93 Cut-up Architecture

CONTENTS Eric Lapierre

100 Argument Vs. Concept: the City Is Not an Egg

3 Editorial Federica Pau, Sabrina Puddu
and Francesco Zuddas
7 Architecture Without Ideas?!
In Defence of Concepts 105 Liberating and Governing Mechanisms
Jan Bovelet Mark Lee

13 A Pathological Normality 112 Venturi’s First

Matteo Ghidoni Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

22 A Minatory Letter to Conceptualists 116 Being In-Between: the Amsterdam

Composed of Quotations from Texts Municipal Orphanage by Aldo Van Eyck
by Paul Valéry Ariadna Perich Capdeferro
Cino Zucchi
123 Parallel Convergences
29 Four Concepts and a Funeral Guido Tesio
Diederik de Koning, Laura van Santen
and Thomas Cattrysse 132 The Concept Is Me:
Richard Meier at the Getty Center
36 The Measure of Turmoil: Dürer’s Monument Jack Burnett-Stuart
to the Vanquished Peasants
Amir Djalali 135 The Office and the Loggia: Giorgio Vasari’s
Architecture for Bureaucracy
46 Enclaves Francesco Marullo
Matteo Poli
145 The Architectural Form of a Concept:
51 Concepts and Contexts: J. J. P. Oud’s De Kiefhoek (1925–30)
an Analytical Point of View Davide Sacconi
Ilaria Boeddu
151 Skopje, or How Context Fucked
56 The Object as Idea Concepts and Vice Versa
Adrià Carbonell Charlotte Malterre Barthes

62 Without Irony 159 Love Concepts!

Kersten Geers Oliver Thill

66 The Delight of the Site 162 The Triangle and the Eraser
Pietro Pezzani Andrea Zanderigo

73 The Possibility of Disappearing 169 An Airplane Has Landed in the Desert: Myths,
Giovanni Piovene Shapes and Metaphors Related to Brasilia
Martino Tattara
80 Building Context: When Architecture
Becomes the Background 172 Bagh-e Babur
Nicola Russi Ludovico Centis

86 Notes on Contextual Architecture 180 Rituals, Obstacles and Architecture (Fragments

baukuh of an Essay I Will Never be Able to Write)
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
88 Context, Enforced
Fabrizio Gallanti 201 Call for Paper Scary Architects
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Paris, March 2012: Fuck context. Basement of Villa dall’Ava
by OMA with model of the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal by OMA.
Photograph by Freek Persyn
 EDITORIAL

Contemporary architecture is generally presented with the phrase

“My concept is . . . ”, in which the blank is filled in by some sort of no-
tion: “My concept is freedom”, “My concept is the iPad”, “My concept
is the Big Bang”, “My concept is democracy”, “My concept is panda
bears”, “My concept is M&M’s”. This statement is then followed by
a PowerPoint presentation that begins with M&M’s and ends with
round, pink bungalows on paradisiacal Malaysian beaches.

According to concepts, to design is to find what buildings are: an

ontology for dummies that turns banality into spectacle. Thus, the
library is the books, the stadium is the muscles, the promenade is the
beach, the aquarium is the fish, the swimming pool is the water and
grandmother’s garage is grandmother.

Concepts are a tool used to justify design decisions in the absence of

architecture. Concepts originate from a state of self-inflicted despair
in which design needs to be justified point by point, and architecture
by definition has no cultural relevance. Concepts presuppose that
nothing specifically architectural exists in reality: there are no spatial
relationships, no territories and no cities, and it is thus impossible
to obtain any knowledge about these phenomena. Concepts are the
tools used to make architecture in a world of post-atomic barbarians.
Conan and Mad Max would dream up a concept for imagining how to
erect their own primitive huts.

Concepts claim to translate architecture into an everyday language.

As such, concepts claim to be democratic, and therefore claim that

3
 they allow people with no architectural education to understand
buildings. The point here is that translating architecture into an
everyday language is nonsensical (and, contrary to popular opin-
ion, there is nothing democratic about nonsense). Architecture is
immersed in and appropriated by language, but it is not itself a lan-
guage: architecture is about modifying landscapes and shaping spa-
tial conditions, not about communicating information or celebrat-
ing values (values can occupy architecture, but architecture cannot
produce them: like a bowl, architecture can be filled, but it cannot
generate its own content). So, no translation of architecture is pos-
sible, just as it is impossible to “translate” dance or ice hockey. Here
the problem is not only the reduction of complexity that is associated
with any kind of populism, but also the translation into a mediocre
story of something that is simply not a story. In other words, the prob-
lem is not that of mediocre translation; the problem is translation
in general. In the end, there is nothing to understand in buildings.
And democracy is certainly not about understanding architecture: it
is about accessing architecture. You just need to enter, move, look,
wait, climb, stop . . . That’s it.

Concepts exist because of the unnecessary feeling that architecture

needs an explanation, that architecture needs to apologize. Con-
cepts describe what architecture will do before architecture is made,
thereby guaranteeing that it will not do anything else. Concepts turn
architecture into something safe, predictable, tamed. With concepts,
there are no nightmares in the city, no nasty jokes, no surprises, no
contradictions, no complexity, no congestion, no memory, no sub-
conscious. Concepts prevent any free appropriation; they erase any
surprise. The only gestures admitted into buildings are the conceptu-
al ones that were used to explain them. Like ghosts, concepts do not
want to vacate the buildings they generated; concepts do not accept
their own disappearance in the final product.

Concepts introduce a kind of rationality that makes projects auto-

matic-pilot-justified in every step of the construction process. Con-
cepts help decision-makers to remember and re-tell the reasons for
their decisions to those who charged them with their task, whether
these people are parliamentary commissions, committees of kinder-
garten mothers or voters. In this way, concepts start an endless chain
of justifications that are certainly more bureaucratic than democrat-

4
ic (concepts and bureaucracy have always been allies, at least since
Colbert and Perrault screwed poor old Bernini). The need to explain,
justify and certify the project now – and to do all of this easily – pre-
vents any possible future complexity in the building. Concepts oper-
ate as a form of violence of the present against the future. The period
of construction becomes more important than the building’s life-
span. The immediate dialogue with clients and contractors becomes
more important than the future richness of the building. The design
is totally dependent on the narration that is required to sell the build-
ing. (Note: this, to a certain extent, is unavoidable; what is avoidable
is building the cultural legitimacy of architecture precisely upon its
very dependence on these oversimplified narrations, or turning sell-
ing into an ideology.)

Concepts protect us from running the risk of engaging with form.

Why should we bother with form when we have an idea? Why waste
time seeking beauty when we can claim that we are solving problems?
Why think when we can happily sit around a table and do some brain-
storming? Why take the pains to learn something when we can shout
“Eureka!” in your face?

Anyhow, it is possible to escape from this selbstverschuldete Min-

derheit. Complexity exists, in re, in context. Cities and territories are
here, and it is possible to understand them!

Nothing else is needed. Just pay attention; just trust silence and im-
mobility. In the end, to design is to define contexts, to re-shape what
is already there, to formalize the given. No concepts are needed, and
neither are messages or literature. The relationship between humans
and buildings is spatial, being simply based on the fact that both hu-
mans and buildings occupy portions of space but with this difference:
contrary to humans, buildings survive for long periods of time and do
not move. There seems to be a possibility for interaction between hu-
mans and architecture, one that is quite interesting and unpredict-
able: a possibility for built matter to operate on human behaviour by
means of its own immobility. And this clumsy brotherhood of archi-
tecture and human gestures, this mute complexity, survives only if
the relationship is both immediate and indirect, evident and untold.
Nobody has probably ever exposed the nature of this relationship as
precisely or bravely as Rossi did: “Go to an old folks’ home: sorrow is

5
 something tangible. Sorrow is in the walls, in the courtyards, in the
dormitory” (Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1966).

“Go to an old folks’ home” and “sorrow is something tangible” –

there is no link between the two phrases, no explanation: sorrow
and the old folks’ home are just there together. The relationship is
spatial in character in the sentence itself too: here is the building,
there is sorrow. “Sorrow is in the walls”. No jokes. No concepts. Sor-
row manifests itself in space – in the walls, in the courtyards, in the
dormitory. This crystallized sorrow that materializes as walls cannot
be described, just pointed out. Sorrow is not the concept behind the
building, nor does the building represent sorrow; rather, sorrow is
a specific condition produced in space by the series of acts accumu-
lated through time in a specific place. Unhappiness does not need
concepts, and neither does happiness.

So, fuck concepts! Context! And fuck content! Form!

