CAMOUFLAGE

OMA, Très Grande Bibliothèque, 1989

No matter how much we can use the other senses to perceive an architectural work, vision is still the one most directly related to the apprehension of space and the creation of new memories associated with them. This way, it is important to justify the return to a formal and visual speech. 

Branko Mitrović argues in his book “Visuality for Architects” that today, differently than two decades ago, it is possible to talk about purely visual and formal interaction with architecture, independent of our concepts and ideas associated with them.  Under the influence of the Gestalt theory and psychological studies of the 1950’s disseminated by people like Gombrich and Norberg-Schulz, it was believed that every perception was cultural, which meant that there was “no innocent eye”.  Therefore, since perception of space was attached to cultural influences and completely subjective, it made no sense to talk about visual qualities. Furthermore, the understanding that there is no thinking without language – “everything is a text” - contributed to an increasing intellectualization of the discipline, and the justification of projects only through their narratives (instead of its material qualities) took place.

However, psychology has evolved during the 1980s and 1990s with the idea of the “non-conceptual content”.  This means that cultural concepts do not influence what and how we perceive, but only the way we recognize and create meaning for our percepts. Visuality is no longer individual and can be once again claimed in architectural discourse. With this in mind, now I am allowed to pursue an architectural argument based on visual qualities of buildings and their relationship to their context.

“To be democratic, one must acknowledge what exists”, said Rosalyn Deutsche, and the presence of difference in the endless urban environment is crucial for people to become consciously aware of the space they live in and their position towards it.

However, differently than what Aureli suggests with the creation of well-defined boundaries and archipelagos inside the city, I believe that this difference has to occur in a much more dialectical relationship with the context of the place a building is inserted in.  In other words, instead of creating difference with a complete alien object - what has the potential of creating a schizophrenic experience, detached from reality – my aim is to create this difference once the general framework of the object is integrated with its context. This first step of blending can be called camouflage.

Regarding OMA’s use of camouflage in the façade of the Très Grande Bibliothèque, Neil Leach identifies it as a mechanism that allows an individual react to design by both blending in or standing out of a certain environment. However one chooses to react, what is important is that people react to it.

Additionally, what interests me about the strategy of camouflage is that it can be much deeper if applied not only to the appearance, but also in all invisible layers that constitute a building, such as programming or movement vectors. The first step of my work will be to identify patterns in all these layers so later I can be able to subvert them and create the desired difference.