A Conversation between Jacques Herzog and Jeff Wall moderated by Philip Ursprung

A Conversation between Jacques Herzog and Jeff Wall, moderated by Philip Ursprung. Basel, November 4^th 2003

Ursprung
If I were to define a common denominator that links your art and your architecture, it would be the fact that you both produce images. When you entered the world of art and architecture around 1980, there was a growing demand for images. Wolfgang Max Faust’s book Hunger nach Bildern [Hunger for Paintings] was popular in Germany and ‘Pictures’ was the name of an artistic tendency in New York. However, the two of you had to go a long way to get there, and had to get rid of a general aversion to images. Can you tell me how you turned to making images and what kind of opposition you met from critics and colleagues?

Wall
I never had an aversion to images because my interests always started from some kind of affection for them, whether it was paintings or other things, like photographs. In the 1960s, I participated in that ‘culture of aversion’, which was identified with the radical art of the time. I learnt a lot from that encounter. The atmosphere of aversion was not negative; rather, it was a dialectic relationship where I, who was instinctively interested in the art of the past, had to go through a rigorous opposition to my own instincts. My pictures never emerged from a simple sense of return to the past. I see them rather as a consequence of my experience of investigating whether what we call a picture in the West still had any life to it. What was great for me about the 1960s and 1970s was that, by trying to negate that validity of the picture, whether through conceptual art or any of those associated forms, I found ways to experience my affection again, but not in an old-fashioned way.

Herzog
One great difference is that Jeff can produce images – and is expected to produce them – more than architects would be. But the question does touch on something very important, namely that we’ve always based our work on ‘images’. We started a bit later than Jeff did, the first building was erected in 1979, and our first project was in 1978. At the very beginning as very young architects, postmodernism was emerging, something with which we’ve never been able to identify. And when deconstructivism came along two or three years later, we couldn’t warm to that approach either. We experienced it as a field that wasn’t ours. So we had to find our own way.

But we were too young and new on the market to get commissions and therefore couldn’t produce buildings – technically speaking – as easily as an artist can produce images. While looking for alternatives, we came across video, which nobody was using in architecture at the time. Video images are interesting because they relate to real life. As in photography, their pictorial reality expresses things and acts that look real, so suddenly we found ourselves with a tool that would allow us to express our ideas on architecture in a contemporary form even without a concrete commission – and much more successfully than by using classical means of representation like models, plans and drawings. So we produced images of what could become architecture. The pictures showed basically traditional interiors and ordinary life. Like the movies that we love by Powell & Pressburger or Hitchcock, we wanted to develop new possibilities for (architectural) events out of things that are very familiar rather than immediately introducing a new idiom. It seemed much more interesting and subversive to us. For that reason we were accused of opting for convention and tradition in opposition to the avant-garde, for example deconstructivism and other trends that focused on audacious and uncharted ideas. Actually, the deconstructivist emphasis on newness at all costs just bored us. It seemed like a rehashing of Russian constructivism and neo-expressionism, and we felt that a lot of potential for our generation lay in rejecting Modernism’s almost ideological emphasis on novelty. Paradoxically, we focused on familiar, popular and sometimes banal pictures in order to destroy or at least avoid the imagery of the architectural zeitgeist in those days. Our beginnings, with all the images we came up with, were essentially iconoclastic.

Wall
I haven’t seen very many of your buildings, maybe five or six, but, aside from the imagery, I am most interested in your use of materials. They are often unusual, and used in unexpected ways, like at the Dominus Winery. I don’t see that as a programmatic project, but as something intuitive and spontaneous. If one uses terms such as ‘intuitive’ and ‘spontaneous’ one finds oneself in an aesthetic world that is very different from the kind of postmodernism you are talking about. To be intuitive is sort of romantic. I don’t mean romantic in a historical sense, I just mean ‘lyrical’. And to me, that is an aesthetic attitude that is connected to nature. I know that my sense of nature has always had a lot to do with the way things look, the volumes, colours, or textures of a certain object or thing. This old and probably conventional sense of nature was one of those things that were apparently devalued in discourses like deconstructivism. But I see a strong touch of this feeling for nature in your architecture. I wonder whether that instinctive quality has something to do with an acceptance of the past. Not an uncritical acceptance, but an instinctive acceptance.

Herzog
You’ve mentioned several things: romanticism, nature, instinct, the past. These concepts are all somehow related, for one thing because they are somewhat disparagingly considered anti-intellectual. But that also shows their potential: there is no reason to pit intellect against instinct. I‘ve always been fascinated with the way Novalis and Goethe interpret romanticism. There is something both naive and marvellous about Goethe‘s drawings of cloud formations because they testify to the attempt to understand and keep a record of nature, to assimilate it. ‘Natural’ means the existing physical world to us – similar to the way you describe it for yourself – and our architecture is a response to that. That’s why using all five senses to explore the physical world is central to everything we do. We insist on involving them all because that approach strengthens architecture with respect to other media like movies or television, which are incredibly seductive but appeal mainly to the sense of sight. In other words, architecture is an old, archaic medium not because it has been around for such a long time but because it makes such great demands on people, drawing them in, abusing and seducing them with all the senses. Only in that way, with all this archaic variety is architecture capable of surviving and worth preserving. Otherwise it’s decoration, a purely technical structure for our diverse activities.

Ursprung
Materials can indicate the passing of time or time as a process. For both of you, ‘the new’ has always played a less important role than the ‘transformation’ of something pre-existing. Can you tell me something about your interest in historical time?

Wall
Hannah Arendt suggested that artistic creation produces things that are meant to last a long time. This means that the materials out of which sculptures or buildings are made are supposed to get old. I was in Sicily last week, looking at very old things. In the Mediterranean area you see a lot of structures that are aged, not necessarily ruins, but old. And their ageing process is extremely important for their beauty. Once you get interested in materials and in the ageing of material, your relationship to the past has to be affected somehow.

