Prologue
Constant (and illusory) passion for applying to every phenomenon, even the merest, not the child’s question: Why? but the ancient Greek’s question: What does it mean? The fact must be transformed at all costs into idea, into description, into interpretation, in short, there must be found for it a name other than its own.[1]
The Fourth Wall of Architecture starts with the same question as the one that haunts the work of Roland Barthes, What does it mean? It is a work that concerns itself with the question of what it means to build, and more importantly, what it means to build in this or that particular way. What does it mean? What does it refer to? What does it signify? What associations, ideas, values, or ideologies structure the built artefact? What follows is thus an attempt to question the physical environment we live in, specifically in relation to its function within the dominant discourses of our society, through which it receives its multiple meanings. This questioning is not merely analysis; however, it is developed through the creation of new spaces or, rather, through the recreation of existing spaces. By recreating these spaces in a different way, this work tries to create buildings that question the meaning of these spaces through the physical experience of the space itself.
At the centre of this work are three short stories, each dealing with a different type of architecture. The stories explore the ideas of various architects, philosophers, sociologists, and writers within a specific architectural setting, and trace their potential to unsettle this architecture. The tracing of these effects is developed through the actions of the characters within the spaces they inhabit, and the conversations they have about these spaces.
These short stories are juxtaposed with architectural drawings, which try to detect the effects these ideas and thoughts have on the construction of the specific types of architecture itself. Thus, the drawings are not conceived merely as illustrations of the stories; instead, they try to detect the effects these ideas and thoughts have on the construction of the specific types of architecture itself.
These three episodes are based on three different projects that have been developed during my training as an architect. They are situated in different contexts, answering to different needs, but are nonetheless still connected by the same question already mentioned, What does it mean? By bringing them together in this work, I hope to demonstrate how this question can be dealt with in different ways through the practice of architecture.
The first episode – ‘The most photographed suburban neighbourhood’ – is a short story based on a dialogue from Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The story focuses on the architecture of the suburban single-family home, which is sold as the ultimate middle-class dream house by real estate developers. The main theme is the relation between the everyday reality of the inhabitants of a suburban neighbourhood and the imagined idyllic scenario of the real estate developers that build these neighbourhoods.
The second episode – ‘The reality effect of an office building’ – is a short story based on other fragments from DeLillo’s White Noise. It develops the idea of the decreasing relevance of the physical building in the system of representation and identification in relation to corporate architecture. It explores the situation of a multinational company in a globalised context that is characterised by a free flow of capital and people, which renders problematic the idea of locality and identity in the discourse of the company. The space of a typical office building is here recreated through interventions on a structural level, which has consequences for the way the facades, suspended ceilings, raised floors, and emergency exits are integrated into the building.
The third episode – ‘The homeliness of hotel rooms’ – is a detailed description of a fictional hotel and follows the sequence of a tourist arriving in his hotel room. The scenario deals with the architecture of generic hotel rooms, which is seen as a simulation of homeliness in a place where the inhabitant (the tourist), by definition, is not at home. The design of the hotel room focuses on establishing the expected atmosphere of homeliness while at the same time confronting the tourist with the falseness of this atmosphere. This is achieved by recreating an existing hotel in which crucial details have been altered to undermine the atmosphere of homeliness.
The general focus of these different episodes is to conceive of a physical space, where, in the experience of the architecture itself, the subject is confronted with the function of the building within a larger discourse. It is a way of trying critically to engage the subject with the space the subject inhabits, while at the same time questioning the meanings the space develops through its use in various discourses. In the end, it is an attempt to create a form of architecture that questions its own reality.
The result is a work that explores a number of themes in relation to the state of architecture today and its role within society. It tries to develop a method of grasping a complex reality while at the same time proposing a specific practice of architecture as a tool for questioning this reality.