Thinking of Gadamer's Floor
occasions like Christmas. Describing the piano and billiard table that stood on this bare
Jacques Herzog
. .. .. ·- .. .. .. ..
•
• .i=
V)
.. - . . .. .
C o
.....
:,
technological • 2001 •
Jacques Herzog's text reveals design thinking related to his architectural
practice, outlining attitudes towards the existing conditions of a building's
constitution. Inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer's recollections of his :5
C)
parents' waxed parquet floor, Herzog absorbs the reality of the occasion N
a,
as a potential for a design strategy emphasising materiality informed by <O
gravity. This process of extracting the intrinsic qualities of material and
space directs the focus on the floor beyond the merely physical. His
discussion of several projects, including the Tate Modern, highlights a
process whereby interior renovation is a procedure of rigorous
intervention, rather than the application of surface treatments.
A few years ago, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris invited a small group of architects
to thjnk about an exhibition on architecture that would feature new media rather than
traditional architectural objects such as models, plans, and photographs . Despite the
subsequent cancellation of the show due to a lack of funding, we had already started
developing a concept based on the idea of interviewing four people from different fields
and dilierent generations, and asking them the very basic question, 'What is architecture?'
Among the four, we wanted to ask a child; we wanted to ask an artist; and we also
wanted to talk with a philosopher.
Our philosophical interview, which cook place four years ago, was with the then 96-year­
old Hans-Georg Gadamer, who studied under Martin Heidegger and became one of the
greatest figures in German philosophy in the 20th century. The interview was especially
interesting because Gadamer's words sounded as if from another time and world, a
period when architecture had a kind of unbroken quality, and a now lost sense of the real.
We asked Gadamer to describe what he saw architecture to be in the most general terms,
and without reference to any specific architectural works. In his response he did not offer
any theoretical explanations but instead told us a story from his childhood, growing up
in the town of Breslau .
In the home of his parents, which was one of the Gri.inderzeit bourgeois villas in the town,
there was a wonderfuJ parquet floor in the formal reception room, into which the
144
children (including the young Hans-Georg) were not allowed to enter except on special
.. . . floor, Gadamer spoke of this surface as something magical - a wonderful wooden floor,
immacuJately welJ-kept and polished so that it filled the space with the smell of wax .
• • • ••
• •
Every once in a while a friend of his father's would come to visit, and because it was often
o
raining in Breslau, he would enter carrying his dripping raincoat and umbrella. The man,
like his father a professor at the university, always appeared to be immersed in his own
thoughts, and would, upon entering the forbidden room, always place his coat and
soaking umbrella right down on the magical floor. As a child, Hans-Georg would be
horrified that a friend of his father's would do such a thing. He still vividly remembers
the image of the polished wooden floor decorated with water droplets from the sodden
umbrella.
I often think of the Gadarner sto.ry because of its idea of the real. Gadamer's floor
describes a concept of reality that does not exist anymore - the artisanal and traditional
background of the floor itself has been lost for quite some time - but what makes this
surface so interesting is its architectural potential for today. In this sense, Gadamer's floor
can become an emblem for a very powerful design strategy in its emphasis on materiality,
gravity, and maintenance, and its focus on the floor as a floor.
One of the most important architectural elements that makes the Tate Modern in London
such a successful building with artists, curators, and the visiting public is the wooden
floor that we introduced on almost all of its levels. lrreguJar and untreated, the oak floor
planks are simply nailed down onto their joists. Brutal and beautiful at the same time, it
is both rough like a piece of industrial architecture and soft like fashion designer Vivienne
Westwood's hyper-sophisticated fabrics. We wanted to introduce a specific floor surface
so as to ground or root people within this huge building, to exaggerate the sense they have
in standing up vertically in front of the works of art. So, unlike Gadamer's parquet, the
Tate Modern floor is an intellectual rather than an artisanal product. We were not
interested in the nostalgia of revitalizing Jong gone methods of traditional production, but
we were interested in the physical result, in the physical reality of traditional architecture.
To achieve this sense of the real, we developed and tested fuJl-scale mock-ups of almost
every major detail in the building as part of a process driven by thinking, discussing, and
trying, rather than rehearsing individually the necessary technical skills.
In this way, the Tate Modern floor became a prototype for our conceptual and strategic
approach to architecture; an approach that is often masked with the traditional costume
of architectural elements we all seem to have somehow seen before - comfortable and
familiar. This wooden surface is, of course, not a single and isolated piece in that new
museum. It is bound to the overall concept of the whole building, based on what we like
to caU aikido strategies. This is a system through which we try to take the pre-exjsting as
145
a quality that, like in the techniques of the aikido martial art, you use for your own
purposes, transforming it into your own energy. So what once seemed to be alien, hostile,
and insurmountable, all of a sudden becomes a field where you can act and dictate the
architectural and urbanistic scenarios.
