Introducing Metaxography in architecture
In architecture, a designer's dilemma is not the design of a single object. It is instead the fact that buildings have different parts and features, the relationships between which are difficult to control. These parameters include a building's volumes, rooms, walls, ceiling, windows, stairs, colours etc. It would be easier to design a door that stands for itself, but all parts of architecture have to be understood in relation to each other. The same challenge presents itself in urban design: There are many different elements, which do not float separately in a meaningless vacuum. The complexity of urban design is increased by the fact that there are several buildings plus everything in between them: vegetation, parking lots, streets, squares, playgrounds and so on. It is again easy to design these spaces separately, but the conundrum of architectural relationships becomes unavoidable when one sees the whole.
A designer has the responsibility to decide on the interrelationships - how elements relate to each other, how much flexibility they have, and what kind of whole this creates. These relationships can be controlled in a way that consciously produces certain experiences. At the same time, defined relational principles can make variations and changeability possible. They might change and expand work controllably in the future so that the range of alterations in a design are taken into account and managed. Architects have always been good at coming up with design strategies that avoid this question of managing the whole and the relationships between the parts. At the same time, something rigid is produced that simplifies and reduces our world of experience ...often too much. If it were about cooking, avoiding thinking about relationships could be compared to meals that lack thoughtful combinations of different tastes, colours and mouthfeel - for example variations between salty and sweet or soft and crunchy. If it was about dramaturgy, actors would speak in a monologue by themselves without noticing each other. I list different types of architecturally blunt ways to avoid complexity below:
Lump
Let's try to merge everything together without differences, as if carved from the same substance. An example could be the work of Zaha Hadid Architects. As a meal, this would be equivalent to mashed potatoes without anything else.
Zoo
This could also be called The Composition. This is the opposite of the lump: everything is different from each other. Example: Bauhaus-type architecture, which combines a cylinder, a shoebox volume and a canopy with rounded corners. In architectural compositions, singular elemental volumes create sort-of inhabitable sculptures. As a meal, this would be a boiled potato with french fries and chips. Making a composition is too simple.
Serial Reproduction
In another evasion technique, a "primitive" is first designed, a basic piece that is endlessly duplicated in the same way. Example: Ludwig Hilbersheimer's manner of multiplying apartment buildings in a grid. You can find various breed of this idea in contemporary architecture, such as the three-dimensional honeycombs of the BIG office. As a meal, this would correspond to a menu like this: Potato as the appetiser + potato as the main dish + potato as the dessert.
The study of relationships between different objects could be called metaxography (metaxis = in-between, graphy = description). The research on and development of metaxography in architecture originates from a review of some of the canonical metabolist and post-modernist writings from 1960’s to 90’s. The study of relationships has been an inherent, but often a hidden topic in some of the key writings of such architects as Christopher Alexander, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe with Fred Koetter as well as Robert Venturi.
What is the benefit of metaxography?
The metaxographic approach stems from an anthropological reading of architecture during the recent ontographic turnaround in anthropology. The metaxographic approach moves forward from anthropological ontography, which is the descriptive and speculative study of people and their world of objects as they are, into the study of relationships between objects. In this way, the metaxographic perspective contributes to the topical development of non-anthropocentric culture. The inherent detachment of metaxographic architecture from human-based, rationalist, functional and performative design replaces these anthropocentric attributes with adaptability, flexibility, changeability and resilience and in this way contributes to sustainability.
The metaxographic viewpoint is pragmatist and can include cross-disciplinary learnings from relational methods from other fields to architecture. Metaxographic approaches may also lay a new theoretical basis for relationship-based computational architecture.
However, most of all, metaxography produces a physically new type of architectural projects. This article concludes in examples of metaxographic architecture made at helsinkizürich architecture office.
