05
Since the Renaissance in Italy, the notion of void has been manifested in architecture. Architectural elements such as niches, columns, vaulted archways can be seen from the Porta di Santo Spirito to Porta Pia, the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, and the Santa Maria della Pace. Huge empty voids are cut away from the stone structure to form vaulted archways. Columns are constructed which seem to be breaking away from the mass and protruding towards the openness. Holes are relieved of material forming windows. During the day, the niches form light and deep shadows, emphasizing the cylindrical emptiness. Columns cast shadows onto stone, and the archway, a long and deep shadow into itself. This unique composition of elements is an amazing combination of qualities – the light against the dark absences. Protruding and recessed forms form positive and negative, convex and concave spaces. It in itself is also void and solid. The architecture forms a visual experience intending to emphasize to the observer a dramatic architecture with its many contrasting qualities. (Rasmussen, 1962)
In modern times, voids are also often central to the architecture. Rather than just a physical presence of absence, it is often utilized on its abstract qualities. Absences are programmed and made crucial to the architecture. Planetariums aim to create the illusion of the void of space. Darkness fills up the space only to be broken occasionally by rays of light through the walls. (Ahmed and Jameson, 2011) It is toneless, and at its core, the representation of the void of space.
Also is the architecture of galleries and museums. While art is the creation from void, in architecture, we design empty buildings to house those works. Blank white walls and vast empty spaces are designed to be neutral to the works displayed. In fact, they resonate with the void within the art. Visiting a museum is in fact going from void to void. (Smithson and Flam, 1996)
The qualities of architecture are largely dependent on the design of solids. Could it be possible to achieve different kinds of architecture through the absence? In appreciating voids, you need to appreciate the solids.
St. Peter’s Square
Located directly in front of the Basilica is a large public plaza, St. Peter’s Square. With fore mentioned in Chapter 3, the Square and the Cathedral is essentially a void within the city. (Fig. 05) However, the area was not as what we see today. It is worth investigating the influence the emptiness had on the architecture. 30 years after the construction of the Basilica, Gian Lorenzo Bernini began construction of St. Peter’s Square. The requirement of area is designed “so that the greatest number of people could see the Pope give his blessing, either from the middle of the façade of the church or from a window in the Vatican Palace” (Norwich, 1975, p.175). The function directly calls for the design of a vast open (empty) space. Bernini subsequently gave order to the space. Two rows of colonnade, supported by rows of four colossal columns deep are proposed. At the centre is an Egyptian obelisk and at its two sides are fountains.
Figure 11: St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City
It may seem at first rhetorical to design emptiness since it in itself is an empty space. Despite that, what Bernini is attempting is the definition of the space through solids. By doing so, he evokes a visual spectacle through his implementation of perspective. The design achieves through two means. The curved colonnades serve as the “container”, giving the space some sort of definition. By narrowing it towards the end of the church, it acts as guides for the visitor towards the Cathedral. Since the purpose of the plaza is for the accommodation of huge amount of people, it justifies its need for fewer obstructions of solids. With a few solids, it creates an illusion of the vast open space. It is as such that architecture is formed.
St. Peter’s Basilica
Designed primarily by Michelangelo, the cathedral too incorporates architectural elements of the Italian Renaissance: niches, archways, arches and columns. The façade of the church is further designed with architectural details. Statues lined the top of the basilica. On the inside, the niches are filled with statues. The columns and walls are decorated with carvings. Behind the façade are huge porticos or narthex. Portals with long naves and high barrel-vaults lead into the chancel of the church. Marble, stone, gold and artistic treasures decorate the interior of the church. Inside the chancel is a huge void with an altar in the middle. At times, repuscular rays frequently flood through the windows in the dome into the chancel below. Everything seems to be unnecessarily up scaled in its size. In its own defence, this weighty architecture is aimed to reflect the power and richness of Catholicism and of Christ. Undoubtedly it is to inspire awe in all who visits. In current matters, architecture now represents itself not through the void space but its solid entity. Solids are designed. On the other hand, the void acts as a mean to an end. The value of void lies in its medium for the realization of a visual architecture. Figure 12: Main facade of Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
In the Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright designs it by arranging the solids around a central void. Conceived with the purpose of exhibiting works of art, it was initially deemed unsuitable. The spiral ramps are not suitable for works on linear canvases. But Wright has proved himself against the contrary. Works of art has now been designed specifically for the Guggenheim. In 2005, Daniel Buren designed an installation specifically for the rotunda of the museum during his solo exhibition “In the Eye of the Storm”. In the middle of the void space, he placed an installation comprised of huge panes of wedged mirrors. These mirrors reflect onto it the facing void and the spiral ramps. Buren attempts for the interaction with the void of the architecture by emphasizing it. It is also not the last time artists have attempted to do so.
