Incomplete Murdmaa, The Absence of Architect - zstudio0 - Xuite 備份站
I first met Allan Murdmaa at his house in his overcrowded room with drawing table, sleeping bed, models and rolls of papers, etc. At one point, I offered him the raw tobacco I have from Yunan region in the South West China, and we smoked our pipes when talking to each other. I vividly recalled he mentioned he likes strong things, referring to the tobacco we use, and he acclaimed that architecture is a very serious thing to do.
Obviously to me, Murdmaa is a heavy duty man with long enduring spirit, who immediately gave me a Schopenhauerian sense of insistence of living, which manifested in his sturdy monuments. However, I was told he is almost forgotten by the general public and the professional circle for his generation belonging to the former Soviet time and he was probably the key figure in that social political memory to be at least modified.
The disappearance of Murdmaa somehow signified particularly on his unfinished projects. The two major coincided passageways on the ground of the Maarjamäe monument were deliberately making a cosmological orientation, as I read. One is linking to the city center for the mankind. The other one is stretching towards the sea to the horizon, which on the other end supposedly sits a multilayered shell-like pyramid against the cliff behind with a podium inside to place the divine statue, to hit the sky.
Today, this final drama is not there and further distracted by the triangular land form with praying hands near the crossed junction and to the portal leading wanderers to the left side of the main earth-sky axis. This midway rotation turned the appreciation of the whole site into an unusual experience, as if Murdmaa were concealed, thus, no presence of the architect. Therefore, nothing was structured as intended any more but rather scattered zones of symbolic fragments left to random encounters.
The incompleteness is unexpected, none the less interesting, whereas I find it self-evidential and self-critical to the urge of completion in the notion of architecture. When we compiling a retrospective collection of Murdmaa’s works, it reminds us that an architect could never encompass the space and time with full control and the absence of the architect may induce sympathy towards the other possibilities in the society.