Metaxography, even though it is about relationships, is something completely else than the genre of relational architecture, which studies collaborative design methods. Within the term metaxography, the root word Metaxis refers to in-betweenness (relationships) and graphe to descriptive analysis. Objects can have relationships with other objects and interact, influence, and shape them. Relationships between objects can be analysed and developed with analogies, types, and rules. Relationships can be considered as objects as well. Object-like relationships can have their own “motivations” and “thinking”. Sometimes they escape the expressed intentions of their authors. Sometimes authors’ intentions should receive more attention.
Relationships occur for example:
A hierarchy or its absence in building is one type of a relationship principle. The sort-of relational stubbornness of architecture also includes:
A typical relationship in architecture is between a building and its context. Within a building or a site, there are relationships between components, within their assemblage and compositions. Other predominately spatial and plastic relationships in architecture include:
Metaxographic studies can essentially question people’s perceptions of object relationships. This can be done by suggesting a non-anthropocentric and non-metaphysical look at relationships and revealing unnecessary preoccupations. In this sense, the metaxographic approach can be compared to other non-anthropocentric approaches such as nature and object-based perspectives (see three types of non-anthropocentric architecture in the graph below, Image 1). The metaxographic method offers a possibility to free architecture from its stereotypical programmes and its techno-economic-rationalistic context. This does not mean that metaxographic architecture would produce just a sculpture instead of usable spaces. To give an example, the Tombe Brion in Italy (Image 2), designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1978, works perfectly as a funeral site even if, according to its architect,? it was not essentially designed for humans and this is also why the place is so compelling. The relationship perspective urges us to be open to multiple logics in design by putting focus on the speculative plurality of possible principles in architecture.
What makes human-based architecture difficult in terms of adaptability and change is its common attachment to certain use and certain needs. Historic examples of changes of use in buildings show how some buildings are more adaptable to non-anticipated changes of use than others. It is not only open space which allows changes and flexible use, but a variety of spaces as well. The inherent detachment of metaxographic architecture from rationalist, functional and performative design approaches supports adaptability, flexibility, changeability and the resilience of architecture. It can therefore make architecture more sustainable. A too specific linkage between physical space, its use and its characteristics is too restrictive for unknown future changes.
The objective in this approach is to try to create a new type of architecture based on an understanding of relationships in architecture. We can combine our knowledge and design hypotheses related to anthropology, ontology, metaxography and related architectural literature in order to create a new type of experimental architecture.
Specifically, metaxography can be used to answer the following two main questions.
a) What if architecture was not only about the design of objects, but also the orchestration of relationships between them? If our interest doesn’t lay in the obvious functional, economic, or ideological relationships, but in object-object relationships, where can this lead to? This kind of architecture would be the opposite to Lumps, Zoos, and Serial Reproductions. Metaxographic architecture is, on the contrary, based on manipulating relationships between building’s elemental components and it is therefore not a composition but a collage, where repeated elements have variations.
Normative design in the built environment has traditionally focussed on building as a product to be used and consumed and not in interaction, which is essential in ontographic anthropology.
b) A metaxographic building and its metaxographic components do not establish an essential relationship to specific human use. Can that kind of architecture exist which is not too much based on prescribed human needs, and if yes, how can the post-human and more-than-human attitude help in developing new kind of architecture??
This does not mean that there not be connection between metaxographic architecture and human experiences. Different types of relationships can be named – such as harmony, attunement, conformity, compliance, togetherness, assimilation, consolidation, ignoring, hierarchy, contrast, aversion, restrain or compatibility, etc. These can be abstracted diagrammatically and be interpreted in different fields –?for example in architecture.
How metaxography diverges from ontography
To assess space for architectural development as proper, and to differentiate it from mere building, it is essential to ask what the difference between construction engineering and architecture is. Engineers in building construction can design perfectly functional and durable buildings without question. The obvious answer is that architecture is that dimension in building, which exceeds utilitarian and rational ends. To study this surplus part of building, aesthetics and art history could be relevant, naturally, but if we are interested in other things than artists and meanings, what could be a usable method? Ontography, perhaps?
