This architecture2 does not allow for representation2 to subsist as the evident link between the architect and a buidt object2. There is no single intention nor is there a “final” “reality”1. It contains both non-intentional intentionality and intentional non-intentionality.
Probably close to the antecedent (?) idea and the ulterior (?) object, this material is also necessarily different from both. Equivalent part of a sequence of architectural events, its reality becomes intermediary2. This architecture1 is not subjugated to either single building or distinct idea. It cannot be “understood”, it can but be read: it is the space of intention2.
Bruce Dunning & Pieter Versteegh, Architects
P.I.A, May 1990
Geneva, Switzerland
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2The project includes a site-drawing, a housing-plan and a construction-detail. A concrete realization of a highly precise measured survey-drawing of a previously built cardboard object3, apparently lacking intention3, acts as its only “rule”.
2Representation stimulates the existence of a unique link between an original idea and a final reality, which then, is supposed to create a “natural” link between the observer and intended meaning.
2This supposed coincidence is in fact impossible. The difference between the intention and the object always exists, as the possibility of misinterpretation3 inhabits its structure. The violent exclusion of other meanings than the supposedly (and necessarily arbitrary) intended ones limits the value of the architectural object (“intention” always lies).
2 In traditional architecture, the representational aspect of the architect’s media (drawings, models,…) canonize the built object as the only and ultimate architectural reality. The possibility for these media to become both an architectural reality and a part of the act of building is therefore destroyed.
2 That is, a contextual situation of an infinite amount possible intended and non-intended meanings.
3 “The ideal Cube”, 1988
3 Such a survey-drawing has no pretension to express an architectural intention (although it does not exclude its possibility): It is seen as a pre-creative move in the sequence of an architectural making.
In this project, however, it (or, rather, its moulding) is also the closest built reality suggested by the drawings.
3 Although misinterpretation only exists thanks to the repression of non-intention.
