ABSTRACT
Architecture is not the instrument of expression of something beyond architecture. It
is not the reflection or representation of something else. The cause of its form is
architecture itself, in space and time. In his article on ‘objective literature’, Roland
Barthes recognises in the literary work of Alain Robbe-Grillet a will to remove any pos-
sibility of metaphor and analogy and thus to kill ‘the singular and total adjective which
succeeds in tying all the metaphysical bonds of the object’.1 Denouncing the ‘tyranny
of significances’, Robbe-Grillet gives the example of those adjectives that, when
added to a name, impose a psychological reading of space and reduce the freedom of
a sentence. For example, ‘village blotti dans la colline’ – ‘village snuggled up against
the hill’ in English – gives an affective idea to a physical fact.2 Our ambition for archi-
tecture is of the same order as that of Robbe-Grillet for literature. We refuse mean-
ings beyond architecture in order to guarantee the freedom of architecture as a space
and time open to interpretations, to modifications of behaviour, to new fashions of
dwelling, to the unexpected, to the unknown. We want architecture ‘to be there
before being something’ as Robbe-Grillet remarks. The ‘Hormonorium’ that I con-
ceived in the Swiss Pavilion of the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002 was of
this kind.3 By working with certain quantifiable and quantified data of the space – an
oxygen rate lowered to 14.5 per cent, a light intensity increased to 10,000 lux – it
questioned the language of space, the vacuum as a chemical quality, the light as an
electromagnetic field, and consequently renewed the elements of architecture from
the interior of the discipline.