Herzog
Anyone who thinks up, creates, produces or just uses objects – everybody, that means everybody – is confronted with the fact that things change, wear out, erode, decay or somehow disappear. That also applies to architects and their buildings, except that the scale is larger. It’s interesting, though, that there are very different ideas about how to ensure that things and materials have a longer (physical) life and longer (spiritual) survival. Vitruvius’s firmitas best reflects the western bunker mentality, but I prefer venustas – you can come across fragile materials and forms of construction, especially in Asian cultures, that manifest an extraordinary resistance and life span despite their fragility. Palaces and temples made of paper, bamboo or wood sometimes last longer than ones made of stone.

Wall
Like the Japanese concept, wabi sabi. It includes the idea that fragile things survive because of the way people relate to them, and that their fragility and decay are an important part of why we relate to them the way we do.

Bechtler
The concept of ongoing renewal can also be a ritualised procedure, like the Shinto shrine in Ise, which is dismantled and completely rebuilt every 20 years – and it’s been done for the past 1300 years! The idea of the ephemeral is more rooted in Asian societies while the Western world seems to focus more on conservation.

Herzog
Survival works because people love and admire a building or are simply enthralled by its beauty. We are extremely interested in this idea of beauty and it is, of course, associated with the concepts we were talking about before – nature, romanticism, etc. We can only hope that all of our fragile constructions, like silk-screened panels, glass panels, moss, wood or walls of stones piled up without any mortar, will generate enough magic to encourage the love and devotion necessary for proper maintenance.

Ursprung
There seems to be a fundamental difference in attitude here between the two of you. I was interested in the fact that you, Jeff, claim to make your black-and-white pictures last for a hundred years …

Wall
… a thousand years … (laughter)

Ursprung
… whereas Jacques says that he is fascinated by fashion or video because they are ephemeral.

Herzog
The two approaches are not mutually exclusive …

Wall
… because ephemeral things can last a long time. If one cares about them, they are going to survive, even in a decayed state.

Ursprung
Although you agree, I’d still like to explore where your attitudes diverge. Jacques seems to be horrified by the very idea that someone could define or pin down his ideas. His rhetoric is basically one of negation. Jeff, on the other hand, seems completely open to categorical definitions. He ‘fits’ perfectly well into discursive practices and his rhetoric is that of affirmation. I often have the impression that, for Jacques, the world is full of meaning and images, and that he is trying to create some ‘empty’ space. On the other hand, I have the impression that, for Jeff, the world is a priori empty and waiting to be filled with images. Am I correct?

Herzog
Actually, to us the world is full of meaning and also full of images and full of a priori’s. We just have to deal with it. Protestantism, the dominant cultural heritage in Switzerland, produced the antidote of iconoclasm, whose contemporary form in art and architecture is the empty space. Emptiness, the absence of images, always seems laboured and contrived and reminiscent of religious fervour. We’re more interested in destroying pictures in order to make room for other ones. Destroying is more interesting than preventing or suppressing.

Wall
When I come to Europe I notice differences from when I am home in America. (By ‘America’ I mean both the United States of America and Canada.) Here in Europe, older ways of doing things and older kinds of spaces and structures are really palpable – such as the house we are in this afternoon. Generations have passed, looking through that window in front of us. In Europe I sometimes feel an almost suffocating sense of the past. In America you don’t have that feeling, even though America is now over 400 years old.

At home, we can still have the experience of the pathless, the less mapped, even though our places are also getting old and very settled.

Herzog
In Switzerland you can’t experience anything that isn’t ‘mapped’. All the trails are laid, named and sign-posted. Everywhere there are railroad tracks, streets, houses or signs telling you not to do something. Switzerland is totally urbanised and yet not truly urban. Switzerland is totally modern and still caught up in the obsolete image of being a natural environment that contains urban areas. This wishful self-image is so ingrained and so successfully communicated to the world outside that even people who occasionally visit Switzerland believe in it. But in reality Switzerland, possibly even more so than Holland, is a topography of artificial urban development, sprinkled with undeveloped land.

Wall
I wonder if what we call modernity isn’t really very old. The new keeps happening and I feel that we can find what we call ‘the new’ a very long way back into the past. This has to do with my sense about why the arts of the past remain in some critical way available to us. ‘The new’ has happened before.

Ursprung
When I went to see you in Vancouver, Jeff, I found it full of traces of the past. I felt that I could actually see through the layers of the past, see history. In Europe, and particularly here in Switzerland, I have a problem seeing history because everything is constantly being fixed and varnished and polished.

Wall
I rarely have visitors in Vancouver, but when I do have them and show them around the city, I sometimes feel that it is disappointing for them. Sometimes I even feel a little ashamed because Vancouver is really not an impressive city, as a city. It is very ordinary, even worse than ordinary. But that’s what it is, and I’m afraid that is what modernity is like when it is fresh. We often react negatively to that ‘worse-than-ordinary’. In my pictures I try to perceive it as the actual environment in which we live, as the result of all our labours and errors. I think that’s an important way of looking at it and I know that architects sometimes look at it in that way too, partly out of their sense of trying to ‘learn from Las Vegas’, to learn from the vernacular. One of the essential things about the vernacular is that it is unimpressive, it is ordinary, worse than ordinary. It is the essential phenomenon of what we call ‘the new’.

Herzog
Last night, I was studying your famous picture No and trying to figure out what type of city it shows. You can’t see the sky, only the city, any American city, or what you could call a modern city ‘when it is fresh’. It’s a city without all those specific features that inevitably emerge over the years in the process of acquiring a history. In your pictures you seem to go for an anonymous context that does not refer to any specific city.

Wall
It is very important not to use a city as a specific background. Sometimes I find it very boring to find out that in one particular town there is a very good kind of ham and in another town nearby there is another very good kind of ham and that you must go to this town or region to taste this ham, this wine or this rucola and so on. It gets tiring realising that every place is so special, has its own special thing – in the end it is all ham, wine, rucola. You can see why people like Coca-Cola because they don’t need to have this ‘special experience’ all the time.

