Peter-markli-my-profession-the-art-of-building.txt

Good evening and welcome. Thank you all very much for being here on this wonderful Monday evening so close to the reviews and the end of the semester. So we're really appreciative. It's an incredible treat to be able to have Peter Markli here with us tonight. And I think it's even a very special honor that Peter is here with his family, Elisabeth and Anna, that have come from Zurich. I've been trying to get Peter to come and give a talk for a few years. And it's really wonderful that he is here. I could say a lot about him, and I won't. But we have been friends and collaborating. And it was a wonderful thing for me to be able to work with Peter on his book, his first book for publication called Approximations, which happened now about 15 or 16 years ago. And I think it took us quite some time to get to the point of having the book.

And of course since then, we've had many other encounters and conversations about other projects, which we also hope that there would be some other publications that will be happening. In addition to that book Approximations, Peter has also had a number of recent publications, one on drawings and another monograph about his work called Everything one invents is true, which was published last year and is, in a sense, a sort of companion publication to the book Approximations that was done in 2002. Why call the book Approximations? And in a way, in short, part of the reason is because the way in which Peter Markli works is always, in a sense, trying to approach some version, if you like, of the concept of the ideal, of ideality, and deliberately not achieving it, not to try and do things that essentially are perfect. So the concept of approximating the ideal and the notion of approximation itself was a very important, in a way,

phenomenon to use as a reference point for the book. The other thing that will probably become quite apparent in the presentation is that from the very beginning, from the very beginning of his training, thinking, and practice, Peter has had a number of very specific reference points, where he lived, where he studied, who he studied with. And I think from that early stage, two figures, one Rudolf Olgiati, the father of Valerio Olgiati that many of you know, and a sculptor called Hans Josephsohn that he will show were, in a sense, two reference points between architecture and sculpture. And the materiality of the work of Hans Josephsohn is obviously a very important presence in his work. The other thing is really the constant reference to history and the way in which history is very present in the project of contemporary architecture. And this is something that many of us have been discussing about the relevance of history and the manner in which we might be able to refer or utilize or

make history something that is present. But it's very difficult to speak about those things and for you to imagine Peter's practice as something which in some form or fashion is conventional, because it isn't. I think that his practice is very unconventional by contemporary standards. And I want to just read you a few lines from-because I was just going through the book that we did and I did in 2002-and just for you to capture something of the method or work. Because Peter basically works by himself, even though he has an office, which is an office that realizes his work and his production. But he himself works alone. So in the context of an institution, when someone like me constantly talks about collaboration, he is someone who is really, in some ways, very much working as an artist in a studio producing work, not in constant communication with others. So maybe these few lines

will give you a sense. It's a longer piece, so I won't read it. But just because this is the way that the book Approximation starts about Peter's work. It starts with a quote from Paul Cezanne to Charles Camoin in 1902 where he says, "I have little to tell you. Indeed one says more and perhaps better things about painting when facing the motive than when discussing purely speculative theories, in which, as often as not, one loses oneself." Like Cezanne, Peter Markli also believes that one can say better things about one's work when facing it, addressing it directly. Perhaps that is why despite a highly articulate formulation of his ideas, he has spoken little during a 20-year professional career that has produced some apparently simple yet remarkable buildings. Even by the usually reticent standards of Swiss architects, Markli has been more self-reflective than most.

