THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE APPREHENDED FROM THE WORK OF MARK ROTHKO The following text does not intend to be an exhaustive compendium of the doctoral thesis, since that would run the risk of resulting in a mere development and illustration of its index. It is instead a selection of some ideas and arguments organized in a discourse that aims to capture the spirit of the thesis. As I child I enjoyed looking at pictures from Art Encyclopedias, but whenever I read through Modern Art pages I came across pictures that did not make sense to me; I totally understood the presence of Goya and Velazquez there, since their works were true-to-reality reproductions and their creation involved obvious difficulties. But that did not seem to be the case with Modern Art works, and I had the feeling that I was missing something in those paintings, a mystery that made them worth including in the encyclopedia. Years later, when I first saw a real painting by Rothko, I loved it instantly, and it struck me that these were the same paintings that I did not understand as a child. Since then I became interested in Rothko. His concern towards space attracted especially my attention. On the one hand, the space generated by the paintings themselves, and on the other hand, the way in which paintings modify the space around them, both individually and as a group. Rotkho cared a lot about the way his paintings should hang and the relation established between the painting and the space of the exhibition. Rothko´s detailed instructions for the installation of an exhibit at the Sydney Janis Gallery, 1955, clearly show some of his ideas about the arrangement of the paintings. There is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. I have on occasion successfully dealt with this problem by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare. Walls should be painted considerably off-white with umber and warmed by a little red, so that they don´t fight against the pictures. The ideal situation would be to hang them in a normally lit room- that is the way they were painted. The pictures have their own inner light and if there is too much light, the color in the picture is washed out. I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted. But Rothko always subordinated formal and technical problems to a bigger concern, the effect of his work on the viewer, the feelings and emotions that his work provoked on people. He frequently stated that emotions were the main impulse and object of his work: I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. There are several fundamental books in Rothko´s personal and artistic development: The Bible, The Golden Bow and Sophocles´ tragedies were recurrent readings all through his life, as Anne Seymour pointed in her essay Beuys, Klein, Rothko: Transformation and Prophecy. But it becomes evident from its writings that two specific books were pivotal in very specific periods, to the point that they become a milestone, a turning point in his career. In his early years most of his concerns were related to The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, whereas at the end of his life Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard occupied his mind, to the point that he even gave lectures on the book. I suggest that Rothko´s paintings evolve parallel to the thoughts in these two books. Nietzsche´s The Birth of Tragedy, written under the influence of Schopenhauer, deals above all with the idea of life, claiming that life and death are one and the same thing in an unceasing flow. And that, rather than the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, turns out to be the real tragedy. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard deals with Abraham´s Faith. That is Faith with capital F, the most sublime experience attainable by a human being, surpassing even that of the tragic hero. Whereas a tragic hero like Agamemnon is still bounded by ethics and moral, Abraham stands beyond ethics. Faith is the paradox of existence: irrational, incomprehensible to everybody, it

