Architecture as landscape: Kengo Kuma, Jean Nouvel, and the ambivalence of material experience

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary conceptual, perceptive and aesthetic potential of architecture to transform into landscape by means of materialization. Contrary to the former, modernistic principles of transparency, which eliminated the wall between the internal and external space on a literal, visual level, contemporary social and visual context create the prerequisites for establishing a new, ambivalent treatment of (de)materialization of the border between architecture and the landscape. Such transformation was interpreted in the paper as a consequence of the general change related to determination of architectural form, as well as change in the sphere of theory of perception. The ambivalent relation on the line subject-architecture-landscape relies in the paper on the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Juhani Pallasmaa, whereas the architectural actualization of the given concept was analysed on the example of two different authors? views - Kengo Kuma and Jean Nouvel. The emphasis on architectural experience, rather than on the architectural image, places the material in the domain of the main framework of this concept, whether based on its tactile (Kuma) or imaginary value (Nouvel). Finally, in order to make architectural materiality a part of the natural environment, both design methods paradoxically shift the materials from their natural context (truth to materials), whereby, consequently, except for materiality, the perceptive experience of the place itself is relativized.nema