The Mortensrud Church by Jensen + Skodvin Arkitektkontor takes the familiar materiality of stone, a material historically associated with Christian chuch architecture, and celebrates it literally and figuratively through its elevation in defiance of its expectations as a heavy material that wants to rest directly on the ground. Structures made of lighter material such as mud and wood employ stone as a practical foundation, while Florentine palaces celebrate the heaviness of stone and stability it provides through the expressively rusticated masonry employed at their lowest stories. The church at Mortensrud defies the established conventions and expectations of stone by lifting the entirely stones off the ground with a steel framework, in effect communicating the bizarre image of a floating stone wall. Beyond the already powerful aspiration to the miraculous defiance of gravity inherited from the medieval builders of Gothic churches, the specific decisions the designers made in construction take a clear, one-liner concept and invest in it layers of tectonic richness.
The stone infill wall of the steel frame is built without mortar, which allows light to shine through the gaps created by the meeting of the naturally irregular shapes of the stones. In contrast to the expectation of stone walls as formidable barriers that block light, the stones at Mortensrud form a permeable screen that modulates natural light in a manner again harking back to medieval precedents, where tracery pierces heavy stone walls to dematerialize them in light, a move not only aspiring to the miraculous, but also to the numinous in the Christian sensibility, bringing to mind the transcendence of the divinity and humanity of Christ narrated in the story of his luminous transfiguration before three of his disciples on a mountain.
As with medieval stone tracery, the stones at Mortensrud act structurally in addition to defining the atmosphere of the interior space. The stones are stiffened horizontally into a wall by steel plates embedded among them, spanning between the steel columns of the main structural frame. The plates can stiffen the wall only when the weight of the stones is added to the structure. Thus, the steel plates and the stones are integral to each other’s stability, making them integral to the structural ensemble that forms the floating wall. The floating masonry walls in turn suggest a role in stabilizing the steel frame that carries them, although their actual composition prevents them from fulfilling the stabilizing role of shear walls, leaving this role to conventional moment connections aided by an expressively singular instance of diagonal bracing. Structural integrity thus exists literally and is expressed figuratively.
One may simply copy the exact materials and structure of the church and achieve at the bare minimum, though necessarily stripped of novelty, the same immediately clear yet visually, symbolically, and structurally layered tectonic expression of the church at Mortensrud. However, the designers have anchored the specificity of the building as an instance in the world of architecture that is impossible to be replicated with its full power by the way the materials and structure of the building relate to its site placement and its environment. In the nave, bare rock protrudes through the floor and interrupts the regularity of the pews. The obtrusive rock deliberately expresses the specific design intention to leave the site, dominated by a rocky ridge, largely untouched. The church sits lightly and comfortably on the rocky site, interacting with it without disturbing it through the dialogue of contrast between stones artificially contrived to float in lightness and rock left untouched in its natural state of earthy respite as an artifact representing a comprehensive set of design decisions. The church at Mortensrud embodies tectonics as an exercise beyond internal logic. Without weaving the internal structural and material logic at the core of tectonic definition with practical and expressive concerns beyond the materials and structure of the building itself, tectonics cannot achieve its full potential in the quest to ground architecture in complex relational webs of relevance if not in the clear and solid surety of platonic truth.
While still active modes of research and production, the four trajectories of articulation, notation, decoration and figuration have, in the intervening thirty years, confronted impasses internal to their development that have provoked subsequent practices to redirect priorities and hybridize modes of production as the opportunit ies of technology and demands of cultural aud iences have allowed. For example, Peter Eisenman's conceptual markings and notations of design process have been invariably registered through manipulations of the structural grid. While this worked well at the scale of the early houses, the sheer size of the later work has opened a disjunction between the structure and its ability to legibly serve as an index of the design process, reaching an extreme in his Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela. With apparently massive volumes given over to the poche of doubled floors and ceilings, and facade fragments in danger of popping off swollen elevations, the irreparable gap between the constructional and notational logics produces a situation where the grid as disciplining geometry can only be rendered as ornamental applique.The grid, in other words, becomes a thematic trope, a drywall voice over that is necessary to maintain continuity and serve as a reminder of where one is in the critical design narrative. (Somol: "Green Dots 101", p. 31)
Systems and humans are entities often seen as antithetical to each other. A system often implies the simplification of humans into numbers, statistics, and rigid patterns. The commonly held negative connotations of systems and simplification are founded. Systems can be misused by those in power to subvert other humans for their own selfish needs. Systematic simplifications, while good in intent, carry the danger of misunderstanding by those ignorant of their intent and their role within the larger system, racism arguably being a familiar example of such ignorance. However, there is nothing wrong in this simplification in of itself when systems are kept as servants to human will to the end of bettering human life. Architects are overseers of systems that collectively fall under the term “architecture.” Such architectural systems range from the miniscule represented by tectonics to the majuscule represented by what might be termed “society building”.
Nowhere is the role of tectonics and its clarity more apparent in architecture education than in design-build courses. Not only is the conception of space demanded of design-build students, but also the putting together of space beyond the imaginary into the physical, through the gathering and assembling of material objects into a finished work of architecture. Put into a world dominated by the outdoors and the material, design-build students may fall into the trap of abandoning the wisdom of systems developed on paper, especially when met with the pressure of a tight schedule. Grids and consistency of approach fall in the wayside in favor of constructing things as they are needed and solving problems as they arise. Grids and consistency of approach, when used effectively, are systems meant to enhance communication and understanding between and among designers and builders. Clear and comprehensive tectonic thinking simplifies decision-making by minimizing time wasted deliberating over each problem as they arise. Design-build students learn the dire consequences of overlooking the design component of building when miscommunication results in wrong moves and unpleasant incoherence in the final product, and poor tectonic conception results in too many special moves that require too many trips back to the hardware store. A design-build project with healthy tectonics is not only built efficiently by persons who understand each other, but stands with harmoniously pleasing coherence, a result of the effective use of systems to better human life, be it the builder or the user.
In a scale much larger than a five-week design-build project and in more general, less concrete terms, architecture students are part of the elite armed to effect positive change on society by their university education and their own predisposition to invest in that university education. A good university education teaches the effective conception and application of systems and inspires students to put into motion these systems through the ideals it imparts from its store of human experience at its best. Successful architecture students are empowered to design good buildings that work with other good buildings in larger compositions of the built environment, whether at the scale of campuses, towns, or nations, themselves designed collectively and systematically by the likes of engineers, planners, or lawmakers. All too familiar are the ills of buildings and communities left to their own devices in the unfamiliar world of consumerism and globalization brought about by human progress. Those to whom the reins of systematic design are invested are charged with the responsibility of stirring and harnessing human progress to the positive. Architects and other people of power and good will should not get lost in the numbers and get fooled by the simplification of data. In so doing, they give architecture and power a bad name at best and at worst endanger humanity with the systems they have conceived to the end of improving human life. Systems are a means to an end, and the end is man himself. A good architect listens to a bit of Immanuel Kant’s Second Maxim: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”
