crossover-schmossover
by mikael askergren ©
mikael askergren does not believe in crossovers (crossovers between architecture and art, for instance).
question #4: what external fields are the most influential to architecture today?
answer: let's get one thing straight right away - i do not believe in crossovers. in architecture, there might be the occasional fragmental visual contamination - from society, art or nature - but never as the result of a deliberate two-way interchange or communication between disciplines. features and attributes that are borrowed or imported from other fields are never understood by the new field in their old, original meanings. they are given new meanings, meanings projected onto and read into them.
(one finds good examples of this sort of cross-contamination in fashion, and in popular music: they say r&b music never became popular in white middle class america until europe had first imported it - without importing the black lower class stigma that went with r&b in america - only to export it back to america, with the rolling stones, as classless and raceless, i.e. as white music. the original meanings of r&b had been lost, new meanings had been found. but there was never in the process any direct interchange or communication between black and white america, there still is not.)
every discipline is nurturing its own exclusive vocabularies and conventions of expression that are different from those of all other disciplines. it is not possible for the disciples of one creed to ever really understand what other creeds are about - or creeds and disciplines would not have striven for and longed for to be separated from each other in the first place. it is all a tower of babel. after all, most of us have problems understanding or knowing even ourselves (as freud et al point out), let alone someone else.
including a question like this one ("what external fields are the most influential to architecture today?") in a questionnaire like this one is a typical example of a much too common phenomenon in the architecture world of today: the hope for cross-fertilization with other disciplines. since no such thing ever really happened in history, nor will ever happen in the future, i see it as a sign of low self-esteem and lack of confidence within the profession. frustrated architects hope for a change within the near future, but feel they have to put their hopes elsewhere (such as trying to hook up with the art world) because they do not honestly trust themselves to make it on their own. however, we all know and we have all seen how cross fertilization projects (architects working together with painters or sculptors or what have you) always, always fail. architecture is architecture, art is art, fashion is fashion, let's leave it at that.
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[ askergren.com ]
response to a question in a 1997 international questionnaire put to all architects participating in the 20 young architects exhibition of interarch 97, eighth world triennial of architecture, sofia, bulgaria. the resulting 20 interviews were supposed to be included on a cd-rom documenting all twenty architects featured in the exhibition, in which mikael askergren was representing sweden. the cd-rom was supposed to be produced by, and to be available in 1997 from, the iakov bulgaria and ifya france. however, though the exhibitions of interarch 97 took place in bulgaria as planned in the summer of 1997, the cd-rom was never finished, and thus the interview/questionnaire was never published.
four years later, in 2001, mikael askergren was invited by area magazine, stockholm, sweden to respond to another questionnaire. the area magazine 2001 questionnaire consisted of questions about the virtues of crossovers between architecture, art, and landscape architecture (area is the magazine of lar, the national association of sweden's landscape architects). mikael askergren simply submitted his interarch 97 questionnaire response to the area magazine 2001 questionnaire. web site of area magazine: www.area.lar.se
more on mikael askergren's contributions to interarch 97:
3 tableaux inspired by the film last year at marienbad