Peter Märkli: The Education of the Eye
Yuer
published on The Architect, 3/2018(193): 23-32; the following text is an abstract.
Interview
Location: Märkli studio, Zürich
Date: 30 April 2018
Reduction, a key concept in a wide variety of trends here (in Switzerland), has a different significance for Märkli, as it is not a manifestation of Calvinistic asceticism, but rather an attempt to fight against the agitation of forms and to defend the truth and pleasure of the eye in the midst of a completely bewildering cultural presupposition. —Marcel Meili, The Labour of the Eye, 1992[1]
Peter Märkli (hereafter PM) was born in Zurich in 1953, studied architecture at the ETH Zurich from 1972-77, established his own architectural practice in 1978 and taught at the ETH Zurich from 2002-2015. Although he was trained at the ETH in the passionate 1970s, Märkli seems distant from his contemporaries. While others were still suffering from the hangover of the 1968 movement, fascinated by the socio-political aspects of architecture brought about by Italian rationalism and accepting its formal imagery without question, he was slowly finding his own way — the architect Rudolf Olgiati [2], the sculptor Hans Josephsohn [3] and the ETH together shaped his direction: he was always thinking about how a certain emotion works, what kind of language expresses it, and what the elements of that language are; about beauty and the reasons why we think something is beautiful and why it is repeatedly perceived as such in different cultures and times. [4] His focus on the essential, his obsession with the beautiful, and his quest for the universal seem as if they were misplaced in time. These questions are so classical that they seem inappropriate in today's architectural phenomena and discussions dominated by "images of images, collages of collages, metaphors of metaphors"[5]. However, they are at the same time so current because they relate directly to human beings, because they still try to communicate in a society that is constantly consumerising, symbolising and virtualising.
According to Märkli, "seeing" is the basis of our profession precisely because it is a means of communication across time and space. From primitive art to the paintings of Paul Cézanne or Henri Matisse, from the most basic Greek temples to the architecture of Le Corbusier, we have to train our eyes to gradually understand form, and then manipulate it to respond to the problems of the present and offer possibilities for the future. This is what the follwing interview all about.