与雷蒙. 亚伯拉罕的对话
An Interview with Raimund Abraham

采访：华黎 interview by HUA Li, 2003

• 你在六七十年代的早期作品体现了你对设计“机器”的极大兴趣----例如你设计的巨型城市（图1），而在后期作品中你的兴趣似乎转移到了在建筑中寻找原始形式的力量（图2）。你对建筑的态度是如何从设计“机器”转向设计 “纪念物”的？这一转变似乎表示了你的关注从“未来”转向“过去”，能否谈谈这种转变与你的职业生涯的关系？

回顾我在六十年代曾被贴上各种标签诸如“建筑幻想”或“想象建筑”的作品，我发现从那时起直到今天，我一直在尝试拒绝传统的对“什么代表了建筑的历史”的阐释。我的设计灵感大多来自“建筑”以外的领域：偶发事件的形象、普通构筑物、机器、抽象的自然形式或诗意的文字。不同于未来主义者将“机器文明”看作是拯救和进步的现象，对我来说，机器代表了一种对于极度精确和策略性的逻辑的构筑。机器在“置于”或“植入”环境之中时经历了一个激烈的演化后变成建筑。如果在我的绘图和建筑中还能找到机器建造的精确，这是我力图在建筑的建造形式上寻求决不妥协的清晰性的结果。

纪念物不是造出来的，而是诗意的力量的体现。它是“当时空经过后，美的再度被发现”（Elias Canetti语）更确切地说，建筑只能被理解为几何空间与生理空间的对抗或理想与物质的碰撞。理想意味着无限或永恒，而物质则可看作是身体的象征----在场和缺席。换句话说，思想总是趋于无限的自由，而身体是脆弱、短暂的，就像材料随着时间而腐败。如果在现代世界我们还有希望重塑神圣的话，这也只能通过对人的原始存在的一种重新解释来达到。新的偶像不可能来自于已经消失的历史阶段里的某一主题，它只能或来自对我们内在的本体极限的认识，或根本无法获得。

• Your early works during 60s and 70s shows a fascination to design the machine like mega-structure (figure 1) and later works shows an interest in the power of “archaic form” in architecture (figure 2). Does this change suggest that your attitude to architecture has changed from thinking of it as “machine” to as “monument”? How is this change of your interest from “future” to “past” related to your career life?

Looking back at my work of the sixties which had been labeled as “Architectural Fantasies”, “Visionary Architecture”, etc., I attempted then and I continue to do so today, to resist the conventional interpretations of what represents the historic manifestations of architecture. I draw my inspirations mostly from domains outside the context of “buildings”; accidental imagery of ordinary constructs, machines, formations of abstracted landscapes and the poetic vision of literary texts. While the futurists envisioned the machine as a spectacle of salvation and progress, for me machines represent constructs of utmost precision and strategical logic. In juxtaposing and transplanting machines into landscapes they undergo a radical transformation in becoming architecture. If the precision of mechanical constructs can still be detected in my work of drawings and edifices it reflects my commitment to exercise uncompromising clarity in the tectonic formations of architecture.

Monuments are not made. They arise by the force of poetic events, to bear witness “that beauty to be found once more when space and time have passed”－－Elias Canetti More specifically, architecture can only be understood as a polarity between geometric and physiological space or as a collision between the ideal and matter, and while the ideal represents the notion of infinity or, let us say, the eternal, matter can be regarded as the symbolic representation of the body –its presence and its absence. To put it in other words, while man’s conceptual powers aspire to the infinite, his body is essentially fragile, temporal, a corpus which will be laid to waste, like material itself, by the unremitting action of time. If there remains any hope for recreating the iconic in the modern world, then surely this will only come from a reinterpretation of the archetypal existence of man; that is to say, new icons cannot possibly be established on the basis of motifs drawn or transposed from lost historical epochs. New icons will either come from a recognition of our intrinsic ontological limits or they will not arise at all.

