THE ARCHITECT AND THE ANIMAL: 20th CENTURY ENCOUNTERS International Workshop 9-10 April 2021 @ Princeton Athens Center & Zoom Organizers: M Christine Boyer & Kostas Tsiambaos Aino Aalto and a crane in the garden of her house in Riihitie, 1939. Photo: Eino Mäkinen © Alvar Aalto Foundation PROGRAMME Friday 9 April 15.00 CET Dimitri Gondicas / Princeton University Welcoming remarks Kostas Tsiambaos / National Technical University of Athens Introduction SESSION I 15.20 Viola Bertini / Università Iuav di Venezia Time, Place and Man. The Role of Animals in Hassan Fathy’s Drawings 15.40 Martin Søberg / The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts John Hejduk, Animals, and the Anthropological Machine 16.00 Martín Cobas Sosa / FADU - UdelaR and Princeton University A Report on the Creature, with an Appendix on Venomous Zoology 16.20 Respondent: Cameron Wu / Princeton University 16.40 Discussion End of day 1 Saturday 10 April SESSION II 15.00 CET Aron Vinegar / University of Oslo Mollusks, Shells and the Stained Soul of Modern Architecture 15.20 Kostas Tsiambaos / National Technical University of Athens Buildings as Animals, or, Eschatological Perspectives of Modern Greek Architecture 15.40 Respondent: Spyros Papapetros / Princeton University 16.00 Discussion Break SESSION III 17.00 M. Christine Boyer / Princeton University An Asinine Tale [Equus asinus]: Le Corbusier’s donkeys 17.20 Manuel Orazi / University of Ferrara Animals in the Humanistic Thinking of Yona Friedman 17.40 Gabriele Mastrigli / University of Camerino Piero and the Dog (and other Stories): Superstudio and the Narrative of Living Nature 18.00 Respondents: Marshall Brown and Spyros Papapetros / Princeton University 18.00 Discussion End of the workshop ABSTRACTS Time, Place and Man. The role of animals in Hassan Fathy’s drawings Viola Bertini Hassan Fathy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1900 and passed away in Cairo in 1989. During his long career he designed more than one hundred and fifty projects, among which houses, religious and public buildings, and several villages. In parallel to his architectural production, Fathy gave birth to a series of paints, mostly watercolors, which can be assumed as a kind of manifesto of his whole architectural poetics. Some of these drawings directly refer to his projects, some others are instead an invention of landscapes and architectures, where a logical realism and poetic realism overlap and tend to coincide. The two-dimensional geometric representations coexist in fact with the dimension of the fable, which is frequently conveyed by the inclusion of symbolic elements borrowed from popular culture and antiquity. These elements, which are mainly flora and fauna, have multiple values. Firstly, the plants and the animals populating Fathy’s drawings are often a quotation of Pharaonic wall paintings. This choice, remarked also by the two-dimensional representations and the frequent combination of plans and elevations, expresses Fathy’s aim to create a link with the Egyptian past, that is the original matrix of his culture and the spiritual starting point from which designing a true Egyptian architecture. A need to question time emerges, meaning to relate with the past in order to create a new architecture which is made by figures rooted in memory. Secondly, these elements are aimed to express an idea of place. Silver fishes in the lake Qarun, a camel caravan in the desert, oxen or ducks in the Egyptian countryside are all simple but iconic elements, which both refer to the physical place and to its symbolic value, that is the Egyptian and Arab context where Fathy’s architectures are specifically situated. Eventually, these elements, as quotations of Pharaonic depictions, are capable to convey other meanings. That is, for example, the case of Hathor, the cow goddess of fertility, and the Ibis, whose presence in the New Gourna watercolor is conceived to symbolically support the project’s success and to protect the housing units. The myths and the beliefs related to these symbols were handed down from antiquity to popular culture. Therefore, their presence in Fathy’s drawings can be intended as a tool to create a dialogue with the people, between the architect and the man. Man who is the measure of all things, and the architecture depicted is always and firstly intended to serve him. Starting from the analysis of several Fathy’s drawings, the paper aims to investigate the multiple symbolic values that animals assume in his paints: the relationship with time, the idea of place, and the dialogue with man. Finally, it will be explored how the use of an ancient language, clearly expressed by the way in which animals are represented, is a tool to give new purposes and meanings to architecture. An Asinine Tale [Equus asinus]: Le Corbusier’s Donkeys M. Christine Boyer Why did donkeys hold a role in Le Corbusier’s meandering thoughts about cities and architecture? He even writes autobiographically about donkeys. Is it because a donkey carried Christ into Jerusalem and henceforth became a symbol of martyrdom, a sufferer for humanity? This lowliest of beasts