Genus Loci, Renzo Piano's JMT Cultural Centre

Genus loci - the spirit of the place

The spirit that imbues a place with meaning and appropriateness.
It cannot be designed to order...it has to evolve, be allowed to happen, to grow and change from the efforts of those who live and work there.

• imperfection (see Ruskin) and generosity (doing something for its own sake, without an ulterior motive, an indication that someone cares for a place)

Thinking about a favourite place within in a public building I visit relatively often - the Auckland Art Gallery 'hidden' staircase in the original building - it's a place that the casual visitor probably wouldn't go to, a place that only those who know the building would actively seek out, a place that has traces of the past, a place that I feel like I can almost call my own.

A secret place - having a secret place makes you feel a certain connection with that place...eg. hidden places, tunnels, nooks,

More thoughts on place...

A sense of place cannot be designed and created in detail, but an explicit understanding of the place might help and support particular places. A key component is that these places must be 'designed from the inside' - allowing them to rise spontaneously out of the requirements and concerns of particular people and landscapes.

People are linked to their places by such varied patterns of activity that they can't all be identified. That is, it's not possible to necesarily make generalisations about the importance of certain activities observed in a place.

'Place' is best applied to those fragments of human environments where meanings, activities and a specific landscape are all implicated.

Whether spaces and settings created might encourage a sense of place among residents depends on the ability of the designer to appreciate the virtues and spirit of place, and their skill in using this ability to create attractive forms...The potential for 'place-making' solely through physical design is very limited. (For example, the Dharavi slum)

How to help create places with spirit?

• strive for an understanding of the qualities that are essential for all distintive and significant places
• develop a sensitivity to the attributes of places, find ways of initiating and directing local developments while also acknowledging the global character of modern life..
• know that places are contexts of human life and, as such, are themselves alive, growing, changing

Edward Relph, Modernity & the Reclamation of Place, in 'Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology'. Edited by David Seamon. State University of New York Press, New York. 1993.

Renzo Piano's Jean Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre & genus loci

A distinguishing feature of this project was the deep reading of the site. Piano created an anthropological framework which then provided a starting point for the project. This framework included derivation of the singularity of that particular location:

• the characteristic patterns of life and culture specific to that place
• the common memory of the place
• the relationship between land and sea
• the ecosystem
• the mythology at the core of Kanak culture

From a series of  interviews with Renzo Piano (A & U: architecture & urbanism, 1996 Dec., n.12(315), p.92-102 and A & U: architecture & urbanism, 1998 Aug., n.8(335), p.[80]-111)

The site was so beautiful I thought we should do nothing there. The shape of the building comes from the land – a very Kanak attitude: you make the building on the land not the opposite, you don’t adapt the land to the building. So it becomes part of the topography. The winds were important and influenced the sail-like shape of the cases.

...

This is not copying Kanak culture, it is accepting it. The attitude to produce from a place rather than just make an interpretation of place.  The site is already a building and the building is an extension of the site.

 

‘Cultural soup’

When we talk about culture we usually mean our own: a soup blended with ingredients from Leonardo da Vinci, Freud, Kant, Darwin, Louis XIV and Don Quixote...In the pacific, it’s not just the recipe that is different but also the ingredients. We can approach their soap with detachment, bringing our own cutlery, or we can try to understand how it was born, why it has developed the way it has and what philosophy of life has shaped it.

 The spirit of the Pacific is ephemeral

Pacific constructions are born out of unity with nature, using the perishable materials it provides. The continuity of a village in time is not based on the duration of the individual building but on the preservation of a topology and pattern of construction.