2 ND ICONA | INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ARCHITECTURE JUNE 30 | JULY 01 | 2021 | ROME
CANON and CODE THE LANGUAGE OF ARTS IN TODAY’S WORLD
Book of Abstract Architecture and Construction Ph.D. DRACo | Dottorato di Ricerca in Architettura e Costruzione Coordinator Dina Nencini
2Nnd IConA International Conference on Architecture “Canon and Code. The language of arts in today’s world” June 30- July 01 2021, Rome, Piazza Borghese 9 www.iconaconference.com [email protected]
Editorial Coordination Francesca Addario Alessandro Oltremarini Andrea D’Urzo Enrico Marani Luigi Savio Margagliotta Giorgio Quintiliani Andrea Siciliani
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Dottorato di Ricerca in Architettura e Costruzione Dipartimento di Architettura e Progetto Sapienza Università di Roma CURATORS SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Orazio Carpenzano Matteo Agnoletto (Università di Bologna) Giulio Massimo Barazzetta (Dean of Faculty of Architecture, Sapienza Università di Roma) (Politecnico di Milano) Bruno Bonomo (Sapienza Università di Roma) Renato Alessandra Capanna, Anna Irene Del Monaco, Dina Nencini Capozzi (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II) Domenico Chizzoniti (Sapienza Università di Roma) (Politecnico di Milano) Nancy M. Clark (School of Architecture University of Francesco Menegatti, Tomaso Monestiroli Florida) Alessandra Criconia (Sapienza Università di Roma) Sedef Doganer (Politecnico di Milano) (University of Texas San Antonio) Massimo Faiferri (Università degli Studi di Sassari) Paola Favaro (UNSW Sidney) Luisa Ferro (Politecnico di Milano) Antonella Gallo (Università IUAV di Venezia) Paolo Genovese (Tianjin University) Anna Giovannelli (Sapienza Università di Roma) Cristina Imbroglini (Sapienza Università di Roma) Martina Landsberger (Politecnico di HONOUR COMMITTEE Milano) Vincenzo Latina (Università degli Studi di Catania) Angela Lombardi (University of Texas San Antonio) Giovanni Marras (Università IUAV di Venezia) Maria Argenti (Sapienza Università di Roma) Carmen Andriani (Università Marco Mannino (Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria) Marina Mihaila degli Studi di Genova) Lucio Barbera (Sapienza Università di Roma) Alessandra (Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism UAUIM) Antonello Monaco Capuano (Sapienza Università di Roma) Daniel Comsa (Ion Mincu University of (Sapienza Università di Roma) Pisana Posocco (Sapienza Università di Roma) Architecture and Urbanism UAUIM) Armando Dal Fabbro (Università IUAV di Enrico Prandi (Università degli Studi di Parma) Sara Protasoni (Politecnico di Venezia) Alberto Ferlenga (Università IUAV di Venezia) Cherubino Gambardella Milano) Manuela Raitano (Sapienza Università di Roma) Antonio Vito Riondino (Università degli Studi della Campania L. Vanvitelli) Liu Jian (Tsinghua University (Politecnico di Bari) Nicola Santopuoli (Sapienza Università di Roma) Leone of Beijing) Martha Kohen (SoA DCP University of Florida) Jean-François Spita (Sapienza Università di Roma) Fabrizio Toppetti (Sapienza Università di Lejeune (University of Miami School of Architecture) Gino Malacarne (Università Roma) Ettore Vadini (Università degli Studi della Basilicata) Federica Visconti di Bologna) Bruno Messina (Università degli Studi di Catania) Carlo Moccia (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II) Shaoming Lu (Shanghai Jiao Tong (Politecnico di Bari) John Murphy (University of Texas San Antonio) Raffaella University) Zhou Zhengxu (Tsinghua University of Beijing) Neri (Politecnico di Milano) Margherita Petranzan (Direttore di “Anfione e Zeto. Rivista di architettura e arti”) Wendy Pullan (University of Cambridge) Franco Purini (Sapienza Università di Roma) Matteo Robiglio (Politecnico di Torino) Piero Ostilio Rossi (Sapienza Università di Roma) Xing Ruan (Shanghai Jiao Tong ORGANIZING COMMITTEE University, UNSW Sydney) Brent D. Ryan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge) Antonino Saggio (Sapienza Università di Roma) Andrea Sciascia Francesca Addario, Alessandro Oltremarini, Andrea D’Urzo, Enrico (Università degli Studi di Palermo) Laura Thermes (Università Mediterranea di Marani, Luigi Savio Margagliotta, Giorgio Quintiliani, Andrea Siciliani Reggio Calabria) Ilaria Valente (Politecnico di Milano) (Sapienza Università di Roma) CALL FOR ABSTRACT TRACKS
What is the meaning of artistic language in today’s world? Architecture, art among the arts, in the age of uninterrupted transformations of paradigms and expression codes, is mostly perceived as communication while in cities all over the world, construction continues by mediating public and private interests. The legacy of modern culture is still influential, producing language within The theme of the conference is presented in three topic tracks: a field of aesthetic expression on the one hand logical-rational andthe other intuitive-empathic. Language is transformed through neologisms, A. genealogy / poetic transcriptions, and experiments. Does each language live in its own time? Does #order #neologisms #transcriptions the meaning of language change over time? B. metamorphosis / actions The hermeneutics of language is expressed either by (absolute or relative) #transformations #mutations #collages intelligibility or by the construction of a consensus through the use of C. multiplicity / communication intermediate codes opening conceptual boundaries and multiple ways of #politics #media #intercodes representations. Adhesion to a linguistic expression does not occur thanks to the intelligibility of the language, and therefore consent is not obtained only through codifiable procedures. In this brief framework, we can discuss whether architects still need to equip themselves with their own language, grammar, canons and codes. The conference aims to explore the languages of the arts at the present time through studies and research on genealogies, inventions, metamorphoses and contaminations, that have always characterized architectural and artistic cultures. PROGRAM OF THE CONFERENCE INDEX
TRACK A genealogy / poetic
Canon and code: project and representation techniques in Giorgio Grassi’s architecture 22 Francesca Addario Euclidean rescue 24 Luigi Arcopinto Alice in Wonderland: “Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant” 26 Francesca Belloni Compositional languages and expression codes in the era of environmental sustainability. Towards the refounding of a theory of architecture. 28 Andrea Bologna Fashion and media architecture. An investigation into new paradigms and new urban (sound)spaces for the design of contemporary cultural systems. 30 Alessandra Capanna The creative process as a synthesis of dual aspects of making architecture 32 Alessandra Como, Luisa Smeragliuolo Perrotta The face of a land. Morandi, Bertolucci, Ghirri, Zermani 34 Edoardo Cresci Modern Poetic in Contemporary Brazilian Architecture 36 Solange Moura Lima de Aragão Anticlassical Codes. Episodes of contemporary Italian architecture through Bruno Zevi’s Seven Invariables 38 Alessia Gallo The girls of the Sixties. Women architects of the golden age of Rome. New wefts, ancient warps Paola D’Ercole, the cities of paper 40 Origin as a choral tale of distinct architectural languages 66 Carla Ghezzi Matteo Saldarini Lyric Spatial Agency: Poetic Practices and Situated Knowledge in the Design Process 42 A cryptic beauty. Ode to the Ungers’ formal canon 68 Jeremy Allan Hawkins Mariangela Ludovica Santarsiero Aniconic PoMo: a boundary line of language and drawing 44 Arcaico Contemporaneo. An interpretative code for architectural design 70 Roberto Vincenzo Iossa Andrea Scalas The project, poetically 46 About permanent in architecture. Luigi Snozzi, a resistant architect 72 Silvana Kühtz, Silvia Parentini Andrea Siciliani The presence of light space. City forms in the arts 74 A Trajectory of Italian Ephemeral Architecture from Renzo Zavannella to Francesco Librizzi 48 Francesca Spacagna Edoardo Marchese (De)Coding architecture: philosophy of abstraction through language 76 “Architettura Parametrica”. Luigi Moretti’s theory for a new architectural language. 50 Bojana Sternisa Martina Meulli Necessary genealogies 78 Kunstmuseum Insel Hombroich or the “Symbolic Garden” of the Third Millennium 52 Andreina Milan Nicoletta Trasi Environmental control and architectural language 54 The unit of composition and construction 80 Gaspare Oliva Federica Visconti, Renato Capozzi Language in today’s Brazilian paulista school 56 Thomas Pedrazzini TRACK B metamorphosis / actions
The overlapping of the slabs: a way of construction of the architectural character 58 The ready-made of existing building stock 84 Michele Pellino Barbara Angi Portugal and Egypt: Tradition and Modernity 60 The Shrine and the Square. Architectures for the myth of martyrdom, Claudia Pirina, Viola Bertini from the political cult to the post-ideological era 86 Building with memory as design tool. Fabio Balducci, Paolo Marcoaldi The reconstruction of the Al Nouri religious and cultural complex in Mosul. 62 Le Corbusier: architecture as a language 88 Riccardo Renzi Barbara Bonanno An Outline of Anthropometric Images in Western Figuration. From Giovan Battista Piranesi to contemporaneity: visions 90 The human body captured by geometry and creatively interpreted by artists 64 Angela Bruni Matteo Giuseppe Romanato Compositional thought and language. Projects at the margins 92 The informal canon of Mediterranean spatiality 118 Giovanni Comi Alessandro Lanzetta, Angela Fiorelli Architectural Design Studio: Experimenting Transition Times in Education 94 Coastal geography icons 120 Daniel Comșa, Delia Alexandra Prisecaru Nicola La Vitola The language of reconnection. Two approaches in Venice 96 Rewriting architecture. Federica Conte, Alice Monacelli Methodological for reinventing destroyed and damaged parts of historical cities 122 Tommaso Lolli Beyond meanings. Symbiosis and metamorphosis in the arts chase and mirror each other 98 Barbara Coppetti Sustainability of the city through the urban form. The case of Tirana 124 Skender Luarasi, Llazar Kumaraku TheatrumOpera: space becomes action. Plastic tracks of dancing research 100 Maria D’Ambrosio, Enrica Spada The collage-montage as an ‘analogical method’. Compositional exercises for the new Vkhutemas Ideal Museum in Moscow 126 Collages and ‘assemblage design’. Oreste Lubrano Re-designing contemporary identities, architectures, landscapes 102 Giuseppe D’Ascoli Language an code in the digital. A new “schism” between technology and its tools in architectural design? 128 Creative peripheries. Roberta Lucente, Giuseppe Canestrino Upcycling the built heritage in peripheral habitats through art and social innovation 104 Maria Giada Di Baldassarre Coat-Cappa-Chapel: new expressions in contemporary european chapel 130 Andreas Luescher The art of kintsugi as a metaphor for building the city by parts 106 Ermelinda Di Chiara The sizes of the shape. Variants and invariants in the architectural design 132 Luigi Savio Margagliotta Morphological transformation. Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen 108 The issue of density. Canon and code of the contemporary city 134 Andrea D’Urzo Elisa Maruelli
Syntagmatic architectural overwriting 110 The performing porosity of inorganic space. Restoring a communication 136 Alessandro Gaiani Fabrizio Marzilli Space, Time, Arts and Crafts. The classic references of a liquid period 112 Transformations/Transmutations. Ludovica Grompone Bertoja vs Mosso: tensions-vibrations-transparencies in the architectural space 138 Andreina Milan Towards New Design Epistemologies: Conversations between Chemistry and Life 114 Rolf Hughes, Rachel Armstrong After the natural, the graft. “Artificialis”: Laurent Grasso at the museum d’Orsay 140 Laura Mucciolo De-coding human living space 116 Bora Kelmendi Visual spaces of change: use, perception, moment 142 Pedro Leão Neto, Miguel Santos The mutation of typological elements The rural as a frontier of expression in contemporary Chinese architecture 170 in the formative and transformative process of school architecture in Rome 144 Gerardo Semprebon Cinzia Paciolla For a semiotics of the school 172 Inclusive architecture. A language for each one 146 Giorgio Quintiliani Chiara Pecilli The (new) legacy of the present 174 Constants in sacred space 148 Concetta Tavoletta Emel Petërçi Transform-Action of Public Space. From urban fabric metamorphosis TRACK C multiplicity / communication to bottom-up strategies in the Post-Pandemic City 150 Greta Pitanti The Dark Heritage Representation in Digital Games. Eternal present 152 The case of the former Psychiatric Hospital of Volterra in The Town of Light 178 Sara Cuccu, Claudia Pintor Sergio Policaro The Language of Architecture and Design in Science-Fiction Movies. Cities for sale: three devices narrating the Chinese urban reality 180 Space and Society in films of the turn of the century 154 Filippo Fiandese, Silvia Lantieri, Monica Naso Sigrun Prahl Promoting human involvement in public spaces through interactive art installations The hypertextuality of art in the architecture of the transition 156 and media architecture 182 Elham Karbalaei Hassani Antonio Riondino Linguistic issues of the railway terminal 158 Architectures assassinées. Four rooms for a crime 184 Marco Lecis Giuseppe Rociola The perception of space in architecture between new codes and new canons. 160 The code of Utopia. Fragments of the necessary in the art of the possible 186 Alessandro Oltremarini Salvatore Rugino The metamorphosis as design approach. The recomposition in Mario Labò’s work 162 Deferred codes. Dialogue between Architecture and Politics 188 Benedetta Tamburini Marco Russo The city of the collection 164 Offshore, Coastward. Contemporary art as a decoding tool of scientific sea-based research to reveal future coastal developments 190 Cristian Sammarco Maria Pina Usai Baltic Code. Language, body and spaces in contemporary architecture of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia 166 Some thoughts on architectural writing in today’s world 192 Ettore Vadini Donatella Scatena Skinned rooms. Space and indexicality across art and architecture. 168 Giuseppina Scavuzzo
TRACK A
A. genealogy / poetic #order #neologisms #transcriptions Canon and code: project and representation techniques individual needs? in Giorgio Grassi’s architecture The contemporary, proceeding by contrast and improvisation, has TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC subverted and desecrated the architectural canons to the point that Luciano Semerani has evoked a sort of metempsychosis towards Francesca Addario: [email protected] the origins. Referring to the theme of the origin, Giorgio Grassi’s Sapienza - University of Rome work, due to the general value of architecture that can be defined as timeless, can still give many points of reflection today: the approach In the subtle difference that exists between canon and architectural to a convinced formal simplification of the buildings character’s it has code – between the set of rules that can be deduced from the possible through a progressive reduction of what is superfluous or, in examples, in order to transferring them, and the system of signs, other words, through a careful selection of what is necessary. As the recurrent symbols and characters that allow the comprehension and work of a craftsman it is in this process of choice and “stylization”, transmission of a certain architectural message and therefore the also transferred to the drawing, that Grassi concretizes the research highlighting of the buildings’ reasons – it is useful to dwell on two on the form and on the syntactic aspect of architecture. topical moments with which the project, depending on the time, takes a position: the comparison with a model, where the initial idea is measured and the architectural theme is defined, and the definition of the expressive character of the building that synthesizes the idea in form making it architecture. The many distractions that, for a long time, has involved and contaminated the architecture’s field, and that directly affect the definition of free and makeshift forms and expression codes, have caused the crisis on one hand between the project and the canon reference model and, on the other hand, have emptied of meaning the correspondence of the project to a character- code that can be recognizable and/or generally recognized. Does it still make sense to speak in the contemporary time of “norm” and REFERENCES “convention” in the architecture, or can these concepts today be Grassi G. (1967), La costruzione logica dell’architettura, Marsilio Editori, Padova. considered totally outdated in favour of a transgressive tout court Grassi G. (2000), Scritti scelti 1960-1999, Franco Angeli, Milano. attitude that erases all kinds of rules? Grassi G. (2004), “Il carattere degli edifici”,Casabella , 722. Lahuerta J.J. (2004), L’architetto e i suoi modelli, in Crespi G. e Dego N. eds. (2004), Opere In addition, are still present and felt those coded and conventional e Progetti. Giogio Grassi, Mondadori Electa, Milano. needs of a general nature and of common interest, that in the last Monestiroli A. (2010), Teoria e progetto nell’architettura di Giorgio Grassi, in Id. (2010) La ragione degli edifici. La scuola di Milano e oltre, Marinotti Edizioni, Milano. century despite everything have animated architecture, or instead Semerani L. (2013), Giorgio Grassi in Id. (2013), Incontri e lezioni. Attrazione e contrasto has the slow dematerialization of relationships only increased new tra le forme, Clean, Napoli.
22 23 Euclidean rescue variations and modifying actions that make ductile, useful and TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC manageable even the most hyperuranie ideas of architecture. In short, only by acting in this way we can focus on a constellation Luigi Arcopinto: [email protected] of possible expressions on the recognition, alteration, corruption and Sapienza - University of Rome interpolation of forgotten and fundamental plane geometries in the poetics of an architect. Especially at a time like this that is poised The meaning of architectural language can be traced back to the between rule, expression, ecology, history, freedom, tragedy and morphological characters of geometry: the entity that allowed man to irony: in short, a great mess. dominate the earth by measuring it. Looking at this poetic order, probably we can build a genealogical investigation that justifies the formal genesis of all architectures with the simple geometric figures. As in a timeless Euclidean paradox in which the square, the circle and the triangle become canons for an architecture made of two- dimensional planes: the field of abstraction where the brain of man is more comfortable. In fact, the most significant representations of architectural projects refer to the orthogonal triad. It is a matter of plan, prospectus and section and, therefore, things that delimit their field of existence to a sheet with two dimensions. Therefore, the formulation of an Euclidean hermeneutic would allow us to trace a procedural code to investigate the reasons for the compositional choices, both in the use of pure and spurious forms. A code that must be used in such a way that it is useful but not devastated by a pervasive and obsessive use as REFERENCES if it was a bible to be executed point by point. G. Ponti, 1957, Amate l’architettura. L’architettura è un cristallo, Vitali e Ghianda, Genova That wouldn’t work out. Giedion S., 1961, Breviario di architettura, Garzanti, Milano Panofsky E., 1962, Il significato delle arti visive, Einaudi, Torino The code must be a useful manual that can, through a transcription Munari B., 1971, Codice Ovvio, Einaudi, Torino without guilt, convince an architect, a scholar or a lover of matter to Purini F., 2000, Comporre l’architettura, Laterza, Bari Munari B., 2005, Il quadrato, Corraini, Milano approach the untouchable perfection of Euclidean geometric figures Munari B., 2007, Il triangolo, Corraini, Milano and the thousand possibilities of use, even seemingly improper, Gambardella C., 2010, Architettura per definizione, Il melangolo, Genova 2010 Munari B., 2016, Il cerchio, Corraini, Milano in architecture, without being dominated by the anxiety to come Carpenzano O., 2018, Qualcosa sull’architettura. Figure e pensieri nella composizione, across something untouchable, forgotten and very resistant to those Quodlibet, Macerata
24 25 Alice in Wonderland: The foregoing is moreover highlighted by considering some well- “Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant” known collaborations between artists and architects such as those TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC between Diener & Diener and Helmut Federle, Caruso St John and Rachel Whiteread or Thomas Demand, or by examining the latter’s Francesca Belloni: [email protected] exchanges with David Chipperfield; all of this in turn paves the way Politecnico di Milano to the world of temporary realizations and live performances by architects, often played in a liminal land between art and architecture. What are the contaminations between art and architecture in today’s The whole complex of these experiences is bound to the (solid) world? In the relationship with the architectural and urban space, what architecture and its theoretical corpus through the rejection of a codes role does art play whenever art and architecture come into contact? and canons that end in themselves, together with the desire to reflect on Quoting James Ballard, the title of the present proposal represents a processes, procedures, transcriptions, and metamorphoses capable of sort of provocation, especially in case of association with Canaletto’s feeding architecture and its languages. famed Capriccio palladiano and to the in some ways inappropriate usage that Aldo Rossi made of it. Starting from the observation that the composition made by Canaletto is, in a certain way, truer than Venice itself, one might wonder about the role of art in the construction of the architectural and urban image and, through some examples, affirm that in the present time art is a kind of seismograph that pushes architects to look beyond, to investigate the field of the unspoken or the unthinkable and it is used, in many cases, as a device to substantiate architecture itself and its outcomes. How and through which instruments? The answer lies in the works as REFERENCES mere instruments used to go back to the (implicit or explicit) canons and codes used, or perhaps to get to admit that, conversely, they often Aubin C. and Mínguez Carrasco C. eds. (2020), Bodybuilding. Architecture and Performance, Performa, New York. fade into a hermeneutic of the indeterminate, in relation to which Ballard J.G. (1998), Theatre of Cruelty, interview by Coillard J.-P., Disturb Ezine, https:// identifying limits and boundaries seems increasingly difficult. www.jgballard.ca/media/1998_disturb_magazine.html Kwon M. (2004), One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, The Who makes what, between art and architecture? Ballard explains MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England. it masterfully and some artists show it clearly. From Agnes Denes’s Lavin S. (2011), Kissing Architecture, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford. Lucan J. and Bruno M. (2001), A Matter of Art: Contemporary Architecture in Switzerland, Wheatfield[s] to Alan Ruiz’s installations, from Fischli and Weiss’s Birkhäuser, Basel. Haus to Do Ho Suh’s Robin Hood Gardens, a fruitful genealogy Rendell J. (2006), Art and Architecture: A Place Between, I B Tauris & Co Ltd, New York. Von Moos S. (2020), Peter Fischli, David Weiss: Haus, Walther König, Köln. could be composed, echoing the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Wallace I.L. and Wendl N. eds. (2013), Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Knowledge. Utility, Ashgate, Surrey.
26 27 Compositional languages and expression codes This contribution aims to investigate (starting from the analysis in the era of environmental sustainability. of real case studies located in different geographical, climatic and Towards the refounding of a theory of architecture. constructive contexts) the analytical and critical tools to be adopted TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC for the understanding, systematization and future development of sustainability’s compositional languages and architectural codes. Andrea Bologna: [email protected] On a methodological level, this investigation will be carried out Sapienza - University of Rome starting from the material aspects of architecture. It will take into consideration how this expression codes’ shift is also leading to a The ambition of the pursuit of environmental sustainability in the further clarification in matching the concept of sustainability to current building industry is leading to a recent development of new architecture, as well as a mutation of the very actual meaning of architectural languages over the world. This is a process, still in tectonics: this last is now to be reformulated e.g. more on the basis of the midst of its development, of compositional research applied to the analysis, from a compositional point of view, of the design needs the use of different construction technologies (often developed to and ways of assembling modules of ventilated facades or series of satisfy local regulatory constraints and on-site practices) that on the solar and photovoltaic panels rather than from its more traditional theoretical side does not still correspond to a real systematization of identification e.g. with the arrangement of joints in stereotomic the related compositional languages. construction or the wooden interlocking of the Blockbau system. “Green”, and therefore “sustainability” in architecture, sometimes is intended as a mere decorative issue, linked to the image that a building wants to convey, often beyond its utilitas. Compositional instances traditionally derived from the designer’s will to decline aspects of the project related to venustas and constructive factors belonging to firmitas, applied to the pursuit of an architectural image ascribable to sustainability, are thus influencing and calling into question the very notion of character in architecture, as well as progressively – and REFERENCES often unconsciously – changing the critical categories that influence Bologna A. (2021), “Verso la definizione di una teoria della progettazione architettonica taste. nell’era della parametrizzazione della sostenibilità ambientale”, Archi – Rivista svizzera di architettura, ingegneria e urbanistica, n°3/2021, forthcoming (June 2021). These processes linked to contemporary architectural production – Gänshirt C. (2021), Tools for Ideas. Introduction to Architectural Design, Birkhäuser, Basel. from the systematization of the first design impulses to the completed Guidetti L. (2021), Manifeste pour une révolution territoriale, Espazium, Zurich. Picon A. (2020), The Materiality of Architecture, University of Minnesota Press, building – thus highlight the need to refound (both on a thematic Minneapolis. and methodological level) a theory of architecture that takes into Ruby I. and Ruby A., eds. (2020), The Materials Book, LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, Berlin- Zurich. consideration the different instances raised by the era of the search Arpa J., Ravon A. (2019), “Covering the city with a forest. The Green Dip”, domus, n°1037, for an emphasized image of sustainability. pp. 718-723.
28 29 Fashion and media architecture. and that of Rem Koolhaas with Prada, for which he not only created the An investigation into new paradigms and new urban (sound) Milanese building of the Foundation, but also the Prada Transformer spaces for the design of contemporary cultural systems. temporary pavilion in 2009, are paradigmatic. To investigate canons and TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC codes of the architecture-fashion system, the architect who interprets both virtual and physical spaces with augmented perception will be an Alessandra Capanna: [email protected] exegete of an active and critical methodology for the project, adopting a Sapienza - University of Rome form of continuous apprenticeship developed in liminal areas, focusing on the narrative cunning typical of the language of Fashion, full of The research about Architecture for fashion involves considerations on quotations and contaminations, stylistic gloom, artificially superficial, the concept of the ephemeral. In fact, if at the beginning of the 20th light and minimizing, subtle, to be translated into an evocative and century Walter Benjamin wrote that Architecture and Fashion “belong multisensory architectural image. Thus, shop windows and visual to the darkness of the lived moment, to the dream consciousness of the displays represented the earliest public forms of street art. Visual collective”, we must ask ourselves how the design of these spaces today merchandisers used window displays as a means of entertainment interprets contemporaneity and if the linguistic codes belong to only for the masses. The goal was the differentiation which over time has one of the two terms of the question, that the other adopts in order to become homologation in the transition from innovative language to communicate properly, or whether it is possible to identify changes in the cliché. The research of which some first results are presented here, codes and aesthetic canons that belong to both. This objective is pursued including design experimentations, therefore aims to study and present by analyzing the different international realities and how, historically and the material and immaterial culture, therefore identity, of the Fashion in the cultural context to which they belong, they have inherited styles system and its close links with the world of architecture, related to the and customs. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, all the most design of indoor and outdoor (sound)spaces for the production, sale important fashion companies approached the world of art, through the and exhibition, events, closely linked to the aesthetic interpretation of establishment of Foundations for contemporary art created by involving contemporaneity. internationally renowned architects. Under the leadership of its creative director Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton can boast the richest and most REFERENCES varied range of relationships with leading artists, designers, architects Barthes R. (1993-ed.it. 2020), Il senso della Moda, Einaudi, Torino and photographers on the international scene by Jun Aoki, Shigeru Ban, Dorfles G. (1984), La Moda della Moda, Costa & Nolan, Genova Giamarresi G. (2008), La Moda e l’Architettura, Mondadori Electa, Milano Vanessa Beecroft, Olafur Eliasson David LaChappelle, Jean Larivière, Rak M., Catricalà M. (2013), Global fashion. Spazi, linguaggi e comunicazione della moda Annie Leibovitz, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Stephen Sprouse, senza luogo, Mondadori Università, Milano Rinaldi C. (2019) Lo spazio architettonico per la moda: tre big a confronto, https://www. James Turrell, Inez Van Lamsweerde, Vinoodh Matadin, up to Frank fashionresearchitaly.org/fashion-journal/architettura-per-la-moda/ Gehry, author of the foundation’s headquarters in the French capital. Secchi R. ed. (2003), Mode, modernità, Architettura, Officina, Roma Simmel G. (1895), La Moda, in Curcio A.M. ed. (2015), Mimesis, Milano The collaborations of Zaha Hadid with Karl Lagerfeld for the 50th Wigley M. (2001), White walls, designer dresses. The fashioning of Modern Architecture, Mit anniversary of the Chanel 2.55 bag, developing the Mobile Art Pavillion, Press, Cambridge Mass.
30 31 The creative process as a synthesis of dual aspects of the progressive construction of a catalog of memory on which one making architecture continues to work and explore through the design project:
32 33 The face of a land. Morandi, Bertolucci, Ghirri, Zermani TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC
Edoardo Cresci: [email protected] Università degli Studi di Firenze
Between the 1930s and 1940s, new and old creators of the character and face of a region, Emilia, converged around the figure of Roberto Longhi. The Art History courses held by the renowned critic at the University of Bologna were attended by, among others: Francesco Arcangeli, Attilio Bertolucci, Giorgio Bassani, and Pier Paolo Pasolini… Characters who, alongside Longhi, would contribute to the formation of a new school of art: “a school that was actually a workshop”. Within that ‘workshop’, reopened by Longhi welcoming Giorgio Morandi, the differences in age between Bertolucci, Ghirri and Zermani did not prevent the establishment of profound similarities; on the contrary they strengthened a certain ‘atelier-relationship’, a trust and a familiarity between figures who, in looking at their own land and in ‘working with it’, perceived that they were in some way its children, perceived that they “have something in common that is more ancient”, something to be developed. Perhaps it is a matter of the common perception of a certain source of continuity, of a disposition and of a culture which, even in times marked by REFERENCES very rapid change, provide those lasting values which, through the Bertolucci A. (1965), “Morandi e Arcangeli: storia di due generazioni”, L’Europa letteraria intermediary of human beings, renew their reproductive forces and artistica cinematografica, n°33, pp. 158-159. guarantee transmissibility and recognition. Bertolucci A. (2011), La consolazione della pittura. Scritti sull’arte, Aragno, Torino, p. 264.
