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Pier Paolo Tamburelli, The Wrong Pyramid.
Translation by Salomon Frausto
EDITORIAL
There is plenty of bad architecture all over the place. Stupid, wrong
architecture. Architecture that failed, and failed miserably. Architecture
that is full of mistakes.
San Rocco 3 does not talk about that. San Rocco 3 is interested in
another kind of mistake: mistakes that are the product of a dispropor-
tion, of a displacement; mistakes that are somehow generous, open,
brave; mistakes that involve some sort of heroic failure; mistakes that
shed a new light on the limits of the very same rule that labels them
as mistakes.
Mistakes are evident, public. Like rules, they involve some sort of
agreement. Mistakes are the opposite of opinions. Actually, mistakes
despise opinions even more than rules do. Mistakes can happen only
if there is a shared knowledge. Mistakes do not imply a complete
refusal of the rule; rather, a rule is opposed by a new and different
rule, not by a mistake. Mistakes do not want to do away with the rule;
instead, mistakes try to establish a relationship with the rule (even
if this is not a very relaxed one). Mistakes are episodes in which the
rule manifests itself in all its weakness and clumsiness. Mistakes are
a comedy about rules, or the stumbling and stuttering little brothers
of rules. There is something intimately didactic about mistakes. As
soon as there is a mistake, there is some sort of correction, some sort
of teaching, some sort of school.
Mistakes are necessarily plural: if there is a rule, there will be plenty
of mistakes. Mistakes suggest the possibility (and the necessity) of a
new kind of rule, one that could even cope with this specific kind of
mistake. Mistakes somehow point toward some forgotten potential.
Mistakes are progressive.
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Mistakes sometimes contain a certain hubris. Behind every mis-
take there is somebody that believes he can afford to make that very
mistake (as in the case of Bramante and the different dimensions of
the orders in his Belvedere, or in that of Bernini and the Doric colon-
nade with the Ionic frieze for St Peter’s Square).
Mistakes are sometimes the product of humbleness: provincial
mistakes, made out of distrust, lack of self-confidence or instinctive
conservatism (like the exquisite provincialism of the pillars of Figini’s
house at the Villaggio dei Giornalisti, or the touching clumsiness of
the church in Roccaverano).
Mistakes can be intelligent, but they are definitely not smart (smart-
ness, in fact, is about avoiding mistakes). Smart mistakes are what
Castiglione and Raphael – who were too smart to really like mistakes –
called sprezzatura, a subtle negligence that undermines the rule without
openly discussing it. San Rocco is not interested in that, however:
San Rocco is interested in something less polite and riskier (or more
honest) – something that involves running the risk of producing a
total failure.
Sometimes mistakes happen precisely where different sets of rules
conflict, or where different scales intersect. Here the rigorous observa-
tion of an overall logic demands that mistakes be made on a smaller
scale: “Good reasons must, of force, give place to better” ( Julius Caesar,
Act IV, Scene III). Bramante’s Belvedere is full of such mistakes.
Mistakes are sometimes elegant. They can have a particular beauty.
They can be as sweet as Buster Keaton or Krazy Kat. They can turn the
rule into something milder or gentler. There is a particular talent for
making mistakes (think, for instance, of Lewerentz – early Lewerentz,
of course – or of Alvaro Siza).
In one of his letters, Schönberg (it was Schönberg, wasn’t it?) talks
about the honesty of Mahler (was it Mahler?) in having written nec-
essarily bad music at moments when bad music was what was called
for. Mistakes can be of this kind: disgraceful episodes that make a
sacrifice for the sake of the global meaning of a work, voluntary ugly
ducklings, self-sacrificing heroes like Judas according to Borges; or
deliberate mistakes, such as the incorrect perspective of the coffin
in Zurbarán’s depiction of St Bonaventura’s funeral, the wrong per-
spective of the Kaaba in popular Muslim prints, the repulsive façade
presented to the visitor by the monastery of La Tourette, the portico
in front of nothing of the Collegio Elvetico, and the fake windows at
Schloss Tegel . . .
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Mistakes can also appear when somebody tries to prove that all of
the rest of the world is wrong, and problems occur in the situations in
which this pure truth collides with the stubborn world that refuses to
comply with it. Thus, Palladio’s Basilica crashes its proud stairs against
a little medieval house, and almost all of Giorgio Grassi’s schemes are
mutilated at the borders of plots that are invariably too small to host
the project that they should have hosted.
Mistakes can also involve pure enigma, like the bent pyramid at
Dashur. Mistakes imply the existence of a story that we would like to hear.
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PERFECTLY FINE FOR MIES
Kersten Geers
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a theory that works
a mania that sticks
a lie that has become a truth
a dream from which there is no waking up . . .
Rem Koolhaas, City of the Captive Globe
I.
In his ironic, if not slightly silly, book Modern Movements in Architecture,
Charles Jencks defines and simultaneously deconstructs Mies’s
Platonic modernism. All he needs to do so is the Seagram Building,
the totem of high modernism on Park Avenue in New York.
Mr Jencks discovers that the building, which is most frequently
shown from its “front side”, has a back, and the back is not convincing.
He states: “Consider, even in Mies’ own terms of visual refinement,
how far he has failed to reach a ‘perfect’ visual solution to resolving
the geometries of the internal corner of the Seagram building.” The
internal corner under scrutiny is the one created by the meeting of
the complex volume of the back with the main volume of the tower;
the corner is strange. Yet the corner is not only a weird detail; it is also
the place where two apparently different systems, or even ideas, of
the building collide. In 1973, this collision seems to be an attack on
Mr Jencks’s world view. It confuses him; it is a mistake. It makes him
simultaneously lyrical and disappointed: “In formal terms the exterior
corners of the building are masterful and convincing, the internal ones
are indecisive and botched: they look as if a meat cleaver has sliced
the two regular curtain walls off at mid point and just joined what is
left over. It appears that Mies is trying to get away with a fudge on just
the very problem which would have exercised the greatest skill and
passion of past, classical architects.”
Jencks is not convinced by what he sees and concludes that it is “a
near disaster in an architecture claiming consideration in the classi-
cal tradition of perfection”.
Mr Jencks, however, falls into the trap he has himself created. In
his technocratic overview of architecture – what he calls “late modern
architecture” and all its incarnations – each actor is supposed to play
a certain role, like two-dimensional characters in a cartoon. If one of
these characters does not behave exactly as Mr Jencks expects them
to, then it is a mistake. According to Mr Jencks, we should be warned
beforehand if things are supposed to be unresolved in the end.
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II.
The back of the Seagram Building is not a compromise. It is a con-
sciously designed rear façade that is perfectly in line with the fact that
the other side is the front. The rear façade is carefully considered, and
it reveals the Seagram Building’s true intentions: to create a context
where the very idea of one does not seem to make any sense at all.
III.
If Manhattan’s grid tries to annihilate the notion of context, then
the Seagram Building tries to falsify it. It works like a model of the
European idea of architecture, abstracted and created on a small
scale. According to this logic, each of the sides of the building must
be different, but none less important than the others, and it is pre-
cisely this equal weight of each of its aspects that the design takes into
consideration so elegantly.
The Seagram complex is comprised of a tall tower and a small block
of equal length and different width that are connected by a marble
“hinge”. Both tower and block are positioned in the middle of the plot
defined by Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. On either extreme of
the lot, no building has been designed. On Park Avenue this results
in the now-famous square in front of the tower. It creates a break in
the rhythm of the street and (supposedly) presents itself as a gesture
flouting the logic of land values. At the rear, however, there is an equally
large open space without a construction project, because that part of
the plot was not acquired by the Seagram Company.
From the surviving documentation, we know that the Seagram
Company tried to acquire the whole lot at first but didn’t succeed. I
don’t know if they ever shared this fact with Mies. To my knowledge,
however, there are no surviving drawings of a project that took this
into account. More interesting is that we can be sure that the thought –
whether real or virtual – was present when the project was developed,
thus making the resulting project one designed for a “handicapped”
site. The Seagram complex that was ultimately built treated this as an
asset and tried to impose an idea of context on a site that has virtually
nothing to do with this idea.
IV.
The alibi was simple. In front of the site along Park Avenue, one finds
the Racquet and Tennis club designed by McKim, Mead & White. It is
an imposing building in their signature palazzo style that was built in
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1919, when two of the three principal partners had already died. Still,
the building is a masterpiece and a perfect example of their imposition
of European contextualism. The formula is rather simple (but effec-
tive): take an Italian palazzo, multiply its size by three times, stretch
it to fit at least two dimensions of the given plot, and you anchor a
romantic European fantasy in the implacable logic of the American
grid plan. McKim, Mead & White made many heroic attempts to inject
a self-constructed sense of European culture into the bulk of the built
mass of New York.
By 1954 the remaining buildings of McKim, Mead & White no
longer represent the bulk of the city, and the racquet club and the few
others that have remained have been left behind as incarnations of
an ideology, or a theory of a city, that could exist parallel to or overlaid
on top of the New York grid.
In the design of the Seagram Building, Mies takes the proposi-
tion of McKim, Mead & White seriously. In the front, towards the club
building, he makes a square, thus incorporating the palazzo into the
site. Together, palazzo, square and tower create a classic composition
of ersatz Europeanism. In the back, Mies designs a volume that takes
the width of the palazzo (which is the width of the site) and builds a
curious volumetric composition. It is a mise-en-scène of the “urban
block” that not only acknowledges its secondary nature with respect to
the tower, but also leaves space for the existing buildings in the back
along Lexington Avenue to dominate. In this sense, both volumes –
the large and the small – argue over the void, the empty space they
do not cover, in an attempt to impose their contextualism. The hinge
between them, created entirely out of the same bronze-coloured steel
profiles but with marble-plate infill, decisively unites both systems.
The manner of its physical materialization emphasizes the ambiguity
of its contextualism. As a dead body, it bridges the two – it steps back
and embraces two different results deriving from the same system of
measurement. The hinge and its awkward inner corner is not merely
a mistake, but also a precise and decisive incarnation of the ambigu-
ity of both plot and architect. Both are simultaneously American and
European, object and infill, imposing and imposed. This microscopic
representation of conflict is fundamental in Mies’s work, and is – upon
closer inspection – everywhere in it. In the Seagram Building one can
find it in the bizarre travertine extensions on the cores outside the
building, in the garage entrances in the base, in the parapets rep-
resenting the centre of the design and, of course, in the hinge itself.
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Each of these elements – combinations of a large volume and a
small one, or of a large cutout and a small one – mimics the other in
section or plan. And yet curiously, the most reproduced of all details,
the detail of the façade structure that shows steel profiles caught in
concrete reproduced by a smaller bronze profile on the outside, has
the same formal language. It acts as a microscopic reproduction of
the building’s formal riddle, part esoteric (un)consciousness, part
contextual pragmatism – a formal collision of seemingly uncombin-
able elements that is perfectly fine for Mies.
V.
In his City of the Captive Globe project, Rem Koolhaas recreated the
idea of the Manhattan grid as a set of speculative spaces on identical
granite bases. It presents a set of plots “where each philosophy has
the right to expand indefinitely to heaven”. It is a place where due
to the grid, lobotomy and schism are able to flourish indefinitely in
order to create the possibility of “cities within the city” as the ultimate
celebration of the endless possibilities that the concept of the grid
allows. Mies’s contextualism is but one of these possible philoso-
phies. However, as a Trojan horse, it annihilates the very frame that
it employs to flourish, or that permits it to exist.
As a self-imposed context within the Manhattan grid, the Seagram
Building is the lie that became truth, creating a dream from which there
is no waking up – Manhattanism aborted from within.
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DATA CENTRE ON LEXINGTON AVENUE
Data centre with perforated building fills the empty lot height of the main volume has grills; the programme hints
base and tall chimney to max- made available after a building been mediated by that of the at the notion of a context
imize cooling through chim- originally present during the neighbouring buildings, which that is everywhere and no-
ney effect. Structure of steel construction of the Seagram makes the new building “fit” where, which is the state of
with natural stone infill. The Building was demolished. The the site; the base is ventilation Manhattan’s grid today.
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BEAUTY AND MISTAKES
IN THE EARLY WORK OF PETER MÄRKLI
Andrea Zanderigo
Beauty can be radical, and for this reason it is more than a consumer object.
Peter Märkli in conversation with Marcel Meili*
Peter Märkli has always been busy with the conscious production of *Mohsen Mostafavi (ed.),
beauty. Even his early, controversial projects might be interpreted as Approximations: The
Architecture of Peter Märkli
an ongoing investigation that attempts to demonstrate the possibility (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
for beauty to make an appearance once more in contemporary society Press, 2002)
(and be understood by it). And this is true despite the obvious fact that
his first buildings clearly belong to the antigrazioso tradition. Indeed,
we do not trust his words when he states in the same conversation cited
above that he was completely culturally ignorant at the beginning of
his career. We know that he had been travelling extensively throughout
Italy at the time, and we can imagine him carefully observing not only
the Romanesque Santa Giusta in Bazzano-L’Aquila, which he acknowl-
edges as a source (as does Meili), but Giovanni Muzio’s experiments
in Milan as well. The close resemblance between the bizarre syntax
and architectural elements of Ca’ Brüta and the double building in
Trübbach-Azmoos are too apparent to be ignored. We also shouldn’t
forget that during those years there was Carlo Carrà’s antigrazioso
poetics with its reinterpretation of the “primitives” that was close to
Muzio’s own. But maybe Märkli really didn’t know about Muzio then;
perhaps he was just sharing the same pre-modern sources, like the
works of the early Renaissance and Romanesque periods.
In any case, in the first works by Märkli, there is a particular kind
of beauty that is truly radical. How might we describe the main façades
of the double building in Trübbach-Azmoos from 1982 if not as radi-
cal? It is a weird pre-modern composition of two red-painted béton
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brut surfaces that are pierced with oddly spaced vertical windows on
the upper floor and an inversely tapering column-screened loggia on
the main one, with the whole standing atop a classical podium with
a double staircase and surmounted by a cryptic sculpture by one of
Märkli’s mentors, Hans Josephsohn. Nothing is aligned here; voids
and solids confront one another along the main axis, and the whole
composition is a beautiful ensemble of detectable mistakes. The
House in Trübbach- language may have changed, but the Minimalist entry façade of the
Azmoos, 1982 1988 apartment building in Trübbach is indeed no different. There
Above right: are intentionally no correspondences between the formwork and the
Apartment building in openings; in addition, there is a bizarre, rather Venturian proportional
Trübbach, 1988
relationship between the tapering windows and the narrow door that
creates an almost symmetrical overall composition (note the formwork
in the upper right portion of the façade).
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that his system alone does not constitute a recipe for beauty. After all,
beauty is the ultimate goal for architecture, and that is important to
us. But what is beauty in his eyes? How could we define it? And how
can we judge it?
What at first glance might appear to be an esoteric discourse on
beauty becomes a more consistent and understandable argument
when one follows Märkli’s train of thought in the above-mentioned
conversation. Responding to Meili’s perception of architecture as a
collective language in which the rules are determined by conventions
(the “discursive” model, as he calls it), Märkli introduces the aware-
ness of there being certain laws that are above individual or collective
will. Certainly, they are open to interpretation, but they do not vary
in their essentials. Perhaps without knowing it, Märkli introduces
Chomsky’s argument for the existence of invariable mind structures
in our brains that predetermine our language, which is in opposition
to the Structuralist discourse à la De Saussure. Märkli empirically sup-
ports this assumption by referring to typological similarities between
products of different cultures and times.
Consistently enough, when asked by Meili why hundreds of people
objected to one of his early apartment buildings and why he was so
certain that he was the only one to have recognized the truth of the
situation, Märkli answered that it was probably because he was the
only one who had ever seriously addressed these issues. Besides, the
mythical circle in which the signifier and the signified were immedi-
ately understandable by all – if it indeed ever existed – has been broken.
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are all reduced to the allowed minimum and the gain in surface area is
concentrated in a large living room connected to an unusually generous
entryway, thereby evading the need for a modernist distribution space.
A deep loggia standing on a mute concrete podium and screened by a
redundant series of oddly spaced pillars characterizes the main façade
of the building while providing privacy to the rooms facing the street.
Again in 1995, Märkli built a two-level single-family house on a plot
at the edge of the village of Grabs in which, significantly, the plan is
almost a square. In this square-based, polished concrete parallelepi-
ped, only the entrance corner has an angle measuring exactly ninety
degrees; all the others depart from perfect orthogonality in a barely
perceptible way. The point is precisely that by being almost a square,
it becomes a perfect square in reality.
This list could easily go on. It is clear that many of Peter Märkli’s
early projects present a pre-modern (and thus postmodern) mastery –
in a sense, beauty as achieved through mistakes.
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MODERNISTIC NEANDERTHALISM
Matteo Poli
photographs by Paolo Rosselli
25
Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans
introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day. Ann Gibbons*
* Ann Gibbons, “A New The house Luigi Figini designed for himself in Milan is profoundly
View of the Birth of Homo Neanderthal, while Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye is most definitely Homo
Sapiens”, Science,
28 January 2011. sapiens sapiens. I am not sure a mistake is conspicuously visible in
Villa Figini (discard the Savoye and pick up the Weissenhof, and voilà,
le pilotis rond ist quadratisch) but I have to admit that its volume is
quite low-vaulted and has the large brow-ridge typical of Neanderthals.
Both houses share supports, open plans, horizontal windows, roof
gardens and a free design of the façade; they basically have the same
DNA. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier cleverly designed his villa as an over-
refined manifesto, demonstrating how sleekness always triumphs over
roughness. Figini limited himself to living in his own house with his
wife Gege Bottinelli, who was actually the curator of the Milanese gal-
lery Il Milione, where the first exhibition of Rationalism was mounted.
By chance, the champion of Neo-Rationalism, Aldo Rossi, abused
square pilotis and Neanderthal roughness, demonstrating how long-
dormant ideas can resurface again in architecture too.
While the house at the Villaggio dei Giornalisti essentially has no
acknowledged heirs but quite a large group of ancestors, Le Corbusier’s
seminal villa reinterpretations later evolved into the architectural
embodiment of Philip Dick–style science fiction with Rem Koolhaas’s
Villa dall’Ava. Instances of extinction and speciation . . .
The palafitte is now working undercover. Vegetation took over the
plot, hiding the last remains of a less sleek alternative to modernism. Still
inhabited and thus extremely hard to visit, it resists transformation: in
contrast to the open field in which it was originally built, it is now part of
a dense urban structure, camouflaged within the garden and extending
Le Corbusier’s five points to almost a century after their conception, and
still maintains its primary function – residential housing. Meanwhile the
Homo sapiens sapiens version risked demolition after becoming a youth
centre in Poissy for some years; stubbornly, Villa Figini kept its quiet exist-
ence resting on its large, flat, suspended belly.
There is general agreement that Neanderthal interbreeding was a
huge boon for our species; sticking with the metaphor, I am afraid that
the regular cross-breeding of similarly sleek buildings is leading archi-
tecture to a sterile place, whereas I think that the brutal genetic aber-
ration that generated Figini’s house might have had interesting conse-
quences and could liberate architecture from continuous self-repetition.
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SCAMOZZI VERSUS SANSOVINO
Paolo Carpi
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programme ends up being won by the latter. Still, it is important to
highlight the dignity with which Scamozzi accepts a defeat that borders
on martyrdom. This dignity is perfectly represented in Veronese’s por-
trait of the architect, in which Scamozzi is portrayed measuring – and
actually carrying – a Corinthian capital; it is a portrait of an architect
bearing his own cross.
If the enthusiasm for the renovatio is able to establish a link
between architecture and specific meanings until the middle of the
16th century, shortly thereafter architecture and its meanings begin to
diverge, if not clearly oppose one another. Scamozzi’s disappointment Paolo Caliari (il Veronese),
derives from the approximation that was instrumental for Sansovino Portrait of an Architect
(Vincenzo Scamozzi), ca.
to establish a connection between classical architectural language 1585, Denver Art Museum
and contemporary political values, a fact that allows him a certain
degree of license in adapting the ancient repertoire to the ideologi-
cal context of his day. What Sansovino considers licenses, necessary
licenses, Scamozzi perceives simply as mistakes, unforgivable mistakes.
When Scamozzi enters the battlefield of St Mark’s Square (1581), his
opponent Sansovino is already dead (1570) and the two components
7 8
6
Layout of St Mark’s Square
in 1580
1. Ducal Palace
2. Church of St Mark
1 3. Clock Tower
9
4. Old Procuracies
5. Church of San Geminiano
6. Orseolo Hospice
7. Bell Tower
11 10 8. Loggetta
9. Library
10. Public Slaughterhouse
11. Mint
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of the square – the larger piazza and the smaller piazzetta – are in the
state shown on the preceding page: the Library, a two-story building
with sixteen bays, is entirely finished apart from its southern façade
towards the water’s edge, the Mint is completed, the Beccheria (pub-
lic slaughterhouse) still occupies the corner between the Library and
the Mint, the Orseolo hospice still defines the southern border of the
square and the Loggetta is at the foot of the bell tower.
In this context, which is quite different from what we encounter
today, Sansovino strongly defines his idea for the organization of the
square with his three interventions, the Loggetta, the Library and
the Mint. The Library defines the alignment of the future relation-
ship between the square’s two parts, for its northern side defines the
new southern edge of the square, leaving the bell tower as an objet
trouvé at the junction of the piazza and the piazzetta. The Loggetta
enriches the bell tower, which has become freestanding. The Mint
is open to the east, toward the Ducal Palace and thus directly onto
the piazzetta, immediately south of the last (sixteenth) arcade of the
Library. Sansovino’s three buildings, together with the pre-existing
7 8
Layout of St Mark’s Square
in 1597
6
1. Ducal Palace
2. Church of St Mark
3. Clock Tower 1
4. Old Procuracies 9
5. Church of San Geminiano
6. New Procuracies (these
actually will not be finished
until 1640 by Baldassarre 10
Longhena)
7. Bell Tower
8. Loggetta
9. Library
10. Mint
32
ones (St Mark’s church, the Ducal Palace, the bell tower, the clock tower,
the Old Procuracies and the church of San Geminiano), operate like
the interconnected gears of a great new spatial machine. Sansovino’s
project is an open one; only a few fixed elements are required to define
the organization of the piazza and piazzetta. When Sansovino dies,
there are only two things left to do: conclude the southern edge of the
Library and substitute the Orseolo hospice with the New Procuracies.
Scamozzi’s first task is to complete the Library. In September 1580,
the Venetian Senate decides to move the public slaughterhouse and
to extend the Library to twenty-one bays, thereby aligning it with the
façade of the Mint facing the water’s edge. Scamozzi’s opinion on the
incomplete building by Sansovino is clear: “[M]any, without reason,
celebrated and described the very large – and almost disproportionally
tall – ornaments upon the columns, attributing to them one fourth of 2
the height of the columns, not to mention those who proposed orna- Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea
della architettura universale
ments of one third, if not half, so that they look like Albanian hats”.2 (1615), pt. II, bk. VI, chap.
Scamozzi’s intolerant orthodoxy does not attack Sansovino’s overall VII, 20.
urban scheme, but rather concentrates on some of the Library’s details: 3
the solution for the building’s corner, the Doric entablature and, most Drawing A 193, Uffizi,
importantly, the Ionic entablature of the second order. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe,
Florence.