I don’t like the idea of the ‘genius loci’, the special spirit of a place. I don’t like the idea that everywhere people feel they live in a very special place that is precious to them, and they are anxious for all the world to know how special it is. I don’t deny that there is some truth to all this, because I like this ham better than that one, too. But as an artist I don’t want to feel that way; I want to feel detached from ‘the local’ whilst being in it, not valuing it, just trying to observe it.

Inevitably you are attached to your own place, and it’s okay if it has a personal value to you as an individual, but I don’t think it’s good as an artistic value.

I dislike the notion of ‘the local’. To me, it means parochialism and provincial power structures. I like the idea that great communities can be formed by people who insist that they are not special, not somehow selected specially by heaven because of where they live. I want to emphasise that we need to value precisely what is not special about us. That way, we are less inclined to create local cults against ‘outsiders’. I don’t want to present any city as a place more special than any other place.

Herzog
That is something art can achieve. Art can express the idea of something that is ‘not special’, in other words, of general validity. Cities can’t do that although it is a goal that urbanists keep trying to achieve: a generally applicable urban form with no specific idiosyncrasies and yet still competitive and self-confident. You can see efforts in that direction, for instance, in the geometrical layout of Roman cities, in Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris, in the modernist proposals of Hilbersheimer or Le Corbusier, in socialist cities built after the war and now in the new cities that are being built by the Chinese. There is always the eternal pipe dream of emancipation because as cities age they become increasingly specific, both to their advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is that residents generally want to make their city better, more beautiful, stronger or just simply different and more special than other places. Cities are a kind of battle zone; they physically reflect human strengths and weaknesses. They are like a petrified psychogram. They can’t help becoming specific, which leads to fascinating, spectacular phenomena like superb buildings, squares and facilities, but the emphasis on difference at all costs and certain affectations are sometimes pushed to almost ludicrous extremes.

Wall
If you’re an architect and want to make a building in a city, you want to make a good building. And by making a good building, you are creating something that people want to appreciate and when they appreciate it, they feel they are in a good place, which makes that place better than another place. I want to suspend that. And therefore to photograph a place like the street in No is as if all the ambitions that have come together there have both been realised and lost. And what is left over is the experienced world that contains both successes and failures. I don’t want to photograph catastrophically failed spaces, partly because that has become a sentimental genre, and also because it is not really that interesting artistically. What is interesting is this zone in which attempts to create a world are in process, have not been completed, probably cannot be completed, and at the same time are being encountered, affected by other forces. So there is some element of failure, there is some element of success, and there is some element of indifference. All those blend to create the picture’s atmosphere. This is the photographer’s good fortune – we need neither urban success nor urban failure. As an architect, you don’t have that freedom.

Herzog
Plus, as a photographer, you are able to produce more than one copy, while we mostly make one-of-a-kind products. Prefabrication and repetition, which apart from the economic factors also embody the utopian attempt to design a generally valid urban form, have all but disappeared from the building industry. Originally we planned to build signal boxes clad in copper, like the two we built in Basel, in all of Switzerland’s major cities. It would have been interesting to be able to compare the same or very similar buildings in various local contexts and to set up a kind of wide-ranging urban territory.

Wall
I don’t agree, because a designed environment only presumes to be completed. But it is never experienced entirely that way. For example, the Rehab Centre we visited this afternoon is very much designed and well designed, and the environment is strongly shaped, but events will always be taking place there for which you could never plan. That’s just the way things are. You told us, Jacques, that you were making videos to imagine an interior life in your project before it exists. But you can’t really know everything about that interior life, and that’s what’s interesting about buildings. As they get older such unexpected, unanticipated patterns show up. I am sure it must be upsetting for an architect to go to a building he designed, and discover that the people don’t use it the way he had in mind. I am sure these things happen, and they make the building more interesting. That’s what photographers like. Even the most carefully designed environment can never really be concluded. I suppose that the most sophisticated designs don’t want to get concluded.

Ursprung
Many of Jeff‘s pictures look like they were film stills. Jacques, you commented on the importance of film for the work of Herzog & de Meuron. What films are interesting to you, and how do they relate to your work?

Herzog
In the films of Powell & Pressburger, Hitchcock or Antonioni, it is fascinating to observe how architecture is treated like a character in the plot. For example the vertiginous mansion in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the gloomy interiors in Powell’s Small Back Room or the winding stairs in Antonioni’s Identificazione di una donna. What appealed to us was the idea of ordinariness, ordinary architecture, people wearing ordinary clothes, which expresses the whole drama of human life much more subversively and profoundly than any over-expressive, fictional stage architecture. Following that track, we tried at the time to come up with an architectural vocabulary that was inconspicuous and ‘normal’. Creating something inconspicuous was, of course, much more difficult for architecture in those days, than producing something new. That is why we borrowed the aesthetics of a new medium, not yet established in the field of architecture, and produced videos stills of our designs with real people in them in order to draw attention to our work, its potential, and ultimately ourselves. We had hardly any commissions and so we composed these images and imagined how people would move around in them. Today, with all the projects that we’ve done, we can go to the buildings themselves in order to observe, photograph or otherwise document how people circulate in them.

Wall
How do you influence what will be there?

Herzog
Architecture can facilitate life, make it enjoyable and inviting, or conversely, make it more difficult. Sometimes – and ideally – the architect succeeds in offering a potential that goes beyond the functional implementation of a brief. We’re trying to do that at the moment with the Forum 2004 project in Barcelona. We’ve practically reversed the brief and are ‘misusing’ the actual program (a huge exhibition space and auditorium), in order to generate space that can be used by the general public apart from conferences, congresses and exhibitions. We want the space to be for normal life and normal people in the neighbourhood, not just for specialists coming into the neighbourhood from outside and not related to it. We raised the entire building off the ground so that there would be a huge covered plaza underneath and convinced the mayor to set up a market and a chapel there. We’ll see whether it works. In any case, the idea is to make room for urban life to settle down there in order to counteract the threat of deterioration in the area.

Wall
That’s another reason why I think buildings should age, because their use could evolve over time. The cinema is very good at depicting the emergence of the identities of spaces by the way people inhabit them. This is the case especially with the neo-realists and then Antonioni, perhaps because they live and work in Italy where buildings are constantly being reused. So it is almost as if the cinema deals with the ‘after-use’, the second or third use of a building.

