Beyond architecture: the words and the images

15.11.2022

Can you research history without being a historian? And can you be an architect without building anything? Ruth Baumeister is an architect whose building material is words.

To the vast majority of architects, plans, sections and elevations are quite commonplace tools. But Ruth Baumeister, who is a German citizen, is not like everyone else. And although she teaches and researches architecture, she would not unreservedly call herself an architect:

‘I no longer construct any buildings, I don’t have a practice, so am I an architect at all?’, she asks.

Throughout her career, Ruth Baumeister has used very different materials to build: words.

‘In German we have the word Gedankengerüst, which means a scaffolding made of thoughts. When I write texts and books, that’s the way I see it. I build the text. But instead of bricks and beams, I use words and syntax. So, if I were to call myself an architect, I would be an architect who writes books’, says Ruth Baumeister.

So far, she has published seven books, all of which are based on research into the history of architecture. Four of the seven books are about the work of Danish artist Asger Jorn and the importance of art to architecture, but how come a German architect ends up devoting so much of her professional life to a Danish artist?

‘I initially focused on the Bauhaus Imaginista movement in Italy. However, when I discovered that Asger Jorn’s thoughts and ideas underpinned many things in that movement, I soon realised that he would be playing a huge role in my future life. It dawned on me that most of Jorn’s work in architecture had not yet been examined in depth. I think many architects – myself included – easily become fascinated with something and then pursue this something without considering the consequences. That was exactly what happened when I realised how important Jorn was’, says Ruth Baumeister, who also focused on Asger Jorn in her PhD dissertation. She continues:

‘Looking back on it today, I almost embarked on a kind of odyssey. Many of Jorn’s texts were only available in Danish or Swedish. So, I also had to learn new languages along the way. On top of this, his theories are extremely complex, which meant my work also took a tremendous amount of time’.

Fortunately, Ruth Baumeister is very interested in languages. And she now speaks five languages fluently – and reads texts in three other languages.

Asger Jorn lived from 1914 to 1973. And he was particularly recognised for his work in the group of artists known as COBRA. But what is it that makes Asger Jorn relevant to architects today?

‘The way Asger Jorn combined disciplines such as art, architecture, ethnology, literature and philosophy is fascinating’. To me, Jorn is an endless source of learning and inspiration. To read his material, you need to immerse yourself in many other issues to understand what he means. And then two pages later he turns it all upside down’, says Ruth Baumeister, and continues:

‘Jorn was very good at engaging with architecture physically. A good example of this is his ceramic relief at Aarhus Statsgymnasium – a very tactile work full of colour and human expression – but placed inside a technically very refined building of smooth surfaces. This is something I think you can learn from if you are an architect’.

Ruth Baumeister is married to the former director of the Asger Jorn Museum in Silkeborg, and her marriage actually contributed to her latest book being about something quite different from Asger Jorn:

‘I had to finish the chapter on Jorn in my life. For I had been working on it for so long and published so much about the subject that it was time for me to start on something new. But I also felt that after I was married, I was suddenly seen more as “the director’s wife” than as an expert in my field, and that bothered me’.

After finishing the chapter on Asger Jorn, Ruth Baumeister engaged with a new topic: modern offices. The book Back to the Office was published in the autumn of 2022. She authored this book in collaboration with Stephan Petermann and Marieke van den Heuvel. Alongside her research, Ruth Baumeister has been committed to working with feminism and diversity in architecture. And she is co-founder of the Equality Collaborative group; a group of people who arrange presentations and debates on these topics at Aarhus School of Architecture.

If you want to add something, you need to know the history

Today, Ruth Baumeister is an associate professor at Aarhus School of Architecture, where she teaches history and theory of architecture. Ruth Baumeister is originally from Bavaria, but before landing in Aarhus, she has been ranging far in the academic world.

‘When I finished my education, I started working in architectural practices. It was the mid-1990s, and a lot of things were happening in Germany because of the fall of the Berlin Wall – and particularly in Berlin, where I was living. I worked briefly for Daniel Libeskind. But I had a feeling that something in my education was missing. I wanted to examine more closely what makes architecture what it is’, says Ruth Baumeister, who did a post-graduate degree in history and theory at ETH Zurich and taught at Bauhaus University Weimar and Eindhoven University of Technology before she was employed as a PhD at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

In 2013 Ruth Baumeister was employed as a Professor MSO (with special responsibilities) at Aarhus School of Architecture. And since then, she has been striking a blow for the importance of the history and theory of architecture for becoming architects.

‘When we discuss training new architects, we often talk about what skills they ought to have and not so much about the actual Bildung – or formation. I am of the opinion that the history and theory of architecture are crucial to the formative process as they both shape you as an individual architect, but also because history can be used as a means of critical investigation’, says Ruth Baumeister. She continues:

‘Architects who make some major contribution need to relate critically to that which already exists. If you want to add something, you need to know the history. I feel you blindfold yourself if you don’t know the history. On a more pragmatic level, knowing the history may also save a lot of time – since many of the issues you encounter have already been dealt with in the past. This way you avoid reinventing the wheel every time’.

As mentioned, Ruth Baumeister does not call herself an architect in the classical sense of the word, and the same goes for the title architectural historian.

‘I like working across different academic fields. And doing so can be very rewarding. But you also run the risk that people see you as being outside the field of discipline. Art historians who work with Jorn see me as an outsider because I am an architect. And to architectural historians I seem to be a strange animal because I specialise in one artist. In a way, I have been caught between two stools. Actually, this is one of the things that has always fascinated me about Asger Jorn – he always placed himself between all the stools. There have been times when being “an outlaw” bothered me. But now I have learned to see the benefits, and in fact, I now like not belonging to one trade or the other’, says Ruth Baumeister.

However, when she began studying architecture in the late 1980s, it was far from clear that Ruth Baumeister would be sitting between two stools. No, a much more boring and conventional career path had actually been laid out for her, according to one of Ruth Baumeister’s teachers:

‘One of my first lectures was given by a sociologist. He took a look at us and asked us why in God’s name we wanted to be architects. There would be no work for us unless we wanted to build crematoriums, he believed, as the German composition of population was completely skewed. He basically told us there was no future for us. And if you have no future, things can only get better’, Ruth Baumeister says and continues:

‘It so turned out that my teacher was wrong, because just a few years later the Iron Curtain fell, and my generation of German architects had plenty to do and many opportunities to pursue what they wanted to do. I also believe this is important to the current generation of young architects. They should allow themselves the freedom to be what they want to be. This may seem like a huge pressure, but you also need to keep in mind that many unforeseen things are going to happen in the future; things that will have a great impact on their professional lives – for better or for worse. If you look at it that way and choose to accept it, not being able to control everything yourself can be very liberating. There are limits to what you can control, but this also holds exciting potentials. Or, as architect and artist Gordon Matta Clark described it in an interview: ’within absurdity there is a fantastic freedom’.