According to Scamozzi, Sansovino’s Ionic entablature is entirely
incorrect: the height is wrong because of the unorthodox ornaments
introduced between the first and second bands of the architrave, and
the height of the frieze is wrong as well, for it has been made overly large
in order to make room for the windows of the mezzanine. Scamozzi
immediately tries to profit from the opportunity of the new commission
to correct the shame of Sansovino’s entirely incorrect entablature. He
proposes adding another floor to the Library, arguing that a twenty-
one-bay building with only two floors would appear disproportionate.
Of course, the construction of a third level would require the destruc-
tion of the second entablature. In order to persuade the Procurators,
Scamozzi designs a project that includes extremely luxurious offices
on the third level of the Library.3 Scamozzi’s proposal is rejected, how-
ever, after a consultation with the proto Simone Sorella, who observes
that a three-story Library would suffocate St Mark’s church, thereby
flouting a decree of 1556 stating the supremacy of the basilica over all
the other buildings in the square. Scamozzi’s strategy is a mistake: it
is simply suicidal to declare a grander goal (correcting the dispropor-
tion of the building) merely to achieve a smaller one (demolishing
the entirely incorrect entablature), knowing that there is no political
33
consensus regarding the former. Scamozzi acts like a fool. He will have
to extend the Library without increasing its height. In this context, it is
difficult to know how disappointed he is by the clash of the orders of
the Library and of the Mint, which Sansovino designed as independ-
ent objects but which are now forced to meet one another along the
sides facing the basin: “[A]nd sometimes orders of a certain kind crash
into others, as occurred here in Venice – without my consent – when
The point of contact the façade of the Library and the façade of the Mint were made . . . :
between the Mint (left) excellent architects do not approve of such things”.4 The remark “with-
and the Library (right) as
seen from St Mark’s basin out my consent” sounds more like an attempt to lay the blame for this
(photograph by Giovanna clash on the shoulders of the Procurators rather than a direct criticism
Silva)
of Sansovino, who had simply never thought about how to avoid this
clumsy encounter because, according to his design, the two buildings
4 were to have remained separate.5
Scamozzi, L’idea della So this first, and most evident, clash between the orders of the
architettura universale, pt. II,
bk. VI, chap. XXXV, 171. Library and those of the Mint is executed by Scamozzi but is not
the product of an intentional attempt to critique Sansovino. Here
5
See the reconstruction of
Scamozzi simply accepts (albeit with no enthusiasm) a solution arrived
the original project in Tafuri, at by someone else. However, he probably would have preferred not
Jacopo Sansovino, 82–89. to realize such a blatant conflict of ornament, because even if it had
been decided upon by somebody else, it was undoubtedly going to be
attributed to him.
In contrast, the second, and less evident, clash between the orders
of the two buildings in the piazza, that involving the Library and the
New Procuracies, happens entirely on purpose. Scamozzi is entrust-
ed with the task of realizing the New Procuracies in the place of the
Orseolo hotel. The new building would be in continuity with the three
bays of the northern façade of the Library. Here Scamozzi does not
have the opportunity to act directly on Sansovino’s entirely incorrect
entablature, but he has to build something that will abut it, and thus
he has the chance to remark upon it architecturally. The two prepara-
tory studies and the final realized version of this point of contact show
an involution from the point of view of formal eloquence that corre-
sponds to an evolution from the point of view of one’s awareness of
one’s means of expression.
The first solution (1582–88) appears in drawing UA194. Here
Scamozzi shows his complete refusal of Sansovino’s solution for the
Ionic entablature. The two façades correspond up until the balustrade
of the second floor – up to this level, the two buildings perfectly match.
It is in the Ionic arch of the second order of the bay between the two
34
buildings that Scamozzi introduces the first difference: a tympanum
that corresponds to the tympani appearing on the third floor of the
New Procuracies. The gap between Sansovino’s entirely incorrect
entablature and Scamozzi’s correct one is filled by three bands show-
ing the correct measurements of the elements of the entablature to
the right as compared to that on the left: the three correct bands col-
lide against undefined points of the entirely incorrect entablature. At
the top of this bay, the roofline of the Library with its balustrade and
statues is moved down in order to align it with the balustrade of the
third order of the New Procuracies, thereby producing a bizarre hybrid
containing elements of both buildings. In this drawing, Scamozzi
attempts an unlikely “fusion” notwithstanding his disapproval of
Sansovino’s design.
The second attempt (1596) to arrive at a solution is even more
paradoxical. Here the discontinuity starts with the first order, where
a blind wall has been introduced between the two buildings instead
of an arch (this is quite puzzling, particularly when seen in plan).
This wall is ornamented at its two ends with a mirrored repetition
of the corner solution of the Library, thereby connecting and divid-
ing the two buildings. The motif of the two mirrored (fake) corners
framing the blank wall extends upward, being just framed by the
entablatures of the smaller orders that cross the wall for no apparent
reason, and thereby links the two (seemingly) independent buildings.
At the level of the Ionic entablatures, the wall is nothing more than
an abstract field where the two entablatures confront each other in
no uncertain terms. Closer to the top, this solution becomes even
more whimsical and finally shows its limits: given the greater height
of the entirely incorrect entablature, the column and pilaster on the
left start higher than the column and pilaster on the right, and so the
column and pilaster on the left look strangely dwarfish. At the level
of the concluding Corinthian entablature, the fictional notion of the
independence of the two buildings comes to an end. While Scamozzi
stops the decorations of the frieze in correspondence with the column
and pilaster on the right, the roof, of course, reaches the column and
pilaster on the left.
The awkwardness of this solution is patent if, for a moment, one
considers the two buildings as truly separate and observes the Library
as an independent building: the attic loses its symmetry and looks as
if it is being harpooned by the Procuracies. Perhaps even Scamozzi
himself thought this was too much.
35
The first solution for the
point of contact between
the Library (left) and the
New Procuracies (right).
Drawn by SOOFFICE after
drawing no. A 194, Uffizi,
Gabinetto Disegni e
Stampe, Florence
36
Second solution for the
point of contact between
the Library (left) and the
New Procuracies (right).
Drawn by SOOFFICE after
drawing no. 5448, Louvre,
Cabinet des Dessins, Paris
1 2 5m
37
The ultimately realized solution represents a masterpiece of defeat.
After attempting first an articulated and unlikely reconciliation and
then a clumsy assault, Scamozzi abandons any formal gimmick and
leaves us with his bitter, merciless judgement, deciding that the point
of contact between the Procuracies and the Library can be solved only
by the brutal clash of the two conflicting orders. Scamozzi opts to
show up the irreconcilability of the two intellectual positions, even if
only with respect to a small detail. And he decides to work exclusively
on this detail despite the fact that it is inconsequential in the larger
picture of the square’s renovation, for he is stubborn enough to be
unable to renounce the opportunity to manifest his disagreement:
he takes full responsibility for a jarring note in order to adhere to the
correct architectural rhythm – the rhythm of Universal Architecture –
for the hundred or so metres of the Procuracies that remain. In the
end, Scamozzi accepts Sansovino’s mistake as it is, without hypocrisy
and without an ostentatious expression of disagreement. Much more
than in the correct solution of the Ionic entablature, it is here that the
lesson of Scamozzi lies.
One question remains: was this violent, Lilliputian confrontation
(a true tempest in a teapot) even noticed by Scamozzi’s clients? Perhaps
their reaction was not much different from that of the contemporary
tourist: a total indifference regarding the clear sign of an architectural
quarrel that, in the end, holds no interest for anyone.
Facing page:
The point of contact
between the Library (left)
and the New Procuracies
(right). How sweet is the
little carved angel who
now bears the weight
of the cornice Scamozzi
mercilessly placed upon
his shoulders after having
literally taken the ground
out from under his feet!
38
39
THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE
GRANDE ARCHE: THE STORY OF
A SURREAL MONUMENT
Wulf Böer
40
In 1982 a competition was launched to design the Tête Défense, a rep-
resentative office building for the monofunctional high-rise colony
of La Défense, which is located in the western-most part of Greater
Paris. The axe historique, a line of historical monuments starting from
the Louvre and running straight through the French capital, pointed
directly toward the designated site.
The historical axis – the voie triomphale – serves as a guarantor of
urban stability in Paris by means of symmetry and continuity. Starting
with the creation of the Champs-Élysées in 1616, it was continually
extended over the course of time under the main premise of defin-
ing a straight corridor toward the western-most edge of the city. The
only architecture allowed along the boulevard was that dedicated to
the achievements of past generations. In the 18th century, that meant
monuments of military success, symbols of victory; not surprisingly,
most of those memorial buildings were created upon the directive of
Napoleon Bonaparte. With the continuous growth of Paris after the
Second World War, the axe historique extended even further westward.
By the 1970s, the avenue already crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly
and unsatisfactorily ended in the wildly growing business district of La
Défense, although no office building yet dared to directly interrupt the
voie triomphale. A new project to be placed along the axis was needed.
The inherent challenge of the competition for the Grande Arche
was twofold: how could one connect the emerging business district
with the historical urban fabric of Paris while simultaneously creat-
ing a functional office building within the purely economic context of
La Défense? In response, the winning entry by Danish architect Johan
Otto von Spreckelsen proposed a rectangular gateway inscribed within
a massive cube and placed precisely at the end point of the axe historique
so that it stands in line with the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile and the Arc
de Triomphe du Carrousel. The walls of the sculptural skyscraper are
wide enough to contain office space on thirty-five floors. Like a Donald
Judd sculpture scaled to an enormous dimension and provided with
an architectural programme, the project was able to solve the double
challenge of the competition by means of a Minimalist gesture on a
grand scale. Together with the spherical Géode in front of the Cité des
Sciences et de l’Industrie (by Adrien Fainsilber) and the glass Pyramide
du Louvre (by I. M. Pei), the project claims a rightful place among the
geometrically idealized buildings that had appeared in Paris by the
late eighties. The strictness that has been used to imply geometrical
discipline reveals an obsessive relationship with symmetry: the Grande
41
Arche is a cube with a centrally inscribed cubic void, and its façade is
covered with square-format tiles of marble and perforated by square-
format windows. As a vast accumulation of geometrical tautologies, the
Arche comes close to losing its feature of being a building and becoming
purely an artefact that belongs to the sphere of flawless monuments.
Geometrical perfection: a postmodern approach to monumentality.
It was dedicated to the ideals of humanity.
Construction started in 1985, and French architect Paul Andreu
took over the duties of von Spreckelsen. The completed building is not
quite a cube, but since the difference in length of each side is only a few
metres (with each side measuring around 110 metres), this distortion
cannot be detected by the human eye. Even knowing about it, it is impos-
sible for the beholder to perceive this “flaw”. More significant than this
deviation from geometrical perfection is the location of the Grande
Arche: in order to prevent the structure’s foundations from colliding
with previously built infrastructure underground, the whole building
had to be rotated clockwise by an angle of 6.33°, thereby breaking the
building’s symmetrical relationship with the axe historique. (Later,
it was stated that the slightly distorted position of the Grande Arche
referred to the also slightly distorted position of the Louvre at the other
end of the axis.) The rotation does not cause a change of direction of
the axe historique; rather, it generates a feeling of discomfort and even
suspicion, for the perfect cube seems to be tilting horizontally. Due to
its extreme symmetry and the in-line arrangement of buildings along
the axe historique, one expects the newer Arche to be placed in align-
ment with the axis. Like an unkept promise, the dislocation produces
an almost embarrassing tension between the object and its environ-
ment. Seen in this context, the displacement of the Grande Arche
finds an analogy in the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico.
The enchanting yet perplexing atmosphere in his Metaphysical Town
Square paintings is, to a certain extent, also created by the distortion
of familiar situations. His famous painting Torre Rossa (1913) shows an
almost absolutely symmetrically arranged view along a Renaissance
street: identical buildings on both sides occupy exactly the same amount
of the canvas, and the vanishing point on the horizon lies precisely in
the centre of the scene. The beholder stands right in the middle, look-
ing at a cylindrical red tower that must be very far away (the ground
on which it stands actually shows the curvature of the earth). But
something does not seem to be right here. The apparent familiarity of
the view is disturbed by irregularities: The arcades framing the scene
42
provoke an abnormal feeling of claustrophobia, for they actually have
different vanishing points on the horizon. The tower is slightly shifted
away from the centre of the image, and its size seems indetermin-
able (can it really be eight times as high as the adjacent buildings?). In
the spirit of the Surrealist movement, the apparent rationality of the
image is undermined by distortions that might well be explained by
technical reasons (i.e., colour, proportions, vanishing points), but they
are nonetheless experienced first and foremost as a subconscious feel-
ing of irrationality. Besides the manipulation of the perspective view,
de Chirico uses carefully placed items of technology to alienate the
scenery. Two objects dominate his work, both symbols of rationaliza-
tion and production: a clock that seems stolen from a town hall and
a steam locomotive in the background. They do not only foresee the
overwhelming importance of technology for the 20th century; they also
dramatically contrast the venerable stasis of the scene and ridicule the
monumentality of its architectural elements. Against a background of
technology, the fountains, arcades and sculptures appear superficial
and somehow timeless; they lose their monumental character. De
Chirico’s Town Square paintings are more than still lifes in an urban
dimension: they are also surreal collages of uncertainty – anachronistic
elements arranged in a landscape of fake visual perception.
The displacement of the Grande Arche along the axe historique
leads to a comparable sort of mental disruption, but paradoxically
so, because the structure tries so hard to be a built manifesto of order
and regularity. Although the site had seemed empty from a bird’s-eye
view before the Arche’s construction began, urban development had
already infiltrated the ground below. The outcome was an involuntary
contextualization of the building that is experienced as a distortion of
the regularity one expects. The fact that the effect created by the build-
ing’s rotation was not intentional brings to mind what the Surrealist
movement defined as automatism: by deliberately applying chance and
accident to the process of its creation, art could be freed from rational
control. The absurdity of the genesis of the Grande Arche is the opposite,
for here an excess of rationality leads to a collective mistake, thereby
turning into an act of Surrealism: architecture automatique. As in the
Town Square paintings, the effect can be explained with technical
reasons, but its visual detachment from the urban context remains an
irrational act. As if there were a curse on the resurrection of histori-
cal architecture, other projects with a similar fervour for symbolism
met a comparably surrealistic fate. The Washington Monument, a
43
super-sized reinterpretation of an Egyptian obelisk, was intended to
be placed at the intersection of two lines, one running south from the
centre of the White House and the other running west from the centre
of the Capitol. It was literally to become a landmark in the true meaning
of the word, highlighting the geographical coherence of two political
buildings and at the same time being the tallest structure to date: an
ancient column designed using the high-tech means of a skyscraper.
Even without tunnels below it, however, the ground was not able to
support the nearly-170-metre-high building. As a result, it was simply
constructed in another location in the park, 250 metres south of its
intended location. Since the context of the Washington Monument
derives from two geometrical lines – theoretical vectors without a built
substance – its actual displacement violates a rather academic rule. In
other words, it becomes a virtual mistake, invisible to those unaware
of the geographical references.
The axe historique, in contrast, is a built corridor, making the rota-
tion of the Grande Arche a very physical displacement that undermines
the premise of the voie triomphale – the laws of structural engineering
overrule those of urban planning. The engineers of the Arche desper-
ately tried to avoid an inclination, but, as if trapped within the inevit-
able tragedy of a Greek drama, they therefore had to accept a horizontal
displacement of the structure towards the avenue. Just as a Surrealist
artwork reveals the subconscious mind, the displacement of the Grande
Arche reveals the subterranean one of the urban organism. Maybe it is
in this mysterious notion that a reconciliation between the metropolis
and this strange object can be found. The Arche is a monument that,
accidentally, demonstrates the collective and fragile process of archi-
tecture within an environment of urban stability through a distorted
monumentality. Its somehow clumsy displacement makes the Grande
Arche more human and less monumental, and even more accurate and
less archaic. It is faulty, and therefore human – a horizontally inclined
tower of Pisa. Maybe it thus becomes, through its apparent failure, an
adequate symbol for a century dominated by the illogical curiosities
of the technological omnipotence it created.
West of La Défense, the latest part of the axe historique is about to
be built. The voie triomphale is being extended even further into the
outskirts of the metropolis, this time to the city of Nanterre, where
it will cross the Seine for a second time. On this last stretch, past the
Grande Arche, the projected boulevard is not on a straight axis: it will
actually bend in a slight curve.
44
Photograph by Leuntje
van Kampenhout
45
SANTA MARIA ANNUNZIATA
IN ROCCAVERANO:
THE MISINTERPRETATION OF
A PROJECT BY BRAMANTE
Manuela M. Morresi
46
“In the significant years of our history, the only road that connected 1
Rocca with the civilized world . . . a victim of the destructive war . . . was Archivio Parrocchiale di
Roccaverano, Pompeo
essentially incapable of accommodating modern modes of transpor- Ravera, 1945 – Roccaverano
tation; the idea of using a car was just a dream . . . When the architect – 1966 Quaderno di memorie
lavori chiesa parrocchiale,
[Ercole] Checchi braved the Mombaldone–Roccaverano road alone unpublished transcription
and on foot on 26 April 1946 for the first time, he did so in a torrential by Tullio Galliano (whom
rainstorm, for the owner of the horse-drawn carriage he had hired to I would like to thank for
allowing me to use the
take him refused to attempt the trip in such weather.”1 This is what quote), 22r.
Father Pompeo Ravera, Roccaverano’s priest, wrote in the records of
2
the restoration (1946–66) that would return the church of Santa Maria Ercole Checchi, “La
Annunziata to its original state, liberating it from the 18th-century chiesa bramantesca di
stuccoes and 19th-century paintings that had long distorted its appear- Roccaverano”, Bollettino
d’arte 34 (1949), 205–17.
ance. Today, while the road is in better condition, it is still a moving
experience to go up to Roccaverano and discover this extraordinary 3
structure “hidden” within the built fabric of the village – a veritable Ravera, 1945 – Roccaverano –
1966, 13r, 13v.
foreign object in comparison to the other buildings in the local archi-
tectural tradition due to its evident “Roman-ness”. 4
Christoph L. Frommel,
At the time, the architect Ercole Checchi was a municipal officer Die Farnesina und Peruzzis
in the Superintendent’s office of the city of Turin: he was overseeing architektonisches Frühwerk
the church’s restoration and was the first to study the building and (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1961),
145ff.
suggest its attribution to Bramante in 1949,2 thereby increasing the
church’s value and encouraging the authorities to continue financing 5
Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante
the restoration through to its completion.3 architetto (Bari: Laterza,
Checchi’s attribution was subsequently accepted by Christoph 1969), 237–41, 1047. For a
Frommel without further research,4 and then in 1969 Arnaldo Bruschi different opinion, see James
S. Ackerman, “Review of C. L.
included Roccaverano’s church in the catalogue of Bramante’s uncon- Frommel, Die Farnesina und
firmed works in his monumental and as-yet-unequalled monograph Peruzzis architektonisches
Frühewerk”, Art Bulletin 44
on the architect.5
(1962), 243–46, where the
The attribution proposed by Checchi and then accepted by Frommel church of Roccaverano
and Bruschi is based on a consideration of stylistic qualities, and until is considered the
consequence of the
today it has not been backed up with decisive documents. More than intervention by Peruzzi at
twenty years ago when I was investigating the church, I only added the Sagra di Carpi (begun
in 1515) without Bramante’s
further details to the framework constructed by those who had come
involvement.
before me by identifying and describing the patron, Enrico Bruno, and
discussing the stylistic connections that link this church to Bramante’s 6
Manuela M. Morresi,
production.6 “Bramante, Enrico Bruno
Over the last twenty years, many documents, resources and pieces e la Parrocchiale di
of information have surfaced, but not “the” document, the one that Roccaverano”, in La piazza, la
chiesa, il parco, ed. Manfredo
could definitively connect the architect of Pope Julius II, Enrico Bruno Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1991),
and the church of Roccaverano. That said, however, it is precisely this 96–165.
47
7 link that I want to discuss here, a link that is supported by the fact that
For clarification regarding the attribution to Bramante has yet to be disproved.
the ecclesiastical career of
Enrico Bruno, see Ludovico Enrico Bruno, who was born on an unknown date in Roccaverano,
Bertoni, “Bruni, Enrico”, lived in Rome from 1476 on. His ecclesiastical career survived the
Dizionario biografico degli
italiani, 14 (1972), 609–61;
pontificates of a series of popes of varying political orientations,
and Morresi, “Bramante, from Sixtus IV (1471–84), to Innocent III (1484–92) and Alexander
Enrico Bruno e la chiesa VI (1492–1503), to Julius II (1503–13). And it was precisely during the
parrocchiale”, 102–105.
reign of Julius II that Enrico’s cursus honorum culminated with his
8 nomination first as Under Treasurer, and then as General Treasurer
Ibid.
of the Church in 1505.7 While holding this office, Enrico participated
9 in the construction of the new church of St Peter’s, thereby coming
Rodolfo Lanciani, Storia into contact with Bramante and other artists active at the papal court.8
degli scavi di Roma e notizie
intorno alle collezioni Enrico’s career leads us to think that he received a humanistic educa-
romane di antichità [1902–12] tion and therefore was probably a man of letters, as is also suggested
(Rome: Quasar, 1989), vol. I,
by his nomination as Prefect of the Vatican Library in 1501 and by
120; Morresi, “Bramante,
Enrico Bruno e la chiesa the presence in his Roman home of a collection of antiques known
parrocchiale”, 105–106. by Fra Giocondo and reported by Rodolfo Lanciani9 at the beginning
10 of the 20th century.
In the survey carried out in The building programme conceptualized for Roccaverano was
1989 (published in Morresi,
supposed to have been very ambitious, but I believe that the death of
“Bramante, Enrico Bruno
e la chiesa parrocchiale”, Enrico in 1509 – the same year that construction began – provoked a
99), the Greek cross was significant simplification of the project. As early as 1949 Checchi noted
found to be inscribed in a
rectangle measuring 18.1
the problem of the solution devised for the façade’s corners, where
(width) by 17.1 (length) two pilasters are partially superimposed in an incongruous manner.
metres. The absence of According to Checchi, this anomaly must have been the result of an
apses on the entrance wall
caused the builders to imprecise tracing of the foundations, where imperfect right angles
minimize the wall’s thickness would have caused an excess of space on the façade that consequently
in comparison to that of
the lateral walls, thereby
had to be filled with the two superimposed pilasters, and as a result of
producing a sagging of the this interpretation, Checchi reconstructed the façade with only one
façade. pilaster at each of the corners.
There is no doubt that the church’s plan presented relevant irregu-
larities in its foundations: the Greek cross, with its central cupola
resting on four piers bevelled on the diagonal and reinforced by four
barrel vaults along the arms of the cross and by four domed vaults
over the chapels in the corners, is in reality not inscribed within a
perfect square.10 It is clear that the solution employed for the façade’s
corners is incongruous, but in it we may perceive the first clue that the
original project – which was presumably communicated via drawings
and perhaps even a wooden model sent by Bramante from Rome to
Roccaverano, as frequently occurred – was radically altered.
48
1 2 5m
49
11 In the church that was built, the apses placed along three sides
A quincunx is a Greek cross of the perimeter, excluding the inner surface of the primary façade,
plan inscribed within a
square composed of nine are segments of a circle. If these apses had been given a semicircular
sections, five covered form instead, as was more customary, then the thickness of the walls
with cupolas or with
domed vaults, and four
would have increased overall and would have led to an increase in the
barrel vaulted ones that width of the façade, which would, in turn, have allowed the insertion
correspond to the arms of of proper pairs of pilasters at its corners corresponding to the paired
the cross.
pilasters of the interior’s minor order. If the entrance wall too had been
equipped with semicircular apses, then the plan would have become
perfectly organic, exemplifying the typology of the quincunx11 that was
en vogue in Rome in the first decade of the 16th century.