34 35 Modern Poetic in Contemporary highly expensive, either because there are no specialized workers to Brazilian Architecture make use of them, either because there are no techniques to do so. Not TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC to mention some difficult in architecture offices to adapt to this or that software. So in certain ways we remain Modern and Modern poetic Solange Moura Lima de Aragão: [email protected] can be found in several examples of what we call Contemporary Universidade Nove de Julho Architecture. But where does this poetic rest? In building materials sometimes (where concrete still remains the favorite one), in form As we observe World’s Contemporary Architecture we realize that itself (we do not abandon the concrete or the glass box), in the volume many experiments have so far been tried in which concern the form (we strive to stimulate our students to try the new, while what we see itself, the volume, applied materials, techniques, use of different around is the modern volume). The poetic language of modernism is software, resulting in what Pedro Fiori Arantes would define as present at several examples of Brazilian Contemporary Architecture exception architecture or brand architecture (Arantes, 2010). On notwithstanding their being contemporary without a shadow of the opposite way, whenever we analyze Contemporary Brazilian a doubt, such as at Sesc 24 de Maio, in São Paulo, designed by Architecture we do not find out - or rarely do it – such kind of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB, or at Praça das Artes (Art’s experiments. What we effectively see is modern poetic still prevailing Square), in São Paulo, designed by Brasil Arquitetura, or even at in the majority of well-known architecture offices production. And Instituto Moreira Salles, in São Paulo, designed by Andrade Morettin what would explain such fact? In conversations with professors of Arquitetos Associados. Architecture History in the Academic field as well as in dialogues with researchers of the field, we have concluded that there are several factors which would or could explain this. First of all, in Brazil, Modern Heritage keeps on being very important, considering the role that Brazilian Modern Architecture has played nationally and internationally. Differently from Brazilian Architecture from other periods, whose value is not so ever recognized, our modernist REFERENCES buildings as well as modernist cities, particularly Brasilia, are frequently mentioned at relevant books of History of Architecture in Arantes, P. F. (2010). “Forma, valor e renda na arquitetura contemporânea”. ARS (São Paulo), 8(16), 85-108. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1678-53202010000200007 the world. Secondly, Brazilian modernist architects lived up to the LIRA, J. “Sesc 24 de Maio. O projeto mais fortemente urbano de Paulo Mendes da Rocha”. end of the 20th century and some of them are still alive. So there Projetos, São Paulo, ano 17, n. 200.02, Vitruvius, ago. 2017
36 37 Anticlassical Codes. on critical analysis of reality and all possible realities at the time of Episodes of contemporary Italian architecture through design. Bruno Zevi’s Seven Invariables “Listing as Design Methodology”; “Asymmetry and Dissonance”; TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC “Anti-Perspective Three-Dimensionality”; “The syntax of Four- dimensional Decomposition”; “Cantilever, Shell and Membrane Alessia Gallo: [email protected] Structures”; “Space in Time”; “Reintegration of Building, City, Sapienza - University of Rome and Landscape” (Zevi, 1973): each of the Seven Invariables will be associated with a relevant case study, in order to make immediate the What has been done with the organic movement led by Zevi in post- correspondence between the pure theory of organic architecture and World War II Italy? In a contemporary scenario in which architectural the echo of the theory in the Italian architecture built in the last two movements clearly referable to a neo-rationalist language seem to decades. prevail, the canons promoted by Zevi’s movement since the 1940s still codify the method that characterises contemporary Italian architecture. I specifically refer to the Seven Invariables of Modern Architecture listed and argued in “The Modern Language of Architecture” (Zevi, 1973), that is, the seven instances that Zevi considers necessary to define as part of a process of “struggle against the repressive constraints” (Zevi, 1973) imposed by previous culture and customs. The Seven Invariables constitute, according to Zevi, a “vademecum for design” (Zevi, 1973) and the analysis of the works of contemporary Italian architecture identified through this research suggests that a significant number of Italian designers of the last twenty years have REFERENCES really kept them in mind in the conception of their buildings and in Archea Associati / Antinori Winery, in AREA, n°127 (2013), pp. 36-47 the relations, they have established with the cities in which they have C+S Associati/ULH-Urban Lake Houses, in AREA, n°118 (2011), pp. 98-107 been settled. LABICS/Città del Sole, in AREA, n°163 (2019), pp. 106-113 Saggio A. (2020), Il pensiero di Bruno Zevi nell’architettura italiana contemporanea, in Architecture has finally shown itself to be dynamic, anti-perspective, L’industria delle costruzioni, n°470 in continuous dialogue with the human eye and with the context; it Studio Boeri/Polo del Gusto, in AREA, n°165 (2019), pp. 120-127 Zevi B. (1973), Il linguaggio moderno dell’Architettura. Guida al codice anticlassico, has gone from being a shell to being a space; from a full object to Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino a void through which bodies move and perceive it. Zevi’s research Zevi B. (1948), Saper vedere l’Architettura: saggio sull’interpretazione spaziale dell’Architettura, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino aimed to find a modern way of speaking architecture, a language that Zevi B. (1978), The modern language of Architecture, University of Washington Press, is not chained by the dogmas imposed by classicism but is based United States of America
38 39 The girls of the Sixties. on the form, on the Gestalt in the various articulations of his encounter Women architects of the golden age of Rome. with matter». Her impressive production is centered on the architectural Paola D’Ercole, the cities of paper language «as an open and effective reflection, which to the traditional tools of the project added those of drawing and painting, freed from the TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC subordinate role of representation of the project» (P. Balmas, 2020). Carla Ghezzi: [email protected] There is no doubt that the dimension in which all of Paola D’Ercole’s Sapienza - University of Rome work is placed has as its key reference the binomial architecture-city (C. Severati, 2020), through the application of the freer creativity of “naming” The research proposed aims to investigate the ways and forms of belonging architectural things (P. Pernici, 2020) with expressive languages that of architecture to art, as in the Roman culture of the “Sixties”, which always allude and lead back to the inhabited space. represents a moment of particular interest and in which the contribution of women architects is significantly highlighted. The context of architecture in the 1960s has some specific characteristics in Rome, among which the collaboration of architects in groups (the so-called “Studi”) together with REFERENCES artists and poets, who work with the conviction of changing architecture C. Bertelli, F. Menna, F. Moschini, La città di carta/Studio Labirinto, Magma, Milano 1978. and, more broadly, society, through art. Within this “Studi”, positions and F. Purini, C. Barucci , G. Rossi , A. Sotgia, a cura di, Ritorno a Roma. Città, didattica e vita quotidiana, Staderini Editore, Roma, 1979. themes are developed that intertwine architectural culture with the artistic P. Portoghesi, La «Scuola Romana», in «Comunità», n. 75/1959, ora in M. Fabbri, A. Greco, one, Roman culture with the national and international one. The research L. Menozzi, E. F. Purini, Come nacque e come mori la «Scuola romana, in «Rinascita» n. 45/1987 points to bring out the personal “poetics”, in their creative dimension, in (novembre), Roma, 1987. the artistic practices of a group of Roman women architects present in V. Franchetti Pardo, a cura di, La Facoltà di Architettura dell’Università di Roma “La Sapienza” dalle origini al Duemila. Discipline, docenti, studenti, Gangemi Editore, some of the “Studi”, as well as the role that they had in project teaching and Roma, 2001. architectural experimentation. The female figures, in fact, are particularly F. Purini, Roma e l’età dell’oro, Padova, Skira editore, Milano, 2003, pp. 171-183. La formazione degli architetti romani negli anni Sessanta, in «Rassegna di Architettura e prolific in the production of drawings and artistic works directly connected Urbanistica», n. 112/113/114, Edizioni Kappa, Roma, 2004. with the architectural production of the studios to which they were part, but Le architettrici, numero monografico Rivista Parametro n. 257/2005, Gruppo Editoriale Faenza Editrice, Faenza, 2005. not as well studied. Some prominent personalities have been selected, such Architetto/Donna, numero monografico Casabella n. 732/2005, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, as: Gabriella Colucci-Patrizia Nicolosi-Anna Di Noto-Paola Chiatante 2005. A. Capuano, Temi e figure nell’architettura romana 1944-2004, Gangemi Editore, Roma, (Studio GRAU); Paola D’Ercole-Pia Pascalino (Labirinto Studio); Laura 2012. Thermes-Paola Iacucci-Lucia Latour-Lauretta Vinciarelli (Studio Atrio M. G. Eccheli, M. Tamborrino (a cura di), DonnArchitettura: pensieri, idee, forme al femminile, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2014. Testaccio); with the aim of highlighting its contribution in this area, in C. Franchini, E. Garda, MoMoWo: women’s creativity since the modern movement: an particular by focusing on representation and design. The present research European cultural heritage, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, 2018. P. Balmas A. B. Oliva, N. Ciaburri, G. Marinelli De Marco, Paolo Martellotti, F. Moschini, A. focuses on the work of Paola D’Ercole of the “Labyrinth Group”, an Muntoni, A. Pernici, C. Severati, Architetti-artisti a Roma nel secondo Novecento. Paola architect-artist who was, as she defined herself, «a researcher on the sign, D’Ercole, frammenti inediti 1965-2000, Writeupsite Editore, Roma, 2021.
40 41 Lyric Spatial Agency: Poetic Practices and Situated that are potentially hidden from traditional architectural tools and Knowledge in the Design Process their habitual modes of intention/attention? At a time when the spatial TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC project, faced with environments of ever-increasing complexity, seeks means of avoided fixedness and rigidity, how can a poetic text Jeremy Allan Hawkins: [email protected] give name to the uncertain, the ambient, and the ephemeral in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Strasbourg / University of Glasgow flux of a spatial figure? In this paper we explore the hypothesis that unique forms of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), complex and In the last decade, growing interest in “literary methods” for spatial evocative in their tenor, arise from poetic practices undertaken in the practice has opened a field of inquiry to explore creative writing’s design process, affording forms of critical spatial practice and spatial capacity to influence architectural research and design (Havik, 2014). agency that are, as yet, underdeveloped. Exploratory in approach, the This literary tendency, along with calls for a “scriptive” design research is built on a practice-based paradigm, drawing from a corpus approach, has largely privileged narrativity, and notably the role of of poetic texts written by the author within the framework of the storytelling in both the understanding and making of place (Havik, SuMo Rhine Research Program (Promotion of Sustainable Mobility Notteboom & de Wit, 2017). If the logic of narrativity can offer a in the Upper Rhine Region, INTERREG, 2018-2021) and engaging dynamic and evocative language of the sequential, however, this same with peri-urban and mobility spaces in the city of Strasbourg, France, logic sets limits on its capacity for representation (Strawson, 2004) while also forming part of the author’s doctoral research on spatial and for invention. At the same time, poetic texts, or more specifically poetics at the University of Glasgow. the practices that produce them, have been relatively overlooked as potential vectors of spatial agency (Awan, Schneider & Till, 2013). The metaphor as poetic figure has begun to be studied in its role in architectural and urban projects (Gerber and Patterson, 2013), and there has been recent interest in the use of “poetic acts” in the pedagogy developed at the Valparaíso School of Architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Andrade & Reyes Gil, 2018), but we still REFERENCES know relatively little about how the act of poetic writing itself could contribute to the design process. This is a question of how poetic Andrade, Ó., & Reyes Gil, J. (2018), “The Word That Builds: Poetry and Practice at the School of Valparaíso”, Writingplace, No. 1, pp. 29–47. practices and the semantic materials they produce offer new fields Awan, N., Schneider, T., & Till, J. (2013), Spatial agency, Routledge, London. of action and agency for spatial practitioners. Going beyond isolated Gerber, A. & Patterson, B., eds. (2013), Metaphors in Architecture and Urbanism, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. poetic figures, how can writing in the lyric mode, for example, Haraway, D. (1988), “Situated Knowledges”, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, p. 575-599 support the reading of a territory in its material-sensorial extension, Havik, K. (2014), Urban Literacy, nai010, Rotterdam. Havik, K., Notteboom, B., & de Wit, S. (2017), “Narrating Urban Landscapes”, OASE, (98), but also as it manifests in the imaginary? How can poetic constraints 1–5. and process-based poetics reveal characteristics or elements of a site Strawson, G. (2004), “Against Narrativity”, Ratio, Vol. 17, Issue 4, pp. 428-452.
42 43 Aniconic PoMo: a boundary line of language and drawing produces an ineloquent language -sprachlos, Aldo Rossi would say TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC - and keeps architecture in a “vestibular disposition”, unfeasible and conscious of its own inaction. When architecture stops on the Roberto Vincenzo Iossa: [email protected] threshold of construction and stays off figurability, does it make Sapienza - University of Rome itself aphasic? What happens to practice, expression and freedom of language? The postmodern condition erases the master narratives of modernism The attempt of this work is to answer the aforementioned questions in a composite exercise of linguistic games (Lyotard): in the overloud through a comparative reading of projects from post-modern and episode of Strada Novissima (Venice 1980), the Cartesian façade by contemporary scenario, along the boundary line of a linguistic Costantino Dardi doesn’t seem to match with the eclectic liberalism research that architecture still carries on with in the realm of drawing that informs the other proposals on display; yet, instead of retracting nowadays: a time of syncretism, self-referentiality, neologisms and its identity within that same family of projects, it reveals the loyal disengaged hiding in professionalism and manners, nonetheless opposition (Jencks) between two different kinds of language: one informed by the desire for order, research and theory. which is iconic and works by increasing syntax, and the other one which is aniconic and works by reducing it. This dialectic cannot ignore its proximity to the codes of art: Minimalism is the on going thinking on the consistence of things (Celant), a self-exploratory investigation that doesn’t t want to discipline a complex reality; it rather aims to organise the questions with which it inquires it, and the privileged tool to do it is the drawing. The retreat into graphic space is a sign of the time that Italy was going through between the 60s and the 70s, marked by the imbalance between economic boom and political crisis; it is also the reaction to a professionalism that is unconcerned with the growth of the cities, led by speculation and threatened by the shortage of adequate instruments to design it. The field of this work is the intangible dimension of REFERENCES drawing as a “waiting room” for architecture to virtually trains its Anceschi L. (1936), Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte, Sanoni, Firenze. codes and tools, and to translate and put them to the test upon future Aureli P.V. (2016), Il progetto dell’autonomia. Politica e architettura dentro e contro il capitalismo, Quodlibet, Macerata. and concrete compositional challenges. The topic of this work is the Celant G. (1988), “La scultura, un’architettura non abitabile”, Rassegna, 36, 16-28. grammar that is produced in the limbo of drawing, between art and Chomsky N. (1982), Linguaggio, Enciclopedia Einaudi, Torino. Dardi C. (1987), Semplice lineare complesso. L’acquedotto di Spoleto, Kappa, Roma-Bari. architecture, critical and operational approach, autonomy of research Jencks C. (1987), The language of post-modern architecture, Academy Edition, London. and heteronomy of profession. In the crack of this border, drawing Purini F. (2008), La misura italiana dell’architettura, Laterza, Rome-Bari.
44 45 The project, poetically Amédée Ozenfant, used the poetic language of Apollinaire to describe TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC the momentum and density of the cultural climate of the Paris of those years. Silvana Kühtz: [email protected] Sometimes it is necessary to speak a different language for a more Silvia Parentini: [email protected] effective communication. Università degli Studi della Basilicata Architecture speaks in drawings, it follows codes made up of points, lines and surfaces, but the aim of the project is foster the life of its The world is an intertwining of letters, of graphemes, “the world is inhabitants and their feelings, their well-being. language”, says Haim Baharier (2020) “the letters shake the bud to tell What would happen if, in addition to the standard project drawings, it to blossom. The letters/pillars that create the world are the letters of the architect also associated the texts written for the project by a poet? the alphabet. In the Hebrew alphabet the letters themselves are concrete, Poetry is a form of expression that uses sensory qualities to evoke square, squat, and geometric”. In short, if language creates the world, meanings in addition, or in replacement of prosaic, semantic meaning to quote Heidegger, and therefore anyone has a responsibility, it is even (Poetry.org, 2005). greater the responsibility of the architect who explicitly shapes the The storytelling and communication of the architectural project through world through his/her language. poetry is the basis of the experimentation launched since 2006 within “Each project must be reconstructed not only through a single the department (DiCEM) University of Basilicata, which combines the architectural script but communicated to others, not necessarily poetic word with teaching, and with the architectural project. designers, through a series of parallel writings, interspersed with white lines” (Macaione & Sichenze 2014). Each architect has his own poetics; many architects define their project as poetry, from Wright to Lina Bo Bardi. Perhaps poetry in architecture is in forms when they move the soul of human beings, or in the invisible harmony of the lines, or in some intangible aspects. The architect is a visionary who, like the poet, describes what does not yet exist. The space itself (the architectural space in this case) takes on its own poetics, as amply highlighted by Bachelard in the essay The Poetics of Space (1957), which investigates from the phenomenological point of view how the description of a domestic space generates a REFERENCES poetic image in the writer in the first place and then in the reader. Bachelard G. (1975), La poetica dello spazio, Edizioni Dedalo, Bari. Poetry is a language in itself that can complement the architectural Baharier H. (2020), Da Neanderthal ad Adamo, Festival Filosofi lungo l’Oglio - XV ed. - Essere Umani, https://www.youtube.com/c/FilosofilungolOglio/ project and concut an added value, as photography does. Macaione I. & Sichenze A. (2014), Scrivere architettura, FrancoAngeli. L’Esprit Nouveau, the magazine founded in 1920 by Le Corbusier and Wright F.L. (1945), L’Architettura organica, Muggiani Tipografo Editore.
46 47 The presence of light space. constructible and meticulously controlled from a technological point A Trajectory of Italian Ephemeral Architecture of view, and yet capable of structuring ethereal, dreamlike spaces, from Renzo Zavannella to Francesco Librizzi rich in evocative and symbolic power. Traces of that poetic can still TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC be seen today in the ephemeral operations of a number of architects, again from Milan, such as Migliore+Servetto, Scandurra Studio or F. Edoardo Marchese: [email protected] Librizzi, who, by updating the language of their work, have created Sapienza University of Rome a new, more realistic and more functional design. These architects, by updating that language and those devices, still manage to reflect Since the first half of the twentieth century, Italy has stood out in the on the same spatial assumptions through a light architecture. These world for the research in the field of architecture for installations and profound influences have traced an expressive canon to be referred exhibitions. The necessary proximity between artists and architects in to and reinterpreted, which despite its distance in time is part of a this sphere led to a reciprocal and beneficial influence as early as the horizon of spatial and cultural research that is still contemporary and first experiences. In the Milanese area, in fact, starting with the first significant. exhibitions of the Galleria il Milione, young artists, such as Fontana and Melotti, who were to reveal themselves as absolute protagonists of late twentieth-century art, came together. Their contacts with contemporary architects such as Zavanella, Carboni, Bianchetti Pea led to a coincidence of cultural and figurative interests leading to precise and recognisable spatial research. The convergence of all of the arts involved within the space was manifested transversally, almost as a need, for architects, sculptors and painters, who would work together during those years attempting to produce total works of art. A sort of register of collective expression seems to be structured, where even the most apparently elementary occasions, such as the REFERENCES layout of a shop, are explored with the same care as large installations Allegri D. (2019) Renzo Zavanella 1900-1988 Scripta. Verona for trade fairs. This tension towards a modern space is expressed in Bianchetti A., Pea. C. (1947) Il negozio. Gorlich. Milano Borsotti M. (2017) Tutto si può narrare: riflessioni critiche sul progetto di allestimento. an oppositional dialogue with physical forces: the contrast to gravity Mimesis. Milano and the signs of time takes shape through the extensive use of light Carboni E. (1957) Esposizioni e mostre. Silvana. Milano Celant G. (2012) Melotti. Electa. Milano metal frames, complemented by shiny reflective surfaces. This Finessi B. (2016) Stanze. Altre filosofie dell’abitare, 21° Triennale Design After Design. language is well suited to the need for narrativity and temporariness Marsilio. Irace F. (1976) “Assenza-presenza: due modelli per l’architettura”, Op. Cit., n° 37, pp.18-32 in exhibitions and installations. This is an architecture of presence, Migliore Ico (2019) Time to Exhibit. Directing Spatial Design and New Narrative Pathways. to define it according to F. Irace’s categories, which is always Franco Angeli. Milano
48 49 “Architettura Parametrica”. families of parameters, the fundamental ones – quantifiable – and the Luigi Moretti’s theory for a new architectural language. secondary ones – not quantifiable: it is the architect’s task to have the TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC sensitivity to build their relationship expertly. Moretti’s parametric theory amazes with its topicality. Although Martina Meulli: [email protected] Architecture is at the heart of its digital turn and computational Sapienza University of Rome thinking is establishing itself as a form of management of the complexity of the project, many architects do not use IT tools to In the first issue of his magazine Spazio, Luigi Moretti publishes the full potential. The study aims to investigate the influence of an essay entitled “Eclecticism and unity of language”, in which the numerical revolution on today’s architectural language – which he distinguishes the various arts’ expressive possibilities between is already visible in the production of the built environment – periods with a universal language and restless moments dominated considering Luigi Moretti’s theory in the light of the most recent by eclecticism. According to Moretti, “a unitary language is born [...] technical and theoretical evolutions. by a sorting and a classification, in fundamental and secondary, of the infinite parameters of reality and their relationships” (Moretti 1960). As a result, the more limited and shared the essential parameters are, the more universal the language can be and can progress, thanks to the possibility of resolution given to minor relationships. Conversely, when a language reaches its expressive fullness, it wears out, and unity is replaced by a multitude of verbs. Architecture, art among the arts, stands out from Construction for its need to express itself, that is to communicate through a language that makes its ideas and intentions understandable and shareable. Architectural language has also evolved and has gone through periods of gold and moments of rupture; in addition to the impressive advances in technique due to metal structures and reinforced concrete use, a considerable evolution is related to the introduction of digital design software. It is Moretti himself who since 1940 theorizes the so-called “Architettura Parametrica”, according to which “the «parameters» and their interrelationships become [...] the expression, the code of REFERENCES the new architectural language” (Moretti 1971). Like all languages, Moretti L., “Eclettismo e unità di linguaggio”, Spazio, n.1, pp. 5-7. Parametric Architecture is based on the relationship between two Moretti L., “Ricerca matematica in architettura e urbanistica”, Moebius, a. IV, n. 1, pp. 30-53.
50 51 Kunstmuseum Insel Hombroich or the “Symbolic Garden” of the Third Millennium TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC
Andreina Milan: [email protected] Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna
The expression “Symbolic Garden” refers to the trend that took root in Europe and Italy between the end of the XVI century and the second half of the XVIII century in which hortus conclusus was designed as a real and true “theatre of virtue”. Here the human journey was represented in the space of natura artificialis by taking the allegorical form of “garden or topiary theatres”. The Venetian examples made in the area around Padua are celebrated, that is, in the locus amoenus of Valsanzibio (Padua, I) created by Luigi Bernini in 1669 on behalf of Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo as well as the masonic park of Treves de’ Bonfili completed in 1809 for a rich local Jewish family to the REFERENCES design of Giuseppe Jappelli. Heerich E. Kastner J.P., Zschokke W. eds. (1996), Museum Insel Hombroich, Hatje, Berlin. It remains a “symbolic garden” – in the size and shape of the territorial Heerich E., (1998), Skulptur und der architektonische Raum, König, Köln. park, qualifying as “Land art” – which the German entrepreneur- Weilacher U. (2005), Museum Island Hombroich: Art in an artificial Arcadia, in nI Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape Architecture, Birkhäuser, Basel. patron developed with the sculptor Erwin Heerich and various Maahsen-Milan A. (2009), La scelta minimalista. Da Mies van der Rohe ad Erwin Heerich. Il architects at the Kunstmuseum Insel Hombroich from 1982 to 2004 controllo della geometria delle forme primarie | The minimal choice. From Mies van der Rohe for Erwin Heerich. The control of the geometry in primary forms, in Hands-on. Il (Neuss, D). It lies on the re-naturalized site of a former NATO missile modello come metodo. Il progetto come evocazione ed esperienza, CLUEB, Bologna. base, and the disturbed relationship between humans and nature in the Massaro M. (2019), Il Palazzo Treves de’ Bonfili e il suo giardino, Poligrafo, Padova. Pietrogrande A. (2001, Il giardino di villa Barbarigo a Valsanzibio, in Padova e il suo “post-Hiroshima” age was to be restored in the arts and architecture territorio, 16, n. 92. competition. The fragments or rather the remains of the “Cold War” Rossmann A. (2007), Parallelnatur. Zum Tode des Mäzens Karl-Heinrich Müller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7.11.2007, 44. machine are transformed into a meeting place with humanity and the Raxworthy J. (2018), Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and universe reconciled in a synthesized spirit of renewal. Gardening, The Mit Press, Cambridge Massachusetts. .
52 53 Environmental control and architectural language elevate installations to the status of architectural elements, pertaining TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC to a possible order, and therefore contribute to the expression of character. Gaspare Oliva: [email protected] To this aim, we analyse some buildings of the Twentieth Century Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli which reflected on the possible expressivity of technological installations. La Rinascente building by Albini, with its corrugated ThMechanical systems for environmental control play today façade accommodating air pipes; Richards Laboratories by Kahn, a fundamental role in the buildings’ life: on the one hand the with towers hosting installations that marks the glass surfaces, and technological-regulatory paradigm of sustainability imposes higher the building on New York’s 5th Avenue by SOM, with its curtain wall performance in order to contain energy consumption; on the other horizontally marked by the projection of false ceilings, are compared hand, the need for thermo-hygrometric comfort stands out as one of to some contemporary artefacts built in developing countries which, the main needs of living. given the scarcity of resources, use construction and technological Considering Vitruvian requirement of firmitas in inclusive terms, needs as opportunities to define language elements. these instances are here placed within the framework of the construction, alongside static issues. In this way we try to understand how they can contribute to the definition of an architectural language adequately representing this time, characterized by the climate crisis and by the centrality of ecological issues, and overcoming the two main contemporary spectacularizing trends: the fetishistic exhibition of technology and the plastic formalism hiding constructive data in sculptural envelopes. Differently from other artistic expressions, the architectural form can only be conceived in terms of constructability and therefore on the basis of the static need and, in the light of what has been said, of the REFERENCES environmental comfort. If we assume we can talk about architecture Banham R. (1978) (ed Morabito G.), Ambiente e tecnica nell’Architettura Moderna, Editori only when the constructive forms, which don’t have aesthetic and Laterza, Bari Cao. U. (1995), Elementi di progettazione architettonica, Editori Laterza, Bari expressive intentionality in themselves, stop responding exclusively to Moccia C. (2012), Il carattere e la costruzione, in Moccia C., Architettura e costruzione, their technical function and become representative of the constructive AION, Firenze Monestiroli A. (2002), La metopa e il triglifo. Rapporto fra costruzione e decoro nel progetto act, we can say that the formation of architectural language consists di architettura, in Monestiroli A., La metopa e il triglifo, Editori Laterza, Bari in the formal identification of the constructive elements, according to Morabito G. (1978), Introduzione, in Banham R., Ambiente e tecnica nell’Architettura Moderna, Editori Laterza, Bari their role and meaning within a specific building system (Monestiroli Quaroni L. (1977), Progettare un edificio. Otto lezioni di architettura, Kappa, Roma Venezia 2002, Moccia 2012). On this basis, we can reflect about ways to F. (2013), La separazione fatale, in Venezia F., Che cos’è l’architettura, Electa, Milano
54 55 Language in today’s Brazilian paulista school of architecture: bold structural choices made possible by the use TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC of reinforced concrete, compact volumes with blind facades and the integration of nature are the simple ingredients that make up Thomas Pedrazzini: [email protected] the architecture. Each architecture is conceived as a large public Sapienza University of Rome building where the space becomes continuous, without unnecessary subdivisions, favoring the creation of areas where it is possible to In the world of the arts, an artistic movement is usually characterized generate situations within a large void. by a program of rupture or renewal with respect to the existing The figure of the architect uses language as a means to express the panorama that develops in the different forms of art in a specific ideals of a current, of a thought common to several figures. In the historical period and in a specific area. Architecture, precisely Brazilian school it is possible to see, even in less known signatures, because it is time and space placed, aims to respond to the social how the ideal is the same expressed in different ways but always using needs of the people who inhabit that place. the same syntactic structures. Paulista school continue to share the Like any art, architecture also admits the formation of architectural message in today world with different tools but in the same way; the movements that immediately remind us of the current program essence of this architecture is still mediation and not an expression of itself; it is easy to think of the modern movement, as the purifiers a single architect, it is rather an expression of the environment and of of decoration, the high-tech as the technology innovators or the that part of humanity. deconstructivists as the shape creatives but, in each of these cases, it is immediate how their programs are evident and recognizable. The authors refer to a program sharing or totally or partially some aspects but, each of them, presents a language; this allows artists to convey their present to us who, in our present, read the present of a past time. Language in architecture, as if it were the vocal timbre of an individual, is an inseparable and malleable feature of an author that makes it common to others but unique in its kind. The Paulist school was born in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century as a movement aimed at building a social thought that could express ideals. People who take part to this movement came from all over the REFERENCES world, expecially from Europe, bringing the innovations of Modern 142/143, RASSEGNA DI ARCHITETTURA E URBANISTICA La Scuola di São Paulo in Movement; its features are clearly evidente in the composition Brasile Concezione strutturale e ideazione architettonica. Edizioni Kappa, Roma 2014 Francesca Sarno (tutor: Giorgio di Giorgio, Maria Argenti), L’architettura della scuola di of the volumes and of the internal space but the the real strength san paolo in brasile necessidade e desejo, Roma Sapienza, Roma 2013 of this current lies in the sharing and transmission of another kind Vilanova Artigas, Caminhos da arquitetura, cap.”1952”, Cosac & Naify
56 57 The overlapping of the slabs: coincident or diversified and translated, as happens, for example, in a way of construction of the architectural character the office building designed by V. Olgiati in 2001 in Zurich (winning TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC proposal in an architectural competition), in which the supports are deprived of the usual verticality, leaving the organism to lose Michele Pellino: [email protected] the modular-additive nature of the dom-ino system (Olgiati, 2011). Sapienza University of Rome Finally, the research questions the genealogical relationships that exist between the aforementioned works and the artistic experiences Within the vast panorama of twentieth-century and contemporary of abstractionist matrix that have marked the last century. architectural production, some works stand out for a logic of internal- external separation built in the absence of the wall enclosure through the overlapping of the decks. These architectures, which build a limit in absentia and are often based on the order and uniformity of the elements (Tessenow, 1916), deeply reflect on the role of construction as the most powerful means of expression to represent the character of a building (Moccia, 2012 , p. 18). In distinguishing themselves in this accentuation of the horizontal plane as a necessary condition for the development of human activities, these works work on reducing the arbitrary components in the definition of the architectural character, focusing onan “oggettivazione dei problemi della comunicazione artistica, rifacendosi a modi linguistici di cui non è difficile scorgere l’origine illuminista, o, perlomeno, una matrice che […] si rifaccia a parametri di controllo tendenzialmente oggettivi” (Tafuri, 1966). The expressive issues are resolved through the skilful use of the REFERENCES foundational elements of the skeleton construction (decks, beams and pillars), determining the cancellation of the separation between Frampton K. (1995), Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, MIT Press, Massachusetts. tr. it (1999) Tettonica e the representative and ontological aspects of the architectural form architettura: Poetica della forma architettonica nel XIX e XX secolo, Skira, Milano. (Frampton, 1995), those that Semper defines symbolic and technical. Moccia, C. (2012), Architettura e costruzione, AION, Firenze. Olgiati V. (2011), “Edificio de oficinas en Zurich”,El Croquis, n° 156, p. 86. The contribution, therefore, carries out an interpretative analysis of Tafuri M. (1966), Le strutture del linguaggio nella storia dell’architettura moderna, in AA. some of these architectures reduced to their tectonic condition (in a VV. (1968), Teoria della progettazione architettonica, Dedalo Libri, Bari. Tessenow H. (1916), Hausbau und dergleichen, Woldemar Klein Verlag, Baden-Baden, certain sense primordial), with a particular interest in the figurativities Berlino. tr. it. Grassi G. ed. (2003) Osservazioni elementari sul costruire, FrancoAngeli, determined in the superimposition of horizontal planes, equal and Milano.