6
 ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT IDEAS?!
IN DEFENCE OF CONCEPTS

Jan Bovelet

To be frank, the elimination of concepts from the realm of architec-

ture seems to be neither a smart nor a promising move, particularly
if concepts are identified with ideas. However, even though Vitruvius
had already seen the concurrent development of language and archi-
tecture as early as the 1st century BC, today it seems necessary to
review the role of concepts in architecture and architectural design.
It must also be said that it is not the role of language and linguistic
concepts in general that we must critically review, but that of one
particular kind of language, namely formal languages. The develop-
ment of architecture and urban phenomena in the 19th and 20th
centuries was profoundly influenced by that of modern logic and then
by the subsequent emergence of the digital habitat. In the course of
this, it has gotten subsumed all too often under the rules of formal
linguistic systems that are, among other things, prone to capitalistic
bureaucracy/rationalization. But this diagnosis, of course, does not
imply that ideas cannot or should not play any role in architecture; as
epistemic concepts they are an indispensable component in the crea-
tion and use of architecture. In fact, these epistemic concepts, these
ideas, are precisely what enable us to make, perceive, debate and use
architecture. Our task here is to differentiate the epistemic role of
concepts in architecture from the “linguistification” of architecture
by way of externally imposed formal concepts.
In order to get a clearer grasp of the difference between epistemic
and formal concepts, three philosophical considerations are of particu-
lar relevance: the difference between natural and artificial languages,
the epistemic difference between the context of justification and
the context of discovery in the theory of science, and the notion that

7

1
See Patrik Schumacher,
The Autopoiesis of
Architecture: A New
Framework for Architecture
(Chichester: Wiley, 2011),
286. Schumacher bases his
approach on Imre Lakatos’s
contributions to the theory
of science; see Lakatos, The
Methodology of Scientific
Research Programmes
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978).
2 architecture, as can be seen, for example, in contemporary attempts
Schumacher, The Autopoiesis
of Architecture, 284.
8
the impossibility of translation between architecture and linguistic
concepts is but a special case of the general indeterminacy of transla-
tion. Without going into too much technical detail here, I would like
to introduce these considerations informally in order to argue that
ideas are not identical with formal concepts and that they are, when
understood as epistemic concepts, as indispensable in architecture
as they are everywhere else. Even though architecture indeed cannot
be translated into a formal language, it can and must be translated
in some way, as the translation into and through different media is
the precondition for its collective creation and use. Thus, instead of
banning ideas from architecture, we should focus on understanding
how the translation between architecture and formal concepts works
and if and how it is subject to restrictions.
Natural Languages and Formal Languages
The translation of architecture into everyday language-concepts does
not lead per se to a violent reduction and distortion of architecture:
rigidly defined concepts exist only in formal languages, whereas con-
cepts in natural languages always remain fundamentally ambiguous.
Thus the everyday talk in natural language about architecture can, like
architecture itself, never come to an end; both natural language and
architecture are constantly pragmatic approaches towards reality. In
contrast, the analytical-descriptive use of concepts within the frame-
work of formal languages can be – and indeed has been – a threat to
such as the dogmatic “style of Parametricism” by Patrik Schumacher,
which he sets out to define by way of describing the “formal and func-
tional taboos and dogmas”1 that safeguard the “hard core of princi-
ples”2 of a given architectural style.
A paradigmatic figure in the formal-language approach was the
mathematician David Hilbert. As a proponent of formalism in the
foundational crisis of mathematics, he opted to “clean” the symbols
used in mathematics by removing all concrete meaning from them and
to consider the symbols themselves as the “material” of mathematics.
With this approach, he followed in the tradition of Leibniz’s notion
of the characteristica universalis and his “calculemus approach” to a
scientia generalis. For Hilbert, mathematics consisted of the manipula-
tion of symbols without asking what these meant or what they referred
to: “the objects of number theory are . . . the signs themselves, whose
shape can be generally and certainly recognized by us”.3 Thus for him,
the justification or proof of a mathematical statement consisted in the
demonstration that it could be constructed from a set of defined signs
by way of defined rules whereas its negation could not. To achieve this,
he aimed at a complete axiomatic formalization of mathematics, so
that the truth of any mathematical statement could be decided by way
of an automatic or algorithmic procedure. This is, in a nutshell, the
central idea behind his famous so-called Hilbert Program, which he
presented at a conference in Paris in 1900.

The Distinction between the Context of Justification and the Context

of Discovery
For the calculemus approach and its idea of finding a universal “formale
Redeweise”, it is characteristic to privilege the context of justification
over that of discovery. What matters most in this perspective is not the 3
question of whether or how new insights are discovered, but rather David Hilbert, “The New
Grounding of Mathematics:
which proposition – i.e., which syntactical ordering of concepts – can be First Report”, in From
proven to be true in a formal language by way of automatic procedures. Brouwer to Hilbert: The
Debate on the Foundations of
The Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle particularly tried to build Mathematics in the 1920s, ed.
a unified scientific system based on this approach. Such prominent Paolo Mancosu (Oxford and
figures as Karl Popper, Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap aimed New York: Oxford University
Press, 1922), 202.
at what the latter called the “rational reconstruction”4 of scientific
propositions in his Der logische Aufbau der Welt. For Logical Positivism, 4
See Rudolf Carnap, The
a proposition is scientific only when it can be logically reconstructed Logical Structure of the
and justified by way of formalized, calculation-based procedures. World [and] Pseudoproblems
The crux of this approach is that it excludes everything that is in Philosophy, trans. Rolf
A. George (Chicago: Open
not expressible in formal language per definitionem. Accordingly, all Court Publishing, 2003),
processes of discovery and design are excluded from the realm of sci- 158ff.
ence. Although this is already problematic in science, in architecture
it is obvious that this picture is crooked because it is missing one – if
not the most – important aspect: if science is only concerned with the
justification of propositions, where do these to-be-justified proposi-
tions come from? In architecture, the “logic of discovery” is clearly
an indispensable, integral aspect of designing as well as of using and
debating a design. This explorative and creative aspect of architec-
ture is indeed neglected if it is reduced to a formale Redeweise that
systematically suppresses the relation between concepts and reality.
But formal concepts are not the same as ideas. Formal languages
are one particular means by which to describe and deal with reality.
They do not objectively describe an independent ontology; instead,
they construct ontologies by way of establishing formal procedures

9

5 to decide whether a translation between different natural languages
See Willard Van Orman
Quine, Word and Object
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1960), 26ff., chap. 2
(“Translation and Meaning”).
6 ously unknown tribe. The linguist observes that the tribe members
Willard Van Orman Quine,
“Ontological Relativity”,
Journal of Philosophy 65
(1968), 200.
10
of description. But does this strategy also work for design? Of course,
aspects of the design process can and must be objectified by way of
formal procedures. But every formalization is itself, in fact, a transla-
tion: from a potentially infinite sea of possibilities, some are selected
and related within a formal language. There is good reason to do this,
but architecture – like science itself, of course – always has to be aware
of the consequences of this translation.
The Indeterminacy of Translation and Architecture as Translation
But that’s enough of formal languages and the context of justifica-
tion for now. Instead, let’s have a look at natural languages and the
aspect of discovery. With his thought experiment on “radical transla-
tion”,5 Willard V. O. Quine has shown that it is logically impossible
is absolutely correct, as there is no objective linguistic framework
available within which this question can be settled. His famous
thought experiment is set up in a fictional jungle where a field linguist
is trying to write a manual of translation for a language of a previ-
frequently make the utterance “gavagai” if a rabbit is present on
the scene. The problem with this situation for the linguist is that it
is impossible to determine what the tribe members are referring to
and mean by “gavagai”. Is it the tangible rabbit as a singular indi-
vidual? Or is it the momentary state of a rabbit, or “rabbithood” in
general? Or does it actually mean “Look! Food!”? In order to specify
what “gavagai” means and refers to, the linguist needs to be able
to talk with the tribe members, and yet this means that he already
needs to know the language he has only begun to investigate. Quine’s
point is that different manuals of translation for the same language
are always logically possible, thus it’s not possible to decide which
manual is the right one. The only means we have is to collectively use
the manuals and see which one works best from a pragmatic point of
view, which means which one helps us best discover the Lebenswelt of
the tribe and facilitates the most fluent communication possible. But
this indeterminacy of translation not only holds for the exploration
of exotic languages in fictional jungles. It also begins “at home”,6 as
Quine says, in one’s own mother tongue, for there is no formal way
to be certain about the meaning of a word somebody else is using;
we always have to translate the other person’s use of words accord-
ing to our own understanding of them.
 Architectural design and the use and interpretation of architecture
is in a similarly radical situation, in the sense that there is no formal way
of designing and using architecture in the right way. In this respect, to
design is to translate, or translation is the principal operation of every
design practice. Only by collectively translating the to-be-designed
between different media can one develop the skill needed to design
it. From this perspective, letting architecture speak for itself or show
itself in its presence – as Rossi has expressed in his claim that in an
old people’s home the “sorrow is in the walls, in the courtyards, in the
dormitory”7 – might be a meaningful description, but taken as a quasi-
formal equation, it doesn’t help to understand how the sorrow “got
there”. From an architectural perspective, the important point is that
we need to translate architecture collectively via different media and
perspectives, because only the misunderstandings and the mistakes 7
that occur in the process of translation can make us aware of differ- Aldo Rossi, L’architettura
della città (Milan: Città Studi,
ences in the understanding of architecture and urge us to refine our 1995), 130.
designs or alter and adapt our uses of architecture.
In contrast to formal concepts, epistemic concepts or ideas are
aimed not exclusively at the justification of something already present,
but also at the discovery and creation of something not-yet-there – be
it a building or the interpretation of a building. This creative and not
formally definable epistemic function also makes ideas indispensa-
ble in architecture and architectural design. Thus we should be very
careful about banning them from architecture. Instead, we should
focus on making transparent the epistemic consequences of formal
concepts and formal languages in and on architecture. This is not
to say that formal concepts and formal languages should be banned
from architecture in general; it is about understanding the epistemic
consequences of formale Redeweisen and formal concepts in architec-
ture better in order to be able to use them constructively and creatively
rather than in a re-constructive and dogmatic manner. We need ideas
in architecture, not to govern and determine architectural reality
by way of formal conceptual abstraction sub specie aeternis, but to
enable us to open up and collectively explore architectonic possibili-
ties pragmatically.