If these few alterations had been made, the dimensions of the
church would have been exactly convertible into Roman palms: 30
palms for the diameter of the central cupola, and 15 for the hemi-
spherical vaults, following a 1:2 ratio. What is more, the Greek cross
would have taken on a regular form based on a perfect square with
sides measuring 18.10 metres, the equivalent of 81 Roman palms
(1 palm = 0.2234 m).
The presence of the semicircular apses along the perimeter, includ-
ing the entrance wall, however, would result in an incompatibility
with the lateral portals on the sides. Consequently, this is a second
clue that is useful in reconstructing the original project sent from
Rome to Roccaverano.
The site chosen for the construction of the church, which was on
top of the hill around which the village is clustered, would have bene-
fitted greatly from a more ambitious building that was demanding
and expensive, one with three analogous façades, each with a sin-
Axonometric gle centrally located portal. With such an appearance, Santa Maria
reconstruction (Morresi) Annunziata would have been perfectly in tune with Bramante’s first
of the original project of
Santa Maria Annunziata project for St Peter’s (U 1 A), a quincunx plan with four identical façades
(drafted by D. Dalpozzo) (in Roccaverano, the difficulties of the site would have made it impos-
sible to build a fourth façade corresponding to the choir for orographic
reasons). With three analogous façades, the church would acquire
complete congruity, presenting a symmetrical and coherent volume
that was isolated and readily visible from a distance. In other words,
the great utopian design that was the first project for St Peter’s – an
idealized plan that was perfect yet unfeasible – would have been “made
visible” in Roccaverano: it would seem that the intention of the patron,
who was personally involved in St Peter’s construction, was that Santa
Maria Annunziata seem like a real replica, though on a smaller scale,
50
1 2 5m
Reconstruction (Morresi)
of the original elevation
and plan of Santa Maria
Annunziata (drafted by
D. Dalpozzo)
51
12 of the gigantic macchina that Bramante had conceived as an exemplum
On the dating of the for the churches of Christendom, a replica that was also designed to
two projects and their
interdependence, see my exalt the Bruno family, as demonstrated by the inscriptions and the
article “Bramante, Enrico family emblems found inside and outside the church.
Bruno e la chiesa”, 117–26,
where all of the drawings
According to the hypothesis outlined above, the actual organiza-
referring to Bramante’s tion of the church displays considerable reductions of and alterations
ideas for the church of Santi to the original building programme, most likely because of financial
Celso e Giuliano in Banchi
are studied in detail. problems that followed after Enrico Bruno’s death in 1509. The early
consecration of the church in 1516 leads us to believe that Enrico’s
13
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
heirs, Giovanni Francesco and Paolo Emilio, intended to finish the
London, Codex Coner, f. building in a short time, which may have sparked the decision to
12; Florence, Gabinetto simplify the project by eliminating the lateral façades and transfer-
Nazionale dei Disegni e
delle Stampe, U 1954 A ring their respective portals to the single realized façade, a choice
(Anonymous), U 1953 A that brought about the removal of the apses on the entrance façade.
(Anonymous), U 875 A
The consequences of the first project of St Peter’s and its reprisal
(Antonio da Sangallo il
Giovane); Pierpont Morgan in the design of Roccaverano’s church are immediately visible in
Library, New York, Codex Bramante’s works from the same period. A series of Bramante’s ideas
Mellon, ff. 56v, 57.
for the Roman church of Santi Celso e Giuliano in Banchi, which was
never realized, date to around the second half of 1509 (and thus to
after the Roccaverano project, which was probably drafted in the last
months of 1508 and the first months of 150912) and can be seen in a
number of drawings that propose a perfect quincunx with extra dorsal
apses corresponding to the arms of the cross and with corner chapels
covered by square-based cupolas.13 Based on planimetric models of
St Peter’s and Santa Maria Annunziata in Roccaverano, this building
would not have had a monumental façade but rather a sequence of
shops whose fronts gave onto the well-trafficked Via dei Banchi.
Bramante’s workshop, plan The perfect integration of Santa Maria Annunziata within the
of Santi Celso e Giuliano “typological family” of quincunx churches as conceived in Rome by
in Rome, 1509 (London,
Sir John Soane’s Museum, Bramante and his followers leads us to reassert Bramante’s authorship
Codex Coner, f. 12) of Roccaverano’s church, something that was already suggested by the
close links between Julius II’s architect and the pontifical treasurer
Enrico Bruno.
Like its plan, Santa Maria Annunziata’s façade also finds its place
in a precise “typological family” based on a frame of intersecting
architectonic orders differentiated by their dimensions: the greater
order, which is the Corinthian on pedestals, frames the median blind
arch and supports a triangular pediment, while the minor order, the
Doric, begins at ground level without pedestals, framing the blind
arches along the aisles and supporting two triangular semi-pediments.
52
We can virtually correct these semi-pediments, which are character- 14
ized by an overly high rise, by lowering their height below the annulet Francesco di Giorgio Martini,
Trattati di architettura,
of the pilasters’ capitals. This alteration was probably due to the fact ingegneria e arte militare,
that the builders intended to increase the slope of the roof to ease the ed. Corrado Maltese (Milan:
Il Polifilo, 1967), 90–91, 260,
weight of the snow brought by the winter months. fig. 38.
Tracing the genealogy of this type of façade brings us to its two
“fathers”, Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. 15
Architettura delle facciate: Le
Alberti was the first to experiment with intersecting orders on the chiese di Palladio a Venezia.
façade of Sant’Andrea in Mantua (begun 1470), which was certainly Nuovi rilievi, storia, materiali,
ed. Malvina Borgherini,
noticed by Bramante. Furthermore, Francesco di Giorgio, whose Andrea Guerra and Paola
body of theoretical and realized works Bramante knew, had imagined Modesti (Venice: Marsilio,
a figure of a man inscribed in the façade of a temple in his anthro- 2010).
53
Photograph by Giovanna
Silva
54
LA BOMBONERA
Giacomo Summa
The first FIFA World Cup took place in Uruguay in 1930. For this event,
and particularly to host the final match (Uruguay–Argentina, 4–2),
a new stadium was built in Montevideo. Juan Antonio Scasso, the
Director de Paseos Públicos, designed the venue for 90,000 people,
and it would later be called the “Centenario” due to the correspond-
ence of its inauguration with the hundredth anniversary of Uruguayan
independence. The stadium was almost circular in shape in order to
provide all spectators with an equally good view of the field.
Thus began the development of a new model of a football stadium
in the Río de la Plata region: modern, functional and colossal. On the
other side of the Río de la Plata in Argentina, the various conservative
governments in power gave strong support to the Buenos Aires foot-
ball clubs and their projects after the economic crisis of 1929. The
55
Facing page:
La Bombonera, sections
through the railway
Left:
La Bombonera, view of the
exterior
Below:
La Bombonera, aerial view
57
In the same year, the Boca Juniors’ archrivals, the River Plate club,
completed its stadium in a peripheral area north of the city. The new
River Plate stadium (known as the “Monumental”) re-proposed the
model of the Montevideo “Centenario”, but introduced two orders of
stands, thereby allowing spectators to be closer to the field and incor-
porating new structural solutions. However, while the monumental
success of the new River Plate stadium made the mistake of the Boca
Juniors’ one all the more evident, the new technology developed by the
engineers of the “Monumental” (Aslan and Ezcurra) actually provided
a potential solution to their problem.
As a result, the engineers Delpini, Sulčič and Bés proposed a new
project for the Boca Juniors. They got rid of the continuous ring around
the field and proposed a strange horseshoe-shaped form instead, with
the stands distributed along the field’s two short ends and only one of
its long ones. The tribunes were organized in three orders with – for
the first time – an increasingly steep inclination in the higher sec-
tors, thereby allowing for a clear view of the field from all the three
orders. These structural solutions made the stadium project extend
five metres over the railway tracks facing the long end of the stadium.
Lengthy negotiations between the Boca Juniors, the railway company
(Ferrocarril Sud) and the municipal authorities were needed in order to
make this possible. The asymmetric layout of the stadium also required
an innovative organization of points of access and escape routes, with
large corridors being introduced below the tribunes that allowed the
stadium to be evacuated in only eight minutes. This complex system
of corridors and stairways resulted in the characteristically machine-
like appearance of the stadium’s exterior. The stadium immediately
achieved the status of a monument in the Boca neighbourhood, becom-
ing an explicit symbol of an increase in the supply of modern attrac-
tions (culture, leisure, sport) to the working-class area.
Along the long side of the new stadium where it had not been pos-
sible to build stands, only a tiny space remained, and this was used to
create a string of executive boxes. These boxes (palcos) are organized on
three levels with separate points of access, thereby creating an ensem-
ble that looks like a box of chocolates; it was this appearance that led
to the stadium’s famous nickname: La Bombonera, the Spanish term
for a box of chocolates. Thus, the unplanned result of a simple real
estate mistake – buying the wrong plot of land – ended up creating a
surprising architectural situation of having the crowds seated on the
stands immediately opposite the opera-style boxes across the field.
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59
60
HAGIA SOPHIA
VERSUS HAGIA SOPHIA
Ioanna Volaki
Chronology
532 AD: Shortly after the commencement of the construction of Hagia
Sophia, its architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, find
themselves in an ominous position. Their original plans for the build-
ing have been overly optimistic, for the structure is already beginning
to deform and their client is not happy. In his De Aedificiis, Procopius
describes the uncomfortable situation that arises between the archi-
tects and Emperor Justinian I when the former ask for the project to
be temporarily suspended but the latter obliges them to continue.
Thus begins the vortex of the monument’s structural reinforcement,
and it will continue for another 1,500 years.
532–537: Feverish changes are made in order to stabilize the structure.
Piers and buttresses grow, and galleries become more compact and
are attached to the main structure. The building is completed on time,
and a triumphant inauguration is followed by an ecstatic Emperor
Justinian making some inappropriate statements.
7 May 558: A moment of counter-success comes twenty-one years later:
after a series of earthquakes, the building’s famous dome caves in,
causing a massive contortion of piers, arches and buttresses. To cor-
rect the north and south arches that have been bent by the downward
and outward thrust of the dome, such an extreme widening towards
the interior is required that the proportions of the nave are altered.
Following this a new, structurally more adequate dome is built. In
total, the reinforcements required result in a cross-sectional area of
100 square metres for each pier. Isidore the Younger is put in charge
of the reconstruction, and the building is inaugurated once more in
563 (in a much humbler ceremony).
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26 October 869: A fire and an earthquake damage the building’s west
arch and semidome. The subsequent restoration aims at strengthening
the lunettes by increasing their mass. Nevertheless, the intervention
does not prevent the collapse of the western part of the dome in 989, and
repairs are consequently undertaken by the Armenian architect Trdat.
1261–82 and 1344: The reinforcement of the north-west part of the
structure continues. A series of buttresses is added in the northern
and western parts of the building.
19 May 1346: In the grim aftermath of another seismic event, the
eastern part of the dome collapses, taking its supporting arch with
it. Despite the incredible accumulation of mass, the structural integ-
rity of the dome and semidomes remains weak. The story brings to
mind traditional Byzantine songs about structures that won’t remain
standing unless grotesque sacrifices are made (e.g., in the song of the
bridge of Arta, the sacrifice was the architect’s wife). The Greek archi-
tect Synadinos Astras and the Italian architect Giovanni Peralta are
put in charge of the repairs.
1570: Interventions are initiated by the Turkish architect Mimar Sinan.
For the first time the east–west axis is strengthened by the addition
of buttresses. The enclosure of Hagia Sophia by structural mass is
Facing page: completed.
Plaster model of Hagia 1847–49: The Swiss architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati under-
Sophia’s interior (I. Volaki)
take the general restoration of the building. The task does not include
the addition of large reinforcements; rather the dome is consolidated
by iron rings.
1926: The Turkish government calls for a team of experts to investi-
gate the possibility of the monument collapsing. After six months, the
result of their research is surprising: by default the building has been
guaranteed a certain level of protection from the seismic activity of
the area because it is built atop natural rock . . . Nevertheless, another
iron ring is added to the dome.
Afterwards
Due to the original miscalculation of the building’s structural capac-
ity and Justinian’s inability to compromise, Hagia Sophia has been
marked by what seems to be a never-ending cycle of structural fail-
ures and attempts to correct them. All of these efforts, which span
a period of 1,500 years and have been the work of so many experts
from different cultural and educational backgrounds, have resulted
in an enormous superimposition of layers of structural mass on the
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63
64
monument. In addition, there has been a parallel accumulation of
“cultural mass” around the building, for its conversion into an impe-
rial mosque paired with the simple, almost brutal façades of the early
Christian church has resulted in an exterior that resembles a geological
formation more than a monument. Even the surrounding vegetation
contributes to this image when seen from a certain distance. This
sensory perception of the building is amplified the closer you get to
it. The nondescript assemblage of volumes you encounter in the front
garden, which obstructs the majority of the building’s façade, and the
way one enters from a small lateral opening in the south-west side of
the narthex create the sensation of walking into a cave.
Compared to the exterior, the antithesis of the interior is strik-
ing. The main space is bright and articulated. Under the dome it is
perceived as both central and elongated, both a closed space and a
distinctly open one (and it is difficult to realize that this bright, float-
ing dome needs a mountain of mass to support it). This ambiguity
of the interior creates a sense of elasticity that completely contra-
dicts the structure’s absolute, massive exterior. Equivocal on many le-
vels, the “both-and” nature of the internal space has been described
numerous times. Perhaps the most adequate representation would be
something like Luigi Moretti’s plaster models of historical buildings’ Facing page:
negative spaces. As he wrote in his article “Structures and Sequences Plaster model of Hagia
Sophia’s exterior (I. Volaki)
of Spaces”, “There is one expressive aspect that resumes the architec-
tural fact with such notable latitude that it could be seen with greater
tranquillity than the others even in isolation: I mean the internal and
empty space of architecture.”
All early Christian churches were fundamentally perceived as
internal worlds, a fact that led to the treatment of the exterior as a
skin wrapped around a richly articulated interior. In the case of Hagia
Sophia, this opposition has reached the extreme: it is a bright cave
inside a mountain.
65
SOLOMON, I HAVE OUTDONE THEE!
Asli Cicek
“Solomon, I have outdone Thee!” These are the words that the Byzantine
emperor Justinian I is said to have spoken upon entering Hagia Sophia
after its completion on 27 December 537. He had commissioned the
scientists Anthemius and Isidore to construct his dream: a gigantic
dome crowning the rectangular floor space of the largest church in
Christendom, which it would remain for the next nine hundred years.
66
5 10 20 m
0
The dome would later collapse on various other occasions throughout
the following centuries, mainly due to earthquakes, and need to be
reconstructed. (Ironically, each time the reconstruction took as long
as the construction of the whole building had originally.) The rulers of
each period commissioned renowned architects to carry out the work,
and the discussion that follows here concentrates on one of them:
Mimar Sinan, the most eminent architect of the Ottoman Empire.
68
the empire. But this might also have caused his admiration for Hagia
Sophia to turn into the lifelong ambition of surpassing it inasmuch as
the sultans obliged him to build something bigger and better. He got
several chances to surpass Hagia Sophia, and many of his mosques
carry traces of his thorough study of this building. His two biggest
mosques, the Süleymaniye and Selimiye, challenged Hagia Sophia’s
grandeur, but Sinan’s attempts cannot be considered to be limited to
these. He must have seen more errors in Hagia Sophia than merely
the structural one concerning the dome – which, given its elliptical
base, caused difficulties in the even transfer of its weight to the rec-
tangular base of the building – and he clearly tried to avoid these in
his own buildings. Lighting conditions, spatial order and a harmoni-
ous façade incorporating the structure seem to be the issues he found
unresolved in Hagia Sophia and tried to respond to on various scales. Sinan holding a
Yet it remains difficult to explain why Sinan dealt with Hagia Sophia wooden measuring
stick overseeing the
only in some of his projects. There is no linear evolution in his works construction of Suleiman’s
that represents a systematic response to Hagia Sophia’s marvels and mausoleum, watercolour
flaws. With the Şehzade Mosque of the 1540s, what Sinan called his
on paper by Nakkas Osman,
ca. 1579 (from Lokman,
“apprenticeship” project, the architect had demonstrated that a cen- Tarikh-i Sultan Suleyman)
tral dome with four semidomes on the sides would provide a coherent
interior. Thirty years later he built the Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Mosque
where the subsidiary spaces disappeared almost completely, with
freestanding columns supporting the central dome and permitting
the creation of one grand, uninterrupted space.
The contrast between Hagia Sophia’s richly decorated interior and
its plain, stucco-clad exterior must also have irritated Sinan. In his
eyes this building may have been a forced combination of too many
ideas that lacked coherence. While its façade is simple, the extrava-
gant interior boasts five different sorts of marble and plentiful golden
mosaics. In contrast, the interiors of Sinan’s mosques are stripped of
embellishments, revealing a unity in his architectural projects that
derives from their structural form. Any interior ornamentation is the
result of material compositions, not artistic ones. Obviously, Islam’s
prohibition of the depiction of the human figure provided Sinan with
the proper justification for decorating his buildings with abstract
adornment. If Sinan were to have built churches and depicted biblical
stories within them he might have found himself in a difficult position
from which to challenge Hagia Sophia’s heavily adorned interior with
his comparatively restrained architectural spaces. The most strik-
ing evidence for his disapproval of Hagia Sophia’s decorated interior
69
70
is possibly an early work from 1545, the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque Above:
located on the Asian side of Istanbul. The inner surfaces of the walls of Kiliç Ali Paşa Mosque
Mimar Sinan, 1580
this mosque are plainly plastered; in fact, the interior looks strangely
abandoned. Although Sinan’s later work displays some elaborately Previous page:
Şehzade Mosque,
decorative detailing, he treated interiors much more simply than many Mimar Sinan, 1543-1548
other mosques built before and after his.
Sinan was commissioned with strengthening the structure of Hagia
Sophia in 1573. He added eight buttresses along the east and west
façades that guaranteed the dome’s survival until the 19th century.
This is significant for an architect who spent most of his career trying
to give shape to his unspoken critique of Hagia Sophia. He also built
two larger minarets, thereby structurally balancing the existing two
and giving the building its silhouette of an imperial mosque (though it
71
would only be in the 19th century that all four minarets were made of
equal height by the Fossati brothers). Sinan also introduced a twenty-
four-metre buffer zone around the building in which nothing else could
be constructed. It remains curious, however, why Sinan was so keen
to assure Hagia Sophia’s survival and to exhibit the building in all its
grandeur. Perhaps we can claim that by doing so he guaranteed an
indestructible rival: the stronger the enemy, the sweeter the triumph.
Towards the end of his long life Sinan built two curious mosques
that can be connected to his critique of Hagia Sophia. One is the Kılıç
Ali Paşa Mosque, with a floor plan that almost copies that of Hagia
Sophia but succeeds in avoiding the creation of dark secondary spaces
despite the presence of the central dome. The second one is the Şemsi
Ahmet Paşa, a miniscule mosque positioned with sensitivity on the
The restored mosque of Asian shore, 300 metres from the Mihrimah Sultan mentioned above.
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, The Şemsi Ahmet Paşa is the smallest külliye (mosque complex) imagi-
watercolour on paper by
Nakkas Osman, ca. 1581 nable. Through the mosque’s low windows the Bosphorus can be seen,
(from Lokman, Shahnama-i and the scale of the building is like an embrace rather than being
Salim Khan)
overwhelming. Its modesty contrasts with the Selimiye mosque that
Sinan had completed six years earlier and called his masterwork; it
had a dome with a span slightly broader than that of Hagia Sophia’s.
Yet here we might take the Şemsi Ahmet Paşa Mosque as Sinan’s last
attempt – free from any sultan’s demands – to surpass Hagia Sophia
by ignoring its most significant quality: its scale. Obviously it is ridicu-
lous to compare these two buildings, yet it is remarkable that Sinan
became so precise about the design of such a small structure, one which
is also regarded today as one of his most important works. Would he
have consciously chosen an unpretentious, calmer design instead of
Facing page: one that was imposing and exuded grandeur as a way of concluding a
Mimar Sinan, Şemsi Ahmed fifty-year career dedicated to surpassing the building he both admired
Paşa Mosque, 1580–81
and criticized more than any other? Or had Sinan accepted that Hagia
Sophia was worth every single mistake it displayed? In the end, he may
have decided that, as the Turkish proverb suggests, “he should kiss
the hand he could not bend”.
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73
SYSTEMATIC MISTAKES:
NOTES ON LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI’S
DESIGN STRATEGIES
You know in my case all painting – and the older I get the more it becomes
so – is accident. So I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly
ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. . . .
Perhaps one could say that it’s not an accident, because it becomes a
selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve. One
is attempting, of course, to keep the vitality of the accident and yet pre-
serve a continuity.
Francis Bacon (from David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon)
74
references that precisely mirror the mental processes that were behind
it – the ways in which creative thoughts are generated.
Alberti’s habit of entrusting the task of executing his own projects
to others and never surveying the material realization of his designs
was too systematic to have been just the result of historical circum-
stances or the product of an intellectual attitude that implied a disin-
terest in the actual outcome of the principles he communicated in his
writings. Rather, his habit hid a method: it concealed a logic aimed
at obtaining architectural solutions that are deliberately pursued but
not entirely predictable.
In design, homogeneity is considered an imperative condition,
just as the unity of action, place and time is in classical drama. For
Alberti, however, the consistency of an architectural work lies in the
relationship between heterogeneous elements that have been drawn
from the reservoir of history and reassembled concinnatamente (har-
moniously) into a new whole. Alberti’s range of archictectural ref-
erences is extremely broad, and includes classical, mediaeval and
fifteenth-century architectural works. His vast body of source material
even permitted the incorporation of potential future architectural
contributions, thereby allowing for and taking into consideration
the misunderstandings and mistakes that might be made by build-
ers to come. In this way, the seemingly mechanical approach of his
combinatory system was actually a less rigid and more natural one.
As a result, Alberti’s architecture can be considered to be all
of the buildings in which his system is applied, not only the ones
that display an immaculately classical pedigree. Alberti’s architec-
ture incorporates the pre-existing (such as Santa Maria Novella in
Florence or San Francesco in Rimini), the contemporary (such as San
Sebastiano in Mantua, which seems to be an enigmatic combination
of a classical work flanked by a mediaeval structure though both
parts were actually built at the same time) and even the architecture
of the future, despite its sometimes abominable appearance (as can
be seen, for instance, in the stairs of San Sebastiano). For Alberti, the
classical ideal is to be found not in abstract, ideal circumstances,
but in everyday situations where it is cross-bred and contaminated,
embedded in the real and, to a certain extent, made indistinguish-
able from the context in which one experiences it. The classical is
thus torn to pieces, transformed and smothered by superfluous addi-
tions, and yet its presence is still apparent to the eye that has been
taught to recognize it.
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Alberti’s architecture – which is the result of a diachronic approach
to design – presents itself as an integration of wide-ranging architectur-
al references within a core design concept that is so powerful (although
it is less obvious to us today because we read his architecture in the
light of the work that followed after it, his work was sensationally new
in his day) and simple that deviations, mistakes or misunderstandings
in relation to the original idea do not alter the fundamental meaning
of his work. On the contrary, later alterations to his buildings only
increase the purity of the classical ideal contained within them;
they cannot completely conceal it.
