"Architecture isn't the most important thing," says Oscar Niemeyer; "What's important is life...." But it was the other way around for the Dutch "outsider" architect Gert Jan Willemse: "Willemse didn't make architecture to live in, but for life," says his professor Geert Bekaert in this issue. Willemse ended his own life, after careful preparations, at the age of 30. "For him it was finished." And his "autonomous architecture," constructed of tiny pencil dots on paper, was more final than it could ever have been as "built" in this world.

"I dedicate my work to Allah," wrote Mohammed Atta, a graduate student in urban design at the Technical University of Hamburg, at the beginning of his thesis, entitled "The Conflict between Islam and Modernization in Aleppo, Syria." After leaving school, he too carried out a carefully planned suicide when he took over the cockpit of a 747 and aimed it toward one of New York's twin towers. Again, life was less important than a higher cause. And like Willemse's tiny gray dots, the World Trade Center was ultimately immaterial: "Just dust." And in the form of dust, architecture became final.

If, as Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen writes in "Columns of Fire," "creation and destruction are a symmetrical unit..." and if fire "heralds a new and fresh beginning," then the destruction of the WTC , in biblical terms, might have been predicted. But whichever contemporary names and faces we insert into John Martin's painting The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah on the cover, whichever people are fleeing their burning city without looking back, this destruction has created no clean slate; the world is still a mess.

On September 11th, hunch 4 was well underway, focusing not on the either/or extremes of architecture and life, but on this "mess" of reality - the complex negotiations between the profession of architecture/urbanism and the changing world. Confronting and understanding the mess is the aim of the Stealth Group, four architects who work like scientists in the laboratory of Belgrade.The beauty of this "Wild City" is that its uncontrolled growth yields its own solutions. Stealth asks: can Belgrade's successful systems of "self-organization" be consciously applied? As the name, Stealth, suggests, there is a sneaky quality to these kinds of interventions; they bypass whatever "official" channels for change exist - if they exist at all - and very gradually, almost imperceptibly, identify new ones. Stealth exerts a certain resistance from within the mess; they are the city's rebel-angels.

To venture into the mess, rather than to seek an "autonomy" of architecture, is of course what Rem Koolhaas has been doing all along, in his research from Delirious New York to Pearl River Delta to Lagos, Nigeria. But to build - to physically confront, or even take part in the mess - is a different task. The two new Guggenheim Museums, implanted in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, are OMA's dialogues with what Koolhaas calls "Junkspace," where the borders between "junk" and "Architecture" are both exaggerated and diffused.

If, in Las Vegas, culture (The Guggenheims) have been "folded into" commerce (the Venetian Hotel and Casino), and counter-culture (the motorcycle) has in turn been folded into culture in the opening exhibition. "The Art of Motorcycle," then what's left? Once a symbol of rebellion, the motorcycle is institutionalized and sterilized, even endorsed by Hollywood actors, displayed "with no traces of use," reports Jeff Derksen, "[no] mud on a fender, tire wear, exhaust pipes burnt blue..."

If Koolhaas here is jumping in, as opposed to Willemse's stepping out, we might ask ourselves what the messages and motives are behind OMA's museums in regard to the culture of consumption they confront. Does OMA embrace the forces of commercialism? Does it resist them? Or is OMA, like the motorcycle, part of the system, with no traces of mud?
As Koolhaas states in hunch 3: we need "... to investigate whether within the current economy we could define a more ideological position, have ideas, a program." In hunch 4 Pier Vittorio Aurelli and Irene Amanti Lund answer Koolhaas's call for a more "critical judgement". Their statement, "From Nothingness to Nothing at All, " "...might engender emotions that could turn into a debate. That was the initial point of it all, wasn't it?" In fact, hunch, like the Berlage Institute itself - aims to function as a platform for debate and research - one which encourages progress in the form of dialogue, rather than silence.

Very early one Sunday morning not so long ago, after meticulous preparations, four guys working in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center in New York constructed their own private balcony on the 91st floor, just for "the pleasure you absorb when being totally dependent on a structure and atmosphere you have created yourself." Ten minutes later, they dismantled the balcony. The project was successful. They didn't get caught. They achieved the desired pleasure.


for a supsription on hunch, please contact:
Bruil & Van der Staay


links:
The Berlage Institute
 hunch 4
Jennifer Sigler [ed.]
graphic design: Mick Morssink
ISBN 978-90-xxx
language: English
paperback | 192 pp | 30 x 16.5
price
€ 15.00 [netherlands]
€ 17.50 [europe]
€ 19.50 [outside europe]