The critics that once disregarded the museum failed to realise the potential of the absence. The Guggenheim is designed with a unified spatial experience which celebrates the openness of space. In such a case, the museum is designed with void as its programme. The absence becomes the catalyst where interventions with the works of art are achieved.
‘Less solid is more void’
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Figure 14: Exterior of the Barcelona Pavilion Figure 15: Interior of the Barcelona Pavilion
Barcelona Pavilion
Like many modernist architecture, the pavilion of 1929 is conceived with an open plan. This allows for the construction of a continuous space. Long horizontal roof slabs are supported by slender cruciform shafts. Occasionally, the roof slab projects out onto a pool of water and into the open sky again. Almost as if you are standing outside while still under the roof of the pavilion. The glass panes partially frame the space along the outside of the pavilion and thin onyx walls on the inside. Bear in mind that the pavilion is designed to be bare. In it there are no exhibits save a sculptures and few furniture but it is meant to serve no function. However, no function does not equate as to no reason why Mies chose to do so.
One first-hand experience of the pavilion helps distinguish the difference between physical presence and its mental simulation. As Nicholas Maria Rubio I Tuduri puts it:
It encloses only space. It has no practical purpose, no material function. They say, “It doesn’t serve anything.”
(Rubió i Tudurí, 1929, p.410)
This purpose is much an abstract one as to its practical purpose. The absences within the architecture are not of visual perception but of mental stimulation to the beholder. Mies made famous the phrase by the English poet, Robert Browning: “Less is more.” (Browning, 1855) But he himself never clarified the meaning of it in relation to his architecture. It is often credited in reference to his lack or ornamentation and his “skin and bone” architecture. Both in which are presented to use through the pavilion due to its negation of ornamentation and in its minimalistic use of material. Mies’ early education was in a Catholic school. While in Aachen, his encounter with philosophy brought about his understanding pf the metaphysics. He begins to look at things beneath what they are. Perhaps “less is more” (Browning, 1855) could be interpreted as “less solid, more void”.
The pavilion encloses almost nothing within it but space. There are no doors and each room is imperfectly enclosed on three sides by three walls, more often walls made of glass panes. In some of these glass walls, they are tinted a sombre, neutral colour. The reflection of the space in which you see from and the space you see towards are blended together on its surface. When wandering the space, you are led into an open room which are courtyards. In it, space is limited only by three walls and by a horizontal calm pool of water. (Rubió i Tudurí, 1929) The division of space has normally been done so by solid, opaque walls, unforgivingly obstructing any relationship with the opposite side. Whilst in the pavilion, the glass pane walls act as boundaries which define the space within. That enclosed space now is independent of the void outside. Whilst in the Barcelona Pavilion, the use of glass pane walls not only defines the space but as well as reveal the openness outside. Subsequently, it allows the outside space to flow through the pavilion. From entering the pavilion, inside, and leaving it, the space is experienced as a uniformed, single entity, indifferent to the space outside. Mies has achieved in blurring the distinction between the inside and outside space.
The inheritance of manifesting void in architecture can be seen today. Architecture of various qualities has been designed since antiquity. The void in St. Peter’s Cathedral is manifested through the drama of light and shadows cast by the solids. Meanwhile, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Guggenheim is not designed with such intent. The absences are represented in its unification of space. The utilization of the nature of void results in the architecture of the physical, and the abstract.
Figure 16: Early models of the Très Grande Bibliothèque Figure 17 & 18: Excavated model of the Très Grande Bibliothèque
43
Très Grande Bibliothèque
06
In the summer of 1989, east of Paris near the Peripherique facing the Siene, is the site of the now Bibliotheque nationale de France. Then French president, Francois Mitterrand organized an international competition to design a colossal library of 250,000m2. The brief calls for a library building which combines five national collections. It is to house all productions of words, images and sounds in France since 1945. Do note that the brief did not call for a single library. The issue of distinction and fragmentation was raised at the very beginning of the venture. It will be a super-library. Housing five national collections, it will be a composition of five specific libraries, each with their specific programme. Of the five libraries is a cinematheque, a library for recent acquisitions such as books, magazines and videos, a reference library, a catalogue library, and a library for scientific research. These five specific programmes are conceived of equal importance; the Bibliotheque is as much a cinema as a library.
We cannot imagine the world we know of today without knowledge. We crowd ourselves with vast amounts of information every day, every minute and every second; we learn. With the beginning of the 20th century, is the beginning of the electronics revolution.
At the moment when the electronics revolution seems about to melt all that is solid – to eliminate all necessity for concentration and physical embodiment – it seems absurd to imagine the ultimate library.
