Schwitters' Merzbau

 

kurt schwitters, merzbau (1933)

This is Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau.

Herr Schwitters didn't build a Kunsthaus; he tuned a cavity. 

Like a bad theorem in Euclid’s attic, Merzbau's geometry grew infected by weather. 

Objects entered it the way tones enter a chord: nail, ticket, bone, fragment, plaster, each retaining its private frequency while submitting to a bizarre dissonance.

This is architecture by accretion —also by hallucination. One could imagine the structure obeying some occult crystallography—an invisible law of attraction between things that ought not coexist. its grottoes were perhaps chambers of a music not yet composed, scales made from debris, counterpoint in three dimensions.

Merz was collage becoming metabolism. Wall as organism with appendages, memories, false organs. 

Herr Schwitters supplied it with rubbish & the rubbish supplied him with a cosmos. An impossible science.

Here's a chronology of Merzbau: 

1923: the first wall is breached. Not demolished—infected. 

Schwitters begins to build inside the family house in Hannover, and the room acquires a non-Euclidean geometry: a chair-leg, a wire, a ticket, a fragment of plaster; each object is assigned a coordinate in a private astronomy. 

1927: the tower should have risen, but instead it thickens. 

Babel, according to the old architectural myth, was vertical: each language another floor, each floor another interval from the gods. Schwitters proceeds in the opposite direction. His languages do not separate; they pile up. The building becomes a horizontal Babel, a tower of grottoes. 

1932: another Merzbau begins in Norway. 

The structure has learned migration. It is no longer a house but a "species". One might draw its plan as a musical score: the first room in C, the second in some impossible quarter-tone, the passages functioning as rests, the objects as percussion. The architect becomes a conductor of debris. 

1933: the Hannover room is sufficiently complete to be photographed, though "complete" is parola sbagliata. Merzbau has no terminal state. It grows by the law of accretion, as crystals grow, or rumors, or the false organs of a medieval anatomy (the first room is a cross-section of a larger animal). 

1937: Schwitters leaves Germany. By then, the Merzbau has occupied several rooms, a balcony, spaces above and below. The Babel failed beautifully, artfully: not because its builders spoke different languages, but because one man made every object tout à coup.