Ontography researches descriptions of environments and objects. This was originally a method in natural philosophy to describe and characterise things by drawing (Weir & Dibbs 2019). The term also refers to the more abstract study of descriptions of existence (Finkelstein 1988, 76). Such descriptions can include architectural drawings and models, which, as devices for spatial formation, depict physical and functional limits for people’s existence. The metaxographic porsuit contributes to the further development of ontographic architecture. It is in that way part of basic research in architecture, and offers a critical perspective on the application of ontography in the field.
During recent decades, some debates in anthropology have evolved into the so-called ontological turn –?non-reductive, non-conceptualising anthropology beyond the human (see e.g. Henare?et al. 2006; on ontological theory in the studies of indigenous knowledge see Blaser 2014; on ontology and life: Haraway 1990; on knowledge: Stengers 2011). What differentiates ontography from conventional metaphysical or structuralist interpretations in anthropology is that ontography involves a disclosure of objects without necessarily providing any universalist clarification or description about them. It considers analysis to be a thought-experimentation (Holbraad 2009). Therefore, ontological anthropology has focused on recognising differences and variations, points of creativity, experimentation, and questioning hegemonic practices. Contrary to the traditionally anthropological, distant, comparative, and interpretative look and analysis, ontography seeks to understand objects through their locality and contextuality. Ontographic objects are thus critical tools for posing elemental questions of life and culture. A normative art historical position rarely asks the question “why”, or “why not”, which are questions applicable to ontography.
Returning to architecture, one can see that even if its technical necessities (such as electrical networks) or design methods (such as algorithmic design) could be approached with ontographic methods (e.g. studying how a particular design questions conventional electrical engineering or presuppositions behind computational design), the crucial difference between architecture and technology is that architecture is essentially not about problem solving. It is rather about creating provocative questions on living or even creating constructive challenges. The ontographic, post-humanistic shift can give an useful viewpoint on contemporary architecture and a potential for its new directions.
Architecture, a field that embodies and symbolises basic assumptions about our identity, fantasies, and ideologies, is a potential sphere in which profound questions about new spatial constellations, problematising the foundations of inessential thinking and inaccurate perceptions, as well as proposing alternatives to hegemonic ideologies can be placed. Therefore, a design decision in architecture cannot, strictly speaking, be based on technical problems. Therefore, architecture is an appropriate subject to ontography. Building includes problem-based decisions, but they belong to the field of engineering, not yet to the side of excess, which is the dimension of architecture.
The work of ontographers is based on methods which aim to take the words and views of cultures or authors seriously as they are, rooted in their internal logic and not in external prejudice. The research tradition of material culture is in this way also similar to ontography. The difference is though that ontography – in a sort-of revolutionary way –?sees persons, objects, things and environments to be subjects of their relations, while the rather humanistic oriented material culture tradition tries to figure out how relations between human and material worlds create a particular kind of person (See Santo 2009).?Objects and buildings are persons as well! It is difficult to see how creativity, experimentation and questioning could be realised without a human agent and culture. However, Weir & Dibbs (2019) propose quite convincingly that ontographic art objects are non-anthropocentric because they can withdraw from human-oriented explanation and even appearance. In this sense such architecture as Carlo Scarpa’s Tombe Brion (Image 2), a funeral site made without human-oriented functions like pre-designed walkable routes, fits this definition.
Accordingly, in the metaxographic development at hand, one does not concentrate on human-object relationships, but on object-object relationships. It is this non-anthropocentric position, which questions cultural ideologies embedded in architecture, even if architecture cannot escape becoming domesticated and part of culture.
Recent writings by the computer game theorist Ian Bogost amongst others have extended ontography from anthropological geography to a design approach called “object-oriented ontologies”, known also as “OOO” a.k.a. “Triple-O” (Bogost 2012). Fitting to Bogost’s occupation with ontology, he has seen architecture rather as a game than a narrative (Bogost 2016). In this context of games, objects have their own motivations, and architecture cannot be reduced to its smaller elements, but rather to the interaction of the rules of the game and its elements.
