Cohabitation
[original material A&B 01'2020]
In the Stockholm concert hall, King Carl XVI Gustav and his Family, the Nobel Committee, the Laureates and Laureates of the Prize, the orchestra with conductor and soloist, the audience, the medals and diplomas in their hands, the sculptures, furniture and flowers on the stage - everyone and everything, together, (re)created a world-class ceremony.
The lectern on the stage stood slightly offset to the right, to give the axis of symmetry of the hall to the stone bust of the founder of the Prize. Above the stage, a focused orchestra waited on a choir spread out in the same symmetry. The king and members of the royal family took their seats to the right, and among the ninety people present on stage, they were distinguished only by their opulent armchairs and, in the case of the queen and duchess, their colorful gowns. The background of the royal family was the members and members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Committee and the Nobel Foundation sitting on rising rows of chairs. It was their decisions that the First of the Royal Family would convey to the Laureates. On the left, closing the stage's semicircle of chairs, the current Laureates were seated in the front row, while behind them, with Alfred Nobel medals on their chests, were the previous years' Laureates.
After delivering a laudation and an invitation to the 2018 Literary Award ceremony, the Swedish king and the laureate approached the center of the stage in silence. They stopped in the middle of it, standing on either side of the geometric axis of the room, and it seemed to spark, electrically bringing the sculpted image of Alfred Nobel closer to them. They stood for a moment facing each other level and symmetrical, both of them in profile to the audience. In the silence of the hall and the murmur of exchanged words, the king passed the diploma and medal enclosed in a case to the laureate's left hand, his left hand helping to keep them balanced. They shook hands with their right hands. As the Laureate took the insignia in both hands, there were symmetrical steps backward, and her bow to the King was made in silence. In the same silence, she turned toward the Nobel Committee. She bowed just as carefully. Then she turned toward the audience. The silence continued. The laureate repeated her bow for the third time. The audience responded by applauding. The hall carried the vibrations from their hands to all the microphones, further into the ether, into the network, to the speaker membranes of radios, televisions and computers around the world.
Two days earlier, in the words of the Nobel reading, Olga Tokarczuk asks in a calm voice: "Is it possible to have a story (...) that would be able to distance itself from the trodden obvious and banal center of 'commonly shared opinions' and be able to look at things ex-centrally, from outside the center?". I was flooded with admiration for the literary precision of these words, which rediscover the essence of eccentricity. This admiration defined the perspective from which, at a public meeting at the Gdansk Institute of Urban Culture, I watched Olga Tokarczuk bowing three times on the Konserthuset Stockholm stage. But it was the entire ceremony, in which musical auras separated the precisely repeated ritual of presenting successive Awards, that made me realize the structure of this cultural event: Here are masters of ex-centricity, explorers and predictors of the future coming together in one place to celebrate respect for a community of researchers trying to understand and improve the world, respect for the tradition and continuity of that community, for the roles, recognitions and ennoblements it has granted, and - note - the precisely established form of these events, the careful architecture of their venues.
And the everydayness of culture? Undoubtedly, it too concerns the ability to build communities, respect for their forms and places. So, I would ask, how precise is the form of our cohabitation? How careful is the architecture of its places? Is it possible to have forms and architectures that "know how to distance themselves from the hammered and obvious center of 'commonly shared opinions' and can look at things ex-centrally, from outside the center"?
What "commonly shared opinions" have we trampled in the center of contemporary architecture? Immediately from the memory comes back an architectural meeting at SARP a few years ago. It was so pleasant and interesting that I suggested we meet again and ask ourselves what mistakes are we making in academic studios and lecture halls that lead to the fact that contemporary residential areas built (by our graduates) are so clumsy non-urban? But we didn't meet. My thought was trivialized by a smiling sentence from one of my friends, "Jacek, after all, so many interesting and good buildings have been built in the city. Don't complain." Today I think that this is one of the most trampled into the center of architecture opinions. Architecture, which naively convinces itself that it may not be interested in urban planning. And I still dream of the phrase, as I understood it, ex-center: "let's not complain that we haven't built too many super buildings so far. We have managed to build a supercity - we have built an urban community of architecture."
The celebration at Konserthuset Stockholm is to science and literature what the city is to architecture. Individualities and differences come together in one place to (re)create a culture, the essence of which is the ability to behave communally.