He spends long periods thinking through every aspect of his projects from inception to realization, yet he has not previously documented his work in a systematic fashion. This publication will hopefully go some way towards remedying that intentional neglect. In many respects, Markli works in self-imposed exile from the normal conventions of running a practice. He works alone, and the studio where he spends most of the time developing the initial drawings and models for projects is in an anonymous, rundown, courtyard building close to the periphery of Zurich. That's how it used to be. That area has become much more fashionable now in Zurich, so in the last 15 years. But I'm saying these things just for you to get a flavor of the circumstance, the environment, the kind of conditions that an architect uses in order to find the productive conditions for his work and the way in which he oscillates constantly between drawing in

a very direct way and how those drawings then become really part of the material of a building, an office building, an institutional building, and so on. It's a really incredible dedication and devotion to architectural practice. There's a lot more to say, but we should really hear from Peter Markli. And as you know, we have someone in San Francisco who's doing this simultaneous translation for us. It's a first for us. So with best wishes to Peter Markli, would you please welcome Peter. Thank you. [applause] [speaking german] I welcome you cordially to this presentation. My profession was art of buildings, which means that that became my language. Art of building means that with your profession-that is, the art of building, but there are also painters, moviemakers, writers, and so on--

that you try to express your view of the world with your products, with your buildings. This is a very early building of mine. You can see it's a duplex residential house. I was very young at the time. I did have a language, but the language was still very limited because I was young. But I didn't have a small, limited feeling, emotion. The emotion is there. You don't need an education. My passion was great at this time. And passion, emotion, and language were still limited. And that was the building that I built for two families. And what I always was interested in was that the building has a mood, that it exudes something, has an appeal which can give the people some kind of dignity. This is the meaning of our profession, the purpose of our profession, whether it's a single building or urban planning project. The floorplan of the two-family. And here you see these circular elements which, for example, my students left out.

But these are so-called columns. And when architects today leave out the columns, it's legitimate, but they will have to be able to explain exactly why they are omitting them. And the column, in our profession, was the most expensive element that you could possibly have. And they have to take responsibility if they leave linguistic or language elements in the art of the building out or if they retrieve them, because some elements need to be retrieved, because the classical modern age cannot represent the entire future to come. But classical modernism has to be reviewed critically. Next slide, please. The next, please. [speaking german] In the middle, you'll find this two-story hall. Then you have the interior of one. Next, please. [speaking german] And a photograph of the outside. You can see there is a little door frame. And I would like to explain to you with these three

photographs how I arrived at this type of design. I was there visiting. And we mostly discussed this area that I pointed out in that building. This is a place where much was invested in. And Rudolf Olgiati has built in these areas where they had these archaic columns. And about the chapter structure, he said that there needed to be an intermediate space between the columns and what is behind. So it's floating over the columns. And every chapter structure that has been built has this same function. It's an architectural element that will always produce shadow. And if a leaf is shown on the chapter structure, then it is the element in a tree that can carry the least load. So building does not always mean to show how heavy a load is but to try to abstract from the load to dematerialize. And this is what I was using here. This model from Rudolf Olgiati.

And the general model was this Roman-style church. And you see that elements were taken from there. And together with the columns, it has gotten this design. It was said at the outset that I got to know the sculptor Hans Josephsohn during my studies. And at that time, big museums were built in Paris, for example. And we had these fantastic discussions that we could actually make a building, one specifically designed for his works in Switzerland. And this was then implemented in Ticino. In the north, you have the Alps. And in the south, to the south, you have the Gotthard line. So this is a very small place with a very nice Romance-style church. And the building is set in the situation between the river there. Next, please. And the structure of the building, the shape of the building is such that you see the traces of work. These are side views here. And these sculptures were

suitable for being lined up in rows. We selected two types of sculptures, reliefs and semi-sculptures. And we needed space around these sculptures. Height was not the most decisive element here. And as I said before, this building was designed specifically for these sculptures. And what I understand by the art of building is actually expressed in this area. The idea is the side view of the building. And the question when working on it was, can this narrow lower part cooperate-can two parts cooperate to create a joint impression? So these are traces of work. It's the same thing as when a writer starts to delete something. You see the variations here. Art of building means you have an idea, but that does not mean that you also are looking through variants that might be totally different, that you study variations.

