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Poché and Free Section

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function (Fitzgerald 1936, 41).

Within a vast arsenal of architectural techniques employed by OMA in their first decade, poché occupies a unique position, for two reasons. First, unlike design techniques adopted from Surrealism, such as the paranoid-critical method or the cadavre exquis, or metaphors such as the medical term lobotomy, the concept of poché is drawn from the history of architecture. Second, while appropriation to architecture of techniques originating elsewhere figures prominently in Rem Koolhaas’ theoretical output, the use of poché is never mentioned by Koolhaas or Zenghelis during OMA’s first decade. Only in 1999 Koolhaas finally acknowledged “a fascinating condition to work for the first time with so-called poché” (Oswalt and Hollwich 1998, 12-22), on House Y2K and the Casa da Música in Porto, thereby denying the apparent role of poché in the strategy of the void for the new town of Melun-Senart (1987) and in the project for the Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989). OMA’s ambiguous reception of poché during its first decade can be summarized as negation in writing alongside appropriation in design. It is as such a reaction to Robert Venturi’s extrapolation of the Beaux-Arts conception of poché to urbanism; Koolhaas has described Venturi as both inspiration and threat (2004, 150). Koolhaas has acknowledged: “I think that for instance the historicists very legitimately have accused modernists of being stupid about many things. And I think that in that sense, on an almost pragmatic level, I would say, yes of course there is a lesson, because now it is possible to be a better modern architect, simply because of their critique. You can incorporate your critique in your own things” (Koolhaas 1983). Repudiation of Venturi’s and Colin Rowe’s contextualist definition of poché acts as a polemic protective shield which allowed OMA to amalgamate poché with its tectonic antithesis, the free section.

Poché

In Beaux-Arts education, poché denoted the hatching or rendering in fields of colour of masonry that is sectioned in plan, which was applied to presentation drawings, but not to working drawings. Nevertheless, poché is as much a tectonic as it is a drawing convention, denoting load-bearing masonry construction which presumes space and structure to be congruent, in opposition to the free plan theorized by Le Corbusier in 1926. That same year, the Beaux-Arts theorist John F. Harbeson emphasized that “poché always encloses rooms” (1926, 188), which applied not only to the primary spaces bounded by walls, but also spaces contained within the hollow walls.

The theme of the “hollow wall” is a longstanding trope in the work of Koolhaas, beginning with the cells inserted into the walls of his 1972 thesis design at the Architectural Association, Exodus (Koolhaas 1977, 328-29), continuing with the 1974 House in Miami (Koolhaas and Spear 1977, 352), where “service areas such as pantry, powder room, bar and bathrooms are located within the thickness of the wall,” and the Story of the Pool (Koolhaas 1977, 356), its basin bordered by two thick, hollow walls accommodating locker rooms. The dominant impulse of these early Koolhaasian walls is to divide rather than enclose space, betraying their derivation from Koolhaas’ 1971 study The Berlin Wall as Architecture (Koolhaas 1995, 236). The early Koolhaasian walls act as radical disjunction, in opposition to Modernist orthodoxy postulating that “the inside should be expressed on the outside” (Venturi 1966, 70).

Urbanism and Contextualism

Robert Venturi, in Complexity and Contradiction, noted that “contradiction between the inside and the outside may manifest in an unattached lining which produces an additional space between the lining and the exterior wall,” and that “the space left over by this contradiction was taken care of with poché” (1966, 70). In 1968 and 1972, Venturi and Denise Scott- Brown extrapolated the spatial conception of poché to the scale of the city; they observed that “Nolli’s map of the mid-18^th century (Figure 2) reveals the sensitive and complex connections between public and private space in Rome” (1968, 128). Their ideas were received with particular interest at Cornell University, by both Colin Rowe and by O.M. Ungers, with whom Koolhaas had in 1972 taken up studies. Following Venturi’s line of thought, Rowe, in Collage City, defined poché at two scales. First, at urban scale “a building itself may become a type of poché, (…) a solid assisting the legibility of adjacent spaces,” able “to engage or be engaged by adjacent voids, to act as both figure and ground” (1978, 79), and second, at the scale of building and façade, “ideal types” are adapted to and modified by “empirical context” (1978, 106) with poché acting as a technique of mediation.

