ON BIOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE // Simone Egger
Stipulations
How can a life be described? What is to be said about a person? What characterises a biography? A life story depends on many different factors, stems from opportunities but also resistances that give rise to a career path within or result in exclusion from society. Each range of opportunities is tied up with a person’s habitus and is generally related to dispositions. Level of education and family social status, in combination with other constellations, determine where a path can lead.[1] The biographical should always be seen as a process and is always bound up with the characteristics that make up a person: personal preferences, talents, individual interests and independent decisions, inclinations and sometimes even quirks. Relationships with other people have a lasting effect on a life.
At the same time, cultural imprints or even collective experiences in resonance with political events and global developments influence the course of a biography in the local context. Various impressions can play a role in orientation – sometimes, just a few impulses are enough. It is the interpretation of contemporary events that fundamentally affects a family. Some moments become more manifest than others; sometimes, a connection also emerges that dominates a career progression. In particular, how private life and profession interact, whether the areas are linked or exist separately, is also of key relevance to the biographical. Every day we move in built spaces; we live, inhabit, work in houses and use buildings that influence us, shape our actions, make us think and breathe easier or depress us. The qualities of the environment, in turn, affect life.
In retrospect, an autobiography is likely to emphasise different aspects in its presentation to those in a biography, which looks at the life-world of another, more or less familiar person from the outside. In this respect, “biography […] is a social construction that emerges in interaction between the actions and perspectives of social individuals. This means that the perspective of the self and the perspective of others are also intertwined.”[2] The educational scientist Bettina Dausien emphasises the moment of construction of meaning and constructing in general, which is inherent in biographical narration, but also in writing a biography.[3] Against what background and with what knowledge is a biography written?
What can be understood as the expression of a life? Material as well as immaterial things that have been produced, and/or the family that continues to exist beyond one’s own life and can bear witness to a person? A catalogue raisonné is also a curriculum vitae. For Günther Domenig, architecture, building and design were a medium of the biographical. The design of a structuralist, brutalist or even deconstructivist building translated into his language what moved the artist-architect personally and occupied him professionally. How these areas relate to each other in each phase of a life has to do with the facets of an identity, situational condition and the circumstances in which – in this case – Domenig’s works were created.
Because he grew up in the 1930s and 40s, patriarchal notions of masculinity influenced his manner. His handling of his own feelings should be viewed in the context of the 20th century, National Socialism and the consequences of the war. Regarding the silence between the generations and among their representatives after 1945, the psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich speak in their popular study of the “inability to mourn”.[4]
Violations
The tree is an iconic image that is often employed when it comes to visualising family structures. The motif stands for the time dimension of family, connecting generations through what has grown from the roots to the top of the tree. The sketched ideal necessarily includes breaks: sickness and death constantly cause branches to die off. However, this linear scheme does not reflect differences in content or antipathies. Emotions such as love or close bonds, essential for understanding a life-world, have no place in the image of the tree – nor do the effects of climate change related to nature or the social. Nevertheless, seismographic traces of what has been experienced over decades and centuries are inscribed in the tree’s rings.
Günther Domenig was born and grew up in Klagenfurt in 1934. The architect was connected to Carinthia and yet was always in revolt against the landscape and its people. For Domenig, his parents’ ideological convictions as National Socialists, in particular, were a subject that preoccupied him throughout his life. He used planning and building as a way to grapple with the political beliefs of his father and mother and with National Socialism in general. With a view to the development of the “Chicago School of Sociology”, the cultural scientist Rolf Lindner emphasises the importance of what is known as the “life history” method, which sociologist Edward Burgess had established in the 1920s. His colleague Robert Ezra Park, the pioneer of the “Chicago School” and originator of independent social research in the USA, also attached great importance to the study of biographies. “To Park’s mind,” Lindner reflects, “biographical material […] is not only of scientific value, but serves directly to fulfil what was the main aim of Park’s sociology, namely, to develop the ability to put oneself in the position of other people, in order to know and understand other people better, and thus bring about mutual understanding (verstehen), a common universe of discourse”.[5]
The Steinhaus (stone house) on Lake Ossiach, built over more than twenty-five years between 1982 and 2008, represents the lengthy process of working through one’s own family history. The sculptural building can be read as an autobiographical figuration that refers to a very specific network of interrelations. Very rarely do bonds and fractures become evident in such a striking way. Visitors can sense the rifts that affected the conception of the building and can still be physically felt in the present – even after the architect’s death. The deconstructivist building unfolds towards the water, seems to open up, and yet is not an inviting forum, not a dwelling. The Steinhaus offers no warmth or shade; instead, its atmosphere conveys some of the turmoil that the architect’s family evoked in him. In its inhospitableness, this site of biographical significance also led to new hurt. Both vulnerable and harmful – to himself and others – is a characterisation that comes up time and again in descriptions of the architect. At the same time, the architect’s skill in shaping such a complex design in collaboration with his team makes a stunning impression.