Because of the importance of rules, difference and variation for understanding relationships between objects, one needs to proceed from sheer descriptive ontography. We need to look even further – towards the metaxographic assumption that object-worlds such as architecture, are about multiple object-object relationships, instead of Triple-O’s typical relationship between the singular ontographic object (usually "a Lump") and its context.
Traditionally, architecture has been considered to be the design of object-like physical elements (which people can enter) or the defined relationships between people and objects. Architecture has rather rarely been viewed as the art of designing relationships between objects and systems where objects interact with each other. These interactions can anyway be analysed, classified and developed. They have rules and variation. Without this shift from objects to relationships, the full capacity of ontography in architecture remains unused (see Barad, 2003: 817-18).
The metaxographic approach can be thus seen as criticism of the way the Triple-O approach has benefitted ontology. Triple-O’s typical dystopian sci-fi formalism does not fully engage in its promise of “speculative” design and the creation of “possible worlds”. It is very difficult to understand why ontological architecture should produce the kind of post-apocalyptic graphic design it has done within the OOO genre. Its symmetry, homogeneity and dihcotomic contrast to environment emphasises the building as an object and places it in the centre as the symbol of otherness. Consequently all possibilities for sophisticated relationships within the building are lost and the chance to really establish the “object as a subject of its relationships” goes astray as well. If we move on from stylistic limitations and mere graphics, metaxography is a better method for improving diverse object-object relationships in architecture.
One challenging part of design in ontography are design decisions. It is impossible to transfer the decision-authority from humans to objects. Nevertheless we can shortcut this dilemma by starting the design with the definition of relationships. For example, instead of applying typical Triple-O mannerism of symmetrical baroque, which would only be a subjective recipe for a design object, we can jump from the level of man-defined objects into objects defined by larger systems.
An example of metaxographic analysis is to separate different “object systems” as shown in Image 3.
This adaptive reuse project –?Shiroiya hotel in Tokyo by Sou Fujimoto (2020) – is based on six types of objects and their interrelationships: a criss-crossing path, cavities, two buildings, fireplaces and trees. Each of the instances of these primitive elements is different. Their shapes are varied, but not that much that they would loose their distinctive identity. They remain six types. Part of design are the rules of how much the elementary objects can change. An important part of design here is the rules concerning the interrelationships between the object types: There is general even distribution of them, except when the buildings stand side by side and the path connects the bottom and the top. Cavities are many and fireplaces only few. These rules of relationships define this work. Following the rules makes changing the totality without loosing its nature possible.
Cross-disciplinary learnings
Lists of different types of relationships and the mapping of architectural component systems are easy to understand as tools for formal analysis. However, following the spirit of ontography, it is more important how a tool supports new creativity and unconventional solutions. For example, one could transfer a size-specific design to a different scale or mix expected building types or contextual types creatively, as well as blend spatial building programmes.
In other fields than architecture, there are totally different conceptions of relationships – alternative aims, thinking patterns, concepts, and methods behind. Perhaps some of these could be implemented in architecture as cross-disciplinary interpretation? Following a pragmatist approach, let’s not doom the end results of experiments before we have seen them. When looking for new possible relationship models for architectural implementation, we can study how relationships occur and have been processed in other fields. The relationship perspective urges us to be open to multiple logics in design by putting focus on the plurality of possible principles in architecture, but also on the diversity of different relationships. It might also be possible to represent relationships as diagrams, which can be implemented as strategies of organisation in various disciplinary fields.
?Architecture is sometimes not as connected to contemporary culture as some other more dynamically charged and evolving fields such as cinema, literature, or urban activism, for example. Could architecture gain some of the vitality of more popular fields, if it followed the same relationship patterns used in these fields? What about dramaturgy, for example?