And this is how it was eventually built. So there was a little recess built in through which incident light comes in. So light from the top asymmetrically placed. This is the ground plan, a very simple plan. For me, the question always is, what do you understand by imagination? What do you understand by language? Architecture is a language. There are conventions between people to be able to communicate. Or is language privatized in a manner so that the next person will not understand it? The art of building is developed in a way that you definitely have to create a relationship with the past. There has to be a connection to the past. You cannot reinvent or invent yourself. And what you do must appear fresh and novel in terms of current conditions but not detached from our past, from what has been there before. So we look into the past

and rebuild the future. So you have to decide for yourself how much you allow of that to get into your work. So the ground floor is really very simple. You have these various chambers. And you have a general rectangular long stretch with two doors in the middle. And these are the spaces in which these sculptures were exhibited. And this is the only space, so the doors are of the same length. And the asymmetrical is depending on the situation. So the access door is facing away from the village. You will see that later. If that was a supermarket, the door would be on the other side. And the spatial can show you what my question always is when we discuss about the language of the art of building. If I personally walk around a building by, say, Frank Gehry, does it have various different sides? Or are these sides all uniform? And does this overall plan have more varied sides

than the building by Gehry? The other question is-and I'm saying that because I have traveled from far away-if I explain a language as the constructs-I'm interested like the deconstructivists in things like build horizontally or not build horizontally. And language, of course, is not complete. If I have to build horizontally for various reasons, I can leave the language. And I have not met yet any deconstructivist who would want to eat his food from a table that is askance. And these are the questions that you have to ask young people from all the offers that are available today. What is the language you wish to speak? The sectional view, different room heights. And this is how you approach the building from the village. You have the top light there. There's just a transparent plate with Japanese films. It lets diffused light into the building and no shadows at all. Here you see this small entrance.

You have to get the key down from the village, and then you can enter the museum there. Can you go back one? One, one. Yeah. [speaking german] So that was the drawing. And this idea is not far away from what was eventually built. These are early works by Josephsohn created in the 1950s. In inverted commas, abstract reliefs, then the deep space with these plastic reliefs, this row of plastic reliefs. And here is the room with the sculptures. They have to be away from the wall and be on pedestals. So the spatial reaction is important. Here it was a real experiment, because there was no comparable building. So this is a fairly narrow room. Usually if you try to place such sculptures, you will make the room wider. And what we wanted was that the sculptures speak for themselves and are not arranged within a space.

These small chambers for doing a 90-degree movement. It's a very rough concrete. And we then got a contract to build new headquarters building for Synthes company on a former military premises. And this building is used to produce surgical parts for all the bone fractures, like screws and other parts needed to heal fractures. This is the former barracks, the military object that was here. This first building is protected under the Monument Act. The urban planning situation is it's close to a river outside of the city of Solothurn. We designed this building in connection with the Baroque city. This long building and the arsenal were taken, and between the two, a space was created. The contractor wanted an underground parking space there. And we said, you cannot do that here. We wanted to have the parking space out here so that the longitudinal building, this oblong building, gets a specific design.

We included parking decks and extended the arsenal with these parking decks. So the entire area was usually thought to be meant for the public. These are the sketches we made. This is the top view. They are different from the drawings, because the drawings, they look into the language, into the design of the building, and these sketches, they capture such different things, like the positioning, this urban planning situation, the way the building looks in its environment. And that was the centerpoint first. And step by step, it was moved closer towards the river to create an urban space between the arsenal and the new building. And a large part of my work, which I love very much, is the search for an idea of a given spatial program that we translate or have to transcend into what later will-yes, of course, will fill the functions, but which also has a mood

that it reaches human beings, the soul of human beings. So these sketches, these ideas are always made on smaller sheets of paper, A4 letter size. You see the arsenal here again, the parking decks, and this vertical element of the new building and the driveway and the river. This is very economical as far as cost is concerned. And I recommend that you never forget about all these offers that today that you need to draw all by hand still. Economical means you can carry it with you in your pocket. You can take it out in a cafe. And art in general is highly economical and efficient. It is very important to say different things with one and same element. If a building has superfluous parts, then it's no longer art of the building. We have to look to what we need to express our feelings and everything that is too much has to be found and be left out. And that is the great art.

