Contextual Counterpoint

In recent decades, conservationists and planners have co-opted contextualism, reducing it to a tool for enforcing urban conformity. Here Charles Jencks reclaims contextualism as a dynamic design strategy. He identifies four different contextual treatments that as well as ensuring continuity are potentially transformative.

Over the last 40 years, the architectural concept of contextualism, borrowed from literature, has missed an important distinction within Post-Modern practice. For many commentators and Prince Charles it has come to mean being in keeping with the surrounding neighbourhood, and thus is used by planning boards to enforce conformity. Why Post-Modernists allowed the co-option of one of their better ideas, and did not protest or explain more clearly what they were about, remains a mystery. But it is time to change that idée reçue. They had already designed another strategy beyond mimicking. In 40 years the contextual idea developed into four different strategies underscored by formal tropes. These confirm that Post-Modernists care about the neighbourhood coherence and urban fabric but seek to extend them with transforming continuity, like musical variations on a theme. ‘Contextual counterpoint’ is thus a hybrid trope borrowed from literature and music to illuminate a moral form of urbanism.

Punctuated jazz is an approach deriving from James Stirling’s particular use of collage composition at the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, designed in 1977 and opened in 1984. The key work of Post Modern classics, Vermeer, modern and historical themes are mixed together here as a contextual infiltral and are punctuated by counterpointing incidents in highly coloured High Tech. The irony of using this style almost always as symbolic comment was almost never understood by British commentators, and thus a major lesson was missed. These High-Tech elements signal the taxi drop-off point, entrance areas and the main production venue. The background styles – neighbourhood vernacular, modern concrete, banded and arched Neo-Romanesque, coved Neo-Egyptian, Alvar Aalto, 1920s Stirling – are all underplayed but present. Thus the whole neighbourhood ensemble is knitted together with high-culture moments, an approach Aldo Rossi took in a more monumental direction.

The variable chameleon. There are several notable examples of this type, Robert Venturi’s National Gallery Extension, London (1991), Dodsworth House, Hauser Holder’s Blue House, Venice (1990) and Stirling’s Core Gallery, London (1986). The variable chameleon differs from the natural animal in taking on different adjacent codes to mediate them as it undulates around a large city block. But it transforms each imitation into another message, in the Venturi version creating new 19th-century ‘ghost pilasters’ to confront the Miesian ‘cuts’ to either side. Mediation here is to acknowledge and respect old, new and the highly used corner function.

The ad two Time City is a palisade.
Henzo & de Mauro's Forum La Cala,
Madrid (2008) takes existing urban
fragments and makes a holistic collage from
them in the vertical dimension. The bottom
of the city is opened up to movement, the
old brick facades are lifted off the ground to
hold the museum, and the top floor imitates
in shape and overwrite the morphology and
style of Madrid's past culture, including the
Arabic. Thus preservation is mixed with
papyrus, paper and rewriting, like the
remimited coins of Rome, these palisades
make an enjoyable art of urban time.

The repaired and paraphrased Time City. This is a first cousin of the former category which often comes out of war damage and the symbolism of rebirth. In Germany, particularly Munich, the approach was first well worked out by Hans Dölgart for the Axis Potsdam (1937) and then by Josef Wiedemann at the Glyptothek (1980) (bottom). Recently, David Chipperfield has left his minimalist abstraction for the Post-Modern mixed string at the Neues Museum Berlin (2000). Again it is repairing, reproducing and paraphrasing in new materials the work of time. These multiple methods and materials may then be given a light whitewash to pull them together.

Contrapuntal counterpoint. The most risky version of Post Modernism contextualism is that carried through with brilliance by Edouard François at the Hotel Fouquet, Paris (2006). This patche is a sensual amalgam of the regulated tastes of the 8th arrondissement and a hotel that wanted to put as much space into a stairway psychology as they could get away with. You have to look twice at the details, the variations in material and colour to see the point. Procast grey concrete is played smooth, illustrated and rough, and their dark and light. It is carefully woven with metal glass and connect into an all-over grammar. An adjunct Haussmann facade set the building code, and then the template for the concrete castings. But while the main façades look fine storey, the overfitting grey platan windows show the truth. These symbolic TV sets indicate the individual hotel rooms. They suggest the reality of eight floors above ground and five below. To signal that you know that François knows that you know that all in Hausmannian Paris is not what it seems, note the way comical lines are broken, and oeils de boeuf, at the top, are ended by the windows. The counterpoint is contrapuntal, the patche Mozartian.

Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 63, 64(b), 65-7€
Charles Jencks; p 64(0) © Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc

Copyright of Architectural Design is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.