FORMALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
Architect Arieh Sharon | early works 1926-56
Paper presented in the Israeli Architectural Formalism conference, Tel-Aviv University, Oct 2008.
Abstract:
In this paper I would like to focus on the works of the Architect Arie Sharon (1900-1984), mainly regarding works made during the first three decades of the 20th century. I shall examine a specific historical perspective and thus disconnect the study from a wider political context.
I shall follow Sharon’s initial professional career - his intellectual architectural & creative experiments - and focus on Sharon's language, since I believe that his oeuvre is strongly political, just like most cases of formalism/formalist architecture.
In order to inspect Sharon's architecture in view of the annals of Israeli architecture, I shall look at it as a whole. This inspection assumes a dialectic development, whose form resembles a tree, and it presents us a stable and hierarchical array of interrelations between the projects. This, assuming that his work originated in is his studies at the Bauhaus, and that it is possible to draw from there a straight linear line, extending in time and space.
If we look at it this way we shall be able to draw lines of movement and changes and to create a genealogy in which each project can be traced.
In the following lines of text, I seek to show that the basic concepts regarding Sharon's oeuvre are misleading and that they are a result of regimes and of various perspectives which we work for. We are accustomed to the narrative.
Case studies
The first case study is "The working class project", which sets an example for the common narrative regarding Sharon and his work. We view Sharon as a functionalist that translates Ideology into a program.
The case of “The working class project” can be easily connected to the socialist ideology, which literally dominated the scene.
Vila Kupferman stands in contrast to the first case study, and its architecture does not fit the canonization of its time, nor to texts written by Sharon, his critics and followers.
This case is not singular. While checking Sharon's archives, I found few other projects, including ones which were never published. These "other" projects evade definitions and conceptualization, although several attempts were made to do so, and they preserve their own character. These projects are of a singular occurrence that tells us about the other Sharon. And while they do not reject the "well-known" Sharon, they certainly disturb the way we perceive common knowledge.
Who was Sharon the Architect?
Since it exists between two poles, just like a schizophrenic entity, Sharon's language maintains its locality. Sharon’s Architecture merges various influences from different sources, such as using simple principles of middle-eastern architecture to solve climatic problems.
Its powerful three-dimensionality, expressionist curves and flow of horizontal lines create strong effects of light and shadow, which became one of the main characteristics of Sharon's architecture in particular, and of Israeli Architecture of that period in general.
In his texts, Sharon failed. He made an effort to transform a utopian ideology into a pure formalistic language. Yet the formalist modernism, as Sharon writes it, leaves us with a reduction that concludes in a fixed number of values.
In contrast to Sharon’s writings, and to writings in regard to him, the cases which I studied present quite a different picture. It shows Sharon’s architecture, as functionalistic and modernistic as it is, as an architecture with an expressive dimension. Any effort to evaluate Sharon’s oeuvre with solely rational variables leaves us with “dull”, gray architecture, which has no depth to it.
It is precisely in his earlier works, that we can find his search and the struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian.
His early works present us a rich architecture, made by a non-dogmatic architect, unlike his teachers.
Summary or Schizophrenia as a process
In front of us we see Schizophrenia, not as an illness in its familiar Freudian sense, nor in its Lacanian sense, according to which Schizophrenia is a situation in which the signifier-signified relation is destroyed and ceases to exist. Instead we see Schizophrenia as a process. Deleuze and Guattari stressed that the schizophrenic is not the one who is disconnected from reality, but rather that he is the one planted in the very heart of reality.
The schizophrenic creative process which I seek to stress out is hanging between a breakthrough towards a new model and a breakdown into a used, old and familiar model.
Sharon, as a schizophrenic architect, maintains the separation and multiplicity in his oeuvre. He does not seek to abolish the separation by creating an identity and by abolishing the paradoxes of his work, but rather he stresses out the difference and confirms it, and therefore he spreads a branched rhizomatic complexity, which we must cross continuously, without halting. We cannot divide or pace the distance between the projects, it must be experienced as it comes into being.
Sharon is not a post humanistic functionalist and also a humanist, nor is he pacing himself between these two poles. He does not present us an average of these two. He is not an Apollonian architect, nor a Dionysian one, nor does he posses any qualities of both. He is all of these at once, and each one of them in his own.
And in a contemporary context, I find schizophrenia to be an important position. By deconstructing Sharon, and by making a multitude of other, different Sharons, I stand against the historiography of Israeli Architecture, which places Sharon inside a predetermined order, and thus applies a writer for the writings and an architect for the architecture, and therefore forces a liminal point upon architecture and constructs a very comfortable notion for critics. When the architect is considered as a hegemonic author, his creation becomes “explained” and criticism wins.
In my view, Sharon as an “Architect” renounces the center of the stage, and moves to its margins. Sharon as an architect has no preceding entity to his architectonic work; he exists as an architect only while doing specific architectonic work.
Architecture as a schizophrenic process has no other content beside the act through which it expresses itself.
This study wishes to show that while examining Sharon’s oeuvre with a tree model, the average becomes an ideal. The effort to find order and consistency relies on a formalistic analysis, and it concludes in an analytical formalistic system, which represents humanistic values. But actually, this structure itself does not withhold the criterions of the general formalism, but only the addition of all of them into an average.
Therefore, the formalistic examination of Sharon’s architecture as a whole is asking the wrong question. We cannot relinquish the architectural context, which is the language of architecture, the form. We cannot isolate the space which is constructed out of its formalistic components.
my reading of Sharon’s architecture suggests a fresh and liberated way of thinking, which undermines modernistic texts, and presents us an architecture which raises aesthetical question, deals with “form” in itself and relates to the surrounding and locality.
This is clarified in the case studies, but nothing can actually be deciphered. The structure can be identified, deconstructed and followed, but the architecture remains open, and it invites one to stroll in.
I claim that architecture that represents a schizophrenic process enables the structure to contain the historical dimension, not by reinforcing it in a certain time period, but by enabling us, who use it, to continually give it content and meaning.
Sharon’s architecture is not found at its origins, but rather in its destination, and in its user. This user has no personality or history; he strolls and gathers all traces which constitute architecture in one single space.
EXHIBITION FOLLOWING THE RESEARCH:
Curators: Natanel Elfassy & Kerem Halbrecht
Images courtesy of Sharon family.
April 2008
Spaceship Art Gallery,Tel Aviv
Following the footsteps of arch.Arieh Sharon Early works 1926-1956
28.04.2008 Haaretz Gallerya|
