There is an increasing tendency towards a flight into the ivory tower of architecture, as the discipline gets confronted with the phenomena of global market and mass-culture. The reactionary lethargy of a retreat from the struggle with society leaves no significant position in the field of cultural production for the protagonists of the discipline. Architecture is perhaps the last field, which refuses to confront itself with that dilemma, even though the star system starts to be introduced into its realm with the faces of Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Rem Koolhaas on the front pages of popular magazines. The urge to create one’s personal style, in order to become a successful trademark leads to a specialization into certain fields including the danger of failure. Today’s architects are facing the problem that a specifically styled tool, however adorable per se, might not be appropriate for every task given. An adequate style and method for one operation can be unsuccessful in another. In the coherency of architectural thinking, methodology, function, and formal language lies an advantage and a danger at the same time: there is no doubt about the strength of a pure style, but one cannot deny the inevitable limitations of a fixed ideology either. This ideological enclosure can not be opened up through the replacement of one system of beliefs through another or a combination of others, but only through the introduction of methodology instead of ideology – the destruction of exclusive borders through the introduction of inclusive structures for the production of the border-less.
In that sense the term style has to be reevaluated and redefined, the concept of style will have to be reformulated. Used as an internally coherent tool to homogenize the cultural production of a region or period, the term has to accept its role as an internally conflicted methodology for the production of a heterogeneous pool of results. Architects have to embrace the concept of style, instead of rejecting it.
Every creation involves one or more styles. To make a good building a single style is usually chosen. But a movie like Casablanca is not satisfied with that. It uses a multiplicity of archetypes and styles, resulting in the effect that each viewer can see something different that the others have missed. Casablanca is a cult movie because all the archetypes are there, because each actor repeats a part played on other occasions, and because human beings live not a “real” life but life as stereotypically portrayed in previous films. Should architecture not try to follow a similar path through the simultaneous dissipation and embracing of its interiority? Casablanca became a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is “movies”. And this is the reason it works, in defiance of any aesthetic theory. For it stages the powers of Narration in its natural state, before art intervenes to tame it.
We can see an architecture of new combinations, the grafting of different cultures and styles. The English word graft includes a variety of meanings and multiple readings. It has a particular meaning in the terminology of botany, the grafting of one shoot onto a genetically different host. The positive properties of two genetically different cultures are combined in the new biological hybrid. With botany as a point of departure we can look at GRAFT as a phenomenon in human culture and examine its implications for Architecture. We can look at a wide variety of archetypes from different sources without prejudice – high culture, low culture, philosophy, banality, architecture, movies, literature, sports, etc. – and analyze their similarities and differences.
Based on extensive and all-inclusive research a pool of resources is being created that opens the possibilities for different ways of communication between the elements – Adjacency, Juxtaposition, Overlapping, Hybridization, Fusion. This creation of relationships between singular elements will be called ‘graft’. It refuses to accept the exclusive limitations of artificial borders between disciplines and elements and opens new possibilities for the creation of all-embracing products. Unexpected and surprising misunderstandings, global transfer of architectonic beauty, robust crossbreeds – architecture derived out of circumstances, which can only be created through the grafting of different realities.
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