58 59 Portugal and Egypt: Tradition and Modernity two different eventual paths in the declination of this relationship TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC with regard to urban and architectural forms. In 1951, Josep Antoni Coderch (1913-1984) and Santos Torroella, in the section dedicated Claudia Pirina: [email protected] to Spain at the Milano Triennale Exposition, exhibited a series of Viola Bertini: [email protected] furnishings combined with handicrafts, works of art and some shots Università degli Studi di Udine of traditional architectures and works of the architect Antoni Gaudì Università Iuav di Venezia and the photographers Joaquim Gomis and Joan Prats. What unites the work of these architects who, all born in just over a Egypt, 1945: Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) was in charge of the project decade, worked in two countries - Egypt and Spain - so geographically for the village of New Gourna, a small foundation settlement near distant from each other? What links them to other figures, such Luxor. The project represented for Fathy a field of experimentation as Fernando Tavora or Dimitris Pikionis, who carried out similar of a series of already undertaken thinking about the search for operations in Portugal and Greece? an Egyptian architectural language, in which inhabitants could Starting from these questions, the paper aims at investigating recognize themselves. A language which in nourished by forms, consonances of intent and linguistic differences of approaches that spaces and architectural elements found in the basin of the Arab nevertheless express similar concerns in the search for an architectural tradition, rewritten and transposed into the contemporary. Six years language through operations of abstraction of cultural meanings. later, in 1961, Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911-1974) established the Ḥarrāniyyah Waving Village, located along the road taking from Cairo to the archaeological site of Giza. Conceived as a village, of which it reproposes the structure, the Center was created with the purpose of passing on ancient knowledges in the field of applied arts, which, in that particular moment of the Egyptian history, were given a fundamental value within the process of reconstruction of a national identity. REFERENCES
Spain, 1953: Alejandro de La Sota (1913-1996) published in the Damluji S.S., Bertini V. (2018), Hassan Fathy. Earth & Utopia, Laurence King Publishing, Revista Nacional de Arquitectura the project (later realized) for London. Fathy H. (1973), Architecture for the poor: an experiment in rural Egypt, University of the new Pueblo de Esquivel near Seville. Part of a vast program Chicago Press, Chicago. of colonization of Spain undertaken by the Intituto Nacional de Hobsbawm E. J., Ranger T. O. (1983), The invention of tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Colonizacíon, the project was used by Sota as an opportunity to Pirina C. (2018), Alejandro de la Sota. Frammenti di città, Clean edizioni, Napoli. reflect upon the relationship of contemporary architecture with Pizza A, Rovira J.M., eds. (2000), En busca del hogar. Coderch 1940-1964, Colˑlegi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, Barcelona. tradition in search for a new architecture. In the project, recognized Sota A. de la (1989), Alejandro de Sota, Arquitecto, Pronaos, Madrid. as a “transitional essay” for the works to come, the architect identified Wissa Wassef R. (1972), Woven by hand, Hamlyn Publishing Company, London.
60 61 Building with memory as design tool. Kandahar with a new settlement for war widows. The reconstruction of the Al Nouri religious and cultural The most recent of these case-studies, subject of this speech proposal, complex in Mosul. concerns the award-winning project in an Unesco call for the TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC reconstruction of the Al Nouri Mosque and new cultural buildings annexed to the religious complex that have been destroyed recently Riccardo Renzi: [email protected] in Mosul. Università degli Studi di Firenze
This proposal presents some results of a research carried out on architectural and urban design as possible expression of a theoretical framework, firmly anchored to a systematic study of highly historicized urban contexts and cultural heritage sites. The methodological structure of the research is aimed to demonstrate the strong connection between analysis and design, based on urban study intended as stratigraphic study of Places over times. These analytics investigations searches for invariant characters of built environment during synchronic and diachronic transformations of the urban context. The identity and tradition of the places, their practices and their architectural types, have allowed the operational dimension of the project to take on connotations, forms, materials and figures REFERENCES around which to build the operative methods of the research. The immateriality and the difficulty of passing on through the exercise Albini F. (1958), Funzioni e architettura del museo, in La biennale di Venezia, n. 31, pp. 25- 31. Jedlowski P. (1987), La memoria collettiva. Maurice Halbwachs, Milano, Unicopli. of Memory constitute one of the most relevant aspects promoted by Zermani P. (1988), L’architettura delle differenze, Kappa, Roma. the research which is articulated with verifications on some typical Rossi Prodi F. (1994), Atopia e Memoria, Officina Edizioni, Roma. Monestiroli A. (2002), La metopa e il triglifo, Laterza, Bari. cases on historical sites affected by recent war destruction in the Near Bonaretti P. (2002), La città del museo, Edifir, Firenze. East. Zumthor P (2003), Atmosfere, Electa, Milano. Schneider J, Susser I (2003), Wounded Cities, Berg, Oxford-New York. Zeri F. (2004), L’arco Starting from the participation in competitions, some projects have di Costantino, Skira, Milano. been developed for the construction of new museums and cultural Settis S. (2004), Il futuro del classico, Einaudi, Milano. Monestiroli T. (2010), La logica della memoria, Maggioli, Rimini. centers, some of which have been selected among the finalists or Haidar M,, Cipollini L., Kossel E. (2010), Città e memoria: Beirut, Sarajevo, Berlino, awarded: Aleppo with the new Museum of Memory of the city; Mondadori, Milano. Capanni F. (2017), Architettura e Luce, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa. Mugnai F. (2017), La costruzione della memoria, Lybria, Melfi. Baghdad with a new cultural center in the bombed area next to the Campo Baeza A. (2018), Principia architectonica, Martinotti, Milano. Hay al Seray complex; Bamyian with the Museum of local traditions; Amirante R. (2018), Il progetto come prodotto di ricerca, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa.
62 63 An Outline of Anthropometric Images in Western Figuration. source of inspiration, led, in Mannerism, to widen and strain the The human body captured by geometry and creatively legacy of the masters by stretching proportions as a way of reshaping interpreted by artists the relationship with history. Notably, painters such as Pontormo, but TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC even more Parmigianino and El Greco, in addition to the singular case of Tanzio da Varallo in the Baroque period, were able to propose Matteo Giuseppe Romanato: [email protected] alternative anthropometric canons that would be able to fascinate Unimi future artists even after centuries. Therefore, with contemporary art such interpretations could be better “Bones are beautiful as part of skeleton, as elements of life and dSince appreciated by painters who were no longer satisfied with the trivial ancient times, the artistic canon has been related to anthropometry duplication of the real world but nourished the ambition to work with and the measurement of the human body has so taken the role of a forms to move the conscience of the observer. basic reference. At least for Western figuration, we can speak of a log- The late Renaissance and Mannerist lesson is so retrieved by the lasting wish to enclose the body proportions of man into a geometric movement Die Brücke as well as by Egon Schiele, Salvador Dalì frame by measuring human limbs, head and face. The original purpose and the primitivism of Paul Gauguin or Constantin Brâncuși. But it was clearly to have a reliable model for interpreting man’s action in is not only the historical avant-garde that believes in criticizing the the world. An outline of drawings, pictures and sculptures, analyzed representational conventions for anthropometric forms. Continuous through the comparison of their dimensional relationships, can make references to suffering bodies and sorrowful faces foster the evident, with the help of digital reworking, the tricky features of existentialist art of the first postwar period. Unnatural and almost recurring references as well as notable exceptions. mystical ghosts reappear in Giacometti’s work, for example, and This approach can show how classical antiquity stated a principle tormented yet recognizable human shapes are the heart of Henri of authority that Renaissance wanted to rescue with awareness by Moore’s sculptures, so recomposing the fragments of an iconic going to its original references, sometimes verifying them through genealogy which has never lost its fascination. empirical comparisons. If, on the one hand, Piero della Francesca could fix the human face by points as if it were just an object, on REFERENCES the other, Leonardo da Vinci tried to compare, through observations and experiments, what was offered by the philological rediscovery AA. VV. (2000), Egon Schiele e l’Espressionismo in Austria 1908-1925, Mazzotta, Milano. Carlino A., Ciardi R. P., Petrioli Tofani A. M., eds (2010), La bella anatomia. Il disegno del of Vitruvius with the real physiology of a body. Albrecht Dürer, with corpo fra arte e scienza nel Rinascimento. Silvana. even greater engagement, was compelled to admit the non-existence Curti M. (2014) Canons of Proportion and the Laws of Nature: Observations on a Permanent and Unresolved Conflict.Architectural Histories, 2 (1), p. Art. 19. of a unique proportional canon and proposed a family of human Fagiolo Dell’Arco M. (1970), Il Parmigianino: un saggio sull’ermetismo nel Cinquecento. typologies, represented according to different measurements. Bulzoni, Roma. Moly Feo G. (2007), Albrecht Dürer. Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion. BUP, The hard aim of defining a stable canon, but even more the weariness Bologna. of a model that had become more of a conceptual cage than a reliable Perissa Torrini A. ed. (2009), Leonardo. L’Uomo vitruviano fra arte e scienza, Marsilio.
64 65 New wefts, ancient warps. The study aims to demonstrate how their actuality is possible, Origin as a choral tale of distinct architectural languages suggested and verified in a privileged field of investigation that is TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC the relationship with the ancient; here, the project of the new has the honor and the burden of showing the choral tale of two necessarily Matteo Saldarini: [email protected] distinct languages. Sapienza - University of Rome Therefore, the new constitutes a fundamental moment of knowledge and a tool for researching the reasons of the project (Ferro, 2020). We live in an era in which architecture, to use Heidegger’s words, Listening to what has already been said, it is possible to rediscover unravels along the “traces of the fledged gods”, a time in which every the linguistic fragments of ancient sounds in the ruins: codes, words, kind of shared linguistic convention has met its demise (Monestiroli, harmonies, proportions, rhythms, compositions, canons lie immanent 2018). in the traces of the ancient, waiting to be revealed. Contemporaneity in the “time of the night of the world”, living The project re-finds, case by case, a system of conventions capable of the crisis as the norm, seems to have stopped questioning itself establishing a specificaedequatio (Teyssot, 1987) in the contemporary on the sense and origin of things, lingering instead in the folds translation of language. New words come to life as a transcription and possibilities of a language whose vocabulary over time has of the ancient and establish with it a new whole (Ferro, 2012); like been enriched, transformed, hybridized, deformed. Countless recomposed shards, different fragments of the same vase, ancient and new possibilities have been added to the original archetypes and new together become physical witnesses of a superior, original order grammatical structures (Purini, 2000). As a result, they have enlarged (Benjiamin, 2012). the language to the point of producing a diaspora, a new Babylon that prevents architecture from being once again a bearer of shared values and in which the “merciless hunt for success makes research increasingly superficial” (Kandinsky, 2005). Architecture is a particular form of language: it does not express, but rather expresses itself (Focillon, 2002). If it is true, on one hand, that REFERENCES a new system of architectural language seems impossible, imposing Benjiamin W. (2012), Aura e choc, Einaudi, Torino. and anachronistic, on the other hand it is clear that it becomes Ferro L. (2020), Mantova. Nuovi frammenti per antiche rovine, Araba Fenice, Cuneo. Ferro L. (2012), Matrici originarie, in Novati A., Pezzola A., Il mutevole permanere necessary to the life of the discipline itself. Is it possible today to dell’antico, Araba Fenice, Cuneo. re-establish a system of conventions able to clean the language Focillon E. (2002), Vita delle forme, Einaudi, Torino. Grassi G. (1988), Architettura lingua morta, Electa, Milano. from self-referentiality in order to orient it again towards a shared Kandinsky W. (2005), Lo spirituale nell’arte, SE, Milano. and intelligible story? How can code and canon, words and rules of Monestiroli A. (2018), Lectiones. Riflessioni sull’architettura, CLEAN, Napoli. Purini F. (2000), Comporre l’architettura, Laterza, Bari. composition, renew their sense and necessity in the contemporary Rowe C. (1990), La matematica della villa ideale e altri scritti, Zanichelli, Bologna. world? Teyssot G. (1987), L’Angoscia dell’Origine, Perspecta, n° 23, pp. 180-185.
66 67 A cryptic beauty In the last way, architect develops a system of rules working in the Ode to the Ungers’ formal canon construction of pure form and intervening on the laws that regulate it. TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC An example of this procedure can be provided by the work of O.M. Ungers who sees the need for form “more urgent than laws of Mariangela Ludovica Santarsiero: [email protected] construction, demands of users or functional result. [...] the architect’s Sapienza - University of Rome spiritual responsibility [...] is not the technique of building but the art of building.” (Kieren, 1997). Classical architecture can be identified by the recognizability and The paper aims to analyze the relationship between canon and coincidence of canon and code. The first one is the “scheme referred abstraction in O.M. Ungers’ work and to answer a question: does the to as the rule of an art”. In fact, thanks to the κανών it’s possible true value of a piece of architecture lie in the existence of a canon to proportionally reconstruct the entire work from the fragment. which, although not codified, offers the possibility of a logical and The second one is “the set of conventional signs that leads to the therefore democratic translation or in the immediate fruition operable identification of each individual unit of a given system” and it allows thanks to instant codification? deciphering from a fragment. The contemporary wonders about the possibility of rediscovering the presence of codes or canons within the architectural project, but these have not disappeared, the relationship between them and their use has changed, while in the classic they coincided. This split resulted in three ways of operating: The refusal of canon and code: architecture, by refusing an apparatus of objective laws, lives in a system that cannot be compared, relying on subjective language;
The adoption of the code without the use of the canon: the theme is REFERENCES endorsed by architect in favor of a system of universally recognizable Ungers, O.M. (1982), Architettura come tema, Quaderni di Lotus, Electa, Milano signs. But if there is no decoding process, architecture aims to be an Ungers O.M., Neumeyer F., De Michelis M. (1991) O.M. Ungers: opera completa 1951- instant image, a faithful representation of the present or only answers 1991, Electa, Roma Moschini F., Neri G. (1992) Dal progetto. Scritti teorici di Franco Purini 1966-1991, Kappa, to functional needs; Roma The use of the canon without code: not providing a decoding key Ungers O.M., Neumeyer F., De Michelis M. (1997) O.M. Ungers: opera completa 1991- 1998, Electa, Roma presupposes that in the contemporary architect operates on the Kieren, M. (1997), Oswald Mathias Ungers, Zanichelli editore, Bologna canon through abstraction as a “process through which [...] all the Ungers O.M. (1998), “Pensieri sull’architettura”, Casabella, n. 657 Purini F. (2002), Comporre l’architettura, Laterza, Bari occasional elements are eliminated [...] in order to reach the extreme Purini F. (2003), Metafisiche dell’atopia, http://www.francopurinididarch.it/testi form of things […] their essence.” (Purini, 2003). Purini F. (2008), La misura italiana dell’architettura, Laterza, Bari
68 69 Arcaico Contemporaneo. Fujimoto and the primitive future are just some of the figures An interpretative code for architectural design who narrate archaic principles, characters, configurations, and TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC compositional mechanisms through their works. Their approaches tell of a balance between the aspiration to the Andrea Scalas: [email protected] eternal, existential fulfillment and elementary reduction, something University of Cagliari that is expressed through a sense of unconscious fulfillment and is manifested in the formal essentiality of architecture. They are ways Due to the progressive fragmentation of contemporary architecture, of understanding the project that don’t need explanation and, at the increasingly suffocated by processes of globalization and speculative same time, allow a continuous possibility of interpretation, holding practices, it is necessary to rethink codes capable of re-founding some together the singular - the individual - and the universal - the idea universally valid certainties and signs that conceal the original forms (Vacchini, 2007). It is in this diversity that we can discover addresses, of places which man’s action has corrupted with the passing of time. suggestions, analogies that can provide some potential answers to the Every sign is the result of a process that derives from concatenated problems of contemporary design. actions, composed as much of ideas as of material reality: this process can be understood, and consequently interpreted and consciously designed, only through profound knowledge. Archaic means close to the archè, that is to say, the origin (Agamben, 2019): the etymological nature of archaic suggests a potential approach that deeply investigates places, finding their persistent elements and making them become active matter in the transformation of the territory. The contemporary, on the other hand, is he who firmly holds his gaze REFERENCES on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. Only he who perceives the indices and signatures of the archaic is Agamben G. (2008), Che cos’è il contemporaneo?, Nottetempo, Milano. Calderoni A. (2016), Appunti dal visibile, Lettera Ventidue, Siracusa. the most modern and recent can be contemporary (Agamben, 2019). Eco U. (1968), La struttura assente. La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale, Bompiani, The paper investigates the dichotomous category of the contemporary Milano. Forty A. (2004), Parole ed edifici. Un vocabolario per l’architettura moderna, Edizioni archaic as an interpretative code for architecture. The aim is to outline Pendragon, Bologna. an itinerary of paradigmatic approaches that make use of a double Fujimoto S. (2014), Primitive future, Lixil, Tokyo. Perraudin G. (2011), Architecture massive, Libria, Melfi. component: one current, contingent, immersed in contemporaneity; Vacchini L. (2007), Capolavori. 12 architetture fondamentali di tutti i tempi, Allemandi, the other universal, eternal (Venezia, 2013). Torino. Venezia F. (2013), Che cosa è l’architettura. Lezioni, conferenze, un intervento, Mondadori Zumthor and the evocative power of the atmosphere, Perraudin and Electa, Milano. stereotomic megalithism, Radic and the suspension of contrasts, Zumthor P. (2007), Atmosfere, Electa, Milano.
70 71 About permanent in architecture. Here, the emphasis underlines how a different stance, an alternative Luigi Snozzi, a resistant architect one, will represent the freedom and the democracy of thinking. The TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC purely performative character of the language is not considered. Concerning the political sphere, the poetic question is addressed Andrea Siciliani: [email protected] and not the ideological one: how does the idea of a new perspective Sapienza - University of Rome manifest itself in the project? Identifying canons and codes relate to the sphere of the Locarno Defining the centina of reference in which the architectural project architect’s project, the essay makes a series of considerations to is built, Luigi Snozzi unequivocally declares his ideological position understand a language that is, at the same time, hectic and logic. and the importance of having a moral conscience with regard to the On the table for discussion is addressed not only the poetical society in which one operates. dimension for the construction of a formal language but also the This socialist conception of the world contrasts to an utilitarian political one applied for the design thinking. and efficient vision in whom architecture must maintain its own disciplinary autonomy: non sfuggire alle responsabilità, occupati della forma, in essa troverai l’uomo (Luigi Snozzi, 2012), he says in one of his aphorisms. He is capable to draft a sort of poetic and didactic manifesto: not only designed to his own personal research but also to the pedagogical panorama where he taught. He underlines the structural characteristics of two categories linked together by an ancestral relationship: architecture and politics. The first one, architecture, aims to the permanent and it is inherently anti- efficient: this architecture is capable to re-generate itself regardless of the individual. He further stated: adattarsi mantenendo la forza della propria struttura, dei suoi elementi architettonici stabili (Luigi Snozzi, 2016). On the other hand, there is the political discipline. Here, he argues that must constantly change and adapt, REFERENCES regarding the crumbling of fragmented and ever-changing society. Snozzi L. (2012), Viva la Resistenza, in Fonti A., Mameli M. eds., Luigi Snozzi, This practice tends unequivocally towards the ephemeral in the Un’autobiografia architettonica, Franco Angeli, Milano. Gregotti V. (1984), Sulle tracce dell’architettura, in Luigi Snozzi Progetti e architetture 1957- research for a maximum efficiency. 1984, Electa, Milano. The permanent in architecture is expressed through the drawing up of Snozzi L., Merlini F. (2016), L’architecture inefficiente, Éditions Cosa Mentale, Parigi. Monestiroli A. (2006), Lo stupore delle cose elementari, Ogni uomo è tutti gli uomini Edizioni, canons, codes and their transgression in the application to the design Bologna. and critical thought. Agamben G. (2019), Creazione e anarchia, L’opera nell’età della religione capitalistica, Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza. 72 73 City forms in the arts art? All the great manifestations of social life have in common with TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC the work of art the fact that they arise from unconscious life [...] some are produced by the public, others for the public: but it is precisely the Francesca Spacagna: [email protected] public that provides them with a common denominator». University of Naples “Federico II” But is it possible to talk about architecture when the architect imposes his personal language and the community cannot recognize a style In the world of art there are multiple languages that, as such, also deal in it? Style, according to the definition given by Monestiroli, has with personal modes of expression. For this reason, they can often its ultimate goal in the creation of a common feeling in which the make the reasons for the work not entirely intelligible: this happens community recognizes the values of its time and for this reason in the figurative arts as much as in architecture. architecture must be an expression of it. The essay, starting from the The construction of an order, in the opinion of the writer, is the expressions used in figurative techniques, intends to investigate the primary condition, necessary for the recognizability of forms and possibility of identifying ‘forms of the city in the arts’, delving into their construction in the world of art. We assume as a reference the some of Rossi’s works and trying to identify the contaminations that notion given by Antonio Monestiroli, who sdefines two different they have had in the language of artistic culture today. types of order: «an order external to the nature of things that creates conditions for research, or, on the contrary, an order that results from the knowledge of the nature of things and the appropriate form for its representation»1. In the figurative arts, the process activated for the definition of forms and figures that represented their own time was often that of abstraction, understanding the style as “reduction to the essential”2 or as “creation of an ideal”3. Giorgio De Chirico used a process similar to that ob abstraction, representing the suspension of space and time through the use of a few elements of pure and clear form. With the arrangement of the REFERENCES objects – belonging to different periods and set in a unique context – Monestiroli A. (2002), La metopa e il triglifo: nove lezioni di architettura, Laterza, Rome. De Chirico defines an enigmatic, austere and monumental atmosphere Riegl A. (1893), Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, Verlag von, that seems to move us into the interior of some architectural and urban Georg Siemens, Berlin [trad. It. Problemi di stile: fondamenti di una storia dell’arte ornamentale, Feltrinelli, Milano 1963]. projects by Aldo Rossi, a master who was able to express, through Winkelmann J.J. (1763, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Waltherschen the order of his works, his message regarding the city «human thing Hofbuchhandlung, Dresden [trad. It. Il bello nell’arte. Scritti sull’arte antica (1755- 1767), Einaudi, Milano 1963] par excellence»5 and «urban facts»6 intended as a work of art. The Rossi A. (2011), L’architettura della città, Quodlibet, Macerata. architect himself wrote: «How can urban facts be related to works of Ivi p. 24
74 75 (De)Coding architecture: creative core, we will be able to feel their philosophy of creation. philosophy of abstraction through language Redefining the concepts and core of architecture over time is a philosophy of task that, through reason and experience, leads to TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC an explanation of the discourse that unites theory and practice in architecture. Ideas are related to the context of the time in which Bojana Sternisa: [email protected] they originated, so a philosophical framework that can guide the University of Donja Gorica development of a new era is important for deepening the connection. Cultural changes condition the course of architecture, so that Searching for the epistemology of the term, we travel through the philosophy in architecture also depends on the time of testimony, history of thoughts and ideas that the term wants to explain. The so it is necessary to always be one step ahead. A mature attitude meaning that words have for explaining associations and concepts towards architecture today is looking at what has gone through time has separated from that classical vocabulary. Sentences are now and comparing its typological, anthropological, historical, social not just a set of words that explain or define an object, concept and many other aspects. Philosophy will combine all this in its or situation, but on the other hand, they vividly and meaningfully explanation. The flow of thinking must be a process. The process describe an organized system of things. That is why researchers as the only reality. The history of ideas helps us in that, as a kind of put so much effort into language and its basic role in conveying cultural self-reflection. Understanding the context is possible only thoughts and ideas. if we have previously understood the spirit of the time within which The language of architecture reflects a special system of ideas, artists encode the meaning of their creations in order to convey a which leads to the understanding and simplification of concepts, message to those who read these space mappings. Communication codes, postulates in the cultural transition of modern times. implies this process of exchange, the articulation of which in Horizons of understanding are correlated with views on culture, and architecture requires the language of architecture. The language of above all with the attitude towards the language of society, which architecture is an abstraction of a higher order, a communication modifies the culture of architecture. Architectural diagrams form a with a deeper meaning. sense of language because they are a means of communication. They are a mysterious depiction of the inner thoughts of the creator. What happens to language when the words we describe no longer exist, when culture takes on new features of the modern age that do not know thought patterns? Basic linguistic concepts are often at odds with what we think and want to express. Some philosophers, including Wittgenstein, believe that the task of philosophy is to first discover linguistic REFERENCES disagreements and point out their unfoundedness. Wittgenstein metaphorically says that we are “prisoners of images created by our Thiis-Evensen, T. (1986), Archetypes in Architecture, Norwegian University Press Krier R. (1983), Elements of architecture, Architectural Design Magazine Vol. 53 No. 9/10 language.” Pallasmaa J., MacKeith P., eds. (2005), Encounters: architectural essays, Rakennustieto Oy, The stylistic expressions of the authors may differ from each other, Helsinki but if we know the design codes of the authors and understand their Eriksen T. (2013), What is the history of ideas?, Karpos, Belgrade Svendsen L. (2015), What is philosophy?, Karpos, Belgrade
76 77 Necessary genealogies is invented but everything is reinterpreted and modified, naturally TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC according to the techniques of the time in which one lives and works. Just to quote a paradigmatic example of this reflection, Rem Koolhaas Nicoletta Trasi: [email protected] claims to have started with Le Corbusier; the two transversal bodies Sapienza University of Rome of Villa Dall’Ava recall the architecture of Villa Savoye: they are Bernard de Chartres, a 12th century French philosopher, said “we tripartite spatial organisms - pilotis, inhabited floor, roof garden - are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants”, so that we can and have other obvious similarities such as the ramp and the ribbon see many things even far beyond them, not because of the sharpness window. Thanks to this ‘giant’ on whose shoulders he has leaned, of our eyesight or because we are taller, but because we are lifted Koolhaas makes us understand that his interpretation of the original up and elevated by their gigantic size. What does this mean? That architecture can and must produce a new synthesis, different and everything has already been said in the principles and that everything in line with the spirit of the times. This Koolhaas / Le Corbusier is to be rewritten in the forms; the idea, in other words, of the prodigy combination can be found in many other architectural events and in of the universe as a continuous transformation, and of architecture different eras, and will be the subject of this reflection. as a collective creation, as something that began before us and will presumably continue after us. An essential reference in this regard is the Essai sur l’architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier of 1755 with its cabane rustique, as a paradigm of a rational architectural system, based on a constructive and functional interpretation of the discipline. The rational reduction of the means of architecture at the service of the commodity of the building and the usability of the city do not mean, according to Laugier, an impoverishment of the architectural language and do not necessarily lead to monotony. On the contrary, reason continually produces variety of forms, as a natural and spontaneous combination of the elements at its disposal. Nothing is invented ex novo, every era benefits from the benefit from its predecessors, and often knows many things not from having reached it with their own ingenuity, but illuminating even the great works of the fathers with the strength of others. By transferring this concept to the world of architecture, it derives the absolute importance of studying the works that preceded us, from the most distant eras to Modern and Contemporary times; and you will realize that nothing
78 79 The unit of composition and construction In the lesson by Florenskij it is clear that ‘composition’ and TRACK A. GENEALOGY / POETIC ‘construction’ have to be a unit. This means that form and space are indissoluble in Architecture: the first cannot exist without the second Federica Visconti: [email protected] and vice versa. Renato Capozzi: [email protected] Following these idea, the paper will show some drawings/projects, University of Naples “Federico II” developed in the last year, that, in absence of function, have been Pavel Aleksandrovič Florenskij, during a lesson for his students at representing a reflection about the language of Architecture in the Vkhutemas in Moscow, stated: «We must start from the very concept relationship of composition and construction. of the work of art. The work in itself is a reality that overcomes itself, The first is “Memento virus”, elaborated following an invitation that is, it tells us and gives us more than what it is directly through to contribute, during the first lockdown, to the initiative Il cielo in the perception of the senses. On one hand, the work is subject to trentatré stanze. The second is “Il muro nei muri”, elaborated for the given laws that regulate what is represented, on the other hand it exhibition L’opera d’arte nell’opera d’arte edited by Franco Purini depends on other laws based on the fact that it represents something. and Enrico Ansaloni. The last one is the ex inferis ad sidera celebrates In other words, general relationships, general schemes, general laws the Divina Commedia in the 7th centenary of Dante’s death. of organization of the work of art in itself exist but, at the same time, it is not extraneous also to other relationships, to schemes and laws that concern not the work, but what is represented in it. Consequently, it is twice a unit, the work. […] This duality, if expressed in a common language, represents the two moments of composition and construction» (Florenskij, 2001). Even if Florenskij is talking about art in general, two words strictly related to Architecture appear in his lecture: composition and construction. «Composition is the unit that is deposited by the artist in the work when he chooses a given space. In other words we can say that, in a certain sense, composition is the function of the artist who creates the work, construction is the unity of things represented in that work, it is also a function but not only of the artist but of that reality towards REFERENCES which the work is addressed. […] Composition is what the artist brings in the work; construction is what to contend with. Construction Florenskij P. (2001), Lo spazio e il tempo nell’arte, Adelphi, Milano. Bilò F., Palma R. (2020), Il cielo in trentatré stanze, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa. is what the world forces to recognize of the world itself» (Florenskij, Molinari L., Ingrosso C. (2018), Divina Sezione. L’architettura italiana per la Divina 2001). Commedia, Skira, Milano.