Photography does that too, in a less dramatic but maybe a more permanent, more contemplative way.

Ursprung
Is that why you build like to build sets for your photography?

Wall
No, I only build sets if I have to, for practical reasons, and occasionally because I want an artificial environment.

Herzog
How did you shoot The Stumbling Block?

Wall
I photographed the background, along with a number of the figures, out in the street. Then I took measurements of the foreground sidewalk area and reconstructed the first 20 feet of it in the studio. I photographed a number of the main figures in the studio and then combined their photographs with others taken in the street, using the computer.

Herzog
Did you project the city onto the background?

Wall
No, that sort of projection is completely unnecessary now.

Herzog
Was it just in your imagination?

Wall
No, all the pictures were made either at the actual location on the street or in the studio, and were then combined in the computer.

Herzog
Do you ever feel the need to rearrange the architectural background – for example, take away one building and put another one there, higher or lower, with more or less glass, in order to get an ‘ideal city’?

Wall
No. I like accidents and odd incomplete situations because that’s in the nature of photography. I think an architect can imagine a project as a possible, or provisional ‘complete situation’. I guess as an architect you can have a sense that this completion in your work is possible, whereas I always encounter incompletion. Not that I am looking for it, but because I feel that it is the way we actually live with buildings. So the incompletion and the subliminal elements of what I might call ‘the building to come’ are always hovering in the sensibility of those who are paying attention to the experience of the space. I think that is also true for natural space.

Herzog
The idea of incompletion is relevant to architecture in two respects: through physical wear, ageing, and through the unpredictable and changing way that people use architecture. A lot of our projects incorporate incompletion as an integral part of the design. You might see it as an alternative strategy to assertions of permanence or firmitas, as illustrated for example by various neo-classical approaches to architecture. But whether or not the projects are better protected in that way from demolition, destruction or being forgotten is a moot question.

Wall
I think you try to speed up the process by which the building’s use starts to mutate. You try to find ways to accelerate the historical process. I don’t think that you can succeed, but it doesn’t matter because what it really changes is the nature of how you practice architecture.

Herzog
That would mean that we envision the process of transforming architecture and the city in order to transform ourselves? We have described our architecture as an instrument of perception in order to understand life.

Wall
I think that is very modernist. I think in pre-modern culture, the manifest use of a building was determined in a different way. A building that was built as a church was used as a church and there was little question about that. One did not have the right to suggest other uses. But this probably applies only to prominent things like churches. For lesser structures, and in the villages and smaller, less central towns, with their beautiful crooked paths and streets, people could renegotiate space, rethink it and experience it as an everyday thing.

Bechtler
Like your picture The Crooked Path.

Wall
Yes, I tried to express something of all this in that picture.

Nowadays we tend to dislike the idea of anyone dictating the ultimate way to occupy a place or a space, the ultimate way to use a building. It’s not considered very democratic. At the same time, the architect, by determining the manner of occupation, becomes a new, modern kind of authority figure, since now he wants to let others discover their own path as well. He wants others to alter, maybe even violate, his original plan. And that suggests that he is making a different kind of plan now.

Herzog
Architecture and city planning cannot escape the dilemma between determination and freedom. We are currently doing urban planning for large sections of Beijing and Jinhua, and we’re trying to find new answers to this problem with a labyrinthine topology of space, with what you might call a multiple-choice topology. The neighbourhoods are being built so quickly that we’ll have the opportunity not just to see the finished product but also to observe the process of transformation as the years pass – that’s the most exciting prospect we’ve ever had in doing a project!

Ursprung
That is a crucial point. You enlarge your surface the way an animal enlarges its silhouette in self-defence. In a way that’s a very experimental means of defending yourself against time, since you don’t know what is going to happen with the buildings and perhaps taste is going change anyway in a couple of years. So you have to speed up observation, reaction, discourse. You have to set up traps, like de-automating perception, to provoke discourse. This might relate to your practice to write a lot, Jeff. You cannot take every viewer around your photographs but you can guide your readers in using discourse. Through art criticism you can also speed up the process of reception and validation. In fact, you are trained as an art historian and your professional practice followed two paths for many years since you worked simultaneously as an artist and as a historian/critic. And Jacques, you trained as an architect, but worked as an artist until the mid 1980s and, like Jeff, you’ve done a lot of writing, too. Can you tell me more about this dual practice? Are your writings commentaries on your own art and architecture, or are they autonomous works of theory? Why do you both write much less today?

Herzog
To me, writing has always been a tool that I use in order to understand. Sometimes a door opens up onto vistas that I haven’t seen or thought of before. But there’s also the danger of developing your thinking too much in the form of writing so that you rely too much on the logic of the written thoughts. I‘m convinced that only literary, poetic writing really makes sense and can pass the test of time. When architects write, it’s a technical or journalistic writing for the sake of personal marketing. I want to restrict myself in that respect because it doesn’t make any sense and it takes too much time.

Wall
In my case, there is no particular reason for writing less. Writing is difficult, especially when, like me, you have no literary talent, only some ideas to talk about. I wrote quite a bit during the years I earned a living teaching, but nothing of that was ever made ready for publication, and so it was never published. Then I wrote some critical essays because other artists invited me to write something for their exhibition catalogues. I probably took that work more seriously than I should have, and wrote more than I should have, and more intensely than I should have. Maybe that’s why the invitations stopped coming.

Herzog
Are you perhaps unconsciously trying to lead the viewer, the consumer, the person who looks at your work in a certain direction?

Wall
I think I have made pictures that had that quality, that seem to have a specific meaning. I am thinking of pictures I did, mostly in the 80s, such as Outburst, the picture of the angry factory manager. In pictures like that I did want to create access to what I might have thought to be the meaning, so people would have a direct, immediate experience of a situation whose meaning they might appreciate. That tends to suggest a dramatic picture, in which much is made visible. Slowly, I have come to feel that meaning is almost completely unimportant. Because of our education in art over the last 20 or 30 years, people expect to relate to art by understanding it, by apprehending what it means. But I may have returned to an older, simpler point of view, namely that we don’t need to understand art, we need only to fully experience it. Then we will live with the consequences of that experience, or those experiences, and that will be how art affects us.