creates a unique bond between Abraham and God. We continue analysing the emotions provoked by Rothko´s paintings and comparing them with other artistic disciplines. Rothko´s paintings can give the impression of movement. Very often they seem nebulas in a continuous wave, constantly changing, they are unstable systems and energy flows through them, dissipative structures, as in Untitled (1962), A 720 (fig. 1). According to Ilya Prigogine, dissipative structures are those in which an increment in imbalance causes an increment in energy. That is the system of living creatures, so it could be said that Rothko´s paintings are somehow alive, they emanate energy, vibrate, losing its materiality. The onyx wall in the Barcelona Pavilion vibrates too, dematerializing and transforming its materiality into energy. The onyx plane and the plane of green marble are symetrical to the vertical plane of the glass. This plane works both as a transparent and a mirror depending on the lighting angle (figs. 2 and 3). When looking at the glass plane it is hard to know which is the real and which the reflected wall. Maybe there is a single wall and its own vibration dematerializes it, transforming it into energy (figs. 4). It resembles the rotating disc arranged by Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely in The Excavator of Space (1958), which vibrate and duplicate its limits, blurring them (fig. 5). A different way of expressing movement is through the observation time. Viewers need to look at Rotkho´s works for a period of time to appreciate all of its nuances. His paintings keep changing as they are observed, what seemed at first to be a uniform block fills with shades of color, with transparencies, it keeps flowing. Rothko´s works are almost impossible to photograph, they can only be experienced directly. These works are very demanding, they require a patient and constant viewing, but there are huge rewards for those who persevere. Some works by Turrell share that characteristic, they keep changing when exposed to uninterrupted observation through time. This image shows the floor plan and elevation in Turrell´s installation Dark Space, Pleiades, Pensylvania, 1983 (fig. 6). James Turrell conceived his Dark Spaces in the eighties, working with minimum levels of light. These were dark areas where the visitor could have a sit and, after getting used to the surrounding darkness, he or she started to perceive lights. Turrell recommended to allow at least twenty minutes for the visitor´s eyes to adjust to the darkness. The image seen in Turrell´s experiment is a nothingness of color in the black space, that later remains in the retina and keeps changing until the image becomes independent from reality – an interior vision. Turrell´s work is based on the physical characteristics of the eye. When in light, we perceive color with the cones of the retina, and in darkness with the rods. When light is reduced, the eye changes vision from cones to rods. This optical process is not instantaneous, it takes a while for the eye to adjust. Through this experience we put into question our own visual perception, we think about what is real and how should reality be perceived. Turrell and Rothko coincide too in their treatment of light, although in opposite ways. Rothko dematerializes his paintings transforming them into light, whereas Turrell materializes light. In works such as Cross Corner Projection, California, 1966, Turrell manages to show light as if it had volume (fig. 7). The idea of materializing the light was already in use in other periods, such as the Baroque. Bernini used it in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria (fig. 8). The scene is illuminated by natural light coming from a hidden window above; the natural light becomes matter when it slips on the golden rays, thus creating the utterly unreal space inhabited by the saint (fig. 14). Subtracted from gravity, the sculptural group conveys a scene of great dramatic power. Bernini must have considered the detail of the lighting of the rays to be of extreme importance, since he did not hesitate to modify the exterior of the church to achieve that light inside the chapel. Thus, there is a fanal or lantern on its side facade, capturing the light from the South, East and West (fig. 10). The importance of movement in the observer should be noted too. The perception of Rothko´s paintings depends on the distance between the viewer and the object. If we look at one of his paintings from a distance it seems flat, but as we come closer it turns into space, it surround us. According to Rothko, 45 cm is the distance at which his paintings evolve from flatness into space.

Therefore we need movement to understand them. That is, there is a scale change as the observer comes closer: the scale of the painting is clearly defined in the distance but as we come closer the painting surrounds us and we can no longer see the scale, it disappears. Besides, Rothko sometimes worked with the same color in different matt or satin textures, and the observer needs to move along to perceive these variations. The Seagram murals are a perfect example of this. Duchamp´s piece The Lange Glass also compels the viewer to move around in order to understand it (fig. 11). The work is made in perspective, with a single vanishing point located in the middle separation between the two glass panels, which suggests a front view to the viewer. Besides, only one side of the glass is painted, so the images can only be appreciated from that side. But, on the other hand, being painted in perspective on a glass, the viewer does not know whether there is something on the other side, and is forced to move to discover it. As the viewer moves, the perspective of the painted elements remain unchanged, whereas the perspective of the real elements behind the glass begin to change. The ambiguity of this work lies in that transparency, it forces the viewer to reconcile the frontality of the painted elements with the permanent mobility of the background. In The Large Glass we can find the phenomenom of transparency. Colin Rowe famously stated that: transparency may be an inherent quality of a substance, as in wire mesh or glass curtain wall, or it may be an inherent quality of organization. And one might, for this reason, distinguish between a real or literal and a phenomenal or seeming transparency. When analysing Rothko´s work in detail we see that it contains in no particular order all the possible combinations of transparencies and opacities, both in shapes and backgrounds. The feeling of transparency produced by the work is not only literal but phenomenal, that is, inherent to the organization of shapes and colors in his paintings. In Red, Orange, Orange on Red, 1962, there is hardly any real transparency (fig. 12). An architectural example of phenomenological transparency is the East Wall in Le Corbusier´s Ronchamp, 1954. Since Ronchamp is a pilgrimage chapel, it has two altars, a normal one inside the church and another one outside for officiating mass on pilgrimage days, when there is a great amount of parishioners. We can think of the East Wall as transparent, referring to phenomenological transparency (fig. 13). In one of Le Corbusier´s travel journals there is a draft of Ronchamp from the East, in which the East wall is drawn transparent, so both the inside and the exterior of the chapel can be seen, and the altar, the choir and all elements are duplicated. The image of the Virgin is kept inside a glass urn in the wall, so that it can be seen both from inside and outside the church. It could be said that the only function of the wall is to sustain this urn, and the transparent urn gives sense to the solid wall. The urn is a real transparency whereas the wall creates a phenomenological or apparent transparency (fig. 14). There are some other elements in the wall that connect the inside and the outside, thus justifying this conception of the wall as transparency. Besides the urn, there is a horizontal strip of light 10 cm wide between the upper part of the wall and the ceiling, and there is a number of holes in the wall itself. These holes are perceived as light from the inside and points of shadow from the outside. What is the meaning of these holes? The positions of the orifices in the wall resemble a constellation (Le Corbusier’s interest in astronomy is well known). But in one of Le Corbusier’s travel notebooks there is a sketch of the East wall with the pattern of these holes and some more, crossed out, that did not appear in the final wall, and they seem to suggest that the holes are connected to the Golden Section (fig. 15). The function of the holes would be facilitating the visual transition from the darkness inside the chapel to the image of the Virgin, a cube of light. As in Turrell´s installation, it takes a while for the human eye to make the transition from a very dark place to a very luminous one. At first the eye cannot perceive anything and it only little by little starts perceiving things. With these points of light Le Corbusier aimed to reduce the adapting period of the eye. He made use of the same effect as Turrell but in an opposite way. The idea of transparency from the East wall in Ronchamp can be applied to the Transparent Altar

