The works open the possibility of a contemporary living space when each spatial proposition unfolds in immediate response to the problem of dwelling experienced by the artist in his time. If the
motivation for the individual artist from the outset is as a simple need to live and work somewhere, then this space will be carved out in defiance of a problematic setting in all three cases. As such, the works are testaments to three very specific historical moments, and the notion of the contemporary dwelling attains two immediate, if overlapping, meanings – the dwelling of today and the dwelling of any day. If the significance of the contemporary in relation to dwelling therefore is that there cannot be a set concept when every new day asks for something else, the living space is bound to be reinvented accordingly.
Through the time and site-specific engagement with the built fabric of houses, the chosen works approximate the notion of this contemporary dwelling. They do so in the way that the artists engage with the fabric of the environment in which they struggle to find themselves at home. Their
commitment to the here and now precludes the effects of standardisation and formulas for living, favoured by modern architects operating during the century of the works’ conception. No concept with application across time can be drawn, and no history of this dwelling in the moment is possible. In the following chapters, the thesis traces and analyses the strategies that made the chosen works possible as contemporary dwellings in this sense. It identifies the dynamics by means of which the buildings took form as both living spaces and critiques of it, positive/negative constructions, literal and discursive works – thereby proposing an alternative to predominant orders. By way of distinct approaches to the practice of building the contemporary dwelling, the works are seen to have built their critiques, the critique to have become a building and this building a place to live.
The spaces opened by the chosen works are from the perspective of writing the thesis entered into a triangular constellation rather than a linear chronology. Through this grouping that places one work in equal relation to the other two, the works manifest individual and isolated events while outlining a context for each other of relevance in the conclusive fifth chapter of the thesis. Eventually, something will be located within the triangle, and something will be located without, overall, there will be neither beginning nor end to the works and their possible relationship. The spatial rather than temporal history that is invoked by this strategy is an account in three dimensions that leaves chronological time out as a reference or historical signifier. The thesis argues that the spatial relations of the works come forward when their historical succession is ignored in favour of a constellation of the spaces anchored in their specific historical moment.23 When attempting to distil the spatial histories of the three case studies perceived as objects of a particular context, the thesis aims to exemplify contemporary living
23
Such an approach to the analysis and interpretation of inaccessible past events reflects the thinking of Walter Benjamin in the essay “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” [Theses on the Philosophy of History] (1940). Here, Benjamin invokes a concept of history as an “object” situated in the here-and-now of its construction, “a past … blasted out of the continuum of history,” as Benjamin writes (1970: 263). This blasting of historical progress is seen as an opportunity to critically undermine the historian’s preconceptions by approaching particular historical moments as transmitters of something of a larger scale outside the limitations of the immediate historical narrative.
spaces unfolding in the moment. When each work is permitted its own expansion by means of which the artist’s oeuvre, the epoch of his making and the historical context, overall, is seen to crystallise in the individual gesture, a particular historical event in the form of a spatial possibility is channelled. To emphasise the absence of a chronological and connective interpretation, the works are placed in a non-chronological order in the following chapters. As such, the thesis begins with Matta-Clark’s
Splitting because both thesis and work begin by approaching the dwelling house as the main locus and
subject matter. Through Matta-Clark’s cutting of the house, the thesis opens its enquiry into the question of dwelling by tracing the concerns and ideas that drove the artist to split a house in two. Secondly, Schwitters’ Merzbau is addressed for the purpose of addressing the artist’s studio located inside this house with implications for the domestic setting coexisting with the creation of art. And thirdly, Schneider’s HAUS u r gives access to rooms as interior spaces from where the artist seemingly cannot get out. This movement through the house, from initial access via inhabitation to leaving it behind, outlines the trajectory of the thesis and its enquiry illustrated by the split wall diagram introduced in chapter 3 [3.3, p.99].
The locations of the works in terms of their initial construction – Splitting in New Jersey, USA, Merzbau in Hannover, Germany, and HAUS u r in Rheydt, likewise Germany – situates the enquiry across two continents, if within a Western discourse. In terms of the houses within which the works have taken form, these are all physically inaccessible at the time of writing the thesis. The buildings that housed
Merzbau and Splitting no longer exist, and HAUS u r is the artist’s private residence and therefore not
open to the public. As a result, the material consulted for the present study is largely representational, and the building processes are mediated by this material. The artists’ documentation and reproduction exist in different formats such as reconfigurative and interpretative film, photo collages and installation in Matta-Clark’s case, documentary photographs in Schwitters’, and exploratory video-walkthroughs and photographic still lifes in Schneider’s. This visual and textual material, constituting the works as works of art today, has been displayed frequently in museums and art galleries while other types of evidence, produced by the artists as part of the works’ initiation or as a subsequent documentation or commentary, are held in archives. For the purpose of the present study, I have visited the Kurt Schwitters Archive in Sprengel Museum Hannover (August 2010), the Gordon Matta-Clark Collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (August 2011), and for additional material related to Matta-Clark and Gregor Schneider, MoMA, New York (September 2011). On the basis of the
evidential material found in these places, the nature of the works and building activities that brought them about, not to say the spaces created, are framed by the thesis outside the time and place of their making.
Conclusion to “The Problem of Dwelling”
The first chapter set out the problem of dwelling, identified by the thesis, on the basis of a selection of literature concerned with the experience of homelessness as central to the modern age. The chapter thereby articulated a series of themes in preparation of the following analyses of the three case studies. These themes all revolved around a conflict between prevailing concepts of dwelling and a contextual setting experienced as essentially uninhabitable. If an environment marked by instability and change was at the heart of this incompatibility, factors internal to the dwelling space were, however, also seen to play an important part. They did so when the exclusion of the other left outside became the exclusion of the other always already residing within, which is to say that there cannot be an interior without an exterior, and no house without a contextual setting that also in some ways transcends its walls. The chapter thereby suggested that the problem of dwelling at odds with its time and place essentially is at odds with itself. Furthermore, it argued that to overcome this identity crisis, the dwelling must be challenged on its own grounds in the sense of challenged by its own building as both process, spatial enclosure and occupation – a challenge inevitably involving the architect.
While the upheavals of the twentieth century have been severe, it was especially the two world wars that were seen to retain the problem of dwelling in its locked position. Taking off from the time of World War I, the chapter reached the defining moment of World War II before coming towards the present age. This movement of the modern into the contemporary of the twenty-first century was outlined through the juxtaposed writing of Adorno and Heidegger with a consideration of the two opposed positions and their implications for the postwar discourse on dwelling. The problem of the modern/contemporary living space split into extreme polarities with Heidegger’s desire to recollect the authentic dwelling versus Adorno’s altogether negative denouncement of the house. The thesis
stepped in between these two positions to open a space from where to address the problem by suggesting that the negative dialectics seen to drive the modern, and hence the problem of dwelling, could be challenged from this gap. A position at the margins, however, rather than the centre, which is to say tentatively by the limits, the outer wall, the façade of a house.
The thesis thereby intimates that in between inside and outside, one and the other, a differential field of overlapping systems and identities is awaiting articulation. It argues that it is in this intermediate zone that the contemporary living space emerges as a relation between the dweller and his/her material context – a circumstance challenging the architect as the provider of spatial form. To get access to this space of resistance to the domination of forces with which the individual struggles to reconcile, an opportunity to take charge remains. The thesis argues that the ability to reclaim this living space lies in the engagement with material fabric by means of negative gestures at the same time rebuilding the spaces that are being dismantled. In the following chapters, the thesis pursues such
processes exemplified by the chosen works of art as possibilities for a contemporary living space applicable at all times because never quite the same.