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EUROPA
ambient disorder, the disparate landscape integrates within a totality: coordinat-
ed by regulations (size, minimum distance between buildings to allow unimped-
ed views, alignments); rich and ambiguous, due to the differences and similarities
of styles of the period, materials or colours. Patchwork is the expression of the
regulating function against the risks of dispersion and dislocation; its role is the
relative decrease of disorder. In this sense, it conveys, within material culture, an
image of democracy. It reunites and tidies up, but without restricting the variety
of the individuals that will work in it. It uses the differences and draws its prestige,
its cheerfulness from them.
Such a regulation is applied over time. Its function is temporal as well as spatial.
The logic of the narrative prevails over that of the picture, at least it sets the com-
position in motion, i.e., it makes the composition suitable for alteration, for repair,
for substitution. ”Contrary to traditional layout [patchwork] offers an area with
potential for change where components can transform over time. From the start,
it contains an permanent and sensitive ability to regenerate…” [Ph. Samyn,
op. cit.
,
p. 12/21]. This point is critical. Formerly the industry popularised the concept that
standardisation was a condition for the interchangeability of components, the
guarantee of the durability of constructions, if not for their development, i.e., it
has always been true for bricks, and it became true for any modular or catalogue
component, as a result of factory production… However, experience teaches us
that the standard does not last. The very standard that guaranteed what is univer-
sal (the same product for all), only managed to freeze time. And freeze the space
itself, the standard fixes, in its repetitive and homogeneous forms, the reference
points of an era, inexorably dates its processes and artefacts. It locks the forces
of decomposition and recomposition always at work amid technical systems as
they are within companies that make them live.
Patchwork locks in uncertainty and the fortuitous, but also the signature of the
artist or artisan, within a framework that provides them with usage and meaning:
an opportunity to blossom. It fits out a stage on which the game of similarities
and differences plays out, it opens the theatre of collective likenesses. [François
Noudelmann,
Les Airs de famille : Une philosophie des affinités,
Gallimard, 2012].
Instead of a powerful typological affirmation, in the style of the models of former
civil architecture, the European Council building asserts itself as a remarkable
structure, whilst exhibiting, in the middle of this chaotic neighbourhood, the
game of differences and endless adjustments. This civil use of patchwork har-
bours, in Philippe Samyn, a doctrine, coordinated with a double theory of meas-
ure and perception. But it is a theory that would force an unexpected alliance of
the
ready-made
(window frames) with geometric abstraction; or that, according
to another analogy, would show to what extent the multitude, agitated and lifted
by these window frames, echoes the solitary meditation of a Benedictine archi-
tect: the written work of Dom Hans Van der Laan
[Le Nombre plastique: quinze
leçons sur l’ordonnance architectonique,
translation of the Dutch manuscript
by Dom Xavier Botte, E.J. Brill, 1960] illuminate an entire side of the architectural
reflection involved here. And yet, in the face of a bold undertaking, intentions
overlap, reasons run into each other; it is not all that certain that the best compo-
sition rules suffice to explain the power of architecture. The interlacing of frames,
casings, bars, beyond any aesthetic aspect, carries an implicit and ambiguous
Simplicity of scales has remained one of
the qualities of Michel Polak’s architecture
for the
Résidence Palace
. The building is
notably interpreted like a web of horizontal
lines with an interdistance of 3.54 m, the
height of a floor: it is this basis that is
used for the window frame patchwork
layout. A music theory, a grammar have
been implemented. The aim was to create
harmony that charms and attracts; a layout
with a random appearance, but tempered
by measures, by perceptible rhythms. The
eleven levels above the ground floor are split
into a regular square pattern. However, each
panel is divided differently from the others,
but follows the same rules: its 5.40-m width
is subdivided into 4 x 1.35 m, a dimension
used for its flexibility. These dimensions are
divided by the primary numbers 2, 3, 5 and 7.
Subsequently all the results are multiplied
by 1.02 and 0.98 in accordance with the
theory by H. van der Laan, which shows that
a space less than 2% between the segments
of straight lines of different lengths is imper-
ceptible to the eye. This set of lines forms
a tartan with main and secondary lines.
Balances appear. From there, regulating lines
are chosen, according to which the window
frames are installed. This method for the
generation of the patchwork is stable and
convergent in any case: placing large frames
vertically, then a few casements horizontally
without drip grooves; subsequently, fill with
wood and new window frames. All frames
adjoin at least one line, and where possible
and most often two regulating lines.
Dr
philippe samyn
, engineer
the PATCHWORK