Koolhaas sharply distanced himself from Rowe’s historicist tendencies and approaches, polemically deriding his “contextualist epiphany,” and criticizing that “the modern contextualist is forced to telescope vicissitudes of centuries into a single moment of conception” (1980, 48). His position drew on his own book Delirious New York from 1978, where he recounted that, “frustrated by the irrelevance of the Beaux-Arts system to the new age, ... in the deliberate discrepancy between container and contained New York’s makers (of the early 20^th century) discover an area of unprecedented freedom. They exploit and formalize it in the architectural equivalent of a lobotomy - the surgical severance of the connection between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain” (Koolhaas 1994, 100-101). Lobotomy eradicates the rationale for poché as a technique of arbitration between building and city. Instead, the façade makes a surgical cut; it thereby allows for volatile metropolitan cultures to be assimilated and intensified through spectacular orchestration of the interior, which is dissociated from, and thereby unencumbered by the enduring civic responsibilities of the exterior face. Koolhaas’ polemic against a particular reading of the Nolli plan is qualified by appropriation of Nolli’s drawing convention in the competition projects for the 1978 Dutch Parliament Extension (Zaero-Polo 1992, 46) and for the 1986 Hague City Hall (Buchanan 1987, 87). The site plan of the later project diagrammed, as voids rendered in white, public exterior spaces of streets, squares and parks, alongside the public interiors of churches, of the rail station, the Parliament, a theatre, department stores, and shops along the streets. However, imaginative travel through the public realm is sharply arrested upon reaching OMA’s proposed City Hall; an abrupt shift to axonometric drawing convention conceals its public interiors. The strategy of the void OMA proposed in 1987 for the new town of Melun-Senart invests Nolli’s opposition between solid and void (private and public) with new layers of meaning, namely indeterminacy and stability, renouncement and control, architecture and program. A system of voids is tasked to “preserve existing landscape,” to ensure “beauty, serenity … beyond the possible architecture that will eventually emerge in between”. The rationale for this postulated that “the built, ‘the full,’ is incontrollable – subjected to the maelstrom of political, financial and cultural forces – in a perpetual transformation” and speculated on the void as the new locus of “architectural certitudes” (Koolhaas 1989, 95). Progressively expanded in scale from wall to building to urban field, poché transfigures from device of precise compositional calibration to placeholder for the incontrollable. Melun-Senart is a pivotal project; it is rooted in the diagram of Ungers and Koolhaas’ 1977 Berlin as a Green Archipelago (Hertwek and Marot 2013), which proposes a process of eradication of superfluous built areas, thereby creating urban islands (read as figures) floating in a green landscape (read as void). The project for Melun-Senart would become the progenitor of a lineage extending to the McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the IIT in Chicago (1997-2003), whose reference to Georges-Eugène Haussmann further elaborated the terms of poché as the residuum of erasure (Oswalt and Hollwich 1998, 14). The plan diagram juxtaposes islands of cellular building texture (poché), the rhythms of their subdivision determined by programmatic requirements, against a choreographed system of avenues (voids) notionally subtracted from the dense cellular field, which thus is made navigable and transpicuous.

Fig. 2: Giambattista Nolli, Pianta Grande di Roma, 1748.

Fig. 3: OMA, Site plan for The Hague City Hall, 1986. Copyright OMA.

Poché and Free Section

While this urban, “horizontal” conception of poché retained Beaux-Arts privileging of the plan as generator, OMA’s projects for the Très Grande Bibliothèque de Paris (1989) and for the ZKM in Karlsruhe (begun 1989) reconceptualised poché in terms of a “free section.” The TGB, the project text reads, is conceived of as a “solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory, books, optic discs, microfiches, computers;” the major spaces then are generated “by scooping out forms from a solid block, like ice cream” (Koolhaas 2004, 77). This “sculptural” conception is prefigured in Luigi Moretti’s volumetric plaster models of voids (Figure 4), which make visible and explain spatial structure and sequences of spaces in a series of Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque buildings and unrealised projects (Moretti 1952, 9-20; 1953, 107-8). The transitions between “elementary volumes,” via interspaces, linear passages, or through volumetric fusion, that Moretti visualized and catalogued had been shaped by the use of poché; by not representing the poché, Moretti’s three-dimensional diagrams evoked a previously unseen, sculptural notation of space. This notation resurfaces in a model of the TGB that, like Moretti, represents the voids as solids. While Beaux-Arts notions of poché did also “ascribe to the space of the room the physical power to eat into – to pocket – the wall,” and posited space as a “positive force, causing the passive masses of the walls to yield before it as it balloons up to form sequences of volumes” (van Zanten 1978, 72). The tectonic principles of masonry construction meant that the primary interiors had to be aligned vertically. Koolhaas’ new, “isomorphic” notion of poché breaks with the tectonic understanding of poché as “the imprint upon the plan of the traditional heavy structure” (Rowe and Koetter 1978, 78), to—as the project description goes—“introduce a new era of liberated and randomized relationships between the different components of a building,” which are compared to “multiple embryos, each with their own technological placenta.” This idea resonates with Bernhard Hoesli’s translator’s note to the German translation of Collage City: “’Pocher’ would then be the packaging or the surrounding of an (ideal) form with tissue. Poché in plan, section or urban plan would denote ‘packaging,’ connective tissue or supporting tissue” (Hoesli 1984, 114). Rather than forming “connective tissue” that articulates transitions between spaces, poché internalises Koolhaas’ conception of lobotomy by disengaging the major interiors. In the TGB, relationships are left to be established mechanically rather than architecturally, as a grid of 9 elevators connects the voids. Begun at the very end of OMA’s first decade, the project for the ZKM in Karlsruhe continued the specification of a new tectonics of poché prompted by the free section. Servant spaces are accommodated in horizontal layers supported by Vierendeel beams, interspersed between the served spaces thus kept free of columns.

Fig. 4: Luigi Moretti, Basilica di S. Piero in Vaticano, from ‘Strutture e sequenze di spazi’, 1952-53.

Fig. 5: OMA, Axonometric drawing for Très Grande Bibliothèque de France, 1989. Copyright OMA.

Fig. 6: OMA, Floor plans of Très Grande Bibliothèque de France, 1989. Copyright OMA.

The radical inversion of architectural poché, in terms of space as well as tectonics, from a device of urban contextualisation to one of internal lobotomy, from antithesis of the free plan to enabler of the free section, conjoins ideas which previously were conceptual antagonisms. Perhaps this became conceivable only through Koolhaas’ paradoxical strategy of polemic rejection of the traditional implications of poché and suppression of the term, paired with imaginative appropriation of its radically malleable guises.

This chapter is a revised version of the journal article “Poché. De naamloze evolutie van een Koolhaasiaanse techniek | Poché. The Innominate Evolution of a Koolhaasian Technique,” first published in OASE 94 (April 2015): 124-131.