– Will Fu

In 1979, the community of Riehen in Switzerland toured an indoor and outdoor swimming pool proposal by Herzog & de Meuron in the comfort of their private dwellings. Shared as a TV still of a video simulation, the shadowy figures and pliable ceiling surfaces, finished with a grainy wash of subterranean blue, offered the public a beguiling viewing experience. Given the office’s inspired attention to art practices, video art techniques were adopted to advance rougher and more realistic ways of representing the atmosphere of the project for public engagement. With the vantage point of a camera in mind, the TV still staged a diffuse set of events for participants to make their own images and memories. What the audience saw was not a polished presentation model, but a working model constructed out of cardboard populated with cutouts from magazines. Delivered in low resolution, the tickling static filter of the TV washed over the characters, elements, and setting, producing a cool, ambiguous scene that was both dreamlike and visually transient. Varied openings on all possible surfaces created delectable opportunities for exploration in this self-described submarine world. The audience could float through the oculus, paddle on axis towards a sketched backdrop of the outdoor patio space, or sink through the blushing apparition of light reflections on the floor. The TV still had a delicate texture that yearned to be touched. Renderings are typically full in both pixel count and content entourage. However, this TV still denied the viewer’s unconscious habit of completing the image, prompting a sense of frustration and distanced suspicion. The image’s poor resolution left gaps of possibility for viewers to fill in and inhabit the frame. Broadcast live, the TV still seemed to simulate a direct connection from the camera to the monitor, from production to product. The audience became unwitting co-conspirators to the proposal, fantasizing about the office working on and through a physical model. The physical model in the TV still would represent an iterative feedback process, with a double agenda to operate simultaneously as a design tool in the office and a communication device for public engagement. 

During a time when architecture was infatuated with the semantic retreat of postmodernism, Herzog & de Meuron opted to broadcast an architectural reality rooted in material culture. With cameras, lights, TVs, cardboard, plastics, and magazines, the office turned the design process into a pedagogical program for everyone to tune into. Bypassing the meta language of orthographic drawings that require learned expertise to understand, the immediacy of the TV still invited the audience to the possibility of cohabiting with the architectural imagination of both the project and its designers. After the playful exuberance of the digital turn to the post-digital skepticism of today, the TV still both anticipates and critiques the ubiquity of software in architectural experimentation and practice. In a contemporary context overstimulated by market-driven visual noise, the poverty of low-resolution images takes on a subversive social role. More liken to a ghost of an image, the small storage footprint and abstract content make it easily distributed and missed by scanning surveillance—a perfect stage and agent for all to speculate on alternative just futures.[1]

Note

1. Enamoured by the possibility of a pool in Riehen, the project went through several successive iterations: from a reduced footprint in 1982, to a facility with only outdoor pools in 1987, to (finally) a built bathing lake in 2014 that promoted biological filtration. See: H&dM, 319 Naturbad Riehen, Riehen, Switzerland <https://www.herzogdemeuron.com/projects/319-naturbad-riehen/ [accessed 19 September 2024]

Will Fu is a Chinese Canadian designer currently based in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo. Will is interested in the capacity for rituals, media technologies, and spaces to tell old and new stories alike.

This text is one of the selected responses to the Open Call: Storytellers, Observed—an inquiry into the origin and circumstances of a single drawing (or series of drawings), observing the ways by which each achieves the specific purpose for which it was made. For further information click here.