On the first of the year it’s tempting to give one’s imagination free reign to portray how things and the world will look by year’s end – with considerable trepidation, as the course of events, a locomotive that began to gather speed in 2020 on tracks without stations save the terminus, is in all likelihood accelerating towards a great derailment, a crash which represents nearly the best case of what one has to look forward to, extrapolating the trajectory thus far, unless the passengers somehow do manage to pull the emergency-brake soon – an event against expectation.
Yet even more compelling, at the outset of this new year, is the wish to find a respite if one can from the onrushing spectacle, where bases of common life that seemed relatively intact even at the beginning of the decade, now are falling apart into scraps. Here, accordingly, a contest for prominence is instigated to see who will carry the furthest the demolition and removal work still undone. An urge towards world-simplification, terribly provoked by the general flaunting of weakness, discards the criterion which might otherwise have guided it, namely, how worthy of destruction anything is found to be. Because stability in its merest appearance then suffices to arouse the destroying rage, those who do not want to witness the obliteration, nor to fall under its purview, may begin to ponder whether they should emit their own light elsewhere than in public, or for the sake of the public. By which ways this withdrawal might best be accomplished, under current circumstances, would henceforth become for them an overarching focus for reflection, circling around it perhaps mainly in silence’s obscure privacy.
To the topic of retreat architects often recur, nearly ex officio. Of all building types, the private refuge may be deemed the most quintessential, while with this one, to a higher degree than with the others, an architect could take the opportunity to create a work that will be more unique, more recognisably his and no one else’s. Not just any architect, however, might turn his attention towards the construction of these edifices with satisfying results, if the aim is to distinguish oneself and the work, but rather those who expatriated themselves for professional reasons and then developed the closest attachments to their new home-countries, thus starting quite afresh, professionally and personally. Especially on this account, they may show a notable degree of acuity when it comes to devising a building that is meant to be first and foremost a private shelter.
The architect Ludwig Godefroy is a case in point. After his professional training in France, his natal country, and in some others, he moved to Mexico around fifteen years ago and established himself there, and in the interval has come to regard his locale not as incidental, but rather as affording him the chance to participate in a specifically national architecture. This opportunity he has taken in a number of projects for private houses (of which some have remained unbuilt), amongst others one in Mérida, completed in 2018, and small resorts akin to private dwellings, such as one in Puerto Escondido, finished last year.
Though these buildings can be termed “neo-Brutalist” on account of the ample use of concrete, even the quality of the material is related to the country’s specific conditions. A perfectly un-perfect concrete* it will be, says Godefroy, in a rejoinder to the desire he at times meets with on the part of prospective clients that the construction should emulate the appearance of the material as utilised by architects in certain other countries. With the eschewal of finer varieties of finish, the concrete will age in accord with the native climate, and not be affected unduly in its substance through the course of time, as would happen were the materials handled more delicately. With my designs, you can come back in 15 years and it will be exactly the same.** So, by his considered choices of materials and finishes, and perhaps by other routes too, he sidesteps the temptation which besets some architects to build in such a way that in future it would be a relatively simple procedure to erase the traces of the building’s own age by means of the destructive treatment otherwise called “renovation.”
* Nicola Barrett, “Ludwig Godefroy”
** Bex de Prospo, “Meet Ludwig Godefroy”
His assurance on this point is noteworthy. By now, one gathers, as a long-time professional in his adopted country, he can speak with both experience and authority on these matters of grade in the construction process. Moreover, with regard to the advancements of technology as generally used in construction, he talks in a similarly forthright manner. (Granted, in the statement which follows, there is some ambiguity in his relations with technology as he states them, but this does not pertain, so it seems, to his work in architecture in any direct sense.)
Barrett: Are there any new technologies in architecture that you are particularly excited about?
Godefroy: Not at all. I really love technology, I need the internet non-stop, computers and smartphones but I still remain a peasant. I was born in Normandy, in a fisherman’s village and I still like what’s most simple in life. I still like to push and pull a switch to turn on and off the light, I don’t need my fridge to tell me what to buy, and I still like to open the curtains myself in the morning. I like the wind, I like the light, I like the heat, I don’t need much technology around me, only music.
