We start by asking not more than two questions to Wolker Kirchberg, one of the most interesting and representative German Sociologist, who teaches in the United States at the William Paterson Universityand in his country at Leuphana Universität.
Pierfrancesco Cravel: Whitin the general context of crisis of the project, how sociology as well as semiology,through your approach, can positively step into a dialogue with architecture since both your case history about Hamburg and Baltimore were demonstrating that weak cities, with less money and power have major chances of solving their own urban problems, which is quite far from the common sense. Shall we use your approach to' make the project process more authentic?
T Volker Kirchberg: It is very interesting that you used the word common sense because sociology always looks at words and somebody used a word like a New Order - which in Italy is also the name of a non costituitional party of the extreme right" n.d.r. -.... Wait a minute I don't like the words New Order consequently I don't like the word common sense because it implies that we already know what sense is, what makes sense so that there are some groups in society - most of architects actually work for them - that decide what is common sense and what is not common sense.
First of all I love most of the Modern architecture. Yesterday I went to the Triennale and there is an exhibition of the winners of Premio Mies van der Rohe which I visited and I agree with those choices: I like that they gave the first prize to the Norwegian National Opera and all the others buildings, so that it is like a first statement of the architecture: flagships but not only flagships. The NL Architects’ Basketbar, for instance - so that’s why I was so interested in this exhibition - in their project you understand that there was the need of a public air and you could put it anywhere.
I like the fact that public spaces that were not used as public spaces any more, or not yet are invented or re-invented by architecture so that you just symbolize that this is actually a place that could be used as a public place. It was not huge architecture but there was just this small important idea that we are planning for the people, to help them find a place where they can get together and communicate.
We are not doing it just as a signal or as symbol for the power and for the efficiency of our cities. So what I want to say is that the time of flagship is an illusion of the sociologists who think that urban lives should be shaped by people who live in the other spaces, because it is shaped by the people who have the money and the power, so they create flagships and a flagships development is what makes it so difficult to normal people to live in these cities. So let us finish the statement. I am very schizophrenic on that, on the one hand I see flagships as a twisting on the other hand I like them a lot.
P.F.C.: The German Pavilion in Biennale of architecture was totally dedicated to the German concept of Sehnsucht Coud it be a way of joining some authenticity in designing spaces?
W.K: I am not an architect even if I am very interested in architecture. Anyway Max Weber, made this idea of disenchantment. So we live in a time of modernity, of rationality of efficiency of control of predictabilty and of quantification and this time lets our lifes become more ad more disentchanted...Emotions, all these feelings that are related to our lifes are taking out, are vanishing. I do not want to become religious - I am not at all - but I think that in religion you also find some elements that are illogical but that lack of logic is filled with emotions. In architecture you find the same way of this enchantment that you find in our own life. Some times architecture tries to work against that. There are some of the architects who tried a way out of modernity, - some years ago. It was postmodernity - to re-enchant our lifes through architecture, but it doesnt’t work like that. The re-enchantment of our lives through architecture in our urban enviroment - I think, the source for it - happens mostly through old buildings that have been used and restructured by the people who used it. Old buildings today have been rebuilt by major architects.
I mean our old industrial buildings became shopping malls, the churches became shopping malls or restaurants and so on.
This is not what I mean because this has been done by investors. They should look authentic. Authenticity is another nice word for enchantment - but the purposes remain that they are profit oriented, which are purposes of modernity, of rationalisation, of making money.
And now I am coming to what I was telling yesterday in Bocconi University, when I talk about those old delimited small projects of warehouses in the peripheries of cities and if you allow artists, which I think are the craftsmen of enchantment - a vision very far from Bonami’s disenchantment of yesterday where during the same meeting he presented art as buisness and himself like somebody who deals with money and assholes (good artists in his language) n.d.r. - , if you allow them to create their own lives in these buildings, this is a real re-enchantment of this industrial delimited areas. And that is more and more where architecture should go. Baltimore is a good example, Hambourg, Austria, Vienna are good examples of the opposite.
They have buildings that they have to rebuild in a major way by major architects with a lot of investments so that people can make money.
These are changes that are not generated from inside, and that is not what I want. I want that those old buildings are restructured by the people who live in, I mean they have to be secure but I mean let people to decide what they want to do with them.