The astonishingly analytical dramaturgical tool Dramatica is used by script writers in cinematography. It is a method of working through roles, patterns and dynamics of relationships that could be implemented in architectural design, as well as many other relationship-oriented methods in multiple forms of art and science, which have not been tested in architecture yet. Dramatica presents a structured description of dynamic relationships between “character dimensions”. This is a presentation of motivations that superimposes the characteristics of archetypal characters onto the elements of a character in a production. In an analogous manner, architecture could be based on characters – types of architectural elements that stem from archetypal sources an interact with each other following defined rules of relationship.
Robert Hinde (1996) made the next graph describing human relationships.
The graph organises personal and social relationships and raises the question if there can be architecture, which engages not only in such relationships as symmetry, parallels, compensation, reciprocity, or complementarity, but also in different levels of closeness, equality and detachment?
Chemical relationships
One handy analytical tool for architectural systems could be mimicking how in chemistry mixtures can be typified by differences between element and compound substances and heterogeneous and homogeneous mixtures (Image 6).
We can easily find architectural counterparts to these different categories of chemical substances. For example, both structuralist architecture (such as Herman Hertzberger’s) and Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) super-shape modular stacks fall to the category of pure substances in the way that their architecture cannot be reduced to its pieces. BIG seems to make specifically compound substances (with recognisable large-scale shapes). The American Neil Denari is a master in creating homogeneous substances, or as he calls it, diptychal space.
There are numerous possible trajectories for cross-disciplinary metaxographic architecture, or varying approaches to manipulating relationships between architectural elements. In the following, we would however like to focus especially on the possibilities of heterogeneous mixtures in architecture.
To give an example of heterogeneous mixtures in textiles and clothing, Marimekko textile prints (image 9) very often represent this type of homogeneous mixtures of repeating patters, while as casual clothing tends to manifest heterogeneous mixtures. A heterogeneous mixture could also be called a collage.
It seems that different types of collages in art?(and their organisations of types of visual relationships) has not been a big research topic. Collage is one type of relationship: the parallel, sudden co-existence of different elementary components. A collage questions the dichotomy of creation and imitation and emphasises the creative characteristic of a relationship.
Compositions of heterogenous matter are called collages. The word collage refers to glueing in Greek language: colla, sticking paper on a surface. Since the early twentieth century, collage have been a technique used by visual artists, where the elements of collage have often been pieces of surface taken from existing material: coloured paper, wallpaper, newspaper, magazine images, etc. Different types of collages are, for example, mixed-media paintings or glue work as well as decoupage (lacquered paperwork). Famous artists who have used collage as a technique are for example Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson and Henri Matisse. In music, sampling a loop and combining that to new content is a sort of collage. The core characteristic of a collage is establishing relationships among presented fragments and bringing each fragment new value through the newly created whole.
In architecture, a good example of a collage is adaptive reuse – the combination of an existing building or its part with new components. A good example of a collage is also most interior designs with fixed and movable elements, backgrounds, and foregrounds. The following picture (Image 11) show this amalgamation of old and new in volume and space, juxtaposing different volumetric elements in systematic ways.
Collage in architecture is in a way pragmatic formalism, where the multiplied and transforming relational constituents of a collage can fit the functional requirements of an architectural project. The collage-principle in architecture can be implemented further to include other relational characteristics, such as connections between spaces, inside and outside, relationship to light etc.
Metaxographic method in practical architecture
The metaxographic perspective can be used as a loop to review related architectural history such as Gottfried Semper’s 19th century fascination with the relationship between surface and structure, the element systems of metabolism and the post-modernist collages. In hindsight, relational, metaxographic questions and attitude have had an important role in many canonical writings of architectural theory from especially 1960’s to 1990’s, even if it has never been formulated as a central concept, and these architect-writers have implemented these ideas in their architecture as well.
