DRAWING MATTER

OPEN CALL: STORYTELLERS, OBSERVED

Between The Lines

A city calls on an idea, while others pray for God. They look at architecture obscurely; both architect and the inhabitants, while the world goes about its business. Berlin has always been symbolic; in fact it challenges the notion of its perpetuity, but it is scale that has always looked to the assertion of power and of looking the other way. This is a drawing of events, collapsed in time, culminating in a construction drawn out from those locations. The lines compete for authority; the Landwehr Canal ; the Wall; the Star; each offering its own sense of orientation. The Landwehr Canal takes its direction of flow from The Spree. The Wall divides East and West; a cultural division in the setting of the sun. The Star brings together the language of the arcane, but now responds to the politics of Israel. There is of course, at a smaller scale, the modernist Erich Mendelsohn’s House of the German Metalworkers' Association, 1929 and the baroque building of The Collegienhaus, 1735 from Philipp Gerlach, located between these lines, now framing The Jewish Museum. By all accounts it is a minimal and rational drawing, that observes a master-plan surrounding the societies that recognise The Temple of Solomon. It has summoned a competitive spirit towards the imagination, in grasping the identity of the architect, both as an origin and in its contemporary survival; thus accounting for the juxtaposition of our professional society in both architectural style and lifestyle. It is very easy to get lost in its symbolism, but the logic the drawing proposes supports a probability that this sort of design has been conceived before; that originality is not the property of the architect; that they are only a messenger in a much grander scheme, that we all have a responsibility to take hold of. In the blurring of history, epochs are imagined and traditions are lost; both in representation and ceremony; a welcoming of Generation X; those that are sometimes being characterized as slackers, cynical, and disaffected and with that becoming, the myths of yesteryear are treated with suspicion; the price of fame is tantamount to lunacy and architecture that rocks the boat is discredited for jealousy. The Jewish Museum is one of those, and if it had remained as Libeskind’s only building, like Piranesi’s Santa Maria del Priorato (1764-6), we could have come closer to happily achieving our collective global responsibilities. But the purpose of this story is to illuminate architecture; to show that ink has the power to write over time and instruct a set of personal beliefs, that can carry an imagination towards the construction of that conviction. This drawing is directed at architects that have to carry the weight of history; that have to re-equate the paradox of recognising death; of utilising the will to live and making an architecture that can force a change beyond the facts that are presented to us. This construct is not solely about Jewish history, it is about a will to power that should challenge the notion of what it is to be an architect; of the sacrifices one necessarily has to make to communicate a concept and make it conceivable; to enable the notion of genius to be readily acceptable. Berlin has a chequered history, moving between disaster and delight, that architecture has narrated; there are ideas that have never left the drawing board, but they have instilled an imagination amongst its population of achieving the impossible; of relishing the charm in the founding myths of Judaism. This has instilled an unspoken requirement in appraising the need to look to architecture’s origin; of allowing abstraction to speak cognitively, that was the ground work in this drawing of Between The Lines and has propelled the growth of academic and serendipitous schemes across our globe. Beyond the seriousness, if there is any humour to be found it is that the language of architecture writes a story so unbelievable that it seems its desired purpose is to form a new religion; amongst architects and the their followers, in the firm belief that all their hard work will open the door to immortality and breach the threshold of life after death. This is of course implausible, but the impetus that is engaged with the work of this drawing lets the arcane draw mysteries that architecture today would never condone. We are curbed from reaching the acme of architecture because myth would become reality and we would have no lessons to learn from. This drawing is a lesson upon restraint; of making the microcosmic acknowledge the macrocosm; of developing a myth that buries the arcane and preserves the security in society that had or could be challenged by the revolutionary. Of course this will anger some; of course this will lead to an obstinacy; of course the architecture we know will not change; of course we will still be plighted by architecture’s insufficiency until we wake up to the real message that is being purveyed. This drawing was illuminated to present the world with an option; to consider the effects in the birth of a nation; in the traces of the unborn that could relinquish the guilt that we had been beguiled to carry; that generations had carried; to halt the effects of a learned tradition that has enforced governance that we have taken for granted; just as much in architectural representation as in the quorum of a political democracy. This is not about truth, but in the idea of making it and of making it work; this is about establishing a reason to live while repudiating meaning as the cause célèbre of an insecure fellow. We should not follow suit or allow to be played with. While history is dictated by ink and the architect makes it their own, we should cherish the fact that there is a great deal of imagination untouched by the trials of life and while Berlin wallows in its unprecedented political maelstrom, there are other cities that are seeking their key to the future from the new blood that has stemmed from this architectural drawing’s creation.