11
 A PATHOLOGICAL NORMALITY

Matteo Ghidoni
Photographs by Stefano Graziani

The Continuous Monument is one of the most ambiguous urban tales 1

ever produced by so-called radical architecture. Provocatively affirming Superstudio, “Discorsi per
immagini”, Domus, no. 481
that it is in search of a “moderate utopia” for a “near future in which (1969), 44–45.
all architecture will be created with a single act”, Superstudio seems
to show interest here in a semi-serious rediscovery of the ancestral
power of architectural archetypes in an effort to “realize cosmic order
on earth” and “affirm humanity’s capacity for acting according to
reason”.1 This self-inscription within the realm of utopian projects,
or negative utopias, led to an instant and almost automatic success
of the Continuous Monument as a prominent example of conceptual
architecture – an architecture made of ideas that are organized in a
demonstration ad absurdum and are to be conveyed by an utterly beau-
tiful and utterly neutral image in which everyone can see their own
ideas reflected, together with the clouds of the sky above. However,
contrary to many other utopian projects developed in close cultural,
political and generational proximity, it is impossible to imagine the
Continuous Monument outside of its context.
Another project with a similar ambition of endless expansion,
the No-Stop-City by Archizoom, is often considered to be in dialec-
tic opposition to the work of Superstudio. Its author Andrea Branzi
describes it as a “cognitive utopia”: a more subtle, more sensitive form
of knowledge about the city, one that describes reality as it is already,
taking the structures of capitalistic accumulation of the contempo-
rary metropolis to their extreme, reducing it to an infrastructural sys-
tem with no aesthetic quality. According to Branzi, the No-Stop-City
investigates the preconditions for a city without architecture, while
the Continuous Monument offers an image of an architecture without

13

2 kind of particular relationship does the Continuous Monument develop
Superstudio submitted a
project for the international
design competition on the
theme of “Architecture and
Freedom” organized in 1969
by the Biennale of Graz,
Trigon 69.
3
Superstudio, “Superstudio.
Progetti e pensieri”, Domus,
no. 479 (1969), 38–39.
4 the ruins of a Roman aqueduct would be. It comes from a far distance,
Then the title was changed
to “Monumento Continuo” in
Superstudio, “Discorsi per
immagini”.
5
Ibid.
14
the city. Only the first part of Branzi’s observation is true, however. It’s
easy to demonstrate that the city of the Continuous Monument is out
there: it’s Manhattan, Monument Valley, Coketown, the Loggia of the
Caryatids, Palazzo Chiericati, Piazza Navona, Niagara Falls, Positano,
the Taj Mahal, the Swiss lakes . . . The broadening touristic imagina-
tion disseminated by weekly newspapers of the late 1960s, such as Life
and Epoca, has been absorbed into the collages of the project. While
No-Stop-City exists as a total interior without the need of something
external to it and substitutes the actual city, the Continuous Monument
has no interior space (or the architects never dared to show it to us),
but it is tied to context just as much as the Mile Long Drawing by Walter
De Maria is tied to the Mojave Desert.
So, what is the specific “exterior” we are talking about, and what
with it?
The urban tale of the Monument begins with a postcard from Graz.2
The colossal spans of the Viaduct of Architecture violently cut the city,
cross over the river, intercept a little hill and then disappear out of sight
on both sides of the picture. Graz is not Manhattan: it can’t be taken
as the abstract, generic paradigm of the contemporary metropolis.
Instead, it is a very specific place with its own modest topography and
landscape. The Monument seems to be there before the city, absorbed
into the contemporary urban structure – and indifferent to it – just as
in terms of both space and time – from a more immaculate surface
where its pure stereometry was capable of being originated. It belongs
to the metaphysical landscape of the desert where the Journey in the
Realm of Reason3 begins, and from there it starts to articulate a nar-
rative that will merge with the storyboard of the Total Monument or
the Architectural Model for Total Urbanization.4 The totality here is the
entire surface of the earth, reduced to a single continuous environ-
ment: “the world rendered uniform by technology, culture, and other
forms of imperialism”.5 In this isotropic space, only the parallels and
meridians can approximate the size of an architecture whose ultimate
raison d’être is to measure, order and provide us with an understand-
ing of the earth.
Superstudio’s journey is constructed through a discontinuous
montage of the possible places in which the Monument could sud-
denly appear. It produces a subversion, a disarticulation of the fun-
damental narrative structure shared by the majority of urban tales.
Bernardo Secchi describes such a structure very well;6 it can be subject
to smooth adaptations according to the specific use to which it is put,
but its morphology is usually invariable. If the aim of the urban text
is to analyze, propose and produce transformation in the territory,
the city and the network of social relations, then its structure tries
to integrate the temporally organized events that one assumes to be
relevant for the production and comprehension of these changes into
a single action, thereby giving them meaning. Secchi recognizes two
typical sequences of the urban tale. They are connected in an inverse
relationship: the initial sequence, or “process of decline”, is followed
by the planning or design sequence, or “process of enhancement”. The
process of decline can be generally described as a “sickness” affecting
the context, a morbid condition that shows, as if through a magnify-
ing glass, some aspects that could be considered normal but, being 6
normal, are simply not visible. The following process of enhancement Bernardo Secchi, Il racconto
urbanistico: La politica della
is the sequence of organized actions that leads to a new, desirable casa e del territorio in Italia
condition – a newly acquired normality. (Turin: Einaudi, 1984).
The normality to which the Monument aspires is not a static or 7
pacific condition, but a highly unstable and polemical one. As a great Peter Lang, “Suicidal
“normalizing” plan, it holds the property of an object to be taken as Desires”, in idem and William
Menking, Superstudio: Life
a reference for objects and facts that are still waiting to be organized without Objects (Milan: Skira,
as such. At the same time, it is the extension and the exhibition of a 2003).
new norm. It obsessively multiplies the rule while pointing to it, and
it tends to cover everything, even though much of that nonetheless
escapes its control. It ultimately evolves into a “perversely hegemonic
system of architectural domination”.7 The polemical use and target
of the idea of the norm adopted by Superstudio has to be found in
the core of the normal–abnormal relationship. According to Georges
Canguilhem, rather than being based on contradiction and exteriority,
this relationship is produced by an inversion of polarity:

A norm can’t be original. The rule doesn’t exist as a rule until it starts to act
as a rule. So it has to start as an infraction, in order to act as a correction. . . .
A norm devalues everything that its system of references forbids to con-
sider normal, thus creating the possibility of an inversion of terms. . . .
The abnormal is subsequent to the definition of normal, its logical nega-
tion. Nevertheless, it is the priority of the future abnormal that triggers
the normative intention. Normal is then the effect obtained through the
execution of the normative intention. It is the norm exhibited in the facts.
From this point of view, a relationship of exclusion lies between normal

15
8 and abnormal, but this exclusion is subordinate to the negation, to the
Georges Canguilhem, Le
Normal et le pathologique,
augmenté de Nouvelles
réflexions concernant le
normal et le pathologique
(Paris: PUF, 1966); the
translation is the author’s.
9
Lang, “Suicidal Desires”.
10
Superstudio, “Discorsi per
immagini”.
16
correction required by the abnormality.
There is no paradox, then, if we say that the abnormal, logically second,
existentially comes first.8
The Architectural Model for Total Urbanization is chosen as the
norm that will substitute a disappointing state of things with a satisfy-
ing one. It is a way to unify what is different, to reabsorb difference, to
regulate the controversy generated by architecture’s incapacity to affect
the primary structures of the city. But the possibility of reference and
regulation it offers contains the seed of another possibility that can be
nothing but the opposite: its repellent, despicable context. “The creep-
ing expansion of the Monument across the global landscape is subtly
revealed as its own neutraliser, thereby putting an end to its sublime
terror”,9 and thus showing the capacity of architecture to be in favour
of its own death. What remains is that “bunch of ancient skyscrapers,
preserved in memory of a time when cities were built with no single
plan”,10 in all their pathological normality.
These photographs belong
to a larger project I did in
the Superstudio archive
in Florence in the summer
of 2011. They will be part
of a volume curated by
Gabriele Mastrigli entitled
Superstudio, Storie con
figure forthcoming from
Quodlibet.
Stefano Graziani
17
 A MINATORY LETTER
TO CONCEPTUALISTS COMPOSED
OF QUOTATIONS FROM TEXTS
BY PAUL VALÉRY

Cino Zucchi

1 Nothing is more original, nothing more oneself, than to feed on oth-

Tel quel, 1943. All quotations ers. But one must digest them. The lion is made of assimilated lamb.1
have been translated from
French to English by the
author. Our spirit is composed of disorder, as well as a desire to make order.2
2
Mauvaises pensées et autres, I see the “modern man” pass by with an idea of himself that is no
1942. longer a determined one. He cannot but have many different ones,
3 and he almost couldn’t live without this contradictory multiplicity
Tel quel. of visions; it became impossible for him to be someone with just one
4 point of view, and to really belong to just one language, just one nation,
Ibid. just one religion, just one physical science.
5
This is a consequence of his way of living, and of the mutual interpen-
“Rhumbs”, in Oeuvres, vol. etration of different solutions. And thus ideas, even the fundamental
II, 1941. ones, begin to lose their character of essences, taking on the character
of instruments.3

Science simply means the aggregate of all the recipes that are always
successful. All the rest is Literature.4

It is necessary to work on several things at the same time. This is

the most productive way; one thing profits from the other, and each
becomes more itself, purer, because each of the ideas that comes is
sent to where it fits best, since there are more places waiting.5

It is typical of the artist to choose, and the choice is determined by the

number of possibilities. Everything that gives room to uncertainty
needs an artist, although it does not always find one. In all the arts

22
(and this is what makes them arts), the necessity that a successfully 6
completed work must suggest can only be created by arbitrium.6 Degas, dance, dessin, 1938.

7
A poet is someone for whom the difficulties inherent to his own art “Rhumbs”.
give rise to ideas, and not someone from whom they take them away.7 8
Tel quel.
An accomplished thing is the transformation of a missed thing.
9
Therefore a missed thing is missed only through abandonment.8 Ibid.

10
To build a small monument to each of our difficulties. Cahiers, vol. I, 1970.
A small temple for each problem.
To each enigma, its own tombstone.9 11
“Rhumbs”.

I am sure many give what they don’t have – that is to say, give and pass 12
Degas, dance, dessin.
off as nourishment what are only stimulants.10
13
He who says “Work”, says “Sacrifices”. Mauvaises pensées et autres.

The big question is how to decide what will be sacrificed: we have to 14

know who, who will be eaten.11 Tel quel.