80 81 TRACK B
B. metamorphosis / actions #transformations #mutations #collages The ready-made of existing building stock artifacts with a renewed architectural worth. As is known, in history TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS often happened who the ruins of architecture have been used to develop a new building. «Roman temples provided useful columns Barbara Angi: [email protected] for Christian churches» says Theo Crosby in Architecture, the sense Università degli Studi di Brescia of the city (1971), to underline how, the practice of manipulating the built, though with motivations and outcomes of different from From the beginning of the new century, the culture of architectural time to time, it has always been present in architecture. In the case design seems in a state of permanent crisis, if related to the times and of contemporary building stock, the tools for redevelopment not places of a durably experimental epoch. This anomaly must not to be limited to change of intended use or to the recycling of materials but perceived negatively because can represent the premise (the gamble?) allow a morphological qualities redefinition of the built that affects, for future growth of discipline and, simultaneously, is a bearer of inevitably its urban role. development potential for the contemporary cities. At the same time, it represents an unprecedented and dynamic adaptation process for REFERENCES the existing building stock built after Second World War, also through Crosby T. (1971), Architettura: il senso della città, Calderini, Bologna. the reworked version of known strategies in the history of modern Gregotti V. (1984), “Modificazione”,Casabella , n° 498, pp. 35 – 42. architecture. Very often, meaningful examples of this design approach Solà Morales Rubió I. (1995), Terrain vague, in Davidson C. (ed.), Anyplace, MIT Press, Cambridge, p. 122. are found in negligible areas, to all appearances, of the contemporary Castro R. (2000), Impressionisme urbain, ESA Productions, Paris. urban fabric, and can transform social, environmental, and spatial Druot F., Lacaton A., Vassal J.P. (2004). Plus. Les grands ensembles de logements. Territoire d’exception. Etude réalisée pour le Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication obstacles into supports for the people, for the environment and, also, Direction de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Ministère de la culture et de la for architecture. And it is in this constellation of terrain vague that it is communication, Direction de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris. Castro R. (2005), [Re]Modeler Métamorphoser. Le Moniteur Editions, Paris. possible to activate multidisciplinary synergies capable of supporting Branzi A. (2006), Modernità debole e diffusa. Il mondo del progetto all’inizio del XXI secolo, ambitious programs of reconversion, and to inaugurate new scenarios Skira Editore, Milano. Petzet M., Heilmeyer F., eds. (2012). Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Architecture as Resource, Hatje by reusing existing structures with greater creativity and awareness. Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern. The key assumption for implementing effective design strategies Angi B. (2016), Amnistia per l’esistente. Strategie architettoniche adattive per la riqualificazione dell’ambiente costruito, LetteraVentidue Edizioni, Siracusa. seems to be to consider a “second time” in the life of buildings, after Tolla A., Lignano G. (2017), LOT-EK: Objects + Operations, The Monacelli Press, New that of the function for which they were built, which is configured York. Angi B., ed. (2016), Eutopia urbanscape, the combined redevelopment of social housing, as the time of modification, adaptation to new uses of materials and LetteraVentidue Edizioni, Siracusa. constructions. These concepts appear to be relevant as regards the Angi B. (2018), Ricomposizioni architettoniche, parallelismi e analogie, LetteraVentidue Edizioni, Siracusa. issues of sustainability of the production cycle and reuse of resources. Marini S. (2018), Nuove terre. Architetture e paesaggi dello scarto, Quodlibet Edizioni, At the same time, the design orientation is acquiring an aesthetic Macerata. AA.VV. (2019), “Borders”, Lotus International, n° 168. dimension that establishes the value of the object linked, essentially, Boano C. (2020), Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della minorità nel progetto urbanistico ed to ready-made operations who transforming ordinary buildings into architettonico, LetteraVentidue Edizoni, Siracusa.
84 85 The Shrine and the Square. The Sacrarium can now show its ambivalent character, suspended Architectures for the myth of martyrdom, from the political between the expressive power of universal elements of architecture cult to the post-ideological era and the need to find firm roots in the landscapes of the Karst. On TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS one hand, the painful memory transcends the place through forms of absolute symbolism, but at the same time the memory is renewed Fabio Balducci: [email protected] through an inseparable contextual link, in a mixture of drama and Paolo Marcoaldi: [email protected] pathos. Sapienza - University of Rome At the foot of the Military Shrine, in the new square built with triangular stones coming from all the quarries in Italy, “the apparent The commemorations of the centenary of the Great War marked the orderly disorder of the stone tapestry, in its extreme fragmentation, start of a series of pro-jects to restore the great military shrines in suggests the accumulation, the work of bodies that the war con-fined north-eastern Italy. At Redipuglia, in front of the great monument in the narrowness of the trenches” (Greco, 2018). containing the remains of one hundred thousand soldiers, a new per- During night, this stone carpet lets a tenuous captive light shine manent installation defines a field, the Campo delle Pietre d’Italia, through its leaks, trans-forming it into a lamp lit in memory of the which is both a square and a geometric address for the directing lost generation. force of the shrine. The contemporary interven-tion becomes an The project, coordinated by Orazio Carpenzano, activates a opportunity to rethink the meaning that nowadays can be given to a dialectical comparison between the physical dimension of matter and par-ticular kind of sacrifice for modern man, which is the sacrifice for the ritual dimension of catharsis and remembrance. This architecture motherland (Kantoro-wicz, 1951). for memory, now devoid of the propaganda related to its construction, The Military Shrine of Redipuglia was built between 1935 and 1938 speaks to the present of the sacrifice of an entire generation, and in according to the pro-ject of Giovanni Greppi and Giannino Castiglioni its homage of the fall-en finds a way to celebrate the sacredness and and testifies the regime’s clear desire to appropriate the cult of the unity of the homeland. Great War as the heroic motif underlying the Fascist revolution (Dogliani, 1996). The tomb takes on the geographical dimension of the war theatre, trans-forming a big portion of Monte Sei Busi into REFERENCES a monumental staircase. The huge mineral mass, an allegory of the Carpenzano O. (2020), “Il Campo delle Pietre d’Italia. Il tappeto urbano ai piedi del Sacrario martyred army, moves inexorably towards the top of the hill, where di Redipuglia”, XY, n° 8, pp. 24-33. three bronze crosses transfigure the ancient war grounds into the Carpenzano O. (2019), “Il campo e la strada. Progetti rigenerativi per nuove ritualità collettive”, L’industria delle costruzioni, n° 467, pp. 82-87. Christian Golgo-tha. Carpenzano O. (2019), Il progetto per la Casa della Terza Armata a Redipuglia, in D’Amelio Time has slowly - even if not totally yet - deprived the monument M.G. ed., Per non dimenticare. Sacrari del Novecento, Palombi Editori, Roma, 2019. Greco A. (2018), “Orazio Carpenzano. Il Campo della Pietra d’Italia”, Abitare la Terra, n° of any rhetorical-celebratory impetus for the cult of sacrifice, and 45, pp. 40-41. historical memory has consolidated more intimate forms of ritual. Celiento I. (2018), “Urban Carpets”, PLATFORM Architecture and Design, n° 21, pp. 23-27.
86 87 Le Corbusier: architecture as a language themselves. So, the real question is no longer whether it is necessary TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS to have one’s own language, but rather whether architects today have, the knowledge, the spirit, and the ambition to have their own critical Barbara Bonanno: [email protected] vision of the world and to believe in it until it becomes a language. Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli
The spirit of this call aims to highlight the current meaning of artistic language and, consequently, emphasizes the need for the architect to have a personal reconstruction of autonomous figurative codes, passing through the identification of a recognized system of expressive canons. Against this background, the analysis of Le Corbusier’s methodological action - one of the most influential figures in the architectural scientific community - is proposed on the intentional way of identification, between subjective aspirations and ideal network of thematic references, to be poured into the personal poetic composition. The essay deals with the problems related to a universalistic and shared dissemination of knowledge in relation to that propaganda action that Le Corbusier was able to activate, starting from its first beginnings in the country of origin, with a projection radius spanning at least a century, and how such an action has in fact influenced a large part of international architectural production. In 1913, Le Corbusier still lived in La Chaux-de-fonds with his family, and in a letter to his friend William Ritte reads, “I hate this city. And by extension also people. I cannot do anything here... but I cannot help myself. And there is not much to do either. There is not much to do in this city. I had nothing to do this year. And I will continue to have nothing... My ambition, my vanity and my pride push me toward great things.”. It is, perhaps, in these words that REFERENCES one can already read the desire to mark a change, a change that is Cohen J.L. (2008), Le Corbusier Le Grand, Phaidon Press Limited, China first structural and then formal, whose forms and externality will dal Co F. (2012), “Paris me dit: brûle ce que tu as aimé, et adore ce que tu brûlais. – Parigi mi ha detto: brucia ciò che hai amato e adora ciò che hai bruciato”, Casabella, n° 814, be the conclusion of a functional process and of necessity and a pp. 4 - 31 means for the dissemination of a thought, these will never be ends in Gregotti V. (1987), “Le Corbusier più vicino”, Casabella, n° 531-532, pp. 2-3
88 89 From Giovan Battista Piranesi to contemporaneity: visions projects, future ideas for architecture and the city. TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS Wright’s lesson of Brodoacre City is contaminated with Piranesi’s references and ecological instances. Angela Bruni: [email protected] From Paolo Soleri with Arcosanti in Arizona to Superstudio, to Rem Sapienza - University of Rome Koolhaas whith Junkspace, to Franco Purini and his projects for Rome. Alessandro Melis is the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2021 Giovan Battista Piranesi anticipates many categories of Venice Architecture Biennale. contemporaneity. He has a great fear for the city of the future, for the Resilient Communities is the title he has chosen. He designs visions loss of the classic. His projects go beyond tradition, they witness the for a resilient future. In his visions there is a link with Piranesi. As in fall of the rules, the eclipse of history, the opening to progress. previous editions of the Biennale, internationally renowned architects Much of his works, including the engravings, projects and his unique question the future of the city and architecture. Melis indicates in architecture, the architectural and urban design of the Santa Maria del the architect the figure capable of transforming transdisciplinary Priorato complex, contain the elements of a controversy on the theory knowledge into visions. of architecture and a search to recognize oneself in the new times. “Giovan Battista Piranesi is one of the few great architects who with his work allows the passage from the ancient to the modern times”. “(..) in any era, architecture has been great when it poetically expressed the vision of the world of the person who made it, and it has always had great value when he (the architect) was able to express the contradictions”. Manfredo Tafuri in The Sphere and the Labyrinth outlines the underlying design of the contemporary crisis project, starting from the great crisis of the Illuminism, which is embodied in Piranesi. The Carceri of Piranesi are the expression of a visionary language carried to excess, of a scenographic sense given by multiple stratifications. The REFERENCES concept of the center of the composition is challenged and replaced Purini F. (2008), Attualità di Giovan Battista Piranesi, Libria, Melfi by that of infinite and metamorphic space, evoking the fragmented Terranova A.(1982), Alcuni temi e problemi tra progetto e storia. Intervista a Manfredo contemporary space of the city without borders and the open spaces Tafuri, “Rassegna di Architettura e urbanistica”, XVIII Tafuri M. (1980), La sfera e il labirinto: Avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni of the periphery. ’70, Einaudi, Torino After Piranesi, Boullè and Ledoux, revolutionaries in the way of Purini F. (2008), Architetture parlanti su sfondo di rovine, http://www.arteecarte.it Melis A. (2021) ITALIAN PAVILION BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA,Venezia,Italia conceiving architecture, there are many architects throughout history Melis A. (2016) Piranesi su Giove INDUSTRIARCHITETTURA, https://www. who experiment, in different ways, through drawing, visions, and industriarchitettura.it
90 91 Compositional thought and language. into geometric form: the attack on the ground, the use of light, the Projects at the margins structural and material choices. TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS The place brings with it the problem of inhabit or rather – on this occasion – that of re-inhabiting contexts that for various reasons have Giovanni Comi: [email protected] suffered from abandonment and depopulation. Lands at the margins Università degli Studi di Udine such as those of the Alps where natural elements establish the limits of human action and the fragmentation of spaces requires a reading «Language of substantial immobility», is how Juan Borchers defines of architecture not aimed at the single object, with consequent the architecture that makes the place the first manifestation of the homologation of the places that would condemn them to silence, but work as a built act. From compositional thought, architecture disclose around the characteristics of permanence, continuity, tradition. itself into reality through material construction, translating the idea Building the conditions of re-habitability of villages in the process into form. In this process, the place plays a decisive role as it defines of depopulation and, more generally, of fragile and complex the character of the building. environments, means recognizing the matrix of places, their systemic Architecture thus emerges from the encounter between two tensions, relationships, being the result of specific transformative phenomena, the form of the imagination and the context with its characteristics, which cannot be solved with the stereotyping of forms according to peculiarities, limits. Knowing them provides the ability to reveal pre-existing figurative canons. through the project a wider reality that escapes the language of contingency. If to build means «to elaborate with earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby», the architect must be able to recognize the ground as a compositional resource which is rewritten by control and manipulation. Architecture is defined as a necessary act that not only gives a shape to the site but transforms it by translating forms of nature into pieces of geometry. The space REFERENCES built by architecture is not designed starting from aspects of pure image but from the clarification of the characters of the place; the Borchers J. (2011), Hiperpolis, Metales Pesados, Santiago del Cile. De Rossi A., Mascino L. (2018), Progetto e pratiche di rigenerazione: l’altra Italia e la relationship between figure and construction is therefore the result of forma delle cose, in De Rossi A., ed., Riabitare l’Italia. Le aree interne tra abbandoni e “actions” – not “creations” – capable of arousing tensions rather than riconquiste, Donzelli Editore, Roma. Gregotti V. (1977), Il linguaggio dell’architettura, Casabella, n° 429, pp. 28-30. leading back to a pre-established order or rule applicable everywhere. Maldonado T. (2010), Arte e artefatti, Feltrinelli, Milano. Talking about language means recovering the sense of place for Morandini M., Reolon S. (2010), Alpi regione d’Europa. Da area geografica a sistema politico, Marsilio, Venezia. the project, overcoming abstract experiments, using those words Teti V. (2004), Il senso dei luoghi. Memoria e storia dei paesi abbandonati, Donzelli Editore, of composition able to translate the specific conditions of the place Roma.
92 93 Architectural Design Studio: to serve as a productive source of inspiration that now has been Experimenting Transition Times in Education reduced to the solitary motion of scrolling down on a smart device: TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS looking at cropped pictures and sharing unfiltered information. Besides missing the current studio’s place surroundings and direct Daniel Comșa: [email protected] in-process communication through hand drawings and models, the Delia Alexandra Prisecaru: [email protected] new educational studio – now digital - is moving the attention from Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest the paper to screen in an attempt to register every scratch movement as mark of possible inception fragility, along with short-cutting In the recent months, forced by new the pandemic conditions to adapt every information on how to learn to process and progress fast, and to face a second level of ʻOpen Source Architectureʼ (Ratti, both on producing valuable architectural exercises (for scholars) 2014), both teachers and students had to think, draw, explain, listen, and sustainable tutoring (for mentors). The discussion is based on teach and learn online. The present contribution tries to offer a point exploring works developed within the design studios and their new of view on how the experience we had in the cyberspace learning anthropology nuances for transition times might later be implemented, once the restrictions are lifted, to improve further the academic performance and results of the design laboratories. Teaching architecture must be based on experiencing space and it’s characteristics first in the exercise of understanding it, and the students must concentrate their design effort on research through drawing (Gregotti, 2010), both of which were significantly affected by the impossibility to physically interact with and within studio’s place. The sensation of a fantastic lesson or lecture in front of the computer screen, is similar to an everyday sunset which we tend to ignore and we need to see an installation such as the Weather Project (Eliasson, 2007) in order to fully understand the phenomena and the weight that the process possess. The lack of physical human interaction and the lack of time to process the information, for example the interval between classes, or the time spent in transit from home to the university and back, had a definite REFERENCES negative impact on the development of the design thinking process Castoriadis C. (1998), The Imaginary Institution of Society, MIT Press, Cambridge and that needs multiple iterations separated by intervals. This time of London. Eliasson O. (2007), Colour Memory and Other Informal Shadows, Postmedia, Milano. reflection and introspection, has doubled and alternated with hearing Gregotti V. (2010), Tre forme di architettura mancata, Einaudi Ed., Torino. opinions and observing in the same time other surroundings, used Ratti C. (2014), Architettura Open Source, Einaudi Ed., Torino.
94 95 The language of reconnection. this metamorphosis, a semantic gap is sometimes determined between two Two approaches in Venice deliberately explicit works; it happens when architecture consciously faces a TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS critical situation in relation to its context. It is not a question of different styles, but of how the language has assimilated the context from the project or how Federica Conte: [email protected] it has been interpreted. Starting from the poetics and then from the action, in Alice Monacelli: [email protected] the sense of ποίησις, the two authors, Palladio and Muratori, will be read in Sapienza - University of Rome relation to their interventions on the city and how their contributions interact in different ways in relation to the considered historical background. The theme of Over the centuries, Architecture has chosen, as Summerson records in his 1963’s consolidated island town and marginality will be read throughout the symbiotic essay, a very precise grammar, a syntax that recognizes itself in the distinction relationship between code and canon, thanks to the design comparison of two of the four and later five, architectural orders, considered as fundamental for different case studies: the Giudecca area for Palladio and the San Giuliano’s the construction of the project. However, every artist who was inspired by the one for Muratori. In a strict correlation with the city of Venice, the two projects principles of these orders, enacted something more: they modified the rules will try to understand which will be the new dialogue to establish with pre- in the most subjective and arbitrary way. Maybe, Contemporary Architecture existing canons and how to find out groundbreaking codes with whom reading acquired this aptitude, trying to resist all kinds of constrains: it unburdened modernity in an innovative way. by any rough rules and dogmas. What is left out is the order with whom the
Architect will dispose these referenced paradigms in the syntagm, although REFERENCES he is equipped with a lexicon, a sort of logic thanks to which some permanent Summerson J.(2000), Il linguaggio classico dell’architettura, trad. di Livia Moscone Bargilli, codes have existed and still exist today. In this way it is possible to think that Einaudi, Torino the syntax of every architect is something to be invented: he needs to find Zevi B. (1997), Il linguaggio moderno dell’architettura. Guida al codice anticlassico, Einaudi editore it in the increased diversity of the world of art and in the every day world. Caniggia, Gianfranco; Maffei, Gian Luigi (2008), Lettura dell’edilizia di Base, Alinea ed., Architecture builds the communicative directions of his own language thanks Florence. Dal Fabbro A., Montessori M. G., Cantarelli R. (2020), Venezia dall’alto, Jaca Book ed., to the continuous variatio, both diachronic and synchronic, with the other Venice. codes that probably do not always belong to the world of construction. For Giedion S. (1989), Spazio, tempo ed architettura. Hoepli ed., Bologna. Maretto M. (2020), Il progetto urbano sostenibile. Morfologia, architettura, information its organization and constitutive value, Architecture has an active role in the technology. Ed. Franco Angeli s.r.l., Milan. capability of making changes and experiments that contribute to the definition Maretto M. (2012), Saverio Muratori. Il progetto della città. A legacy in urban design, Angeli ed., Milan. of a language in the different spatial-temporal cultural areas. Therefore, the Monestiroli A. (2013), In compagnia di Palladio. Taschenbuch ed. city of Venice becomes a theatre of experimentation for a reflection on the Ovidio P. N. (1994), Le metamorfosi. BUR ed., Milan. Purini F. (1996), “Il linguaggio architettonico come ‘spazio pubblico’ dell’architettura”, evolution of the grammatical expressions of a consolidated common language, METAMORFOSI n° 29-30, 2° quadrimestre, pp. 74-76. from the small to the large scale. Within the intent to respond to the needs Saverio M. (1960), Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia, Roma: Istituto poligrafico dello stato, Rome. of Time, rules have been broken, dogmas and canons have been violated, Savoy D. (2012), “Palladio and the Water-oriented Scenography of Venice”, Journal of the witnessing a metamorphosis of expressions regarding a particular Era. In Society of Architectural Historians n° 71 (2), pp. 204–225.
96 97 Beyond meanings. by Mies Van Der Rohe, Lingeri and Terragni, the interiors of Figini Symbiosis and metamorphosis in the arts chase and mirror and Pollini (Rosellini 2019) up to the creative universe of Giò Ponti, each other constitute precious texts that tell about “similar” cities. Practical TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS works in which the arts chase each other and mirror each other, in which it is possible to read the expression of a thought in which the Barbara Coppetti: [email protected] architectural space participates. On the other hand, a critical point of Politecnico di Milano view is thrown towards the hyperrealism of renderings, the perfection of digital images that do not transmit principles or communicate the The artistic works expressed through the actions -drawing, painting, designer’s idea but persuades the observer (or client) of the result’s sculpting, but also sewing, photographing, making films, writing, validity. The reflection focuses not on the image market but the crossing deserts - define its limits or the potential not for the type relationship between images and consciousness, between image and of action performed but through the ability to render the action like the degree of awareness of architectural action as an artistic practice a text, that is, to give rise to a meaning (Vettese, 2015). The central (Gregotti 1991). The arts have never ceased to represent autonomous knot of the avant-garde of the twentieth century was to free the works, emblems of that sort of clash against the most deeply rooted “mediums” to open up to the multiplicity of means and expressive convictions and beliefs. Some works of art are the manifesto of channels. Architecture, a kaleidoscope of the arts, is transformed timeless relevance made by characters outside the clichés within into a terminal generated and regenerated surprising, hyperbolic hopeless scenarios, weaving disturbing but perfectly contemporary visions and news (Celant 2004). However, in a context in which collages. Against the background of the torn peripheries of globalized the work of art risks being ignored, the idea’s implementation must metropolitan territories, today’s acid elements appear that combine lead to a practical device; the work of art exists when it becomes a following a highly fragmented logical flow, disorienting the cut of generator of meaning. Rosalind Krauss supported the supremacy of the public linked to a conventional plot. In the end the only possible the project over the execution, also releasing it from the hypothesis meaning to be grasped in these cases is that there is no meaning. of making a device. Therefore, the artwork would ignore any external rules but continue to exist as a design and a significant fact. Mixing means and languages over time, the project that is an expression REFERENCES of meaning explores the changes in the physical and social space Beitin A., Eiermann W, Franzen B. (a cura di), (2017), Mies Van der Rohe, Montage Collage, that generated it and worked with the desire to change the present. Ludwig Forum Aachen, Mueseum Georg Shafer Schweinfurt Within disruptive and inexorable modernity since the beginning of Celant G. (2008), Artmix: flussi tra arte, architettura, cinema, design, moda, musica e televisione, Feltrinelli, Milano the twentieth century, critical points of view appear on the landscapes Celant G. (a cura di), (2004), Arti&Architettura 1900/2000, Skira Ginevra-Milano of the contemporary post-metropolis. On the one hand, works such Gregotti V., (1991), Dentro l’architettura, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino Rosellini A., (2019), Epicentri concettuali del collage digitale a vocazione teorica, Piano b. as Canaletto’s intriguing Capriccio or the subversive visions of Arti e culture visive, vol.4 n. 2/2019 https://pianob.unibo.it/article/view/11023 landscapes by Malevich, El Lissitzky, Ivan Leonidov, the collages Vettese A., (2015), Si fa con tutto. Il linguaggio dell’arte contemporanea, Editori Laterza
98 99 TheatrumOpera: space becomes action. experience that aims to create an inter-coded educational design of Plastic tracks of dancing research space. TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS To re-open incorporated constructs, either from a certain Architecture that from a certain Pedagogy, we called the machine-Theater, and Maria D’Ambrosio : [email protected] thus the art of performing, as a destructuring device that can open Enrica Spada : [email protected] to another posture, to another experience, to another poietic for Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples educational space. The two working groups and their ‘artworks’ or University of Cagliari traces of the path they have crossed are presented and made part of a research that recovers the need for performative practices and In the experience of epigenetic research that finds its place in the the richness of their inter-coded plurality, and makes them part of a ‘embodied education’ group, Art and its sensori-motor sphere discourse that brings back Architecture and Pedagogy on the common constitute the environment in which the pedagogical takes shape trajectory of research on transformation processes of a cognitive/ - whereby pedagogical we mean the nature of the transformative embodied nature. This trajectory reinterprets body and space processes of the ‘living’ (Dewey, 1934). Art is mobile space: it is outside the category of language and expression because it needs to a dance that creates (Ceruti, 1989), for the ‘living being’ and its recover the political horizon of body and space from whose mutual generative and situated process of an autopoietic nature (Maturana- generativity emerges the life of a new community form in motion. Varela, 1980) from which knowledge and cognition emerge in the form of action/gesture and work (Arendt, 1956). In this perspective, space becomes a key-category of epistemological and methodological work that tracks the tactile and plasticity quality of space as a co- essential condition of living, because it will fully accommodate his sensitive life (Coccia, 2011). Architecture and Pedagogy, therefore, REFERENCES look at the same constructs - the body that becomes space and the space that becomes body - recognizing the centrality of the Arendt H., 1956, Vita Activa, Bompiani, Milano Berthoz A., (1997), Il senso del movimento, McGraw-Hill, Milano, 1998. performative dimension that crosses them and nourishes their mutual Ceruti M., (1989), La danza che crea, Feltrinelli, Milano. co-existential need. Coccia E., (2011), La vita sensibile, Il Mulino, Bologna. Coccia E., (2016), La vita delle piante, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2018. Recovering the phenomenological perspective and in particular Derrida J., (1967), La voce e il fenomeno, Jaca Book, Milano, 1968-2010. Nancy’s notion of theater body (2010) and Berthoz’s motor theory Marone, R., (2018), Ovunque è architettura. Fatti dello spazio che abitiamo, Libria, Melfi. Maturana H., Varela F., (1980), Autopoiesi e cognizione, Marsilio, Padova, 1985. of perception (1997), we present some traces of a work related to Nancy J.L., (1994), Le Muse, Diabasis, Reggio Emilia, 2006. the design/production of a hypothesis of spaceForming called Nancy J.L., (2010), Corpo teatro, Cronopio, Napoli, 2011. Nancy J.L., (2013), La Comunità inoperosa, Cronopio, Napoli. TheatrumOpera. The work refers to two groups - high school students Nancy J.L., (2014 a), Il corpo dell’arte, Mimesis, Milano-Udine. and kindergarten teachers - involved into embodied methodology Nancy J.L., (2014 b), L’altro ritratto, Castelvecchi, Roma.