is more often a symbol of foolishness, stubbornness, sometimes stupidness. Is this why Le Corbusier pronounced near the end of his life “I am an honest donkey”? A donkey is a pack-animal – a core technology for moving goods especially in the mountainous terrain of the Mediterranean basin. Le Corbusier’s donkey tales begin with his early unpublished manuscript “Le Construction des Villes” (1910) where he praises the meandering paths laid down by donkeys. In a chapter on “She’s and He’s” in Voyage d’Orient (1911), he worships the young women and little donkeys of Istanbul — a quixotic juxtaposition of incongruent exotica. But by the time “Urbanisme” is published (1925) he reverses his thoughts on the road of the pack-donkey: now this stupid, lazy animal meanders along, zig-zags to ease his climb, always trying to gain shade. He takes the line of least resistance. While man is rational, he thinks ahead and seeks the straight line. Le Corbusier drew images of donkeys as he traveled about: images of placid, tranquil animals, appreciated for their hard work grinding grain, pressing olives, pulling carts—for resisting modernity and keeping to traditional ways. The donkey becomes an image of Sancho Panza riding his donkey Dapple, a down to earth, faithful companion to Don Quixote who goes about tilting windmills astride his horse, Rocinanta. Then again a reversal as he scrutinizes nature to penetrate its laws: the law of the meander, a geological law, seen from an airplane, breaking through resistances, seeking eventually the straightest route. There is a lot to learn about the meandering path, sequential movement, and variety of views, expectations and curiosities witnessed in the promenade architecturale and all of its subroutes. And of course, the meander becomes a parable for man’s life and the path to self-knowledge: long years of faithfulness followed by decadence and collapse. All of which leads us to Le Corbusier obscure text, Le Poème de l’angle droit (1955).,in which Le Corbusier tries to make a syncretic union of the animalistic route, a fusion of opposites. “Life must force a passage burst the dam/ of vicissitude. It cuts through the / meander pierces the loops/ …. The current is straight/once again.” This paper will explore the various meanings and their implicit associations to be made from Le Corbusier’s donkey references. A Report on the Creature. With an Appendix on Venomous Zoology. Martín Cobas In the beginning, a particular type of Amerindian myth goes, there were only human beings, and human and animals were not yet distinct. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics What does the Kreatur do to architecture? A Report on the Creature investigates the space of the creature and its architectures from an anthropological standpoint. It thus addresses the rich history of Kreatur –from its Western theological incarnation (recapitulated by Rilke and Benjamin) to its Brazilian variations, and dwells on a singular creaturely modern milieu: Brazil, this paper argues, was born creaturely. Triggered by creation (as Kreatur ), taxonomy (as specimen ), pharmacology (as antidote ) zoomorphism (as the will to animal metamorphosis) or tragedy (as monster ), by rhetorical declination or fantastic imagery, the creature exposed our own animality and helped articulate the threshold between nature and culture, a master schism of Western metaphysics. The creature became a tool of translation in a modernizing society in search of a topical idiom. Crucial in this respect was the work of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (née Achilina Bo, 1914- 1992), whose interest in animals –whether in creaturely, Indigenous-craft, or pet and collectible form –too often intersected her ethno-anthropological project, recalling Clarice Lispector’s animal call in her novel Água Viva (1973), in which the narrator speaks to animals not to humanize them but to animalize herself. In Bo Bardi’s work animals and architecture are enigmatically interlocked. A case in point is her collaboration with the Instituto Butantan (São Paulo’s biologic research center and house of a world-renowned collection of venomous serpents), an unbuilt project for the institution’s reptile diorama and a curious epigone: a collage that portrays a tumultuous scene of a group of men battling with giant serpents. But what is at stake in it: the mythical creature of Christian theology or the Amerindian animistic ontology? A Brazilian Laocoön of sorts? By tracing the rich iconography surrounding Bo Bardi’s Butantan — from dioramas to historical tourist postcards and scientific materials — this paper seeks to elaborate on the cross-fertilizations between the creature (i.e. venomous serpent) and the body qua body, the body-architectural (space) and the body scientific. Neither exclusively a matter of scientific inquiry nor public voyeuristic pleasure, the multifarious ways in which the creaturely was addressed in modern Brazil cannot be categorized as merely insular or metaphorical but are rather to be understood as continuous with strategies of resistance (political, cultural, and otherwise) — i.e.