15
Completing a work means getting rid of everything that reveals or Cahiers, vol. I.
suggests the manufacturing procedure. The artist must not “blame”
himself for anything other than his style and must sustain his effort
until the work itself has erased the traces of the work that went into
it. But, little by little . . . the condition of “perfectioning” appeared
not only useless and boring, but also opposed to truth, sensitivity
and the manifestation of genius. A sketch became worth as much
as a picture.12

That which resembles nothing does not exist.13

We have to be light as a bird, not as a feather.14

My method is Me. But me summarized, recognized.15

The art of building reminds us that it is one matter to love beauty and
understand it; it is another matter to have others understand it. Just
as gravity works and in its own way judges the work of the architect,
and submits it to a constant and merciless criticism, so it happens
in every field. . . . Even in the easiest writings we have to think about

23
16 duration – and therefore about memory, about form, just as the build-
Amphion, 1931. ers of spires and towers think about structure.16
17
Cahiers, vol. I. Everybody has his own asymmetry.17
18
Mauvaises pensées et autres. Anything we know can be used in anything we make. Intelligence is
the capability of employing anything. It is therefore a sort of immoral-
19
“Autour de Corot”, in Pièces ity, and there is crime in the strokeof Genius.18
sur l’art, 1934.

20
I have come to think that ornament, by its very nature, is a natural
“Ego Scriptor”, in Cahiers, reaction of our senses to a spatial void in which they attempt to place
vol. I, 1970. what would best satisfy their receptive function.19
21
“Autour de Corot”. The “sense” of a poem, like that of an object, is the reader’s business.
Quantum potes, tantum aude. The business of the poet is how to build
22
Cahiers, vol. I. a sort of verbal body that will have the solidity, but also the ambigu-
ity, of an object.20
23
“Ego scriptor”.
Structure lies behind a veil: not absent, but delayed.21
24
Degas, danse, dessin.
There is nothing to be done about it; everything interests me.22
25
Cahiers, vol. I.
It is remarkable how mathematics share with poetry and music the
26 fact that among them the background becomes the act of the form.
Tel quel. “Truth” depends on formal conditions. “Existence” is nothing but the
27 absence of contradiction – and this is a condition.23
Ibid.
“Academicism” is not, in the end, anything but the more or less
conscious conservation of more or less illusive criteria of objective
judgements.24

My work is a work of patience carried out by an impatient person.25

If they ask me what I wanted to say, I answer I did not want to say any-
thing; I wanted to make something, and it was the intention of making
that wanted what I said.26

In modern life I like what would allow me to conduct with more pleas-
ure and ease a non-modern life.27

24
Exchange generates form.28 28
Tel quel.

Don’t use words that you don’t use for thinking.29 29

Cahiers, vol. II.
Arts have to show the possible along with the apparent; from this come 30
the variations in music.30 “Ego scriptor”.

31
Ornament is underlining the evidence of the functional principle – It Ibid.
is the law of the pure functions made visible through the means of
32
representation. . . . Energy surplus. Remaining freedom? – Sign of a Ibid.
force greater than the one necessary and sufficient for the main act,
as in children’s games.31 33
Cahiers, vol. I.

In poetry, syntax and words have to be as precise as possible, but 34

Ibid.
meaning has to remain imprecise – multiple, never identifiable with
a “finite function” of the terms. 35
This non-equation is essential for poetry. . . . The real poet does not Tel quel.

know exactly the meaning of what he just had the joy of writing. Because
a moment later, he becomes a simple reader. He writes non-sense:
what this needs to do is not to present but to receive a meaning (and
this makes a great difference).32

My mind tries to construct something that could resist it.33

For the pure intellect, nothing is trivial, nothing is important. This is

the reason why men who are really and more authentically intellectual
joke quite easily. And they joke as a habit, in some way without joking,
with the detached game of their plastic and verbal organizations. They
like to play with groups of similarities and with the distinct possibili-
ties of the single parts of their psychic patrimony just as others play
with their own muscles.
This way of doing shocks and provokes scandal among the narrow-
minded people and the greedy people – people who ignore that an
infinity of traits, of relationships found by chance, of fast and useless
fantasies, can clean the mind and prepare it to find the “problem”, to
illuminate its numberless data, to depolarize it, to analyze it down to
its very essence.34

You belong to a party, my friend – therefore you clap your hands or hiss
against your own heart. The party wants this.35

25
36 The new holds an unavoidable attraction for those who request their
Ibid. maximum excitement from simple change.36
37
Cahier B, 1910. Modern contents itself with very little.37
38
Degas, danse, dessin. What is there more beautiful and positive than the language of the sea
and that of hunting? The latter, for example, contains only the names
39
Mauvaises pensées et autres. of what can be seen and done in hunting. . . . These languages tend to
express with exactitude every little detail, while one of the great arts
40
Degas, danse, dessin.
always aims at eternal uncertainties and unwinnable ambiguities. We
still talk as if nobody had ever painted, drawn or written until today.38
41
Ibid.
The natural is boring.39
42
Monsieur Teste, 1926.
We were forgetting that a tradition exists only to be unconscious and
43 that it does not bear to be interrupted. A hard-to-perceive continuity
Ibid. is its essence. “To pick up, to renew a tradition” is a false expression.
44 . . . As soon as a tradition shows itself to our spirit as such, it is not a
Ibid. tradition anymore, but rather a way to be and to act among others,
and it is exposed to a critique about its value at the same level as the
45
Cahiers, vol. I. others.40

I don’t know what historical truth is; everything that does not exist
anymore is false.41

Youth is an age when conventions are, and must be, badly under-
stood, either blindly fought against or blindly respected. It is difficult
to conceive, at the beginning of a life of thought, that only arbitrary
decisions allow man to create everything: language, society, concepts,
works of art.42

I hate extraordinary things. They are a necessity of weak spirits.43

I want to take from the visible world only some forces – not some forms,
but what one can make some forms with. No history – no scenes – but
the sense of matter itself, rock, air, water, vegetable fibre and their
elemental virtues.44

Here and there I found fragments of what I wanted.45

26
My son, I will educate you very badly, because I am unable to give you 46
precepts that I myself don’t understand.46 Ibid.

47
My mind is unified, in a thousand pieces.47 Ibid.

48
I am a grafted being. Ibid.
I performed different grafts on myself.
49
To graft mathematics onto poetry, rigour onto free images. “Clear Ibid.
ideas” onto a superstitious trunk.48
50
Introduction à la méthode de
I have a natural contempt for those who do not see difficulties at all. Léonard de Vinci, 1894.
Even when they overcome them without sensing them.49

The monument (which composes the city, which stands for almost
everything we perceive as civilization) is such a complex being that our
knowledge sees in it in a progression: a varied decoration belonging
to the sky; then a very rich texture of motifs ruled by height, width and
depth, infinitely varied by viewpoints; then a solid, hard, tenacious
object with animal features; a subordination, an organism and at
last a machine in which weight is the agent that leads from geomet-
ric notions to dynamic considerations and all the way to the finest
speculations of molecular physics, for which it suggests theories and
structural models. It is through the monument – or better yet, through
its imaginary scaffoldings made to match its conditions including its
appropriateness to its stability, its proportions with its placement, its
form with its matter, and to harmonize each of them – that we under-
stand at its best the clarity of a Leonardo-like intelligence. It can play
at imagining the future sensations of a man who will tour around a
building, get near to it, reach a window, and what he will perceive; . . .
feel the paired stresses of the carpentry, the flutter of the wind that
will blow through them; foresee the shapes of the natural play of light
over the roofs and the mouldings, trapped in the overhangs, which
the sun touches at their edges. It will try and judge the overhang of
the lintel on its bases, the opportunity of the arch, the difficulty of the
vaults, the cascade of stairs . . . and all its invention, which ends in a
long-lasting, hard, adorned, defended mass pierced by glass, made for
our lives, to contain our words and from which our smoke escapes.50

27
Jockum Nordström,
The Architects, 2001,
mixed media and collage,
50.2 x 69.9 cm.
Courtesy of David Zwirner,
New York

28
 FOUR CONCEPTS AND A FUNERAL

Diederik de Koning, Laura van Santen

and Thomas Cattrysse

I thought it would be a funny idea to build the bridges 1 to 1, precisely as

they appear on the banknotes. And I didn’t really care where.1
Robin Stam

There is a curious story to tell about the design of seven abstract bridg-
es. This year we are celebrating their ten-year anniversary, and over
the past decade drawings of them have been printed on paper almost
fifteen billion times. It has been a long wait, but someone has finally
taken on the silly task of constructing the bridges three-dimensionally.
Two have been built to date, although we could argue that both have
remained rather two-dimensional. These phony bridges in the Dutch
city of Spijkenisse may appearto be nothing more than a joke. And
according to their “designer” Robin Stam, the idea behind building
them certainly did start out as one.
But a message lies hidden in this story, for it is the series of events 1
leading up to the construction that reveals the Achilles’ heel of the Robin Stam, quoted in
“Eurobruggen Werkelijkheid
discipline of architecture so clearly: the concept. And these bridges in Spijkenisse”, EénVandaag,
certainly are conceptual, in every sense of the word. They are: (I) awk- Nederland 1, broadcasted 4
July 2011. The translation is
ward realizations of (II) fictitious designs that are (III) printed as a the authors’.
metaphor for an ideal (IV) on the currency of an arbitrary union. It
is difficult to think of a better example to reveal the slippery slope of
what is often referred to as “conceptual thinking” (mind the tautol-
ogy!). After all, these bridges are the manifestation of a concept of a
concept of a concept of a concept.
Constructing them had become such an obvious idea that the
bridges would, sooner or later, have been built somewhere, regard-
less of the context. All that mattered to graphic designer Robin

29
30
Stam was claiming the idea by being the first to get the job done!
It represents a shout “into the ears of millions”, for Europeans
know these bridges all too well: they are portrayed on the back of
every euro banknote.

