Compositions: Landscapes & Paintings

By Shawna Hammon 
Lecture - "Making Landscapes: Urban Gardens"

I cannot help but notice some striking similarities in the formal language between the Rem Koolhaas competition entry for Parc de la Villette and a Wassily Kandinsky painting.  Although these two designers lived during different eras, I believe this comparison will demonstrate how this language continues to be used today by designers across the world – it has become the universal dictionary of graphic elements that Kandinsky sought to assemble during his career.

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter, is credited as the first to produce completely abstract works.  He began his studies with law and economic.  He did not begin painting until he was 30 years old.  Kandinsky lived during both world wars and taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis shut it down in 1933.

Rem Koolhaas, a Dutch “starchitect,” is considered one of the “World’s Most Influential People” by Time magazine.  He is a founding partner of OMA and teaches at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.  Koolhaas has published several books, most notably (for the purpose of this blog post), Delirious New York in which he explores the idea of the city as an unstable environment shaped by political and economical forces and organizational tools such as the grid that help stabilize and program the city into its current state of being.

This post will compare the Koolhaas competition entry for Parc de la Villette to Kandinsky’s Composition VIII.  Both projects are layered and explore the juxtaposition between controlled and free conditions.

 

Koolhaas explores two conditions (1) the “culture of congestion,” which is unstable, uncontrolled, and unprogrammed as opposed to (2) “the grid”, which is structured, rigid, controlled and programmed.  The park acts as a “social condenser” through the 43 programmatic bands that are permeable and encourage programmatic mutation.  There is a “dynamic coexistence of activities.”  In Parc de la Villette it is possible to never experience the park the same way twice depending on how you move through and between the programmatic strips.  Koolhaas encourages self-invention, it is the “people’s park” allowed to evolve and change over time.  Participants are invited to make it their own. 

Kandinsky also plays with the notion of geometric versus organic shapes.  He notes that there are exact geometries in nature, like those seen in the formation of a spiders’ web or the veins of a leaf.  Others are freer, organic.  He leaves it to the observer to decipher his paintings and extract meaning – whatever that may mean.  He seeks “effective contact with the soul.”  The observer might not even understand why they are drawn to a certain painting, but that it just feels right.  Kandinsky sought a language for painting – he tried to assemble a universal dictionary of graphic elements for his compositions.  This vocabulary consisted of point, line, plane, colour and texture.

Both men talk about their projects in relation to music – not surprising from Kandinsky, but we do wonder if Koolhaas was influenced by Kandinsky even to this extent.

“How to orchestrate on a metropolitan field the most dynamic coexistence of activities x, y, and z and to generate through their mutual interference a chain reaction of new, unprecedented events; or, how to design a social condenser, based on a horizontal congestion, the size of a park.” – Koolhaas

“As soon as we open the door, step out of the seclusion and plunge into the outside reality, we become an active part of this reality and experience its pulsation with all our senses. The constantly changing grades of tonality and tempo of the sounds wind themselves about us, rise spirally and suddenly collapse. Likewise, the movements envelop us by a play of horizontal and vertical lines bending in different directions as colour-patches pile up and dissolve into high or low tonalities.” – Kandinsky

Citations:

Özkan, Özay. “Strategic Way of Design in Rem Koolhaas’ Parc de la Villette Project.”  MA Thesis Middle East Technical University, December 2008. Dissertations and Theses. Web. 10 Sep. 2012.