The interest of Alberti’s logic of architectural design lies not only
in his anticipation of the effects of potential changes to his projects
over time, but also in his inclusion of them within his repertoire of
creative techniques and compositional algorithms ab origine.
Thus, the potential architectural “mistake” – which Alberti includes
from the very beginning in the range of possibilities generated by
his projects – is deactivated, neutralized, annihilated. If irregularity
is itself a part of the rule, then how can one distinguish it from the
rule itself?
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REVIEW OF THE EXHIBITION similar designs, the readymades as we know them
77
Crisis of Faith evolve quickly, based on consumption, into an icon.
The most troubling analysis of meaning in the Also on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art is
title – and in the introduction to the exhibition – the famous Alfred Stieglitz photograph of Fountain,
is a direct play on faith itself, or a “crise de foie”. the only proper document of the original. This photo
Duchamp’s golden calf becomes tangible, and belief was in itself a carefully staged “event” that, after its
is suspended when contextualized within the archive reproduction in The Blind Man, was sure to place this
of the Arts Science Research Laboratory. Portrayed formerly quotidian object in a pantheon all its own.
like an anthropology exhibit, the lab was founded To further the Doubting Thomas, most everyone
by Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould. from you and me to MoMA and MoCA accepts the
The couple spent most of the 1990s establishing idea that Fountain and its original siblings have been
claims that Duchamp had more of a hand in his lost. Yet there is a lack of solid evidence to support the
readymades coming into being than merely pointing common belief regarding the “selection” process or
and choosing. the provenance of the object itself. The myth is a good
What is presented is an arsenal of objects: snow one though, bordering on folklore.
shovel, bottle rack, urinal. Each is a potential Alas the research of Shearer and Gould was
source “version” of the readymades but of slightly broadly and publicly dismissed by past and current
differing designs. Works like Fountain, we discover, Duchampians not only because it was sacrilege, but
have no traceable origin or blueprint. Plumbing because the theory was full of holes. It is nonetheless
manufacturer J. L. Mott, who supposedly produced an idea that subverts the entirety of 20th- and
the urinal “chosen” by Duchamp, could never 21st-century art history, making most of the cultural
historically prove that Fountain, with its subtle production of contemporary artists working with
intricacies, ever really existed due to the make’s found objects, appropriation, etc., rooted in what
absence from their archive and even from the could be now described as an elaborate hoax.
sales catalogues they had produced at the time. Outside the Arts Science Research Laboratory one
The conspiracy develops into an assumption that finds a vitrine of early sculptural artefacts from
Duchamp might have produced a few of these deftly performances by Chris Burden – works ironically
simulated objects and even put them into circulation. loaned by the notorious Duchamp referencer Jasper
Then, as legend has it, he theatrically chose the urinal Johns. The lock from his 5-Day Locker Piece (1971)
that became Fountain from a group of other equally or the sand and shells from his disappearance to a
handmade and identical sculptures. random island are each tangibly present to tell their
Duchamp biographer Calvin Tompkins eloquently tale of origin, complete with Burden’s sober and dry
described the artist’s obsession with meticulously account. Altogether these works neatly illustrate the
remaking his own works. From copies of Nude sacred, reliquary-like status that objects obtain and
Descending a Staircase to the iconic “replicas” of yet, in the case of Burden, the works provide evidence
the readymades, a surgically precise hand was of performances that can, short of a witness, almost
at work, one which, in the biographer’s words, never be proven.
“turned mechanical reproduction into a personal A small gallery with a guard and a sign reading “NO
expression”. Early on Duchamp demostrated a clear MINORS ALLOWED” presented works by artists
understanding of the power of the popular image Carmelo Gavotta, Bola Ecua and Hamid Piccardo.
over the object itself and of how something could The rather tasteless range of subjects made even this
78
writer experience difficulty accepting them as serious I waited in line for fifteen minutes to see films by
art due to their clearly gratuitous and overtly perverse Leopold Kessler. Expecting to enter sooner than later,
qualities. It felt like someone was trying too hard and I discovered that everyone in front of me was an actor
their work bore no relation to anything so far seen paid to wait – a clever but annoying performance
in the exhibition. The room, which displayed a large piece by Slovak artist Roman Ondák. The work took
banner reading “The First Tirana Biennale” (2001), comical advantage of my desire to see everything and
was presented as a mini group show containing the my unquestioning obedience to social structures.
biennale’s promotional posters of bukkake girls or an The films by Kessler were disturbingly banal. The
AK47-bearing Osama bin Laden and curated by Oliviero artist has a habit of dressing like a city employee,
Toscani, the famously kitsch Benetton photographer. the kind you imagine going about fixing streetlights
Some twenty minutes’ distance from this room a or performing other acts of cosmetic maintenance.
placard revealed the project as being a work by Tito Kessler, however, changes things slightly and even
Mussoni. Ten years ago this little-known artist from introduces elements that you might not otherwise
Italy concocted a subversive intervention when recognize that enhance the function of the given
he managed to curate a section in the First Tirana structure while playing into our habits of use, such
Biennale by stealing the identity of Oliviero Toscani. as, for example, installing perfectly designed locks in
He invented the careers and commissions of new the interiors of London phone booths. By means of a
work from five artists. He was never caught. Upon simple sleight of hand, he has created a new form of
learning what I had actually seen, the former feeling private space in public through a device that no one
of cheap shock warmed to a baffled anger about even notices.
feeling duped. Nonetheless, the troubling display An exploration into the thingness of things was at
made for one of the more intriguing and yet, to this work here. Christian Jankowski’s Strip the Auctioneer
writer’s knowledge, totally unknown mythologies of
the entire exhibition.
79
from 2009 is a very funny look at a Christie’s auction newsstands and Sturtevant’s Warhol flowers all
where, after having sold all the lots, the auctioneer pushed and pulled in different ways. They could have
eventually puts the shirt off his back, as well as his all been IKEA products at that point.
socks and shoes, etc., up for bidding. Jankowski’s Duchamp himself finally made an appearance with
auction lots oscillate between the priceless and his Rotoreliefs, a prescient harbinger he originally
the worthless, and they are transcended by a created as post-art products, aesthetic shortcuts or
Duchampian alchemy whereby a sock still warm from hypnotic optical porn. He first exhibited them at an
its wearer becomes a four-figure item of artistic value. inventors’ fair, selling not a single one to any member
The gavel becomes a magic wand that itself takes on of the public. In the exhibition at the Institute of
value and aura through proximity. Jankowski’s work Contemporary Art, the row of discs spun from a
thus frames the visible birth of the contemporary art wall mount and literally sucked in the room like a
object. spiraling vortex.
Liver Sickness
The next linguistic trick in Duchamp’s title “Crise
en faveur de 2 Fois” is “crise de foie”, the French
expression for “liver disease”, an affliction resulting
from having too much sugar, or, if you like, too much
of a good thing. This again reflects the prolific use of
the readymade and the way in which its abundance
has damaged our visual palette, faulting an inability
to recognize a good thing or “the real thing” when we
see it.
In the exhibition, a large, chaotic room was strewn
with garbage and objects. It was a white-cube
apocalypse, a total saturation and collapse of a world
now made of Cartesian paper. The garbage, it turned
out, was all meticulously handmade by Australian
artist Carly Fisher. To a tee, I was looking at things
I know so well that I don’t look at them twice: junk
food wrappers, discarded Coke cans, crumpled
cigarette packages. I was now being forced to look
at them out of suspicion, a sense of fear or a strange Crisis in Favour of Emergence
creeping paranoia that the world around me was one The final room in the exhibition did everything to
big choreographed coincidence of circumstance and overcome the now daunting legacy that this mode of
props. production has taken on; it was a palette-cleansing
Damien Hirst vitrines of medical instruments reconciliation, especially after the previous room and
glimmered in a corner. Sherrie Levine’s gold-plated its implosive ubiquity. For this space, a number of
urinals, Robert Lazzarini’s psychedelically skewed artists were given the playful task of producing their
phone booth, Bertrand Planes’s schizophrenic own interpretations of “Emergency in Favour
80
existed in the artist’s mind. A quivering squiggle
on the wall was constantly and palimpsestuously
rewriting itself in a green laser projection like an
afterimage of some insecure primordial shape.
In a similar vein, artist Ignacio Uriarte presented
a series of photographs showing configurations
of clear plastic rulers. The series presented every
imaginable combination, and the results were a dry
but curious new language of totemic forms. The
glossolalic score from Steve McQueen’s video Once
Upon a Time (2004) echoed from a side room. Myriad
images flashed from the Voyager II golden record
that would represent a sort of a time capsule for any
alien or would-be seafarer who might come upon this
indexical account of the human species.
In the corner of the room, the Behring Institute for
Medical Research had a salon hang. The Institute is a
Dutch organization that began a widespread survey
in search of art that could function as a placebo and
of Twice”. It was a brilliant carte blanche, and one of placebos that could in fact be art. The project begs
that was, in some cases, well played. many questions regarding how a person experiences
Somebody had to do it, so artist Jeffrey Vallance an artwork, exactly what it is that they experience
hired a psychic medium to contact Duchamp and which differentiates between art, “art”, something
finally describe what our lost readymade looked otherwise common and non-art, and whether such
like. On-screen was a comically stuttering, dusty a differentiation is, in fact, possible. In addition,
old man reaching deep and conjuring quotes like there were several dozen objects in the room taken
“any form is the perspective of another form . . . a from other cultures for which one did not have
chariot made of rods of emancipated metal . . . in the an immediate point of reference. From Vladimir
form of a toboggan but more of a corkscrew”. Loris Archipov’s Folk Art Archive of improvised bricolage
Gréaud made a rather hilarious work called Air of devices to a private collection of fetish objects, cult
Judgment? (2011), a direct riff on Duchamp’s Air de icons, out-of-place artefacts and ritual devices, each
Paris, even using a similar glass vial to hold what beautiful and awkwardly alienating, these works
was purportedly the breath of a local court judge. somehow brought everything to a conclusion by
Gréaud’s wordplay with “err of judgment” brought posing this question: How can we move beyond the
things appropriately full circle to oblige the visitor to readymade, and what does art without reference look
think about the origin of this phenomenon and how like?
it had been historicized. The Abstract Expressionists faced a similar dilemma,
The young Spanish artist Rubén Grilo contributed but with what seem today like easily surmountable
something that in all its simplicity burned its way odds by comparison. Today’s artist operates almost
into my memory. It was a form that until now only entirely in the realm of reference and employs a
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language of art that references art. The path for Emergency in Favour of Twice
development leads to a gaping maw of white noise Institute of Contemporary Art
containing everything and nothing, often with 1 April–2 August 2011
dead ends of conceptual arithmetic. Yet an eventual Participants: Marina Abramovič, Vladimir Archipov,
endgame is in sight, and maybe this is, in fact, the Arts Science Research Laboratory, Behring Institute
real crisis. In this way, works like the Grilo laser piece, of Medical Research, Alighero Boetti, Chris Burden,
while not what I imagined the lost readymade to Roisin Byrne, Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Cuoghi,
look like, achieved something rare through the art Marcel Duchamp, Bola Ecua, Carly Fisher, Carmelo
of disengaging and letting the act of creation drift Gavotta, Loris Gréaud, Rubén Grilo, Damien Hirst,
into a realm in which the Surrealists and Abstract Christian Jankowski, Leopold Kessler, Oliver Laric,
Expressionists first broke ground but to which we Robert Lazzarini, David Levine, Sherrie Levine, Steve
have not found a sincere way to return without the McQueen, Tito Mussoni, Roman Ondák, Hamid
security of mannerism and loaded parentheses. Piccardo, Bertrand Planes, Gedi Sibony, Situationists
One could surmise that Duchamp, aware of how his International, Alfred Stieglitz, Sturtevant and Jeffrey
actions might be interpreted by future fans, set this Vallance
all up as one of his many games full of clues, dead
ends and intrigue – maybe his last great game. The
Green Box, his immense treasure map to The Large
Glass, certainly makes you wonder whether such a
forensic strategy of planting the devil in the details
was happening everywhere all along, forcing us
to do a double-take at his every word. The “copy”
had a different, almost performative meaning for
Duchamp, one that related more to the nature of the
word and referred not only to serializing, but even to
mimicry and sublimation. As a whole, the exhibition
at the Institute of Contemporary Art functions
simultaneously as a conspiracy theory, a litmus
test and a crystal ball, revealing the threadbare
psychological paradoxes of the readymade.
With a precise handicraft and an alchemist’s
desire, Duchamp’s readymade penetrated the thin
membrane of the retinal function of art, thereby
releasing a flood of potential for future generations.
And yet with this lost readymade he even broke the
bond binding the idea to the form and, one could say,
to the reference. Now one must discern whether his
legacy is based on what is written, on an elaborately
mistaken identity or on a possible hoax.
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THE WRONG PROGRAM
BARarchitekten
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The main project that we drafted with SuperPaint was called
Stadtbaustein, a prototypical mixed-use building for Berlin in which
a rationalized structure and the careful positioning of service shafts
allowed for economical construction and flexible use. SuperPaint’s
restricted palette contributed to the formal reductiveness of the design.
For one thing, only orthogonal lines looked good. At a 1:50 scale, one
pixel corresponded to roughly two centimetres, which became our basic
unit. And the novelty of “cutting and pasting” allowed us to quickly
produce large numbers of plan variants with a set of standardized parts
that showed different scenarios for the use and spatial arrangement
of the floor plan. The one-pixel unit also produced a basic but highly
legible, almost Op Art–like graphical language in which one-pixel-wide
lines were separated by one-pixel-wide gaps. Through these gaps, each
building element (window, partition wall, plumbing fixture or piece of
furniture) retained an independent identity and a feeling of potential
mobility. After a few months, we realized we had reached the limits of
the software; we needed to produce usable architectural drawings. So
we moved on to use a conventional vector-based CAD program with a
more powerful computer. At first we missed the feeling of arranging
elements on the screen and the comforting simplicity of the pixel unit.
But that was soon forgotten as we got used to the many advantages of
this new way of working.
For fifteen years, our SuperPaint period seemed to be nothing but
an amusing misstep in our digital evolution – that is, until we recently
started to work on a large housing project in Berlin that began to look
remarkably like Stadtbaustein. This encouraged us to look again at the
previous project. Although we had some old printouts of it, we found
Facing page: that SuperPaint would not run on a modern operating system and that
Stadtbaustein, 1995, the files could not be opened by any modern program: it was a classic
city block version
example of digital obsolescence. By using an emulator called Basilisk,
however, it was possible to run Mac OS7 and SuperPaint on a modern
computer, and thereby to convert the files into a readable format.
In looking at the drawings again, it became clear that using
SuperPaint as our medium had had a lasting influence on our work.
We had always looked back on our SuperPaint period as a preliminary
to our subsequent adoption of CAD; it is more telling, however, to see
it as a coda to manual drafting. Robin Evans wrote extensively on the
historical influence of techniques of architectural representation –
types of orthogonal and perspective projections – on architectural
imagination. He didn’t write so much about the influence of different
84
85
media and instruments – for example, the use of transparent paper –
but, clearly, the (hand)work of making a drawing used to provide a
continuous feedback to the imagination of the architect, and this feed-
back depended on the particularities of the medium. The SuperPaint
drawings, though done on a screen, were still linked in our minds to
the practice of making plans by arranging lines on a sheet of paper,
a way of thinking that all but disappeared with the adoption of CAD.
We still have the choice of using non-digital media (physical models,
sketches), but the focus of our work, which now happens on the com-
puter, no longer has this tangibility.
In their essay “The Shift”, Alison and Peter Smithson described
the unintended influence that collages and home-made prints that
they made as their Christmas cards and other ephemera had had on
their work. For us, SuperPaint was a medium that, through its limited
capabilities, had brought certain ideas – such as rationalization and
kit-of-parts construction – into focus, even if we didn’t know it at the
time. Contrary to normal expectations of technical progress, our new
medium involved a limitation of choice, a return to basics. Unlike
the Smithsons, who produced their Christmas cards year after year,
we only used SuperPaint for the very short time it took us to realize
that it was useless for the practical work of producing architectural
drawings. So what if we had carried on with our pixel experiments?
While it would be possible to set up a modern pixel-based program
like Photoshop to allow us to draft in the same way, it is most unlikely
that anyone would accept such self-imposed limitations. It would no
longer be a mistake; it would be an affectation.
Stadtbaustein, 1995,
infrastructure and patterns
of use (right) and scenarios
in detail (facing page)
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87
THE FOUR BOOKS OF MISTAKES
Matteo Ghidoni
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creativity, grace and other qualities aspired to by architectural theo-
reticians. Palladio himself introduces a section titled De gli abusi (On
Abuses) in his first book. We can read this more as an invitation to
transgress the rules than as a warning against their infringement.
Moreover, one of Palladio’s followers, the amateur architect Teofilo
Gallaccini, felt the need to write an entire Trattato sopra gli errori degli
architetti (1621). But besides this conscious and limited use of license,
which could spark debates about the use of a “broken tympanum” or
the “banded column” at the most, the transmission of architectural
knowledge is punctuated by genuine and fruitful errors whose main
vehicle of diffusion is the printed page.
The Four Books of Mistakes is a series of drawing exercises that
methodically violate the four books of architecture by Palladio. A
number of increasingly serious “printing errors” – erasures, overlap-
pings, cuts or the combination of all these actions – is introduced
into the pages of the treatise. The exercise’s only (self-imposed) limit
is maintaining a respect for the page’s own architecture, such as the
boundaries of the frame and the positioning of text and drawings.
The result is a set of new pages that question the risk of transmitting
a mistake together with the rule, or the possibility of opening things
up to new mistakes and new rules. The latent image of an open and
generous text emerges from a rather dogmatic one. We can plumb
its depths, trying to share a manipulable knowledge of architecture.
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96
97
98
DELIBERATE MISTAKES:
STORIES OF THE WINCHESTER HOUSE
Cédric Boulet
99
Winchester rifle was promoted by both Buffalo Bill Cody and Theodore
Roosevelt, and the Winchester family was in competition with other
famous gun-manufacturing families, namely those behind the Smith
& Wesson and the Colts. Sales of their rifle spread beyond the U.S.,
and contracts with other countries swelled the Winchester fortune.
Although Sarah remained mostly a bystander to it all, the Winchester
legacy would eventually have an effect on her life nonetheless . . .
100
For instance, one might encounter a set of stairs that is entirely
conventional in and of itself but runs dead into the ceiling rather than
granting access to the floor above. The tension between the properly
designed and built stairs on the one hand and the glaring problem of
having them cut off by the ceiling on the other generates a sense of
utter dysfunction. Elsewhere in the house another staircase appears
normal but leads nowhere, while a door on the second floor opens
directly to the outdoors with a sixteen-foot drop to the ground. Three
other doors also open to large drops within the house itself, and an-
other opens onto nothing but a wall. There is also a window that looks
into the elevator shaft rather than outside. In another room, windows
are used as flooring, while in a different space, doors are used in the
same way. One of the rooms is fully decorated but has no floor at all
and also lacks a ceiling; another simply has no door by which to enter
it. Finally, an otherwise functional chimney stops a few feet short of
reaching the outside.
The list of oddities at the Winchester Mystery House extends to
the way some rooms connect to one another, instances of redundant
circulation, the occasional creation of uncomfortably tight spaces and
the introduction of strange secret passageways. These oddities and
their conspicuous dysfunctionality are so unfamiliar to our everyday
interaction with architecture that we seem to enjoy the experience,
for tourists have sustained the Winchester Mystery House’s status as
a popular attraction for decades.
101
friends and servants that plainly attest to her sanity (though never
failing to recount her inordinate eccentricities as well), but the ghost
stories still prevailed in the public’s imagination, and since Sarah
never attempted to dispel the gossip by disproving the newspapers,
her reputation as a madwoman grew.
As mentioned earlier, Sarah was ill. She had crippled hands due
to rheumatoid arthritis and she was missing teeth, thus leading her
to always wear a veil and gloves. Self-conscious of her appearance, she
avoided contact with neighbours and family, and built a large hedge
around her lot to conceal her unconventional building activity. Between
her disinterest in the community and what they could make of the
rambling house, the newspapers concluded that Sarah had to be mad
and tied the famous Winchester rifle money into their speculation.
Though the Llanada Villa was particularly bizarre, many of the fea-
tures we find odd today would actually have been rather mainstream
in the late 19th century. Upper-class women often took an interest in
architectural design and experimented with it, leading to some rather
strange combinations of architectural elements. In fact, there were sev-
eral other irregular Victorian houses on the west coast, including one
primarily designed by Elizabeth Colt of the Colt revolver family. Sarah
Winchester must have found solace in the constant act of designing
and building, for it distracted her from a life of loneliness and sorrow.
As Ignoffo puts it, “she wanted to work in peace, plodding along in a
labyrinth of her own making, perhaps reflective of an equally complex
interior life” (Captive, 122). She built spontaneously and ceaselessly,
and without any real goal or underlying logic. At times she tore whole
portions of the house down, had them rebuilt or constantly adjusted
them, and then abandoned them only to later resume their construc-
tion, relocate them or tear them down once more; it is said that the
main cupola was demolished and rebuilt a ludicrous sixteen times.
But a large number of the architectural mistakes that remain today
were a consequence of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Like
most houses in the San Jose area, Llanada Villa was severely damaged
by the 7.8-magnitude seismic event. Whole and partial rooms crum-
bled, gaping holes were created, and the seven-story tower collapsed
directly onto the house. While other homes were either levelled and
rebuilt or heavily reconstructed, Sarah cleared the debris and dealt
with the wreckage, making only minimal adjustments and correc-
tions to the house. This approach accentuated the house’s shortcom-
ings, making the lack of a proper sense of design even more evident.
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New mistakes became apparent as rooms were left improperly propor-
tioned, misaligned, unfinished and, occasionally, even inaccessible.
Sarah actually gave up on Llanada Villa not long after the earth-
quake, and only returned in 1909. By the time of her return to San Jose,
she had been “deemed a madwoman because of her pessimistic and
recalcitrant reaction to the earthquake” (Captive, 157). Speculation
about her would only worsen after she insisted on living in the earth-
quake-damaged house, spending her days amongst a myriad of archi-
tectural mistakes. Sarah Winchester never escaped the tragic rumours.
Since the idea of designing, building and living with architectural
mistakes was unfathomable to the public, the only way to explain
the dysfunction of the house was to attribute an equal measure of
dysfunction to its owner.
In the end, whether one chooses to believe the Winchester Mystery
House story or that of Llanada Villa doesn’t much matter; more
interesting than the question of Ms. Winchester’s spirituality or
sanity are the mistakes that were committed in her architecture.
She welcomed – or at the very least permitted – the house’s shortcom-
ings, testing and experimenting with the conventions of architecture
and using the house itself as a kind of laboratory, unashamed of its
failures. She not only continued to build erroneously without correc-
tion, but also elected to leave the mistakes intact and live with them
for a good portion of her life.
Perhaps most fascinating is the interest generated by Sarah
Winchester’s home. The house was so disturbing that it fuelled years
of newspaper speculation followed by nearly a hundred years of tour-
ism. It would seem as if our appetite for architectural unconventionality
is somehow satisfied by experiencing Ms. Winchester’s house, or by
experiencing mistakes that were to some extent deliberate – mistakes
that were designed.