Semper was one of the first architectural theorists and practitioners to write about and practice relational architecture. In his work from the 19th century, he privileged the surface or the external appearance of architecture over structure and worked on variations of their relationships. This attitude grew out of his enthusiasm with the principle of polychromy in the architecture of the ancient Greek temples. Semper also drew an analogy between buildings and clothing where they are central to the formation and maintenance of social conditions and relationships. Semper represents an alternative take on architecture compared to the Modernist Zoo tradition of reducing a building to its structure, spaces, and plain walls.
Semper believed that the use of colour on an architectural exterior served to clarify form. He regarded abstraction and whiteness as unnatural while polychromy represented the more easily approachable “feelings of the masses” to him. To support his theory, he traced the etymology of ‘wall’ to its origins in the term pares, signifying a soft, woven partition made of coloured textiles, in opposition to the later term mures, a tough, defensive, external structure. Semper reasoned that it was the surface of architecture which made an impression on the viewer and created feelings, and not necessarily its structure. This understanding led Semper to develop a strong argument for the relational character of architectural elements, their dynamic relationships.
Image 13 shows a model of Fumihiko Maki’s Hillside Terrace, a group of buildings designed and realised over several decades. Each of the buildings share characteristics with others, but are simultaneously different, as if Maki wanted to test how different the parts can be from each other without compromising the integrity of the whole. What is crucial for the integrity of the groupform, is the classification of building parts – the definition of the visual systems for inherent variation. The classification consists of stable and varying parts. The stable ones are repeated aluminium windows. All buildings have similar windows. The varying components are 1) pedestrian podiums, 2) height limit, 3) colour palette, 4) double-height indoor spaces, 5) single columns and 6) elevated passageways.
Maki’s Investigations in Collective Form (1964) scrutinised the relationships between parts and a whole and linking acts in architecture. He analysed how architectural forms, such as building forms, become linked together through such relationships as mediation and repetition. Linkages in architecture can connect with intermediate elements or imply connection by spaces that demonstrate the cohesion of masses around them. Defining elements, such as walls or any physical barriers, set a realm off its environment. Repetition is also a way to link by producing one common factor in each of the dispersed parts of a design or of an existing situation. Another linking act can be a sequential path, where buildings or parts of buildings are arranged in a sequence of affordable spaces. Maki also analysed collages as heterogeneous compositions and group forms. They represent two different types of collages. The difference between them is that a heterogeneous composition consists of two or more systems of repeated objects or matters, while a group form is a heterogeneous mixture created by one visual system, where each of the manifestations of the elemental object has differences without losing the connectedness to the group. Analogous to Maki's architecture, metaxography encompasses collages made of heterogeneous compositions or groupforms.
Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (1966) described the city as a collage of individual and collective memories –?playing with the relationship between new and old. In Rossi's realm, new architecture interprets old themes and old buildings find changing uses. Rossi called such buildings, which could not be repurposed to new functions, pathological. The Architecture of the City can be taken as an early experiment of collage both through its own structure and its subject matter. One specific collage Rossi was interested in was the collage created by a network of monuments and the mundane city in between. In this way monuments give structure to the city.
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Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) states that ambiguity and tension are the key formal relationships in architecture. He differentiates between unsatisfactory thinking in architecture and ambiguity, which he prefers, and where the character of architecture is dependent on the viewpoint. A component of a building can draw its motivation from its hierarchic relationship to the whole city instead of from the building’s own scale. For example, the outer thirds of Michelangelo's stair in the Laurentian Library vestibule are abruptly chopped off and lead virtually nowhere: it is similarly wrong in the relation of its size to its space and yet right in relation to the whole context of the spaces beyond. In Venturi's view, many modernist buildings choose to ignore complex, contradictory and ambiguous relationships or simplify it in an idealised way. He points out that architectural components can have different functions depending on the distance. He writes about relations created by material, texture, massing, and colour, as well as depth – front and back in historic architecture. He also mentions different techniques for breaking up serial reproduction and symmetry within larger wholes in a way that exaggerates the unity yet creates a tension in the whole. This type of adapted contradiction can be tolerant and pliable. It admits improvisation, such as shifting pillars from a grid. It involves the disintegration of the system and ends in approximation and qualitative differences. On the other hand, Venturi describes how there can be juxtaposed contradiction, which is unbending. It contains violent contrasts and uncompromising oppositions, such as windows, which disregard a bay system of a facade. An adapted contradiction ends in a whole which is impure, and a juxtaposed contradiction ends in a whole which is unresolved.