In pictures like Outburst, I was experimenting with that sense or value of direct meaning. It is interesting to experiment with something that you may think is aesthetically inferior. Often you don’t know the nature of the rule you are following until you attempt to break it or to rewrite it. So I don’t want to say that it’s not a good way to make pictures, it’s just not the way that interests me at the moment.

Herzog
Could you describe in which way you see meaning to be more represented in this particular picture than in other ones? I see it as very expressive the way this guy is screaming at a garment worker but there’s no difference to me between that and the gestural impact of a work like Mimic.

Wall
You’re probably right. I suppose what I see as its expressivity lies in the intensity of the gestural language and of capturing the gesture at what seems to be its culminating moment, a moment that seems to reveal something basic or essential about the situation. It isn’t different in kind than other pictures, but it seems to me to be taking all that gestural work further than some, if not many, others.

Herzog
How are you going to eliminate meaning? I can certainly understand your idea of the viewer simply fully experiencing a picture. But you can’t ignore content and that’s probably not your objective anyway in view of the failure to do so in abstract painting or minimal art. What strategies or concepts do you pursue with regard to meaning? Some of your works, like Restoration or Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) remind me a little of the Byzantine tradition of inverted perspective where the simultaneous and equivalent presence of various scenes in the same picture communicates an ‘impossible’ spatiality, a kind of discontinuity that forces viewers to move back and forth and to look at the picture from different distances. The fact that the viewer has to move around in itself prevents restricting the focus to only one meaning and adds a certain element of chance.

Wall
The accidental, the contingent, is what makes photography exciting. Any aesthetic of photography contains this notion of contingency, and so of course, in a certain sense, so-called overly designed photography might be considered less photographic. I have experimented with this overly designed photography and don’t think it is ‘less photographic’…

Herzog
… it’s more cinematographic.

Wall
Yes, probably more cinematographic and less photographic in the classical sense of photography. The point is that the multiple elements you’re interested in are usually created through accidents, through chance. It is fascinating that any scene that is put in a frame contains accidental combinations of elements. Here in this room at the moment, certain objects happen to be placed on the table. They are not necessary for our meeting here, there is no call for those things to be here, they are not required. So in that way, they are accidentally present. If I should photograph us here this afternoon, these objects would be a contingent element in the picture. Nearly every combination of elements is accidental to some extent. Sometimes I stand on the street corner (this is a photographer’s game) and try to predict what the next person who is coming around the corner is going to look like. You will likely never guess right, and that unexpectedness is fundamental to the medium. So if you let that happen in one way or the other, be it through artifice or through lack of artifice, in whatever technique, it will give rise to multiple shapes, colour combinations, accidental figurations and other marks of contingency. All of those things are essentially dissonant. They’re not harmonic, in the sense that a painting by Poussin or Cézanne can be harmonic. Photography doesn’t have that harmony unless you impose it by means of composition.

Herzog
I never think of the accidental when I look at your pictures although it is, of course, extremely important in photography and in life as well. Maybe that’s what unconsciously appeals to your viewers, this aspect of chance. Chance, or rather being open to unanticipated or different kinds of change, is also our objective in architecture and in the urban projects in China that I was talking about before.

Harmony or overdetermination is a problem that applies not only to architecture but to art as well. As I said, it’s fascinating the way Byzantine artists distorted perspective in order to make viewers actually move about in front of their pictures and to avoid nailing down a specific focus. Later, painters like Delacroix or Tintoretto – you‘ve referred to them in your work, too – tried to create the same effect using different means, like a sense of scale. Do you see this contingency factor or something photographic in their work?

Wall
I’ve said many times that I think one of the great qualities of western painting since the Renaissance is its sense of scale, that scale which is related to our body and to the room in which we look at the picture. Scale helps us to realise our own mobility and its role in our experience of works of art. There is great pleasure in that mobility. Great baroque and post-baroque art has this fantastic combination of scale and order that makes you want to move back and forth to see it at different distances. It immediately suggests that there is no single way to see a picture.

Herzog
The strategy of offering viewers different levels of reality and scale at varying distances applies to the medium of architecture as well. We worked with that idea when we built the Ricola storage building in Laufen, under the influence, at the time, of conceptual and minimal art. When you move up very close the building, the image of the façade falls apart: you only see single components, nothing but paltry screws and planks. It was an important step for us, a new way of looking at the surface of the building, investing it with a kind of materiality and reality of its own. I think surface, as such, is not a major concern in your work.

Wall
No, no, I am very interested in it. But I want my surfaces to look like they do, with very fine grain. That is almost the only thing I am interested in – things like the qualities of the surface, of the grain, of the physical, formal aspects of depiction.

Herzog
But you don’t treat it as a self-contained issue, like for example Gerhard Richter or, increasingly, Thomas Ruff in his recent work on jpg structures …

Wall
… You mean making pixels visible. I don’t want visible grain or pixelation, I find it distracts from the pictorial qualities I think are more important. The crucial quality of photography is the sense that the picture surface is invisible, or seems invisible. This distinguishes it from painting; with painting the surface is physically visible and then the illusion springs from that visibility. When photographers try to imitate that, they almost always fail, because photography is not the same medium as painting. It is the invisibility of the surface that is so dramatic. What you are experiencing in photographs, in the moment of seeing the thing depicted in the photograph, is the invisibility of the surface.

Herzog
Is that why you illuminate it, to make it even more immaterial?

Wall
It can, although I don’t think that’s essential. I see the emphasis on the mark of the pixel as indicating the imitation of the norms of painting. I feel that to emphasise the invisibility of a photographic surface, its intangibility, is truer to the medium of photography. Overemphasis on grain is a way of making photography seem painterly. If the grain in your photograph is too big, it is because you’ve enlarged the negative too much. You’re out of scale.