100 101 Collages and ‘assemblage design’. senses that the collage can take, the paper will propose the idea of Re-designing contemporary identities, architectures, the ‘assemblage design’, which tries to hold together at the same landscapes time ideative, verification and synthesis project moments; trying to TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS compare itself with identities of places, communities, contexts that should be “continually assumed and called into question” (Koolhaas, Giuseppe D’Ascoli: [email protected] 1995). Design with collages allows to proceed with subsequent University of Naples “Federico II” approximations, with assembling fragments that, repositioned and reassembled in different ways and times (refers to composition and Over the last twenty years, a keen imaginative realism has assembly processes such as A. Warburg for the Mnemosyne Atlas), characterized the representation of several projects worldwide. they create a process that is not only language, but a tool of thought. It is an ongoing process that is shaping not only the image but Intersecting the works of some contemporary designers like the the very idea of the Architecture project. This risky phenomenon MVRDV and EMBT groups, the contribution explores possible gives way to the ‘standardization’ (Micheli, Lo Ricco, 2003) of the new paradigms for the design of architecture and landscapes (in contemporary world by promoting an immediate ‘visibility’ of the Chinese景观) where the themes of protection, conservation, reuse project. Countering the spread of this phenomenon – which sees the (Chipperfield, 2020) are tense with drawn fragments and textures of realistic fixation of render as the most obvious limit – an ‘assemblage places, identities, and cultures. design’ is proposed: is a project approach – named out of the actor- network theory (Latour, 2015) – able to comprehendere (from Latin ‘keep together) and ‘translate’ through collages the heterogeneity and fluidity of the reality we live. From these premises the contribution aims to investigate the potential of the collage as a project tool that ‘keeps together’ various techniques. The collage expression process, born in Art with the everyday life elements ‘assembled’ by Picasso and Braque, can REFERENCES connect different materials. In Architecture, collage is established Chipperfield D. (2020), “Ecologia della conservazione, della memoria, del riutilizzo”, in its analog-metaphorical sense thanks to the cities ‘readings’ Domus, 1044, 2-5. Galofaro L. (2020) “Il montaggio come forma di progetto”, Piano b. Arti E Culture Visive, (4) of Rossi in the 1970s (Nicolin, 2000); stressed and forced to re- 2, 16-38, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2531-9876/10856. discover forms and processes of the history of Art and Architecture Julien F. (2018), L’identità culturale non esiste, Einaudi, Milano. Koolhaas R. (1995), S,M,L,XL, The Monacelli Press, New York City. (Rowe, Koetter, 1984) chosen as a means of expressing radical Latour B. (2005), Reassembling the social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory, OUP, positions such as those promoted by Superstudio, the collage is now Oxford. Miralles E. (1996), Enric Miralles: Works and Projects, The Monacelli Press, New York City manifested in increasingly different ways as a means of imaginary Nicolin P. (2019), “Rossi/Tafuri La città analoga”, Lotus Booklet, 10, 55. project storytelling (Miralles, 1995). Thus, starting from the many Rowe C., Koetter F. (1984), Collage City, MIT press, Cambridge.
102 103 Creative peripheries. appropriation of common goods by the communities. Participatory Upcycling the built heritage in peripheral habitats through processes of regeneration through art can have positive benefits in art and social innovation the short and long term. They may involve temporary occasions, TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS associated with festivals and events, which aim to attract tourists and new residents to peripheral territories, such as the experiences of the Maria Giada Di Baldassarre: [email protected] PopUp! Festival (Marche, 2008) or the Re-pop initiative (Macomer, Marche Polytechnic University, Ancona 2019). Other relevant practices concern the redevelopment of spaces that are vital for the communities, such as the GRAArt project for the Over time, the original spatial meaning of peripherality has Rome Ring Road (2017) or the Garden of Cultures in Milan (2015), been associated with meanings often related to socio-economic and can even involve entire neighbourhoods or villages, such as marginality; still in the most widespread meaning the term ‘periphery’ Tor Marancia in Rome (2015) or the Farm Cultural Park in Favara is associated with some characters of disvalue: uprooting place, made (2010). These experiences show how the language of art is capable by spaces different from those of the city properly meant, no man’s of bringing out new shared visions of the built heritage and social land and places of degradation, physical and social (Bonvini, 2019). inclusion and integration. The crisis of these areas, urban and at territorial scale, becomes more and more evident through phenomena as social exclusion, marginalization, abandonment and widespread degradation. The term ‘periphery’ derives from the Greek periphérō, formed by ‘perí’ (‘around’) and ‘pherein’ (‘carry’), therefore it means to carry around, as to say that peripheries are by nature dynamic and in evolution, and can be understood as transitional spaces, areas of potentiality for change, between action and transformation (Oliva, 2018). Peripheries condense innovation forces which in these loose contexts are freer REFERENCES to find a place of expression, so they can be intended as test fields Bonvini P. (2019), THE IDENTITY OF PERIPHERY, in Schröder J., Cappeller R. ed., where dynamics of transformation are not ‘passively experienced’ but DYNAMICS OF PERIPHERY Videoworks and collages, Regionales Bauen und it is the place itself that becomes an enabler and a booster of them Siedlungsplanung, Hannover, 2019. Fabietti U. (2015), Elementi di antropologia culturale, Mondadori, Milano. (Ferretti, 2018). Ferretti M. (2018), Place: Managing the change, in Schröder J., Carta M., Ferretti M., Lino In this context, the role of cultural creativity is central. It consists of B. ed., DYNAMICS OF PERIPHERY Atlas for Emerging Creative Resilient Habitat, Jovis, Berlino, 2018. the possibility that human beings can produce ever new meanings Oliva J. S. (2018), Resilience in City-Core Peripheries: Flexible, Creative, and Dynamic from the cultural models available to them (Fabietti, 2015). In this Urban Regeneration Processes, in Schröder J., Carta M., Ferretti M., Lino B. ed., DYNAMICS OF PERIPHERY Atlas for Emerging Creative Resilient Habitat, Jovis, perspective, the regeneration of disused, abandoned and degraded Berlino, 2018. built heritage through art allows the material and immaterial re- Schröder J., Carta M., Hartmann S., eds. (2018), Creative Heritage, Jovis, Berlino.
104 105 The art of kintsugi as a metaphor for building that are in continuity with the shape of the city in order to define the the city by parts completeness of the parts, this essay proposes a different strategy that TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS consists in assuming the space between the parts, the urban void, as an element of continuity capable of giving structure to the relationship Ermelinda Di Chiara: [email protected] between them, as an element in which this relationship is manifested. Sapienza - University of Rome In particular, taking the city of Naples as a case study, it attempts to identify those golden arteries of the now-damaged ceramic object The term kintsugi refers to the ancient oriental technique of “mending without, however, merging the parts of the city, but with the aim of with gold” – from the Japanese kin “gold” and tsugi “connection” making them always recognisable through inserts of precious metal – which allows to join the fragments of a shattered object with gold – the void of nature – which welds, but at the same time makes the dust in order to enhance its “scars” and not hide them (Santini, 2018). urban parts evident by difference. The result is an object composed of an interweaving of golden lines, which appears unique and unrepeatable by virtue of the randomness with which the ceramic can shatter. If it’s not possible to reconstruct the object from its fragments, the kintsugi technique involves a more articulated methodology: the craftsmen try to achieve the integrity of the object either with other ceramic fragments or, more often than not, with gold leaves, thus returning golden portions of varying size, which join the golden arteries. This art, originally associated with the ceramic objects used for the Japanese tea ceremony and spread over time to many different fields, allows us to highlight the potential of the void, similar in analogy to gold inserts, which can be found in the ability to maintain the separation between elements, making the field of relationships between them clear. Starting from these premises, the essay attempts to apply the art of kintsugi to the field of urban morphology, in which, by analogy with the Japanese technique, the parts of the city become the ceramic fragments of the decomposed object, the urban catalysts (Rossi, 1966) are the eventual shards added, and the void, the space between the parts of the city and the catalysts, is finally assimilated to the golden filaments. If studies on REFERENCES the city have often given space to those urban projects in which it Santini C. (2018), Kintsugi. L’arte segreta di riparare la vita, Rizzoli, Milano. notes the possibility to mend the weft of the fabric through operations Rossi A. (1966), L’architettura della città, Marsilio, Padova.
106 107 Morphological transformation. Ungers puts his reflections into practice, investigating the theme of Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Morsbroich Museum modification, which he will repeatedly address in his design activity. In in Leverkusen the project for the Morsbroich Castle Museum, a continuous elliptical TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS wall, placed on the edge of the islet surrounding the Baroque palace, is subjected to a series of morphological transformations that modify Andrea D’Urzo: [email protected] its spatiality. Through this operation, however, the destinations Sapienza University of Rome of the spaces and their possible interpretations also change. The architectural element, with its modification, takes on a new meaning. “Just as water can dissolve into the vaporous state or solidify in Through the analysis of this unrealized project and the comparison the form of the ice, a spatial structure can be transformed from a with other works by the German architect, it is still possible to define, definite situation into one without precise limits.” even today, a framework in which the concept of morphological Oswald Mathias Ungers transformation, understood as a design tool, can enrich the architectural language and stimulate the architect’s creative The transformation was, for Oswald Mathias Ungers, one of the ability through the exploration of all the possible modifications of main themes of theoretical reflection and design research throughout architectural elements and space. his career. The German architect recognizes in the principle of transformation, which is internally linked to the concept of new formation, the ability to free architecture from the problem of the apparent irreconcilability of conflicting situations within the project. He is also able to avoid reducing architecture to mere functional thinking. It is precisely through the transformation that it is possible to explore the numerous possibilities of configuring reality, recognizing the value of multiplicity and the dialectical comparison between opposites. The principle of transformation, due to its characteristic inclusiveness, also offers the possibility of resolving the conflicting knot between art and nature.
According to Ungers, the transformation can even be considered the REFERENCES very object of the design process, as long as architecture is recognized Ungers O.M., 1982, Architettura come tema / Architecture as theme, Electa, Milano as a process of historical continuity where the past defines the field Ungers O.M., 1988, Quando si parla di architettura, in Lotus 57 of action for the future, conceivable through the tool of modification. Ungers O.M., 1985, Sieben Variationen des Raumes über die Sieben Leuchter der Baukunst von John Ruskin, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart The 1975 project for the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen certainly VV. AA., 1991, O. M. Ungers. Architetture 1951-1990, Electa, Milano represents an example with a strong demonstrative character. Here Nicolin P., 1986, L’“anti-umanesimo di Ungers”, in Casabella 525
108 109 Syntagmatic architectural overwriting The new language, understood as the conjunction and the interweaving TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS of different architectural “signs” between them and the hybridization with man and the environment, needs, then, a reinterpretation through Alessandro Gaiani: [email protected] the use of new tools suitable for complexity, which as catalytic University of Ferarra agents, trigger reactions, activate processes of re-signification, promoting a “syntagmatic architectural overwriting” of the existing, The painful season that we are living, since the beginning of the for a new social and architectural identity and a new relationship new century, puts us in the condition of having to learn from our between man, environment and built, able to propose a new complex experiences and to transform them into a change of course, or at least symbolic message. Tools that in their constitutive identity, contribute to define a reflection of transition that establishes new contours of to the change and co-production of the conditions of reciprocity with possible scenarios of innovation. people, in which architecture takes on an evolutionary dimension. The political, economic, social problems and the natural disasters that The result is a new and changed form, not only the outcome of a have followed one another in this short beginning of the century, have creative act but the adaptive result of a multirelational processual determined a degradation in the ecological and social system, and interweaving that has originated and conformed it. lead us to the need to regenerate our living on earth and to indicate a possible new field of action for the discipline of architecture through the definition of a new language that adequately represents, in this time, the relationship between space and the man who inhabits it. We are witnessing a paradigm shift within the system of knowledge and the arts, which transits from a Cartesian scientific one, which REFERENCES proceeds by methods of simplification, also used by the great masters Ciorra P., (2011), Senza architettura. Le ragioni di una crisi, Laterza editors, Rome-Bari of architecture of the last century (Le Corbusier: the principle Cerruti M., Bellusci F. (2020), Abitare la complessità. La sfida di un destino comune, Mimesis, Milan. of universal determinism; Mies Van der Rhoe: the principle of Bourriaud, N. (2016), The Exform, trans. Erik Butler, Verso books, New York. disjunction; Aldo Rossi: that of reduction) to a more complex one De Solà-Morales I. (2001), Decifrare l’architettura, Allemandi, Turin. Dionigi I. (2020), Parole che allungano la vita. Pensieri per il nostro tempo, Raffaello Cortina suitable for a society in metabolic change. The Cartesian disjunctive Editor, Milan logic, which separates and decontextualizes, is insufficient. Instead, Dorfles G.(1969), Valori iconologici e semiotici in architettura, Op.Cit., n.16, 27- 40, Guattari F. (2013), Architettura della sparizione, Mimesis, Milan. it is necessary to conceive the language of architecture through a new Diez Medina C., Pierini O.S., eds. (2012), Rafael Moneo L’altra modernità. Considerazioni paradigm understood as an inclusive system, diversity, transversality sul futuro dell’architettura, Marinotti editions, Milan. Morin, E. (1991) , Introduction à la pensée complexe, esf Éditeur, Paris. and adaptation. Maturana H.R., Varela F.J., (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition, Springer, Dordrecht. Therefore, the specific element of a theory is no longer to reduce Polin G. ed. (2009), Elementi di architettura. Gino Pollini, Archivio Cattaneo,Como. Purini F. (2012), Linguaggio Architettonico, http://www.teknoring.com/wikitecnica/ complexity to simplicity, but to translate complexity into a possible progettazione architettonica/linguaggio-architettonico/ theory. Rocca E. ed.(2008), Estetica e architettura, Il Mulino, Bologna
110 111 Space, Time, Arts and Crafts. framework (Montanari, 2017) and showing us, as Barthes writes, The classic references of a liquid period untimely (Agamben, 2008). On the one hand, we adhere to the TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS emergencies of everyday life and we keep a distance from them, redesigning the relationship between classic and contemporary, for Ludovica Grompone: [email protected] which the past preserves its perennial relevance (Settis, 2004). The Polytechnic University of Bari classic, in fact, no longer represents a gallery of eternal figures to contemplate and replicate, but a mine of categories to be reinterpreted. The use of each material defines the construction of a place and On the other hand, there is a need to turn attention to the classic, its transformation. In fact, according to Rossi, the principle of the especially in times of hardship, crisis, and anxiety, because the continuation of energy, in every artist or technician, is mixed with classic represents a reserve of consciousness and it can fill abysses the research of happiness and death. The art and craft, in this sense, and chasms, preserving the inner life of humanity (Montanari, 2017). should be understood as a description of things and of ourselves, thanks to which the work, when it is completed, is not lost, because it remains latent in the block of stone (Rossi, 2009). All contemporary artistic practices, however heterogeneous, share this idea and they use shapes already produced, inscribing the artwork within a network of signs and meanings. In this way, we try to insert ourselves into the innumerable flows of production, planning the pre-existing shapes rather than composing them, in a universe of signals already sent out, buildings already built, itineraries already trodden (Bourriaud, 2004). At the same time, in the field of exhibitions, a clear distance from traditional genres is marked, decreeing the radical transformation of the artwork which is replaced by temporary installations. The latter rewrite the environment in which they are placed. For them space REFERENCES represents the only material support, and for this reason all projects are carried out without a beginning and an epilogue, to be inhabited Agamben G. (2008), Che cos’è il contemporaneo?, Nottetempo, Milan. Bourriaud N. (2004), La società come repertorio di forme, in Postproduction. Come l’arte and not just observed. Their ephemeral character does not condemn riproggramma il mondo, Postmedia books, Milan. them to remain, but to be destroyed, according to the liquid idea of Montanari T. and Trione V., eds. (2017), Installazioni-mania, in Contro le mostre, Einaudi, Turin. time. So, without understanding if we are going through the time Montanari T. and Trione V., eds. (2017), Essere contemporanei, in Contro le mostre, Einaudi, or if the time is going through us, we interrogate it, but we do not Turin. Rossi A. (2009), Autobiografia scientifica, Il Saggiatore, Milan. receive any answer (Montanari, 2017). We try to stage relationships Settis S. (2004), Il “classico” nell’universo del “globale”, in Futuro del “classico”, Einaudi, between distant eras, resorting to the dismantling of the chronological Turin.
112 113 Towards New Design Epistemologies: Conversations between Chemistry and Life TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS
Rolf Hughes: [email protected] Rachel Armstrong: [email protected] KU Leuven
Distinguishing between architectural agendas concerned with external logics, or milieu, and the internal logics of the practice, the authors develop a linguistic toolset based on the tactics of life. A series of case studies are presented, ranging from automatic drawings to processional performance and ritual, we examine how a negotiated tension between material agents that are capable of reaching tipping points of order with metamorphic potential, move away from the conventions of Euclidian geometry towards a body-based grammar of design. Releasing the practice of contemporary architecture from notions of building maintenance—the preservation of an immortal REFERENCES corpse—a living, teeming fabric in constant flow begins a material Armstrong, R. (2018), Soft Living Architecture: An Alternative View of Bio-informed discourse that addresses the inevitable changes of space with time, Practice. Bloomsbury Academic, London. how it is changed by occupancy and how it contests the ambient Cairns, S. and Jacobs, J. M. (2014), Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge. biological, cultural, and political environments in which it exists. Chomsky, N. (2006). Language and Mind, Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. By considering spaces as bodies, rather than bounded geometric Darwin, C. (1859), On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection: On the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, John Murray, London. plots, the grammar of the production of space is radically expanded. McFarland, B. (2016), A World From Dust: How the Periodic Table Shaped Life, Oxford What emerges is something that we might not call a building, but University Press, New York. Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Harmondsworth: Penguin a constructed entity that is designed, inhabited, and haunted by its Classics, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, London. community. Wyndham, J. (1955), The Chrysalids, Michael Joseph, London.
114 115 De-coding human living space Surprise, Sadness, happiness, Nostalgia, Disgust, and Boredom. By TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS bringing a hypothetic scheme of how these codes are implemented in a human living space, the approach to how space articulation effect Bora Kelmendi: [email protected] human is enabled. Sapienza - University of Rome
‘...analytic possibilities might have to be explored if one had to compare architectural phenomena with phenomena belonging to some other ‘language’... a metalanguage capable of describing them in the same terms’ Umberto Eco
Is architecture the art of space articulation and if so, is geometry the visual deciphering tool for architectural syntagm. However what stands out for geometrical approach to the space is that it can appear as a communicative system, even though limited. To decode architecture different aspects of space should be taken under consideration. This paper is based on Umberto Ecos architectural codes which are; Technical Codes; Syntactic Codes; Semantic Codes and are applied to a typical family living space in Pristina. In this paper it is highlighted that in able to encapsulate an architectural code encapsulating architecture as a hole (one structural form) it is not enough, in this regard it’s important to take into consideration the human factor. When discussing human factor it designates the relationship between the sign and the interpreter of sign. In this regard this paper aims to approach the icon effect through experience REFERENCES and use of human living space by its habitants. By having a clearer de-coding of human space, one might have a clearer picture of what Eco U. (2005), Rethinking Architecture, A reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, New York, 2005 is important while creating new spaces. By aiming to have a clearer Gregory P. (2018), “Affective Spaces in Urban Transformation’s Contexts”, Journal of Civil metalanguage and questioning what has been served until today, the Engineering and Architecture, 12, 563-572 Griffero T. (2014), ‘Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces’, Ashgate, Rome possibility for greater results based on human needs is enabled. To Rizzolatti G. & Sinigaglia C. (2008), ‘Mirrors in the brain- How our minds share actions and conclude in this paper 6 main cognitive codes/ emotions are applied: emotions’, Oxford University Press, New York
116 117 The informal canon of Mediterranean spatiality Corbusier, Rudofsky, Team X, Rem Koolhaas. TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS The Mediterranean space reveals an intrinsic nature that can be characterized as labyrinthine and permeable and is random only in Alessandro Lanzetta: [email protected] appearance as it is the result of a semi-spontaneous construction Angela Fiorelli: [email protected] process, from which can be codified a method of urban development. Sapienza - University of Rome It is an organic evolution of the human habitat witch goes form the landscape to the housing, capable of giving a domestic and A Mediterranean spatial principle runs through the history of “hybrid” character to the urban space in witch internal and external, architecture, offering resonances even in territories far from the private and public spaces mix. From the domestic patio to the urban Mediterranean Sea. This principle produces architectures with a labyrinths, the Mediterranean principle contrasts with the rules of porous character, where voids are just as important as solids and modernist urbanism, made up of numbers and zoning. In this sense, where opacity and transparency merge. The Mediterranean settlement this architectural canon born as an articulated phenomenological process organically creates a suitable habitat for the integration of habitat is still valid to redesign the use and the relationship between society and through the studies of shapes it creates the necessary private and public space in the contemporary city. condition to face the surging climate and health emergencies we are currently facing. The Mediterranean city, in fact, breathes through “urban alveoli” that compress and expand the space based on the hybridization between “home” and “city”, between individual and collective dimension. This phenomenon produces transit areas that are resilient and adaptable to the contingent needs. Archetypes such as the wall or the fence are the paradigmatic elements of this space as they represent material and visual limitations that invite us to overcome and cross them, both physically and perceptually. If we think at architectural matter as a REFERENCES spatial one laid out in three dimensions, we can propose the action of Lanzetta A. (2018), Roma informale. La città mediterranea del GRA, Manifestolibri, Roma. crossing as the forth dimension which brings architecture to exist not Lanzetta A. (2016), Opaco mediterraneo. Modernità informale, Libria, Melfi. Lejeune J. F. (2016), Michelangelo Sabatino, Nord/sud. L’architettura moderna e il only in space but also in time. Mediterraneo, List, Trento. The Mediterranean code produces informal architectural laws still Rudofsky B (1977), Architettura senza architetti, Editoriale Scientifica, Napoli. Rudofsky B. (1979), Le Meraviglie dell’architettura spontanea, Laterza, Bari. useful for the development of the contemporary metropolis: it can Gravagnuolo B. (1994), Il mito Mediterraneo nell’architettura Contemporanea, Electa be used to rethink the design of the city suburbs and to build public Napoli, Napoli. Bocco Guarnieri A., Rudofsky B. (2003), A Humane Designer, Springer, Wien-New York. spaces in the city centre. In fact, this spatial principle is also present Braudel F. (1987), Il Mediterraneo. Lo spazio la storia gli uomini le tradizioni, Bompiani, in the work of the modern and contemporary masters, such as Le Milano.
118 119 Coastal geography icons we have to form a discontinuous picture of the historical process made up TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS of hierarchies of phenomena, of principal and secondary facts, in order to commensurate displacements and purposes. The construction of this Nicola La Vitola: [email protected] structural model of history is not implemented and achieved once and for Politecnico di Bari all, but it is a continuous effort of construction starting from the needs of the following today in which we move” (Gregotti V., 2008). The way in The Mediterranean coastal landscape represents a deposit of places with a which the transformation of the territory is manifested in the history of strong identity character in which the presence of certain architectures to society is a matter of study for the places of the coastal landscape as it mark the conspicuous points enhances the characteristics of the geographies brings together memory and image and helps to build the cultural identity of the coastal limit. These architectures, by stratifying themselves, build of the territory. Once again, the architectural project has the difficult role places of exceptional value, becoming images of the projection of the of a tool to allow the establishment of relationships between the path with last limit of the earth towards the sea and therefore systems of identifying which the places were formed over time and our present, the means to spatial orientation for the territory; Icons of coastal geography for long time establish these new interactions is precisely the language capable of to awaiting project capable of interpreting the meaning of the place. In the communicate “what is” with “what will be”. The identity of a territory history of places, the forms of the project allow to operate that process of directly linked to the collective memory and therefore in a process of wise choice in which the construction of the image is also the construction research and construction of the same is revealed as an image. Research, of identity. History, therefore, is the subject of the project and therefore linked to the relationships that are established in territorial systems when through the exercise of design we are called to re-signify through the they are transformed, risks falling into mere commercial operations in “forms” the territory that stratified and never crystallized its image. In the which architecture is only, if we are lucky, a pleasant container. The need process of building an identity of the territory, the history of architecture to reconstruct a meaning, an identity, with which research contributes to and the project become confused and tend to search for an essence of the project, stages the relationship between memory, present and project architecture itself whose objective, however, cannot be the architectural for the future. The proposed essay, through some manifestations of the object, but the transformation of landscapes as to summarize the aspects of project, aims to highlight possible ways to deal with the places of the the economy, society, tradition, infrastructure it hosts. “The real possibility coastal schedule with the aim of recognizing some ways of re-building the of using historical teaching therefore consists in becoming aware of the image of the landscape through architecture. essence of the tradition in which we operate and, through it, above all of what we believe to be the directions of the possible transformations of architectural design; it therefore consists in the ability to criticize our intentions, to participate by adhering internally to that particular historical condition which is actuality. But to continuously adhere to current events, REFERENCES to change it is necessary to touch the movement of history where it is most sensitive to transformation, most vulnerable to modification. [...] to act Gregotti V. (2008), Il territorio dell’architettura, Feltrinelli, Milano, p. 138.
120 121 Rewriting architecture. alone - such as historical, geomorphological and cultural contextual Methodological for reinventing destroyed and damaged parts instances - that contribute to a virtual state of rewriting possibilities. of historical cities The methodological hypothesis deriving from these considerations TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS - which will be applied to an exploratory case study such as the city of Mosul in Iraq - is based on a series of declaredly logical- Tommaso Lolli: [email protected] rational or intuitive-empathetic steps, which follow one another Sapienza University of Rome until the plausible definition of an individual solution, with the final intention of creating a demonstrative, albeit arbitrary, path of an If between the terminology of architecture and the literary one it is operative and critical attitude to architectural design in urban areas always more common to find a mutualism - it is enough to remember with a high symbolic content. Starting from an urban analysis, an expressions such as: the narration of an architecture, architecture as interpretative phase of formal/figurative synthesis as transposition a palimpsest, writing and/or reading architecture, etc... - it is not so of the settlement intentionality, a montage procedure as spatial widespread a further specification on which is the field of reference and typological articulation until the unravelling of the residual of such terminological borrowing. As in Logic, metalanguage is typological complexities in a design solution will follow. used to identify the object of the proposition without losing the sense of the statement between different levels of reading, the aim here is to propose the differentiation between a language of the architect - understood as poetics - and a language of the discipline of architecture, that is, that system of syntactic, compositional and generative logic that allows the development and articulation of an architecture. This second meaning, which is the primary interest of this contribution, opens up the reflection on some parallels between architecture and linguistics: from the implicit concordance of some REFERENCES components to recursiveness, the property to obtain aninfinite number Derossi P., De Luca C., Tondo E., Architettura e narratività, ed.1 (2000) Edizioni Unicopli, of configurations from a finite number of words. Franco Purini Milano. Corboz A. (1985), Il territorio come palinsesto, Casabella, n° 516, 22-27. (2000) writes that “knowing many buildings [...] forces us to rewrite Palladino D. (2010), Corso di logica. Introduzione al calcolo dei predicati, Carocci, Roma. permanent structures of meaning in a renewed way”, identifying Graffi G. (2008), Che cos’è la grammatica generativa, Carocci, Roma. Ciucci G., Ennesimeanamnesi, in Ciorra P., Peter Eisenman. Opere e progetti, Mondadori precisely the recursive attitude of rewriting. However, here we would Electa, Milano, 1993. like to propose a broader definition of rewriting, not only considering Purini F. (2000), Comporre l’architettura, Editori Laterza, Roma-Bari. Aymonino C. (2000), Il significato delle città, Marsilio, Venezia. the co-textual aspects of architecture, but also counting other Rossi A., Ciudad y proyecto, in Proyecto y ciudad historica, C.O.A.G., Santiago de permanent structures of meaning outside of the architectural form Compostela, 1977.
