Contextual Counterpoint

Charles Jencks
Contextual
Counterpoint
In recent decades, conservationists and planners have co-opted contextualism,
reducing it to a tool for enforcing urban conformity. Here Charles Jencks reclaims
contextualism as a dynamic design strategy. He identifies four different contextual
treatments that as well as ensuring continuity are potentially transformative.
Over the last 40 years, the architectural concept of contextualism,

borrowed from literature, has missed an important distinction
within Post-Modern practice. For many commentators and Prince
Charles it has come to mean being in keeping with the surrounding
neighbourhood, and thus is used by planning boards to enforce
conformity. Why Post-Modernists allowed the co-option of one of their
better ideas, and did not protest or explain more clearly what they were
about, remains a mystery. But it is time to change that idée reçue.
They had already designed another strategy beyond mimicking. In
40 years the contextual idea developed into four different strategies
underscored by formal tropes. These confirm that Post-Modernists
care about the neighbourhood coherence and urban fabric but seek to
extend them with transforming continuity, like musical variations on a
theme. ‘Contextual counterpoint’ is thus a hybrid trope borrowed from
literature and music to illuminate a moral form of urbanism. 1
62
1
Punctuated jazz is an approach deriving from James
Stirling’s particular use of collage composition at the Neue
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, designed in 1977 and opened in
1984 – the key work of Post-Modern classicism. Vernacular,
modern and historical themes are melded together here as
a contextual infill and are punctuated by counterpointing
incidents in highly coloured High Tech. The irony of using this
style almost always as symbolic ornament was almost never
understood by British commentators, and thus a major lesson
was missed. These High-Tech elements signal the taxi drop-
off point, entrance areas and the main pedestrian routes.
The background styles – neighbourhood vernacular, modern
concrete, banded and arched Neo-Romanesque, coved Neo-
Egyptian, Álvar Aalto, 1920s Stuttgart – are all underplayed
but present. Thus the whole neighbourhood ensemble is
knitted together with high-culture moments, an approach
Aldo Rossi took in a more monumental direction.
63
2
The variable chameleon. There are several
notable examples of this type, Robert Venturi’s
National Gallery Extension, London (1991)
(below), Hans Hollein’s Haus House, Vienna
(1990) and Stirling’s Clore Gallery, London
(1986). The variable chameleon differs from
the natural animal in taking on different
adjacent codes to mediate them as it undulates
around a large city block. But it transforms
each imitation to send another message, in
the Venturi version creating new 19th-century
‘ghost pilasters’ to confront the Miesian ‘cuts’ to
either side. Mediation here is to acknowledge
and respect old, new and the highly used
corner function.
64
3a
The ad hoc Time City as a palimpsest.
Herzog & de Meuron’s Forum La Caixa,
Madrid (2008) takes existing urban
fragments and makes a holistic collage from
them in the vertical dimension. The bottom
of the city is opened up to movement, the
old brick facades are lifted off the ground to
hold the museum, and the top floor imitates
in shape and ornament the morphology and
style of Madrid’s past culture, including the
Arabic. Thus preservation is mixed with
paraphrasing, repair and rewriting. Like the
re-minted coins of Rome, these palimpsests
make an enjoyable art of urban time.
65
3b
The repaired and paraphrased Time City. This is a first
cousin of the former category, which often comes out of
war damage and the symbolism of rebirth. In Germany,
particularly Munich, the approach was first well worked
out by Hans Döllgast at the Alte Pinakothek (1957)
(top) and then by Josef Wiedemann at the Glyptothek
(1980) (bottom). Recently, David Chipperfield has left
his Minimalist abstraction for the Post-Modern mixed
strategy at the Neues Museum, Berlin (2009). Again
it is repairing, reproducing and paraphrasing in new
materials the work of time. These multiple methods and
materials may then be given a light whitewash to pull
them together.
66
4
Contrapuntal counterpoint. The most risky version of Post-Modernist
contextualism is that carried through with brilliance by Edouard
François at the Hotel Fouquet, Paris (2006). This pastiche is a sensual
amalgam of the legislated tastes of the 8th arrondissement and a
hotel that wanted to put as much space into a six-storey typology
as they could get away with. You have to look twice at the details,
the variations in material and colour to see the point. Precast grey
concrete is played smooth, rusticated and rough; and then dark and
light. It is carefully woven with metal, glass and concrete into an all-
over grammar. An adjacent Haussmann facade set the building code,
and then the template for the concrete castings. But while the main
facades look five storeys, the overlapping grey picture windows show
the truth. These symbolic TV sets indicate the individual hotel rooms.
They suggest the reality of eight floors above ground and five below.
To signal that you know that François knows that you know that all in
Haussmannian Paris is not what it seems, note the way cornice lines
are broken, and oeils-de-boeuf, at the top, are eroded by the windows.
The counterpoint is contrapuntal, the pastiche Mozartian.
Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 63, 64(b), 65-7©
Charles Jencks; p 64(t) © Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc
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Charles Jencks

Over the last 40 years, the architectural concept of contextualism,

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