6
SPACE OF MONTAGE
Movement, Assemblage, and Appropriation in Koolhaas’ Kunsthal
Movement is a translation of space.1
Gilles Deleuze
Typically, when I asked him [Rem Koolhaas] about choosing between cinema and architecture, he replied that the two fields are more alike than they are different. “You are considering episodes, and you have to construct the episodes in a way that is interesting and makes sense or is mysterious,” he said. “It’s about montage also – whether it’s making a book, a film or a building.” Whatever the general similarities between the disciplines, it is more interesting to observe that Koolhaas practices architecture in the spirit in which a director makes a film. “It’s very scripted, the way people move and the possibilities he leaves for people in his buildings,” Vriesendorp points out. “The experiences are laid out. You go up and you have to look where you’re meant to look. He sees a space and he sees what could happen – a scene in a space.2
From Rem Koolhaas Builds
There are always strengths and limitations in exercising analogical similarities between the fields of architecture and film and while similarities and differences between the two media have been wdiely discussed, it is the operation of montage between the two media that becomes truly significant in some of Koolhaas’s work. Consider the manner in which Koolhaas introduces the Kunsthal, Rotterdam project in S M L XL:
Approach the building from the boulevard. Enter the ramp from the dike. It slopes down from the park. Halfway down enter the auditorium. It slopes in the opposite direction. A curtain is drawn blocking out daylight. At the bottom see a projection screen. Walk down. Turn the corner. Enter the lower hall, facing the park. It is dark, with a forest of five columns. To the right, a slender aperture opens to a narrow gallery. Look up. Rediscover the ramp you used to enter. Walk up. A glass wall separates the people outside. At the top …turn left. Enter the second hall. It is bright, with no columns. Look back. Exit under the balcony. See the auditorium, but don’t walk that far. Instead, turn and take a third ramp. Halfway up, grope through a small dark room …and emerge on a balcony that penetrates the second hall. Return to the ramp, run up, and emerge on the roof. Look down. Spiral back down to the beginning. Exit to the park. Pause. Turn the corner. Pass the restaurant underneath the auditorium. Keep going.3
The description of the building has a photomontage layout and a simultaneous narrative that runs parallel to the manner in which one would actually experience a walk through the building. It intriguingly reminds one of Choisy’s analysis and diagrams of perceptual experience of the Acropolis in Histoire de l’architecture that plays such a significant part in Eisenstein’s writing on montage and the role of movement in the spatial experience. In fact, Eisenstein called the walk of the Athens Acropolis “the perfect example of one of the most ancient films,”4 thereby relating the perceptual and peripatetic aspect embedded within architecture and the built environment to film editing techniques.
Eisenstein’s discussion of movement and montage drawing on Choisy’s walk at the Acropolis is no doubt significant when it comes to any architectural discussion of montage. In this case, montage created by a conceptual juxtaposition of shots to create an elegant sequence – a diachronic spatial unfolding which in turn simultaneously and synchronically creates an assemblage of the architectural experience and enriches our understanding of the Acropolis.5The notion of movement is intrinsically related to the idea of path with which Eisenstein starts his discussion of montage and architecture: “the word path is not used by chance,” he writes when talking about cinema, “nowadays it is the imaginary path followed by the eye and the varying perceptions of an object that depend on how it appears to the eye. Nowadays it may also be the path followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathered in a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept; and these diverse impressions pass in front of an immobile spectator.”6 There are two important issues of note in this statement; the first is the significance of the path, both in a conceptual and physical sense; the second is the multiplicity of phenomena to create a meaningful concept. While Eisenstein borrows the idea of the path from Choisy’s architectural discourse, the cinematic path in fact becomes a pronounced feature in architectural discussion, especially with Corbusier’s promenade architecturale and later with more overt suggestion to cinematic techniques in Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts and explicit reference to “cinematic promenade” in Parc de la Villette. The second issue, that of establishing a single meaningful concept from a “multiplicity of phenomena,” that Eisenstein talks about can be related to Ernst Cassirer’s reasoning that the apprehension of a spatial “whole” can be achieved through presupposing the formation of temporal series. In his discussion of symbolic form, Cassirer emphatically states: “form then appears as potential motion, while motion appears as potential form.”7 This idea of experiencing the spatial whole through movement is crucial when considered in relation to Eisenstein’s position stated previously when discussing physical and conceptual motion that creates “diverse impressions,” perceptual shifts in position to create a “meaningful idea” are particularly of interest when we speak of construction of spatial montage.