To the topic of music’s role in the architecture as built I shall come momentarily. – In this statement Godefroy evinces his sense of humour, which is represented in abundance in an informal interview he and his business partner gave several years ago. There the reader may discern a streak of mischief-making throughout his several remarks, even though this is manifest, to vary his own phrase, only in a subtly un-subtle manner. In the interview, his humour, informed evidently by a self-restraint which means to please, is signalised in ways which call back to mind the promenade of ironies during the conversation which that conceptual imp Marcel Duchamp held with Richard Hamilton in 1959. (As a document their discussion has become well-known, although the tape-recording is listened to less often than it ought to be. Much which the page generally cannot hope to convey, the tone could establish.)
A work of art has a life as transient and short as a human being’s, or even more so: this conception Duchamp took as a starting-point for an excursion of thoughtful observations, which the listener or the reader was invited implicitly to continue. And of these thoughts this or that implication may be spun out as far as one still has breath enough, inwardly speaking. ( À l’extrême de toute pensée est un soupir. – Adieu, me dit cette pensée, je n’irai pas plus loin.)
How to clarify why some works of art and not others were, are, and shall be accorded opportunities to live? And, more to the point, why the long afterlives of some in particular are taken or mistaken for their lives themselves? Not in order to provide an answer, but rather to bring those very questions into discredit, Duchamp availed himself of a notion which requires but little consideration to disclose itself as a deliberate oxymoron, and hence as embodying a joke. “The law of chance” – explains nothing at all, and that was the very point of introducing it. By this phrase, a backhanded compliment paid to sheer persistence, he did indeed acknowledge the brute fact of success, which is after all an entirely different act than advocating or espousing it.
In this field of art, explanation is error. – As for the concept of “chance” on its own and unconjoined to “law,” it seems quite doubtful that Duchamp would ever have let himself get caught in the aleatory domain. Though it hardly needs to be said, here I shall say it anyway: one does well to avoid confusing him with John Cage.
The work of art, Duchamp suggested, is as mortal as its creator. By this suggestion too he acknowledged what is evidently a brute fact of existence, which does not mean he abdicated in the face of it, nor abandoned himself to the melancholic reflections this fact can so readily provoke. Instead, it seems he espied a challenge to be met on an intellectual plane. (If so, a fuller sense would be lent to his own admission that this train of thought had a hypothetical character.) And then, by implication, a different question would be posed: without aiming to abolish the mortality of a work of art, nor to extinguish its melancholic nimbus, how could one be made so that its life – not its afterlife – endure longer than its maker’s?
The mortality of the work of art is not limited to the material substrate, but also affects the ideas presented by visual means, whether on a flat surface or in the round. How then to counteract (or postpone) their dissolution as effected by the continual passage of time?
In this connection, two practices seem especially promising.
Firstly, the conveyance of some idea through the use of a visual element which signifies something obviously different and other than it – that is, allegory. By opting for this type of representation a work of art would comprise a coded message: the rebus offers a elementary illustration of such a procedure. The aim here would be to outfit the idea with a layer of insulation over against the changes in its own constituent elements, namely, the meanings of words.
Secondly, the equipping of a visual element with the marks of considerable but not excessive age in advance, so that later on its capacity to transmit an idea would not decline suddenly. Then this operation would be analogous temporally to the spatial procedures of the trompe-l’œil. Anticipation of the changes in the materials used could to some degree assist in minimising them when they inevitably do occur, for the sake of the idea the visual element is meant to convey.
Now, what might be achieved, by way of shoring up the ideas lodged in a work of art against its ruin, if these two practices are coupled together?
The private retreat, as a type of building, when conceived by the architect as though it were a work of art, something akin to a variety of sculpture, might indeed permit these two practices to be paired, instructively.
Such a conjunction might yield all the more significant a result, the further the notion of the eventual ruin of the building weighs on the architect’s mind, and the concern to devise ways to postpone this fate preoccupies him while he conceives it.
And this even more so, if the private retreat to be built has been thought of from the beginning in relation to edifices such as sanctuaries and temples, for then the eventual reality of the ruin not only of the structure but also of the weighty ideas it had embodied, is presented for consideration in an especially palpable way.