(Koolhaas and Mau, 1995, p.606)
With the invention of radios, television, and the Internet, the way in which we interact with information changes. No longer is information only mediated through books. The library is imagined as a dream, a utopia. Films, books, music, computers are integrated in a single information system, in no favour of one over the other. They are all placed on the same pedestal. This does not mean the end of books, but an age where all forms of knowledge are seen as equals. It is perhaps a sense of euphoria in France that the idealization of the scheme is commendable.
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, led by Rem Koolhaas entered the competition. Koolhaas questioned the possibilities of the project. A project where winning is not much of concern, but a scenario for the proposal of a new kind of architecture. To him, architecture is seen as a visual commodity of forms. For it is restricted by its implication to the eye and also to the technological constrains. Thus, the ambition of the project is to relieve architecture of its obligations, where architecture’s purest form could be manifested. It is in this thought that results in the realization of symbolic spaces. (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995)
The Very Big Library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory – books, laser disks, microfiche, computers, databases. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absences of building, voids carved out of the information solid. Floating in memory, they are multiple embryos, each with its own technological placenta.
The TGB is a cube, 100m on its height, “a solid block of information”. The majority of the library would be filled with the physicality of information. The focus here is the creation of the absences where reading, dining and public activities will take place. In the majority of architecture, the invariable component rests on the solid. The walls and columns are fixed, it cannot be moved. What are variable here are the public spaces because spaces have to adapt to the ever changing needs of its users. Since they are voids carved out of the solid, the creation of these spaces would be free of architectural implications of its external envelope. Each space could be designed to suit its needs. As long as the external boundaries are defined, each individual library could be arranged without restriction, even disregarding gravity itself. (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995, p.620)
If the space requires natural lighting, it could be located close to the external façade. Holes could be carved into it in relation to the amount of natural lighting needed. If the space requires roof- light, it could be located at the top of the block. The catalogue room appears on the exterior as a cavity in the façade. Essentially a catalogue itself, providing panoramic views outwards towards the city. The cinematheque is proposed on the ground floor as it was speculated to be the most popular space. Thus, making it more accessible to the public. At the same time, the reference library is designed as a continuous spiral. The library will span five floors of partly accessible storage, each with different themes and subjects. In the building, two void spaces intersect one another which will form the recent acquisition library. The reading rooms are laid horizontal while the television and audio spaces slopes down across towards the river. In the scientific research library, you find a loop, in which the wall becomes the floor, becomes the ceiling and becomes the wall again, forming a loop-the-loop.2 (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995) Since each of the libraries are autonomous institutions of their own, how then are they accessible? Nine elevator shafts form part of the grid structure for the building. As long as each shaft pierces the void spaces, the libraries are accessible. As much as it is influenced by the solids, these public spaces in turn now influence the solids.
2 I have to admit that I have doubts on the conceivability of this space, but the idea here is
the flexibility of spatial creation.
Here is one of the early models of the TGB still in development. It shows the design process where spaces are formed simply by cutting out the materials. In the real sense, they just have to be not constructed.
Interesting it would be to note if one would actually come to the same conclusion of design if it were to be designed in the conventional way. The idea proved to be a complicated one even for Koolhaas which led him to question it in his diary:
Only anxiety, amid early symptoms of exhilaration: it’s an idea, we know, but it is absolutely unclear at this point whether it’s a good or a bad one. Model, intended to clarify, prolongs uncertainty…
We suspend judgement, it needs time. (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995, p.636)
The design for the TGB has reached its final stages and an intermediate critique is held to a group of intellectuals. In this session, a reverse model of the TGB is presented. The model does not “solidify” the solids but the void spaces. The solids are left unconstructed and the voids made solid, skewered by the shafts, floating in absence. What were the comments? – Perplexed silence.
Were the jury awestruck by the proposition? Or were they left speechless in disgust as to a madman’s idea? Little is known about the commentary of the session, but it is clear enough to conceive that it is a radical idea. Firstly, the proposal seems structurally impossible. The building at 25 storeys would mean that the elevator shafts at the bottom would have to be massive to structurally support the spaces above. Instead of an open space, it restricts the flow of space on the ground. Second, visuals; imagine the nine “towers” peaking above the Parisian skyline supporting oddly shaped structures. Third, function; to where will the vast number of collections is stored?
Figure 19 & 20: Void model of the Très Grande Bibliothèque
Of course the proposal is not that of the void. In the majority of architecture have spaces represented by four facades. They merely represent four out of an infinite quantity of possible cuts. Most of them immensely more important for the building and its contribution to the collective architecture. (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995) The public are blinded by the pretence of the architecture where voids are hidden behind façades. Besides that, it would mean stripping the freedom of the “settlement” of space and fall into the notion of “function follows form”. Once again, architecture would be poised by the problem of aesthetics, of construction and the mere repetition of structural blocks.
The building is a composition of spaces: 75% storage, 25% public spaces. The dark zones however are not solid spaces but storage