Comportamiento del indicador DCI en el PVL y grupo de control 98

The first example is the computational reconstruction of an important Jugendstil house built by PETER BEHRENS (1868–1940) in Darmstadt, which is not preserved in its

original state. The house was designed as a piece of the exhibition Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst that was prepared by the artist colony of Darmstadt in 1901. It represents a unique Gesamtkunstwerk: Apart from the architecture of the façade and the exterior disposition, all details of the interior decorations are based on designs of BEHRENS himself. This does not only include the doors, windows, carpets and

wallpapers. The form of furniture, lamps, glasses, chinas, and cutlery, even music instruments, inkstands, and jewelery fitting to the house’s aesthetic conception are based on inventions of BEHRENS. In this unique fashioning of human living space

characteristic for Art Nouveau, a specific conception of life was expressed. It is the approach of using artistic abilities to transform the environment in a beautiful and reasonable manner in order to harmonize again humaneness and the technical development [BUCHHOLZ 2000; BEHRENS 1901, 3–6]. During the 19th century, the two

aspects had developed more and more into quite different directions in Europe, a disintegration of the manners of life that pushed forcefully into public conscience at the end of that century and gave rise to a large number of reform-oriented approaches, which to our days have a strong influence.92

The functional and aesthetic investigation of an integral ensemble like the House Behrens is an important building block toward a proper understanding of the characteristic conception of life of that time and its lingering influence on us.

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While LEM keeps an ironic distance to such technologies and is interested mainly in epistemological and ethical questions, other scientists are not so prudent: recall, for example, M. MINSKY’s public fan-

tasy about all humans being “equipped” with an implanted computer interface to their brains. The crea- tivity of narrative artists had been excited by such scenarios, as well; beside FASSBINDER’s TV produc-

tion Welt am Draht [1973], CRONENBERG’s film eXistenCe [1999] is one of the more interesting results. 92

Just as a few examples: fitness studios and ecological agriculture, functional architecture and feminism, health food and artificial tanning; they all can easily be traced back to the broad movement of “Lebens- reform” about a century ago [BUCHHOLZ ET AL. 2001].

However, the house was destroyed severely during Word War II. The façade was re- constructed afterwards with only minor alterations, but the interior decoration is utterly lost.93

The original partitioning of rooms has not been restored; all decorative elements are destroyed. A reconstruction by means of computational visualistics – a virtual archi- tecture – must, then, appear as a very plausible approach [FORTE & SILIOTTI1997].

Such a virtual reconstruction has to be based on data about the original contexts as precise as possible. In the case of BEHRENS’ house in Darmstadt, there is a sufficient

amount of details available at least for the two central rooms of the ground level: the fact that pieces of Art Nouveau have been broadly documented in illustrated papers of that time does not only demonstrate how important the underlying conception of life was rated then; it obviously is quite helpful for the virtual reconstruction, as well. The journal Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration appearing in Darmstadt published an extensive article about BEHRENS’ house with floor plans, sketches, and many large black-and-

white photographs [BEHRENS & BREYSIG 1901/02]. A similar paper appeared in the

journal Dekorative Kunst [SCHEFFLER 1902]. A special catalogue was produced for the

exhibition covering exclusively BEHRENS’ house: it contains an introduction by

BEHRENS and a list of all the enterprises that constructed the objects designed [BEHRENS

1901]. Finally, numerous modern color photographs are available of those parts of the furniture that have survived World War II and are exhibited in several museums (e.g., [INSTITUT MATHILDENHÖHE DARMSTADT w/o y., 6–27].

