Detail 01/1961 - Konrad Gatz [Diskussion]
The architectural work must be universally oriented again in a new way. As a whole as in the details, she should seek to do justice to the full person with all her powers - calculation, mind and mind. This also requires greater activation of direct personal cooperation between both planning and execution. The mere decoding of any financial, technical or artistic risks must not remain decisive in detailing.
The efforts for the spiritual foundations of architecture in our time - and thus also for the principles of detail work - have been largely clouded in recent decades by overemphasis of the functional in the narrow sense.
In the meantime, however, more universal ratings are gaining space again. Among other things, they assume conclusions like this:
The actual purpose of each building and thus also of all its details ultimately results from the general demand, also given to architectural work, that everything we work out at all should "serve man for physical and mental welfare" (Theodor Haecker).
If you also want to comply with this in construction planning and in the details, then you no longer trust the maxim according to which "the function is followed by form" (Sullivan). Rather, one is then aware that adaptations to the functionally comprehensible functions can only be self-evident prerequisites, but not the goal of the architecture. Therefore, from all activities that are ultimately committed to concern for the well-being of the whole man, it must be required that it actually targets man in his unity of body and soul with all available forces.
This is especially true of the work of the architect. It must not remain attached to mere calculation in the big as well as in the small, but must seek to meet both the demands of the mind and the needs of the mind, so that the built also serves the full reality of life. - Function and construction of the buildings and their elements are usually still understood today as detachable from the mind. Quite often, one still only sees a general aesthetic quality in the form, which is in a sense added to what is necessary, but should not necessarily suit it from the inside.
It was and corresponds to the fact that today buildings and building details are mainly theoretically defined, manufactured and assembled. The more exclusively the preliminary planning determines everything, the less space remains on a case-by-case basis for personal differentiation and the co-determination of executive forces, the weaker the immediate trace of the person-In the built, the more inadequate the adaptation of things that work in the narrower sense very well to the real necessities of human development.
The "safe" elimination of the risks associated with free play in thinking, doing and applying things naturally seems to ensure trouble-free "functioning" and - with appropriate talent - also a "clean" form. Everything seems to be quite "form-just, but also far from full life.
It is obvious that today - in view of the now almost infinitely diverse necessities and possibilities in construction purposes as well as in constructions and materials - we are strongly inclined to counteract untalented arbitrariness through mandatory planning. However, it should not be forgotten that this inevitably reduces the active participation in the individual parts, fed by inner freedom, if not completely eliminated. If the predetermining planning itself only follows an traditional or currently fashionable scheme, the construction gains even fewer qualities directly human character.
Accordingly, he remains, as it were, neutral to the mind and mind of those who are the environment. Only optical effects do not outweigh this. Not infrequently, such secured buildings seem easy to sensitive feelings as documents of fear of elementary life development.
In view of the fact that the buildings are often very similar in their purposes today and the construction systems usually accommodate this very well, it arises whether and how it is possible to achieve as fruitful experience contacts as possible with spiritual and factual consistency in the basic concept and the practical arrangement developed from it. But these can still be achieved and promoted, especially at all those more or less important points in construction and space, where the services and constructive functions go into detail or focus on points where something happens - that is, where the whole leads to detail or the detail into the whole.
In everyday practice today, this counteracts the fact that building and room details are often regarded as something of inferior rank. Often they are only given the attention and care that demand the "function" in the narrower sense and the so-called good taste. Some have lost the sense that every decision-making point in architecture, no matter how insignificant, challenges possibilities for a solution that testifies to their own intellectual management and thus really "addresses".
Such solutions as answers to ever-increasing questions to the power of the active person are, as always, still possible today in a thousandfold ways according to our time. It is of only minor importance whether elements of industrial production or possibilities of craftsmanship are used for their execution. Rather, all in all, the measure that activates the "more" of spiritual and also emotional energy that has been spent on them under the breeding of spiritual discipline is decisive. Only then can the details of architecture truly become "forms", whose man needs not only material functions or superficial stimuli, but ultimately also for his salvation. Ultimately, every single architectural detail thus has a decisive role to do with the great, unchangeable fact that "the world is not designed for the merely measured, just sufficient, but for the fulness - that the reason of the world is not the rationed, but the more; things, man, are only framework for the more" (Max Picard).
Konrad Gatz, editor "Detail, Munich
P.S.: translation from Deutsch to English through scan to text and auto-translation. The original is provided. I am not a german native, although I lived a few years and can understand some basic german, I leave this as it is. Will accept any help on the correction of the translation if provided. Thank you for your understanding.