122 123 Sustainability of the city through the urban form. sustainable and resistant to urban speculation and degradation than The case of Tirana others. The hypothesis here is that such sustainability or its lack TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS thereof is an inherent predisposition of the form of the city. It is also our hypothesis that more formal layering and adjacency reciprocates Skender Luarasi: [email protected] a more sustainable form. The investigation focuses on the history and Llazar Kumaraku: [email protected] urban form of the main axis or boulevard of Tirana. This site performs Polis University both as an object of research and speculation on the one hand, and a sort of methodological axis for this very process, which moves from This presentation focuses on the topic of the sustainability of urban the evaluation of sustainability of an existing site to the projecting of form, in the specific urban context of city of Tirana, Albania. By the principles of sustainability of form toward the future. ‘sustainability’ here we mean the disposition of the urban form to persist at different scales of the city in history and play a formative role in the city’s future development at different scales and levels - symbolically, morphologically, and functionally, among others. Leonardo Benevolo, for instance, pointed to the disposition of the Baroque urban forms to anticipate the “spatial dimension of the modern town, ([how] Versailles transformed into the “boulevards” of a late nineteenth-century town, just as the radiating avenues of the
Champs Elysées became the basis for Haussmann’s Etoile) whereas REFERENCES the time factor, which was to be so important in the new urban society, Alexander C, 1965 “The City is not a Tree,” Architectural Forum, Vol. 122, No 1, April, remained totally foreign to them.” The paper reflects on an ongoing Benevolo L, (1967) The Origins of Modern Town Planning, trans. Judith Landry (Cambridge: PhD seminar at POLIS University, which consists of two research The MIT Press, Dhamo S, Thomai Gj, Aliaj B, (2016) Tirana - Qyteti i Munguar, (Tirane: Polis Press, and design problems: Hillier B., Hanson J, (1984) The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University - how to read an existing city (or parts of it) and its history in terms Press, Le Corbusier, (1987) The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells, (New of the sustainability of its form at different scales; York: Dover Publications, - how to design a future city (or parts of it) according to the principles Lynch K, (1960) The Image of the City, Cambridge: The MIT Press, Mumford E, P, (2018). Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850, New Haven: Yale of the sustainability of urban form. University Press, This research seminaris motivated by the recent urban transformation Mumford L, (1989) Cities in History, (Orlando: Harcourt Rossi A, (1982), The Architecture of the City [1966], trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman of Tirana, which is marked by two seemingly divergent yet correlated (New York and Massachusetts: IAUS, MIT Press, tendencies: an unbridled growth in the periphery, and an erasure of Sitte C, (2013) The Art of Building Cities: City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals, trans. Charles T. Stewart, Martino Fine Books, the historic center from within by new star-architecture real estate. Soria A. (1999) Cerdà: The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization, trans. It is observed, however, that some urban areas have been more Bernard Miller and Mary Fonsi Fleming, Madrid: Electa
124 125 The collage-montage by derivation from the given form, an exemplum - the Bibliothèque as an ‘analogical method’. nationale de France by Dominique Perrault - to the figure, which Compositional exercises for the new Vkhutemas Ideal detects the fundamental elements of the reference itself but translates Museum in Moscow them into a new configuration. The drawing becomes an elective instrument of representation, understood as a moment of abstraction - TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS the morpheme - which allows to identify the significant elements that Oreste Lubrano: [email protected] contribute to the constitution of the work. Recognizing the type of the University of Naples “Federico II” court as a fixed structure, and making explicit the syntax between the signs through successive elaborations in a field of multiple variations, The paper aims to investigate the relationship between canons and the exercise on the Library will lead to the definition of an open court expressive codes – the object of the Call – starting with a reflection composition that, ‘then’, will be ‘inhabited’ by forms deriving from on montage-collage as a technique of approach to the project that an inverse exercise - from figure to form - starting from a painting by can represent a way to “succeed in undermining all the illusions Kazimir Malevič. of representation” (Groupe µ, 1978) and, instead, lead to a deeper The principle of definition of the exercises is based on the intelligibility knowledge of reality. and adequacy of the formal structure of the analyzed work so that it This type of ‘analogous’ composition found its first field of becomes a premise for the formativity of the new figure. experimentation in the artistic avant-gardes: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque worked with this mode of composition, made up of “fragments”, with the aim of producing new relationships between figure and background and, therefore, a new unity. In architecture, Arduino Cantàfora’s La città analoga and La città banale, Aldo Rossi’s La città analoga and Hans Kollhoff’s City of Composite Presence represent just a few manifestations of the experiments that were conducted with the intention of recognizing ‘in the dialectic between the parts’ a greater meaning than that represented by the individual elements. Therefore, the technique of REFERENCES analogical assemblage, allows to make explicit the relationships that define the process of morphogenesis of a new figure through a critical Braghieri N. (2020), “Transizione digitale e continuità analogica”, Casabella, n° 914, pp. 3-35. redesign of the forms belonging to the past. Ernst M. ed. (1972), Scritture, Rizzoli, Milano. The international research seminar, for the realization of the new Groupe µ. (1978), “Douze Bribes pour décoller (en 40.000 signes)”, Revue d’esthétique, n° 3-4. Vkhutemas Museum, has represented the occasion to experiment this Monestiroli A. (1979), L’architettura della realtà, CLUP, Milano. type of analogon composition. A compositional exercise is carried out Monestiroli A. (2002), La metopa e il triglifo, Laterza, Roma-Bari.
126 127 Language an code in the digital. contemporaneity. The current paradox is that one of the most A new “schism” between technology and its tools in important aspects of technical innovation in architectural design lies architectural design? in the codes of its own processing tools, even before the translation TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS into a built object. In its code dimension, this genetic modality of architectural languages that is driven by the digital and was hailed Roberta Lucente: [email protected] by Zevi (1973) as an opportunity to enrich the “lexicon”, “grammar” Giuseppe Canestrino: [email protected] and “syntax” of architecture, is, today, divisive and problematic Università della Calabria when it, not infrequently, inspires radical positions. And these radical positions may be with equal absoluteness and irreducibility both in This paper proposes a reflection on a specific aspect of the relationship favour and against these consequences of the digital dimension in between the digital dimension and architecture. architecture. Considering the different explorations of the connections that exist Reconsidering the boundaries between the territories in which these between the codes of digital instruments and the codes specific to experiments are located and those of purely artistic research, on the architecture, it is interesting to think about those modalities of one hand, and of renewed interest in tectonics, on the other hand, may architectural design that determine linguistic outcomes not inspired help us to evaluate their impact concerning architectural languages by tectonic needs linked to construction or dwelling but, rather, more correctly. according to sensitivities suggested, supported, researched, or imposed by the digital design instruments themselves. Such a reflection inevitably raises questions about the relationship of technology, and in particular of technological innovation, to the genesis of architectural languages. That inspired Simondon’s (1982) association between the diction of “techno-aesthetics” and architecture, led Giedion (1941) to recognize construction as the “subconsciousness of architecture”, and fueled Frampton’s memorable research on tectonics. Today, these visions are updated REFERENCES by paradoxically removing the needs and rules of construction from Giedion S. (1941), Space, time and architecture. The growth of a new tradition, Harvard architecture in order to see the “intrinsic” rules of the design tools University Press, Cambridge, prevail, in particular when they coincide with digital instruments. Negroponte, N. (1970), The Architecture Machine. Toward a more human environment, MIT Press, Cambridge. Some of these rules, such as diagrammatic abstraction or a project’s Negroponte, N. (1976). Soft Architecture Machines, MIT Press, Cambridge. indeterminacy, if they were foundational in the initial digital Simondon G. (1982). On techno-aesthetics (Letter to Jacques Derrida never been sent). The letter is republished in (2012) Parrhesia: a journal of critical philosophy, n° 14, pp. 1-8. experiments, such as those proposed by Negroponte (1970; 1976), Zevi B. (1973), Il linguaggio moderno dell’architettura. Guida al codice anticlassico, are confirmed in our times as typical expressions of a certain Einaudi, Torino.
128 129 Coat-Cappa-Chapel: chapel can be. The Ronchamp design is the complete opposite of new expressions in contemporary european chapel Le Corbusier’s earlier geometrically oriented work (Huse,1976). TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS In a similar approach, most of the contemporary European chapels included in this essay introduced a new architectural vocabulary Andreas Luescher: [email protected] that challenged the traditional notions of a chapel and its function. Bowling Green State University, Ohio This paper explores the poetic quality of experience that is weaved between the human, personal, and emotional experiences one may This research was inspired by a short book entitled Modern Churches have visiting these award-wining chapels, as well the opportunity (Le Corbusier, Matisse, Léger, 1957), which traces three works: the to develop an appreciation of the physical, spatial, and atmospheric Chapel of Vence by Matisse; the religious art by Fernand Léger in components of these chapels as a place. To conclude, the paper will Audincourt; and the Chapel of Ronchamp by Le Corbusier. Readings articulate a specific relational network (Beziehungsgeflecht) between from this book function as a precedence for how architecture and art three facets of contemporary design in chapels in connection with contribute to the creation of a place of silence, prayer, peace, and the following three modes of the poetic: bodily spatial experience; inner joy. Biblical symbolism is very evident in both the origin of immersive experience of nature; and air of sound and light. and the actual physical building of a chapel, and its interpretation can be viewed as originating in a place called cappa, where St. Martin’s miraculous cloak was stored during the Middle Ages. The Latin word cappa denotes a head covering (hence our word cap) and also a hooded coat. Capella (little coat) was the name given to what was left of Martin’s coat as a venerated relic (MacCulloch, 2009). The priest who cared for the cloak was called a cappellanu. To safeguard relics, people built small churches, capellas, from which the English word chapel is derived (Cross and Livingstone, 2015). In addition, any territory without a parish was given the right to form and name its own chapel. Today chapels take on various forms and purposes, such as a place for prayer, a destination for a pilgrimage, and a place for baptisms and burials. These chapels are located on roadsides, REFERENCES in hamlets, in cities, in meadows, or on mountains. As sacred Cross, F. L. and Livingstone, E. A, (Eds). (2015). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian architecture, chapels were perhaps not seen as epochal creations, Church, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. but these particular spaces—especially Le Corbusier’s ecclesiastical Huse, N. (1976). Le Corbusier, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Hamburg. Le Corbusier, Henri Matisse, Ferdinand Léger. (1957). Moderne Kirchen, Arche, Zürich. design for Ronchamp, which laid the groundwork for its successors— MacCulloch, D. (2009). A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Penguin change the definition and understanding of what a contemporary Group, New York.
130 131 The sizes of the shape. dimensions but rules and principles. In territorial contexts, the project Variants and invariants in the architectural design ceases to be a practice that aims at building; it concerns instead the TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS formal reinterpretation of the existing, aimed at the reorganization of spaces and development models. Also the methods of representation Luigi Savio Margagliotta: [email protected] change with the passage of scale. To the geographical dimension Sapienza - University of Rome the project design uses an expressive code «that is placed halfway between concept and image», in which the canonical drawings give In the contemporary times every process has undergone a temporal way to the invention of a writing almost biographical which represents acceleration and the events that concern the transformation of intentions and interpretations translated into image (Pellegrini 1965). the city and the world are now taking place relatively quickly. In Starting with some specific examples, we intend to analyze the this scenario, the architectural design, together with the creative variations and invariants of the architectural design in the transition process, has undergone a weakening: on the one hand there is a to large scale, identified the first in the expressive and figurative deresponsibilization of the facts relating to the transformations characters, while the second in the compositional method that of reality, especially in the big dimension, on the other hand a de- presides over the formal construction. semantisation of operational gestures that affects every scale of the project. In an era of great mutations, reflecting on the capacity of the architectural design, as an instrument capable of producing visions, appears as one of the central points: transformations which concern all the scales of the artefact, from the reduced one of the single building, to that of the city, to that of the wider one of the territory. This one, writes Saverio Muratori, represents the «reorganization given by man to the world» (1967), that is the product of a human practice, as well as for the city, of which result is an artefact (Renna, 1979). «In other words – says André Corboz – the territory is object of construction. [...] Consequently, the territory is a project» (1985).
However, today it represents an exhaustible and perishable resource, REFERENCES an often ousted and unmeaning system which needs formal and Corboz A. (settembre 1985), “Il territorio come palinsesto”, Casabella, n° 516, 24. semantic restructuring operations. Muratori S. (1967), Civiltà e territorio, Centro Studi di Storia Urbanistica, Roma, 313. Taking action today on the big scale implies therefore to question Pellegrini C. (1965), “Note per un’architettura del paesaggio: mitologia e specializzazione”, Edilizia Moderna. La forma del territorio, n° 87-88, 103. itself on the ways and on the specificities of the design, to reason Renna A. (1979), La costruzione della città e della campagna, in Renna A., De Bonis A., on the process of construction of the form, that it does not have Gangemi G., Costruzione e progetto. La valle del Belice, CLUP, Milano, 13.
132 133 The issue of density. Local features are progressively abandoned to accomodate global Canon and code of the contemporary city physiognomies in a process of general homologation, and in different TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS points around the world the image of the same city reiterate itself. These features are at the centre of a more complex phenomenon which Elisa Maruelli: [email protected] invest the language of the new parts of the city and its architecture as Sapienza - University of Rome well as other expressions in the art field. The aim of this work is to investigate the topic of language of the contemporary city, in terms Today the conditions affecting the transformation of cities are of architectural research, aesthetic, communication and the iconic multiple and linked to phenomena of global range, such as the content in the construction of new part of cities within the frame of increase in population in urban centres, the pressures of the global the present time. economic model, the climate emergency, the digital revolution and the issues connected to the recent SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. In this problematic scenario the importance of cities has never ceased to grow. The factor of density that it accommodates underpins its own logic and stimulates economic activity, social activity, represents a good ecological principle for dealing with climate change as it allows to save on infrastructural resources. On the contrary it generates the problem of managing and host a high concentration of people and resources, and the consequent need to include, integrate, adapt, organise and plan complex life processes made of assimilation between multiple activities and variable human behaviours. Since the end of the 20th century, globalisation and the spread of technologies have radically changed the geography of our living spaces: the increase in population in cities has put pressure on urban planning indices, the progressive depletion of natural resources has focused attention on limiting land use, on energy efficiency and technological innovation, favouring the choice of a vertical urban development model. The development on the third dimension make possible to promote an idea of technological innovation, of economic engine, of environmental sustainability. On the other hand, the tower and the skyscraper are design models that generate a controversial relationship between urban morphology and architectural typology.
134 135 The performing porosity of inorganic space. material construct and increasingly projecting it towards an aseptic Restoring a communication but also emotional, virtual but experiential space. The human being, TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS as a consumer of digital images, tends to absorb the world around him and the environments he lives in. In him, however, nothing or very Fabrizio Marzilli: [email protected] little settles in the unconscious. Sapienza University The need, therefore, is to rediscover an autopoietic communication of architecture, which, together with contemporary artistic forms, In 2001, Marina Abramovic dances on a mirrored podium performing reformulates the spiritually typical Simmelian. A language and a “Mambo a Mariendad”. Regardless of the meaning of the act, the most grammar that make the organism and its earthly physicality a moral striking feature is how the playing becomes a work of art through and formal value, deleting its self-referential character in favor of a the museum exhibition. The performance, which by definition must process that makes contextually universal elements its foundation. It be experienced when it manifests itself, is told through its parts: a needs (architecture and art) to be itself, aware of not “to be in time” photograph of the moment, the red dress and a pair of shoes. The (T.S. Eliot, 2013). photography of the artwork, through an internal contradiction, reveals the main post-modernist inheritance that is the will to emphasize no longer the act as an event but the dialectical process between the parts. If on the one hand Eisenman claims that the intention (design or expressive) to distance the observer from the immediate sensory perception is necessary to lead him towards a conceptual position, annulling the hegemony of a sensory response (Eisenmann, 1980), on the other hand, Roland Barthes affirms that the sign must be considered through its adjacencies and more importantly that if “signification participates in the substance of the content” (Barthes, 1977), “value participates in its form” (Barthes, 1977). The former is projected towards a sensible de-territorialization of experience; the latter identifies the new value paradigm in the relationship between REFERENCES the parts. Today architecture, like contemporary art, stands as a mutant, Barthes Roland (1977), Elementi di semiologia. Linguistica e scienza delle significazioni, Einaudi, Torino. transformative, inorganic space. Its porosity, understood as a space Eliot T.S. (2013), La terra desolata, Rizzoli, Milano. full of voids and lacking in its own vitality, seeks to integrate its Eisenman Peter D. (1980), “Architettura concettuale”, Casabella, n. 386, p. 24-27; Georg Simmel (2012), Le metropoli e la vita dello spirito, Armando, Roma animus through human action, transforming the individual from a Bachelard Gaston (1972), La poetica della rêverie, Dedalo, Bari. performer into a performance. It does so by distancing it from a real, Bachelard Gaston (1975), La poetica dello spazio, Dedalo, Bari.
136 137 Transformations/Transmutations. reducing it to a mere mathematical abstraction. Architectural Bertoja vs Mosso: tensions-vibrations-transparencies projects, learning experiments, word-shape combinations, luminous in the architectural space installations by Mosso that reveal the enduring tension in the TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS concentration of the art as Gesamtkunstwerk.
Andreina Milan: [email protected] Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna
Arieto Bertoja (1915-1978), also known as “Harry”, and Leonardo Mosso (1926-2020) – the former being the preeminent Friulian sculptor-designer and the latter a Piedmontese architectural theorist – were exponents of innovative artistic designs in the field of contemporary architecture in the condition of the “intellectual- craftsman” and expressed some of the most fertile moments of artistic production in the second half of the XX century, facilitating subsequent formal hybridisation. Bertoja – who worked autonomously and in co-operation with E. Saarinen and the Eames – synthesizes the experience of the European Vanguard by applying “synaesthesist” design conception to vibrant structures, “musical” in space and light, creating suggestive suspended metal screens. His is the design and fabrication of the Floating Screen, the cascade of light on the altar of the MIT Chapel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. REFERENCES
Fully autonomous was the biographical-artistic reciprocity of Ackerman, R.A. (1991) The Bertoia Legacy: Sound and Motion. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Leonardo Mosso, son of Nicola, talented futuristic architect. Harry Bertoia’s Sculpture. A documentary about Harry Bertoia (1965). https://youtu.be/ a9EF_zO5ihs According to the philosopher Mario Trinchero, the design conception Harry Bertoia, Near and Far, https://youtu.be/nlGhyqkQnxs of space by Mosso – in long-term collaboration in Italy with mentor Cavaglià G. (2020), Leonardo Mosso (1926-2020), Il Giornale dell’Architettura. https:// ilgiornaledellarchitettura.com/2020/12/16/leonardo-mosso-1926-2020/ Alvar Aalto – is called “experimental ideography”. His research is Schiffer Nancy N., Bertoia Val O. (2003), The World of Bertoia, Schiffer, Atgelen. shared in the investigations of the Gedankenesperiment (E. Mach) Trinchero M. (1993), L’architettura come ideografia sperimentale/Baukunst als experimentelle Begriffschrift, in Leonardo Mosso. Die transparente Stadt/La città and the Sprachspielen (L. Wittgenstein): the “theory of the container” trasparente, (inedito), IAAT, Torino. substitutes the “theory of the object” in the fictitious space. Thin, Vowinckel A. (1994), Stukturen der ambivalenz. Versucht einer Annäherung an skulpturale Arbeiten von Leonardo Mosso, in Leonardo Mosso. Die transparente Stadt/ La città slender metal constructions – luminous meshes, spirals, trellises – trasparente/The transparente city, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Scheiwiller, dialogue with or are estranged from the natural and urban landscape, Milano.
138 139 After the natural, the graft. deployed by Grasso be revelatory of signs through which to pre- “Artificialis”: Laurent Grasso at the museum d’Orsay figure the project to come? TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS
Laura Mucciolo: [email protected] Università degli Studi di Firenze
The Museum d’Orsay hosted the last installation by Laurent Grasso, a film called Artificialis, within the exhibitionThe Origins of the World: the Invention of Nature in XIX century. Artificialis is a research project aimed at narrating the transformations adopted by man to modify nature by conforming the space: the mutations and evolutions enacted by humans change their spatial references, updating the language of project with transcriptions, neologisms, experimentations. The images of this cinematic narrative are derived from the geographic- satellite domain, a semi-authorial method confirming the ubiquity of acquired by the human eye thanks to technology. The exploration no longer concerns the physical position of the subject performing it, but rather the relationship of density between the images reproduced as virtual apparatuses, which cannot be univocally decoded. The field of investigation highlighted by Grasso fits transversally into an open path, at the center of which lies an equation to be unlocked: the balance between ‘natural’ and artificial affects the dwelling of the present and the future. From this landscape, do canons and REFERENCES codifications emerge that affect the project? AA. VV. (2014), San Rocco, Ecology. From Grasso’s work the paper intends to analyze the relations of AA. VV. (1975), Le Macchine Celibi, La Biennale, Venezia. Bonfadio J. (1744), Lettere famigliari di M. Jacopo Bonfadio, Longui, Bologna. coexistence between ‘natural’ and artificial, in the landscape of post- Bridle J. (2019), Nuova era oscura, Nero, Roma. natural as a set of future artificial laws. The link between human Colonna, F. (1499), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Manuzio, Venezia. Corboz A., “Il paesaggio come palinsesto”, Casabella, n°516, pp. 22-27. and non-human leads to unprecedented operations of exploration Ibánez D., Katsikis N. (2014), New Geographies, Grounding Metabolism. and advancement, whose relationship emerges already in the Koolhaas R., AMO (2020), Countryside, a report, Guggenheim Taschen, Köln. Pistoletto M. (2010), Il terzo paradiso, Marsilio, Venezia. contemporary among the subtle anticipatory meshes of art. If the Rykwert J. (1972), La casa di Adamo in paradiso, Adelphi, Milano. Artificialis’ images are memories of the future, then can the moves Von Humboldt A. (1860), Cosmos. Descrizione fisica del mondo, Grimaldo, Venezia.
140 141 Visual spaces of change: use, perception, moment and memory of the spaces photographed, while creating “visual TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS pathways” that intentionally interfere with the territory in a self- reflective representation of its process of change. It gives visibility Pedro Leão Neto: [email protected] to spatial and temporal aspects difficult to perceive without the use Miguel Santos: [email protected] of photography and imagery, reinforcing the potential of photography Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto as an object of thought and production of meaning for rendering visible transformations of architecture and urban landscapes. This paper discusses Sofia F. Augusto’s project: Architecture and Augusto´s architectural gaze is able of unveiling important spatial Photography - Photographic Mapping: Use, Perception, Moment features of Siza´s FAUP building, communicating through an about the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP). architectonic vantage point the spaces of FAUP and its experiences in The article suggests the importance of photographic projects in the a visual narrative. It possesses a documentary and artistic character perception and design of architectural environments. The article that expands the conventional categorization of photography of is contextualized by the interdisciplinary research project Visual architecture. This article explores and deepens new artistic languages Spaces of Change, which combines contemporary photography of looking and understanding the built space. and visual documentation with georeferencing. The project fosters a renewed understanding of contemporary architecture by inviting photographers to respond to the work of Portuguese architects. It instigates the research of new photographic approaches, which depart from the traditional imagery displayed in architectural press, offering REFERENCES visual narratives that enrich the discussion on architectural buildings Augusto, S. (2018) ‘FAUP – Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade do Porto: Momento. and their uses. Percepção–Representação’, in Pedro Leão Neto (ed.). Um Outro Olhar Sobre Obras de Augusto’s work is a visual dialog with the FAUP’s campus, which Álvaro Siza Viera, Fotografia Documental e Artística: Um Olhar Contemporâneo sobre a Arquitectura portuguesa, Porto: scopio Editions. was designed by Álvaro Siza who might be the most prestigious Bourriaud, N. (2002), Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Réel, Paris. Portuguese architect. The photographic work proposes an explorative Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (eds) (2008), A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. visual narrative, which creates a strong relation between document Solnit, R., (2009), River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. and fiction that highlights architectural features and encourages Bloomsbury, London Pardo, A., and Redstone, E. (eds) (2014), Constructing Worlds: Photography and the re-examination of this iconic architectural place, its complex Architecture in the Modern Age, Prestel Publishing, Munich. dimensions and architectural language. Augusto’s photographic Campany, D. (2014), ‘Architecture as Photography: Document, Publicity, Commentary, Art’ in Pardo, A., and Redstone, E. (eds) Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture exploration suggests new ways of understanding and perceiving in the Modern Age, Prestel, Munich. these spaces and buildings, how they are used by students, staff, and Gadanho, P. (2005), “Architecture Photography: New Territories in the MoMA Collection”, in Scopio International Photography Magazine 2 1/3 Dec. 2014 p. 42-55 visitors. Wagstaff, S. (2005), “The Labouring Eye” in Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978 – 2004, Tate This photographic project enriches and informs the perception Publishing, London.
142 143 The mutation of typological elements The operational usefulness of this study on building types consists in the formative and transformative process in identifying, over a long period of time, the meaning of the of school architecture in Rome transformation sequences and in analyzing how an organism can be TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS read, not only as an individual building intended to satisfy needs in a short period, but as a moment of a process of transformations of an Cinzia Paciolla: [email protected] entire civil area. Sapienza - University of Rome
At the end of the nineteenth century, the school building in Rome settled in the historic centre of the city, in a prestigious area characterized by historical resonance, which, at the same time, ensured accessibility and great turnout. The location in the stratified and consolidated fabric collides with the limited availability of free spaces and, therefore, with the need to expropriate pre-existing buildings. The school is adapted in irregular plot in which it’s often not possible to make transformations in accordance with the pedagogical and technological avant-garde. The construction of the school building in the consolidated city re- proposes the ancient dilemma between building type’s innovation and permanence of the typological substrate in the historical fabric. This research proposes an interpretative analysis and the reading of the typological and morphological characteristics of scholastic architecture of Municipality I of Rome. These buildings show REFERENCES profound historical, architectural and pedagogical diversifications. Cannigia G., Maffei G., (2006), Ragionamenti di tipologia. Operatività della tipologia For this reason, to facilitate the search of mutations, the buildings processuale in architettura, Alinea. have been classified by their typological matrix, such as reuse and Cannigia G., Maffei G., (2001), Architectural Composition and Building Typology: Interpreting Basic Building, Alinea Editrice. re-functionalization of pre-existing building, especially palaces and Maffei G.L., Maffei M. (2011), Lettura dell’Edilizia Speciale, Alinea Editrice, Firenze. convents, and ex-novo buildings that reinterpret the same types. Strappa G. (2015), L’architettura come processo, Franco Angeli, Roma. Casalina, M., Le scuole di Roma, Roma, 1932. With these premises, the buildings are considered as results of Ragazzi D. (1990), Storia della scuola italiana: linee generali e problemi di ricerca, Le procedural derivation, variants due to the progressive specialization Monnier, Firenze. Carbonara P. (2009), Architettura pratica. Sez. 7-Edifici per l’istruzione e la cultura. 1958. and hierarchization of the cells that transform civil and religious Bedarida A. (1932), Edifici scolastici razionali : giardini d’infanzia, scuole elementari, serial building into special and complex organisms. scuole per sordomuti, Crudo & C., Torino.
144 145 Inclusive architecture. the built space as a vehicle for social equality. A language for each one This is the principle behind Takeshi Hosaka’s project that creates, for TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS his deaf clients, the “RoomRoom” house with 100 small windows to allow parents fast communication, and the ability to follow all their Chiara Pecilli: [email protected] movements. Sapienza - University of Rome A prosthetic approach aimed at enhancing the ability of the subject. This is what happens in the Maison à Bordeaux by Rem Koolhaas “Architecture is not just an art that responds to a function, but in which the owner, confined to a wheelchair, wants a house that something that also serves to communicate: the culture, environment, expresses the complexity of a different life, since now “the house will uses and customs of a nation” (Renato De Fusco, 1967). define his world”. (Domus, 1999) At the basis of the artistic language of architecture there is global It is not to aim for a “regulation” but to entire new canons that could communication, never univocal. enter the daily life of all of us, to the point of enriching and making “Good architectural communication occurs when it is perceived, this process inclusive. We must focus on an expanded, unexplored when the sign is understood and becomes a common heritage for the user base from which it is possible to acquire skills that allow you to construction of knowledge, of a culture” (Maurizio Abeti, 2018) design consciously. Many factors condition the transmission of spatial codes: we speak Architecture is a tool of and for communication and as such cannot of disabilities that can be sensorial, motorial, psychical and each be exclusive or limited. The transmission of knowledge takes place involves a different perception of space. through a changing language in continuous evolution, a process that The proof of good architecture lies in public experience, and represents what remains through a process of selection; the purpose experience in constant motion, often unsatisfied. is to investigate new codes of space remembering that architecture is We adapt places to people instead of creating different, inclusive at the service of those who use it. codes. Architecture is spoken of as a universal language that, like human languages, can achieve semantic universality if it possesses the ability to produce information. We, therefore, mean the possibility of adding another message to a message, the meaning of which brings with it values of social, cultural, and economic changes. So, can we say that artistic language in today’s world is truly REFERENCES universal? We are looking for an inclusive and multi-perceptible architecture Abalos I., 2009, Il buon abitare. Pensare le case della modernità, Marinotti, Milano; Fava S., 1984, Gentile B., La casa e l’abitare in psicopatologia, Cortina, Milano; that is a tool for reading contemporary society and a fundamental Tinacci E., Steven Holl, 2005, Antologia di testi su sensual space, l’architettura element of its transmission, using the improvement of the quality of fenomenologica, Kappa, Roma.