Interrelations
Although childhood experiences accompany a person throughout their life, Günther Domenig also took up positions both professionally and privately that took him away from Carinthia. “The life-world, understood in its totality as a natural and social world,” writes sociologist Thomas Luckmann, building on Alfred Schütz’s ideas, “is the arena, as well as what sets the limits, of my and our reciprocal action. In order to actualise our goals, we must master what is present in them and transform them.”[6]
Luckmann understands the concept of Lebenswelt, or life-world, as a reality “which we modify through our acts and which, on the other hand, modifies our actions.”[7] Günther Domenig went to study at the TH Graz; he worked as an architect with various partners – with Eilfried Huth, Hermann Eisenköck and Herfried Peyker or Gerhard Wallner – and taught for a long time as a university lecturer himself. Domenig was a professor at the Institute of Building Theory, Housing and Design and spent years training and supervising students. In the end, he also died in Graz.[8]
“Trying to understand a career or a life as a unique and self-sufficient series of successive events without any other link than association with a ‘subject’ (whose consistency is perhaps only that of a socially recognise proper name) is almost as absurd as trying to make sense of a trip on the metro without taking the structure of the network into account, meaning the matrix of objective relations between the different stations.”[9] As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, the project of tracing the path of a life cannot predominantly be about reconstructing a stringent curriculum. Bourdieu is critical of the fact that this idea is nonetheless all too often attached to the biographical. However, the course of a life is neither linear nor coherent. Given this commonly assumed link, the social scientist and anthropologist speaks of a biographical illusion. In his opinion, when dealing with a life story, it is not necessary to first look for continuous lines but rather to ask about changes of place and shifting placements in social space.[10]
It is always changed positions that make up a biography in the form of a chain of interlocking social surfaces. Bourdieu describes the social surface as a “collection of positions simultaneously occupied at a given moment of time by a biological individual socially instituted […].”[11] One can understand a social ageing only in this sense if the “successive states of the field”[12] have been included in which this development is to be placed relationally. According to Bourdieu, a trajectory can only be put together if “the collection of objective relations link the agent considered […] to the collection of other agents engaged in the same field and facing the same realm of possibilities.”[13]
Locations
In the words of the philosopher Gernot Böhme, the oeuvre of an architect – Domenig’s oeuvre – can be described as aesthetic work.[14] The building as a designed space has an aura that can be conveyed from the object to the subject via atmospheres – provided the recipient is open to such an aesthetic experience, as historian Gertrud Lehnert comments.[15] Aesthetic making is connected with the frequently implicit knowledge of which means can create certain atmospheres. In his explanations, Böhme takes as an example the art of garden design, which on the one hand, focuses on what determines an area and which elements – wood, water, stone – distinguish a landscape, but on the other hand, can also perceive what is to be placed aesthetically in interaction with the conditions in order to create atmospheres or to quote them. The knowledge associated with this, mostly not explicitly formulated, is in turn linked to power, a power that uses “neither physical force nor commanding speech”.[16] “It acts on the human condition, it affects the mind, it manipulates the mood, it evokes emotions. This power does not appear as such, it acts on the unconscious. Although it operates in the realm of the sensual, it is more invisible and more difficult to grasp than any other force.”[17] With these characteristics, aesthetic work is also of interest for economic, religious or political contexts; in view of its potential for staging, the examination of atmospheres must especially include its critical analysis, as Böhme repeatedly emphasises.
Applied to designing, planning and construction, a building such as Domenig’s exhibition space at the Heft inscribes itself in the landscape because the architecture starts from the situation, incorporates the industrial heritage, and simultaneously develops an independent position. The postmodern structure allows for the simultaneity of past and present. It is characterised by connections on the inside, while – viewed from the outside – it seems to cut sharply into the hilly landscape. “The architect […] creates […] [atmospheres], more or less consciously. The sensory items he employs, the colours, the surface form, the lines, the arrangements and constellations he creates are at the same time a physiognomy from which an atmosphere emanates. […] What the philosopher should remember, on the other hand, is that it is never merely about the design of an object, but always at the same time about the creation of the conditions of its appearance.” [18] The extent to which there is a political intention behind such a setting or the created element is evaluated politically leads to a discourse that is connected beyond architecture to the mental state of people who feel touched by it in some way, sometimes even irritated.