It is not great art to overdo it. To know what precisely expresses my abilities, current abilities in the moment, and what expresses the program, that is decisive. Here again you have a ground floor plan of the arsenal. You see a high roof and these super verticals. So this is now a project drawing of the arsenal with the parking decks in the back. It was applied stones. It's the same stones used to build the Baroque city center. And also the new building has parts of this typical material of the town, together with other materials, of course. A sectional view here. And then these wonderful-for me-- wonderful works where you just have dots, nothing but dots. And these dots sometimes can mean an architectural element or a tree. And when you look through it in diagonal, these incredibly complex structures are developed. This is the ground floor of that building. Here we have the

parking structure. So the ground floor is structured such that it has an entrance into the yard. This is a representative entrance. There is not a single separation between these spaces. It's just the way in which the materials or stairs that were used inside, you can see that you either come from one side to the other or vice versa. There's a formal hall, a lecture hall. Yeah, this is the lecture hall here. A room for practical exercises and the workshop. So this is asymmetrically styled along the river. In the upper stories, we propose that this is the actual communication surface, communication area. So you can create individual office spaces up there. How do you arrive at the design? I think that's the story of our profession is that you prepare for every day, and then you have some sort of a vocabulary on which you can build and process a project. This is a very small sketch.

But this sketch is very important for me, because sketches can make things that are of iron cast. If you draw them 100 times, no longer that iron cast. And the same we find in mathematics, if you know an equation, you can derive others from it. And if you do not know the equation and only a derivation, it is possible to discover some way that hasn't been seen before. And these sketches are exactly the same. You have these clusters here, and they've coincided in one point from the vertical elements. And I made several sketches. Once again, you see the chapter structure is in the horizontal plane. It starts with a small relief here. And it optically guides the eye very strongly into this horizontal play. And afterward, you find nodes between elements. Here is everything in the horizontal plane. And we submitted this sheet for a competition. You see the ancient architects looked at it this way.

You have the column. You have the superstructure reliefs. And we took all that that you see on the left-hand side, and it was summarized in this node here. And this is the consequence of these drawings. The element in this building, the vertical element, it was then split up and the node. These are the parking decks. And if everything gets these stone applications, then it will be more expensive. And so we just applied them here and there. And these interspaces emerged because they wanted to have a joint here. And so we left a large interspace. The material from this arsenal and then applied to this other structure, applied to this concrete structure. And you see the pavement there. It is cobblestoned. You see the columns here at some spacing. The new building is in this big landscape area, so the spans are enormous. And what we thought is

the so-called facade is not that alone, but in combination with this part. And this basically makes up the general appearance. And so it's bound back with the help of this node there. Whether this is a residue of a classic socket is a different question. And in this portion, we address the scale of the people that are moving about in here. These pillars were painted with a color of white so that the gray color can shine through. Next, please. Next, please [speaking german] Here you see these nodes again moving all the way to the top. This is the entrance hall with the main staircase on this side, very lofty and a very bright atrium. And then these corner rooms, where you have a number of rooms to hold meetings in. And I was not just an architect. I had also friends who were artists. I knew painting. I knew sculptures. And I had no difficulty to

work with these new conditions in architecture, because I had very many language options that I discovered in architecture from painting and from sculpturing, sculpturing as far as joining things and as far as painting is concerned, this wall, for example. Only half of the material is on a gray priming. This is the portion where the workshop is. This table and the workshop, everything is open. And then we have curtains as part of art elements in the building. Various students had project proposals, and these are what they proposed for these spatial curtains built like tubes. The lecture hall. Once again, curtains and rods. And the informal lecture hall, where you come in. You find the textile material here, a leather, incorporated here. The offices. And here you have a view of the interspace. Back, the view towards this Baroque city. And the view towards the river.

