Architekturbüro Riegler Riewe |  A Review

Marc Boutin, MAIBC

The simple is not simply simple. Roger Riewe.

This statement written inside the front cover of the Architekturbüro Riegler Riewe (ARR) monograph reflects not only a complexity in the work, but also alludes to the sensibility from which this work is derived. Characterized by the use of abstraction, simple forms, planimetric flexibility, and an investigation into the palpability of light through structure and materiality, it is an architecture that synthesizes strains of modern and postmodern thought in an attempt to project spatial conceptions beyond both of these ideological frameworks.

Riegler Riewe’s architecture is representative of a larger body of work emerging primarily from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The intention here is an interpretation of the underlying conceptions of this critical and important body of work, focussing on the work of ARR and the statements made by these architects in describing their own process.

The architecture of Riegler Riewe is strategically positioned in contemporary practice between a modernist exclusivity and a post-modern inclusivity. The advocacy of concepts that are limited to the essential, the economical, and the realizable, while defining function as the point of departure in the projection of minimal forms, reflects modernist sensibilities. These concerns contrast sharply with Riegler Riewe’s insistence on elevating process over product in an effort to deny the consumption of the building, a specifically postmodern intention that was well represented in the work of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi amongst others.

These seemingly contradictory intentions are synthesized through a fundamental conceptual shift in the design process. This shift witnesses a reorientation from function as the point of departure, to utilization as content. It is a redefinition that shifts an objective, exclusive, and defined paradigm, to an open-ended, evocative and inclusive paradigm - the creation of an architecture of conditioned openness. Where function implied the definition of an empirical purpose, utilization suggests a broader palette of occupation, an understanding that a building frames not only the performance of specific functions, but the manner in which the totality of human life unfolds in these endeavours. It is the unpredictability of this unfolding and its evolution over time that Riegler Riewe address through the generosity of a spatial freedom facilitated by minimum means.

This conceptual shift from function to utilization also resolves the dilemma inherent in modernism’s panacea of form follows function. The placement of a formal and symbolic burden on the factual by modern architects is most clearly represented by Hannes Meyer’s 1928 thesis Bauen, that proclaimed: “Building is nothing but organization: social, technical, economic, psychological organization.”[1] The impossibility of removing all subjective and formal mechanisms from the creation of architecture, a condition that could not be avoided by Meyer, is addressed by ARR. Utilization is analysed, not defined; removing the causal relationship between function and form, and instead investing in more open-ended and non-prescriptive space-making and form-making strategies that create opportunity for interpretation. In explaining the relationship between use, abstraction and form, Riewe states: “...we are interested in the display of utilization– in an open structure, which inevitably results in an abstraction of spatial and organizational dispositions.”[2] In this way, utilization as content, interpreted through abstraction, becomes the means to spatial fluidity and flexibility, dictating not a precise function, but a framing of the present and future potentials of that architecture.

Similarly, the conditioned openness projected by ARR challenges the limitations inherent in postmodern thought. The idea of the constructed is embedded deep within most postmodern thought, from the poststructuralist assertion that reality is relative and is in fact constructed, to the historical constructions explicit in post-modern historicism. Hal Foster, in his essay (Post)Modern Polemics, suggests that both practices are “symptoms of the same “schizophrenic” collapse of the subject and of historical narrativity - as signs of the same process of reification and fragmentation under late capitalism.”[3] While postmodern historicism understands architecture as a repository of stylistic attributes to be collaged, poststructuralist theory initiates a deconstruction of architecture within its own rules. Both practices, therefore, operate within a strategy of collage, endlessly recombining signs and forms in search of meaning.

By contrast, the meaning sought through conditioned openness is to be defined by those who occupy the building– the meaning is constructed by the user. This means to significance is especially relevant in regard to another school of thought that can be loosely called “place-making.” Here, as in the other examples of postmodern practice, the intentions of the architecture is to construct, in this case, constructing place through the careful definition of particular relationships between site and artefact. The central argument in Riewe’s theory of place to space is the provision of not a single and idealized conception of place defined by the architect, but of numerous and different potentials of place, defined by its occupation and the forces already present in the site. Again, ARR’s strategy is of a non-prescription of space and form that allows the inhabitants to take possession of their building, initiating a process of continual evolution between architecture and user.

TU Graz / Information and Electronics Institutes / 1993-1999 (Phase 1)	First Floor Plan and Interior View

In all their work, the objective of conditioned openness is made manifest in form through an investigation into abstraction and the “openness of orthogonality.” [4] Their design for the Information Technology and Electronics Institutes at the Technical University in Graz, Austria (1993-99) is a case in point. The site plan’s primary reading is that of an abstract tableau of parallel lines. Each “line” consists of two parallel bars of space, dimensioned to accommodate office space in one and teaching space in the other, with a thin skylit volume in between. In cases where no program exists, the bar is not built, resulting in a rupture within the simple form. This erosion of the building volume also results in the potential of other spatial connections, both in the interior and from the exterior. The project’s reading and experience, therefore, vacillates between a highly abstract and simple series of parallel and flexible spaces, to a complexity of connected multi-story spaces, interwoven with the exterior space. Riewe elaborates on their strategy of an architecture of multiple readings by stating that: “...this [simple] geometry is disintegrated in order to offer a wide range of spatial variations, architectural experiences, views and a variety of figures of movement...”[5] 

The potential for a broad spectrum of spatial experiences, generated from the open-endedness and flexibility of abstracted and simple forms, is consciously advanced by ARR’s investigation into material presence. In fact, Riewe insists that the development of the construction details and the selection of materials are the extension of the same design process. Specifically, he recognizes that the exploration into the details must commence during the analysis of the utilization, imbuing the design of the detail with the same conceptual questioning, thereby “...integrating it into the context of the task to be solved.”[6] The result of this conceptual investment in construction and the detail is a renewed potential for the creation of a building enclosure. Inherently, the design moves from the habitual limitations of an architectural facade to the potentials of its conception as a skin or an envelope. The development of the Bundesinstitut Für Sozialpädagogik (1994-98), in Baden, illustrates the inherent potentials in this conceptual investment. Here, Riegler Riewe redefined the building skin as a heat transfer system, excavating new potentials for architectural space and building envelope within the context of winter comfort. The thick wall of transparent and translucent glass also allowed for new relationships to arise between the user, the exterior and the mediating skin.

That these new relationships between the building occupant and their architecture create an initial level of friction is confessed by Riewe. However, he also suggests that: “A phase of irritation due to abstraction can well lead to a strong identification with the project.” In the end, Riewe’s conditioned openness suggests new avenues of architectural and spatial investigation, projected beyond the modern and the post-modern, whereby a heightened awareness of the potentials of contemporary architecture is well worth the initial period of irritation.

Notes:

1. Hannes Meyer, Bauen, originally published in Bauhaus Year 2, No. 4. Reprinted in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture. (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1984) p. 120.
2. Roger Riewe, lecture presented in Calgary, Canada, January 6, 1999.
3. Hal Foster, “(Post)Modern Polemics” in Recodings Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985). p. 132.
4. Roger Riewe, lecture presented in Calgary, Canada, January 6, 1999.
5. Roger Riewe, lecture presented in Calgary, Canada, January 6, 1999.
6. Roger Riewe, lecture presented in Calgary, Canada, January 6, 1999.

Marc Boutin, MAIBC is an Assistant Professor in the Architecture Program (Faculty of Environmental Design) at the University of Calgary and is the principal of Marc Boutin Architect.

Photo Credits:  Paul Ott