In late March of the past year, Christian Norberg-Schulz died at the age of seventy-four, and the world of architecture lost a great critic, teacher, historian and theorist whose thought, work, professional practice and personal life were all coherent, integrated and unassailable. Throughout his life he had sought to bring his understanding of architecture into theoretical order and to offer it as a new way of looking at architecture and environment. In the history of contemporary architecture, one rarely encounters figures of Schulz's breadth and depth of vision, and today — when discussion of the abstract aspects of architectural space and form is very widespread — speaking of him as the theorist of architecture's concrete aspects takes on a particular importance.
He was born in 1926. At twenty-four he became a member of the Norwegian International Congress of Modern Architecture, and he worked with Utzon and Fehn, the great Norwegian architects. After completing the Zurich Polytechnic, in 1949 he went on to study architecture at Harvard and then came to Italy for further studies. He completed his dissertation on "the history of architecture and technology" under the guidance of Pier Luigi Nervi. From 1964 he taught in the architecture department and received honorary doctorates from the University of Hanover and a gold medal from the French Academy of Architecture. Norberg-Schulz left behind thirty books, which have been translated into most languages. He himself had complete command of several languages and, in his studies, he made meticulous use of the subtle semantic and etymological differences among synonymous words in various European languages to present his material with the utmost care.
Norberg-Schulz received his first important and influential lessons in the history of architecture from Siegfried Giedion. During his studies he also took advantage of the classes of the Bauhaus masters. In those same years he was in touch with Le Corbusier, Brâncuși, Giacometti, Hans Arp, Alvar Aalto and James Joyce. Among the teachers who greatly influenced him one can name Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Arne Korsmo. He collaborated with most of the contemporary architects and critics, such as Charles Jencks, Paolo Portoghesi, Giancarlo De Carlo and Robert Stern.
I first met him in Genoa, in 1980 or 1981. He was of medium height with thinning hair. Throughout the three years that he came to our school to teach the phenomenology of modern architecture, he appeared in a simple suit. In those same years Paolo Portoghesi would appear at his lectures dressed in some unusual get-up that, each time, a famous fashion designer had prepared for him. Schulz was a very modest, quiet person and did not set himself apart from others by the way he spoke or dressed. Despite many obligations and a heavily pressed working life, he was always ready to help students and listened carefully, patiently, to what everyone had to say.
Writing about Norberg-Schulz's work is difficult; it requires that one have read and analysed in full his thirty books and hundreds of articles. On the other hand, what Schulz has said is hard to express better than he himself did. Taking notes from his work is very difficult, because everything is expressed in a dense and concise form. The amount of information packed into one of his books is unprecedented. He examines problems from several points of view, and for that reason the main table of contents of each of his books is very long. Inevitably, what is quoted from Schulz describes only a very small part of his work, and, in terms of interpretation, it is entirely personal.
As Schulz himself points out, the starting point of his theoretical work is Giedion and his well-known book Space, Time and Architecture. Giedion was among the first to herald the emergence of new tendencies in modern architecture: a monumentalism realised in works such as Le Corbusier's Chandigarh complex, and a regionalism that came out in Alvar Aalto's work. After the Second World War the new dimensions of modern architecture had become fully visible; the 1951 CIAM congress in England was devoted to the theme of "the heart of the city." The architecture of that decade had also undergone a general change from that of the twenties (the peak of modernism): prismatic, coherent, compact forms had given way to open, broken-up, fragmented forms; great roofs of free and particular shape increasingly became the defining feature of public buildings.
In that same period, between the 1920s and the 1950s, the matter of architecture was inclining from an initial idea of "space" toward an idea of "place": architecture as space or a physical locus where functional and rational ideas and forms answering to the laws of visual perception (the psychology of sensory-nervous-luminous stimulation) would be carried out was giving way to a more concrete, more tangible conception of architecture's relation to a real human being. Culturally, historically and semiologically rich architecture played an important role in realising this second tendency. In Intentions in Architecture (1967), Schulz lays the theoretical groundwork for the new tendencies in modern architecture that Giedion called "new regionalism." Schulz cites as his motive for writing this book the inability of the traditional modern methods in education.
According to him, the Bauhaus masters taught visual perception and its rules, but when designing the students were forced to use purely functionalist models. Schulz concludes that architecture needs a unified theory that, in laying out the different functional and aesthetic dimensions of a project, would not separate them but rather present them as a single, meaningful whole that is naturally intelligible — a whole which he named the "symbolic environment."
In the following years, through his acquaintance with Heidegger and Piaget, he was able to complete his theories and introduce the method of "phenomenology" as the best way of examining place. Heidegger's influence on Schulz is fully apparent in Between Earth and Sky (1978), whose very title is taken from Heidegger.
