Jacques Gubler: what does an elegant solution mean in architecture? During a visit to Basel, Switzerland with a colleague of mine and architecture students, I rekindled my relationship with Jacques Gubler, an esteemed history and theory faculty who taught at the EPFL when I was a student there. It was a wonderful fully-packed afternoon, with visits to key architecture projects, a critique of the new annex designed by Christ & Gantenbein, followed by a tour of the Kunstmuseum Basel (Image 1).
Before discussing an elegant solution, I want to mention that I have always privately admired Jacques’ teaching. I feel that I have grown in my academic career by delivering content in a manner somewhat related to his pedagogy, while never having given him full credit for his impact on me almost four decades ago. This blog is perhaps a way to correct this lapse of gratitude for the contributions and strong impact he had on my professorial life, knowing that Jacques would never suspect being in any way instrumental in my career. Rest assured, despite my hoping to follow a little in his footsteps, there remains only one Gubler, and no one can take the fire away from this eccentric humanist.
Image 2: Jacques Gubler among students at the Kunstmuseum Basel; painting by German artist Konrad Witz titled Saint Christophe (c.1435), (author’s collection).
So, let’s start from the beginning. It might seem difficult to describe Jacques’ teaching without mentioning the word unorthodox. What I mean by this is that contrary to a well-orchestrated and chronological sequencing of historical events, Jacques’ teaching style during history lectures offered surprising tangential content that took us off guard. We were second year students, and his teaching style was new to us, as we were accustomed to boring survey classes during our freshmen year—a content delivery method that I still see taught in the history and theory sequence in many schools of architecture.
What was different with Jacques—despite the subject matter remaining historically situated—was that he established new connections between topics which made his deliveries remarkable, and may I say even more memorable to our young minds. Autobiographical and at times subjective, the spontaneity of thinking between an unorthodox interconnectivity of ideas was key to Jacques’ teaching.
There was never time during class for our minds to relax (and look at Instagram if it had been invented) during what might have seemed an insignificant pleasantry. We had to, and wanted to, pay close attention. The erudition of Jacques’ scholarship was based on allusion, and while calling something to mind, he was underscoring his lectures. To follow his thoughts, we as students, needed to already have a certain cultural grounding in our discipline. That was asking a lot from us, but retrospectively, he taught by challenging his students to truly think.
I remember during a class on Villa Garches (1926-1928) designed by Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, that Jacques included a cubist still life by Juan Gris followed by Le Corbusier’s own purist painting, he then unexpectedly morphed architecture and painting into a discussion of futurist theories by Filippo Marinetti as they related to their absurd Futurist cooking recipes (1932). The correlation between any subject matter was often cryptic, and, at first, inexplicable as an indirect or passing reference. However, by the end of the class – or the semester – connections did make sense when further explored through countless other intellectual excursions!
Another time, Jacques focused on a window, describing its attributes while contextualizing it within the history of apertures in architecture. Each slide zoomed further away from an image of a window, accompanied by new information that we could have never imagined to be connected to this seemingly banal opening. At one moment, without any overstatement from Jacques, we realized that the window we had been looking at in such a nonchalant manner, was nothing less than the 19th century window across our own design studio. History was conducted in real time.
We were humbled by his subtle trickery and learned a great lesson that day; one which pointed out that we must always observe and contextualize our environment be it banal or inspiring. More importantly, Jacques always underscored what was essential for students to learn, while he himself shied away from easy clichés found in our textbooks. Knowledge (his and eventually ours) was the result of Jacques’ complex thinking, which challenged us to always understand the meaning behind the visual gestures of any artifact; be it in architecture, painting, material culture, politics, construction, and even cooking!
Elegant and solution in architecture
During the afternoon I spent with Jacques and the students in Basel, we were fortunate to visit the former First Church of Christ, Scientist (1936) designed by Swiss architect Otto Rudolf Salvisberg (1882–1940). Emblematic of Salvisberg’s architectural minimalist style—and to my recollection an architect admired by Jacques—the visit was a treat as I had never seen the inside spaces of the building. During the tour, Jacques pointed to one of the two main staircases (Image 1 and 2) and casually asked our group: Is the staircase an elegant solution?
Knowing that Jacques openly ruminates his thoughts, I immediately understood that the teasing comment was one of allusion that demanded quick thinking. I had heard about the term elegant solution referring to mathematics (now extended to computer science and engineering) but not so often applied to architecture. Staring at the staircase, I asked myself what were the ramifications of Jacques’ invitation for us to uncover as the formal identity of the staircase seemed to be the veneer of a larger question.