• 你谈到建筑是一种隐喻：一种对记忆的普遍性的解释。这是否出于你对建筑形式的象征性的力量的一种信念？你认为建筑中的象征在我们今天日趋技术和计算至上的现实中扮演什么样的角色？

如海德格尔所说：德语“场地”（Ort ）一词原意是长矛的尖----无限小但有力，所有的力和矢量都集中在一点，然后通过一种由能量到物质的神秘转化而释放。这种转化即是场地作为场所的历史。对这种力量的认知转化为一种对事件、场所、时间的记忆，进而成为永远变化的现实的定义和确认。 当建筑的要素变成记忆的触发剂时，这种从场所的历史中得来的对空间事件的记忆就通过建筑语言的抽象得到理想化。 自由组合的象征及图像决定建筑语言的一种客观极限，对文学性的描述方式提出挑战----拒绝文学表现式的戏剧化。建筑成为了历史组合中的理想化语言，而理想是一种极为清晰的形式。过去，作为历史神话或历史记录的体现是不可消逝的，它通过空间和时间的片断揭示自己，记忆由此转化为空间事件。

建筑的元素定义了场所的空间结构，通过与事件、场所的物质和历史的渐变进行思辨式的对抗，这些元素变化为一种隐喻，试图对记忆进行具有普遍性的解释：埋藏/挖掘/分离/分割/穿透/碰撞/终结/门/ 轴线/ 通道/ 张力/ 调和等等。这些隐喻，能无限组合成为建筑中的基本的东西。将隐喻译为建筑形式的过程通过持续对抗式的思辨成为一个平衡张力的过程，它导致对一个自主的理想形式的领域的发现。

建筑形式的理想需要冥想去理解，建筑的功能只是满足人生活的基本习性和需要。

• You talked about that architecture is a metaphor to attempt a universal interpretation of memory. Is this sort of from your belief on the symbolic power of form in architecture? How do you think of the role of symbolism in architecture in our more technology and computation oriented reality?

The etymological origin of the German Ort (site), according to Heidegger, means the tip of a lance –infitely small but mighty by its power to encompass and condense, where all forces and vectors are concentrated to be liberated and released through a mysterious transformation of energy into matter, of image into built form. This transformation becomes the history of the site as place, while the cognition of forces and vectors becomes the memory of events, temporary sediments of place and time, definition and confirmation of an ever-changing reality. The manifestation of the memory of spatial events from the history of the site is idealized through the abstraction of the language of architecture, while the elements of architecture become the catalysts for the process of memory. Interpretors, limited by narrative conventions of content, ought to be challenged by free associations with symbols and images that determine the objective limits of the architectural language –to resist the theatrics of narrative representations. Architecture becomes the idealized language of historical associations whereby ideal ought to be defined as a form of radical clarity. The past as a representation of historical myth or historical documentation can neither be conquered nor erased: it reveals itself through the fragments of space and time. Memory is transformed into spatial events. 

The architectural elements, which define the spatial structure of the site through continuous dialectical confrontations with the physical and historical morphology of events and places, are transmuted into metaphors to attempt a universal interpretation of memory: burial/ excavation/ separation/ division/ penetration/ collision/ terminal/ gates/ axes/ cuts/ pathways/ tension/ reconciliation. This limited selection of universally interpretable metaphors, which permits an infinite choice of associations while it defies narrative interpretations, becomes the essential foundation of the architectural concept of paradigms. The process of translating this metaphorical program into the language of architectural forms should should lead to the recognition of the autonomous domains of ideal form and ideal use without a predetermined attempt of reconciliation, but through a continuous process of dialectical confrontation: equilibrium through tension.

While the ideal of architectural form demands contemplation, utility obeys the habit and necessities of human existence.

• 你是否认为今天象你这样的建筑师在社会中已被边缘化？似乎你更认为自己是一个艺术家因为你曾谈到你从未将建筑当作一种职业？与此相关，你是否可以谈谈你在库柏联盟教书时的一些目标？

如果你在建筑生涯中选择了一种对抗和独立的姿态并且有不愿妥协的激情，你自然而然会被一个日益趋于合作化的社会推向边缘的位置，而库柏联盟作为学校因为持有同样姿态自然不可避免有相似的结果。

对于我，建筑不是一门职业，而是一种纪律。一个建筑学院不是培养专业技术人才的，而是一个论坛提供思考与对抗的舞台----针对老师、意识形态以及时尚的对抗。建筑自身纪律的危机与建筑教育的危机是相互关联的。或许建筑学本身并不存在危机，危机来自于建筑师、老师、学生对职业诱惑的屈服。我的目标是指导学生挑战想象的极限，去寻找思考的极致，寻找“不可能”。历史中有一个时刻就是“原初”（Originality）需要重新定义。当艺术家作为反传统者被迫切入历史的积淀去再次触及所有事物的原点，事件的发生否定了表象。对我来说，现代建筑是对风格的不可逆转的终结。

石匠要理解切割石头的本质，他必须是一个勘测者和地质学家。建筑师在绘图时也应意识到纸面就是场地（site），就是地形（landscape）。建筑绘图是不可以渲染的，相反，它是一种对形式表达的语法上的建造。它不是走向建筑的一步，它本身就是建筑。 我将对场地的介入和平衡的打破作为建筑设计中的重要事件（图3）。设计则是接下来的一个调和的举动。我建的房子不多，但我实践建筑学的原则。在设计中，我不相信一个预设的现实（preconcieved reality）我相信主观的东西，理想的建筑就是要突破我们习惯性的思维尺度。

• Do you think that the social position of architect like you has been marginalized in society? Actually it seems that you consider yourself more as an artist since you said you never took architecture as a profession. Related to this, could you talk about the education goal of Cooper Union when you were teaching there?