146 147 Constants in sacred space As is well known, our perception doubles between objective and subjective, TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS between material and non-material, and this perception is closely related to the interpretation of form. Through the authors’ analysis will achieve the Emel Petërçi: [email protected] existence of constants in the built architecture and the precise definition of Polis University the sacred space, the finding of the elements, in this case, will accomplish the constants during the transformation of the sacred spaces. In the following, In a century of rapid technological change, it seems that returning to the the research looks closely at how space is loaded with meaning and, more importance of experiencing sacred space is a contemporary problem. Also, broadly, in some aspects of space transformations - how they were brought reducing the tension between continuity and innovation is a dilemma that about and what constituted them. This thesis will parallel the study of has long troubled and conditioned the modern discourse on the architecture constants as architectural theory and the research of sacred spaces converted of sacred spaces. One of the phenomena that have intrigued this study is for Mediterranean cities. Also, be able to project how were experienced the to explain how different religions have shared the same room at other sacred spaces before the transformations took place. The discussion focus times by highlighting how during functional transformations, the feeling of on Muslim attitudes towards the conversion of the sacred space, how they sacred space remains unchanged. Consequently, the need arises to use an have influenced the transformation of space, especially in Albania, during immeasurable tool that will explain the perception of the sacred. This tool in the Ottoman occupation. The social dynamics of the change of sacred spaces the research is called “constant” referring to its use as a noun meaning “not over time is a relevant topic for the religious community and the preservation, to interrupt in time and which acts continuously over a while” (Dictionary, and documentation of the country’s cultural heritage values. 2021). The term “Constant” is widely used in algebra as “a fixed value” (Dictionary, 2021) nd this paper will demonstrate that in this special case the transition from well-known “type” has developed to “constant”. and this REFERENCES paper will demonstrate that in this particular case, the transition from well- ppadurai, A. (1986). The social life of things: Commodities in Religious buildings. . known “type” has developed to “constant.” Typology is a functional and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dictionary, M.-W. (2021). Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www. instrumental device and is accepted due to the importance that many authors merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constant. have paid to it, and any other term has not seriously challenged it. However, Miller, D. (1987). Material Cutlure and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Quincy, A.-C. Q. (2000). The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy although a long time has passed since the treatment of the typology, an (Vol. vol. 3). (S. Younés, Trans.) London: Papadakis Publisher. agreement has not yet been reached to conclude the exact concept. Raphael Robert M. Hayden, A. E.-E.-M.-H.-H. (2019). Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces. Routledge. Moneo makes a good effort to summarize the author Quatremere de Quincy’s Rossi, A. (‘1956-1972). Tipologia, manualistica architetture. In R. Bonicalzi, Scritti scelti definition, where he defines it as a grouping objectively characterized by the sull’Architettura e la Citta (p. 304). Milan: CLUP. Rossi, A. (1982). The architecture of the City. (D. G. Ockman, Trans.) Cambridge : MIT same formal structure (Rossi, 1956-1972). And here lies the power of type. Press. Many theories relate the concept of sacred space through a phenomenological, Verkaaik, O. (2013). Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives. Amsterdam University Press. ontological, or cultural explanation. These definitions relate to the notion of William, J. (1961). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature. . New emotions and perception as the primary means of experiencing the sacred. York: Collier Books.
148 149 Transform-Action of Public Space. revolution of public space, whose metamorphosis has meant its From urban fabric metamorphosis to bottom-up strategies emancipation from the building fabric, sufficient to allow an adequate in the Post-Pandemic City response even in the face of an unpredictable emergency such as a TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS pandemic, which has forced us to reinvent the use of public places and where urban codes, hitherto written, no longer have any value? Greta Pitanti: [email protected] Starting from the metamorphosis of the urban fabric, including the Sapienza - University of Rome public space that is an intrinsic part of it, the research proposes to analyse some case studies of “readaptation”, demonstrating that Public space changes with the city and has always been the object evolution is constant and that it is always possible to transform a and ‘subject’ of urban transformation. Its definition as both physical language for a need, giving the city an intrinsic and innate fluidity. and relational space (Torricelli, 2009) stems from the need to find (Bauman, 2000) a new meaning for the city and from the urgency to affirm it as an identity space, a symbol of the Genius Loci, no longer as an urban void compared to the architectural fullness, but as a constituent part of the city itself (Koetter and Rowe, 1978). The lack of “planning” of the public space has become an awareness in the Post-Industrial City, distinguished by an evident “hypertrophic synecism” of the urban fabric that has raised a multidisciplinary interest in the outcomes of REFERENCES a city “without public space”. Therefore, not only urban sociology, Barbarossa, L. (2020). “The Post Pandemic City: Challenges and Opportunities for a Non- which has proposed to analyse the socio-cultural and segregative Motorized Urban Environment. An Overview of Italian Cases” Sustainability 12, no. 17: 7172. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12177172 differences that this type of problem has generated (Lefebvre, 1972), Bertuglia C.S., Vaio F. (2019), Il fenomeno urbano e la complessità, Bollati Boringhieri, but also architectural theory which, faced with the issue, has decided Torino Gehl J., Svarre B. (2013), How to study public life, Island Press, Washington to study and intervene on the use and “wear and tear” of urban space https://unhabitat.org/un-habitat-report-on-cities-and-pandemics-towards-a-more-just-green- (Gehl, 2013). Thus, the desire to make it a “focus” to observe and and-healthy-future https://www.isglobal.org/en/healthisglobal/-/custom-blog-portlet/los-espacios-publicos-y-la- a “corpus” to reach (Bertuglia and Vaio, 2019), declaring the need salud-en-la-ciudad-pospandemia/8000927/12302# to find a new design formula capable of analysing public lifeand Koetter F., Rowe C. (1978) Collage City, The MIT Press, Cambridge Lefebvre H. (1972), Spazio e politica: il diritto alla città II, Ombre Corte, Milano acting to improve it. (Sim, 2019) Hence the bottom-up strategies of Norberg-Schulz C. (1979), Genius Loci. Paesaggio, Ambiente, Architettura, Mondadori the Contemporary City, which find in the social initiative and in the Electa, Milano Sim D., (2019) Soft City, Island Press, Washington participatory process the cornerstones of a transformation, capable Torricelli G. P. (2009), Potere e spazio pubblico urbano. Dall’agorà allo slum, i.CUP - of impressing its work also in the urban expression, defining a new Accademia di architettura – Università della Svizzera italiana, Mendrisio. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) (2019), City-Wide Public architectural language symbolizing the need to communicate a Space Strategies: A Compendium of Inspiring Practices, UNON Publishing Services necessity rather than a design code (Un Habitat, 2019). But is this Section, Nairobi
150 151 Eternal present discover, to give a meaning to his passage, to his life. Architecture TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS is life. Architecture tells the story of life, accompanies it in time with renewed languages. Forms that speak of the contemporaneity Sergio Policaro: [email protected] of keeping pace in the present time. Emotions and feelings that are Sapienza - University of Rome translated through one’s own image. Being and not appearing. Living bodies of reality. The tensions between the forms animate the space. “We tell the engineers what we want to achieve, and they tell us if it Architectural construction has the power to simplify man’s existence, is possible. Most structural engineers, with very few exceptions, do welcoming his needs and preserving his transitory reality. Harmonies not know what they are doing. They can imagine things, but they don’t between spaces that, looking back in time, explore the future. know what they mean”.(Pizzigoni) The “eternal present” of architecture is built. It is not identified with a specific form but is sublimated by “types” and “archetypes” that belong to the history of man. Elements that start from afar and reach the contemporary world with new languages, they develop images and translate them into forms. They are spectres of compositional mutations that move in complex fields of architectural variables, in search of meaning, an immutable value in time. Architecture is a human fact that represents reality, it is cloaked in meaning and aesthetic values. It tells the story of the culture of its time. What is transitory cannot be called architecture. It requires the art of building combined with expressive clarity to achieve it. Rereading the constructions of Mies or the works of Kahn, the role of form becomes evident. It is understood as an architectural necessity to assign a role, through the wise aggregation of elements, basic components of the construction such as columns, walls, etc., which are part of a whole: they materialize the space. REFERENCES The research field of the form identifies the architect’s work, to challenge once more gravity, laws of nature to build a space of Pizzigoni V. (a cura di) (2010), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Gli scritti e le parole, Einaudi, Torino, p. 199. apparent stability. A restless relationship made of similarities and Monestiroli A. (1979), L’architettura della realtà, CLUP, Milano. references. Gestures that are carried out in the continuous ritual Zermani P. (1995), Identità dell’architettura, Officina Edizioni, Roma. Purini F. (2005), Comporre l’architettura, Editori Laterza, Macerata. necessity of founding, fencing and covering. In this millenary action, Portoghesi P. (2006), Architettura e Memoria, Gangemi Editore, Roma. man is at the center with his mortality that crosses time. He tries to Campo Baeza A. (2013), “Principia architectonica”, Mairea Libreos, Madrid.
152 153 The Language of Architecture and Design lies and destruction. They often feature a group having an exclusive in Science-Fiction Movies. ideology and ritual practice, a system of religious worship, a devotion Space and Society in films of the turn of the century to a person, idea or activity, or a popular fashion. The movies are often TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS set between an urban nightmare and high-tech paradise or an urban paradise and a high-tech nightmare. There also is a rich tradition Sigrun Prahl: [email protected] of science fiction literature and films depicting an urbanism of the University of Applied Science Krefeld future that speculates on social order and hierarchy. The problems of dehumanization, conformism and the lack of free-will seems to be Science-fiction movies show a variety of fundamental more prevalent here. principles and theories about spatial and social appearance Science fiction cinema has used the city to architecturally represent and might therefore serve as a harbinger of future city designs. the political, technological or social dreams and anxieties and to This genre of film constantly reflects visually stimulating contexts project forward and visualize desires and fears. and portrays cities of imagination that are often responsive to real It would go too far to claim that our cities will once be similar to the urban issues. These references range from the interaction between ones we see in science fiction movies today. But the films show us different kinds of people to the arrangement of architectural form. The trends in architectural style and trends in society that might give us a relationship between human behavior and the physical environment hint of what our future environment will look like. is a key factor in this analysis. More importantly the films make us think of how we as designers In this context five main topics are studied: can influence these (for the most part negative) trends today to make - story, context, and site; our future cities more human both in social terms and in spatial - social, economic, cultural and natural forces in the story; appearance. - design of spaces, architecture, fashion, and graphic design; - relationship between spatial and social appearance; - relationship between human behavior, hierarchy/equality, and the physical environment. In many science fiction movies the city and the possibilities it could bring for a better future is embraced. On the one hand many films REFERENCES portray cities of hope reflecting a belief that the future architecture Banks, M. J., (2002), Monumental Fictions: National Monument as a Science Fiction Space, and urban design will not be the enemy but rather a potential savior in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Fall 2002. Barber, S., (2002), Projected Cities: cinema and urban space. for many of society’s problems. In this context they sometimes King, G., Krzywinska and T. eds. (2000), Science Fiction Cinema, From Outer space to project an ideology of a clean, organized and rational future that was Cyberspace, Wallflower Press. Mahleb, E., (2005), Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema, in also shared by many modernist architects. Architecture and Design, Cinema, Essays, Sci-Fi. On the other hand there are films that feature a city of fear, hierarchy, Toy, M. (ed.), (1999), Sci-Fi Architecture, John Wiley & Sons.
154 155 The hypertextuality of art of dematerialization of the architectural product as an expression in the architecture of the transition of virtual reality, on the other, experiences aimed at reunifying the TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS arts in a new meta-historical plan are being concentrated, certainly derived from critical reformulation of the experiences of the 1900s. Antonio Riondino: [email protected] Their pre-eminent character is in fact the conceptualization of the Politecnico di Bari object: a place through which, by affirming autonomy, historical codes are put in contact with what is today outside of any of their “The problem and the current crisis of art are part of the broader rules, both grammatical, syntactic and tectonic. and more alarming scenario of the problem and the current crisis of The dissertation intends to dwell on this aspect, analyzing it in relation the city” to the dynamics that are influencing the concept of living, making its Argan, 1970 crisis the field of a new aesthetic research and new methodological measures based on hypertextuality, able in this sense to evoke and During the twentieth century, the main invariant of modern language re - to mean the problematic dimension of history, in the transience was the plastic-visual decomposition of the plane and space, of the present. aimed at investigating the dark field of the zeitgeist opened by the new physical-social scenarios through its most direct antipole: the reason. This was the beginning of compositional upheavals that shattered the image to reformulate it into analytical plans intended to “hypertextualize” the work of art. From there a new approach to the arts and therefore to architecture was born, understood no longer according to their specific peculiarities, but within a broader and more problematic gnoseological field due REFERENCES by their reciprocal circularity. The result was the relativization of languages, a paradigm of an action of art that became Arnheim R. (1977), Arte e percezione visiva, Feltrinelli, Milano Argan G. C. (1970), L’arte moderna, Sansoni Editore, Firenze programmatically temporary, provisional, to the point of cracking the Augé M. (1992), Nonluoghi. Introduzione a una antropologia della surmodernità, Elèuthera, most stable of its expressions: architecture. Marc Augé, in this regard, Milano Terranova A. (2001), Mostrimetropolitani, Meltemi Editore, Roma wrote that contemporary architecture no longer has eternity as its goal Severino E. (a cura di R. Rizzi) (2003), Tecnica e Architettura, Raffaello Cortina Editore, but the present. A haphazard and transitory present, chosen, in some Milano Purini F. (2008), La città come testo critico, Franco Angeli Editore, Milano cases, as the analogical form of the consumer product, subverting its Purini F. (2012), Tra norma e forma, Accademia University Press, Roma original function into that of the mass-media image, devoid of its own Tafuri M. (1980), La sfera e il labirinto: avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ‘70, Einaudi, Torino linguistic and temporal stability. Gregotti V. (2012), Incertezze e simulazioni. Architettura tra moderno e contemporaneo, In this context, if on the one hand we are witnessing a similar process Skira, Milano
156 157 Linguistic issues of the railway terminal rhetoric and innovation. In the second half of the twentieth century, TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS the development of “high speed” gave impetus to the further updating still in progress, which is pushing both to the ever greater integration Giuseppe Rociola: [email protected] of the station with the surface and underground urban space, and Politecnico di Bari towards terminals immersed in the landscape as iconic landmarks, whose language, often self-celebrating, emphasizes their presence The study concerns the linguistic metamorphoses of the railway and symbolic value. terminal and the strong relationship they have with the transformations The purpose of the dissertation is to examine the linguistic of city and landscape. metamorphosis of the railway terminal, as an expression of the The contemporary terminal, as emblematic place of “supermodernity”, functional and morphological changes that over time transformed reflects in a sense some issues of the railway stations of the nineteenth it from infrastructural hub, decentralised with respect to the city, century, in which the question of language immediately became the to a nodal place of the urban-landscape structure and social, as an dominant theme, as for example in the Euston Station in London, expressive theatre of metropolitan flows. whose neoclassical propylaea replace the primitive wooden and iron canopies of other coeval stations. In a few decades, the need to make the innovation of rail transport expressive as a new urban icon becomes more and more central, as in the Gare de l’Est in Paris and especially in the King’s Cross Station in London, where the facade and the entire building is “fractured” thanks to the iron and glass structure, allowing to mediate the classical language with the progressive “opening” towards the city, and transforming the REFERENCES terminal into an extension of the public space. A trend perfected in Barbera L. V. (2013) “Esercizi di trascrizione di opere contemporanee di architettura italiana : the twentieth century, characterized by linguistic mutations due to Il progetto di concorso per il Nuovo fabbricato viaggiatori della Stazione Termini, Roma the different role of the station in urban processes, from a periurban (1947-’48)”, L’architettura delle città - The Journal of the Scientific Society Ludovico Quaroni, Vol 1, n. 1-2, pp. 5-53. appendix to an attractive nucleus. A paradigm shift, supported by the Cerver F. A. (1997), The architecture of stations and terminals, Whitney Library of Design, introduction of electricity, that stimulated the replace of the industrial New York. Ferrarini A. (2004), Stazioni. Dalla Gare de l’Est alla Penn Station, Mondadori Electa, language with the typical language of the urban palace. Milano. In the main European and Western cities, in the 20s the first phase Gerlini M., Mori P., Paiella R. (2016) Architettura e progetti delle stazioni italiane ...dall’Ottocento all’Alta Velocità, CIFI, Roma. of this process reached its peak, while in the 30s and 40s the main Jones W. (2006), New Transport Architecture: Travel Hubs in the 21st Century, MITCH, international contribution to the linguistic updating of the train London. Mazzoni C. (2001) Stazioni. Architetture 1990-2010, Federico Motta Editore, Milano terminal was mainly due to the intense season of architectural Pevsner N. (1976), Railway Station in History of Building Types, Thames & Hudson, competitions and realizations in Italy, tensed between national Princeton.
158 159 The perception of space in architecture between the differences and incongruities of cultural systems. In this frame of new codes and new canons. reference, architecture does not exhaust its energy by strengthening TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS old ideologies, but frees itself by exploring new worlds, new codes. To succeed in the exploration it is necessary to triple, quadruple the Salvatore Rugino: [email protected] number of parties involved in the design process. Università degli Studi di Brescia The game of perception of space is to collect information that revolves around and does not belong to the world of architecture. The sources The tendency to believe that it is possible to live within the patterns that indicate the path of complexity are numerous. In this regard, and images of the past is one of the fundamental problems inherent Cecil Balmond asks: “How can the architectural imagination respond in the processes that make up the relationship with everything that to this change and how can the collective imagination be exploited no longer belongs to it. Today, we must free ourselves from patterns in contemporary organizational structures?”. This is possible by and conventions in order to understand the “new”. It is nothing thinking that the whole can be sectioned into several parts and finally more than the result of the creative instability and materials, real reduced to a single image, using digital systems. All the images or and virtual, of architecture. We do nothing but describe the new as all the new scenarios produced by digital systems cancel, in a certain something “outside” our competence, as something foreign to our sense, the three-dimensionality to the point of misunderstanding of way of operating. We must, however, recognize that this “outside” the architectural object, making it almost, precisely, an image. This is everywhere, we are surrounded by it, and it is within us, within involves the superimposition of several factors that increase the game our imagination. The secret lies in freeing the view from objects and of illusion, generating a new type of space. The space of illusion no habits that derive from a vision that is too focused on the object. longer represents a conception of the world, but a conception of life, We stop describing to clarify. One question, one possible answer. We because today the relationship between the individual and space is try to occupy the space, so that the dynamic action prevails over the undergoing a radical transformation, taking on new codes and new continuity of the predictable paths. In this way, the space is generated canons. and not ordered by the movement. A space that is the instant sign of use.
In the past, architectural research has focused its attention on image REFERENCES and form, putting aside the concept of structure or use. There was a AA. VV. (2001), Dicionario Metápolis de Arquitectura Avanzada, Actar, Barcelona. certain area of familiarity in the images that came from modernism Deleuze G. 1969)DELEUZE, Logique du sens,Paris. or classicism. Today we must focus attention not on familiar Heidegger M. (1924), Der Begriff der Zeit, Marburgo. Kwinter S., Koolhaas R. (1996), Conversations with Students, Princeton Architectural Press, images, but on those structures that represent a dismembered reality, New York 1996. taking advantage of them and enhancing, at the same time, their Lewis M. (2002), Next. The future just happened, New York. Tescione E. (2003), Architettura della mente, Testo&Immagine. fragmentation through the culture of differences. Today we feel the Tschumi B., Berman M. (2003), Index Architecture. A Columbia Book of Architecture, MIT need to expand our horizons by exploring and experimenting through Press edition, New York.
160 161 The metamorphosis as design approach. levels archive, where the last floor houses a reading room. While in The recomposition in Mario Labò’s work the previous case study the alteration of the villa is ‘painless’, in this TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS adaptive reuse there are important modifications given by the walls anchoring or by the unprecedented close-up view of the frescoes by Marco Russo: [email protected] Domenico Piola. Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli Mario Labò’s work allows us to reflect on the transformation of the built environment starting from its spatial features. The project The Ligurian architect Mario Labò works in the 1940s on the for the University Library in Genoa recalls the surrealist act of the transformation of existing buildings with the transfiguration of a decontextualized object, but either way, we can trace a method villa in Genoa, while for listed buildings he uses a more ‘cautious’ inspired by the main artistic movements of the twentieth century approach. by which there is the creation of new languages born around the In 1941 he transformed a small house in Genoa overturning its preexistence (Bohigas, 2020). meaning (Podestà, 1941). The existing building is in gothic style and Labò alters the image of the bourgeois house in a radical way; the naval engineer and the art collector Alberto della Ragione was the client of this singular operation. The project is not reduced to simplifying the excessive decorations of the old house, but there is a total tampering of existing building. Floor plan and main volume are involved in an operation after which it is impossible to recognize the features of the past building. The concept of palimpsest, described by Machado (1976) as a rewriting operation, leaves space to an original recomposition. While in the palimpsest we can still read some traces of the old villa, in this case it is not possible to identify any reference to what exists through a new planimetric distribution and a modification of the volumetric characters of the existing house with some references to the Villa del floricoltore by Terragni built a few REFERENCES years before (Labò, 1947). Labò uses a similar approach for the reuse of the Saints Gerolamo Bohigas, O. (2020), “Pre-existences as aesthetic discourse”, Tc Cuadernos, n° 144, pp. 20-24. Labò, M. (1947), Giuseppe Terragni, Il Balcone, Milano. e Francesco Saverio Church in Genoa with a spatial revolution Machado, R. (1976), “Old buildings as palimpsest – Toward a theory of remodeling”, thanks to a steel structure inserted in the central nave. The original Progressive Architecture, n° 11, pp. 46-49. Podestà, A. (1941), “Una villa a Genova”, Costruzioni-Casabella, n°157, pp. 28-33. project has several authors, but Agnoldomenico Pica attributes the Scelsi, V. (2017), “Fuselli, Labò e la Nuova Biblioteca Universitaria di Genova, 1926-1936”, final configuration to Labò (Scelsi, 2017). The new library is a five- ‘Ananke, n° 81, pp. 91-96.
162 163 The city of the collection TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS
Cristian Sammarco: [email protected] Sapienza - University of Rome
“Having refers to things and things are fixed and describable. Being refers to experience and human experience is in principle indescribable “. For Erich Fromm (1900-1980) Having is Being and Massimiliano Gioni in the 2013 Venice Art Biennale summarizes this assumption by wondering if the knowledge that passes through the knowledge of objects is less truthful than experience. He does so in the curation of the exhibition on Marino Auriti who in 1955 in the utopian project for “Il Palazzo enciclopedico” in Washington dreams of gathering all knowledge in a single large architectural organism. According to Maria Grazia Meda, this is the mania for collecting that can be summarized in terms of Having, Being and Knowing. Through the possession and knowledge of the objects we collect we find our identity. But if collecting is usually summarized in its noblest Wunderkammer image, to a private dimension made up of small and large objects that build the surfaces of an interior space, if we open our eyes to the contemporary city we can identify it as a city of the collection. The proposed essay deals with the theme of the city as a large tray on which “signed” objects are placed too REFERENCES often without any relationship with the existing urban fabric. It is a city- Croce B. (1920), Breviario di Estetica, Laterza, Bari; museum for occasional visitors. A city that must amaze as Rome did in Cuisenier J., Vibaek J. (2002), Museo e Cultura, Sellerio Editore, Palermo; Fromm E. (1977), Avere o essere?, A. Mondadori, Milano; the early Middle Ages following the “emergencies” encountered along Grazioli E. (2012); La Collezione come forma d’arte, Johan & Levi; the Einsiedlen Route. From Dubai to Milan, the cities of the image are Maffei G. L., Maffei M. (2011), Lettura dell’edilizia speciale, Alinea Editrice, Firenze; Sottsass E. (2017), Per qualcuno può esse lo spazio, Adelphi Edizioni, Milano; collecting object-architecture: is this a new practice or just the evolution Travanini C. (2016), Oggetto e valore. Intersezioni tra teoria dell’oggetto e teoria del valore of a building process already underway for centuries? in Alexius Meinong, Mimesis, Milano;
164 165 Baltic Code. The reflections of the International Seminar had an incredible Language, body and spaces in contemporary architecture synchrony with the proposals seen at the Contemporary Venice of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia Architecture Biennale where Estonia, in its pavilion, reflects on the TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS public spaces of small cities increasingly affected by urban voids, the result of the demolition or abandonment of obsolete Soviet Donatella Scatena: [email protected] architecture. In the exhibition “Square! Positively shrinking”, edit by Sapienza - University of Rome J. Tintěra, G. Raagmaa, K. Vellevoog, M. Pedanik, and P. Pähn, there are the regeneration projects of 15 Estonian cities: squares in Elva An International Seminar entitled “Small Baltic Conversations” has and Rakvere (2020), just ended at Sapienza, which wanted to investigate the state of the town center squares in Võru and Kuressaare in 2019 and othersin art of contemporary architecture in the three Baltic regions through Tõrva, Põlva, Valga and Rapla (2018). Lithuania presents Planet an interdisciplinary approach. of People, the work of the artist Julijonas Urbonas, which tends to Starting from the results of this series of meetings, the article investigate the relationship between gravity and artistic aesthetics. asks some questions: is there a Baltic school? Is there a shared This project, set up at the Derelitti church, is a work in progress that code? It emerged that although Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are makes use of the presence of the public to “create a new celestial often perceived as one in the north-east of the West, they are three colony of human bodies” floating in space. To the question of the very different realities in terms of culture, heritage and artistic Biennale “How Will We Live Together?”, As well as to that of the development. Despite this, since their independence from the 1990 Sapienza Seminary, the three Baltic regions respond through a study regime, Baltic architects and artists have worked simultaneously on of the real and fluctuating space in which our bodies move and relate. invariants in the search for new urban places and on the connections between language, space and body in architecture. Already from the experience of the experimental Fluxus movement (by the Lithuanian G. Maciunas 1931-1978), the perception of space becomes continuous change, cultural and geographical distances are eliminated and a single community affirms itself in which to enter and exit freely, as opposed to the desired fragmentation from the system. From this perspective, the latest works by A. Ambrasas can be read, who conceives architecture as a puzzle, or the reinterpretations of M. REFERENCES
Drėmaitė who studies and proposes the optimism of early twentieth Drėmaitė M., Jankevičiūtė G. and Petrulis V., (2018), Architecture of Optimism: The Kaunas century architecture in Kaunas; the photographs by M. Tomba that Phenomenon 1918–1940, Lapas, Vilnius. https://www.archdaily.com/author/christele-harrouk anticipate and confirm the ferment of public areas in Estonia; and the https://www.artribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/THEGAR1.jpg works of U. Bratuškin, with Latvia in full renewal. www.lithuanianspace.agency
166 167 Skinned rooms. In 2017, an exhibition in Venice juxtaposes Matta Clark’s cut- Space and indexicality across art and architecture. out architecture with the works by Swiss artist Heidi Bucher, who TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS applies a perfectly indexical operation to architecture, but internally oriented. By coating the interiors of rooms with a thin layer of latex, Giuseppina Scavuzzo: [email protected] which she then peels off like a flayed skin, Bucher creates a surface Università degli studi di Trieste imprint, an opalescent inner shell. Here there is an echo of the poetic definition of architecture as «shell of thought» given by John Hejduk A large part of contemporary architecture works on outer shells, who uses the image of opalescent shells left by some insects in their technological skins as screens on which the media power of metamorphosis to another state of being. architectures as urban objects is displayed. Bucher’s «Skinrooms», like the footprint on Crusoe’s island, are Some works of contemporary art seem interested to another skin of indicative of an absence/presence: they are the imprint of a house architecture, with a different sensitivity, the inner one. shaped by a lived-in, now spent life. Behind the outer skins of It is an invitation for architecture to turn its attention towards its architecture, akin to armours or screens, they show the inner skin introverted universe, which shares with art an intimate and empathetic of architecture, the one in contact with the human skin, the sensitive language. organ of the inhabitant. Peter Eisenman includes Libeskind’s Jewish Museum among the Ten canonical buildings that, in his opinion, inaugurate a new architectural canon. The canon inaugurated by this project is the incorporation of the concept of index into the architectural language. The museum is read by Eisenman through Rosalind Kraus’s definition of index: unlike the symbol and the icon, the index «establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its referent» and is linked to the issue of absence and presence. Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint in the sand reveals to him a human presence on the island. REFERENCES When the foot lifts up from the sand it leaves the imprint in the depressed sand, at the same time a layer of sand clings to the bottom Eisenman P. (2008), Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, Rizzoli, New York Krauss R. (1977), “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, October, Vol. 3, pp. 68-81. of the foot. Thus, through a subtraction of matter, a void, the footprint Wigley M. (2018), Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Project, Lars Muller Publishers, records the time between the presence and the absence of the man Zürich. Bucher H. (1981), filmRäume sind hüllen, sind häute (Spaces are shells, are skins), Produced who left it. The cuts on the walls of the Jewish Museum are compared and directed by Reinhart G., Edited by Killer P., 33:36 min. by Eisenman to this void and to the cuts in Matta-Clark’s work, Bria G. (2018), “Heidi Bucher. Skinned casts of reality”, Domusweb, https://www.domusweb. it/en/art/2018/12/03/heidi-bucher-skinned-casts-of-reality.html described by Krauss as a linguistic shifter «filled with signification Hejduk J., Henderson R., eds. (1988), Education of an Architect: The Irwin S. Chanin of only because it is empty». Architecture of the Cooper Union, Rizzoli, New York, p. 340.
