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Olgiati calls his work "non-referential architecture", the title of a 2018 treatise by Olgiati and
architectural theoreticianMarkus Breitschmid about the social purpose of architecture for the people of the 21st century.[7]
Olgiati and Breitschmid write that "non-referential architecture is not an architecture that subsists as a referential vessel or as a symbol of something outside itself. Non-referential buildings are entities that are themselves meaningful and sense-making and, as such, no less the embodiment of society than buildings were in the past when they were the bearers of common social ideals."[8]
The first documented use of the term "non-referential" in architecture appears in a reprint of an interview between Olgiati and Breitschmid in the Italian architecture journal Domus.[9] In 2014, Breitschmid publishes a rebuttal titled "Architektur leitet sich von Architektur ab" (Architecture is Derived from Architecture) in the Swiss journal Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, thereby responding to an architectural claim made by others that attempts to imbue meaning into architecture from the extra-architectural, such as the economic, ecological, political.[10] Architect
Christian Kerez investigated the limits of referentiality and speaks of "non-referential space" as a quality of his contribution for the
Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016.[11] In the same year, architect
Peter Eisenman points out that architecture has been moving toward a non-referential objectivity for some time, in as much as architectural form is increasingly reduced “to a pure reality.”[12]
In 2018, Olgiati and Breitschmid published the architectural treatise Non-Referential Architecture. It analyses the societal currents of the early 21st century and argues that those currents are radically different from the epoch of postmodernity.[13] The book proposes a new framework for architecture and defines the seven underlying principles for non-referential architecture:[14] 1) experience of space; 2) oneness; 3) newness; 4) construction; 5) contradiction; 6) order; 7) sensemaking.
One of the hallmarks of non-referential architecture, according to Olgiati, is that each building exists for itself. Each building is governed by an architectural idea – and that idea has to be form-generative and sense-making.[15] "Non-referential architecture denotes but it refuses to explain or narrate and it leaves behind any vestiges of a theatrical mode of persuasion and propagation."[16] Describing the intent of the exhibition ‘Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech’, held at
Harvard University’s
Graduate School of Design in 2018,
K. Michael Hays argues that today’s architecture presupposes “not a particular meaning, but a specific kind of potentiality — a non-semantic materiality, a non-referential construct that can be developed into an actual architectural project.”[17]
Career
Olgiati mentioned that the most important step for his formation as an architect was his temporary emigration to
Los Angeles, and not his upbringing in a specific culture, country, or landscape nor was it his architectural education. According to Olgiati, living in the radically heterogeneous
United States of America allowed him to begin to understand the world in formal and natural terms and not in symbolic and historical terms.[18]
This shift away from basing architecture on any kind of referentiality found its early theoretical form in his Iconographic Autobiography, first published in 2006.[19] The Iconographic Autobiography is an anthology of 55 illustrations. The Iconographic Autobiography foreshadows non-referential architecture in as much as it points to references, yet these references are not meaningful.[20] Olgiati has said that he believes that only basic insight from the experience of space is able to move architecture of the present time within its highly heterogeneous society.[21]
^Martin Tschanz. “Schulhaus, Paspels, Graubünden, 1996-98,” in: Anna Meseure, Martin Tschanz, Wilfried Wang (eds.), Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, Volume V: Schweiz, München/Frankfurt a.M.: Prestel/DAM, 1998, p.314f.
^Hubertus Adam. “Von der Idee zur Erscheinung. Valerio Olgiatis Umbau des ‘Gelben Hauses’ in Flims,” in: Neue Züricher Zeitung, October 29, 1999, p.66.
Valerio Olgiati, edited by Laurent Stalder, Texts by Mario Carpo,
Bruno Reichlin and Laurent Stalder, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König,
Köln 2008 (1st Edition) / Quart Verlag,
Luzern 2010 (2nd edition); German:
ISBN978-3-03761-031-2, English:
ISBN978-3-03761-030-5, 192 pages
The Significance of the Idea in the Architecture of Valerio Olgiati, Text in German and English by
Markus Breitschmid, Verlag Niggli AG, Switzerland 2008,
ISBN978-3-7212-0676-0, 80 pages
Valerio Olgiati, Scharans - House for a Musician, Edition Dino Simonett,
Zurich 2007,
ISBN978-3-905562-54-5, 64 pages
VALERIO OLGIATI, Das Gelbe Haus, Publikation zur Ausstellung an der
ETH Zürich 28. Mai - 15. Juli 1999, gta Verlag,
ETH Zürich,
ISBN3-85676-091-1, 18 pages