If you choose a position of resistance, independence and uncompromising passion in architecture, you are automatically marginalized by an increasingly corporate society, and so are schools of architecture, like Cooper Union, which share and celebrate this position.

For me, architecture is not a profession, but a discipline, and a school of architecture is not a place to prepare students for professional enterprises, but a forum for intellectual discourse and resistance: resistance against teachers, ideologies, and the gurus of the newest fashions. And whether or not there is a crisis in our schools, we cannot separate the crisis within the discipline of architecture from the crisis in architectural education. On the other hand it is too easy to accept the generalization of critical conditions, maybe because there is no crisis in architecture or in the education of architects, but rather a crisis of architects, educators and students who have succumbed to the seduction of professionalism. When Wittgenstein said: “A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are under his direct influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at his level, so that they immediately decline again, as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom”, you may assume that I am one of those teachers. Either we try to teach the students the necessity to challenge first the limits of their imagination, to envision the impossible and to think as far as their thoughts can carry them, or we deny them the only thing worthwhile teaching: the poetics of architecture. A moment in history, when the term “originality” ought to be redefined, when the artist as an iconoclast is forced to cut through the accumulated sediments of history, to reach again the origins of all things. Occurrence against appearance. For me modern architecture is the irreversible termination of styles. Architecture can only be understood as a polarity between geometric and physiological space or as a collision between the ideal and the matter. But while the ideal represents the notion of infinity, matter can be regarded as the finite representation of the body.

Forthe stonemason to understand the nature of cutting stone, he ought to be a surveyor and a geologist. The architect when he draws has to be aware that the paper he draws on becomes a site, a landscape, and that the pencil he is using can either cut lines into the landscape or built up graphite, depending on how hard or how soft the pencil’s lead is. An architectural drawing can never be rendered. On the contrary it ought to be constructed to reveal the syntax of its formal manifestation. Drawing for me is like an event of making architecture itself, it fluctuates between the idea and the anticipation of the physical reality of built form. It is not a step toward architecture, it is architecture. I consider the violation of the site, the disturbance of its equilibrium, the primary event in making architecture. (figure 3) Design is the consequent act of reconciliation. I have built very little. But I practice the discipline of architecture. I don’t believe in a preconceived reality. I believe reality has to be made. We are talking about the dimension of the ideal architecture which can be confronted with the dimension of habitation, habitation in a metaphoric sense.

• 现在让我们来谈谈你建成的作品，你似乎对建筑中雕塑感的塑造特别感兴趣，表现在空间和体量的抽象化上。你在设计奥地利文化中心这个作品是如何考虑材料的使用和细节处理的？你是否有意弱化细节以突出整体形式的纯粹性？

在发展商眼中，这是一块非常狭小的地块：25英尺宽，80英尺长。决不是一个有很大投资回报的项目，这险些促成（奥地利）政府停止这一项目。如前面所言，对场地的解读是我所有作品中最关键也是最基本的一步。基于此，才会有建筑的介入。对这块特殊地段而言，场地的特点来自空地两边相邻建筑的高度和重量感所形成的一种水平方向的压力，也来自城市法规对建筑轮廓线的控制。这栋从夹缝中长起来的塔楼有三个句法学的要素：脊椎骨—楼梯塔，核心筒—结构塔，表面—玻璃幕墙塔，象征了重力的反作用力：上升、支撑和悬挂。楼梯塔和玻璃幕墙塔分别在垂直方向和对角线方向试图塑造延伸感。楼梯塔在上升而玻璃幕墙似乎是要坠落。

我在处理材料和体量时主要有两个决定性因素。我从来没对玻璃的幻觉式的光影效果感兴趣过，相反，和密斯相似，我关注这种材料的本质，即：沉重和精确。为了获得建筑立面上的“刀锋”的效果，所有的金属龙骨都作了尖角的特殊处理。斜的玻璃幕墙角度来自规划对建筑轮廓的要求。塔楼本身就如同在楼梯塔和玻璃幕墙之间的裂缝。

• Let’s talk about your building. It seems you’ve always been interested in the sculptural quality of architecture. i.e. abstraction of space and geometry. In Austrian Cultural Forum, how did you consider the use of material and way of details? Were they meant to be not too much emphasized or articulated so that you can gain the purity of form?