I
A casual passerby in Spijkenisse will probably raise an eyebrow when
confronted by the bridges for the first time. And they surely ask to be
confronted, for on closer inspection it becomes clear that they are noth-
ing more than decorative concrete façades in front of simple spanning
structures. This is more than a little odd considering the main purpose
of a bridge – namely, to get you from one place to another. One might
argue that instead these bridges take you from nowhere to nowhere.
But while one is hardly ever in the position to appreciate the frontal Facing page:
elevation of a bridge, the seven “euro bridges” in Spijkenisse will be Diederik de Koning, Laura
van Santen, and Thomas
built over two short stretches so that we have a rare perpendicular Cattrysse, A Romanesque
view of each of their flanks. Bridge for Ten Euros
Looking at the so-called Romanesque bridge, we can clearly point
out a few awkward details. First of all, its pigmented concrete pre-
cisely matches the colour the European Bank gave the ten-euro bill.
(The seven colours for the banknotes were based on Johannes Itten’s
colour wheel, so that we wouldn’t make the expensive mistake of
confusing a five-euro note with a fifty-euro one.2 Since the good man
was Swiss, however, the European Bank couldn’t quite take pride in
his accomplishments. Or were they keeping their options open for a
future expansion of the eurozone . . . ?)
The façades themselves are based on the exact same drawings that
we find in our wallets, with the exception of added vertical joints. The 2
scaled-up copies are cast in concrete, which may have been an elegant European Central Bank, How
the Euro Became Our Money.
wink at the art of etching were the drawings not made on a Power A Short History of the Euro
Macintosh with Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Freehand. And Banknotes and Coins (ECB,
2007), 22/23.
while they are scaled-up versions of the banknotes, they look rather
pocket-sized compared to the bridges to which they refer. As a result
of the puzzling scale, the spanning structure reveals itself behind the
arch of the Romanesque façade, and the added railing on top reveals
that the bridge itself actually has a different angle than the façade sug-
gests. But the most beautiful characteristic of all is its faithfulness to
the cropped view of the bridge on the ten-euro banknote. The bridge
simply ends where the paper stops.

31
a b c

d e f

g h i

j k l

m n o

p q r

s t u
II Facing page:
These generic structures appearing on the euro banknotes were Classical for 5
euros: a. Valens Aqueduct,
designed by the Austrian Robert Kalina as caricatures of seven dis- 4th c. (TR); b. Pont du Gard,
tinct building styles in European history: Classical, Romanesque, 1st c. (FR); c. Euro Bridge,
21st c. (NL). Romanesque
Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo, the age of iron and glass, for 10 euros: d. Puente La
and 20th-century architecture. This categorization suggests that we Reina, 11th c. (ES); e. Ponte
entered a new architectural era roughly when the euro was introduced. Vella, 12th c. (ES); f. Euro
Bridge, 21st c. (NL). Gothic
His design entry was chosen from among the forty-four proposals for 20 euros: g. Bakewell
for its conceptual approach, which uniquely blended the two design Bridge, 14th c. (UK); h.
Pont de Truyîre, 13th c.
categories defined by the European Bank: European styles and ages (FR); i. Euro Bridge, 21st c.
combined with a modern and abstract aesthetic. In fact, the drawings (NL). Renaissance for 50
became so abstract that hardly anyone is now able to recognize the euros: j. Charles Bridge,
15th c. (CZ); k. Pont Royal,
styles they are supposed to represent. 16th c. (FR); l. Euro Bridge,
One would presume that a currency would be used to showcase 21st c. (NL). Baroque &
Rococo for 100 euros: m.
the remarkable accomplishments of its society by portraying marvel-
Pont des Invalides, 19th
lous existing structures. But in the euro’s case, this would apparently c. (FR); n. Westminster
have led to political jealousy on the part of the countries that wound Bridge, 19th c. (UK); o. Euro
Bridge, 21st c. (NL). Iron
up not being represented by a bridge. After all, the eurozone already & Glass for 200 euros: p.
comprised twelve countries when the euro was introduced exactly ten Blackfriars Railway Bridge,
19th c. (UK); q. Richmond
years ago, not to mention the potential countries that had yet to join!
Railway Bridge, 19th c. (UK);
Since there were only going to be seven different banknotes, Kalina r. Euro Bridge, 21st c. (NL).
made sure that the drawings did not resemble any bridge in particular. 20Th-Century for 500 euros:
s. Rio-Antirrio Bridge, 21st
He stripped them of all specificity by making them generic in shape c. (GR); t. Pont de Tarascon-
and abstract in scale. Consequently, the European Bank became a bit Beaucaire, 21st c. (FR); u.
worried that the drawings might end up being a little too fantastical. Euro Bridge, 21st c. (NL)
Credits: Diederik de
To prevent this from happening, Kalina kept an eye on the struc- Koning, Laura van Santen
tural integrity of the designs, just to make sure that they did appear and Thomas Cattrysse
realistic. This was considered quite crucial, for it was thought that the 3
representation of fragile bridges on the banknotes would have had Kirsten Allen, “An
Uncommon Monument to
a destabilizing influence on the euro as currency. So, lo and behold, the Common Currency”,
they went as far as asking an engineer to do a structural check of the Spiegel Online International,
11 April 2011.
designs of these non-existent bridges. It is not surprising, then, that
Kalina appeared somewhat disappointed when he found out that the
bridges in Spijkenisse are now being built as mere façades rather than
as freestanding structures.3

III
Our passerby in Spijkenisse will probably be unable to tell exactly which
style was used for which bridge, if he recognizes them as the bridges
on his banknotes at all. He certainly will not notice that these tiny

33
 bridges are supposed to stand for the great communication between
European countries and the rest of the world. But it might be interest-
ing to ask this person if he thinks that the masquerade has anything
to do with the current European currency issues. In any case, it is an
odd concept to use structures as a metaphor for communication if
the precise reason behind designing them in an abstract way is the
lack of such harmony. A concept like this is used only when we want
to overcompensate for something we do not yet have: if arches stand
for the openness of Europe, then Europe is probably not as open and
hospitable as we might hope. If bridges stand for the communication
between eurozone countries, then those countries probably ought to be
collaborating a little more. And if the robust structures stand for a strong
currency, then the euro is probably even more fragile than we think.
In fact, all a bridge does is allow one to travel from one side of a
river to the other. This is made possible by a collection of foundations,
columns, beams and arches, and a road on top. Everything else we
make of it is entirely conceptual.

IV
So what exactly is holding the countries of the eurozone together?
Well, the currency itself. In fear of losing each of the countries’ own
identities, and in fear of real commitment, they choose to “live apart
together”. The relationship is based on nothing more than the eco-
nomic advantages of free trade. The decision to use cultural works of
art to symbolize this economic ideal may thus come as a surprise, for
each of the countries is still desperately holding on to its own culture.
There is only one way out: to blend our cultural heritages together
and propose the resulting soup of bridges as our common history. It
is something only the Europeans could do.
Now, there is a downside to this approach, for the bridges also show
an uncanny resemblance to structures outside of the eurozone. The
five-euro bridge, for instance, looks similar to the Roman aqueduct
in the former city of Constantinople, which is now part of Turkey; the
15th-century Charles Bridge in Prague looks a little too much like the
Renaissance bridge on the fifty-euro banknote; and the reference
to the Westminster Bridge in London on the Baroque bill is all too
obvious, not to mention that the steel bridge depicted on the two-
hundred-euro banknote is probably a fusion of the Black Friars and
Richmond Railway bridges, both of which are still maintained with
British pounds.

34
 It is slightly strange that the European Bank is taking pride in 4
bridges found in countries that use a different currency. Is the drawing On a side note (puns
intended), the European
of a border around a territory, then, not entirely conceptual? Central Bank had no
So this is what really happened: we decided to group a couple of objections to building
the bridges, at least not
countries and give them a single conceptual currency. Kalina invented according to an interview
bridges by drawing on the architectural styles that seemed to reflect with Robin Stam in Allen, “An
one common history and shaped them into symbols for economic Uncommon Monument”.

trade. The European Bank preferred to print slightly over-dimensioned 5

bridges, to make sure the new valuta appeared reliable and robust. And Gert-Jan ’t Hart, interviewed
in “Eurobruggen
that’s precisely when we opened Pandora’s box! Kalina had invented Werkelijkheid in
objects that did not (yet) exist, but were asking to be built. The elevation Spijkenisse”.
drawings on the banknotes had turned into useful blueprints. Stam
picked things up from here, and decided to build all of the bridges
as replicas in space. His copies were so literal, in fact, that one might
wonder whether any copyright has been breached in the process.4
Maybe the bridges should all be tagged with the word “SPECIMEN”.
Robin Stam merely wanted to make a point, a statement, a joke,
and on paper, all of this worked out remarkably well. But it did so only
as a concept. Is it not impossible to realize an idea, as the idea loses
all its conceptual strength the moment it manifests itself physically?
The alderman of Spijkenisse, in any case, is happy about his upcom-
ing eye-catchers: he is expecting an increase in tourism.5