Herzog
Then are you essentially interested only in the picture as a picture?

Wall
Yes, in a way, but there is no such thing as a picture only as a picture, because the being of a picture is a complex product. That would be like saying a building is only a building. It’s not so simple.

Herzog
I think it’s not quite the same because the picture has a philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato and the idea of the icon, whereas the building has always been described in its material context, in its functional, concrete context.

Ursprung
The architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, like the Eberswalde Library (1999), is often criticised for being overly focused on the façade. Physical space seems to be less important than the image transported by the façade. There seems to be a specific kind of spatiality, a spatiality that is different from the ‘sculptural’ space one can observe in, say, the architecture of Mies. Jeff has photographed both architectures, your Dominus Winery and Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion. Which is more ‘photogenic’? Can you describe this difference in the treatment of space? Is Herzog & de Meuron’s emphasis on surface related to what Jeff calls the ‘invisibility of the surface’?

Herzog
We’ve focused so intensely on the surfaces of buildings because it seems to us such an interesting and neglected field of activity. In some buildings, like the Dominus Winery or Eberswalde Library, the outcome has been especially spectacular so that some critics, especially those who have not actually seen the buildings themselves, tend to reduce our work to the treatment of surfaces. Our buildings are designed as 1:1 architecture and are therefore always better on site, no matter how good they might look in a picture.

Wall
I think the picture as we call it in the West has been misrecognised almost continually, in other words, people – whether they are learned or not – tend to enjoy misrecognising a picture as just a picture. It seems to be the most natural thing in the world and I think the reason for it is that the western type of picture, which you might say culminates in the photograph, resembles the way the world looks when we are not looking at pictures. To produce that effect, you need great skills, especially in drawing and painting. It’s so difficult to achieve but seems to be natural when it’s done. That illusion is central to the pleasure, which is why we always misrecognise the picture. That’s probably not true of a building. We can recognise architecture as what it is although we might misrecognise its latent uses.

Bechtler
Is that why you try to avoid meaning? Or just express it in a psychological sense but without the connotation of a certain society or narration or symbols?

Wall
Yes, I don’t have any interest in those things because I think the picture as a picture is something that we experience with our whole self – if we have the capacity to do that – some do, some don’t – and it affects us, and we don’t really need to know how it affects us. The pleasure is what affects us, it’s the enjoyment that matters to me, it’s the only thing that matters. I think that’s simpler than architecture. Jacques, do you consider architecture as an applied art in a traditional sense? I ask this because if there is a practical application, then enjoyment cannot be the only thing that matters.

Herzog
Obviously architecture is not a fine art. There are constraints, like budgets, briefs, etc. But that’s not the problem. The problem for architecture today is not a lack of freedom but freedom! Traditions and architectural typologies have become obsolete; there are no rules and no directives anymore on how to build a church or a museum or a city. But it’s thanks to such rules that cities and architectures of the past from all of the world’s traditional civilisations look beautiful to us. Paradoxically, beauty did not become an architectural problem until the freedom of industrial and modern architects and urbanists overshadowed the lack of freedom imposed by tradition. The rise of this kind of freedom calls for a new type of architecture with an aptitude for artistic and conceptual thinking because the problems facing architecture are becoming more and more related to those of the fine arts. That freedom has produced some very fine edifices and caused a burst of global competition, but the downside is the construction of some of the most abominable buildings in history. Sadly, the latter grossly outnumber the former.

Wall
That’s why I said that, with a work of architecture, enjoyment is not sufficient; you have to use it, to relate to it practically, in some way.

Herzog
Yes, because – as I said – you have to deal with a brief, a program, a budget, etc. But that’s not the real burden anymore. The real burden is being faced with a white sheet of paper and having to develop your own world. And that resembles the artist’s job, doesn’t it?

Wall
Good architects must have a talent for bearing that burden, so that the program or what the clients want doesn’t feel like a burden. Talent for architecture must involve not seeing that as a problem.

Herzog
Ideally, yes.

Bechtler
You might say, as you see it, that you are faced with a tabula rasa, but I think that art and architecture can also be a kind of seismograph for questions concerning society. There is a philosophical meaning beyond aesthetics. For example when you design something like the national stadium in Beijing, a much larger context is involved – cultural and social issues and their connotations, the actual environs, lighting or the acceptance of materials. And then there’s also the process of formulating these concerns.

Herzog
In our projects in China, and most especially the National Stadium, heralded by the media as the national monument of present-day China, we clearly have to address the relationship of contemporary architecture to tradition. Traditional images and codes, like feng shui, are much more deeply rooted in the collective conscious in China than comparable traditions anywhere else in the world. We couldn’t possibly fruitfully incorporate the way that works without the help and co-operation of Chinese artists, especially Ai Wei Wei. And, of course, that complements and enriches our work rather than being a burden. A great deal has come to light about which we actually knew nothing at all. The real burden is our own blindness and the challenge is how to overcome it, in the same way that artists are always trying to pinpoint their unconscious assumptions in order to overcome them. Although I wouldn’t claim that architecture is art.

Wall
A building is art. I wouldn’t suggest it isn’t art. It’s just that there is an old distinction between the arts that don’t have to do anything but please, like painting, and then this curious other art that can be experienced by people who take no pleasure in it, for example, the user of a building who goes there every day and never appreciates its forms or colours. I am sure you have met people who use your buildings in that way, and yet their use is legitimate and has meaning. A person who takes no joy in the use of your work can still enter into an authentic relationship to it, whereas a person who takes no pleasure in the forms of a painting or a photograph develops no legitimate relationship to it.

Ursprung
And I suppose part of that relationship has to do with meaning. You entered the art world by explicitly offering to produce meaning, like titling your works. For a long time, people were calling their work ‘untitled’; content was not allowed. Starting with Destroyed Room, you established a language of your own.

Wall
I had thought of taking all the titles off my pictures, but I guess I can’t do it now.

Herzog
Why would you want to do that?