It's a column building. And now we are coming to a studio house. We were asked to build it by two musicians. And they were talking about a spatial program, a house where the workplace formed the center of the house and the rooms that you would normally call your living rooms were organized practically like the crust of a bread around the studio. This is the situation. Very modest buildings, very beautiful landscape. This is sketch showing the height lines, the entrance. And number one would be the studio. Another sketch of how you approach this structure and the facade for this entrance situation. And in this section, you can see it was important to me that the roof did not have exactly the same inclination as the slope had but went into the same direction. And then there is a basement only here in the front. Otherwise, we would have to dig out material at the back. And the side facing the valley is open, very open with these layered, fragmented

walls that create shadows. So the actually surrounding wall that goes around here is not repeated in the upper story, because that would have a dramatic effect. This is a ground floor plan. There's a very small curvature here. And the entrance goes directly into the studio, or this way. Here is a narrow room, living room and kitchen. And upstairs, where you have a bathroom, a toilet, very narrow rooms for the children. And it was built in this manner and integrated. It fits into this landscape. And you can see these layered walls. Otherwise, it looks very much like a conventional building. So what we [inaudible] here most of all is this wall that faces the valley. You see a very big gutter, and the wooden structures between these concrete wall elements. This is the building where the people lived in-had a budget. The budget has nothing to do, in my view, with the art of the building.

The question is if an architect can handle a budget or not. If you have a smaller budget, that doesn't mean you cannot create any art, and it doesn't automatically mean that the spaces have to be small. But the main topic is the people in Switzerland, [inaudible] people in Switzerland, have this idea. And what I know, that for some of them, the toilet bowl or a golden water tap is more important than the actual space. But these owners of the building were very open to any ideas. And I made a drawing of the house and met with the owners. And then it was too expensive for them. And then we just sat together at the table and talked about places where we can save money. And we did not give up any square foot of space. So it's a bituminous roof. It has electrical bottom. And the walls were protected because they were not-they're just walls, not visible, and painted a little bit. And we used a type of insulation called foam glass, which is black.

And we left these black parts of the insulation deliberately visible. So we have bricks, white collar, red outlets, and black insulation. This is the kitchen. It is mobile, so you can move it around. This is a gas range and oven. The bricks here are painted up to a certain height, also not all the way down. And you see the wall is a little rougher, and the gray color shines through. The gray from the concrete can be an element, and the red of the brick can be part of the design, and the black of the insulation can be part of the design. So all together, if it works, is essential and very beautiful house built with very simple materials. And another building can be as beautiful using more exclusive materials. And both can have the same level of art in them. Here you see the furnishings, a floor lamp and various instruments, a big table, a fireplace. Working and living area completely unified.

There's the insulation. And they happen to have a closet like that. The shower and bathroom. And so this light up there, we made a frame, a white frame so that we could put the electric cable down. And we knew we would make this type of framework. So this is the general light, not the vanity light or intimate light that you sometimes also have in a bathroom. Next is the film, please [speaking german] For the first time in my life, I had a video camera in my hand and did something. And an employee of mine actually made it visible what I did there. [music playing] And put music to it. That was the [inaudible]. [music playing] And then we had dinner in there together with the musicians. The last person you saw is the composer. Many thanks for your attention. [applause] I hope you have some questions for Peter.

There's so many issues that are raised in the work. And I'd rather we devote the time to your questions. I'm always happy, as you know, to be the person asking questions. We already have a hand out here. Could we get a mike here? And you can use-This? Yeah. Thank you so much for the lecture. Can you hear in German? I have a few questions about your relationship with Hans Josephsohn. Wait, wait, [inaudible]. So one of the work that you showed, the museum for his sculpture, the proportion to me, the sculpture, the proportion of sculpture inside of the building-the proportion of the building, they somehow match together very perfectly. But because the works, the sculptures are old, they're not going to shrink-but I wonder if you would have another museum for him of relatively new

