Relations between the idea and matter in concrete architecture

Authors:

• Krzysztof Barnaś

Abstract

Conclusion. The concept of the idea and the structuring of the matter of architecture. Everything that exists in architecture in some way has a form that is the result of an idea and some matter that is subject to it. And there is no matter that would not present itself in a certain form appropriate to it; there is also no form that would be devoid of matter. It appears that this aesthetic state is final and its universality forms the principle of the creation of every work of architecture. Architecture has always meant the discovery of an ideal (or any) potential contained in matter and it can then be said that a given object has its architecture. This argument is confirmed by designers of "concrete architecture". They are of the mind that architecture is an art dependent on material, and it is the idea of architecture, together with matter, that establishes a certain scope for the imagination of the structuring of an architectural concept. Understood as such, the art of architecture is based on an effective synthesis of the relations between these two elements. And on the basis of these relationships is architecture created as a completed work—something defined and "limited" by matter, whose sense and understanding is established by the material of border of space chosen by the designer. To architecture, the times of the use of concrete have been a period of searching for new thought structures and their accompanying material experiments with architectural form. Thinking about architectural space as something that is definable by matter and which can even be considered its embodiment is likewise subjected to this rule. The selected matter/material gives the idea a certain logical image, a defined structure, a strength that results from the relationships between each part and their relationship with the whole. Describing this phenomenon has become the challenge of contemporary architecture: a mathematical, poetic or visual creation of the minds of its designers and co-believers—those who have adapted "dead materials" to the requirements of architecture. Concrete, as a state of matter "without an original image", appears to be the perfect material that reflects the "matrix" for the form imagined by the architect. The negative form of the formwork is simultaneously the shape of hardened concrete; a substrate for all creative expression and an abstract for the meanings added by the concrete. This peculiarly understood monolithism—as a principle of a structure's material uniformity—serves to realise the content encased in the variety of forms, but is also the groundwork for the idealisation of established or newly-emergent meanings and poetics. In this transformation, concrete also becomes a tool for the metaphorisation of architectural form. It appears that concrete architecture (in its monolithic or decorative expression), treated as an actual formal value that combines aesthetic expression with the structure of the edifice, has gained the rank of a model reference in the pursuit of the idea-form-matter relationship. From the material of architecture to composition The division into "invention", "discovery" and "composition" is a certain facilitation in traversing the stylistic meanders of the history of the idea and its accompanying evolutions of the concrete matter of architecture. Concrete architecture has a sense that is close to the meaning pertaining to the entire history of architecture—in the beginning, it was a system of rules governing the shaping of a material and afterwards, a time of the development of forms and meanings. Finally, it became an individual programme of action that every artist formulates deliberately or intuitively in the pre-conceived intent to realise their work. Inventive thinking in twentieth-century concrete architecture created an ideology and defined ideas, a construction material and tools for establishing the basis of the subconscious of the twentieth century. The functionalism of matter transforms into a functionalism of forms which are an aesthetic necessity, in which the notion of objectivity, of the "truth of matter", defines the differentiation of a specific structural model—a "prototype" of architecture. In this context, concrete, although it had not been a new material, became the material that established modernity—through its technical "appropriation" in the progressive transformations of Functionalism. Innovative thinking initiated development and started a process that enhanced technological knowledge and aesthetic awareness. In concrete architecture, this became a visible sign of those changes in the material that resulted in innovation establishing the sense of understanding ideational novelty and stylistic originality. Architectural objects comprising the category of a "discovery"—the transformation of an original (form and material), thus become an interpretation of a model, they are an attempt at aesthetising forms by the expressive unbinding of the will of the artist. Experiencing the potential of the construction material causes concrete to become not only a tool, but also the content of architecture in this programme, allowing the highlighting of added meanings by the style of béton brut in the twentieth century, but it is also the essence of creating freeform, monolithic sculptural structures. To "composers", concrete is a material that highlights the ideality of an authorial poetic or the essence of archetypical references to a monolithic shape. To some, it is the matter of rational formal systems, to others, as a base of metaphoric meanings, an added value of a "game with the past". Designers show the world in a completely different perspective—in a mannerist manner or by a radicalism of forms and thoughts. Thanks to the formulation of the notion of the "Museum of Imagination", the contemporary architect establishes the "fiction" of the shape of architecture, which typically accompanies idealistic abstraction, rational geometry and poetic metaphor—tools that form "tombs", "monuments", "palaces" or "palestras". The dynamism and wealth of forms of this world is also (perhaps most importantly!) built by concrete atectonics. The compositional "decomposition" in architecture—the shifting of form and matter to a complex aesthetic and structural dimension, is given sense by acknowledging the fiction of this language as one that assumes a certain instability of notions and readings. Concrete/reinforced concrete plays the role of a material that "supports" and binds the variety of shapes into a whole and highlights the incoherence of spatial organisation. Contemporary deconstruction confirms that the entirety of art is a lie and that there is no truth about the image of the whole, and that architecture is a logic of compositional decomposition that moves towards that which is varied and separate. The ideation of concrete. That which was concrete's weakness has turned out to be its creative force. Concrete has gained a material identity in imitating something that it is not—and because of this, it has become a material for all manners of architectural forms and for finding their aesthetic meaning. The ideation of concrete as a medium of presenting architecture is the fact of "reading" a structure as an object of "material imagination"—in this idealised perspective, concrete is the pursuit of this sense of the meaning of the edifice which the author embedded in its entire structure. The notion of concrete matter, understood as an act or process of intuitively (subjectively) experiencing objects, appears to be helpful in reading the relationships between the idea and the matter/material of architecture. Concrete and its forms are the cause of impressive experiences—ones that distinguish extreme reception and aesthetic reactions. By using concrete, designers have been given the ability to bestow new ideational and ethical meanings. The categories of béton brut, "poor concrete", "sacred concrete", concrete as the "matter of memory", "unblemished concrete"—have defined and established the scope of successive symbolisms and poetics of architecture. This peculiar image also constitutes the start of thinking about the natural "genetics" of concrete, which appears as a substance that substantively and metaphorically absorbs successive natural similarities—imitating stone, absorbing the image of the surroundings, atmospheric conditions, etc. Concrete detail participates in this game of meanings, considered to be a logical element of the entirety of a building and the narrative reflection of structure. To some designers or viewers, the detail can also convey the "soul" of the building as an expression of the reflection of the state of the "soul" of the designer—their affectation, peace, ideal. The Minimalist element in concrete architecture is an expression of the need to present the simplest expression of the construction material and the form created from it. According to the argument that less is more, "less" means the deliberate constraint of any idea and matter of architecture, the application of the naturality of material, the neutralisation of form and its material: the "more" is the addition that arises from the meaning of the edifice that we discover, its archetype, symbolism, a direct encounter with and the experience of physical shape. "Pure concrete", as well as the "non-imitative", "absent" and "extremely simple" one, is the ideational cause and material effect of architecture based on formal reduction—creation that reveals a purely physical origin of form in art.