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PHANTOMS OF MONUMENTS
Mathieu Mercuriali
Investigating Mistakes
Sometimes the phantoms of monuments appear in the proportions
of their façades. When Baron Haussmann’s plans for the renovation
of the part of Paris surrounding the city opera house included build-
ings that were taller than authorized, Charles Garnier had to redesign
the opera house’s façade quickly in order to maintain its monumental
status. As a result, the main façade of the Palais Garnier was raised by
adding an attic to the top of the building. This addition illustrates the
relationship between the façade of a monument and its image. Does
this “mistake” give a distorted perception of the building’s propor-
tions? The mistake can be considered as a change of direction, one that
creates a dichotomy of ideas. In architecture, this dialogue of errors
can create new typologies. Sometimes the programmatic complexity of
opera houses and philharmonic halls, which belong to the typological
family of theatres, leads to complex solutions, for instance grouping
Opera Garnier, Paris activities together within a single form or breaking up the larger whole
into a play of multiple volumes. It is the relationship between context,
content and container that may cause architects to make mistakes
in their decisions and interpretation. Today, with the multiplicity of
formal and urban responses, these notions are blurred, leading to a
deconstruction of the audience’s path: the hall, the staircase, the foyer
and the auditorium. What contemporary theatre no longer follows the
rule that dictates having a façade that is like an imprint of the shape
of the interior hall?
In classical architecture, the main façade provides access to the
building. However, several design mistakes have modified the function
of this façade. For example, the great ceremonial staircase leading to
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the lobby of the Opera Bastille is no longer used, as people now enter
the building from the side. This inversion of functions highlights the
complexity of such programmes. The auditoriums of the Guangzhou
Opera House designed by Zaha Hadid and the Sydney Opera House
designed by Jorn Utzon have unified and unique interiors without a
primary façade. But whereas the Chinese opera house is contained
within a form that has no relation to the auditorium, in Sydney, it is Opera Bastille, Paris
the balance between the needs of the auditorium and the outward
expression of the building that creates the structure’s morphology.
The decision regarding the positioning of the interiors is extremely
important in this case as it has a bearing on the façade in the con-
text of the surrounding buildings. Opera houses that are hidden in
a homogeneous envelope, as perfect as a crystal, seem inaccessible.
Closed to the surrounding neighbourhood, they are conceived to be
strong, iconic buildings of international import. These agglomera-
tions of huge halls are disproportionate in the urban fabric and have
to compete with apartment buildings and offices.
Guangzhou Opera House,
The Shapeless versus Additions Guangzhou
107
Paul Andreu’s Beijing Opera and Jean Nouvel’s KKL in Lucerne
feature a collection of rooms and functions brought together respec-
tively under a bubble and a giant roof, as in a shopping centre. The
rooms are designed as a set of boxes that are built to fit in a specific
area of town. This public space is a neighbourhood people can stroll
Elbphilarmonie, Hamburg through or walk past, and the rooms are objects. Current architectural
projects designed as a mix of different forms that want to be as visible
as possible as recognizable icons can be considered design mistakes
since the signals they give us no longer represent their function, for
example, that of a music hall; rather, their function is swallowed up
within a stereotypical camouflage. Some projects lack innovation
because they consist of a classic auditorium paired with an organic
envelope that is too restrictive. In his 1921 draft of the design for the
Salzburger Festspielhaus, Hans Poelzig solved this problem by creat-
ing a pyramidal building, a symbol that was visible from a distance
Beijing Opera, Beijing and thus corresponded perfectly with the gigantic hall inside it that
was designed to accommodate 3,000 people.
108
is the urban foyer that extends into the covered market atop of which
the performance hall is built. In this way, the audience can mingle
with the artists; the stage is open to this new type of public space.
Designing monuments such as places of culture, sports and leisure
questions the use of the building block where the main façade is no
longer of primary importance. Hans Scharoun did not prioritize the
façades of the Berlin Philharmonic in order to reflect the compositional Taipei Performing Arts
concept of the inner concert room. Here it is the foyer that regulates Center, Taipei
the pressure between the inward and outward forces. Scharoun was
seeking to forge a relationship between the music, the viewer and the
space in his design. He says that he designed this interior as a landscape
in which the auditorium is conceived as a valley protected by a roof
that is stretched over the hall like a tent. He describes his project as
an archaic shelter that stands apart from traditional types of concert
halls and returns to the essence of what a room where people listen to
music should be. With its asymmetry, the project extends its immedi-
ate surroundings – a park – through the addition of winding walkways
that lead to the concert hall. The project is designed to function as an Berlin Philarmonic, Berlin
inside that extends to the outside without a rational composition of the
façade. Thus the project is suited to its unique site. Its specific design
avoids the pitfall of modular spaces, which would not be able to be
used in various configurations for optimum performance. This audi-
torium can be seen as the ideal model for contemporary philharmonic
halls. The style of the architect can express itself in the minimalism
of secondary façades, thereby revealing his or her ability to work with
the technical and artistic media of the day. The architect can design
buildings with an economy of means that is enhanced by his or her
inventiveness. Are these façades a mistake or do they highlight the
monumental character of the buildings on which they appear?
Prototypes
The establishment of a typology can help to redefine contemporary
architectural concepts. By noticing interesting design mistakes, one
can identify innovative morphological typologies. The repetition of
common characteristics – in this case, a space in which to listen to live
music – cannot be used as the only generic element for defining the
architectural family of concert halls. Formal or geometric structures
have been created in response to previously erected buildings in order
to correct mistakes related to acoustics or spectator viewing angles.
This is how the identification of mistakes allows projects to evolve and
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change. Improvements are therefore changing the types of architec-
tural objects and rendering old classifications obsolete. New forms
appear, like the congestion of functions in the Elbphilharmonie that
results in setting density against shape, the façades that result from
the project in Berlin and the reversed context in Taipei. This is a new
way of looking at how a range of solutions can be found to optimize
both function and context. Design mistakes as well as problems in
construction can be discerned in every building, and each innovative
concert hall can be seen as a kind of “full-size” prototype for future
projects. These successive mistakes tend to turn complex buildings
into modern monuments that become contemporary urban icons.
110
FREUD AND MÉLIÈS
If the cruelty of science had to sacrifice for the sake of knowledge the
kind of mystery invoked by magic, it wasn’t only because science had
rendered such mystery useless, but also because it had taken over its
function in a society for whom it only provoked ridicule and laughter,
even if secretly frightened by the absence of myth. Nevertheless, in the
late nineteenth century, just as the progress of science and technology
seemed to irreversibly cast off any understanding of reality through
mystery and magic, the suspicion arose that such traditions wouldn’t
be banished so easily. Ironically, this suspicion also took hold in sci-
ence itself, and in particular in late-nineteenth-century psychology.
In the work of such mid- to late-nineteenth-century natural scientists
as Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Brücke, Emil du Bois-Reymond
and Carl Ludwig – all of whom swore an oath in 1847 to reduce physi-
ology to the mathematical, physical and chemical laws of the clock-
work causality of nineteenth-century mechanistic philosophy – one
is struck by how they explain the processes of the body and the mind
by all sorts of mechanisms, as if man were a huge, haunted machine
that functioned flawlessly at all times. Yet if the mind is a machine, it
isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that this machinery will ultimately
malfunction, or that it is malfunctioning already, silently, secretly, and
if it breaks down, what kind of mechanic knows how it works and how
to fix it? It is here that Freud entered the scene, as if from the wings of
the theatre of history. If, like Helmholtz, he began analyzing complex
psychological effects in order to establish their physiological causes, he
later found that quite a few effects had no cause in reality, so to speak,
but rather in the marvellous and absolutely mysterious theatre of the
unconscious. He inferred that the majority of our psychological life
111
is kept hidden from both ourselves and from others, a psychological
life that only becomes visible when dysfunctional, as in madness or
even the triviality of a mistake, and it was this sort of triviality that
Freud seized upon as a kind of key for his work. Freud may be said to
be the scientist of the mistake, insofar as he chronicled various kinds
of psychological malfunctions in everyday life, largely of a linguistic
kind, in order to reveal the logic of such errors, so that he was left
with a mind that looked less like the mechanical, constant, law-like
causality of a factory and more like a theatre of sexuality, violence and
fantasy in which all the roles are played by a single actor in a farce
beyond their control.
It is of interest, then, that 1896, which was the year Freud first used
the term “psychoanalysis” to refer to his method, was also the year in
which Georges Méliès made a breakthrough of similar import for the
history of film. In the annals of the history of film this is a cliché, but
perhaps this cliché deceives us. Legend has it that Méliès’s camera
jammed for a few seconds while filming the Place de L’Opéra in Paris,
but this mistake was only discovered later, after the film was labori-
ously developed in his studio film lab. For Méliès, this mistake, little
more than the result of a trivial mechanical malfunction, proved to be
nothing less than magical. To his surprise, it produced the illusion of
the supernatural manipulation of the mechanics of space and time.
Before Méliès became one of the first and most prolific auteurs of film,
he was a professional magician. His films are indebted to his work in
magic and thus must be seen as the films of a magician. His interest
in film was initially due to what he saw as its value for his profession,
and he took on the expense of the technology without any aim other
than to add a new trick to his nightly repertoire. In fact, Méliès later
recalled the first public demonstration of the Lumière Cinématographe
on 22 March 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris, to which he was witness,
as an extraordinary trick. Méliès was first of all a spectator himself,
and as a spectator he identified with the popular imagination of film
as an utterly psychopathological spectacle that hypnotized certain
social classes who frequented the fairs where such exhibitions were
held. Méliès transformed the late-nineteenth-century theatre of magic
into a theatre of technology. The film studio he designed for himself in
Montreuil-sous-Bois in 1897 was built to the exact dimensions of the
backstage of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris (which was named
after the famous modern magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin), a the-
atre Méliès had bought in 1888 for his elaborate magic performances
112
and where he later made some of his first films in 1896. From the
arbitrary mistake of the machine Méliès fashioned an entire ontologi-
cal theatre in which the mechanics of time and space, subject in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to further and further
mechanization, were no longer bound to such mechanical causality,
as if enrapt by a spell, having become a marvellous power over reality
itself. This is to say that there is a kind of metaphysics of the mistake
that is nothing other than magical.
For, as Freud argues in Totem and Taboo (1913), the principle of
magic is the act of mistaking the causality of ideas for the causal-
ity of nature and imagining that the control of ideas will lead to a
control of nature itself.1 In other words, for Freud such beliefs are
a mistaken hypothesis, such that the laws of nature have been mis-
taken for those of psychology, the laws of the mind. It is precisely 1
this mistake that the films of Méliès play upon, the havoc that ensues Sigmund Freud, Totem
and Taboo, trans. James
once the boundary of the psychic and the physical has been broken. Strachley (London:
In over 600 films, Méliès constantly investigated the meaning of this Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1950).
mistake, the metaphysics of metamorphosis that it made possible.
If for Freud this mistake may be inferred from an obscure psycho-
logical mechanism that seeks to deny the power of the body over the
mind insofar as we persist in the illusion that our mind has a power
over the body, for Méliès we may say that technology also stood in
for a similar sort of occult mechanism that enabled him to hold his
audience in a psychological captivity. In Méliès the body is multi-
plied and mutilated, and it metamorphoses into an infinite number
of forms. It assumes monstrous proportions; it vanishes and then
materializes again from thin air spontaneously, without revealing
the hand that controls this brutal technological transformation of
bodies, space and time. His films are populated by horrifying colli-
sions, wrecks and marvellous explosions of all kinds, as if he were
making a slapstick comedy out of the carnage of the destruction of
civilization by its machines. The logic of all these mutations is based
on the mysterious kind of materiality that film itself makes available
for the first time, which simultaneously reveals and hides the logic
of perception that it also makes visible. Méliès’s professional suc-
cess in magic was due to the engineering of illusions at the Théâtre
Robert-Houdin. Film allows the documentation of the performances
of the late-nineteenth-century magic theatre, but it also disguises the
complex mechanics of a theatre of illusions within the complexities
of montage born of Méliès’s mistake.
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Le Manoir du diable (1896) is one of the earliest surviving films of
Méliès, and after Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin
(1896), it is one of his first films that depart from the realism of the
Lumière, Edison and Paul films that he had screened in his theatre.
In contrast to the bright and open world of the city and its reality,
as found in the films of the Lumière brothers, Méliès’s world was
one of secrecy and illusion, shrouded in the aura of evil. The film
premiered on 24 December 1896 at Méliès’s Théâtre Robert-Houdin.
The infamous “special effect” of this film is the canonical substitu-
tion shot. This shot introduces an imperceptible schism into the
continuum of the set and the frame. Le Manoir du diable is about
three minutes long and is set within one of his vaudeville mise-en-
scènes. Méliès establishes a set. The camera remains motionless,
integrated into the set, and through the stabilization of the frame
of the mise-en-scène, a cinematographic continuum is constructed.
In terms of this particular special effect, Alfred Clark’s short film
The Execution of Mary Stuart, produced by Thomas Edison in 1895,
preceded Méliès’s film, in which the gruesome illusion of an execu-
tion is achieved through the invention of the substitution shot. This
shot necessitates the revision of the scene through the cutting and
splicing of two discontinuous shots. Because of the mechanics of the
early film cameras, excess footage had to be cut from the film since
the cameras were unable to perform an instantaneous in-camera
cut. In Méliès’s Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin,
this shot is utilized to create the illusion of the disappearance of
a woman on stage during a theatrical performance conducted by
Méliès himself. In Le Manoir du diable, this shot facilitates a magical
transformation: a bat becomes the devil, then the devil conjures a
hoard of alchemical phantasmagorias from the void, and then a cru-
sader appears who causes the devil to disappear by brandishing his
almighty crucifix. In other words, this shot establishes a logic of pure
dissimulation, the discontinuities of a spectacle of time and space.
Méliès is the great showman. In many of his films he assumed all of
the roles of film production, from those of the cameraman, cinema-
tographer, editor, director, set designer, actor and marketer to that
of the producer. Therefore, we must think of Méliès in a sense that
does not distinguish these roles from one another. Due to this explicit
concern with the process of the production of film at the level of the
manipulation of the film base itself, we can reframe the historical
significance of this film not only as the work of the amateur auteur,
114
opposed to the industrial professional, but also as an intervention 2
in the very process of production, from the chemical transformation Sergei Ėjzenštejn, “Georges
Méliès’s Mistake”, in Selected
of cellulose into celluloid in the first industrial chemical laborato- Works, vol. 1 of Writings,
ries to the manufacture, manipulation and multiplication of films, 1922–1934, ed. and trans.
Richard Taylor (London: BFI,
a spectacle that mirrors those of industrialization. 1988), 258–60.
In 1933, Sergei Ėjzenštejn wrote an essay about Méliès entitled
“Georges Méliès’s Mistake” that highlighted the relevance of his work 3
Ibid., 258.
for psychology.2 For Ėjzenštejn, Méliès’s mistake introduced a new
kind of perception that contributed to the evolution of film: “To err 4
Ibid.
is human and Méliès probably made other mistakes in his work. But
for some reason this mistake was consolidated and became part of
the treasure of cinema’s means of expression.”3 Ėjzenštejn grounded
the revolutionary potential of such a mistake in its power to highlight
the “structure of our processes of perception in general”.4 However,
his remarks also show how long after Méliès film would try to repress
the memory of its earliest era when it was still little more than a tech-
nological novelty of modernity and not yet an industry. It didn’t take
long for this novelty of technology to be integrated into everyday life,
or for the effect of Méliès’s sorcery to wear off. He stands as one of
the last of the illusionists, but also as one of the first of a new era of
the avant-garde. Freud and Méliès insist upon the primacy of fantasy
as the failure of the machinery of reality.
115
AN “AESTHETICS OF MISTAKES”
IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE
“COLLECTIVE ACTIONS” GROUP:
SERGEI SITAR INTERVIEWS
ANDREI MONASTYRSKI
The following are two entries from the Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow
Conceptual School (Словарь терминов московской концептуальной
школы [Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999]) that are the most relevant to
the topic of the “aesthetics of mistakes” of the Russian “Collective
Actions” group (C. A.):
116
The following is the transcript of an interview con- and conversations” as a “proper term”? That is, this
ducted online. Sergei Sitar sent Andrei Monastyrski word/expression had to refer to some kind of reality
his written questions in Russian and then Andrei which, while being apparently collective in nature,
answered by sending audio files, attaching photos is situated “above” or parallel to both the realm of
and, on two occasions, writing. language and the level of “artistic practice” as such,
correct?
Sergei Sitar: How come a separate entry for “C.
A.’s Aesthetics of Mistakes” was included in the AM: [audio recording]
Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow Conceptual School Kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam5
published in 1999? kama-kam
kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
Andrei Monastyrski: [audio recording] kama-kam
Mir-reke-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ya-reku-v-reku-v-reku-v-rekuuuuuuuu kama-kam
mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
mir-reke-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kam
ya-reku-mir-reku-mir-rekuuuuuuuu kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ya–reku–mir–rekeeeeeeee kama-kam
ya-mir-reke-reku-rekuuuuuuuuu kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
rekuuuuuuuuu kama-kam
mir-reke-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ya-reku-mir-reku-mir-reku-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kam
ya-reku-mir-reku-mir-reku-mir-rekeeeeeeee kЭ6-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ–
mir-reku-re-mir-rekuuuuuuuu rЭ-kЭ
mir-reku-ya-rek-umir-ya–ku-mir-miruuuuuuuu4 kЭ-pЭ-kЭ-kЭ
kЭ-pЭ-kЭ-kЭ
[added in writing]: kЭ-pЭ-kЭ-kЭ
Perhaps this could be regarded as an answer to your kama-kama-kama-kam-kama-kam
first question? kam-kam
kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
SS: I suppose it could, yes, when one is aware of the kama-kam
context, though it probably has to be transliterated kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam . . .
into the Latin alphabet for potential Western read- kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ers [which has been done here for San Rocco]. How kam-kam-kam
shall we proceed, then? Can we continue, or shall kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
we wait until you feel a bit better? If we do continue kam-kam-kam-kam-kam
right now, I would dare to ask the following: Am kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf
I right to think that, in the course of editing the kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
Dictionary, you were using certain strict principles kam-kam
for identifying some word or expression from “letters kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kaaam
117
Kak mozhet byt poznana immonentsiya – ponyatno!
Kak mozhet byt poznana immonentsiya
– poo-nyaaaat-noooo!
...
Kak mozhet byt poznana transtsendentsiya?
Kak mozhet byt poznana transtsenden-tsi-yaa?
Sovershenno neponyatno!
Kak mozhet byt poznana transtsenden-tsi-yaa – sov-
ershennoo – neponyaaat – nOOOO7
118
based on a series of mistakes and, therefore, as one SS: Dear Andrei, thank you very much. Here is my
big mistake? Or are there some exceptions to this last question: It turns out that Oxana can’t come to
rule? the Kiosks performance on Sunday because of her
orphanage lessons. Since I’m coming alone, would
AM: [audio recording] it be possible to find space for me in one of the cars?
Kvá-kala Or should I still catch a local train?
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá
kvá-kala AM: Sergei! Lets meet at one o’clock near the
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá entrance to the Alexeevskaya metro station. We’ll
kvá-kala see; there will probably be room for you. The 2nd of
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá October – Sunday!
kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá
kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá8
Notes
1 In these dictionary entries, of 10 objects that were things get spontaneously 7 This chant (sung by
the abbreviation “Resp.” specially designed for this distorted, forming the Monastyrski with a
(short for “responsible”, performance. logically impossible gradually rising tone) is
the translation of “отв.”) statement “umir ya”, or “I composed of repetitions
followed by a set of a 4 This tape-recorded have died”. of four basic sentences
person’s initials identifies “mantric” chant is based on that can be translated
the person / persons the closeness of the Russian 5 Kama is the name of a as follows: “How can one
responsible for the words reka (river), reku prominent Russian river. grasp immanence? It is
occurrence of the mistake. (I say), rech (speech) and comprehensible. How can
rechka (creek). The archaic 6 The character “Э” used one grasp transcendence?
2 Mir is an untranslatable word rek is also semantically here designates a sound It is absolutely
Russian word meaning close to pro-rek (predicted) that is very similar to incomprehensible!”
“world”, “peace” and and na-rek (has named pronunciation of the
the traditional peasant something), which, though letter A in English words 8 This mantric song is
community of pre- rare and poetic, are still like “hat”. “KЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf” apparently based on the
revolutionary Russia. in use in modern Russian. is presumably related to verb kvakala, meaning “to
Thus, the entire phrase can the abbreviation for the croak” in the past indefinite
3 The “Nine Hares of Russian be read as “I herald world/ name of the post-Soviet tense with a shifting accent.
Mir” is a term the C. A. peace to the river”, although Communist Party of the The longer lines were sung
coined to designate a group closer to the end the phrase Russian Federation. with a gradually falling tone.