I had no time to process Jacques’ curve ball, as I had refocused on the purpose of our visit: investigating the sequencing of space leading to the sanctuary; a large space that had almost no ornamental attributes yet was appealing in its austerity. While Jacques spoke to either everyone or no one—one of his idiosyncratic habits is that he avoids looking into the eyes of his interlocutors—I returned to the lobby and furtively documented the staircase.
That evening, back at the youth hostel at St. Alban, minutes away from the Rhein River and the historic city center—a building beautifully renovated in 2010 by Buchner Bründler Architekten (Image 6)—I pondered what Jacques had meant by elegant solution when applied to an architectural artifact, i.e., staircase. I believed that I knew the meaning of elegant as being associated with something stylish in appearance or being refined and sophisticated. For example, someone who is elegantly dressed. But, when thinking of the etymology of the Latin term, I discovered that elegant was derived from eligere meaning to choose. My muscle memory kicked in.
So I considered the word solution. As an architect, I am used to defining it as an end product resulting from a question; perhaps an architectural artifact that is a response to a program brief. However, this initial thought did not qualify the term solution, which I believe may be one of the hidden riddles behind Jacques’ question. The teaming of elegant and solution, took me back to my college years, when my mathematics professor talked about not only how to approach a problem, but how to solve it in an elegant manner. It took time to understand the professor’s statement, but accomplishing an elegant solution to a mathematical equation was much harder.
I often associate architecture with mathematics and claim that both disciplines are part of a problem-solving endeavor, resolving a problem by answering a question. Of course, there is much to say about how one asks the question—which has much to do with how a solution is proposed—but there is much more to this statement, especially in architecture where the relevance of the discipline is key to arguing that architecture is not building.
What I learned in mathematics during my college years was that the answer—the solution—can be offered in a variety of ways, but when the end product is referred to as elegant, or being an elegant solution, one is in front of something of a higher order. One can easily be effective in resolving a mathematical problem, but calling its method of resolution an elegant solution suggests that elegance is more about simplicity and ingenuity than being a question of aesthetics. So, what might elegant solution mean in architecture?
An elegant solution in architecture
Looking at the staircase in the Church, with its graceful ascension, and beautifully proportioned relationship between steps, risers, railing and detailing, and, above all, the interplay between functionality and aesthetics, one might well find an answer to Jacques’ riddle. That an elegant solution in architecture is as much about problem-solving in its execution as what is juste and not simply new. I refer to juste and new as I am reminded of Le Corbusier’s use of those words when writing about architecture.
What I take from the word juste (in French as Le Corbusier writes in that language) is that there is a constellation of factors that bring balance to the creation of an object in both its precision and exactitude (making and thinking). This is evident in Le Corbusier’s machine age writing where the call to order draws the analogies between architecture and boats, trains, airplanes, and industrial buildings such as granaries. This is how I teach my students, by having them calibrate and adjust their projects until they reach a degree equal to what I can now call an elegant solution, or simply being juste. However, juste is also used by Le Corbusier in a larger context as it relates to society (une société juste) where new is about form (une forme nouvelle). More about that in another blog.
In any project, there is a choice in resolution to a question, a programmatic brief or the idea of PROGRAM as a way to develop an argument, a THESIS. This endeavor underscores the need to find the best solution, in our case an elegant solution. Seeking an elegant solution is an approach that does not usually come to mind for the majority of people who try to solve the problem. In an elegant solution, despite the initial complexity, the end result is seemingly effortless, is simple, and is an effective resolution to the problem; one which often reveals an underlying intellectual beauty or in the case of architecture a way of designing. It is in the integration of simplicity and effectiveness that calls to mind the meaning of elegant solution.
Conclusion
Returning to Jacques Gubler, I was reminded that what made him an extraordinary teacher was that he brought disparate knowledge together in order to develop in his students a curiosity and passion for learning. Most important was Jacques’s tendence to provide questions that were atypical, often suggesting an unorthodox dialectic between ideas and themes that seemed at first incongruent.
The idea under scrutiny here—an elegant solution—remains complex and cannot be reduced to a one liner. How does the choice of an aesthetic, formality, type and expression of materials, construction methods, precision, or the process of calibration to name a few define what is an elegant solution. Or is it in a return to Le Corbusier’s term juste, that Jacques Gubler’s riddle finds the beginning of an answer?
Other blogs of interest
Pierre von Meiss: architect and pedagogue
Art seminar week
Visiting professorships
Ballenberg; a vernacular architecture museum