35
36
 THE MEASURE OF TURMOIL:
DÜRER’S MONUMENT TO
THE VANQUISHED PEASANTS

Amir Djalali

If someone wishes to erect a victory monument after vanquishing rebellious 1

peasants, he might use paraphernalia according to the following instruc- The English translation cited
in this article is Albrecht
tions: Place a quadrangular stone block measuring ten feet in width and Dürer, The Painter’s Manual
four feet in height on a quadrangular stone slab which measures twenty (New York: Abraris Books,
1977).
feet in length and one foot in height. On the four corners of the ledge place
tied-up cows, sheep, pigs, etc. But on the four corners of the stone block
place four baskets, filled with butter, eggs, onions, and herbs, or whatever
you like. In the centre of this stone block place a second one, measuring
seven feet in length and one foot in height. On top of this second block
place a strong chest four feet high, measuring six and a half feet wide at
the bottom and four feet wide at the top. Then place a kettle upside down
on top of the chest. Surmount the kettle with a cheese bowl which is half
a foot high and two and a half feet in diameter at the bottom. Cover this
bowl with a thick plate that protrudes beyond its rim. On the plate, place
a keg of butter which is three feet high and two and a half feet in diameter
at the bottom. Cover this bowl with a thick plate that protrudes beyond
its rim. On the plate, place a keg of butter which is three feet high and has
a diameter of a foot and a half at the bottom, and of only a foot at the top.
Its spout should protrude beyond this. On the top of the butter keg, place a
well-formed milk jug, two and a half feet high, and with a diameter which
is one foot at its bulge, half a foot at its top, and is wider at its bottom. Into
this jug put four rods branching into forks on top and extending five and
a half feet in height, so that the rods will protrude by half a foot, and then
hang peasants’ tool on it – like hoes, pitchforks, flails, etc. The rods are to
be surmounted by a chicken basket, topped by a lard tub upon which sits
an afflicted peasant with a sword stuck into his back.
Albrecht Dürer, Unterweisung der Messung, 15251

37
2 Dürer’s design solution for a monument commemorating a victory of
Emil Kaufmann, “Three the 1525 German peasant’s war might look to us like an early antici-
Revolutionary Architects:
Boullée, Ledoux, and pation of what Emil Kaufmann defined “architecture parlante at its
Lequeu”, Transactions of lowest” in reference to some designs by Jean-Jacques Lequeu.2 Dürer’s
the American Philosophical
Society 42, no. 3 (1952),
monument does indeed speak, but understanding what it might be
556. Kaufmann refers here saying is problematic. The forms employed in this design pedantically
to Lequeu’s Monument point to their referent, but what is their meaning? Dürer’s monument
mémorial dressé en l’honneur
de plusieurs cit.ens, sur la has always presented itself as an interpretative enigma. Some have
place de l’Arsenal and his seen it as an act of mockery, as an attempt to discredit the misery of
Ordre symbolique.
peasant life. Others interpret its forms as a passionate endorsement
3 of the peasants’ cause.3
For an overview of the We are not interested in making another, even more precise inter-
various interpretations of
the monument, see Stephen pretation of this design, in order to discover what Dürer might have
Greenblatt, “Murdering really wanted to say; of course, we could always refine our iconographic
Peasants: Status, Genre,
references and interpretative tools, but this effort might only accentuate
and the Representation of
Rebellion”, Representations the contradictions and inconsistencies contained in the monument.
1 (1983); and Dominique These inconsistencies and contradictions, however, are nevertheless
Colas, Civil Society and
Fanaticism: Conjoined productive. The tension that the design displays is capable of making
Histories (Stanford: Stanford the monument function beyond its representative character, to make
University Press, 1997),
something new emerge. What we should ask ourselves is not “What
166–77.
does this monument mean?”, but “What is this monument capable of
4 doing?” Dürer’s design establishes a totally new type of monument:
Müntzer and the Peasant
War in Germany always
one that no longer has meaning, but becomes a machine for producing
resurface in revolutionary meaning – a monument that is no longer to be interpreted, but works
moments: Friedrich as an apparatus, a machine capable of producing organization. As we
Engels made reference
to them after the defeat will see, this transformation parallels broader social transformations
of the 1848 revolution, marked by violence and turmoil that would undermine an order estab-
as did Ernst Bloch after
the November Revolution
lished for centuries, particularly religious schisms, the end of old alli-
of 1918–19; see Friedrich ances and the emergence of new social classes – the bourgeoisie and the
Engels, The Peasant War in proletariat – and a new type of relationship connecting them – capital.
Germany (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1977), and Ernst
Bloch, Thomas Müntzer als I
Theologe der Revolution
The period we are used to calling the Renaissance was marked in
(Munich: Wolff, 1921).
Echoes of the peasants’ Germany by a profound social division and political instability, where-
war resonate in the 1999 by the insurgence of the oppressed starts to take the shape of a class
historic novel “Q” by the
writer collective Wu Ming struggle.4 Peasants, miners and urban salaried workers were the ones
(formerly known as Luther affected most by the institutions of the late feudal system. This had not
Blissett), who invoked
always been the case. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the lower classes
Müntzer’s predication in a
flaming pamphlet before the had enjoyed a relative degree of autonomy. In particular, while being
protests against the enslaved to their lords and to the clergy by a collection of taxes, corvées

38
and other obligations, peasants had enjoyed the possibility of accessing G8 meeting in Genoa in
communal lands and directly controlling their means of (re)produc- 2001. A self-criticism in the
instrumental use of history
tion. This gave peasants the possibility of refusing labour and strength- was published as Wu Ming,
ened their propensity to struggle against their lords. Interestingly, the “Spectres of Müntzer at
Sunrise / Greeting the 21st
demographic collapse caused by pestilence and the crisis of the 1300s Century”, introduction to
turned out to be favourable to workers, for it produced both an abun- Thomas Müntzer, Sermon
dance of resources and a scarcity of labour. But at the end of the 15th to the Princes (London and
New York: Verso, 2010).
century the process known as the “primitive accumulation” of capital – Recently, Alberto Toscano
the separation of peasants from the land through the privatization of has argued that Müntzer’s
doctrine marks the birth of
communal lands – had the effect of inverting the above-mentioned modern politics; see Alberto
equation: it made resources scarce and labour abundant.5 Toscano, Fanaticism: On the
From the end of the 14th century, the core of the Empire was in Uses of the Idea (London
and New York: Verso, 2010),
turmoil. The claims of the oppressed found a proper organizational 43–97.
tool with which to express themselves in chiliastic mysticism. In 1471,
5
34,000 armed peasants responding to Hans the Piper’s call to revolt
Marx dealt with primitive
were bloodily repressed. The Virgin of Niklashausen appeared to Hans accumulation in the last
announcing: chapter of volume one
of his Capital: A Critique
of Political Economy (The
There should be neither king nor princes, neither pope nor other ecclesiastic
Modern Library, 1909), 784ff.
or lay authority. Every one should be a brother to each other, and win his bread Silvia Federici extended
by the toil of his hands, possessing no more than his neighbour. All taxes, Marx’s analysis to address
the “arcane of reproduction”
ground rents, serf duties, tolls and other payments and deliveries should be
in her Caliban and the
abolished forever. Forests, waters and meadows should be free everywhere.6 Witch: Women, the Body, and
Primitive Accumulation (New
In a similar spirit, peasants and workers in Alsace organized them- York: Autonomedia, 2004).
selves in the capillary organization of the Bundschuh movement (the
6
“Union Boot”) between 1493 and 1513. In 1514, the “Poor Conrad” Engels, The Peasant War in
rebellion gathered Swabian peasants in revolt against taxes on wine, Germany, consulted online
at http://www.marxists.org
meat and bread. That same year, Hungarian peasants conscripted for /archive/marx/works/1850
the Crusade against the Turks under general Dozsa rose up against /peasant-war-germany.
the lords instead.
In this context, the publication of Martin Luther’s ninety-five the-
ses inflamed an already unstable situation. Luther became the figure
who was able to temporarily reconcile the conflicting interests of the
various German classes. For the nobles, the Reformation offered the
possibility of establishing a national “democracy of the nobility” under
the emperor to combat the increasing power of the princes. The revolt
of the nobility was easily repressed by the latter, however, and in turn,
the princes took advantage of the Reformation in their own way, for
it threw the ancient order based on the supremacy of the pope and
the emperor into crisis, thereby strengthening their own sovereignty.

39
7 The urban burghers connected to commerce and manufacture hoped
Peter Matheson (ed.), The
Collected Works of Thomas
Müntzer (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1988), cit. in Alberto
Toscano, Fanaticism, 75.
8 tion of a new struggle which had the potential to be on a much grander
“‘They should be knocked
to pieces, strangled and
stabbed, secretly and
openly, by everybody who
can do it, just as one must
kill a mad dog!’ Luther cried.
‘Therefore, dear gentlemen,
hearken here, save there,
stab, knock, strangle them
at will, and if thou diest,
thou art blessed; no better
death canst thou ever
attain.’” Cit. in Engels, The
Peasant War in Germany.
A. Dürer, Memorial to a
Dead Drunkard, woodcut
in Unterweisung der der
Messung (Nuremberg, 1525)
40
the Reformation would put an end to the diseconomies caused by the
maintenance of the privileges of the clergy and urban patriciate, which
enforced a morality based on abnegation and work. Last but not least,
salaried workers and peasants saw Luther’s declarations as the initia-
scale than those of the past.
Organized around the predication of Thomas Müntzer, peasants,
workers and miners took control of a vast area stretching from the Black
Forest to Thuringia, occupying castles and monasteries. In March 1525,
the movement approved the Twelve Articles. In this document, the rebels
demanded the right for every community to elect their own preachers,
free access to forests and rivers, the ban of the appropriation of com-
munal meadows and a form of control over the imposition of taxes. But
Müntzer confessed the real programme of his “party” under torture:
“‘All things are to be held in common’ (Omnia sunt communia) and dis-
tribution should be to each according to his need, as occasion arises.
Any prince, count, or gentleman who refuses to do this should first be
given a warning, but then one should cut off his head or hang him.”7
Luther, who in the meantime had become the champion of the
princes’ interests, harshly condemned Müntzer’s predication and
called for the physical elimination of peasants.8 The deceitful diplo-
matic tricks played by the princes had the effect of dividing the rebels,
who consequently participated in the decisive battle of Frankenhausen
unprepared and demoralized. The rebels’ faith in an impending mira-
cle that would have led them to victory could not help them against the
military superiority of the princes’ Landsknechte, who easily defeated
them in a bloody massacre.
II
Echoes of these events can be found in Dürer’s Unterweisung der
Messung (Treatise on Measurement), published a few months after
the Battle of Frankenhausen. This book was intended to be a practical
manual addressed not only to architects and painters, but also to all
craftsmen who would benefit from a conscious control of the principles
of geometry, such as carpenters, stonemasons, painters, goldsmiths, etc.
The treatise solves the practical problems that might have affected
these professionals, who constituted the core of the growing urban
minor bourgeoisie. Geometry represents the foundation of all the
visual arts, and in his book, Dürer ridicules those artists who, despite
having developed a “skilful hand through continual practice”, nonethe- 9
less produce works that “are made intuitively and solely according to Dürer, The Painter’s Manual,
37.
their tastes”.9 Learning the use of ruler and compass allowed the artist
to “recognize truth as it meets their eyes, not only in the realm of art, 10
Ibid., 37.
but also in their proper general understanding, notwithstanding the
fact that at the present time the art of painting is viewed with disdain 11
in certain quarters, and is said to serve idolatry”.10 Here Dürer is refer- Ibid., 227.

ring to the iconoclasm of some of the reformers, including Müntzer.

