“WHAT HAS ALWAYS INTERESTED ME IS
THE MUNDANE AND INSIGNIFICANT.”

GAM: As a newly appointed Professor at the TU Graz but also as a practicing architect and designer: how would you describe your career path, from studying to leading a professional working life?

MC: I think it is actually two-pronged to this day. One thing is that as a student assistant to the Chair of Architectural Design and Conception, I wanted to teach too. After graduating, I was lucky that Andreas Hild, who already knew me from this chair at TU Munich and who was at the time a visiting professor at TU Kaiserlautern, took me with him to Kaiserlautern as an assistant. The other thing is that I have always been keen on really doing or making things, and not just teaching, because one should only teach what one has at least partly already done himself. That is how it came about that I started my first office in parallel to university teaching and later on, joined an existing office as partner. When you start working for an office that is a few years ahead of you, you can contribute to larger projects, that you could not have achieved all by yourself from scratch just like that. After working with Andreas Hild at the University in Kaiserslautern, which shaped me just as much as a postgraduate course does, I decided to pursue the title of a Regierungsbaumeister. The reason behind this was that we learned far too little about the significance of real-life situations during our studies; and also about the conditions of building or of architecture even.

GAM: What is the qualification of a Regierungsbaumeister?

MC: It is a formality which involves doing the preparatory services for the higher civil engineering administration. The requirements consist of professional training, working for building authorities, postgraduate studies and courses and finally passing the second state examination. You can then call yourself Regierungsbaumeister. Usually almost 100 percent of the graduates end up working for in-state building departments and planning authorities.

GAM: So after gaining insight into the administrative practice of planning, you find yourself today juggling between designing buildings and urban planning. Was this perspective shaped by your university research or by your office experience?

MC: I believe both, because to me, you cannot have one without the other. Making architecture, thinking about architecture and teaching architecture are related, but nonetheless are three different things. After I had finished my dissertation quite quickly and the excursion into administration was all done, I thought to myself, now I would like to go back to university. And that is when junior professorships were invented in Germany. I was amongst the first to apply for a position and had the opportunity to develop the general topic of my dissertation intensively for six years. The field of teaching and research back then was called bauteilorientierte Entwurfsprozesse (component-oriented design processes), and I dealt with different questions: How does component-logic work in design? What does this mean for cohesion or also for typologies? With these issues in mind, the question arose about context, and about the relationship between architecture and the city; and this ultimately led me to a deputy professorship for the Chair of Urban Art, which was to be filled at the time.

GAM: You completed your dissertation in 1999, with the wonderful title Gebäudetypologie als Basis für Qualifizierungssysteme (Building Typology as a Basis for Qualification Systems). It deals with exposed aggregate concrete and typological issues, amongst other things.

MC: (laughs) The subtitle is much longer! It goes: Grundlagen einer Theorie zu Gattungen und Typen, entwickelt anhand systematischer Untersuchungen von industriell gefertigten Waschbeton-Minimal-Baukörpern als Verwahrräume für Entsorgungsgüter in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1998/99 (Basics of a Theory on Genres and Types, developed on the Basis of Systematic Investigations of Industrially Manufactured Exposed Aggregate Concrete in Minimal Structures as Storage Rooms for Disposal Goods in the Federal Republic of Germany 1998/99).

GAM: Right, which is why the university library of Technical University of Munich also uses the keyword “garbage can” for the book!

MC: Yes, well, in addition to abstract typology research, what has always interested me is the everyday-life… the mundane and insignificant; the infra-ordinary as opposed to the extraordinary. My hypothesis was that it is possible to consider most of the typological questions, according to Kant’s distinction between the cognitive judgement and the aesthetic judgement, a matter of cognitive judgement. Then there was the idea of doing a model test. Similar to the way biologists research relatively simple organisms, I examined exposed aggregate concrete garbage cans, and not Gothic cathedrals or French castles. You see, the good thing about exposed aggregate concrete garbage can storage rooms is that they form a self-contained population for research that could be examined according to all immanent criteria. But actually, my dissertation was rather about the term “fluctuating type.” The objects with their properties are collected, unbiased, in a database and the respective types only arise at the moment of inquiry; in other words, only through the properties that it itself has. At the time, I was able to do this research with Ludger Hovestadt and Bernd Meyerspeer. After that, the six-year junior professorship was exactly what I needed, to do further research on this basis.

GAM: Now, you have spoken about your real interest in the infra-ordinary. In another publication you also use the term “normal buildings” or “normal city.” How do these terms differ from the ordinary, or from what goes unnoticed and doesn’t seem to raise any questions?

MC: The problem is that the concept of the normal, which I have used for a very long time now, no longer works with Corona, due to the inflationary use of the phrase “new normal.” Before, the terms “normal city” or “normal situation” were actually incredibly beautiful to me, back then when I was working on the booklet Veduten der Normalstadt (Imaginary Views of the Normal City), together with the sociologist Julian Müller. The approach is comparable to the way of thinking of Philipp Garnier’s Über die Lauheit (About Lukewarmness), where he writes that between the high points, as in between hot and cold, the lukewarmness is always in the middle, which is actually the ideal temperature for life. What interests me in this concept is not the average, but this central amplitude. In other words, normality, the ordinary, or the everyday-life, or whatever you want to call it, is how the city and architecture actually exist. A city, for example, needs the not-so-good areas just as much as it needs the fantastic ones; the same applies for architecture. On the one hand, there is this idea that an architect could or even should create an ideal world, which is simply illusory, because the hunt for precise ideals always leads to disappointment. On the other hand, in terms of my point of view, hardly any attempts were made in finding interest in the non-ideal and, as a result, in the non-interesting, which is the closest to “normal.” When it comes to cities, there is what I call the “normal city ideal,” that I would like to further explore.

GAM: In other words, the discovery of the sea route in the everyday-life, isn’t it? But how can I really perceive everyday-life as something infra-ordinary and something exciting at the same time?

MC: Right, and how can I work with all this too? To that end, we launched a format for students a few years ago, which I called “Site Repair.” It is a design strategy in which you work with students on real issues, situations, and properties and try to make “amends.” And here again, it is an approach that deals with the failure of ideals in everyday-life. Because architects in their designs, usually formulate the “beautiful”, “innovative” and “perfect” as ideal goals and aspirations, and hope to be able to cure the deficiencies of everyday-life. However, the real site locations do not seem to always win with this design strategy, as the previously existing inadequacies often become apparent. In a figurative sense, this would be comparable to the situation, say if we were to place a “top model” next to a normal citizen, for example. Therefore, at “Site Repair” we want to rethink this common design process and conduct experimental workshops to investigate whether and how it is possible to formulate an “ideal” intervention that alters a real situation in a positive way. It is a procedure that claims the normal as an ideal and––without giving up the claim to quality–– consciously gets involved in the everyday context and its appearances. Attempts are made to isolate the necessary potentials from everyday reality, to name them as references and analogies, and to use and transform them in the design. For this purpose, the intervention should be as “minimally invasive” as possible and nevertheless transform the substance in such a way that an existing deficit, be it a matter of function and/or form, is eliminated without tension. To sum it up, “Site Repair” is an architectural process in which an operation is carried out, similar to a dentist or a traditional plastic surgeon, if for example a tooth gap is closed with an implant, or a human appearance is recreated through appropriate intervention––matching the “evolved” context. Whether a small single-piece is inserted, as a “denture” for example, or whether the real environment is reassessed using an affirmation-strategy, all depends on the specific location, the situation found there and the individual approach of the designer.