6. WAND AND GE-WAND
In the case of the wall, Semper took this motive back to its origin as a hanging textile, a colourful weave providing vertical enclosure. In the case of the Assyrians, “Hanging carpets remained the true walls; they were the visible boundaries of a room. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for protection, for supporting a load, for their permanence.” “The dressing had evolved from the motive of the textile enclosure, and thus only the dressing symbolized the original spatial idea contained in the enclosure.” Therefore the formal development of the wall traces itself in reference to the original motive of spatial enclosure and not the tectonic function of load-bearing rigidity. By his proposition, Semper shifted the wall from its weight-bearing capacity as “mauer” to that of the “wand”, the partition, the screen.
As separator, the woven wall in its original iteration was “a means of dividing the “home,” the inner life from the outer life, as a formal construct of the spatial idea. It preceded the simple wall made from stone or another material. Scaffolds that served to hold, secure or support this spatial enclosure had nothing directly to do with space or the division of space. They were foreign to the original architectural idea and were never form-determining elements to start with.”