The two rooms in our focus of attention have been discussed extensively in contem- porary architecture critiques: they are the music room and the dining room just beside

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Furniture and other movable parts had been already removed from the house since BEHRENS moved to

Düsseldorf in 1903. Fortunately, some of the furniture was therefore spared from the destruction. Figure 111: Contemporary Photography of the Music Room. The door to the dining-room is just outside the right frame border

each other (Fig’s 111 & 112). Both rooms serve social purposes and are connected by a large double door with partitioned wings. The music room is higher in order to evoke a particular atmospheric effect described by BEHRENS [1901, 8 f.]:

In order to heighten the music room in accordance with its purpose with respect to the rooms around it – the true festive room of the house – it was necessary to lead down two steps from the hall and simultaneously to lift the ceiling approximately for the same dis- tance compared to the adjacent dining room. The two steps have the practical purpose named; but also the other, spiritualized one: to lend a rhythmical movement to the traffic between dining room and music room. Stepping down gives us the feeling of being pre- pared for something; stepping up evokes the one of lifting to something. And in those feel- ings, very essential moods of humanity can be recognized.

Numerous details and materials have to be considered: The floor of the music room consists of a parquet with seven different woods forming a linear geometric pattern. The dining-room has a floor of mosaic in a curved pattern. The steps leading from music room to dining-room are of a pink marble, the music room’s walls are covered with grey marble and blue reflecting glas. Above the door to the dining room and at both sides, additional mosaics are placed. The walls of the dining-room are interrupted by large windows above silver-coated heating grills. Between some of the windows, crystal mirrors are installed. Other parts of the walls are panelled in white-lacquered wood below a frieze of damast. The ceilings of the two rooms are richly decorated: in the music room, it consists of gold-painted wood with another linear ornament; the dining- room’s ceiling has curved stucco ornaments with some of the intermediate spaces coated with silver. The doors are also particularly elaborated. The door from the music

Figure 112: Contemporary Photography of the Dining-Room. The door to the music room is par- tially visible at the left side

room to the hall is adorned with a linear ornament in golden aluminium bronze similar to the music room ceiling. The door between music room and dining-room is white on the dining-room side with a simple curved ornament; toward the music room it shows “an uninterrupted surface of noble silver-maple without a single ornamental line” [BEHRENS & BREYSIG 1901/02, 148].

The interior decorations of the House Behrens vary a small number of different or- naments. The decorative design of the dining room is developed from the basic figure of two intersected curves. They appear in the simple form in the gratings of the cupboard glasses and in the mirror cuttings. A more complex derivation is shown in the heating grills, where different degrees of sinuosity are combined. The curved line induces verve and movement into the dining room. In contrast, all forms in the music room are devel- oped from a linear base, a rhomb, which develops into the complicated form of a crys- tal. Decoration and furniture of the music room induce the impression of static calm- ness.

Taking into account the conceptual background of Jugendstil design mentioned above and the particular emphasis BEHRENS put on designing a complex but uniquely coherent

whole, any alteration of a detail in the virtual reconstruction can destroy the intended use. Unfortunately, many of the colors and texture are uncertain. Black and white pho- tographs only hint at the relative luminescence. Verbal descriptions of the colors are of- ten rather exuberant but obviously of limited help for the computational visualist.

The success of a project like the reconstruction of the House Behrens by means of computational visualistics depends, thus, on an intense cooperation between computa- tional visualist and art scientist. Decisions have to be made concerning the colors or tex- tures to be used. Has a given texture to be modified? In which way? What are the crite- ria? Is it technically possible? Answers depend essentially on the precise purpose of the immersive images to be produced, and in particular on the addressee. Detecting the au- thenticity of colors and texture falls, of course, essentially in the domain of the art scien-

Figure 113: Screenshot from the Virtual House Behrens: View from the Dining-Room into the Mu- sic Room (with door to the the hall)

tist; but “trial shots” generated by the computational visualist are certainly quite helpful even if they are still far from an acceptable end result. In a way, the visual intermediate results (e.g., (Fig’s 113 & 114) serve as a virtual experiment in which the effects of de- cisions about colors and textures can be concretely studied. Thus, the sign character ex- plicitly controls the deception.