works and the works are going to shrink, I assume, then how do you-I'm just curious how important the dimension of the sculpture is to your building. And if the sculpture shrinks, then would you be irritated? [music playing] I'm sorry. First of all, these sculptures can be exchanged, can be moved around. The second is its typologies. And the typologies range from 1950 to the year 2000. So there are reliefs from the 1950s and reliefs from 2000. The third, the building, the entire structure and campus, is the most favorable house you can see for 40 sculptures. The question is if it's effective or not. And if it is effective. Now I know, well, I was about 30 years old back then. Then I today don't know if I had another opportunity to create a place for this sculptor Josephsohn, what this would look like. I have no idea. But I do have ideas to answer your question how I would build museums.

But we all lose these competitions when we propose these, because they are nonconformist. And you will actually make a statement what is decisive and important for the future. And if you talk about art, art basically belongs to the people. And I am asking myself, I'm wondering why all our museums are so bunker-like, why they are-I know about insurance issues and this and that. But one could create a more open, or at least the appearance of a more open and more inviting design. And I find it quite questionable how they're designed towards the outside, towards the audience, the visitors. I would be very interested to exhibit [inaudible] where a farmer goes by with his truck. And I have made this proposal, but it was not accepted. And once again, Alberto Giacometti would also be great. So there's many great things. But if I ever were to build something again for Josephsohn,

I think I would be most intrigued by needing even less money but be as good. That would be my incitement for the next project. And with these bronze sculptures, it's not difficult with the air of the climate in the room, the air conditioning of the room. It is the humidity that is damaging to paintings. If you have low humidity, you see paintings in old buildings and churches that survive. What I didn't quite understand is what you're shrinking, but you-- plastics? If you reduce the scale. So the art is dependent on the scale, right? So not shrinking. But if Josephsohn's sculptures are very big, if you were dealing with sculpture that was smaller-scale, would the scale of art and the architecture-OK, yeah. That's not the question of the size, never, never, because if you will give me a sculpture like that, I will build you a sock, enormous sock, that the sculpture became very big.

And you can [german]. And you can save a lot of money in doing so. [laughter] And if Josephsohn had very large or very tall sculptures-but this is a theoretical question which you actually are not allowed to ask, because if you see his reliefs and his references to human figure, his sculptures are just barely larger than a regular human being would be. I don't know. I cannot imagine if he had made monumental works of art. It's simply-- but as an architect, I could also accommodate a very large sculpture. Please. Hello. I would like to ask you in the way that history is important to you in context, as we saw in your lecture, how do you go about using history and not fall in the trap of using it just as an image but actually as the very complex thing that it is? How do you use the essence of history in your project? Thank you.

[speaking german] We have an advantage compared to art historians. We have to perceive history with our eyes and not by reading books. We are not bound to a chronology, but we are required. For our question, our things we need in the present, we have to look into the past to find potential answers. And art always means to build on previous art, previous work, and to transform it into present-day and future meanings. That is the process. And because our present in social matters as well as in building physical matters has completely new issues and questions, it is impossible to build in a retro style, because we have completely new questions that we need to answer. And if you take these seriously, every time has two, three very important issues which are answered in a sovereign manner when you accept the content

of these issues as issues and do not create readymade sculptures and transport them into the present. Form has to find itself in a new way every time. Otherwise, it is not topical, not current. If you have the American Expressionists, there's no need to paint them a second time, because the very specific conditions they had to get to their works. Do you know the article Barnett Newman in 1948 that he wrote in The Nation? It's very beautiful how he worded it. I don't even know if I can get it right from the top of my head. You want me to quote him? He said, based on the historical situation where he was and where the Europeans were, he also knew European art very well, that the Europeans always stick to the motive and the subject and cannot get away from it, not even Mondrian. And the Europeans were capable of taking these subjects and to transcend them into a spiritual world.