In the context of a practical manual regarding the use of “compass
and ruler”, it might appear strange that Dürer included some designs for
commemorative monuments. He seems to have perceived some prob-
lems in the art of commemoration that cried out to be solved by means
of geometry and measurement. In particular, the commemoration of
military victories presented difficulties. A monument to commemorate
a victory was a consolidated genre whose nature and purpose Dürer bor-
rowed directly from the ancients. A monument must “inform posterity
about what the enemy was like”. It was not unusual that a monument
contain looted materials: “If the enemy was a mighty one, some of the
booty might be used for the construction of the column.”11 Typically,
the enemy was to be portrayed with nobility and honour, because a vic-
tor not only defeats his enemy on the battlefield, but also acquires his
lands and titles. However, war in the time of Dürer was different than it
had been in antiquity, or even in the recent mediaeval past. Two main
transformations were taking place on the battlefield, both of which
generated a common problem of representation for artists that called
for a rational solution.
The first problem was a technological one: firearms had changed the
way armies clashed on the battlefield. War became far more destructive
than it had been previously. Fighting became more and more something
that could be done from a certain distance. Practically speaking, killing
the enemy was no longer an act of chivalry performed by a noble, cou-
rageous gentleman; instead, it had become a technical act performed
by professionals. Dürer first responds to these changes by envisioning
a generic “Monument to Commemorate a Victory”, for which the com-
memorative column is basically made of a cannon turned upwards. Here
the technological element becomes the predominant compositional
element in the design, thereby producing an unexpected departure A. Dürer, Monument to
from the classical tradition of the genre. Commemorate a Victory,
woodcut in Unterweisung
The second problem Dürer had to address was related to the tech-
der Messung (Nuremberg,
nical and political composition of the enemy. What happens if the 1525)

41
12
Ibid., 233.
13
See note 9.
14
Dürer, The Painter’s Manual,
233.
15
Erwin Panofsky, The Life
and Art of Albrecht Dürer
(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1955), 233.
Panofsky had no doubt that
Dürer was a conservative,
and that the intention of the
monument was to ridicule
the revolting peasants.
16
Greenblatt, “Murdering
Peasants”, 7–10.
42
opponent’s army does not come from a foreign country, but is instead
composed of local peasants? What if you discover that your enemy is
not from outside your social world, but actually forms part of your own
society? Dürer presents a “solution” to this problem in his design for a
monument commemorating the 1525 victory over the rebellious peas-
ants.12 The monument comprises a collection of ready-made objects
taken from the everyday life of peasants: farm animals, various agri-
cultural products and peasants’ work instruments. At the apex of the
composition, an “afflicted peasant” sits atop a chicken cage, impaled
by an enormous sword in his back.
Even more than in the cannon monument, here the ancient genre
is hardly compromised in its translation into the modern context. How
should we interpret the meaning of this monument? On the one hand,
including animals, food and peasant paraphernalia is perhaps a way to
discredit peasant life, suggesting that their struggle is illegitimate: the
peasants are not recognized as honourable or worthy enemies. But on
the other hand, and for the same reason, there is no nobility in killing
peasants, notwithstanding Luther’s effort to present this act as a pious
one.13 The peasant is stabbed from behind, and as we know, the princes
at the Battle of Frankenhausen won because they did not respect the
cease-fire that had been agreed upon. The picture becomes even more
complicated when one considers that in his book Dürer puts the design
for the peasant’s monument right after the design of a “monument to
a dead drunkard”, which combines a beer barrel, a board game and a
basket with bread, butter and cheese “for the sake of amusement”.14
In his biography of the German artist, Erwin Panofsky claims
that Dürer was a committed Lutheran, and that his loyalty to Luther’s
cause never faltered.15 Nevertheless, in 1525 Dürer was deeply shocked
by the violence to which both the peasants and the princes were sub-
jecting the country. We know that three of Dürer’s most valuable stu-
dents were jailed as followers of Müntzer, and Dürer himself was pro-
foundly impressed by the preacher’s prophecy of the imminence of the
Apocalypse. A small watercolour by his hand depicting an apocalyptic
flood – something that Dürer actually dreamt the night of 7 June 1525 –
displays enormous columns of water raining from the sky to submerge
the world.16
Dürer had already depicted the End of Days in a 1498 series titled
Apocalypsis cum figuris. These images have been interpreted by some
as Dürer’s commentary on contemporary politics. For instance, in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the people that Dürer depicts
murdered by Death, Famine, War and Plague are peasants.17 In some 17
of the other woodcuts in the series, the Apocalypse is announced by Federici, Caliban and the
Witch, 68.
the many-headed hydra, a monster that was symbolically associated
with the dangerous multitudes, the mobile vulgus. Conversely, the 1504 18
Similar interpretations of
engraving The Fall of Man can be interpreted as an allegory for the chas- other works by Dürer can be
ing of peasants off of the communal lands and pastures.18 found in Colas, Civil Society
The peasant figure at the top of Dürer’s monument can be compared and Fanaticism, 160ff.

to the frontispiece of Dürer’s Small Passion woodcut series (1508–10), 19

which depicts Christ as the “Man of Sorrows”: a prototypical image of Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer,
156–71.
treason, for the peasants were betrayed by Luther when he made his infa-
mous decision to side with the princes. At the same time, the peasants 20
themselves can be seen as traitors, and the monument would thus cel- The author consulted an
Italian translation of Bloch’s
ebrate their just punishment. The afflicted peasant’s posture also recalls work: Thomas Münzer [sic],
that of the angel in Dürer’s 1514 allegorical woodcut Melancholia I. teologo della rivoluzione
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010),
Panofsky notes that Dürer gives a positive connotation to melancho-
68–72.
lia, associating it with a state of inaction that is nevertheless linked
to an excess of mental activity. Melancholia I depicts the allegory of 21
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and
the dark powers of the intellect in competition with God.19 In a surge his World (Cambridge, Mass.:
of interpretative paranoia, we could link this figure to Joachim of The MIT Press, 1968).
Fiore’s heretical prophecy, which Müntzer revived: as the time of the
paternalistic rule of the Father has come, the grace of Love, or the Son,
will be superseded; we are witnessing the becoming-God of men; the
new man will no longer need the truths as revealed in the Scriptures;
in the City of God, which is about to be realized on earth, the truth of
the Holy Spirit – plenitudo intellectus – will be finally accessed by men
without mediation.20
While all of these early prints by Dürer belong to the safe realm of
allegorical imagery, the design for the monument and the apocalypse
watercolour are nevertheless strikingly realistic. These images mean
nothing beyond themselves. The triviality of the elements used in the
monument might suggest another genre to which Dürer might have
made reference. Dürer might have employed the instruments of popu-
lar culture to dispel anxiety regarding the imminent Apocalypse, thus
making the monument a grotesque representation, a popular desecrat-
ing ritual. As Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in his book on Rabelais, this
type of collective, popular ritual began to appear in elevated literature
during the Renaissance.21 The carnivalesque thus emerged as a literary
genre. References to grotesque imagery are not unusual in the figura-
tive art of the period, as paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder show.
Dürer himself frequently employed the techniques and imagery of the

43
22 monstrous and grotesque. The monument to the drunkard, for exam-
Ibid., 14.
ple, can be ascribed to the popular sub-genre known as the “liturgy
23 of the drunkard”.22 But in the monument in his treatise on measure-
Ibid., 464. ment, the collective, liberating laugh of the people is transformed into
24 a cynical sneer.
Greenblatt, “Murdering In carnivalesque representations, the body is always represented as
Peasants”, 11.
enormous, with no clear individuality or boundaries, and as impossible
25 to measure. The comic effect of Rabelais’s prose derives precisely from
Engels, The German Peasant the contrast between the immeasurability of the events he describes
War.
and the accurate measurements he provides for them (e.g., “Gargantua
drowned ‘two hundred sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen’
Parisians in his urine.”23) Dürer, too, provides accurate, “quite unnec-
essarily precise” measurements for each of the elements composing
his monument, although his numbers lack the grotesquely exces-
sive character of Rabelais’s. Dürer provides a careful separation and
measurement of each part of the monument. To measure is to divide:
measurement becomes, therefore, a technological tool in the service
of the accumulation of capital, partitioning and enclosing the earth,
giving defined boundaries to individuals and separating their bodies
from the earth and other bodies.