Wall
Firstly, because slowly I began to feel that any attempt to point out the meaning of the picture tended to inhibit the experiential side, to not let the picture be what it is. I have also come very much to believe that I don’t really know what I am doing, in a programmatic sense, and I am more and more pleased with that. I know what I’m doing technically and practically, but that’s different. A title sometimes feels like it is a statement that you know what you are doing.

Bechtler
Yes, and it can also have the effect of channelling perception.

Herzog
I don’t quite agree. A title can be great and memorable if it really complements or enhances the way you appreciate or approach something. Sometimes a title is superfluous. When I asked you about The Stumbling Block before, I remembered the title only because I’d read it again yesterday although I certainly hadn’t forgotten the picture. I still had a perfectly clear image of it in my mind. So, in this case, it seems to me that the title doesn’t make a compelling contribution; it doesn’t add to the complexity of the picture. But, ultimately, that’s what titles should do. We gave names to our very early projects, like the ‘Blue House’, as a kind of overdetermination, at a time when nobody was doing that.

Wall
What do you think about that now?

Herzog
I think it can still work. At some point we found it counterproductive because we wanted to move in a more abstract direction in order to leave the door wide open to all kinds of interpretation. But we’re much more relaxed about that issue now. We work together in groups – maybe this is different from the way you work, Jeff – and that has an impact on how we find agreement in the process of exploring the identity of a potential or future object. Internal communications play a role in that process as well. Sometimes you can almost sense the project revealing its profile, like a photograph emerging on paper in the developing bath.

Wall
Then you start calling the project something, spontaneously.

Herzog
Exactly. And sometimes that spontaneous reaction can produce a great title because everybody agrees on it without having analysed it.

Wall
Interestingly, most people cannot remember the titles properly, which suggests that there is a discord inside the naming process. The fact that people forget or get the titles wrong interests me because it suggests that what I set out to express is not what I expressed.

I think you were saying, Philip, that I had a polemical intention back in the 70s …

Ursprung
Not polemical. To me it is fundamental that you gave names to your work. In my view, it was a way out of the dead-end of conceptual art. The same goes for your buildings, Jacques. I really like the fact that they have names even if I forget them or mix them up.

Wall
I guess that’s what titles are there for … to be misremembered …

Ursprung
They may result in a certain semantic overdetermination, but there is a positive side to it because ‘misremembering’ them, as you call it, demonstrates that you can never completely fix meaning.

Wall
That’s a very interesting way of looking at it because I think a title can only be unproblematic if it’s entirely generic like ‘Still Life with Apples’. It’s almost like a number or a given name like Jacques or Philip; it simply reiterates what you are seeing.

In the early 70s, it was provocative to assume that we could come back to a relationship with our pictorial tradition. I have been criticised for apparently ‘simply resuming’ the pictorial tradition. But even if I had tried only to resume traditional forms (which I did not), that would still be an experimental gesture, just as experimental as, say, pouring paint off a stick from a coffee can, the way Pollock did.

Herzog
That reminds me of the flack we got from critics about our early works because they looked so unspectacular and didn’t meet the expectations of what was supposedly avant-garde. Like Jeff, the fact that we might recur to traditional aspects, for instance, giving buildings names or titles or incorporating old-fashioned forms and materials like natural stone, does not imply a latent moralism or a penchant for convention. Quite the opposite. It’s an experimental act and an attempt to shake off the ideologies of postmodernism and emerging deconstructivism. Today our designs look much more spectacular and nobody can criticise us for a lack of inventiveness or richness of form. Actually the problem is the richness itself, countless variations that flood the world of architecture and art, and generate a kind of blindness. The problem, as always, is to escape the tyranny of innovation.

Wall
Now, so many people are so good at, so skilled at, making really rather good things, well thought-out, well-designed, well-crafted, very self-aware things – art works, buildings, publications, events, and so on – all our ‘cultural production’. It isn’t awkward, bad and ugly, it’s good, but at the same time mediocre, chic, trivial and therefore depressing. Depression seems to be a major issue these days. Maybe that’s not because of failure, as you’d expect, but because of the widespread success of mediocre culture, the elevation of the quality of the mediocre.

Herzog
Or you might say that so many interesting and beautiful things are happening at the same time that it’s …

Wall
… getting depressing. (laughter) The kind of artistic freedom that we now have has both positive and negative effects. The avant-garde tradition, both in architecture and the arts, was aimed, paradoxically, at reducing artistic freedom through ideological prescription even though it was based on a principle of artistic freedom. This is what is continuing in the academies. But now that many people do not accept the strictures of avant-garde-type thought, we have gained this immense liberty. Naturally, there are some very positive things that come out of it, but also some extremely depressing results. Not bad art, as I said, but a better-than-ever mediocre art, what Catherine David called ‘art lite’.

Herzog
The end of utopias, end of history, end of difference. Scholars like Baudrillard have described and analysed all of that. Baudrillard even laments the end of indifference. Indifference was the ultimate pleasure of intellectuals, who held up the alternative of cold indifference to a world greedily infatuated with difference. Now even that’s gone down the drain. But we’re still around and still making our products: pictures, buildings, etc. Though we seem to be in a situation where the impact, the meaning, the tension of whatever we do has been disconnected, like a global outage. Outages, natural catastrophes and terrorist attacks at the dawn of the 21st century have paradoxically made the world very real again. It’s a tremendous challenge to come to terms with this new situation. As we see it, it could be a great chance for renewal.

Wall
I think that the situation is favourable for those who have the ability to make use of it. For somebody who has an aim, discipline and judgement, and a sense of what is legitimate in art, this is probably a very good situation in which to work because the external aesthetic and ideological constraints are so weak. I suppose we just have to take the exuberant and confident diffusion of mediocrity as one of the major symptoms or consequences of our extraordinary prosperity as a culture.

Herzog
The computer is the accomplice of this rampant diffusion of mediocrity, as you call it. We observe – with a mixture of admiration and detachment – how quickly the computer provides our teams with information and references on a new theme or a new project. Once the pictures and information, come up on the computer screen, it’s very hard to oppose them. That is, it’s hard to distinguish the computer, as a purely technical aid, from its influence as a device that is not only very seductive but also levels everything out and therefore encourages the mediocrity you’re talking about.