in Toledo Cathedral (fig. 16). The name given to this intervention is not casual, it evokes the idea of allowing to worship the Blessed Sacrament from the ambulatory of the Cathedral. In order to do that the altarpiece had to become transparent (East wall in Ronchamp) and the whole atmosphere emphasized with a dramatic illumination. A different example of void can be found in the Transparent of Toledo Cathedral. Narciso Tomé had a project for the floor of the Transparent that never came into being. All that is left is a drawing of it (fig. 17). The drawing shows two different halves, and it is not clear whether one half was supposed to be different from the other or Tomé planned to use just one of them. For the present analysis we will accept the second option and assume that the design in the right half of the drawing, showing circles in limitless perspective, were to cover the whole of the ground in front of the altar. The floor would then appear to us as an infinite perspective, an empty space, a void with an island in the middle, the only place we would be able to tread. We would be forced to either stop our wandering around the ambulatory or skirt that part. If we are outside of the floor we can still see the Transparent but we cannot gain access to it, because the floor pattern works as a perceptive void that cannot be crossed. This feeling is reinforced by the special lighting in the area, which separates and emphasizes this space, creating a boundary with regard to the rest of the ambulatory. The situation bears resemblance to the Capitoline Square designed by Michelangelo (fig. 18). Hans Sedlmayr observed that: the steps of the monumental staircase create a ring that block the way to the centre of the square. The idea of aesthetic isolation is further reinforced by the ground pattern in the spherical cap. The sphericity of the ground gives the impression that one is going to slip on it. An idealist observer cannot place himself in the centre of the square, next to the monument, and cast a look around. The square is not made to be looked at from there, but to look at the centre from its periphery. The centre remains respectfully empty. Nowadays the design of the square has been altered; originally the steps were all around the perimeter, but not now, so it is easier to get inside the square and it is more difficult to get out, since the same rings that prevent the entrance from the outside block the exit from the inside (fig.19). In the centre of both spaces there is a stable area: an empty island in the Transparent, while in the Campidoglio the island is inhabited by the sculpture of Marco Aurelio. The problem with the Transparent is how to get to the island. It seems to be an initiatic path, visitors have to cross the threshold and once we attain the centre the light envelops and isolates us. Absorbed by the Transparent – which seems to be infinite, with no ending, its boundaries blurred in darkness– we visitors are isolated, surrounded by the void. We feel disoriented, inhabiting an unknown space. Something similar happens with Rothko´s paintings. At a certain distance they seem to be flat, but if we come closer and cross the treshold, we inhabit the painting, we are surrounded by the painting. We find ourselves in an unknown, infinite space we cannot understand. Doug Wheeler´s installation, SA MI DW SM 2 75 (fig 20), offers a similar experience. It consists on a vaulted space lit by ultraviolet halogen and quartz lights, with a system to regulate their intensity. At the outside of the installation there is an element of transition of about 6 meters wide that works as a dark frame. From there, installation is perceived as a white flat space, a kind of film screen, and people inside the installation seem to be floating in an infinite space with no shadows. Outside observers may think that they are watching a film projected on that white space. Inside the installation, the visitors are situated in a limitless, unknown, infinite white space, and feel disoriented. Their sense of sight gives no information, and they have to pay attention to other senses. By touching the floor they can sense how it bends to become the ceiling. Thus they realize that they are inside an enclosed limited room, not a limitless space as they thought at the beginning. In this installation some people feel insecure and afraid to fall since, being deprived of their reliability on the sense of sight, they are unable to perceive anything else. On the other hand, there are people who, doubting what they perceive throught the usual senses, turn to rely on those senses which are normally not so used. And they start to feel new experiences. Locked to the outside, they open to their inner world and experiment on themselves, without knowing

