Architecture is too hung up on some traditional notions, at least according to architect and Georgia Tech professor Lars Spuybroek. Space, for one: It is a “useless concept,” just as matter is for physics. As Spuybroek points out, we have known about the space-time continuum and the fact that all matter is energy for more than a century. Similarly, space is just a construct. Instead, if we want to imagine architecture, we should think in terms of a “gap,” which is the playing room between function and form, or between our body and what surrounds it, which is where we effectively live. That gap might be a room or an interior, which are at the core of architecture. According to Spuybroek, all else is an elaboration or “transfiguration” of that original “figurate architecture.”
Got all that? Spuybroek does not make it easy in his hefty new book-as-credo, Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure (Bloomsbury), both because he structures his story in an unconventional manner, and because he is one of those information packrats who can be talking about cave paintings one page and music the next. That also means he makes frequent leaps, jumps, and somersaults in logic and association that can leave readers (or at least this reader) scratching their heads, thumbing back a few hundred pages, and wondering how we got there. One great advantage of the book, however, is that Spuybroek, who was among the first to develop theories around computer-guided design and put them into practice (designing several beautiful buildings and pavilions that were actually constructed in the 1990s), does not make any attempt to justify his own work or claim that he has a recipe for the future. If anything, the book is rather somber, ending with an image of a tomb that leaves us pondering a “thick” architecture that seems to offer little hope or grace.
Grace, however, is what the book is all about, along with charity. Grace as in the Three Graces, those dancing, delicate figures who embody elegance, good manners, beauty, and generosity. A great quality in all cultural expressions, grace, at least to Spuybroek, is the central one. Grace and charity, he points out, are words that are related both in their etymological origins and in what they indicate: an immanence and a possibility; a pose or a gesture that allows for freedom, motion, and even transcendence. Think of “Mary, full of grace.” Grace and charity are also part of the economy of gift giving, which he and several other philosophers have pointed out is a fundamental part of the definition of culture or art, in which value is not negotiated or spent but is inherent—given away, admired, and even sometimes entombed.
The object, whether it is a building or a tool, is therefore not a thing but a cultural artifact, a “passage of generosity.” It is grace itself instantiated. Spuybroek arrives at this conclusion not through a careful argument, but by associations of words and gestures that prove to be rather convincing. By the second chapter, you are wrapped up in his evocation of movement, momentarily fixed into form, that has an openness or beauty that he identifies as the gap.
Grace and charity embodied in art and architecture, or in any cultural artifact, create what he calls “the grace machine,” whose definition he is characteristically vague about:
“Oddly enough, all the parts of what we have called the grace machine can be clearly defined and described—the wheel of habit and training; the rhythms it produces being spatially reflected in the abstract field; the existence of concrete objects, lifted from the field over the vertical axis of gravity—but not grace itself. We can say how grace is constructed, not what it is. Being wholly dependent on workings, it can never be guaranteed whether the machine works. Indeed, this radical uncertainty is the whole reason for its existence; it is a machine with a fundamental question mark at its heart.”
Where does this leave architecture? It lies in the gap:
“The fact that the grace machine has an architecture, being a machine structured in a way where horizontality and verticality play crucial roles, does not mean grace can be designed … There is not fixed point in space where the horizontal and the vertical intersect, an intersection which architects fundamentally rely on, and that absence of a crossing is what we have called the gap, and somewhat less dramatically, room. If there is the slightest possibility of design in relation to grace—and that must be or else we cannot live—it must be the design of the gap, because the gap requires a shape and has to find some kind of measure, though it cannot be measured with a ruler, at least not in advance, during the design phase. As in the model of the contrapposto, the ruler has to be found, not followed.”
The house, which for Spuybroek remains at the core of architecture, is a “trap” that captures grace, but also turns it into “a mechanism for letting in spirits.” What those ghostly presences might be—Spuybroek hints that they are beauty, God, and intimations of mortality—is never made entirely clear, but it certainly sounds both attractive and haunting.
This is a book filled with feints and implications. Still, Spuybroek is arguing in favor of something: a kind of building he prefers. He describes historical examples of architecture that’s able to catch grace and spirits both. This architecture evolved from caves and particularly the painting of caves, which he sees as the first transformation of stone and fixed form into soft and fluid figuration (the figure being central to the leap and motion that is grace), and that later flourishes in the Gothic and, at its best, constitutes a grace machine. The Gothic is matched, I gather from the author’s fond descriptions of it, only by art nouveau, with its equal fluidity.
By contrast, Modern architecture belongs to what Spuybroek calls the “plastic,” which is a “state of thickness that contains only flat images.” He evokes a modern-day tomb in which we are confronted with new kinds of specters: floating imagery that does not evoke anything or leap with grace, but only piles references and glimpses on top of each other, drowning us in association.
If Spuybroek proposes a way forward, it is this: that we explore the poché—the thickness of the wall, but also of the house itself. His notion of poché expands to include the attic and other storage or “servant” spaces, and narrows down to the ducts and conduits that serve the house. These become the haunts of monsters, figures, and other nascent forms that conjure memories of his earlier dancing Graces.
The task of the architect, then, is to design, or perhaps just get caught up in the grace machine, exploiting the poché in a way that allows that slippery spirit of architecture to present itself. It is this vague promise of figuration, always deferred, floating, and endlessly flexible, that is reminiscent of Spuybroek’s own architecture and is what he apparently dreams about. It is a graceful if not a comforting or sellable concept, at least for those who ply their trade as architects. But at the very least it may serve as inspiration to improve on the dull and thick forms and spaces that too often pass for architecture.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