Godefroy’s two buildings mentioned earlier, and probably several others of his, do seem to exemplify all of these several conditions.
On his website, he offers a concise text of which one portion seems pertinent here. It is the following.
Concordancia
¿Porque me gusta la palabra concordancia?
Me parece que introduce un tema importante y esencial de subjetividad, proprio a cada quien, donde la concordancia es un extraordinario punto de encuentro entre las cosas, una fuente de sorpresa, y para mí muy seguido un punto de partida para empezar un proyecto.
Una concordancia es algo personal, pero sin ser demasiado intimo para impedir compartirlo.
Es según yo, lo que vuelve singular un trabajo de arquitectura, acorde a su sensibilidad, su curiosidad, sus emociones y también su historia.
Concord, he then remarks, is a term whose possible applications are multifarious, and in its breadth of reference, though he has no need to mention this, it is a peer of the notion of harmony, while no less than the latter, it too comes forth from music. Yet leaving its provenance aside, the word when used properly can actually clarify something, whereas the Duchampian “law of chance” deliberately offered no explanation at all (perhaps the phrase was a minor act of vandalism against the questions to which it pretended to respond). – What may its proper usage clarify? Without simply repeating anything Godefroy himself says, one answer might be this: over any propitious beginning from which a structure as built emerges and by which to it then is vouchsafed vital longevity beyond the lifetime of its creator, a concord will have presided. – Whether in fact concord did preside there, this one gleans from the vantage-point of an anterior future. Nothing of such a piece of good fortune can really be understood if in the present moment one’s imagination does not edify itself through a deployment of that tense of verb.
A look backwards from an imaginary future, one has warrant to surmise, also played some role in the motives which led his clients to commission these private refuges from the architect in the first place. Possible exigencies (alas impending more and more upon us all) in which resort to such dwellings would be necessary, were probably much on their minds.
Concord – a rapport that is, as Godefroy says, personal yet not overly intimate – between him and such a client may then help to clarify some characteristics of the buildings as realised.
Concrete and its treatment was spoken of before; that the architect did persuade the client to accept his approach to it, is one point in the concord between them.
Most notable amongst the other instances of it, is the abundant usage in these buildings of geometrical shapes such as circles and triangles, not of course as ornaments, but neither strictly as responses to the requirements of function. By this choice (often it is indeed una fuente de sorpresa) the buildings are configured as something like sculptures, and to have opted for this, obviously a substantive agreement between the architect and the client was needed. Especially so because these shapes in the aggregate seem to comprise a code, a variety of rebus by which an articulate meaning is conveyed, and then presumably both of the participants in the concord from which the structure emerged know quite well what this ensemble of shapes does say. Perhaps what it encodes is as simple as the initials of a name, or some manner of caption, or else a favourite sentence or apothegm. Possibly, and this I imagine would agree nicely with the sense of humour the two may share (for this could be a further point of concord), what they wrote with these architectural substitutes for words, is a brief notation about the transience of all things: for it is just this which the structure as a whole has been designed to arrest for a considerable stretch of time, prolonging its lifetime accordingly.
Such private inscriptions – if, of course, that is what they are – are not utterly illegible; with some patience and more time, one might be able to decode them. The very difficulty which would call forth such an effort, is not the least of the stratagems by which these edifices preserve their vitality, now and for some larger part of the foreseeable future.
Restricted legibility also assists these writings by other means to forestall the melancholic reflections which their constituent signs, being variations upon formal elements proper to the sacred architecture of the environs in times past, would tend to arouse. Were these rebus-like inscriptions rather less legible than they are, then the ancient remnants might come to mind more readily, thereby affording melancholy a larger scope for its solemnities, while if they were made quite illegible, little notice would be taken of them. As it is, and as befits the refuges these structures aim to be, in their rooms sorrowful reflections are held in check.
There remains the question of the music which would suit these distinctive retreats and the concords presiding over them. But this essay has already been venturesome enough, so, by way of concluding, it’s to a composer who has been discussed here before that I’ll recur, at the outset of this uncertain year, and merely suggest they might be proper settings within which to listen to a singular composition by another emigrant Frenchman, Edgard Varèse, Amériques.