For Eisenstein, Choisy’s analysis brings to the forefront a particular sequential connection of spatial and formal entities to create an overall comprehensive experience that is comparable to a cinematic montage which is also “a means to ‘link’ in one point – the screen – various elements (fragments) of a phenomenon filmed in diverse dimensions, from diverse points of view and sides.”8 In a sense, sharing similarities to Choisy’s architectural experience which is formed through carefully choreographed oblique fragmentary views of discrete building facades that constructs a particular spatial composition of the Acropolis, Koolhaas’s sequential layout of Kunsthal in S M L XL is comparable to what might be a walk-through experience of the building mainly with a deliberate montage of photographs that are inset into a larger interior experience of each space. In S M L XL, in addition to the verbal and photographic description of the walk through the building, one also finds parallel black and white photographs that are either views of the same space or spaces above and below and an intriguing dialogue from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that runs in parallel to the photo-narrative. It is the juxtaposition and tension of various conditions that creates the montage effect in the Kunsthal, much like Eisenstein’s description of the montage effect: “when the tension within the movie frame reaches a climax and cannot increase any further, then the frame explodes, fragmenting itself into two pieces of montage.” When we consider various aspects of the Kunsthal it initially appears that montage was the driving factor. Consider for instance the diverse structural conditions that come together in this building; the columns in Hall 1 break from the static condition to alternate and form a dynamic experience within the space; structural conditions in individual halls and spaces follows their own logic. Different structural systems that come together to form a whole in the Kunsthal can also be seen as an exemplification of this montage condition. Cecil Balmond in writing on the structure of the thin red line in Kunsthal’s Hall 2 says: “Why not structure as an animation that provokes synthesis?” further saying: “Altogether there are four proposals to be made in the Kunsthal: I: Brace II: Slip III: Frame IV: Juxtaposition…Strange as it is exciting, raising questions about a bigger adventure, structure talks in the Kunsthal. The dialogue is with architecture; one discipline provokes the other.”9 One can make an argument that the choice of the four proposals sets up a dynamic play, each structural system offers a different sensibility and approach to the architectural problem, and each individual one can clearly be identified within the synthetic whole.
Juxtaposition occurs not only at the structural level but also at the material level and quite deliberately so. Some writers have likened this to deliberate “shocks and jolts.”10 A building that can be seen on some level as a commentary on the architectural discourse from the overall spatial organization to materials and details. For instance, Kunsthal’s four different column types at the front façade have been pointed out by critics, “four different column types that, in their uniqueness can only be read as quotations from a previous time. A cruciform column, two black square columns, a white square column paired with a flat, white, perforated one.”11 The differences and variations at the level of details with materials are similarly quite telling in this project. While in many buildings one tends to see the repetition of details with certain materials, in the Kunsthal, by contrast, even with seemingly similar material combinations there are differences in details. Consider the manner in which transparent glass is detailed in the Figure 6.7 on the rear elevation it is detailed on one side in the interior plane and on the other side on the exterior plane. On the elevation at the auditorium glass is on the exterior edge with an open web truss mullion, while at the front façade plane it is detailed with a silicone joint at the exterior edge.
What is perhaps of interest in the manner in which montage is employed in Kunsthal is best revealed by a comparison to a discussion of montage by Stan Allen, who in his analysis of Corbusier’s Carpenter Center says: “Montage, in other words, is not so much a synthetic mounting of one image on top of another as it is an analytic that releases a multiplicity of dimensions and simultaneous meanings from a given figure.”12This idea of montage is evident throughout the Kunsthal especially when one considers the deliberate distillation of modernist history and design. Kenneth Frampton has compared it to Corbusier’s unbuilt project Palais des Congrès, Strasbourg, especially when it comes to idea of the promenade architecturale and the architectural device that encapsulates it as well as pointing to some other formal similarities.13 Jeff Kipnis has also compared it to Mies National Gallery in Berlin.14 Such references with Corbusier and Mies, the two stalwarts of the modernist movement, are not surprising and also present in other projects by Koolhaas. Consider the discrete elevation of each side of the Kunsthal box, unlike most buildings, with the Kunsthal each elevation seemingly belonging to a different building but in this case at one level it alludes to a Miesian pristine box complete with the play on Miesian columns (see southern elevation), at another level, the elevation, instead of putting up a facade, it reveals the section as in the auditorium elevation (see eastern elevation) and is truly “an analytic that releases a multiplicity of dimensions and simultaneous meanings.” This analytic release is also obvious in the allusion to the interior curvilinear broken eggshell auditorium of Corbusier’s Millowner’s Association building that is detailed such that it seems to be floating on the floor through the temporary creation of volume that is created with the drawing of Petra Blaisse’s curtain. It is also apparent in the wooden columns of the hall that Frampton points to as alluding to Dali’s paranoid critical method reminiscent of disembodied trees in the park. As in many other architectural projects, columns are the primary actors,15 the wooden trees, the slanting ones in the auditorium, the play on Miesian ones at the entrance, the circular ones at the ramps, each following their own logic. Much like Tatlin’s corner and counter reliefs wherein the compositions were assembled through material fragments, each alluding to their own histories and discourses, the Kunsthal deliberately makes references to specific icons of architectural discourse through certain iconic elements, spatial organization and compositional operations, and material and details. It is important to bear in mind that for Eisenstein, who made the term “montage” synonymous for a specific technique of film editing, it is also linked to the Russian term for “aesthetic form, obraz (which means ‘image’ as well), is itself a cross between the concept of ‘cut’ [obrez] and ‘disclosure’ [obnaruzhenei]…”16 so the cuts aimed at revealing connections that in Eisenstein that contribute to the overall meaning, and with Koolhaas, the disclosure is in unveiling connections to other icons of modernism and the architectural discourse in general.