Placing Venturi’s thinking into the context of metaxography, we can see that complexity and contraction between objects is inevitable and we should adapt or juxtapose that. We can also understand that the relationship between ontology and object is what constitutes metaxography. The relationship between objects in architecture should not only concern the building itself, but also the surrounding environment, such as the city scale, or the influence of multiple disciplines on the building. Complexity stems from the quest for diversity and the increasing extents of construction. Architecture could therefore reflect the complexity of the world and make its creative interpretation.
Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language (1977) discusses how specific physical design choices (recognisable patterns in space) can help us build better human relationships. Pattern Language is very much about how specific design choices (patterns) can help us build better relationships between people in different scales of a room, a house, a neighbourhood, and a city.? Here “a pattern” is the way physical design responds to human or social relationships. For example, the relationship and needs towards publicness and privacy may differ. Therefore, as the city might not be homogeneously planned, neither should the neighbourhoods, Alexander guides. He describes how a relationship between buildings and their surrounding outdoor space defines either negative, leftover space or defined, positive space. This positive space can also occur as pockets of activity bordering a larger space. He explains how movement between rooms establishes patterns of loops. In Alexander's methodology, the solution - the “heart” of the pattern describes the “field of physical and social relationships which are required to solve a stated [social] problem” in a context described by him. This solution is always presented in the form of an instruction for how to build the pattern. No pattern is here an isolated entity but requires also repairing the world around it. The book also displays diagrams, which show a specific solution in the form of a diagram as in Image 16. A Pattern Language might have some outdated thoughts concerning social relationships, e.g. ”feminine and masculine space” and respective behaviours, but it scrutinises the relationship between building components and the nature of the building skilfully. This type of relationship is a better fit for the metaxographic view than the human – object relationships. On page 971 for example A Pattern Language especially points out the relationship between roof and surrounding nature and suggest an “organic” relationship for them.?
Colin Rowe’s and Fred Koetter’s Collage City (1979) describes the city as a set for the dynamic relationships of coded spatial intentions. Rowe and Koetter convey this idea of dialectical dynamics from democracy, where interests and points of view constantly collide. Consequently, in a very pragmatist “why not” way, they suggest a theory of contending powers which establish an ideal, comprehensive city. Rowe and Koetter describe relational collisions of urban elements in Imperial Rome (for them a more radical example of the traces of dynamic forces than contemporary urban design) –?its palaces, piazzas and villas as an “inextricable fusion of imposition and accommodation”, a “traffic jam of intentions” “abrupt collisions”, “radically discriminated matrix” and a “general lack [of] sensitive inhibition”.The “bricolage” mentality of relationships is at its most lavish, where a tension between a quasi-integrated whole and quasi-segregated parts is resolved by a complementary possibility – a “sublimated conflict”, resolving the polar extremes. They propose considering multiple possibilities of functions, shaping the space from the things in between and generally being positive to changes and conflicts –?keeping it developing spontaneously.
Kisho Kurokawa’s The Philosophy of Symbiosis (1994) also concentrates on the relationship between a part and a whole. The Philosophy of Symbiosis recognises the scared zones and creates an intermediate zone between two opposing elements or two different cultures. The philosophy of symbiosis is a non-dualistic view of the part and the whole. One of the wordings is the concept of the holone, developed by Arthur Koestler. Holone is something that is both whole and part of something else. For Kurokawa this double and parallel approach, working holistically and on the details at the same time, leads to a holonic style of architecture. Antagonistic coexistence is created –?the relations between opposites, for example, the extremely modern and the extremely traditional, such as Karakuri –?an 18th century robot serving tea. Kurokawa writes especially about the relationship between the inside and outside – the engawa. In a very metaxographic spirit, Kurokawa writes about the need to misplace humans from the centre, discarding anthropocentrism.