In the pragmatic world of developers and their lackeys who call themselves architects, the site for the tower, 25 feet wide and 80 feet deep, would be interpreted as a narrow lot, unfit for a profitable development; an argument used initially and finally by the government to deny the project its realization. As in all my work the reading and interpreting of the Site is the most crucial and essential condition to attempt its transformation and to define its intervention. Infinitely small but mighty in its power to encompass and to condense all vectors and forces, concentrated and to be liberated and released through a mysterious transformation of energy defined through the dichotomy of physiological verses geometrical space. Within the context of this particular site, this dialectical condition is manifested by the lateral compression of the void, defined by the weight and height of the neighboring buildings, and the geometrical definition of the zoning envelope, as defined by the building code. The tower rising autonomously between the existing walls of the adjacent structures, is defined by three syntactic elements, the Vertebra-Stair Tower, the Core-Structural Tower, the Mask-Glass Tower, signifying the counter forces of gravity: Ascension, Support and Suspension. Both the stair-tower as well as the curtain-wall thrive for infinity: the stair-tower vertically, the curtain-wall diagonally. While the stair-tower is raising, the curtain-wall is falling by suspended sheets of glass and metal.

There were two decisive issues for me in defining the material and geometric articulation of the curtain-wall. I have never been intrigued by the illusionary transparency of glass, but rather, like Mies van der Rohe, by its mineralogical origins: heavy and precise. To achieve the knife like cutting edge of its planes, all outer metal frames are mitered toward an infinitely small line. The angle of its ascending planes is derived from the angle of the zoning envelope. The tower itself can be defined as an interstice between the stair tower and the curtain-wall.

• 在奥地利文化中心项目的施工中都有什么问题？为什么美国的幕墙系统不合适并导致你用奥地利的幕墙产品？为什么用混凝土而不是钢结构作结构？是为了节省层高吗？

一种象征意义上的建造商和建筑师职业的衰落已经影响到了美国的建筑技术。美国更关注技术的演化，而欧洲的建筑技术仍离不开手工技艺的传统。我相信建筑师有责任去激发建造者对精确的追求并且挑战他们固有的定式。选用混凝土结构是由建筑的宽高比决定的。为了减小墙、梁和柱的尺寸已获得内部空间的最大化和玻璃幕墙的通透。为获得玻璃幕墙的钢和铝框的最大精确度，选用了一套预制幕墙系统（图4），是由世界领先的玻璃幕墙制造商之一，奥地利的GIG制造的。

• In Austrian Cultural Forum, what was the major problem during the construction? Why American curtain wall system is not qualified and that leads you to use Austrian product? What is the consideration to use concrete instead of steel structure? (was it for saving the floor height? but it’s not flat slab system, there is cross beam)

A symbolic decline of the builders and the profession of architects have effected the building technology in the USA. The lines of scrimmage have been shifted to newer challenges in the evolution of technology, while in Europe technology is still embedded in the tradition of craftsmanship. I believe it is the imperative obligation of the architect to inspire and challenge the builder to rediscover their aspirations and pride for precision in order to succeed in transforming the plans into built reality, independent of geography, economics and politics. The choice of reinforced concrete as the main structural system had been necessitated by the extreme ratio of width and height of the building. To be able to reduce the dimension of walls, beams and columns in order to provide optimal use of spaces and maximum transparency of the curtain-wall. To achieve the utmost precision for the steel and aluminum framing the glass façade a prefabricated panel system (figure 4) had been chosen over the, in New York customary, stick system. It was produced by GIG of Austria, one of the leading curtain-wall manufacturers in the world.

• 奥地利文化中心在周围一大片体现了工业化复制特征而没有太多表情的摩天楼的包围中，显得像一个图腾柱（图5）。这种对比很强烈，你如何看待纽约摩天楼未来的发展？

这栋楼已经被比作图腾柱、断头台、银翼杀手（Blade Runner）或是复活节岛雕塑（Easter Island Sculpture）。这都是观者自发的想象而不是建筑师的初衷。一个25英尺宽280 英尺高的细塔，成了一个很极端的形式，与周围的楼形成强烈对比。它的力量来自它的纤细、它的清晰和刀锋般的立面（图6）。

• The Austrian Cultural Forum building looks like a totem pole (figure 5) among the typical mass produced and faceless skyscrapers in New York. The contrast is amazing. Do you have a vision on the future image of Skyscrapers in Manhattan?