168 169 The rural as a frontier of expression in contemporary The paper considers the work of celebrated architects active in countryside Chinese architecture development, including Zhang Lei (AZL), Xu Tiantian (DnA), Wang TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio), Mu Wei (Advance Architecture Lab), Joshua Bolchover and John Lin (Rural Urban Framework, RUF), Gerardo Semprebon: [email protected] to discuss how they interpreted designing in the rural as opportunities Politecnico di Milano for architectural explorations (Tiantian, 2020; Pisani, 2020). They tested local materials and traditional techniques in innovative ways, renovating This paper aims at showing how the rural is a frontier of expression in design processes and architectural languages. They ultimately contributed contemporary Chinese architecture. In a recent conversation, Zhang Lei, to redefining contemporary Chinese architecture, inaugurating a fertile chief architect of Atelier Zhang Lei (AZL), explained how his approach to season featured by new negotiations and alliances between social, architectural design varies according to the contextual condition. Featured economic, political and cultural values. by fewer regulations, he remarked that the countryside encompassed a cultural dimension released from the burden of urban codes, regulations, and requirements, which generate design limitations. Contrary, it put REFERENCES designers in the condition of more freely experimenting with site relationships, buildings’ typologies, architectural languages (Bolchover Bolchover, J. and Lin J. (2014), Rural Urban Framework. Transforming the Chinese Countryside, Birkhauser, Basel. and Lin, 2014; Bolchover et al. 2016; Lange et al. 2013; Valle, 2016). Bolchover J. et al. (2016), “Where is the Rural in an Urban World?” Architectural Design n° In this perspective, the rural became a compelling showcase for many 86, 06-13. China Development Research Foundation, (2017), China’s rural areas. Building a moderately Chinese architects eager to test cutting-edge design approaches, sometimes prosperous society, Routledge, London and New York. provocative, and gave them exceptional opportunities of stimulating the Hillman B. and Unger J. (2013). “Editorial. The Urbanisation of Rural China”, China Perspective n°3, 3. international debate. Behind this favorable circumstance, we find the Jun, W. et al., (2018), Rural Moves. The Songyang Story, Aedes, Berlin. idea that a creative sensitivity by architects, scholars, artists, intellectuals, Lange C. et al. (2013), Homecoming. Contextualizing, Materializing and Practicing the Rural in China, Gestalten, Berlin. and other figures, helps stimulating processes of rural revitalization by Lee, C. C. M., ed. (2015). Taiqian. The Countryside as a City, Harvard University Graduate strengthening local development (Zhang, 2018; Li, 2018; Jun et al., 2018). School of Design, Cambridge MA. Li, X., ed. (2018), Building a Future Countryside, Catalogue of the Chinese Pavilion at the Mitigating the rural-urban gap is a top priority of Beijing’s agenda, and the 16th Biennale of Venice Architectural International Exhibition, The Images Publishing Rural Revitalization Strategic Plan is just the last step of two decades of Group/ACC Art Books, New York. Pisani, M. (2020), Abitare in Cina oggi: esperienze a confronto. Libria, Melfi. rural-oriented policies (Hillmann and Unger, 2013; Lee, 2015; Stokman Stokman, A and Ruff S. (2014), Designing for an Urban Countryside, in de Meulder B. et al. and Ruff, 2014, China Development Research Foundation, 2017). The eds., Village in the City, Park Books, Zurich, 2014. Tiantian, X. (2020), “Rural, Reconsidered”, TRANSFER Global Architecture Platform, 2020. projects orchestrated by Xu Tiantian of Design and Architecture (DnA) in https://www.transfer-arch.com/transfer-next/rural-reconsidered/. Accessed on May 1st, Songyang County, to mention a well-known design experience, represent 2021. Valle, P. (2016), Rural Urban Framework, Libria, Melfi. a paradigmatic example of, on one side, a new architectural awareness and, Zhang X., ed. (2018), Beautiful Villages. Rural Construction Practice in Contemporary on the other side, the large participation in rural construction by architects. China, transl. He Yanfei, Images Publishing, Victoria.
170 171 For a semiotics of the school architecture that cannot exempts themselves from being a means for TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS spatial education. To reiterate the first part of this concept we can mention a Richard Neutra sentence, who tells how «it’s known that Giorgio Quintiliani: [email protected] in the past, philosophers and saints used to sit with their disciples Sapienza - University of Rome in the shade of a mango tree, managing to convey their wisdom without needing for reinforced concrete buildings. So many were The school understood as a place is the interaction result between great men and great spirits who knew how to exploit the entire different factors, related to the methods of knowledge transmission, universe as didactic material together with the simple resources of to the learning reception, to the relationships correspondence within their intelligence and their imagination.» To confirm the second a community, but also obviously the construction of space as an is the fact that architectural space is fundamental for that kind of educational dimension. The school building can be described as education, contributing to the students development of training and a collective architecture, composed of a large number of spatial receptivity, through the architecture itself, which becomes a device elements characterized by different utilities, gathered in a single for experiences and behaviors representation and transmission, a location and whose interaction ability qualifies the built system. It’s communication tool, therefore of knowledge.Through the form therefore identified as an architectural place in which the semantic construction, the architecture, favors the space concept acquisition structure and the syntactic structure both play a fundamental role in intended both as a representation and as a behavioral notion, its definition. Often, however, the conflict, or rather, the relationship promoting the development of praxic- visual skills, indispensable for between sign and meaning, between form and content, in the field of any other type of learning. schools architecture, has been resolved in favor of the latters, ensuring But what does it mean to speak of semiotics in the field of architecture? that the answers to functional, social and economic problems could be considered as the only constituent terms of a new form. It’s difficult to propose a single definition of the school building elements and characteristics. It’s an architecture based on a very dynamic narrative scheme: it must perform didactic functions but also favor social life, it must responds to endogenous project needs REFERENCES but also to the territory extra- curricular needs, it must be autonomous De Bartolomeis F., Scuola a tempo pieno, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1972; respect to the internally carried out activities but also takes on the role Bachelard G., La poetica dello spazio, (tr. It.), Dedalo, Bari, 1975; of a social pole for a community. Gennari M., Pedagogia degli ambienti educativi, Armando Editore, Roma, 1997; Neutra R., Architecture of social concern in regions of mild climate, Gerth Todtmann, Sao Investigating the school space, what makes it up and what meaning of Paulo, 1948, p. 58.; beauty it assumes, leads us to describe it starting from its geometric- D.M. Del 21 marzo 1970, Norme tecniche relative all’edilizia scolastica, ivi compresi gli indici minimi di funzionalità didattica, edilizia ed urbanistica, da osservarsi nella spatial conception. If the forms of didactics can be considered, in esecuzione di edilizia scolastica. (GU Serie Generale n.134 del 01-06-1970 - Suppl. some way, indifferent to the forms of architecture, it’s the forms of Ordinario n. 134), in “Caratteristiche dell’opera in generale”
172 173 The (new) legacy of the present the codes and canons of a still current past must not, however, appear TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS as an expression of the cynicism of architecture but as an analysis of the method of comparison with the new scenario of the conflict and Concetta Tavoletta: [email protected] of what is presented in the urban fabric. In this contest, the battered Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli fabric of Mosul becomes the chosen place to try to imagine a vision for a space that has multiple scenarios. If today it represents the site “Bones are beautiful as part of skeleton, as elements of life and of one of the civil wars of the contemporary era, we must consider death. But they possess a beauty in themselves not unlike the shards the historical and anthropological role that the city in Iraq has played of the museum’s fictitious material” in the definition of the modern world. The Upside-Down project tries Aldo Rossi to emphasize the formal power of the heritage of the place with the aim of emphasizing the traditional compositional system through a The human thing par excellence, the city, the result of actions and reinterpretation of its grammar so as to accentuate the legacy of the reactions, of human necessity and supremacy, remains the canvas time and the new future vision. on which the plots within which architecture finds the margins of its actions are described. And it is precisely in these areas in which it can promote its role that it becomes central again in the political debate of our present. When Franco Purini in his Comporre l’architettura described the image of the city corrupted by bombings and conflicts3, he stressed its ability to let itself be definitively crossed by the gaze of the observer, he showed his insides, his compositional truth which was REFERENCES nothing but image of the city of skeleton. If until the Second World PURINI F. (2006), Comporre l’architettura, Laterza, Bari, p. X War the legacy of the images of the cities described their traditional BACHELARD G. (2006), La poetica dello spazio, Edizioni Dedalo, Bari layout, the conflicts of the contemporary have expressed a new naked BIRAGHI M., SABATINO M. eds. (2001), Ezio Bonfanti. Nuovo e moderno in architettura, Bruno Mondadori, Milano architecture, one inspired by the dictates of the Modern Movement, CHADIRJI R. (1986), Concepts and Influences: Towards a Regionalized International many looms that have revealed a new process that made up the rubble Architecture, KPI, London FATHY H. (2000), Architecture for the Poor: Experiment in Rural Egypt, The University of in different ways than in the past; while previously the debris was Chicago Press, Chicago composed of the dress of the house, today the soul of the city appears GIEDON S. (2015), Spazio, Tempo e architettura, Hoepli, Melfi HERTZBERGER H. (1996), Lezioni di architettura, Laterza, Bari silent and judgmental among its pillars and beams. What presents LÉVI-STRAUSS C. (2015), Tristi tropici, Il Saggiatore, Milan itself to our eyes in a context in which the “new ruin” derives from SACRIPANTI M. (1953), Il disegno puro e il disegno dell’architettura, Fratelli Palombi, Roma the conflicts of the present, is a city where the theme of decay appears STRAUVEN F. (1998), Aldo Van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Architectura & Natura, as the new inheritance of the present. This condition of rediscovery of Amsterdam
174 175 TRACK C
C. multiplicity / communication #politics #media #intercodes The Dark Heritage Representation in Digital Games. (Calabrese & Ragone, 2016). When digital games are set or inspired The case of the former Psychiatric Hospital of Volterra by real places, the involvement can become even more effective. in The Town of Light In fact, digital games can unveil unknown places, encouraging TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION knowledge and fostering appropriation through virtual experience. On the other hand, it can also direct the narrative to the most disturbing Sara Cuccu: [email protected] aspects, particularly evident in the case of asylum architecture, and Claudia Pintor: [email protected] contribute to placing the emphasis on dark imagery, with the drifts University of Cagliari that can arise from this. It is not, in fact, a simple scenario, but an important aspect of the game, which, precisely in the grotesque traits The complexity of the relationship between language and architecture attributed to the place, finds its own atmosphere and its narrative is manifested not only in the design of new structures, but it also trigger. concerns the communication of cultural heritage and its values. After an essential state-of-the-art on the theme, the contribute analyse This renews itself in two different ways: with the mutation of the how historical asylum space is represented in the case study, which linguistic significance in relation to spatial-temporal coordinates, and elements – spatial and symbolic – are highlighted and which are with the introduction of new channels and instruments that convey excluded. In conclusion, it proposes a reflection on the criticalities its narration. of such elements and the prospective of a places’ significant narrative This contribution aims to investigate the potential of digital games through digital games. as a vehicle of communication of historical architecture, specifically the “dark heritage” (Roberts & Stone, 2014); the case study is The Town of Light (LKA, 2016), a psychological horror adventure game set in the former Psychiatric Hospital of Volterra (Pisa), chosen for the careful and respectful attempt to represent the place, in order to highlight resemblances, distortions, and investigate the potential of the medium in the valorisation of places. Digital games and architecture share some topical themes, like the interest for spatial and functional relations. The spatial experience REFERENCES of the digital game is an important marker of difference with other Bogost I. (2007), Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames, MIT Press, media (Bogost, 2007), and the heart of the ludic experience lies in Cambridge. Calabrese S. and Ragone G., eds. (2016), Transluoghi: Storytelling, beni culturali, turismo spatial and kinaesthetic involvement, as it gives spatial liberty and esperienziale, Liguori, Napoli. autonomy in virtual world exploration (Calleja, 2011). This unique Calleja G. (2011), In-game: From immersion to incorporation, MIT Press, Cambridge. Roberts C. and Stone P.R. (2014), Dark Tourism and Dark Heritage: Emergent Themes, connection with space can create an affective relation with the places Issues and Consequences, in Convery I., Corsane G. and Davis P. eds., Displaced that are represented, heightening the awareness of cultural values Heritage: Dealing with Disaster and Suffering, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2014.
178 179 Cities for sale: three devices narrating the considered as lenses for re-reading the reality we live in: how these Chinese urban reality cities, often labelled as “fake”, can help us in understanding the TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION contemporary European city and its contradictions?
Filippo Fiandese: [email protected] Silvia Lantieri: [email protected] Monica Naso: [email protected] Politecnico di Torino
Since the Maoist period, China has produced various imaginaries able to articulate the concept of “ideal cities”, based on the principle of equality in the welfare system. However, from the years of the Reform and Opening-up, we can observe an obvious conflict between the political level, which has been proposing ideals and rhetorics in continuity with those of the past, and the economic dimension, which has been developing new scenarios imbued with capitalist ideals in open contradiction to the past. This contribution intends to explore the mystifications linked to the construction of the Chinese urban dream moving from the analysis of the tools that assemble and disseminate it: slogans, images, maquettes. However, it would be reductive to consider these forms of language - and in particular their implications - exclusive to a circumscribed geopolitical reality. Through the dynamics that characterize the Chinese city, the distinctive conditions of the global city are, in fact, pushed to the extreme: the exceptional nature of the “Chinese city”, often presented as a very limited object of study, can therefore be partially considered as a reflection of the perpetual transmigration and liquidity of urban practices typical of the contemporary city (Ren, REFERENCES 2016). Debord, G. (1992 [1967]), La Société du Spectacle, Gallimard, Paris. Ren, J. (2016), ‘Creative class’ subversions. Art spaces in Beijing and Berlin, in Wang, J. These devices of representation and mise-en-scène of the Oakes, T. and Yang, Y. (eds.) Making cultural cities in Asia: Mobility, assemblage, and contemporary Chinese city (Debord, 1992 [1967]) can therefore be the politics of aspirational urbanism. Routledge, London.
180 181 Promoting human involvement in public spaces through These kinds of artworks, which are freely available for everyone to interactive art installations and media architecture interact with either intellectually or physically, can affect the built TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION environment, not only in the beautification of the city or the design of the public spaces but also on the general public psyche. 2 (Jagannath, Elham Karbalaei Hassani: [email protected] 2015) Sapienza - University of Rome This paper explains how digital and media architecture can involve people in activities in urban spaces on several levels using theoretical In this paper, the potential for media architecture and interactive methods, case studies, and interdisciplinary surveys. It focuses on art installations to promote human interaction and events in public art installations that, with the help of emerging technology, engage spaces is investigated. people in becoming co-creators of the art piece, both directly in a Contemporary city spaces are frequently lacking in stimulation or specific location of the city and through remote participation, using inspiring landscape for human encounters. In this context, media cell phones or the internet. The effect of such involvement architecture and interactive installations may have the power to may affect not only a clearly delimited place but can be used to create increase the intensity of public life by supporting city spaces with an connecting paths or change the perception and identity of the whole ambiance to create meaningful co-presence of people and conditions areas. for creative cooperation. A predominant goal of such artistic and It concludes that such art is used to create vibrant spaces where architectural intervention is to empower people to actively participate people can engage with the installation or with one another, or simply in the artwork, and thus, to animate the space and change it into observe the work of art and other users of the space passively in the an inspiring platform for social encounters. The advancement of city space. However, it is critical to define the requisite pre-conditions innovative technologies and notable steps towards achieving a new and recognize the numerous factors that increase the efficacy of such quality of the urban landscape, more sensitive and reciprocal in projects and art interventions to achieve these vibrant spaces. reactions, significantly fosters public involvement. Visual effects that are unpredictable, more personal, and intellectually challenging in comparison to the predetermined schemes or fixed images applied in the first urban media art projects, are interactive participatory installations to engage the passers-by, local city dwellers, or even stakeholders. 1 (Urbanowicz, Nyka, 2016) When media architecture and interactive art installations become REFERENCES more visible and recognized parts of urban life, they create a range of Urbanowicz K., Nyka L. (2016), Interactive and media architecture – From social encounters new opportunities for participation through dialogue and interaction. to city planning strategies, World multidisciplinary civil engineering – Architecture – Urban planning symposium 2016, WMCAUS 2016. They put more pressure on designers to think beyond implementation Jagannath Th. (2015), The Effect of Public Art on Public Spaces: Poets, Worms and Street details and form new collaborations with city planners and residents. Art, B.A. Dissertation, the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
182 183 Architectures assassinées. likely one of its source) and Blue Velvet ( Lynch, 1986, subsequent Four rooms for a crime but coherent in themes and tones). Both films put a space at the TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION center of their narratives: a circumscribed space, petit-bourgeois, everyday but perturbing, a room hit by the shadow of a crime. Marco Lecis: [email protected] These rooms are fixed scenarios, recurring and obsessive, but they University of Cagliari are also sophisticated devices employed to interrogate the medium language and the elements of the mise en scene. Within these walls, Madelon Vriesendorp did not paint Flagrant délit for the cover of Hollywood paradigm starts looking to itself and takes on abstract Delirious New York: it was made three years earlier as part of an tones. In addition to the movies, one other image could be discussed: independent series of illustrations dedicated to Manhattan. The image Thomas Demand Badezimmer (1997). This photo has been built had a decisive role in the fortune of the book, although many still using the same components and, while it is more radical in its fixity consider it its mere illustration. With more radicality than Koolhaas’ and in its apparent aphasia, it is still pervaded by the evocation of a paragraphs argumentations, Vriesendorp’s picture immediately shifts criminal act, again a useful expedient set to renegotiate the medium’s the discourse, defining an unprecedented theoretical space and a new resources. register: a domestic interior to narrate a metropolis, a romantic drama to discuss the architecture of skyscrapers, the allusion to a crime as a reflection of a critical reversal. Outside canonical theory, Vriesendorp discusses architecture using the narrative forms of mass society, pulp literature and cinema. Beyond the scholastic homage to Dalì, the painting takes up and interprets a new emerging imaginary, that of Ed Rusha, Setphen Shore and Learning from Las Vegas. To record the extent of this critical shift, the rhetoric of Vriesendorp’s image can be compared with pictures from different cultural areas which eventually share the same register, references and sphere of reception. This exercise can measure the new expansions of the REFERENCES architectural critical field, the overcrossing of disciplinary boundaries García Roig J., Martí Arís C (2008)., La Arquitectura del cine. Estudios sobre Dreyer, and the conquest of those spaces destined to attract the younger Hitchcock, Ford y Ozu, Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona audience. Martin R. (2014), The architecture of David Lynch, Bloomsbury, Londra Stadler H., Stierli M., Fischli P. (2015), Las Vegas Studio. Images from the Archive of Robert The idea of a domestic scenario associated with the estrangement of Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Scheidegger Und Spiess Ag Verlag, Zurigo a criminal act - a theoretical and dramatic laboratory - can also be Van Gerrewey C., eds (2019), Oma/Rem Koolhaas. A critical reader, Birkhauser, Basilea Demand T. (2020), House of cards, Mack books, Londra found in two movies and we can project them in fading over Flagrant Shaal H. D. (2009), Learning from Hollywood. Architecture and film, Axel Menges, Fellbach délit: Rope (Hitchcock, 1948, preceding Vriesendorp’s image and Jacobs S. (2013), The wrong house. The architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, Nai010, Rotterdam
184 185 The code of Utopia. Well, as result of the delegitimization processes of universal Fragments of the necessary in the art of the possible knowledge and of the conception of the architect as ‘intellectual’, TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION after the uncertainties and existential dramas that modernity has revealed, this contribution attempts to recognize that absurdly the Alessandro Oltremarini: [email protected] architectural discipline has acquired over time greater strength and Sapienza - University of Rome right - as well as duty - in the development of new scenarios and in the construction of new ideas. In this paper, I ask some questions about writing and/or transcribing In the contradictions of the relationships between city and the relationship between architecture and the environment, meaning architecture, between chance, destiny and project, between expression the latter in its social and cultural complexity. and communication, between public and private interests and finally Specifically, I want to reflect on the contribution of the architectural in the complicated relationship of knowledge with concepts such as discipline - understood as an expressive activity - in the construction nature and technique, we inherit from history the ideal field of action of a cultural scenario and an urban imaginary. of architecture: the world of forms. The only thing it takes. And to do this, I think it useful to ask myself about the causes that define an idea of the city and a way of living, and even if the role of architectural production is to pursue or to design. That is: is it necessary to preserve the eighteenth-century conquest, which perhaps was accidental, about an autonomy of the architectural discipline or, today more than ever, must it be accepted that these ideas and ways are and will be only the result of a series of historical and casual concatenations and contingencies? Throughout history, the answers to these questions have been expressed in literature, philosophy and the visual arts in general, through architectural and urban narratives and images that we recognize as ‘utopian’: for this reason I believe it is necessary to address these issues within the utopia code, in which, from time to time, a precise organizational concept of political, economic, moral and social systems, and two precise ideas, on the use of science and technique - and then of technology - and on the relationship REFERENCES between man and reality - or nature, have defined the visions and Aa. Vv. (1985), Fondamenti. Utopia ed Antiutopia, n° 3, Paideia, Brescia Argan G.C. (1965), Progetto e Destino, Il Saggiatore, Milano representations of the appropriate environment for a specific culture Cirio R. and Favari P. eds. (1974), Utopia rivisitata, Bompiani, Milano and progress. Tafuri M. (1973), Progetto e utopia. Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico, Laterza, Roma
186 187 Deferred codes. was taking shape was united around the realization of a masterpiece, Dialogue between Architecture and Politics which was the result of a collective elaboration. TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION Therefore, just because actually cathedrals are no longer white and society is characterized by “a new global disorder” (Bauman, 1999) Benedetta Tamburini: [email protected] architecture must be configured as a “servizio di linguaggio” (M. Sapienza - University of Rome Sacripanti, 1973), with the mission to represent the society, it is referring to. The urgency, at this juncture, becomes a need to define Artistic languages are traditionally intimately tied with the social a reference framework in a global reach , that changes every few and cultural issues of their times, nevertheless their transmissibility hours becoming more complex. In the opinion of the writer, precisely transcends the circumstances. Sometimes, the ability to overcome because today’s social demands are increasingly diversified, the codes their own era determines that the message, transmitted by the with which architects will have to comply in the near future will be communicating object, is transmuted and, in this passage, it is multiple and increasingly characterized by incursions of external attributed a different meaning. matters that are not within the discipline’s competence. This leads to architectural signs being first extracted, then reread through a different gradient from the one that generated them. In the opinion of those who write there is nothing similar to grammar or syntax of spoken and written speech in the language of modern and contemporary architecture; in contrast with the language used by classical architecture, which, although still consisted a sui generis language, followed a rule expressing a hierarchical (and crystallized) social order. However, this characterization has not prevented its use as one of the most effective tools for the portrayal of society. Giannozzo Manetti, secretary of Nicholas V, in describing how essential the policy of public works was, to clarify to the people the mission of the Roman Church in the world, attributes to the Pontiff these words “(...) Il consenso del volgo è invece rafforzato e REFERENCES confermato dalla continua visione di grandi edifici (…) il consenso in Bauman Z. (1999), La società dell’incertezza, Il Mulino, Bologna. questo modo è mantenuto ed aumentato “ (Battisti 1957). Benedetti C. (1999), L’ombra lunga dell’autore. Indagine su una figura cancellata, Feltrinelli, Milano. In the text “When the cathedrals were white”, Le Corbusier measures Le Corbusier (1964), When the Cathedrals were white, McGraw-Hill Book Company New the distance between the crystallized culture of the European world York. Sacripanti M. (1973), Citta di Frontiera., Bulzoni , Roma. and the ever-evolving and pragmatic American culture; precisely, Battisti E. ( 1957) , Il significato simbolico della Cappella Sistina, in Commentari« » ,VIII, n when the cathedrals were white, that is, newly built, the society that 2 , aprile-giugno, p.99
188 189 Offshore, Coastward. opened in Venice the Ocean Space, an interdisciplinary center for the Contemporary art as a decoding tool of scientific study of ocean transformations and territorial impacts. sea-based research to reveal future coastal developments Overcoming the disciplinary boundaries of specialist fields and TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION contaminating the multiplicity of their different approaches, Arts-Based Research (Leavy, 2009) open up new possibilities of Maria Pina Usai: [email protected] interpretation and communication of global and local changes. University of Cagliari Moving from the analysis of projects and research experiences operating between art, environmental and social sciences, Over the past two decades, ocean and territorial transformations due architecture and education, the present work outlines the potential to climate change have increased exponentially. One of the most for contemporary art to act both as a radar that anticipates territorial affected territories where the effects of these changes are significantly transformations (McLuhan, 1964), and as a medium (ibid.) capable visible and intense is the coastal zone (Alterman and Pellach, of triggering a widespread awareness through its own language, 2020), «uniquely the place on earth where terrestrial, oceanic, and influencing policy-making , and contributing towards the elaboration atmospheric processes interact» (Ray and Hayden, 1992:405), and of new architectural and planning codes for the development of where about 40 percent of world population live (UN, 2017). The coastal landscape. rise in frequency and intensity of phenomena such as sea level rise, hurricanes, erosion, has increased the need to investigate and interpret seas and oceans conditions, and to understand, both under scientific and social point of view, the extent to which they play a key role in shaping the future of coastal areas.
Lately, a growing number of art research started supporting scientific REFERENCES research in the process of investigation and monitoring of the state of Alterman R., Pellach, C., eds. (2020), Regulating Coastal Zones: International Perspective terrestrial, atmospheric and marine environment, with methodologies on Land Management Instruments, Routledge, London. that decode objective data and re-encode those through aesthetic Leavy P. (2009), Method meets art: Arts-based research practice, The Guilford Press, New York. perception. In 2015, the Schmidt Ocean Institute launched Artist-At- McLuhan, M., (1964), Understanding media: The extensions of man, Gingko Press, Corte Sea, a residency program on board of the R/V Falkor ship dedicated Madera. Ray G.C., Hayden B.P., (1992), Coastal Zone Ecotones, in Hansen A. J., Di Castri F., eds. to collaborative research between artists and marine scientists on (1992), Landscape Boundaries. Consequences for Biotic Diversity and Ecological Flows ocean changes; in 2018, the Anthropocene art project, based on the Springer-Verlag, New York, 403-420 United Nations Ocean Conference, (2017), Factsheet: People and Oceans, United Nations, scientific research of the international Anthropocene Working Group, New York, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ took form as an interactive exhibition in which art, environmental Ocean-fact-sheet-package.pdf Anthropocene, https://anthropocene.mast.org/ science and anthropology dialogue with the public about global Artist-at-Sea Program, https://schmidtocean.org/ changes through visual language; in 2019, the TBA21-Academy Ocean Space, https://www.ocean-space.org/
190 191 Some thoughts «Azure» on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of that code- on architectural writing in today’s world book, which is “S, M, L, XL”, signed with Rem Koolhaas. In fact, when asked if architects today still needed to create a (linguistic) TRACK C. MULTIPLICITY / COMMUNICATION leadership like that of OMA + Rem Koolhaas of the last century, he Ettore Vadini: [email protected] replies: “What’s really interesting is that architects were the first to Università degli Studi della Basilicata think this way - they were way ahead. The first to think holistically about designing the way we live. But when it became a profession, Are architectural magazines and books still today primary tools for they did so much work to police the boundary of architecture that expressing canons, codes and positions? If not, are there any new instead of just keeping other people out, they kept the architects tools today? in. Architects […] should be designing education. All of the great Make a new architectural magazine or a new architectural “code- challenges we have. We need the synthesis practice of architecture. book” is still a militant architect’s dream? The complex synthesis that architects do is the currency of our time. Does it make sense today to represent a broader discourse on the It’s the most challenging thing to produce. Architects know how to do world with an architectural writing? it, but they keep it inside of that fence […]” (Mau, 2015). For the architect and architecture, today, perhaps it is worthwhile to understand whether publishing still represents, mainly, the way to establish a direct connection between the detail of his work and an ‘context’ of general legitimation of a disciplinary, cultural and political nature. Just over a year ago, in New York, Bruce Mau, in a speech at “The World Around” summit entitled “Redesigning everything: a new era of a massive change”, first described the profound transformation we face and then explained why everything will have to be redesigned. Bruce Mau, through ‘grammatical’ images, simply recounted his work with communication and media, described his recent interests on “Massive Change”, as well as his ideas contained in his latest book REFERENCES
“MC24 - Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change Amistadi L., Prandi E., eds. (2018), Le “piccole riviste” di architettura del XX secolo, in your Life and Work”, or 24 global, generous, and galvanizing FAMagazine n.43. Mau B. (2020), MC24 - The Principles for Designing Massive Change in your Life and Work, principles to overhaul the way we think and to inspire massive Phaidon, New York. change. Theodore D. (2015), “Q&A: Bruce Mau on 20 years of S, M, L, XL”, Azure, November- December 2015. But perhaps the most interesting concept that Bruce Mau said about Vadini E. ed. (2021), Progetto, teoria, editoria. Modi di scrivere e di trasmettere la ricerca militant architects is found in an interview he gave to the magazine architettonica oggi, Quodlibet, Macerata.
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