The importance of these strategies became obvious to us when we were first faced with
the huge brick mass of the existing Bankside power station. What could we possibly do?
We could not propose tearing this huge brick mountain of a building down, or destroy
any of its obvious architectural elements, such as the chimney (which initially we did not
see as relevant to a museum of contemporary art). Another paradox of the existing
structure was the obvious intention of its architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to connect the
building to the brick tower of the cupola of Saint Paul's Cathedral immediately across the
River Thames - a building that has a particularly strong urban and symbolic power in
contrast to Bankside, which becomes more secluded and unpublic the closer one gets to
it. Scott's design had been prominent and concealed at the same time; people had to be
kept away from it. This was something we had to change, and in a way reverse, without
destroying or losing the powerful energy of the existing structure. So we decided to
drastically cut away the low-rise additions to the main body of the building that were
literally masking the site. After these first operations we then added, piece by piece,
elements such as the north entrance, the ramp, and the light beam, in a kind of genetic
surgery that would incorporate the new pieces into an existing architectural family, all
speaking the same language, almost as if they had been there all along.
Inside the building we decided to remove all of the machinery of the former power
station, in order to reveal the structure in its most naked state. We became aware that the
building was nothing but a huge envelope for that machinery: there was not a single space
designed to be different from another; everything was filled with steel structures,
platforms, boilers, valves, turbines, engines of every kind. With all of its generators
removed, the turbine hall immediately struck us as a space of enormous potential; a
volume that in an almost archaeological way could be dug out so as to become visible to
an approaching public. People, we felt, should be able to reach the lowest point on the
museum site, where all the existing structures could perform internally even more
powerfully than the way they reveal themselves externally. At the same time, we wanted
to achieve a nonhierarchical layout of the different levels in the museum, avoiding
basement and main levels, and to suggest a more democratic treatment of space for a
building that looked to become one of the leading museums of the 21st century.
Once we dug out the turbine hall we found the resulting space to be incredible and
overwhelming, but it was almost too big and too industrial to serve as a public entrance
to the new museum. In particular, we hated the domination of the vertical steel structural
columns, and felt that we had to find something that both enhanced the power and logic
146
of the churchlike interior while diluting its monumental impact. We tried many things
until we found the light boxes, which, like the large glass piece on top of the building,
seem to float, to be unstable in some way, and to cut through the steel columns. The fact
that they are mounted in front of the steel structure (and not behind or in between) makes
the columns appear less powerful than the light and glass. These light boxes have multiple
functions, which are both dynamic and static: as quiet, more intimate spaces for visitors
to rest; as windows that look both from the galleries into the turbine hall and from the
hall into the galleries; as illuminating beacons for the main entrance; and, in a strange
way, as almost cinematic monitors that project the movement of people.
In the gallery spaces we looked to continue to play with these various dichotomies,
framed, the whole time, by the hard physicality of the wooden floor. Interestingly, a
number of the artistic works that fill the completed galleries in the Tate Modem also
allude to this overlapping of contradictory elements, notably Gary Hill's video
installation, Between Cinema and a Hard Place, from 1991. As described by Sophie
Howarth in the Tate exhibition catalogue, Hill uses video images to explore the
metaphors, rhythms, and intonations of language. In a darkened room, 23 television
monitors, both black-and-white and color, are stripped of their outer casing and arranged
in lines like stones marking a boundary. Across the screens visual sequences unfold and
fragment, moving from left to right. Initially it seems as if the images are triggered by a
voice reading from 'The Nature of Language,' an essay by Heidegger. However, as the
work continues, the precise correlation between sound and image becomes increasingly
unclear. Monitors switch on and off; images flicker and blur. Scenes are u·ansferred from
screen to screen or extend across multiple monitors. The images explore the relationship
between domesticity and landscape, and reflect on concepts of emotional and
geographical closeness, which are the heart of Heidegger's text. Some were filmed from a
moving car, and include houses, windows, bridges, fences, and signposts - the frontiers
that define or delimit space. As its tide suggests, the work also questions the relationship
between cinematic and real space. The physical presence of the hardware contrasts with
the immateriality of the video imagery, the immediate gallery environment with the
televised landscape. The spaces between the monitors insistently fragment the flow of
images, underscoring the sense of dislocation expressed in the text. ( ... p 116)
Jacques Herzog, 'Thinking of Gadamer's Floor', Cynthia C Davidson (ed), Anything,
MIT Press (New York), 2001, pp 115-16.
© 2001 Anyone Corporation. Reproduced with permission of The MIT Press.
(Excerpt pp 115-16)
147