The border of present immersive technology can be clearly demonstrated when we consider the broad use of reflective surfaces in the two rooms under investigation: that a material is highly reflective is, of course, not a major problem for computational visual- istics: but what happens if the viewer looks at one of the blue glasses in the music room from an angle of approximately 90°? In the original (not virtual) room, she could then see her own mirror image – an effect BEHRENS certainly has taken into account when

planning the house. It is, of course, impossible to model for every user of an interactive system that provides virtual strolls through the reconstructed House Behrens a fitting avatar that could be seen in the virtual mirrors. The geometrical and optical specifica- tions of the body of that user in its present bearing would have to be included in the model. On the other hand: being invisible in the virtual context or having no body is certainly not a satisfying solution, too. Finally, a “digital dummy” could appear in the virtual mirror representing the user, though it is probable that a user may mistake it not for the own reflection but for the avatar of another user. A solution is not yet palpable.

In the perspective of pictorial pragmatics, the problem offers an interesting aspect apart from aesthetical considerations: How does the missing (or wrong) reflection dis- turb the intention of the reconstruction of a lost Gesamtkunstwerk: i.e., to maintain the deceptive mode of reception? In general, the virtual reconstruction of the House Behrens has to investigate the problem of how much intentional deviation from the original is possible without upsetting the integral atmosphere of the environment. On the other side: how much deviation is necessary in order to mark clearly those parts that are not (or not certainly) integrated in their original appearance?

No doubt: virtual architecture can provide experiences over and above those of con- temporary photographs: for example, views from arbitrary perspectives, and – up to a degree – the atmospheric synthesis of the colors and materials used. The effects of dif- ferent lighting provide another prominent example (compare the two parts of Fig. 115). Mediating further atmospheric aspects in an adequate manner is more complicated: the experience of stepping up or down between music room and dining-room, for example, can hardly be gained in front of a computer screen with the mouse as means of naviga- tion. The same holds true for the authentical impression of the size of the rooms and the objects within: in order to “really” walk though the computationally reconstructed house, we have to employ a highly immersive system, like a CAVE [CRUZ-NEIRA ET AL.

1992] – a cubic room with stereo projections on (almost) all walls on which pictures in the correct perspective relative to the position of the user in the room are projected. The position and view direction of the user are registered; they influence in real-time the projections. Shutter glasses let the beholders see objects in stereovision. Similarly, cor- responding sounds – e.g., of steps, closing doors, or drawn curtains – adapted to the ac- tual position of the immersant with a surround sound system enhance the deceptive feel- ing of being present in that virtual reality.

The computational effort for the different projections of the House Behrens simulta- neously necessary in sufficient detail is still rather too high. Apart from that, using a CAVE for presentation certainly gives a better basis for studying atmospheric aspects of such an artistic ensemble. At least, the proportions of the rooms or their acoustics can be perceived in an adequate manner, quite close to the original. But even for that form of presentation of a virtual architecture, we can easily find problematic aspects of atmos- pheric effects. Although the visual impression paired with corresponding stepping sounds suggest that we are stepping up from the music room to the dining room, we do not use the muscles of our legs in the same way as in real life.

With the questions of aesthetical atmosphere, we meet, it seems, a fundamental diffi- culty of virtual architecture and its use of computer-generated images. The problem is connected with BEHRENS’ aim of artistically permeating all aspects of life in the house.

In the House Behrens, everything is designed towards one unique homogeneous effect. That impression of aesthetical homogeneity has been emphasized by the contemporary critiques (cf., e.g., [MEIER-GRAEFE 1901, 482–484] or [SCHÄFER 1901, 39]). In order to

adequately reproduce that impression, it is however necessary to rather use replicas in- stead of images since the specific distance that always separates the beholders from the image referents due to the sign character of the picture easily may “poison” the atmos- phere and disturb the integral impression intended.

However, it is not the task of virtual architecture to provide room that can be (virtu- ally) inhabited: We are interested in gaining a sensible impression of the house that is sufficient to understand how the abstractly described desire of BEHRENS (and other art-

ists of Art Nouveau) – to extensively embellish everyday life – is put into concrete ef- fect. It is quite unclear, how close we have to come to the original to gain a “sufficient” impression of the characteristic atmosphere.