119
THE NIGHTMARE OF need today are more dilettantes who neither worry
120
Cooperation should be understood as the process of friction and freedom, for in this domain we
of working side by side in agreement rather than in frequently temporarily come into contact with and
competition. Collaboration is a process whereby enter the parochial domain of others.7 They point to
individuals or organizations work together at the fact that if you set up a situation in which people
the intersection of common goals. This can be can produce what they believe in, this condition can
adversarial, so that by joining forces a surplus is generate a set of relationships and productivities
generated, although the stakeholders’ goals might that take the situation further than the conventional
oppose this. In order to clearly distinguish between understanding of disciplinary or interdisciplinary
modes of cooperation and modes of collaboration, practice can. The logic of change is always based on
Schneider introduces cooperation as a method the notion of exception, while unpredictable action
applied among identifiable individuals within and is the catalyst that sparks something new. One could
between organizations, whereas collaboration argue that the autonomy of the art world produces
corresponds to a more disparate relationship that an infrastructure for this. In a context like this one,
is generated by and based on heterogeneous parts opposition can be read as affirmation, and whether
that are defined as unpredictable singularities. the boundaries of conflict retract or expand, they set
In contrast to an organic model of cooperation, up the limits of potentialities.
collaboration is put forward as a rigorously The concept of using conflict as a generator of critical
immanent and illegitimate praxis. and productive collaboration was first introduced
This notion, of course, is linked to the concept of the by conflict theory. As far as the idea of introducing
outsider as well as to the need for a more conflictual conflict is concerned, there are very formalized state/
mode of participation from the point of view of self- political, transnational and non-governmental
initiated practice versus the more established model structures and procedures in place that utilize
of the service provider: “[C]ooperation necessarily conflict as a strategic tool, essentially employing
takes place in a client–server architecture. . . . it in order to both reveal realities and generate a
Collaboration, on the contrary, presumes rhizomatic crisis, which allows for change to occur more rapidly.
structures where knowledge grows exuberantly . . . The United Nations employs a number of conflict
and proliferates in an unforeseeable manner.”6 It is strategies in which micro-conflicts are superimposed
this collaborative structure, according to Schneider, on existing situations of conflict in order to address
that presents the most fertile site of revolutionary a given issue. This concept of introducing other
potential. It is where change can occur, frameworks conflicts falls within what is officially called “conflict
of difference can flourish and the creativity of the transformation theory”, which is strongly influenced
multiplicity generates productive practices. by Johan Galtung.8
Collaboration often produces actors who work To return to the notion of collaboration, it would
on projects for something other than a purely thus not be farfetched to argue that conflict could be
monetary reward or the accumulation of cultural understood as a productive variable in collaboration.
capital. It can also be described as a productive It points to the larger question of how we think about
learning process. In their book In Search of New challenges and change. Conflict is not necessarily a
Public Domain, Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp given, though. It needs to emerge and be fostered as
characterize what they call a true public domain a generative friction, a force of critical production.
as an experience in which there is an interplay However, as mentioned earlier, such conflict should
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be understood not as one that is physical or violent, through its definition of ways of being together and
but rather as a friction that emerges on the levels its reshaping of how we hold things in common,
of content and production – a conflict played out then, as Tom Keenan remarks, “art clearly can be
within the remit of the democratic arena. “Doing” and in fact is a mode of research in the political”,10
and acting within this arena produces reality. In and it engages in politics not through modes of
this context, those who do not act, standing on the representation, but through practice. The moment
sidelines as spectators, do not participate and thus of the political is the moment in which agency is
simply confirm pre-existing paradigms of practice. enacted or in which one becomes visible. Almost
The culture of antagonistic collaboration could also by default, this raises a problem: someone on the
be described as an urban rather than a rural practice, outside needs to recognize art as being political.
for density allows for antagonisms to emerge more Therefore, the relationship between practice and
naturally. The space of performativity is a space of distribution, or the question of how to address and
reaction and encounter in which there is an intrinsic present the political object, becomes imperative.
relationship that Chantal Mouffe has termed the It is important to understand that architecture
adversarial one of “friendly enemies”. What they have can never deliver solutions; what it might be able
in common is that they share a symbolic space. They to do is to visualize and spatialize the conflicts
agree on the ethico-political principles that inform that are at the core of the very nature of its context,
the political association, but they disagree about even if – and especially because – those conflicts
the interpretation of those principles. In a similar are disappearing more and more from our visual
manner Jacques Derrida applies the use of difference registers. Consequently, architecture becomes a sort
to the concept of friendship in his book The Politics of eyewitness testimony.
of Friendship,9 exploring the dynamic between friend Hence, one should argue that instead of
and enemy. Haunted by the provocative address breeding the next generation of facilitators and
attributed to Aristotle – “O my friends, there is no mediators, we should aim for the encouragement
friend” – Derrida illustrates that there is a play of of the “uninterested outsider” or the “uninvited
difference associated with the concept of friendship. participator” who is unaware of prerequisites and
He does not have to problematize the concept of protocol, thereby entering the arena with nothing
friendship, as it is already problematized by its very but a creative intellect and the will to provoke
own history: in its essence, friendship is marked change. Running down the corridor without fear
by difference. Between friend and enemy as well of causing friction or destabilizing existing power
as friend and friend, there is the potential for a structures, he opens up a space for change, one that
conflictual consensus, one that produces the fertile enables “political politics”. Given the increasing
ground for conflictual participation to occur. fragmentation of identities and the complexities
This allows for the politics of participation to be of the contemporary city, we are now facing a
re-defined by a productive difference inserted as situation in which it is crucial to think about a form
friction. Critical practice is supposed to challenge of commonality that allows for conflict to be a form
the expectation of what and how things should be of productive engagement – a model of bohemian
done. Knowledge is necessarily shareable and occurs participation in the sense that it involves outsiders
after a common ground has been established, even who participate in existing debates and discourses
if that shared ground is conflictual. If art is political untroubled by the disapproval of others.
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As Simon Critchley argues, philosophy always begins change through commitment, complicity connotes
with disappointment.11 Nihilism is the breakdown the death of a project. Such a model needs to be
of the order of meaning in which everything that we driven by a result-oriented praxis whose potential for
have previously imagined as a sound basis for moral modalities can only ever be tested in reality. These
judgement becomes meaningless. According to results can then be critiqued, altered, tweaked,
Critchley, philosophical activity, by which he means edited or even dismissed, rather than simply having
the free movement of thought and the possibility their theoretical potential regurgitated over and over
for critical reflection, “is defined by the militant again. The key phrase here is “constructive critical
resistance to nihilism”.12 In order to remain at least a productivity”. One should attempt to produce ten
little optimistic in the current socio-political climate critical realities per year and repeatedly learn from
of practice, one needs to generate a space in which it the potential mistakes these would permit, and
seems possible to overcome the constant lamenting, then develop a single practice after a considerable
pessimism, and negative writing about the amount of time has been spent learning that it had
contemporary condition. Peter Sloterdijk contends failed. Testing allows for agility, and it needs to be
that the individual designer needs to attempt carried out in the proper context, in collaboration
to construct a certain universe of competency, with others and across cultural milieux, in order to
a territory in which one can exist as a sovereign avoid the vanity and comfortable, passive hiding
individual, not in the sense of relative specialization, behind walls of egocentric practice, all of which is
but rather the reverse: the contemporary “expert” highly uncritical and terribly unproductive. Martin
needs to become an incompetent master navigating Wuttke’s analogy about the theatre is relevant here:
the ocean of practices, not a more specialized master
of a single terrain. For Sloterdijk, design is the skilful There is the danger that theatre is turning into a mere
mastering of incompetence.13 Skilful incompetence simulation of itself. It is like a cleaning lady mopping
allows for a sort of neutral gear, a parallel reality in the floor of the stage who, while observing her own
which practice, even in the presence of those who reflection in the window, realizes that she likes the
attempt to think in an unconscious manner, can be movement of her ass as she cleans the floor. It no longer
sustained in an optimistic mode of production. seems to matter whether the floor is actually being
The free circulation of thought necessarily implies cleaned, because the movement of her ass is the only
not always clinging to what is known and perceived result of its being mopped. This is how I perceive theatre
as functional and “right”, or what has been practiced right now: a cleaning lady who has nothing else on her
or experienced previously. Working from the outside, mind but the salacious movement of her own ass.15
like a non-institutional free agent (who is, to a certain
extent, comparable to an external consultant14) also Using Wuttke’s analogy, it seems crucial to find a way
means actively performing a certain marginality. to position oneself, in an agile manner, within the
The isolation of such marginality can only be context of current practices and the contemporary
overcome by a relentless will for collaboration and condition without falling into the trap of deadlock.
a commitment and will to change things from a Today’s critical practitioner should opt to become a
distance that produces a mode of criticality – a receptor of political processes rather than a remote
distance that an insider cannot offer and does not player who navigates through the cultural-political
possess. In this model of practice, which strives for terrain in a deaf/dumb/blind manner – something
123
that Diedrich Diederichsen calls “surrogate- a clear stance, he or she still offers an alternative,
democratic participation”16 – and represents nothing disinterested and less biased perspective on the
more than a depoliticization of the individual beyond internal, consensus-driven mechanisms of the other
serious modes of engagement. In the current climate, political parties present in the House. Although
it is necessary to separate oneself from magic these politicians have an undoubtedly political
buzzwords – sustainability, participation, democracy opinion, they do not subscribe to the nailed-down
or “the multitude” – that were propagated at the tail membership books or party platforms of more
end of the 1990s. Instead of using them as simple consolidated politicians. This is also reflected in
billpostings for political one-liners, one must address the cross-bencher’s physical positioning within
their underlying motives through contextualized the House, with Labour sitting on one side, the
practice. These buzzwords were only a few of the conservatives sitting on the other and the cross-
terms that were used in order to shift attention from benchers in the middle, slightly displaced toward
the micro to the macro scale. This was happening the back of the room.
across the board, beyond political alliances, whether Today participation is part of the neoliberal
on the left or the right.17 At some point, it became project, and it ultimately serves the preservation
sexy to subscribe to one of these terms; whether one of the system. Real questions of power are no
was convinced by its content or future potential was longer being negotiated. Within the remit of such
a secondary question. It was a mainstream trend “directed participation” and highly controlled
that bridged disciplines and political mindsets. The political engagement, one should promote the
whole point of cultural praxis is that it presupposes involvement of the autonomous practitioner as a
and assumes possible futures – that it speculates on means of harnessing conflict as an enabling rather
what might be possible through a series of critical than disabling force. This shift calls for a new
theories and practices which, for society at large, are interpretation of both the late-1990s romantic use
still too abstract.18 of “participation” as a mode or operation as well as
One could claim, however, that the real value of this the function and responsibility of the cross-bencher:
praxis is hidden in an approach in which there is no a mode of conflictual participation that no longer
evidence of either fully rational decision-making perpetuates or relies on a process by which others
or consensus in the result. One could argue that are invited in, but instead acts without consensual
the cross-benching politician in the British House mandate as a disinterested, productive irritant.
of Lords is an interesting reference to consider, In participation there are often too many potential
not as a gesamt-political structure of the House decision-makers, but there are rarely enough people
and its conservative alignment, but as a structural who take on the responsibility and risk of turning
component that is designed to leave space for those decisions into reality, of moving things forward.
who want to remain unaligned in order to provoke, Any political practice must, of course, always opt to
motivate and eventually stimulate change. The cross- remain within the territory and be founded on the
bencher is essentially an independent practitioner basic rules of the democratic arena. Nevertheless,
who neither belongs to a specific party nor regularly there is a potential danger in always using the
fosters alliances with the same political camps. majority as a way of generating democratic decision-
Although this also makes him or her a less reliable making. The dilemma with democracy is that the
or dependable player who potentially even lacks moment you have a room full of idiots, they will vote
124
for an idiotic government, or, in the case of the recent means that you may be very good at doing one thing,
Swiss referendum regarding the subsistence of the but the demand simply vanishes. Everyone who
country’s mosques, if one has sufficient financial joins companies like Sony, Honda or 3M needs to
resources to mobilize the idiots, it is possible to make understand that such competencies are only valuable
the entire country look like a fool. The main difficulty when they can be applied in different fields; they
with the romanticized notion of the participatory should have an understanding of how to facilitate
project is that it assumes that everyone should sit this transfer and why it is desirable. Until recently,
around the table in order to make decisions, for most architects did not know how to do this. Over
this might not necessarily be in everyone’s best time they unlearned this skill, which was actually a
interest. Should one seriously read the British Sun, part of architectural training for a long time. In the
the New York Post or the German Bild Zeitung simply Renaissance, the polymath and generalist was the
because they are the newspapers with the largest role model for such a practitioner: he was a reflexive,
readership and print runs? The question at hand educated individual capable of lateral thinking.
and the development of the last decade’s notion Different times have identified different primary
of the participatory project actually point to a far competencies, but it becomes interesting when one
greater danger: the problem and helplessness of allows these dimensions to become transparent and
the political left. If all one can do in order to make understood as interdependent.
decisions is outsource the decision-making and Rather than mourning the good old days, this
pass responsibility to the floor, then something has model can also be understood as a challenge full of
gone severely wrong with representative electoral potential. Architects have at times been very prolific
democracy. This is also why, in the shadow of the in exploiting the potential of being in a parasitic
last decade, we have witnessed the re-emergence of relationship with the discipline that actually
the right, which now, oddly, appears to get things produces architecture, which is the discipline of
done. It developed irony to perfection, a leap that construction. The natural disillusionment with the
has rendered the right almost invulnerable: “The way in which decisions that have already been made
left may have won the curricular battle, but the right are often not carried through by those who should
won the public-relations war. The right did this in realize them has equipped architects with a healthy
the old-fashioned way, by mastering the ancient art amount of scepticism. Over the last decades, what
of rhetoric and spinning a vocabulary that, once used to be known as the profession of architecture
established in the public mind, performed the work has disintegrated into a plethora of practices. This
of argument all by itself.”19 shift from a profession or clearly outlined discipline
So what can the architect’s role be in all of this to a series of practices was fuelled and mobilized by a
today? A contemporary architect must confront certain politicization of architecture that emerged in
the dilemma of a profession that no longer really the mid 1990s. However, while these varied practices
exists. There is no such thing as a core competence, are trying to achieve many disparate aims, they
although, as we learned from Sloterdijk earlier, might nonetheless be united by a unique quality,
this may actually be an advantage rather than a namely the potential and skill of the imagination,
disadvantage. Having a core competence – such formulation and design of strategic frameworks that
as Sony = miniaturization, Honda = combustion enable things to happen. The problem, however, is
engine, 3M = everything that sticks to things – also that this abstract quality is continuously applied
125
on the same old turf, one that failed architects in who claims to write only for him or herself, or for
the first place. This raises the question of how to the sake of pure learning, or abstract science is
position oneself within the broader realm of critical not to be, and must not be, believed.”20 Here Said
practices. It is easy to agree that there is a certain proactively summarizes the key problematic in the
impotence that seems to govern the profession. present discussion: “The hardest aspect of being an
However, within the cultural sphere, there are many intellectual is to represent what you profess through
niches to be investigated and occupied. Through your work and interventions, without hardening
the exploration of the potential space between into an institution or a kind of automaton acting
stability and instability, critical spatial practice at the behest of a system or method.”21 In Said’s
can be understood as a stage set of sorts, a strategic opinion, the important thing is to never forget that
manual for choreographing futures. Cynics might you have the choice. And choice is what permeates
argue that the architectural project per se is simply a strength and power, even from the point of view of
more baggage-burdened type of storytelling practice, the individual.
and there may even be a certain truth to this. Political space entails the practice of decision-
Nevertheless, one needs to be pretty good at telling making and judging; to judge means to introduce
the story. a system of hierarchies. A curatorial practice that
Such polyphonic practice opens up a new role not generates a political space has at its core the acts
only for the architect, but for critical practices of strategizing and destruction – making choices
in general: to go beyond conventional physical about what to eliminate. In the given context of
construction and venture into the construction of critical spatial practice, the architect as curator
realities, not in order to follow existing protocols, but could be understood as an instigator who, through
in order to generate them proactively. It represents the introduction of zones of conflict, transforms the
a plea to the non-academic intellectual, with a cultural landscape, which is the result of an unstable
wide diffusion beyond academia, although most society that consists of many distinct and often
of it may have been nurtured there. Even more so, conflicting individuals, institutions and spaces.
cross-benching practitioners should not remain at One could therefore argue that instead of breeding
the water’s edge. Instead, they should turn to the the next generation of facilitators and mediators,
political world precisely because it is animated by we should aim to encourage the involvement of the
considerations of power and interest. Unlike the disinterested outsider who exists at the margins, just
academy, its impact might affect an entire practice waiting for the right moment to produce ruptures
or social body rather than only a student body. in the prevailing discourses and practices. This
The intention behind saying this is not to sound outsider is someone who is inherently unaware of
megalomaniacal, but rather to say that in times of prerequisites and protocols, one who enters the
crisis one is responsible for an intellectual premise arena with nothing but his or her creative intellect.
on a larger scale. In this sense, moving from relatively Running down the corridor without fear of causing
discrete questions of interpretation and reading friction or destabilizing existing power relations,
to much more significant and proactive ones of this outsider opens up a space for change, one that
social change and transformation may introduce enables “political politics”.
and articulate an outsider’s perspective on a larger The question remains whether trying to simply
scale. As Edward Said has said, “The intellectual describe one’s own role within a plethora of
126
differentiated practices is to be understood as the value, positions and temporal nature of political
an opportunistic endeavour or whether it has engagement. Along these lines, an alternative
some qualities or use-value that extend beyond rendering of participation and the relational should
the individual. The cross-benching praxis could be arrived at, one that morphs from performer into
be described precisely as acting without a clearly proactive enabler and moves beyond the event-driven
defined mandate while proactively seeking realities of certain artistic production in response
engagement: freelancing with a conscience. It to social situations toward a direct and personal
calls for a hermeneutics and recalibration of the engagement and stimulation of specific future
notion of participation. Such an understanding realities. This can only be achieved by avoiding the
of practice seems vital in order to face the future trap of getting stuck in one milieu, like the art world
optimistically. It assumes that one defines oneself or a single political project; we humans have feet in
through the notion of practice rather than through order to be able to move and not get stuck. Otherwise,
that of a discipline or profession. Here skills and a we would be trees. This movement needs to result
core competence replace the traditional notion of in a content- and agenda-driven nomadic practice
disciplines and professionalism. Here participation fuelled by critical inquiry carried out from an extra-
produces an alternative and parallel reality discursive position that allows one to exit a given
that is activated and driven by self-motivation, milieu in order to be able to re-enter it differently.
political agendas, collaborative willingness and This practitioner will be a co-author rather than a
the fearlessness to exclude rather than thrive in participant, for participants are usually confronted
unquestioned inclusion. This agenda of critical with superimposed structures. Although the “free
manipulation must not take anything for granted radical” does not exist and nothing is ever clean-cut
and must never ultimately take sides, meaning that – rather, everything is ambivalent – such a practice
one should not cop out of responsibility, but stay needs to work toward an ambition that is immune
flexible, agile and critical without being dogmatic. to complicity. This complicity can be overcome
One should, on the other hand, be aware that cross- by assuming three positions with which modes of
benching tactics also have a weakness, for they proactive participation can become meaningful:
tend to be temporary and often local, and hence attitude, relevance and responsibility. Unfortunately,
potentially in danger of ignoring the bigger picture or these are lacking.
having trouble looking at things diachronically. Space is the result of Handlung.22 It is impossible
Apart from a relatively small circle of practitioners, to generate change via a passive mode of response.
the art and architecture worlds, as practice rather Practice always needs to go beyond absorption and
than pure critique, have lost touch in this regard. become projective, injecting itself into contextual
Many practices in the art world rarely produce realities and making itself visible in order to
more than one-liners and nestle within the instrumentalize these. In a time when participation
relative freedom and luxury of a superimposed has become nothing more than a rendering of
happy-go-lucky bubble in which participation has tokenistic political correctness, such a propositional
become nothing but an esoteric self-awareness rather than purely reflective notion of practice offers
programme. This has resulted in an almost entire a hideout for agonistic commitment.
de-politicization of the art world. What is needed now Most sub-cultural developments of the last
is a re-introduction of the critical interrogation of fifty years obliged themselves to gravitate more
127
toward the military logic of the avant-gardes than
toward the ideas of democratic participation:
first on site, scouting out unknown terrain, but
otherwise living the wild and dangerous life of
small underground cells.23 As Marcel Reich-Ranicki
wrote about Gotthold-Ephraim Lessing, “The
loneliness appeared to him as the qualification for
the autonomy of the critic, and the autonomy as the
prerequisite for his function.”24
Notes
128
ARCHITECTURE, DYNAMITE AND
THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT
Giovanni La Varra
129
I.
“We used what was the requisite quantity of dynamite, about 150 kilo-
grams. We’ve being operating in this line of business for twenty-five
years and never before had anything of the like happened. We blew
one of the two base supports of the building to make sure it would
fold over in the right direction. What happened instead was that the
concrete slab remained mysteriously in place.” These are the remarks
of Beppe Zandonella, the owner of Tecnomine, a firm from Piacenza,
Italy, engaged to demolish one of the “Vele” buildings in Scampia,
Naples (“vele” is the Italian word for “sails”, a nickname derived from
the triangular shape of the huge Neapolitan buildings).
It was 12 December 1997, and at a window in the building facing
the Vele in the Scampia quarter of a suburb of Naples, Neapolitan
mayor Antonio Bassolino was waiting to see one of the Vele collapse.
The intention was to demolish two of the seven Vele structures, and
news of this had been announced to the press, which had thus turned
out to witness the event. It was the first time in Italy that a residential
building built with planning authorization was to be demolished
using dynamite.
The local Neapolitan government had a plan to tackle the diffi-
cult quarter of Scampia, an area of the city beset by acute problems
of urban decay (drug dealing, squatting, etc.), problems that had thus
plagued the seven Vele (designated as A, B, C, D, F, G and H) from the
time of their construction. The plan involved demolishing Vele F and
G, adapting Vela H to house the Civil Defence and Emergency Service
on the basis of a design by the firm of Gregotti Associati and restoring
the others to provide new premises for the university.
The Vele are one of the major public projects of Italian architecture
from the 1970s, much like the Corviale in Rome, the Zen in Palermo,
the large Rozzol Melara court complex in Trieste, Calabria University
in Cosenza and Cagliari’s Sant’Elia quarter. Public residential building,
in what were its final years, had gone in for huge structures housing
thousands of apartment dwellings and, in almost all cases, the signs
of urban decay were evident from the start: squatters moved into the
flats before they were completed, rents went unpaid and the agency
charged with the structures’ maintenance failed to get access to flats
with the result that tenants could end up living for years without a lift
in a fourteen-floor building.
Following the initial blast with dynamite, Vela F remained stand-
ing for several days. The mayor, the town councillors, the engineers,
130
the journalists and the tenants of the other Vele stared in disbelief
at the building, which was tilted at an angle and suspended, precari-
ously poised but tenaciously resistant. After four days the decision was
made to use a crane and a large metal wrecking ball to complete the
demolition of the building, now a spent shell.
So the anticipated event of the building’s collapse had not occurred
as planned. The mistake the demolition firm made was to underesti-
mate the quantity of iron in the reinforced concrete. There was more
than had been expected, and, naturally, the original drawings of the
structures had disappeared before the demolition plans were made.
Some months later, the second Vela was demolished with a more
robust charge of dynamite. The urban restoration plans that should
have followed in the wake of its demolition, however, remained a dead
letter. To date, the four surviving Vele (Vela H was demolished in 2003)
continue to be run-down, and the living conditions there are as dif-
ficult as ever, although some local associations have begun to take
action at a community level and push for the improvement of the area.
Vela F, left hanging and suspended for a few days to the surprise
and dismay of the authorities and local people, eloquently betokens
the considerable uncertainty on a national level about how to view a
period of building that had yielded works which were extraordinary
and courageous in their intentions but a total write-off in terms of
their outcome.
The very idea of a partial demolition appears to reveal this uncer-
tainty. The plan was to demolish two Vele out of seven: a prudent
demonstration of force, but a limited one designed to create an event
that was geared to the types of interests the media has in town plan-
ning issues.
The question as to what should be done with these works is still
unresolved today – to demolish them, to upgrade them, to change
their use under planning law or to intervene with a “bottom-up” or
“top-down” approach.
II.
The short-lived season of large-scale Italian buildings was ushered in
by a sense of expectancy in which three elements overlapped. The first
was faith in new technologies and in forms of building industrializa-
tion, a theme that characterized Italian architecture of the 1960s and
was derived from news about experiences in Japan and the English-
speaking world.
131
The second was the idea that economic planning could become
a territorial, community-level matter. New disciplines linked to the
social sciences, to the urban economy and to land planning issues
became the backdrop for the thinking of a substantial number of
Italian architects.
The third was the possibility that concurrent with a politically
progressive outlook there might be a new landscape of large-scale
buildings tasked with controlling the urban form of towns and their
broader surrounding area. In other words, in the mid 1960s a body
of Italian architects retreated from the battleground of the town and
turned their focus to the territory as the new war front.
However, one very real expectation met with disappointment: the
possibility of a dialogue between architects and the political establish-
ment. No sooner were the work sites in operation than the politicians
sensed that the management of these works required rigour, earnest-
ness, precision and transparency. It soon became clear that architec-
ture in which the formal aspects were emphasized would be matched
by the need for a greater commitment in the management of the final
structure. The response from political circles was an equally rigorous
and radical project: constant and methodical neglect.
All the major works of Italy’s large-scale building period encoun-
tered a lengthy succession of obstacles. The Zen and Corviale build-
ings, in Palermo and Rome respectively, were taken over by squatters
before completion. Following the 1980 earthquake in southern Italy,
the Vele came under siege from the evacuees, who were ready to take
up occupancy even in cellars without lighting. And for its part, Calabria
University was never completed. In all cases there were disputes with
Facing page: the construction companies, work stoppages at the sites and major
Photograph by Luciano design variations (to simplify them and to force down costs, which,
Ferrara
nonetheless, mysteriously grew). The squatting was universally tol-
erated. The political establishment saw these buildings as a sort of
release valve, or as a way of handling social hardship. Judged from
this standpoint, the efficacy of the Zen, Vele and Corviale complexes
was exceptional. From the outset, the nature of these big structures
seemed beyond the political establishment’s ability to run and manage
them. Unsuccessful in its attempt to run these buildings as they were
conceived to be run (as huge machines à habiter or as monuments for
controlling urban expansion), the politicians managed them in quite
a different sense: by facilitating their decay and tolerating unlawful
conduct on their premises.