Translations
Between 1970 and 1972, Günther Domenig and his partner Eilfried Huth designed a temporary restaurant in the park and a free-standing pavilion in the swimming hall in Munich’s Olympic Park, which was built for the 1972 Summer Games according to plans by Günther Behnisch’s Stuttgart office. The spectacular construction is also described in the official documentation of the 1972 Olympics: “The restaurant is located in the hall space as a large walk-in sculpture. It is divided into two levels, the area for swimmers with a self-service counter on the foyer level and the area for guests in street clothes who can enter directly from the outside.”[19] Different areas flow into each other, forming an island in the otherwise open space. In 2022, 50 years later, the organic installation in selected colours no longer exists, although it was to have outlasted the Games in terms of its functions.
“The pavilion was dismantled in 1992 with almost no fuss and removed from the swimming hall under the tent roof, while the Olympic Park as an ensemble is now a listed building.”
Thinking about architecture can start from specific sites and, for its part, rationally and aesthetically measure buildings employing placements and changes of location from different standpoints. Starting from the built spaces, questions arise: What remains of a biography? What remains of an architect? What survives of a person? The biographical is always linked to the evaluation of personal achievement or recognition by others. As a young architect in Klagenfurt, Günther Domenig designed a private residence on the Lendkanal, which was not declared a historical monument until decades later because this episode was no longer known to anyone who could or wanted to put the building into context. On the other hand, Günther Domenig was a prominent figure who had an impact beyond his own life-world, received many awards and attracted much attention as a public persona, not only because of his designs.
Some works by the architect continue to exist after his death, can be found in prominent places, are used, modified, are preserved in their form. Other works are now overgrown, demolished, unused, also because they require an occupation that stands in the way of an overly straightforward conversion. Buildings such as Restaurant Nord in the Munich Olympiapark were only ever temporary from the outset. Some plans were always to be interpreted as utopias that were not necessarily meant to be realised. “Medium Total” was designed by Domenig and Huth at the beginning of the 1970s as an autonomous cosmos and was integrated as a concept into the realisation of the Olympic buildings. The biographical also depends on such chains that must be revealed in order to gain an understanding of the thinking and expression of a person.
Physically tangible, accessible objectivations such as buildings are inextricably linked to the lives of architects and planners and manifest an understanding of the world in built form. What is implicitly and explicitly mediated can change from situation to situation. Built sites do not represent an aesthetic idea but rather evoke atmospheres that allow the viewer to physically feel what it might mean. At the interface of situational appearance and sensory experience, the experience of architecture is, in the words of the philosopher Jürgen Hasse, of great importance in the process of consciousness formation and for the constitution of – biographical – knowledge.[20] Intention and reception do not have to be congruent. Architectural sociologist Heike Delitz also points to sensing, which plays such an essential role in the perception of built spaces.[21] The architecture created by Günther Domenig continues to evoke effects in different states. In order to explore the biography of the man and his oeuvre and grasp approximately what makes the architect who he is, we have to pick up many different threads in the archive or on-site. We need to consider images and plans, the known and the unknown, the existing and the no longer existing and finally, always to feel what a building or plan actually carries within itself as an interface in a fabric.
Sources:
[1] See Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press 1984
[2] Bettina Dausien, Bettina 2020: Biografie. In: Schinkel, Sebastian; Hösel, Fanny; Köhler, Sina-Mareen; König, Alexandra; Schilling, Elisabeth; Schreiber, Julia; Soremski, Regina; Zschach, Maren (eds.): Zeit im Lebensverlauf. Bielefeld: Transcript 2022, pp. 73 – 80. Here: p. 78 – 79
[3] See Dausien 2020: p. 76
[4] See Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich: Von der Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. Munich: Piper 1977
[5] Rolf Lindner: The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, pp. 134 – 135. Here: p. 135
[6] Thomas Luckmann, Alfred Schütz: The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1973, p. 6
[7] Luckmann; Schütz 1973, p. 6
[8] See Sylvie Aigner (ed.): Emanzipation und Konfrontation. Band II: Architektur aus Kärnten seit 1945 und Kunst im öffentlichen Raum heute. Vienna, New York: Springer 2008, p. 264
[9] Pierre Bourdieu: Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998, p. 258
[10] Bourdieu 1998: ibid.
[11] Ibid.: p. 216
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] See Gernot Böhme: Atmosphäre. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995, p. 34.
[15] See Getrud Lehnert: Raum und Gefühl. In: Gertrud Lehnert (ed.): Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung. Bielefeld: Transcript 2011, pp. 9 – 25. Here: p. 15
[16] Böhme 1995: p. 39
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.: p. 97.
[19] The Organising Committee for the XXth Olympiad (ed.): Die Spiele. The official report. 3 volumes (2, buildings). Munich 1972, p. 71
[20] See Jürgen Hasse: Die Aura des Einfachen. Mikrologien räumlichen Erlebens. Freiburg, Munich: Karl Alber 2017, p. 15
[21] See Heike Delitz: Architektursoziologie. Einsichten, Themen der Soziologie. Bielefeld: Transcript 2009, p. 86