Wall
I see the computer and its abilities in rapid modelling and simulation as a part of techné. I am trying to dethrone it to a certain extent, even while I use it, or maybe, in the process of using it.

Photography always jolts you with sudden technical problems. Some of those problems were simply insoluble with the means of photography alone. But being unable to resolve them actually heightened what we could accomplish, and so they determined what photography was. For example, at the Barcelona pavilion on a sunny day it is impossible to photograph the inside and the outside at the same time because the inside is too dark and the outside too bright. In the old days of photography you would simply lose something, whatever it was, and that loss was photography, it showed you just what photography was. And that was the beauty of photography.

Now, you can make a montage, as I did, where you don’t lose anything. You can combine images and, in doing so, resolve the old problems, or at least seem to resolve them. So now you gain something. In the past, with photography as it was, your eye could tell you what escaped the photograph. If you were actually at the Barcelona pavilion on a sunny day, you could see the outside and the inside together at the same time because our eyes can do that. And so we learned that photographic film is more limited than our eyes are. We could see that the photograph could not really show us what our eyes saw. We recognised the limitations of photography but we experienced those limitations as what is beautiful in photography. But what our eyes saw was also beautiful. And now that you can capture that as well, it is also beautiful, maybe in fact as beautiful as the old photography. So therefore we have gained a little bit. We haven’t lost anything, because we are not prevented from photographing in a traditional way. You can still choose to lose something if you want to.

Herzog
The way you describe the two methods of working – traditional photography and simulative, computer-aided photography – their potential for interaction offers prospects that could undoubtedly apply to architecture and city planning as well: being able to engage in one activity without losing or surrendering the other. In the case of our Chinese urban project in Jinhua, we’re using simulative methods in order to bring together concrete and familiar urban spaces and building typologies from all over the world in a kind of genetic operation and then join them up to create a new whole. So you come up with an artificial solution. And, as in any other city, that solution is subject to transformation in the process of concrete, physical implementation and the way people use it in everyday reality. As I said before, it’s going to be extremely interesting to see how this process of transformation develops and we want to give its as much leeway as possible.

Wall
Your model would lead to a plan and the plan would be executed imperfectly.

Herzog
Yes, inevitably: the plan will be imperfect, the execution of the plan will be imperfect, and life in the new city will be imperfect. But it will be an attempt to accomplish this imperfection on the highest level possible.

Wall
The utopian aggression against the actual, against the slow and the imperfect – I see that as a rhetoric, as one of the last formations of the avant-garde. Democracy involves imperfection. The fundamental aesthetic trait of democratic culture is the taste for imperfection. It has to do with accepting its presence and of knowing that everything you do won’t be realised exactly as you want it to be, and that other people will also have something to say about it. That spirit of imperfection realises that the past was made from mistakes that we now find interesting, as interesting as ‘getting it right’ might have been, maybe more interesting.

For an artist making pictures, that beautiful imperfection is relatively easy to attain, much more so than for someone modelling a new city.

Herzog
When you compare existing examples of urban development, Switzerland is a relatively successful model of dealing with imperfection. Switzerland has pushed the imperfect and the fragmented to perfection.

Ursprung
But then you have to accept ‘art lite’ or ‘architecture lite’ as an inevitable part of democracy.

Wall
We have to accept it, but we don’t have to accept it uncritically, because criticism is part of democracy, too. Acceptance includes acceptance of dissent. So if any of us dissent from ‘art lite’, we are in some way accepting it or at least accepting the fact that we relate to it in the form of dissent. The mediocrity that surrounds us – we hope it is a surrounding mediocrity and we are not part of it! – is a phenomenon of the democratic spirit of our wasteful, prosperous society. It’s not bad, as such, and, in fact, a lot of it is fun and amusing, fashionable and entertaining.

Ursprung
You are both in a situation of power in the sense that you’ve been able to create a lot, you’ve even created schools following in your wake. From your point of view this mediocrity might look amusing. On the other hand, many people admire your art and your buildings precisely because they see them as something that offers meaning, that provides protective spaces and that promises to change the surrounding atmosphere of powerlessness.

Wall
I don’t think that art has anything new to offer. Powerlessness and fear aren’t new. We can respond to them with only our discipline, our craft and our judgement. An architect probably doesn’t have anything else, either, but probably has more ability to make an impact on others, maybe on society. As I said, the architect has to accept that many who experience his or her buildings will do so without any enjoyment or aesthetic appreciation, and they will still experience it legitimately. That’s sort of tragic. Artists feel that anyone who doesn’t enjoy their work does not really experience it. So we are insulated, we have this happy space of ours. But we cannot shape very much and so we do not have much direct effect on the affairs of the world. From within our space, our métier, we can contemplate and reflect on the difficulty, the burden, the obligation accepted by those who take on practical tasks. What we artists do is to observe what it is like to be burdened by practicality, acting as if we aren’t.

Bechtler
Art is also a seismograph of a certain social reality and it‘s an instrument that can pose essential, critical questions of social and political significance. Art is like a delicate membrane that senses and responds to the vibrations of the times.

Herzog
Architects don’t have much influence on the course of the world, but they build a stage for all those people about whom Jeff rightfully says that they use and perceive it with more or less enjoyment. As I have tried to explain, our burden is not ‘practicality’ but rather the incredible leeway that seems to be growing all the time and yet, paradoxically, constricts because the coercion to be innovative threatens to nip all innovation and experimentation in the bud.

We can’t change the situation. Our tools are limited. In China with the new resources, we can produce with the speed that is required of us but, on the other hand, medieval craftsmanship could almost be at the basis of this whole production: that’s something quite new for me … And, in the final analysis, what counts won’t be a city or its architecture, but how people live there and how close we have come to what we envisioned. … and whether anything can be a model for contemporary China in order to replace or be an alternative to destroying entire cities, which they are currently doing. That I think is something which is specific to architecture as opposed to art. However, for you as a photographer, it might be a new market to see how these people work.

Wall
I am sure photographers will be flocking there.