Genius Loci — "the spirit of place," the Latin term — was published in 1979, and very timely it was. In the seventies another of modernism's pillars, namely art as sheer innovation, had collapsed. In the second half of that decade, post-modernism and the post-modern style came into view. As Paolo Portoghesi puts it in the Post-Modern manifesto, the common thread of the post-modern architectures was their break from modernism. In this period new values came forward; ornament, historical forms and vernacular values made their way back into architecture. The post-modernists restored the relation with place and time in a concrete — and often populist — way.
This book was born in the years when Schulz, alongside the leading figures of post-modernism, was engaged in theorising the new style. Schulz's discussion in this period was far deeper than that of most of his contemporaries. His regionalism was fundamentally distinct from that of the post-modernist leaders. Schulz's aim was to present architecture as the shaper of meaningful, concrete places, in the way this is set out from a phenomenological point of view.
"Place" forms the central theme of this book. Place is not a container; rather, it is a structure made up of environment and human being, in which phenomena are present qualitatively and in the way they are known in natural, everyday experience. Every place is a part of a unified totality; everything is related to one totality, and each place is itself part of a larger place.
According to Schulz, modern culture, arising from functionalism and rationalism, seeks to break the world apart. The separation of object from subject, rooted in Cartesian thought, has cast its shadow over most modern productions. In today's sciences, too, phenomena and topics are scientifically separated from one another and studied in isolation. Non-meaningful aspects of form — such as visual perception, which concerns itself only with the nervous stimuli arising from seeing and the reactions bound up with them — become the means of knowing form and architecture; whereas people's lives are lived in qualitative, meaningful, real places, not in the abstract space of the sciences of object and subject; and the human being in the environment is not a detached observer but stands in a relation of coexistence with the things and beings and the place of which he himself is part.
To explain this, Schulz turns to linguistics and literature; the use of literary and linguistic paradigms to explain architecture is another important feature of his theories. For Schulz, every utterance has a meaning that is set in relation to other meanings through the rules of grammar; the structure of language and the words together form the text of speech. That is the formal, surface meaning, while words and sentences can carry deep and varied meanings that depend on indications that are not amenable to scientific analysis and are felt only through direct experience. Architecture too is the art of making place, and the artist has the duty of revealing the values latent in place.
In a person's everyday life, the flatness of the earth and the shaping effect of gravity are a key pre-assumption. Pre-assumptions, according to Schulz, play an essential role in understanding the environment. Phenomena, while unpredictable, possess a stable identity which allows them continually to be reinterpreted and to change. The principle of art is differentiation and identity. What relates the phenomena of a place to one another is not their imitation of some eternal and fixed form, but their shared way of being in the world. What connects sparrow to eagle is their being-birds, and being-a-bird is a description of how they are in the world. Schulz says that in the city today, identity and the sense of belonging to place have faded, and this situation has dealt an important blow to human beings. The sense of belonging to place must be present, and it arises from an understanding of space and from "finding one's position within it."
The book Existence, Space and Architecture (1971) is devoted to the discussion of space and is therefore a complement to the earlier studies of place. In it, kinds of space — from practical and conceptual space to scientific space — are classified. Schulz, before raising architectural space, speaks of existential space, and to explain it he uses Piaget's theory: the child gradually learns how to distinguish between stable and changing objects and uses the former as a frame and reference for identifying the latter. The child's world is made up of a limited set of stable elements; the adult's world has more elements, but in either case existential space is the whole set of perceptual experiences inscribed in our mind, and the core of such a space is formed from the earliest years of life.
Meaning in Western Architecture (1974) applies the same concepts raised in the previous book to the analysis of the history of architecture from ancient Egypt to the present. Landscapes and ancient settlements are presented as meaningful presences in which the values of natural phenomena and culture are manifested concretely. Another important book of Schulz's is The Roots of Modern Architecture, published in 1988. Its aim is not to present a history of modern architecture but to find a theoretical basis for it. In this book, the initial aims and the results of modern architecture are discussed. Meaning and regionalism are among its other topics.
One of Schulz's last comprehensive books devoted to the theory of architecture is Architettura: Presenza, Linguaggio e Luogo, published in 1996. In it Schulz names "presence" as the principle of architecture. In concrete, everyday experience, human understanding is qualitative and cannot be made specialised; specialised, one-dimensional understandings are deficient. Today we do not learn from concrete things but pick up abstract categories; for instance, everyone knows that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one of oxygen, but few people attend to water as one of the most important and complex natural presences, one that in every historical culture has borne a sacred value.
In the Renaissance, for example, the arts devoted much time — even ahead of Leonardo da Vinci — to the study of the form of water as it flows in rivers. For Leonardo, water was an element of nature in which substance, form, movement, colour and other properties were inseparable from each other. This kind of knowledge is artistic knowledge, and it leads us toward a poetic understanding of the world. Through it, the unknown and deep sides of phenomena disclose themselves to us. Schulz calls this method the phenomenological method — or the natural method for knowing phenomena.