132
133
These large-scale structures brought about no change in the think-
ing and action of politicians. Rather, it was the political establishment
with its machinery for control and management that changed both the
nature and value of this type of architecture. The introduction of the
principle of laissez-fairism into Italy can be traced back to long before
the surge in interest in non-interference by the state during the 1980s.
Large-scale structures built in the 1970s like the Vele – including
other, less well-known ones – represent an unresolved trauma expe-
rienced by architectural thinking in Italy. Large buildings were put
up throughout the world during those years, but elsewhere the efforts
made by architects were backed up by the firmest rigour in the manage-
ment and maintenance of these large machines à habiter, and when the
management of such projects was complicated by social conditions,
a radical choice was made: to demolish and rebuild.
For Italy, there was no Pruitt-Igoe.
This trauma has weighed heavily on the development of archi-
tecture in Italy, and its effects have been felt in two ways. On the one
hand, architects have been overwhelmed by disenchantment. The
enormous opportunities of the 1970s led to the creation of negative
landmarks. As the possibility of controlling local land development
through large-scale structures unravelled, any and all enthusiasm for
local planning evaporated. The abandonment of the project was abrupt
and uniformly supported. At the start of the 1980s, the scale of build-
ing projects changed, as did the nature of society’s expectations with
regard to architecture. On the other hand, society had begun building
cities in which the “do it yourself” approach was fashionable. Nowhere
in Europe did as many people get in on the act of building the urban
landscape as in Italy. Sprawl in its Italian incarnation released Italian
society’s pent-up individualism. Local planning was delegated to count-
less people, and en masse Italians became the owners of single-family
homes and small craftwork and industrial structures.
III.
The formal nature of buildings like the Vele is rich and complex. The
issue now, after the intervening years, is to decide what the outlook
for them is, not just to conduct research into their past.
What, therefore, is to be done? What view can we take today of
these buildings? There are three mainstream approaches. The first,
which is the most disagreeable and extreme, is that they should be
demolished and that they need to be replaced with other forms of
134
residential accommodation. Managing and maintaining them is
costly and complicated. From this point of view, the only solution is
to do away with them, given that they are no longer conceivable within
the contemporary context of towns and neighbourhoods that would
willingly have done without these elephantine buildings in the first
place. The new run-of-the-mill building recently put up in the place
of the demolished Vele perfectly exemplifies this attitude.
The second approach implies a romantic vision. It argues that these
structures, to a degree, are evidence both of an era and of a philoso-
phy regarding towns and cities. It is thus essential that they survive
as proof that “cities of another kind are (were) possible”. Defeats, too,
after all, create monuments. However, as with all forms of romanti-
cism, the risk inherent in this vision is that it is private, abstract and
difficult to share with thousands of people living in strained social
conditions without any prospect of improvement. For them, the idea
of living in a monument is a non-starter.
A third approach is to take a closer look at these large architec-
tural creations, to see them for what they are rather than viewing
them according to the negative connotations with which they are
associated. This is the only approach that has attempted to discern
a new narrative for these buildings. It is an approach that gets down
to work, that intuits the possibility of mounting a project that can in
some way be assimilated into the architecture and that maps out the
threads of the social relationships in these places. The outcome of
this approach is a project that domesticates; it represents the discov-
ery that within these micro-cities there is life and there are human
relationships, and that a fragile sort of community has taken shape
there. It is an unbiased and realistic approach that uses the social
resources available to get more out of structures like the Vele and to
reassemble them in a new scenario.
In different ways, each of these three approaches impedes the pos-
sibility of restoring these buildings by starting from their form. The
first approach physically eliminates the structures, the second one
tries to freeze their appearance by maintaining the buildings’ current
state, and the third leaves the question of form in the background,
perceiving buildings like the Vele as a sort of theatre in which living
is an adaptive and flexible exercise.
However, the destiny of these structures lies in their form, which
is exemplified – and not by chance – by nicknames or analogies that
invariably derive from something unrelated: “the large serpent”,
135
“the bridge”, “the dam”, “the sail”, “the kasbah”. These huge edifices
have brought the possibility of living differently to Italy. This feature
of theirs, their exceptional form, needs to be considered afresh and
worked on. Oddly, taking a new interest in these huge buildings would
involve thinking, once again, about cities and territory in terms of
architectural form.
A fourth approach must be brought to bear on the architecture
of these large artefacts as well. The materials with which such a pro-
ject would start are buildings that are characterized by both ample
dimensions and problems, and that are also saddled with a public
image that is difficult to change. The operation in question is one
of adaptation (through architectural redesign) and architectonic
reinvention (of type or layout), but also of the cultural reinvention of
a new relationship between architecture and politics. The current
economic conditions necessitate a careful appraisal of how to give
new value to public areas, and this new value could be endowed by
an architectural project than can impose a new way of doing things
on the political establishment.
If dynamite is not the solution, then we should make a new attempt
through architecture.
136
TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.
ON THE POTENTIAL OF WHAT
GOES WRONG IN RELATION
TO MODERNISM AND ART
Filipa Ramos
While preparing this text it did not take me long to understand that I
had no ambition to deliver a conclusive essay; instead I was interested
in identifying a set of categories that could be used to classify certain
remnants of the architectonic legacy of modernism that seem to be
particularly attractive to visual artists who, in the process of re-working
them, carried out an exploration of the realm of the gaze and the recep-
tion of modernism.
Evidently I am not the first to inquire into the current artistic use
of cultural memory, in particular that which relates to modernism.
During these last few years, we have all spent so much time rummaging
through countless lost-and-found departments and reading intensively
between the lines of our official art histories that it seems like we are
mostly creating through recollection. Despite living in the age of the
digital screen – or perhaps precisely because of this – we are creating in
Technicolor, documenting in black and white and constantly evoking
gestures, attitudes and aesthetics of the past.
This exploration of production and consumption seems to have
brought to light the fact that what attracts us most in the recent past
is not the perfect or the preserved, but rather what did not work – what
has been lost or was never fully acknowledged.
Not surprisingly, failure has a special place in our contemporary
lexicon. It constitutes a key motif in the transition from modernism to
postmodernism, and it has been continuously revisited, as in Samuel
Beckett’s exemplary plea from Worstward Ho (1983): “Ever tried. Ever
failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
More recently, its relation to contemporary aesthetics was celebrated
in Harald Szeemann’s 2004 exhibition The Beauty of Failure / The Failure
137
1 of Beauty (Juan Miró Foundation, Barcelona), which reflected upon the
Mark Lewis’s essay “Is richness of the debate between utopias and their often disastrous results,
Modernity Our Antiquity?”,
published as a contribution and how they constituted the poles of a central axis of artistic inquiry.
to Documenta 12 (Afterall There has not been a radical change of focus since then; instead
14 [Autumn/Winter 2006]),
provides an exceptional
we have engaged in a sort of up-close examination that has brought
discussion of this theme. micro-histories to the fore, not so much to confirm that the promises
of a Golden Age that was due to arrive hand in hand with rationality and
technology were never fulfilled, but to trace direct ways of dialoguing
with the past, as incompleteness provided the perfect possibility for
inserting something new into a circle that was not closed.1 Something
that is not fully accomplished leaves space for others to squeeze in, not
only so that its value and use can be reconsidered, but also so that it can
be used as a host for subsequent interventions and rearrangements.
Building on this idea, I propose the identification of three figures
that appear to be crucial for the grounding of this consistent return to
the failed, especially in relation to spatial use and occupation. These
three figures are the museum, the ruin and the razed.
The museum corresponds to those places that, despite their pristine
state of conservation, have lost (or never fully acquired) their original
function. In this process they display their unfulfilled vocation, thus
becoming an archetype of the divorce between form and function.
The ruin is related to what was abandoned, to the cumbersome left-
overs that magnify the paradox of modernist utopias in their oscillation
between presence and oblivion and in the loss of a connection with use.
Stills from Tamar The razed refers to those obsolescent structures that were destroyed
Guimarães’s video Canoas, in order to eliminate an undesired and invasive presence.
2010. Courtesy the artist
Each figure will be analyzed through the specific case of an art-
work that provides a terrain for an inquiry into what became of the
modernist legacy. These three cases also seem to suggest that the
attempt to overcome unresolved situations (such as the “museum-
ification” of a house, the abandonment and decay of a failed touristic
complex or the more brutal act of demolishing a utopian community
project that had become a ghetto) was equally unsuccessful. But, alas,
these failures are precisely what allow artists to enter an open terrain
and work with it. The artist thus behaves as a sort of mediator in the
attempt to overcome modernity.
The Museum
Canoas (13’, 2010) is a film by Tamar Guimarães that presents a dou-
ble portrait of Oscar Niemeyer’s project for his private residence in
138
the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The house is the axis and perimeter
of the camera: the film is shot either around or from the inside of
the domestic space, comprising the gardens; we see the house in the
daylight and in the evening, during both its apparently everyday use
and the exceptional moment of a party, when it is serenely occupied
and very crowded.
We watch how different individuals relate to it differently – how
the servants move around with ease, seeming to be the only ones who
really know all the corners of the house, even if, as caretakers, they
never really use it. Then there are other people for whom the house
represents a meeting point, a place where their common presence
confirms a certain social and cultural status.
Here everyone seems to be the Other, and it is this sense of oth-
erness that triggers a second portrait of the house, a more fleeting
one, that depicts it through a series of discourses it propitiates and
contains. The house becomes the host for the outcome of thoughts
about identity and about the relationship between popular tradition
and modernism in Brazil, as well as for short stories and events, as,
for example, when Suely Rolnik talks about the relationship of Lygia
Clark’s practice to drug culture and experimental literature. In this
sense, the house stops being a commodity and a symbol and becomes
the place for the in-between, for the exchange and flux of common
intellectual property: ideas, impressions, feelings and memories.
Despite this potential to become a space for exchange, Casa das
Canoas, with its organic, mild, sensual form, its gentle curves and its
languid insertion into the landscape, can never hide the gaps it per-
petuates between class and race, nature and culture, discourse and
abandonment. When talking about Clark, Rolnik’s words are uttered
inside the house, and what at first seemed like the perfect setting for it,
actually proves to be ill-suited, as it is full of people dancing, chatting
and moving about. The house becomes noise, which overshadows the
possibility for reflection about the legacy of modernism, both its offi-
cial, known versions, and the narrow alleyways of its micro-narratives.
In 2007 on the occasion of the celebration of the hundredth birth-
day of Oscar Niemeyer, Casa das Canoas became a listed building and
can now be visited as a cultural institution.
Is a museum made out of a house still a house? What function
does it have? Is it a tribute? A relic? A monument? Will it become, in
its permanent condition of inhabitability, the archetype of modernist
architecture? Through Tamar Guimarães’s film we get the impression
139
2 that the house is a container for impermanence: those people do not
“Je suis toujours aussi mal belong there and those conversations are being had in a strange con-
installé. Je ne sais si c’est
la cause de, mais depuis text that is unable to contain them. Everything is slightly forged, just
un mois que je travaille like the house itself: a high-class simulacrum of a machine for living.
sur une grande toile, j’en
ai fait au moins 20 les unes
sur les autres toutes plus The Ruin
dégueulasses les unes que It is thus quite paradoxical that a certain desire for the preservation of a
les autres. Le résultat est
nul.” Buren quoted in the hotel in a tropical location and of what it contained arises from seeing
leaflet of the exhibition Je Mario Garcia Torres’s Je ne sais si c’en est la cause (“I don’t know if that
ne sais si c’en est la cause,
Museo Experimental El Eco,
was the reason”, 2009).
Mexico City, June–August The work consists of the presentation of a research project focused on
2011. two sets of murals that the artist Daniel Buren created in the 1960s for the
Grapetree Bay, a beach hotel in St. Croix in the American Virgin Islands.
The title of the work is taken from a letter that Buren sent to his family
while working on the murals in which he complained about not being
very well inserted and wondered if this could be the reason for what he
considered to be the “dégueulasse” quality of the work he was producing.2
Forty years have passed since then, and the murals are currently
in an advanced state of decay because the hotel experienced a series of
financial fiascos that culminated in its closure in 1989, when Hurricane
Hugo devastated large areas of the island.
Garcia Torres carried out an inquiry on Buren’s mural works, and
he displays his research through a combination of past and present
photographic records and other documentation, such as original
leaflets from the Hotel, that he presents in a double slide projection.
The images are accompanied by an audio track of a song whose lyrics
were inspired by Buren’s letter from 1965 interpreted by the musician
Mario López Landa. As in many of his previous works, Garcia Torres
proves to be an exceptional researcher of the recent past of art history,
bringing to light hidden episodes – often vicissitudes – that he presents
through his own review and reinterpretation.
Buren’s murals are out of reach, for they are found in a very isolated
location inaccessible to most people. Their insertion within history of
art – and in particular within the history of Daniel Buren’s art – can
be problematic, not only due to his remark about the dégueulasse
quality of the works, but also because soon after doing the murals,
the artist underwent a radical change from the rather expressionistic
and materialistic approach that is still visible in these panels, even if
some of them – the ones produced around 1965 – already make use of
the abstract motifs that became the artist’s trademark.
140
The murals are condemned to their current condition of being
a ruin, and the artist seems to transmit mixed feelings as a result:
if there is a nostalgic attitude toward a “squandered” artwork that
almost no one sees or is interested in preserving, this condition also
holds a strong fascination.
After all the antiquities have been found, catalogued, preserved and Mario Garcia Torres, Je
inserted in history, the contemporary researcher feeds upon modern ne sais si c’en est la cause,
2009. Courtesy the artist
ruins, expressing an inevitable contempt for their state of decay, as it
was their very abandonment that had allowed them to be forgotten –
and then subsequently rediscovered.
The Razed
Leaving St. Croix behind for a different context, we could wonder if
urban landscapes tend to be less generous to the development of ruins
(which is, to a certain extent, an oxymoronic expression), especially
in relation to the very recent past. Also, there seems to be less benevo-
lence toward our recent ancestors, as if it is the passing of time that
attenuates taste and judgement.
The combination of these two factors – the rapid replacement
of the old in urban contexts and the impious attitude toward the
recently aged – triggers a schizophrenic condition, because in our age
of historiographical obsession we deliberately erase some of the most
resistant remains of modernism. Even stranger is the fact that it seems
that the more innocuous the memory of these places is, the easier it
is for them to be erased. It can be harder for the setting of a dramatic
occurrence to succumb to the vicissitudes of time (such as abandon-
ment, forgetfulness or disinterest) or to be actively erased, than for a
building that was not fully functional or suited to a certain moment
in time and is thus more vulnerable to the desire for its elimination.
Demolition could well represent the ultimate triumph and defeat
of the studied legacy of modernism: nothing remains, and yet all that
141
exists lies in the shared memory of those who were there to see it and
in the fragmented, dull and vague documentation that outlives what
has been deliberately razed.
Still from Cyprien Gaillard’s What we perceive in several artworks by Cyprien Gaillard, such as
video Pruitt-Igoe Falls, 2009. the video Pruitt-Igoe Falls (6’55’’, 2009), is a consistent interest in docu-
Courtesy the artist
menting these acts of destruction, which he subsequently combines
with other materials more or less linked to Western culture. There is
something very ambivalent about documenting demolitions: despite
their violence, they emanate such a strong energy, emotion and power
that they are one of the things that come closest to embodying the
contemporary perception of the sublime.
Pruitt-Igoe Falls takes its title from the large urban housing com-
plex of Pruitt-Igoe. Built in the 1950s on the outskirts of Saint Louis,
Missouri, the housing complex had a rather short life, as it suffered
from the effect of a global economic and demographic strategy that
caused the emptying of the city during the late 1950s.3 In the early 1970s
the complex was in such a state of decay that it was synonymous with
3 disruption, marginality and crime, and it seemed like the only option
A new perspective on was to start from scratch; in fact, the process of razing the building
the failure of the Pruitt-
Igoe complex was complex began in 1972.
recently presented in the Ironically, Pruitt-Igoe was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the same
documentary The Pruitt-Igoe
Myth: An Urban History (2011)
architect responsible for the Twin Towers. It is impressive that his
directed by Chad Freidrichs. two best-known building complexes both became famous due to their
destruction, which in both cases also signalled a moment of radical
change. Although the destruction of the World Trade Center lies beyond
the limits of this discussion, the demolition of the housing complex in St.
Louis marked a point of no return in the architecture of a given moment.
As Charles Jencks famously declared, 15 July 1972 – the day that
the last part of Pruitt-Igoe was razed to the ground – was the day that
“modern architecture died”.
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In spite of its title, Gaillard’s video does not document Pruitt-Igoe.
It consists of two static, silent shots that gradually cross-fade into one
another in a continuous loop. The first captures the demolition of a
part of the Sighthill Housing Estate in Glasgow, a city that underwent
a radical regeneration plan. The video shows a night view of a concrete
monolithic block, illuminated as if it were an important monument or
a film set. Then all of a sudden the building implodes and collapses,
producing a thick cloud that gradually grows bigger and engulfs the
camera, thereby plunging the image into almost total darkness. It
is in this moment that a faint light appears and gradually outshines
what remained of the first scene: the second shot also presents a night
view, this time of Niagara Falls illuminated by bright and colourful
spotlights. Here again, the image becomes gradually obscured, in
this case by the vapour of the falling water, and then it gives way to
the initial shot once more, creating a continuous loop between one
spectacle and the other.
One could easily reflect on how nature and urban decay can become
entertainment, as the cause of awe and emotion. But it could also be
that the main (and only) actor here is failure: the failure to preserve
and share something that is a common good (the waterfall), which
has been turned into a sort of Disneyland attraction, and the failure
of a modernist housing plan that is no longer in use but studied only
for its impressive demolition.
Failure is also very dear to Tamar Guimarães’s and Mario Garcia
Torres’s projects, and once more, the question remains: what failure
are we considering here? That of modernism’s proposals or that of our
attempts to overcome them?
As stated earlier, this discussion offers no final conclusions, given
its inconclusive nature. Rather it aims to open up the possibility of
using these three categories to inform certain recent artistic practices.
As a last remark I would like to deterritorialize this proposal in
order to conceive of the failure of modernism as a cliché and to con-
sider the subsequent attempts to overcome this as the true failures.
By way of farewell, I would propose three different figures that
became key architectural typologies in the early 20th century. They are
less related to a specific moment in time than those of the museum,
the ruin and the razed; instead, they refer to particular conditions of
inhabitation and use: the museum, the hotel and the house.
But perhaps this will be discussed on another occasion.
143
MITOLOGIA FERRARI
Stefano Graziani
144
145
146
147
INSTANT PARADISE:
A STORY OF FAILURE
AND ACCIDENTAL BEAUTY
You can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west . . . And with the right
kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where
the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
148
and real estate developers immediately grasped the economic opportu- Steven Bosmans & Michael
nities it represented. During the following decades numerous attempts Langeder, Salton Sea Map
149
Photograph by Steven Predictably, and almost literally, the Salton Sea proved to be a Fata
Bosmans Morgana. By the 1980s, with the lake being fed only by agricultural run-
off, the unpleasant side effects of its environmentally overburdened
system resulted in the near abandonment of the area. The lack of fresh
water and the ever-rising saline levels in combination with high water
temperatures led to a cycle of massive fish die-offs, thus turning the
former paradise into a morbid wasteland. Today, the retreating shores
are covered in a thick layer of fish skeletons, and a penetrating stench
lingers in the air.
The settlements around the sea, which bear exotic names like
“Bombay Beach”, “Desert Shores” and even “Mecca”, underwent a
fate comparable to that of the towns that sprang up during the Gold
Rush: they were deserted almost as suddenly as they were created. Now
the neat infrastructural grid around the lake largely remains empty.
Today’s visitors encounter the aftermath of the American dream in
the run-down trailers and the empty lots along the shoreline, and
the geometrically arranged streets are home to eccentrics and desert
nomads. The lake itself, for its part, is as revolting as it is attractive. Due
to the constant heat, a haze hangs over its sky-blue waters, generating
sublime and otherworldly vistas, while cockroaches crunch their way
through the strata of fish carcasses that lie along the shore of the lake.
Today the lake serves three purposes:
1. as a convenient repository for agricultural wastewater;
2. as a resource for fisheries and outdoor recreation (although to
a far lesser extent than in its golden age);
3. as an ecological wildlife reserve, especially for birds.
150
All three of these purposes are basically artificial, trapped in a curi- 1
ous stalemate. Left to its own devices, the lake’s salinity will continue The proposed interventions
include digging a canal to
to increase gradually, eventually impairing its other uses. The fish the Gulf of Mexico as well
will disappear, thereby affecting the local wildlife. In this scenario, as the more subtle and
potentially interesting
only the first of the lake’s three purposes will endure: that of serving idea of accumulating the
as a dump for agricultural waste. Cutting off the agricultural inflow, agricultural waste in smaller,
however, would make the lake disappear completely, and thus make dyked portions of the sea in
order to create an inverse
life in the area impossible. Returning the “sea” to the initial phase of archipelago of “themed”
its accidental birth by achieving a stable water/salinity balance would lakes: the nature reserve,
the recreational lake and the
be technologically complex and, in any case, cost billions of dollars. agricultural dump.
The lake’s situation continues to be complicated, and none of the
proposed restoration strategies is without its pitfalls.1
Whatever the future holds, the once-imagined urbanization of the
Salton Sea may have failed, but it did successfully generate another
kind of beauty. The Salton Sea is a window in time, an apocalyptic
glimpse of what the world might look like after its occupation by man-
kind. Driving along its shores one encounters infrastructure without
purpose and unfinished cities – the visible traces of something that
almost happened but in the end wasn’t meant to be.
The occupation of the Salton Sea proved to be a mistake, one that
can now be neither fixed nor ignored after the collective expectations
and ambitions that were invested in it. The story is a truly human one
and, though perhaps only to the eyes of an outsider, a Californian one.
The lake’s birth was merely an accident; the real mistake was in seeing
its potential, the first step in an unavoidable cascade of future errors.
Meanwhile, the Salton Sea remains, dancing inside its own ethereal
bubble. And although the natural depression in which the Salton Sea
was formed had probably already flooded and dried up a thousand
times before in the history of the planet, this time it will have to last.
151
A LAKE AND A SWIMMING POOL:
TWO WATER STORIES FROM THE USSR
Saverio Pesapane
152
“to signify Our gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from
the doom that overshadowed Her” and as a memorial to the Russian
people’s sacrifices. In 1817 Alexander I endorsed the architectural pro-
ject, which was carried out by Aleksandr Lavrentyevich Vitberg, and
the church was consecrated on 26 May 1883, the same day Alexander
III was crowned. Such a reminder of the era of the Tsars was probably
too much for the Soviets to accept, so demolition began on August
18, with two last detonations finally destroying the structure on 5
December 1931.
During the same year an international architectural contest was
launched for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, an administra-
tive centre in the heart of Moscow near the Kremlin, on the site of the
demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The competition was won
by a project by Boris Iofan proposing a huge celebratory edifice. It was
supposed to become the world’s tallest structure, and the top of the
building was designed to host a statue of Lenin that was taller than
the Statue of Liberty.
