Stephane Dawans

Rem Koolhaas, a major provocative figure on the global scene of architecture theory since 1978—when he published Delirious New York—clearly bases his rhetorics on obsessive patterns such as the loop or intertwined spaces claimed as Piranesian. This is notably the case in Euralille, this large urban complex meant to revive the old French industrial city, where the reference to the 18th-century engraver is most obvious in a large destructured hall, in an accumulation of stairs, footbridges and escalators which, on the way out of the railway station, are deliberate reminders of the engravings of imaginary jails that emerged from the Venetian artist’s brain. Of course engraving, painting, photography and cinema have been using similar processes for quite some time to create a dizzying sensation with the spectator. Those high and low angle views of entangled planes based on seemingly paradoxical geometry denote a willingness to use the features of the sublime to create mixed feelings of fascination and anguish or to remind mankind of their mortal condition, in other words, of their finite nature. Romanticism is known to have been quite inspired by this dramatic force. Yet what appeals to us in this revival of an aesthetics of the sublime is that it now crosses a new border as it imposes itself into public space, into city life. If films or 3ds digital games attract informed and consenting viewers, Piranesian spaces—Koolhaas also speaks of Junkspace—impose themselves to all and dramatize the modern man’s anguish without the slightest concern for his opinion. What kinds of ethos and of pathos underlie this contemporary theory of architectural and urban spaces inspired by Piranesi’s or Escher’s engravings? What literary strategies are at play? Why can the same obsessive spatial leitmotivs be found in plane puzzles, in films and in the new urban scenery? What does this aesthetics tell us about man in the 21st century? Can we talk of post-humanism? These are some of the basic questions this paper wishes to address in relation to the symposium’s theme Architecture and Urban Space.

Carried by the philosophical mainstream, which had built modernity on the primacy of vision, rationalism, which gradually imposed itself as an academic discourse, soon took architecture on the path of abstraction. This finally proved Marshall McLuhan right, who in 1962 was legitimately going to suspect that such a bias must imply “a distortion of reality.” In this critical context and with globalisation as a backdrop, Kenneth Frampton will try to evaluate the points of resistance on which a dialectical approach could be based that might lead us out of the double dead-end of regionalism and modernism, with the sense of touch playing a crucial part. In this paper we will briefly consider how this issue was raised and particularly emphasize the prospects that a phenomenology of touch (which, according to the Livre blanc published in 2004 by the Institut de la Cambre does frighten our contemporaries) can offer to architecture and to the teaching thereof.