The tower of the Austrian Cultural Forum has been compared to a “totem pole”, a “guillotine”, to“blade runner” or “Easter island sculpture”: All associations triggered by the imagination of the viewer and never intended by the architect. A vertical slice 25 feet wide and 280 feet tall, became a deliberate manifestation of utmost formal reduction, challenging the indigenous variations of the surrounding buildings while the symmetrical spinal structure of its mask reflects necessity, not choice. Its power lies in its smallness, its radical clarity and its knife-like cutting edge, challenging the normalcy of the existing city-scape (figure 6). 

While a skyscraper reaches for the clouds the tower reverses its gravitational direction, by suspending its tectonic layers: 

“The lateral compression
of the site
defines the latency
of its vertical thrust. 
Three elementary towers: 
The Vertebra/ Stair Tower
The Core/ Structural Tower
The Mask/ Glass Tower. 
Signifying the
counterforces of gravity: 
The Vertebra- Ascension
The Core- Support
The Mask- Suspension. 
The entire Tower
rests
on the cavity
of its public spaces” 

--Raimund Abraham, 1991

• 你的一幅早期作品“航空纪念物”（图7）令人想起9.11的恐怖？当时的设计灵感来自何处？

来自诗人James Laughlin的一首描绘当年一架飞机撞上帝国大厦的情景的诗，以及我对“碰撞”这一主题的理论研究。（附英文原诗）

• One of your early works: A Monument for Aviation (figure 7) is very powerful and it reminds the terror on 9.11 . What was the idea behind that when you designed it?

The project for the “Monument of Aviation” had been inspired by the following poem by James Laughlin and by my theoretical investigations of “collisions”:

“You know our office on the 18th
floor of the Salmon Tower looks
right out on the 

Empire State and it just happened
we were there finishing up some
late invoices on

a new book that Saturday morning
when a bomber roared through the
mist and crashed

flames poured from the windows
into the drifting clouds and sirens
screamed down in

the streets below it was unearthly
but you know the strangest thing
we realized that

none of us were much surprised
because we’d always known that those
two paragons of

progress sooner or later would
perform before our eyes this
demonstration of their
true relationship”

--James Laughlin, New York, 1945

• 可否谈谈你对当今迅速发展的中国的印象？

演进是一个创造性的过程，一种基本品质的变化，尊重记忆也预期未来。 中国的发展似乎并非如此。 在来自全世界的商业建筑师的帮助下，进行着对过去的文化系统性的破坏，忽视了对其居住者的基础设施、类型和场所的关注。而能解决这一问题的也只有中国人自己。

• Can you talk about your impression on today’s fast transformation in China?

Transformation is a creative process, a metamorphosis of the essential qualities of that which is to be transformed, respecting its memory while anticipating the new, the unpredictable. What is happening in China today is just the opposite. It amounts to a systematic destruction of an ancient culture by neglecting the infrastructure, typology and topography of its habitat, assisted by mercenary architects from all over the world. Who can save China? The Chinese!

附：

雷蒙.亚伯拉罕，1933年出生于奥地利Tyrol地区的Lienz，但作为一个建筑师他从1964年起在美国从事实践和教学。作为六十年代维也纳前卫建筑师的代表，他的作品与Hans Hollein及Water Pichler的作品于1967年在纽约的现代艺术馆展出。

建筑绘图在亚伯拉罕的作品中占据了中心位置，挑战着建筑必须被建造的观念。绘图创造了一个独立的现实，是亚伯拉罕的一个建筑理念。亚伯拉罕的设计作品及建成的作品反映了其很深的建筑历史根源。“碰撞”这一最基本的概念成为一种思辨式的建筑理念也成为亚伯拉罕 的建筑学的本体意义上的基础。

“对于亚伯拉罕，历史是一个不可逆转的展开，没有一种文化能基于历史主义或其衍生物。另一方面，不同于英雄主义时期的先锋，他从不认同进化的神话。像Van Eyck一样，他认为人的存在保留有不变的、来自原初的状态（unchanging archetypal condition），而真正的建筑的文化由此而来。亚伯拉罕认为他不同于先锋之处在于它始终关注存在于人文意义之先的建筑本体。这种从本体出发的方法并不是要拒绝现代技术，也不会排除使用传统材料的可能。它寻找一种建筑语汇的清晰表达。就如在密斯和Carlo Scarpa的作品中显示的，新与旧，机器制造的和手工艺制造的在一种延续中共存。”----弗兰普顿（Kenneth Frampton）