by Ng Chen Yin 1001540026
Violence of Architecture
From the reflective text, Tschumi describes the word violence as the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces. By that, it suggests that actions qualify a space as much as vice versa. Both action and space are independent but inseparable. In regards to his thought of Spaces violating Bodies, he questioned that why has architectural theory often tend to claim that the architecture itself should be pleasing to the eye, as well as comfortable to the body, instead of it can stimulate strange desire or feeling while a certain spatial device takes its form.
In my opinion, the best example of Violence of Architecture is undeniably, a museum. The relationship between visitors and spaces is the key element in museum architecture. In other words, a good museum architecture should be able to encourage connection between individuals and their surrounding spaces, in either way of bodies violating spaces or spaces violating bodies.
Speaking of museums, one that strikes me the most is the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind. The building zigzags with his “between the lines” design, it is not a simple nor typical museum building, but instead a building which many people are left with a feeling of insecurity or disorientation. Although the building is independent on the surface, but to reach the exhibition area, visitors must walk through an underground passageway from the entry area in the adjacent building. A visitor must endure the anxiety and losing the sense of direction before coming to a cross roads of three different routes. Visitors are fully engaged with the surrounding spaces yet are controlled by it. The zigzag formation of the building directs visitors to walk through and experience the spaces within, concurrently the spaces are violating bodies of visitors, stimulating the feeling of loss, such as what the Jewish people during WWII felt
"If you forget your memory, have a trauma and you repress it, it's going to come to haunt you. It's going to do something to you, something bad, something violent at some point, It's important not to repress the trauma, it's important to express it and sometimes the building is not something comforting. Why should it be comforting? You know, we shouldn't be comfortable in this world. I mean seeing what's going around." said Libeskind.
Going back to Tschumi’s thought on spaces violating bodies, violence exercised by and through space is considered as spatial torture. However, such discomforting spatial devices are seen as objects of contemplation to architecture. The pleasure of violence can be experienced differently in every other human activities, is unique and unrehearsed. One of the most powerful and emotional spaces in Jewish Museum is a 66’ tall void that cuts through the entire vertical axis of the building. The ground is covered in 10,000 coarse iron faces. Libeskind uses the void to address the physical emptiness of Jewish life, he wanted to make this loss visible and tangible through architecture, through the violence between individuals and the spaces within the museum.
Violence of architecture contains the possibility of change, its contradictions are maintained in a dynamic manner. The space, the program and the human are three important elements in architecture, by extension, there is no architecture without violence.
After all, it all comes down to the relationship between the space and the human to create a meaningful architecture.
References:
https://www.jmberlin.de/en/libeskind-building
https://www.archdaily.com/91273/ad-classics-jewish-museum-berlin-daniel-libeskind