In the 1940s, the Soviet government undertook a number of ambi-
tious construction projects aimed at transforming the Russian land-
scape with the goal of improving irrigation, waterway navigation and
hydroelectric power on the orders of Joseph Stalin. Among these, one
of the grandest was the “The Great Plan for the Transformation of
Nature” (Великое преобразование природы), a massive intervention
in land improvement and hydroengineering.
The construction of the Palace of the Soviets was begun in 1937,
but it was interrupted by the German invasion of 1941. In 1941–42, the
steel frame of the foundations was disassembled to be used to make
fortifications and weapons for the war. After World War II the country
no longer had the energy to continue this gigantic project, so the site
was abandoned for several years.
The location’s conversion into the world’s largest open-air swim-
ming pool following the design of Moscow architect Dmitry Chechulin
began in 1958. When the Moskva Pool opened in 1960, it was circular
in shape and had a diameter of 129.5 metres. For more than thirty
years afterward, the pool remained open to the public year round with
a modest entrance fee, and during the long, cold Russian winters, a
huge vapour cloud enshrouded it.
In 1954, when the head of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences was
Trofim Lysenko, an anti-Mendelian scientist who carried out agricul-
tural experimentation and research that today is largely dismissed as
153
Moskva pool, aerial view
154
In 1968 a Soviet engineer said in a public talk: “It is obvious to eve-
ryone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable.”3 Sure enough,
during the 1990s more than fifty percent of the surface of the former
Aral Sea became a desert.
Following pages:
Saverio Pesapane, Aral Sea,
2008
155
156
157
158
159
A MISTAKE OF PRINCIPLES:
THE PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURE
ARE ELEVEN AND IMMUTABLE
2A+P/A
160
161
I. The first principle of architecture is: you do not talk about principles
of architecture.
IV. The choices that one makes in architectural design are driven by
our need to refer to something that already expresses, in a complete
form, a universe of yearnings to we aspire.3
Notes
1 The original sentence is Aldo Rossi, “Architettura per Rossi, “Architettura per i 5 “Thus, all those who engage
as follows: “I use the term i musei”, in Guido Canella et musei”, 130. seriously in architectural
architecture in a positive al., Teoria della progettazione design, and who
and pragmatic sense, as a architettonica (Bari: Edizioni 4 “We can explain how we simultaneously design and
creation inseparable from Dedalo, 1968), 136. did something, not why we imagine buildings, should tell
civilized life and the society did it – but ‘how’ is broad us how they arrived at some
in which it is manifested.” 3 “This particular emergence enough. / It does not refer of their architectural works”
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture that some architectural to a more or less rigid (our translation). Rossi,
of the City, trans. Diane works have in the history system of conventions, “Architettura per i musei”,
Ghirardo and Joan Ockman of technology and art but to a collection of 124.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, is certainly due to the experiences that create
1982), 21. so-called spirit of the times these conventions” (our 6 “I believe that we will not
and to the artist’s need, translation). Aldo Rossi, transcend functionalist
2 “[I]t is unthinkable that often autobiographical in I quaderni azzurri, vol. theory until we recognize
in creating this or that nature, to refer to something 14 (5 November 1972–31 the importance of both
particular architecture that already expresses, in a December 1972) (Milan and form and rational processes
we do not want to express complete form, a universe of Los Angeles: Electa and The of architecture, seeing in
something else, something aspirations that he intends Getty Research Institute, form itself the capacity to
of our own” (our translation). to pursue” (our translation). 1999). embrace many different
162
VI. It is impossible to determine why one form or another is suitable
or not as an architectural work: a moka pot could be architecture. This
is because any given form has the ability to assume different values,
meanings and uses.6
IX. The city is the home of everyday life, and it is where architecture is
the fixed stage of human events10 – the scene of life’s spectacle.
values, meanings, and uses.” and continuing to constitute (eds.), Architettura moderna e Bonicalzi (ed.), Scritti
Rossi, The Architecture of the an important urban focus.” storia dell’architettura (Milan: scelti sull’architettura e
City, 118. Ibid., 59. Bruno Mondadori, 2001), 368. la città 1956–1972 (Turin:
CittàStudiEdizioni, 1975), viii.
7 This principle refers to 8 Ibid., 116. 10 “Architecture, attesting
the notion of “permanence”, to the tastes and attitudes 12 Our translation. Aldo
which we can summarize 9 This sentence comes of generations, to public Rossi, “Considerazioni sulla
using Rossi’s own words in from a letter that Rossi events and private morfologia urbana e la
The Architecture of the City wrote to Ezio Rossi Bonfanti tragedies, to new and old tipologia edilizia”, in Aspetti
as “a past that we still feel”, in response to his text facts, is the fixed stage for e problemi della tipologia
where “by permanence I “Elementi e costruzione: human events.” Rossi, The edilizia, readings for the
[mean] not only that one can Note sull’architettura di Architecture of the City, 22. course entitled “Caratteri
still experience the form of Aldo Rossi”, which appeared distributivi degli edifici”,
the past in this monument but in issue number 10 of the 11 “What is decisive will Instituto Universitario di
that the physical form of the magazine Controspazio happen anyway. And the Architettura di Venezia,
past has assumed different (October 1970). Aldo Rossi, end result is as obstinately 1963/64 academic year
functions and has continued letter to Ezio Bonfanti, 3 pursued as it is unexpected” (Venice: Editrice Cluva,
to function, conditioning the January 1971, in Marco Biraghi (our translation). Aldo 1964), 31. Also in Rossi,
urban area in which it stands and Michelangelo Sabatino Rossi, preface to Rosaldo Scritti scelti, 225.
163
Alexander Brodsky,
Untitled, 2011
164
Flaneur&Publisher is a container for beauty.
A black box, intimate and personal.
Everyday but extraordinary. Like poetry.
Flaneur&Publisher is what is left unsaid.
www.flaneurandpublisher.com
Frog www.frogmagazine.net
K ALEIDOSCOPE www.
A contemporary magazine kaleidoscope-press.com
main theme
San Rocco is interested in gathering together the widest possible illustration source, name of photographer or artist, name of
variety of contributions. San Rocco believes that architecture copyright holder, or “no copyright”, and caption, if needed.
is a collective knowledge, and that collective knowledge is the G San Rocco does not buy intellectual property rights for
product of a multitude. External contributions to San Rocco the material appearing in the magazine. San Rocco suggests
might take different forms. Essays, illustrations, designs, comic that external contributors publish their work under Creative
strips and even novels are all equally suitable for publication in Commons licences.
San Rocco. In principle, there are no limits – either minimum H Contributors whose work is selected for publication in
or maximum – imposed on the length of contributions. Minor San Rocco will be informed and will then start collaborating
contributions (a few lines of text, a small drawing, a photo, a with San Rocco’s editorial board in order to complete the
postcard) are by no means uninteresting to San Rocco. For preparation of the issue.
each issue, San Rocco will put out a “call for papers” comprised Proposals for contributions to San Rocco 4 must be submitted
of an editorial note and of a list of cases, each followed by a electronically to mail@sanrocco.info before 31 January 2012.
short comment. As such, the “call for papers” is a preview of
the magazine. The “call for papers” defines the field of interest Contemporary architecture is generally present-
of a given issue and produces a context in which to situate ed with the phrase “My concept is . . . ”, in which the
contributions. blank is filled in by some sort of notion: “My concept
Submission Guidelines: is freedom”, “My concept is the iPad”, “My concept is
A External contributors can either accept the proposed the Big Bang”, “My concept is democracy”, “My concept
interpretative point of view or react with new interpretations is panda bears”, “My concept is M&M’s”. This statement
of the case studies. is then followed by a PowerPoint presentation that be-
B Additional cases might be suggested by external contributors, gins with M&M’s and ends with round, pink bungalows
following the approach defined in the “call for papers”. New on paradisiacal Malaysian beaches.
cases might be accepted, depending on their evaluation by the According to concepts, to design is to find what build-
editorial board. ings are: an ontology for dummies that turns banality
C Proposed contributions will be evaluated on the basis of a into spectacle. Thus, the library is the books, the sta-
500-word abstract containing information about the proposed dium is the muscles, the promenade is the beach, the
submission’s content and length, and the type and number of aquarium is the fish, the swimming pool is the water
illustrations and drawings it includes. and grandmother’s garage is grandmother.
D Contributions to San Rocco must be written in English. San Concepts are a tool used to justify design decisions in
Rocco does not translate texts. the absence of architecture. Concepts originate from a
E All texts (including footnotes, image credits, etc.) should be state of self-inflicted despair in which design needs to
submitted digitally in .rtf format and edited according to the be justified point by point, and architecture by defi-
Oxford Style Manual. nition has no cultural relevance. Concepts presup-
F All illustrations and drawings should be submitted digitally pose that nothing specifically architectural exists in
(in .tif or .eps format). Please include a numbered list of all reality: there are no spatial relationships, no territo-
illustrations and provide the following information for each: ries and no cities, and it is thus impossible to obtain
169
any knowledge about these phenomena. Concepts are buildings they generated; concepts do not accept their
the tools used to make architecture in a world of post- own disappearance in the final product.
atomic barbarians. Conan and Mad Max would dream Concepts introduce a kind of rationality that makes pro-
up a concept for imagining how to erect their own jects automatic-pilot-justified in every step of the con-
primitive huts. struction process. Concepts help decision-makers to
Concepts claim to translate architecture into an every- remember and re-tell the reasons for their decisions to
day language. As such, concepts claim to be democrat- those who charged them with this task, whether these
ic, and therefore claim that they allow people with no people are parliamentary commissions, committees of
architectural education to understand buildings. The kindergarten mothers or voters. In this way, concepts
point here is that translating architecture into an eve- start an endless chain of justifications that are certainly
ryday language is nonsensical (and, contrary to popu- more bureaucratic than democratic (concepts and bu-
lar opinion, there is nothing democratic about non- reaucracy have always been allies, at least since Colbert
sense). Architecture is immersed in and appropriated and Perrault screwed poor old Bernini). The need to ex-
by language, but it is not itself a language: architec- plain, justify and certify the project now – and to do all
ture is about modifying landscapes and shaping spa- of this easily – prevents any possible future complexity
tial conditions, not about communicating information in the building. Concepts operate as a form of violence
or celebrating values (values can occupy architecture, of the present against the future. The period of con-
but architecture cannot produce them: like a bowl, ar- struction becomes more important than the building’s
chitecture can be filled, but it cannot generate its own lifespan. The immediate dialogue with clients and con-
content). So, no translation of architecture is possible, tractors becomes more important than the future rich-
just as it is impossible to “translate” dance or ice hock- ness of the building. The design is totally dependent on
ey. Here the problem is not only the reduction of com- the narration that is required to sell the building. (Note:
plexity that is associated with any kind of populism, this, to a certain extent, is unavoidable; what is avoid-
but also the translation into a mediocre story of some- able is building the cultural legitimacy of architecture
thing that is simply not a story. In other words, the precisely upon its very dependence on these oversim-
problem is not that of mediocre translation; the prob- plified narrations, or turning selling into an ideology.)
lem is translation in general. In the end, there is noth- Concepts protect us from running the risk of engaging
ing to understand in buildings. And democracy is cer- with form. Why should we bother with form when we
tainly not about understanding architecture: it is about have an idea? Why waste time seeking beauty when we
accessing architecture. You just need to enter, move, can claim that we are solving problems? Why think when
look, wait, climb, stop . . . That’s it. we can happily sit around a table and do some brain-
Concepts exist because of the unnecessary feeling that storming? Why take the pains to learn something when
architecture needs an explanation, that architecture we can shout “Eureka!” in your face?
needs to apologize. Concepts describe what architec- Anyhow, it is possible to escape from this selbstver-
ture will do before architecture is made, thereby guar- schuldete Minderheit. Complexity exists, in re, in context.
anteeing that it will not do anything else. Concepts turn Cities and territories are here, and it is possible to un-
architecture into something safe, predictable, tamed. derstand them!
With concepts, there are no nightmares in the city, no Nothing else is needed. Just pay attention; just trust si-
nasty jokes, no surprises, no contradictions, no com- lence and immobility. In the end, to design is to define
plexity, no congestion, no memory, no subconscious. contexts, to re-shape what is already there, to formal-
Concepts prevent any free appropriation; they erase ize the given. Concepts are not needed, and neither are
any surprise. The only gestures admitted into build- messages or literature. The relationship between hu-
ings are the conceptual ones that were used to explain mans and buildings is spatial, being simply based on the
them. Like ghosts, concepts do not want to vacate the fact that both humans and buildings occupy portions
170
of space but with this difference: contrary to humans, • No-nonsense Classicism •
buildings survive for long periods of time and do not As our world became increasingly bureaucratized, it be-
move. There seems to be a possibility for interaction came crucial for architects to find a way to deal with
between humans and architecture, one that is quite concepts. Various strategies were developed in order
interesting and unpredictable: the possibility for built to react to this situation and to offer an architecture
matter to operate on human behaviour by means of its befitting the logic of bureaucrats (e.g., Durand, Schin-
own immobility. And this clumsy brotherhood of archi- kel, Semper). A strange kind of no-nonsense classicism
tecture and human gestures, this mute complexity, sur- appeared, one that was logically arranged, repetitive,
vives only if the relationship is both immediate and in- economical and realizable in stages.
direct, evident and untold. Probably nobody has ever
exposed the nature of this relationship as precisely or
bravely as Rossi did: “Go to an old folks’ home: sorrow is • Content •
something tangible. Sorrow is in the walls, in the court- Modernism accepted the 17th- and 18th-century infatu-
yards, in the dormitory” (Rossi, The Architecture of the ation with concepts, yet it recognized only one of these:
City, 1966). content, or, in other words, quantity. Modernism (a tru-
“Go to an old folks’ home” and “sorrow is something tan- ly Protestant project) was an architecture of quantity,
gible” – there is no link between the two phrases, no ex- measurable in terms of the amount of social housing
planation: sorrow and the old folks’ home are just there produced in a year, or a given project’s cost per square
together. The relationship is spatial in character in the metre. But content (which is to say quantity) was still not
sentence itself too: here is the building, there is sor- a reality; rather, it was the concept of modernism. For its
row. “Sorrow is in the walls”. No jokes. No concepts. Sor- only concept, modernism also invented an entire body
row manifests itself in space – in the walls, in the court- of propaganda, thereby creating a model of the happy
yards, in the dormitory. This crystallized sorrow that marriage of concepts and propaganda that would be so
materializes as walls cannot be described, just pointed successful later on. In the process, form was dismissed
out. Sorrow is not the concept behind the building, nor because modernism was about doing the right thing, and
does the building represent sorrow; rather, sorrow is a context was ignored because modernism was about do-
specific condition produced in space by the series of ing the right thing in large quantities. Architecture had
acts accumulated through time in a specific place. Un- to sacrifice itself in the name of a good cause. But then
happiness does not need concepts, and neither does that good cause somehow got lost. Concepts survived,
happiness. though, as brutal as Bolshevik propaganda and as re-
So, fuck concepts! Context! And fuck content! Form! gressive as Lady Thatcher’s social policies. How could
San Rocco 4 attempts to understand the genealogy of modernism come to such a sad a conclusion? What
concepts and ultimately tries to imagine a new archi- went wrong along the way? Is there a parallel here with
tecture without ideas. the depressing history of the European political left af-
ter May 1968?
• Genealogy •
There is a tradition of concepts in architecture, quite a • Into the Ears of Millions •
serious one, with all kinds of related topics (character, Concepts correspond to the need to whisper into the
architecture parlante, and so on): Serlio’s Book VI with ears of millions (as Jeff Koons has said, “At one time,
its houses that change appearance according to the dif- artists had only to whisper into the ear of the king or
ferent professions of their inhabitants, Palladio’s villas, pope to have political effect. Now, they must whisper
Colbert’s reasonable objections to Bernini’s Louvre, into the ears of millions of people”). To do this, contem-
Laugier’s hut, Ledoux’s architecture parlante . . . porary architecture enthusiastically embraced all sorts
171
of trashy allegories. But did this populistic attempt jokes and out-of-place erudition. But then again, im-
really work out? For all its love of cheap slogans, con- precision can generate a world if one is stubborn and
temporary architecture is still highly non-communica- consistent and ignorant enough not to care too much
tive, misunderstood and neglected. Any other art form about it.
works better, and any other expressive medium (con-
sidering architecture, just for the sake of argument, as
an expressive medium) has higher returns. Why should • Le Corbusier, a Contextual Architect •
we not learn from this failure? Why should we not ac- Despite his initial claims for a new universal, machine-
cept this situation and make use of it? Consider how inspired architecture, a number of essays from L’Esprit
successful contemporary art has been in being deliber- nouveau (later to be included in Vers une architecture)
ately obscure. Maybe what is wrong with contemporary communicate Le Corbusier’s deep interest in specific
architecture is precisely its (modernist) humbleness, landscapes such as the Acropolis in Athens or the city
its desperate eagerness to sacrifice itself in the name of Rome. Le Corbusier considers the Acropolis to be
of something else. an architectural device that provides the key to the in-
terpretation of the entire landscape lying between Pi-
raeus and Pentelikon. Convincingly enough, Colin Rowe
• A Defence of Concepts • states that the La Tourette monastery acts in the very
Over the last four centuries, concepts have been very same way with respect to its context. On another scale,
popular. As a result, a large majority of our readers it is easy to consider the series of projects ranging from
might be irritated by (or at least have doubts about) Plan Obus to the sketches for South American cities as
our argument against concepts. So, please explain to us obvious members of the same family. Among the ap-
why we are wrong. You know we are open-minded. parently most un-contextual operations, even the Plan
Voisin or the Beistegui attic clearly fit within the very
specific Parisian context of the Haussmannian eras-
• Stirling’s Non-dogmatic ures and the cult of the urban axis, curiously coupled
Accumulation of Formal Knowledge • with the surrealistic excision of the Cadavre Exquis.
Stirling is often considered a stupid architect, probably
partly because (at least in the second part of his career)
he didn’t write, and what has appeared in print is in- • Why Architecture by O. M. U.
deed a mishmash of statements, vague interviews and (Peace Be Upon Him)
sloppy prize acceptance speeches. It is also probably Always Looks So Bad •
partly because he seemed so strangely inconsequen- The architecture of Oswald Mathias Ungers is always un-
tial in his trading in of British industrialist brickwork comfortable, uneasy and fundamentally unhappy. And
for pink, oversized railings. In his “inconsequential” ac- the worst thing about it is that you always suspect that
tions, however, Stirling was a fundamental contextual- there is some sort of reason for this; you always have
ist, though his context was not the gloomy universe in the feeling that its failures exist on purpose, or that its
which he was supposed to place each of his buildings, shortcomings are supposed to tell you something. Un-
but the one that he constructed himself along the way. gers’s architecture is an example of how concepts can
For Stirling, the series of preceding formal solutions destroy all good presuppositions. In fact, Ungers was
created the context for the new ones he would develop. right on almost every level. He was intelligent, educat-
In each of his commissions, reality turned out to be con- ed and realistic, had a precise notion of monumentality
frontational yet fertile. Over time, Stirling put together and an impressive understanding of the city, and he did
a body of non-dogmatic formal knowledge comprised of not lack good taste. He may also have had some sort of
imprecise sources, inconsequential fascinations, bad (German) sense of humour. Still, he felt the need to turn
172
all his impressive architectural knowledge into argu- • Examples •
ments, and so he never made a decent building. San Rocco is also interested in contributions analyzing
concepts and contexts in the buildings included on our
lists of the Top 25 Contextual Masterpieces and the Top
• Vanna at the Door • 25 Conceptual Disasters.
In a famous photo of her house, Vanna Venturi stands
next to the entrance. The photo is frontal: it shows the San Rocco’s Top 25 Contextual Masterpieces:
house as in an elevation. In the image, Vanna hides in
the shadow, almost unnoticeable at first glance. The • Flatiron, New York, USA
owner and the house are clearly two separate things. • Forum Nervae, Rome, Italy
The house is clearly not a portrait. Robert Venturi is • Seagram Building, New York, USA
extremely delicate with his mother: architecture must • Annunziata, Ariccia, Italy
keep its distance from the world of feelings. A house for • Portico dei Banchi, Bologna, Italy
one’s mother, however, is a house just the same, and • Bowery Savings Bank, New York, USA
Vanna Venturi’s house is a masterpiece of abstraction • Currutchet House, Buenos Aires, Argentina
and, as such, a masterpiece of respect. It clearly cor- • Haus am Michaelerplatz, Vienna, Austria
responds to the rigorous mannerism of Robert Ventu- • Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brazil
ri’s early production. The house is not an icon; it has • Twin Parks Northeast Houses, New York, USA
no message, and it develops no argument. Vanna was • Satellite Towers, Mexico City, Mexico
lucky: Bob designed her house before learning all the • Economist Building, London, UK
ideas that his wife would later discover in his architec- • York Terrace, Regent’s Park, London, UK
ture – brilliant ideas, but ideas nonetheless. • Kiefhoek social housing, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
• San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, Italy
• John Deere headquarters, Moline, Illinois, USA
• The Concept Is “Concept” • • Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey
Whether you consider Eisenman’s, OMA’s or Tschumi’s • Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
entries for the competition for the Parc de la Villette, • Public Library, Seattle, USA
the contest was clearly about concepts even if nobody • Stone House, Tavole, Italy
understood what those concepts were. Maybe the con- • Santa Maria della Pace, Rome, Italy
cept was just “a concept” – the concept of a concept, • Fire Station No. 4, Columbus, Indiana, USA
or a manifesto about the potential of an architecture • Casa Milà, Barcelona, Spain
of pure concepts. In fact, the proposed pavilions had • Gehry House, Santa Monica, California, USA
no programme, no message and no reason. They were • National Farmers’ Bank, Owatonna, Minnesota, USA
expensive and they clearly did not do any good for the
surrounding urban fabric. They were also uncompro- San Rocco’s Top 25 Conceptual Disasters:
misingly ugly (as the ones that were built still testify).
The question is: Why red? Why did concepts in archi- • Tour Eiffel, Paris, France
tecture appear in 1983 as something entirely unintelli- • Tallest tower in the world, wherever it is right now
gible, apart from the fact that they had to be red? • Fred & Ginger, Prague, Czech Republic
• Bibliothèque François Mitterand, Paris, France
• Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy
• Vito Acconci, Architect • • Villa Capra (a.k.a. “la Rotonda”), Vicenza, Italy
Could you please go back to masturbating under art • The Calatrava project of your choice
gallery floors? • Fondation Cartier, Paris, France
173
• Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Louvre, Paris, France (except the pyramid, of course)
• Einsteinturm, Potsdam, Germany
• NEMO Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Cemetery of Modena, Modena, Italy
• Olympic Stadium (the so-called Bird’s Nest), Beijing,
People’s Republic of China
• Reichstag (the old and the new), Berlin, Germany
• Aqua tower, Chicago, USA
• San Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome, Italy
• Kubuswoningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
• Mountain dwellings, Copenhagen, Denmark
• J. P. Getty Center, Los Angeles, USA
• Capitol, Dhaka, Bangladesh
• Central library, Delft Institute of Technology, Delft,
The Netherlands
• McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Illinois Institute
of Technology, Chicago, USA
• Dutch Pavilion, Hannover, Germany
• Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, Germany
Following pages:
Flatiron Building,
photograph by Francesco
Giunta;
Tour Eiffel, photograph by
Giulio Boem
174
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