|
My first impression of Villa Tugendhat (1930), Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece in Brno, Czech Republic, is colored by a curious anomaly in the recently restored structure -- A crack in the exterior wall of the villa inhabited by honeybees. This otherwise classic, rational modernist monument is already re-colonized by wild nature, albeit a small inroad. Tugendhat is powerful, a suburban nest for newlyweds, compact and virtuous in all things modern, full of curious gestures to grandiosity -- full-storey doors, monumental glass enclosures on three sides implying a relationship to the infinite beyond the structure of the villa. Rich veneers of stone and wood remind one of the Barcelona pavilion. The rationalist use of a grid of supporting columns (space- and wall-generating units) frees the interior of the need for actual load-bearing walls. Each vestige of wall, then, performs a different task -- blocking a view here, rounding a space there ... All in all, Tugendhat is a moment of architectural history frozen in time. Architecture may be frozen music, but it is also frozen time. The bees, then, are harbingers of a type of Spring -- after Winter. A small crack in the ice offers a space for the irruption of the Other into the emptiness of the Frozen Moment. At Kew Gardens, near London, a very large, expansive unit in the Royal Botanic Garden franchise, the breadth of the park-like grounds is structured, here and there, by architectural elements both formal and informal. The conservatories and the adjacent alpine and taxonomic gardens, the new Japanese garden notwithstanding (as it still seems just out of the box after three years), lend to the open park an episodic narrative of alternative, sometimes competing experiences. The greater part of Kew is its broad, tree-strewn grassland and glades, partly, now, gone to seed as the curators pay homage to the wildflowers that are colonizing the meadows and glades. In Aristotle’s Poetics, episodic effects in literature and art are described as lacking value if not linked by a larger, all-encompassing theme or concept. At Kew this concept is Nature and its volition -- that is, to overwhelm and define everything in its path. The dialectic is developed in its inevitable collision with Culture (and Kultur). Horticulture is just a favoring of Nature in a scientific context -- the mission of Kew. The great drama of Kew is its subtle battle with Nature through Horticulture, perhaps to make Nature dance to a more civil tune. But it is William Kent’s (see note below) Ruined Arch (c.1760) at the edge of the park that commands the eye, the subtle eye, in the sense that all of Kew is secretly striving to mimic the mock indifference of the Arch. This folly, constructed to appear antique, and much further ruined since, stands aloof from Kew proper, an architecturally benign shrug to the on-going grooming of the park. It rivals the crack at Tugendhat for poetic and dissonant effect. Both are openings to the ineffable: wild bees, wild nature and wild imagination. The episodic is transcended by the irrepressible success of Nature and Time. Gavin Keeney (Skryje, Czech Republic - 28 May 1997) SUBSEQUENT NOTE FROM READER Thanks - Kent's arch at Kew? Surely Chambers? Best: JOHN SUBSEQUENT NOTE TO READER John - Ah, of course, you are right... Thanks: GK NOTE TO OTHER READERS Of course it is sentiment, not fact, that is most important in penning reveries. Best wishes: GK POSTSCRIPT "The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey bees, Come live in the empty house of the stare." --W. B. Yeats (1923) OUTTAKES RBG Kew - The Arch Villa Tugendhat - 3D Model Villa Tugendhat - UNESCO |
Landscape Agency New York - 1997/2004