The Disappearance of Architecture as an Artistic Theme–Part 2

Nature in Architecture

The disappearance of built structures does, however, not simply result from profit seeking and desires for fame that become manifest in continually new structures, which pay little regard to the existing substance, but also springs from the effects of natural forces. As Georg Simmel established, architecture's constitutive paradox, defending something existent against transitoriness with the forces of nature against nature, has no permanence and finds its fate in the built structure's decay as "nature's revenge." The clash of nature and civilization becomes visible in architecture through ruins. This precarious relationship of architecture and nature stands vis-à-vis the desire to not only master natural powers with architecture, but also to design nature itself as a paradisiacal site of desire (horticulture) and integrate it into the dwelling.

In their photo-text montage Private 'Public' Space: The Corporate Atrium Garden (1987), Dan Graham and Robin Hurst see the need to create a little garden of paradise on earth as the outcome of the nature enthusiasm of the waning eighteenth century, influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They follow and comment on how nature is incorporated in the city through six selected examples. They view the winter garden, as developed at world's fairs for the exhibition of exotic plants, as the forerunner of the publicly accessible atria in office towers arising since the 1960s--which they analyze as closed,"ecologically purified" spaces within a company building and whose function is to form a "hyperspace," to become "the sky" in a transferred sense. Here, nature appears within an architectural and institutional context, which presents it as controllable and part of a worldwide, highly technical civilization. Their artistic analysis--revealing the artificiality of this construction--counters this form of ideological manipulation.