The American Expressionists had taken pure ideas, no subject, no topic, just a pure idea. And if it comes to transcending that into a spiritual world, they can transcend their abstract the world into a very real and perceivable world. And you as an architect always have a job, a program, that is, always try certain parameters. And you have to just take it as it is without whining about the budget or because there were parasites there and there are these problems, those problems with the electricity and because the craftsmen don't know what they're doing. Stop whining about all these issues. If you want to be an architect, take this dry program and translate it into an emotional, perceivable world. That is your job, simply speaking. And that's how you find your language. This means we have a subjective choice from history. Egypt, Renaissance, many thousands of years back, Renaissance, 500 years back,

are much more current for me-I could talk about it for two hours-than the classical modernism is. I find much more material for answering our today's questions back there. Thank you for your lecture. I was hoping that you could expand a bit upon the way that materiality and budget, what you spoke about both multiple times in the lecture, both inform the way that you design and how you approach a project. [speaking german] I can only talk about it in this way because I can only work when I am happy and work with joy. That the creation of material basically is not the first one in the hierarchy, hierarchy up there. The urban planning answer in conjunction with a program, that is at the top. And these decisions are made at an artistic level, but equivalent to that is a politically active person as well. And if you don't know anything about life and are not

politically engaged, you will not be able to create potential beauty, because beauty cannot be consumed like a piece of pie. And what motivates me is beauty. And I keep thinking, oh, I would like to be able to do that. This means I have an idea, an urban planning concept, a spatial structure that comes together without a surroundings, and then I have a budget. And if the principle lets me select materials, and it's not even many, it's the same to me, as beautiful as something else. So first, something has to be created. An idea has to come. And the idea does not come through the material, but the urban planning situation and the spatial situation. When you have an idea, it is small without any variation. But when you start working on it, it's like a character in a novel, that right of determined, but it gets its own life. You cannot see all its traits yet. But then in the history that is playing out, the character in the novel must add new traits of character.

And we have to work in constant communication with our plan. And the more we have on this plan, the more it speaks to you. And it's important to me that-and you apply two things at the same level, the being in love with your plan and an incredible distance to it that does not make you a slave of your plan, that lets you look at it from afar and see something like, wait, you have to move in this direction or in that. And as far as a plan has developed, the less free you will be. You will have to communicate on the way. This is the most important thing. And then you discover the more and more you work on it, you find ways and directions where to go. And unless you just have an ideology or pattern, rigid pattern how to build, this will create things, because you also change in the process. You will create things that you might not have been able to create two years ago, because you didn't

have the calmness. And now you're capable of using this material and can produce just as beautiful things that you thought two years ago that material is unsuitable for your work. And this is the way how you have to address it, and you know that the world is open towards the top. And you can piece by piece add and approximate whatever you would like to achieve. If you achieve something 100%, your world becomes limited or you're just at the target close to the sun. You've reached your goal. The point is something you do not quite achieve 100%. And that's the nature of things. And I do not know an absolute masterpiece at all. I know wonderful masterpieces only. Well, I didn't say much about material. But I accept every material that you would give me. And then I say, well, let's see. Maybe we'll find something. We can do something with it. And I would be open. I would always compare it to sculptures, sculpting

and painting. Look at painters or sculptors. A sculpture by that sculptor, it could have been said that he wasn't able to show sensuality of the body. He had this motive in the face and the body of his main model who had a sensual model. He did not have a real subject there. And then he invented this wonderful foot. He knew everything about history. He knew about Etruscan sculptures. And he made these wonderful sculptures. And if you cut out a piece, this small piece of this sculpture, will be very different from an archaic sculpture of the Greeks, because here even a fragment contains a little bit of a substance. That's our novel, our new times. We can reach the same level in art, but we have become way more vulnerable, much more vulnerable, I say. But we can create participation in art. So we heard you speak of proportion before, but--

[speaking german] Yeah, sure. I'd like to do that. I could talk until tomorrow, if you have that many questions. If one has to say things in one hour-and proportion has always something to do with measurements and dimensions. Like back then when I was a young man, these proportions and measurements are an important element, to give an idea, substantial and indestructible content. My drafts have a basic stability that is indestructible and cannot be destroyed at the building site. For example, if the foreman is in a bad mood because he has-whatever the design is, the proportions provide stability to the house. And they go way over the question of materials used. And what systems you need, proportions, dimensional systems in numbers, that is open. You have to decide for yourself how this all works. You can write the numbers down in the plans.

