When building another house inside the existing, Schneider appears to gradually forget his childhood home and the house that enclosed it. When the continuously doubled structure becomes ever more complex, clear-cut lines through space can no longer be drawn to reveal a meaningful section of the old house. Through the repeated building activities with parts of the doubled structure displaced to other sites, the interior of the house becomes so disfigured, is eventually so chopped up, that only imagination and the external façade set a limit for the spatial excesses produced by Schneider. While the work manifests an inwards movement away from this external wall, the façade itself is left untouched and continues to mark a clear distinction between the interior and exterior of the house in Rheydt. As a sign, the street front, as it remains at the time of writing the thesis, signifies a
conventional German dwelling house in a typical semi-residential area [Fig. 4.2]. In Schneider’s case, however, this signifier has no signified.
Robert Venturi in the chapter “The Inside and the Outside” from Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture (1966) says, “Since the inside is different from the outside, the wall – the point of change –
becomes an architectural event” (1977: 86). To which Geoffrey Bennington in the essay “Complexity without Contradiction in Architecture” (1987) adds, “In so far as most architecture is concerned to build walls separating inside from outside, it would appear that architecture is all about events” (15). Following Bennington, Venturi’s insistence that space does not transcend walls is a resistance to the idea that the façade of a building could express the interior that lies behind it rather than simply put up a detached face (16). Bennington draws a line to Derrida’s treatment of de Saussure’s notion of the sign, also discussed in chapter 3, with its reliance on the inside/outside dichotomy. Following this thinking on the space from where one contemplates the sign – the outside that reveals the inside, the signified – the sign/signifier is a transparent façade. In contrast, Venturi’s exterior is the space external to a non-transparent façade, and, as such, Venturi acknowledges the separation of interior and exterior as two distinct spaces. Venturi acknowledges that the sign is situated in space where Bennington with Derrida suggests that insofar as inside and outside must be defined in relation to each other, they also
are each other and a clear difference can therefore not exist. There cannot simply be a wall before all
else; the inside cannot simply be an inside, and the sign not simply the face of something existing behind it. At the same time, the space enclosing the sign cannot be exterior if nothing resides within it. In response, Schneider’s façade is detached from the house behind it, insofar as it does not reveal the nature of this interior. On the contrary, it hides it when creating the illusion that the house on Unterheydener Strasse is a typical residential building. By reflecting the surroundings, the external façade conforms to the standard appearance of a dwelling house in the region, and Schneider makes use of the possibilities that this screen façade facilitates. As such, it becomes a cover for the activities
taking place inside the house during the first decade of the work’s development. The extent to which the external wall itself is doubled remains unknown besides from accounts of layers of unaligned windows witnessed by visitors to the house.138
As an architectural device, the event of the wall establishes the provisional order of a house. The agency of a wall is one of differentiation, it cuts a house into pieces – the event of a wall is therefore a spatial cut. A double wall marks a call to a more complex house when the wall defines more than simply outside or inside one room or the other. Schneider’s walls are placed in front of the walls that they double, the rooms that these doubles eventually form are placed inside the rooms that they come to hide. In between these two rooms, another kind of space emerges like a passageway between both defining a liminal zone resembling the space opened by Schwitters in the split wall diagram. While hidden from view in the photographic documentation, it is in the video work, such as the 30-minute long Nacht-Video [Night Video] (1996), that the relationships between the rooms in the doubled house become evident [Fig. 4.21]. In the video, Schneider moves around the house in one filmic take insisting on exploring every opening and passageway that he encounters. The camera is handheld, the artist’s breathing is audible, and the house alternates between darkness and artificial light. Schneider keeps going until running out of steam rather than coming to a dead end – there is always another way out of a room than the door. Once acquainted with the artist’s filmic logic, every air duct in sight becomes an invitation to explore another space. “You could basically turn the house inside out from there. You could get out through shafts and empty spaces. It is also an escape route,” Schneider explains with reference to the air duct in u r 12, TOTAL ISOLIERTES GÄSTEZIMMER [Completely Insulated Guest Room] [Fig. 4.13] (Loock 2003: 96).
The guest room was built as an attachment to the rear side of the house in Rheydt in 1995. The construction of the small lead-insulated room is documented in a series of photographs published on Schneider’s website [Fig. 4.13.b]. The photographs of the finished interior show a whitewashed, minimally furnished cell illuminated by a strip of neon lighting from the ceiling. The air duct, covered by a removable grille, is visible on the wall opposite one corner with a freestanding radiator. The escape route that the duct provides leads into the space between two walls clad in lead to prevent any kind of transmission between inside and outside. However, as Schneider says, one can turn the whole house inside out from this point – it is, as such, an escape route in a wider sense. It is a point from where the house might escape itself, yet it is also the point from where Schneider begins to address the notion of a world outside the house. The guest room, resembling a prison cell, is attached to the house and therefore not a copy of an existing room. It is in this sense already an external space. It will, however, take another couple of years before Schneider actually turns the house inside out by cutting out rooms for display elsewhere. At that point, he will also escape the house himself.
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