up to the next level. Andrew Benjamin suggests that the Villa Müller living-space thus: ‘needs to be understood [not as a ‘room’ but] as a specific spatial condition’. It is a condition that combines the enclosed space of the sedentary subject within a nexus of the structural possibilities of movement through the spaces that privileges the mobile subject. ‘There is’, writes Benjamin, ‘both movement and arrest. The two subject positions are the effect of the architecture’ (Benjamin, p. 27). I’m now going to show a short clip from the Villa Müller sequence which will hopefully give you at least a sense of the film (which runs to 72 minutes). By illustrating both the durational and sequential effects of the shooting, we see, in this clip, how the circulation effect of the Raumplan is achieved. It’s worth bearing in mind a comment from Beatriz Colomina, who provides a useful bridge between inhabiting the Loosian interior and Emigholz’s approach to filming these spaces. She notes that ‘upon entering a Loos interior one’s body is continually turned around to face the space one has just moved through, rather than the upcoming space or the space outside. With each turn, each return look, the body is arrested’. Beatriz Colomina, ‘Interior’, in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 232-81, p. 234. The Villa Müller sequence runs for about ten minutes, but due to time constraints I’m showing only two minutes. The clip begins inside the house, with the seating alcove mentioned earlier. The passage through each of the buildings of Loos Ornamental corresponds almost precisely with Colomina’s interpretation of entering a Loos interior – the inward turn of the gaze, and the static positioning which suggests the bodily ‘arrest’ are evident in Emigholz’s camera positions and sequence constructions. It is in this way that the architectural motivations of the Raumplan manifest themselves in their cinematic equivalent. The sequence on the Villa Müller is a case in point. On one hand we find Colomina’s return gaze. When Emigholz moves us from the secluded seating area through into the living room, he turns the camera back on the direction from where he has come. The latticed aperture above the alcove is evident, now, from the other side. As we saw, the sequence of shots then proceeds through the house, moving up the stairs and into the upper spaces, before returning to the living room several minutes later. At this point the film moves around the room, the shots turning back on themselves in contemplation of what has come before. This can be seen by looking at the progression through these images, which come shortly after the clip we just saw, and by noting the reappearance of the vase and plant. As Emigholz explains, ‘“the viewers’ thought processes in the cinema are trained to receive an accumulation of different viewpoints that come together as an imaginary overall picture as the film progresses’” (Ries/Emigholz dialogue). As such, Emigholz’s move to engender a ‘mentally experienced’ space utilises the effect of the Raumplan’s spatial-circulatory design by following and recording the path through the space as a montage ‘accumulation’. On the other hand, Emigholz’s approach also suggests the bodily arrest. This too stems from the accumulation, but in this case it is the stasis and duration of the shots, not the movement between shots that is significant. Each shot is a pause; a real-time representation of a specific view and space. In a way, the sense of inhabiting the house which Emigholz desires, the sense of a ‘perfect’ mental experience of the space, is disrupted by the cuts between shots. And yet, while fragmenting our sense of presence within the filmed space, the decision to shoot with a static camera creates a highly meditative viewing experience. It places the emphasis of the film on duration. Removed from the perimeter of the frame, which remains still, movement in each shot is confined to the contents of the frame, to the passage of time and the subtle effects of a breeze on the foliage outside or play of shifting light on an interior surface. The combination of long duration shots and sequences of shots on the same object in the absence of non-diegetic sound, result in a demanding cinematic experience. As spectators we are required to engage with the image, to wander across the image, to search for movement, study the surface – or juxtaposition of surfaces – under scrutiny, or establish the spatial relations between past, present and future shots. The result is an embodied spectator, one who becomes involved in, and who inhabits the re-constructions of these spaces. This notion of the embodied spectator finds articulation in Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion (London; New York: Verso, 2002). Here Bruno theorizes the relationship between architecture and cinema through a model of expanded haptic visuality that moves beyond Marks’s concept by considering the virtual embodiment of the spectator in the film. Bruno writes: There is a mobile dynamics involved in the act of viewing films, even if the spectator is seemingly static. The (im)mobile spectator moves across an imaginary path, traversing multiple sites and times. […] Film inherits the possibility of such a spectatorial voyage from the architectural field, for the person who wanders through a building site also absorbs and connects visual spaces. In this sense, the consumer of architectural (viewing) space is the prototype of the film spectator. [...]This relation between film and the architectural ensemble involves an embodiment, for it is based on the inscription of an observer in the field. Such an observer is not a static contemplator, a fixed gaze, a disembodied eye/I. She is a physical entity, a moving spectator, a body making journeys in space. (Atlas, pp. 55-6) There is an implication in Bruno’s work here which seems to relate directly to Loos Ornamental. For Bruno, the haptic nature of cinema relates to habitation. The cinematic space enables the spectator to travel and the sense of spatial apprehension implicit in this idea of travel relates by necessity to our tactile senses – hence Loos’s notion that his interiors could not be captured in photographs, but had to be experienced by bodies-in-space. The position of Emigholz, positioning and standing behind the camera, moving precisely as a ‘body-in-space’ through the lived-space of the Raumplan interior, inscribes this experience onto the filmic image that we as spectators consume. For Bruno, the moving images of the cinematic experience bring about the embodiment of the spectator, enabling the viewer to inhabit the cinematic space (Atlas, p. 250). In an earlier version of one of the chapters from Atlas of Emotion, an essay titled ‘Site-Seeing’, she writes: Film creates space for viewing, perusing, and wandering about. As in all forms of journey, space is physically consumed [...]. In film, architectural space becomes framed for viewing and offers itself for consumption as traveled space. (Site-Seeing, p. 17) Thus, through her expanded notion of haptic visuality, by reaching beyond the notion of merely touching with the eye towards a more kinaesthetic sense of mobility and embodiment, Bruno provides a way of conceiving the space of the film as an inhabitable space, resolving the problem of how to film the experience of architectural space, by bringing that space into a proximal relation to the viewing subject. Indeed, this fluid conception of haptic visuality results in a sense not only of the experience of Loos’s buildings – thereby embodying a Loosian identity – but a greater sense of personal embodiment in relation to the film’s surface, thus reinforcing our own identity as it exists in relation to the screen. Works Cited Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos’, in The Journal of Architecture 11:1 (2006) pp. 1-36, p. 26. Online [accessed 4 March 2012] <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360600636099> Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotion (London; New York: Verso, 2002) Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) Emigholz, Heinz & Ries, Marc, ‘Loos Ornamental. Heinz Emigholz, Marc Ries – A Dialogue’. Online [accessed 4 January 2013] <http://www.adolf-loos-film.com/about_dialog-en.html> Marks, Laura U., The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) Long, Christopher, ‘The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”’, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68:2, (2009), pp. 200-223 Loos, Adolf, ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, CA: Adriane, 1998) Loos Ornamental Dir. Heinz Emigholz, 2009 Moravansky, Akos, ‘The Ornament: Salvation or Crime?’, in Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 285-332 7 Alan Macpherson