But if you have this basic stability in your draft, in your design, the house, the building, or the urban space will always be good. Whether a simple material is used and it's correctly built or an inexpensive material is used, the most tragic buildings for me are those that have bad dimensions and want to cover it up with very expensive applications of materials. I'm sorry for these buildings. The dimensional design is much farther up in the hierarchy. So when you determine your dimensions, no one will talk you out of it. No one will even interfere with you, and it doesn't cost any money. And this is the area where the main stability of a building comes from. And therefore I recommend that you deal with the measurements, dimensions, and seek to implement that. I don't know a nice beautiful German word about the teaching. Our architectural profession works via emptiness and not

via the fullness. We think the first draft is empty at first. Between two elements there's space, empty space. The empty space in between our elements can build an almost electrical tension. The air in between can be just normal, commonplace, or it can be exciting. And the dimension, the measurement between, if there's no tension, the building will have less constant appeal. But whatever we do, it's always how we handle the emptiness between the spaces and the stability. To provide tension to the empty spaces is what you determine by giving measurements to both the material elements as well as the emptiness. And you have to measure out so many sketches and translate it into dimensions. And if you work with a proportion system, and if you have an accurate line, you can make an approximation to the left or right, and in our system even,

at the center once again. And that's where the tension is. And the deceitful thing of a sketch is is that it deviates from the orthogonal. And that's why I sometimes say, in a facade, should we move the line a little bit inward or outwards to provide tension to the overall facade? And this is something that takes a lot of work, a long period of work where you have to find out where these dimensions are and how they relate to one another to create this tension that you need to achieve. And that costs. That is work. That takes a lot of time. And because I was a dropout during my studies, I couldn't make the drawings. And therefore I dealt with it later and found a dimensional system, which is basically based in very simple geometric shapes, the triangulum, the golden section as the main ratio. And from there you go to 1/8, 1/16. And people keep asking me, does this have something

to do with music? And I'm saying no, not with music. It's just simple what I've found. The triangulum is very close to 7/8, and the golden section is very close to 5/8. And because I'm combining the discussions about these two concepts, the triangulum and the golden sections, I said I combine these to some extent. I work with these. And division is only allowed by even numbers, so 8, 16, and so on, never 3, 5. And the computer loves it when it gets integral figures. Computer likes precise numbers. A computer is a very good tool. It's an instrument. Sorry, the dimensions I meant, not the computer. They're an instrument to use. So can the computer. Peter, thank you very much. [speaking german] Thank you very much for a great lecture. Thank you very much to our translator in San Francisco. [applause]

Thank you. As you can tell, this conversation can go on for quite some time. I think Peter just mentioned the word computer at the very end. And the relationship between the hand drawing and the computer could be, of course, the subject of a much longer discourse and discussion. But what I hope has been made clear is way in which Peter works is really very, very different than so many other experiences that we see today. And his relationship just to the drawing, the thickness of the pencil, the relationship between the body and the drawing itself that really produces the final outcome is all part of a longer conversation around this question of precision and clarity and the way in which the ambiguity of the line itself is actually part of the procedures of thinking and revealing. And there's a lot more about history and his love of the Romanesque and things like that. But hopefully he'll come back and he'll

spend more time with all of us and discuss these things. Really, thank you all very much. And I hope that you found the conversation productive. Thank you, Peter, for everything. Thank you. [applause]