Metaxography in recent architecture
The Swiss architecture office Herzog and de Meuron’s architecture is a fine example of metaxographic thinking. They have based their work to consciously manipulate relationships embedded in dichotomies in architecture with creative and often radical ways, questioning traditional and normative expressions: art/architecture, surface/space, nature/art, and bearing/non-bearing.
In the buildings of Herzog and de Meuron, decorative facade treatments are motifs equivalent in importance to interior spaces and structures. They have produced numerous types of variations of the relationship between the facade and the building’s interior. This reminds of the variety of veiling in clothes that for example Semper describes: loose and tight fit, transparency and opaqueness, protective and vulnerable, horizontal and vertical etc.
Herzog and de Meuron’s architecture exemplifies how important variations are in relationships: the elements (e.g. facades and interior spaces) are specified, but subject to varying manifestations. In this sense, the art of relationships in architecture is not that much about obscure objects and forms, but creative relationship conditions –?for example new continuities or disruptions, and new types of collage. These types of questions arise: Which kinds of object–relationships and systems of them are there? Are they intentional or accidental?
The following is a collage of metaxographic architecture that we have found during last years. Some of these are from architecture schools and some made by professionals.
Metaxography in helsinkizürich's work
The end of this piece consists of a picture gallery that is is a collection of projects with the metaxographic approach from our architect's office helsinkizürich. We operate from Finland and Switzerland.
Scandit Headquarters, Zürich CH 2022
The metaxographic principle used in this project was "Mutated primitives".
Mutated primitives
1) Create an elemental part of a collage with original geometry. This should be a bunch of spaces. It can be 2D or 3D.
2) Multiply the object, fitting the whole gameboard to the building site.
3) Modify each part to be unique and different from each other
It is easy to recognise the different types of mutated primitive objects in Scandit: the concrete ceiling, the grids of lower ceiling, tartan floor, dark shiny fixtures, wood and glass surfaced casseted volumetric elements and the light pylons. These types of primitives have faced different degrees of variation: the ceiling elements and volumetric units more than others.
This following project (Urban Confluence Park and Memorial in San Jose, California 2021), uses metaxographic scaling as a method for turning the microscopic world of bacteria, viruses and fungi into a multipurpose park.
Scaling
In addition to mixing diagrammatic relationships and building programmes in collage, one can mix architectural solutions from unusual scales, building types or locations to the design work –?for example, implementing city-scale solutions in building scale, or furniture-scale solutions in room scale. Or design a functional part based on a typical layout of some other function.
The next design is an example of relational programming: The building has been defined as 1) a fissure between two volumes 2) covered by a hanging roof with three sub-systems of objects (vegetation, solar panels and stages). The angular mass timber building parts divide into closed core volumes and surrounding open plans. These principles are constants, even if the building would have a different overall plot or shape, or if its size was different.
Relational programming
Establish a relationship with elements of the room programme to each other.
The next museum project (Museum of the History and Future, Turku FI 2023) was based on two diagrammatic analyses: 1) Turku Castle located nearby the building site and 2) the loop part type museum of Louisiana, Denmark. The volumetric traces of the castle were used as the starting point for the new museum, but turned into a sort of imploded extreme –?vaults, bridges and barrels gone crazy. The loop path principle also faced maniac treatment.
Learning from a diagrammatic analysis
1) Find images of architecture (architectural situations), where interesting relationships are apparent. Present these relationships as abstract 3-D diagrams.
2) Implement the same relationships (interstitial connections) between them, their superimpositions or other interaction. Transform each original.