whether the perceptions come from outside or from themselves. In the process they discover sounds, lights, odors, fantasies and visions that were not able to emerge in them before. It is then that Architecture and Art become a personal experience, an inner vision through the senses. This is called synesthesia, and it can be explained as the connection or fusion of one or more sensory pathways in a trascendent act of perception and imagination. The aim of synesthesia is the blurring of boundaries between our senses. On this matter there are not differences among people, everybody can perceive synesthesia. The only difference is the way in which synesthesia is presented to us. The synesthetic component may be clear from the beginning, as in Scriabin’s Prometei, where music and color are directly associated. Lights are projected while the orchestra is playing, and the audience feels and assimilates the experience in a direct way, without making any intellectual effort. Other artworks require a subtler reading, and spectators have to discover the synesthetic relation by themselves in order to understand. They have to use their senses in this process of understanding, and different visitors can perceive the reality of the work through different senses. An example of this is the aforementioned installation by Doug Wheeler. The sense of sight is not enough to understand the meaning of the work, but none of the other senses alone leads to the solution. Some viewers can use primarily the sense of touch, others the sense of hearing, to discover that they are in a closed space. Synesthetic sensations were also present in Muslim architecture, where space was perceived not only through the sense of sight, but also through the other senses. In the Alhambra of Granada, for example, the different courtyards can be identified, besides their specific visual aspects, by the peculiar sound of the fountains or by the different odors of aromatic bushes such as myrtle. Even using the sense of touch, since the palace was originally conceived to walk barefoot, and walking across it sets off a series of different tactile sensations. We will explain now the synesthetic sensations in the light towers of Notre Dame Du Haut, Ronchamp (1954). From the outside, the light towers materialize in the towers: the taller one is oriented to the North, and the other two, symmetrical and almost identical, are oriented to the East and West, capturing the light of morning and sunset respectively. Among the light towers, the East one is especially interesting. The curved wall is painted red, whereas the wall with the light window is painted white (figs. 21 and 22). Nevertheless, the real white color of this wall can only be perceived when exposed to a very intense light. The space in the East light tower is completely delimited by color. Color fixes the limits, dividing the continuous space. Red color does not work like a screen, but rather like a volume that covers, inundates and absorbs everything that comes inside its dominion. The great masses of color in Rothko’s paintings produce the same effect: they absorb the observer, who seems to be floating inside the painting, inhabiting the color. This red-dyed East light tower is opposed not only to the atmosphere of the chapel, but also to its symmetrical light tower, the West one, which is painted white (fig. 25). Le Corbusier expresses his theory about polychromy in architecture: “Monochromy allows the exact evaluation of volumes of an object. Polychromy (...) alters its volume.” What was Le Corbusier after when painting each light tower in a different color? On the one hand he wanted to unify the two light towers in their difference, and on the other hand he wanted to differentiate them in their similarity, as he mentions in the text. Both light towers are not exactly equal: due to the leaning of the roof, the West light tower has more light on it. By painting them with different colors Le Corbusier conceals the quantitative difference of light: a red surface does not reflect light so well, and the variation of light intensity between the towers seems to be due only to the change of color. In addition to that, the difference of color between the light towers provokes that, in spite of having the same dimensions, the visitor perceives them differently. The East light tower, partially painted red, seems to be much lower than the other, much closer to the visitor; whereas the West light tower, painted white, is perceived to be higher than it actually is. In contrast with the other two, the North light tower is higher and bigger. Its curve in the ground plan is much sharper and static, since light in the north remains constant (fig. 26). The interest of this light tower lies in that sharp curve, a strange parabola that impedes the correct calculation of height and depth inside the light tower. Similar to Doug Wheeler’s aforementioned installation SA MI DW SM 2 75, the space inside the light tower can not be understood by turning only to the

sense of sight, and visitors need the other senses to approach reality. Since information from the sense of sight is very limited, visitors need to touch the wall to get an idea of its real form. A radical difference between Wheeler’s installation and the North light tower is that light in Wheeler´s space does not create shadows and surfaces are completely even. By contrast, the North light tower has a single source of light and consequently there are shadows. And, instead of even surfaces, Le Corbusier makes use of a very rough concrete surface that blurs the limit of the shadows, so that there is no longer a shadow line but an undefined band (fig. 27). Now we finally understand Le Corbusier´s words: “Ronchamp as a machine for stirring emotions.” That is also valid for Rothko´s paintings, they are machines for stirring emotions too. And we are touched not only by seeing and perceiving them through our senses, but by apprehending them through our inner vision as well. The present exposition aims to be a reduced but efective collection of hints to inaugurate what could be called a new Architecture of the senses. And that Architecture should begin by rejecting photographic reproduction as the ultimate criterion of aesthetic excellence. Aurelio Vallespín Muniesa

 

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