III
So was Dürer sympathetic or hostile to the rebellious peasants? Many
other references and interpretations could be found to support either
position. Stephen Greenblatt has concluded that Dürer was probably
firm in his condemnation of the peasants’ violence, but points out that
in that historical situation, representations did not always work as they
were intended to. For Greenblatt, it is not a question of “the theoreti-
cal condition of all signs, but the contingent condition of certain signs
at particular historical moments, moments in which the ruling elite,
deeply threatened, conjure up images of repression so harsh that they
can double as images of protest”.24
Surely, Dürer was not aware of the explosive cocktail he had mixed.
Nevertheless, the paradoxes of Dürer’s design are helpful in shedding
light on the transformations of art, and on the role of monuments in
a world that had lost its unity. God initially gave the princes the sword
to bring about and enforce His will upon the Earth. But the peasants
led by Müntzer claimed that “if the princes would not exterminate the
ungodly, . . . God would take their sword from them because the right
to wield the sword belongs to the community”.25 As Ernst Bloch has put

44
it, Müntzer claimed the people’s “right to violence” against Luther’s 26
Bloch, Thomas Münzer, 110ff.
appeal for obedience through a self-interested interpretation of Paul’s
Letter to the Romans.26 The one had become two: suddenly, the world 27
had become a dangerous place. Engels, The German Peasant
War.
As Friedrich Engels has shown, the revolution failed not because
Müntzer’s millenarianism was outdated, but precisely because it was 28
Ibid.
too far ahead of its time. At that time, prefiguring communism could
only have the effect of bringing bourgeois society into being.27Beyond 29
any linear conception of history, we can nevertheless register the fact Manfredo Tafuri,
Architecture and Utopia
that even in its early stages, the bourgeoisie already showed a propensity (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
for absorbing the strength of proletarian struggles and turning their Press, 1979).
violence to the favour of its own cause. As Engels notes, every revolu-
30
tionary movement is double, with a proletarian face and a bourgeois Gilles Deleuze, Proust
one. But it is the proletarian side that is independent, that is able to and Signs (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
advance the struggle and shape the future: Press, 2000), 145.

This peasant-plebeian heresy, in the fullness of feudalism, e.g., among

the Albigenses, hardly distinguishable from the middle-class opposition,
grew in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to be a strongly
defined party opinion appearing independently alongside the heresy of
the middle-class. This is the case with John Ball, preacher of the Wat Tyler
insurrection in England alongside the Wycliffe movement. This is also the
case with the Taborites alongside the Calixtines in Bohemia.28

The raw material of Dürer’s monument is precisely this duality.

Dürer manipulates distant forces in a unitary design and accepts the
contradictions of his time without trying to solve them, laying them
bare, making them productive. It is already a bourgeois work of art,
having the capacity, as Manfredo Tafuri has put it, “to ward off anguish
by understanding and absorbing its causes”.29 The role of the monu-
ment is thus completely redefined. While the monument retains its
commemorative, cautionary form, its consumption or reception is not
univocal, but a consequence of the social class of the beholder. The
monument is therefore capable of producing and organizing diverse
subjects into a composition that is simultaneously unitary and unsta-
ble. In this sense, Dürer’s monument can be seen as an inauguratory
work of modern art. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, “The modern
work of art is anything it may seem; it is even its very property of being
whatever we like, of having the overdetermination of whatever we like,
from the moment it works: the modern work of art is a machine and
functions as such.”30

45
 ENCLAVES

Matteo Poli

The context versus concept debate, one of architecture’s most volatile and
venerable, has often resulted in the creation of architectural monstrosi-
ties on both sides, sacrificing projects to the gods of ideology. One of the
main reasons that projects fail is that the individuals or groups of profes-
sionals producing them have focused on creating work that would allow
them to declare victory over those who favour the opposing approach.
In this long war, there have been some politically/economically
driven episodes in which context and concept have become closely
aligned, including the Italian town of Campione d’Italia, the Republic
of San Marino, Vatican City, Monaco, Macao, Hong Kong, Brunei
and the United Nations Headquarters in New York, as well as other
enclaves scattered around the world. These self-contained exceptions
to our theoretically fluid and borderless society have their roots in a
straightforward collective approach to design that perceived concep-
tual isolation and a strong sense of contextual characterization as the
perfect milieu for growth and development. They are a good example
of a symbiosis between concept and context that could be studied by
those who argue in favour of letting one of the two aspects prevail over
the other in the never-ending conflict between projects generated by
ideas and those created in response to places. In the following three
case studies, I have tried to avoid any bias in favour of either context
or concept, and I leave it up to the reader to categorize these examples
of enclaves in the context or concept camps as they see fit.

The Campione d’Italia Border Walk

When googling “Campione d’Italia secrets”, I found an amazing walk
that connects seven border-markers. This hike had us “walking a

46
tightrope” between context and concept, which is something that 1
doesn’t happen every day.1 All of the images and text
have been taken from http:
Marker 17 is beautifully set in a small garden belonging to a chapel //campione.enclaves.org
just west of the road. The marker stands a few metres away from the except the general map,
which is from http://map
shoreline. .geo.admin.ch.
From Marker 17 there is a narrow path toward the south of the
churchyard that leads up to the road and to Marker 16, which stands
southeast of the chapel and immediately west of the road. The marker
is clearly visible from the road if one knows what to look for.
Marker 15 actually seems to be two markers, neither of which is
distinguished the usual way with “15A” or “15B” etc. The markers are,
however, quite different in appearance, one being a bronze plaque
set into the street and the other a traditionally carved block of stone.
The entrance to Campione d’Italia is clearly announced by
the Campione Gate, which stands on land belonging to the town.
Immediately south of this there is a brick line in the road that closely
follows the border.
Marker 14 is at the southeast corner of Campione d’Italia, where
the border makes a sharp turn that almost forms a right angle. The
road ends in a parking lot, and from there it is only a short walk along
a footpath to the border-marker.
Marker 13 is a little difficult to reach due to obstacles in the terrain,
and so it could not be photographed on this expedition. The image
of it that is provided here comes from a reliable source and is said to
have been taken on an earlier expedition undertaken by another party.
Marker 12 is actually a pair of markers, numbers 12 and 12A, which
are a few hundred metres apart: 12A is next to a small path winding
back and forth across the border, while 12 is immediately to the east
on top of the wall next to the road. The metal sign that serves as 12A
is clearly visible from the road, but to see the stone one that is marker
12, one has to climb the wall. From here there is a small path east of
the marker that leads down to the road.
Marker 11 appears to be the oldest marker of those surveyed,
with Marker 10 coming a close second. The border makes a turn here
at Marker 11, which is clearly marked on the top of the stone. The
inscription on the Swiss side reads “AROG”, meaning the munici-
pality of Arogno, while the letters “CAP” on the Italian side signifies
Campione d’Italia.
Marker 10 is highly unusual in that it is not a traditionally engraved
stone; instead, it is an inscription carved onto a large rock found

47
 naturally in the forest. The inscription is clean of vegetation, and its
colour is bright and in good condition, so the marker seems to be well
maintained.

Monaco as a Self-referential Context

Monaco is the result of combining a centuries-old, traditional context
with an interest in world-class, modern entertainment technologies
that serves as the motivating concept for all of the major events held
in Montecarlo, from the F1 Grand Prix to the Monaco Yacht Show.
A recent project known as “Urbanisation en mer”, which concerns
the extension of Montecarlo and is presently on hold, is a European
reinterpretation of the land reclamation projects underway in Dubai.
Prince Albert II drew up a shortlist of five architectural firms, includ-
ing Norman Foster and Daniel Libeskind, to continue working on the
extension of the most densely populated country in the world. (It is
interesting how super-architects are treated by super-developers. In the
French newspaper Nice Matin, a journalist said to Patrice Pastor: “The
two groups still competing are using internationally known architects:
Norman Foster and Daniel Libeskind, two big assets for your rivals.”
Mr. Pastor replied, “They are as good as ours. Frank Gehry is as well-
known as they are, and Christian de Portzamparc and Rem Koolhaas
are not bad; all three of them have won the Prix de Rome, after all.”)
Despite the fact that Mr Pastor is the biggest developer in the
Principality, the Monte Carlo Development Company and Monte Carlo
Sea Land are the two investors heading up the next step: Foster and
Libeskind will have to better define a 10-billion-euro masterplan
adding twenty-five acres to Monaco, all of which is to be built on oil-
rig poles, thereby extending “Monaco’s allure in the future of urban
development”. In other words, here context is the concept for some
more multi-million-dollar housing blocks.

The United Nations Headquarters in New York: A Visionary Concept

in an Ageing Building
The famous phrase with which Oscar Niemeyer gave this project to
Le Corbusier – “I felt he [Le Corbusier] wanted to do his own project,
and he was the master. I do not regret my decision” – has few equals
in the history of architecture (let us tip our hats to Niemeyer, who also
once said “Brasilia is a juvenile work, and it was Lucio [Costa’s] pro-
ject anyway”). That said, we can assert that the UN building in New
York is both conceptual and contextual, for it is a diplomatic enclave

48
that conceptualizes discussion among nations in a very contextually
characteristic New York glass tower (the photo appearing on the next
page was taken from the private residence of the Irish ambassador).
The interesting thing about this building and its meaning is that they
are both ageing in silence.
The following excerpts from a New York Times article wonderfully
describe the decadence of both the content and the tower:

At first glance, the headquarters of the United Nations look nearly as new
as the day they were built. The black and white tile floors sparkle. Fresh
paint adorns the walls. The paneled chambers of the General Assembly
and the Security Council still glow with the elegance of the dreams that
inspired them.
But half a century after the cornerstone was laid on Oct. 24, 1949, a closer
look reveals that the most prestigious symbol of New York City’s claim
to international stature is deteriorating at its core, beset by hundreds of
millions of dollars in structural and environmental problems and with-
out the money to fix them. In fact, if the United Nations had to abide by
city building regulations – diplomatic immunity spares it – it might well
be shuttered.
Roofs leak. A marble wall in the Dag Hammarskjold Library has threat-
ened to collapse. Asbestos insulation needs to be replaced. Plastic sheet-
ing was installed to protect library desks and computers from dripping
water. And some motors and water pumps that keep the building running
are so antiquated that spare parts are no longer made.
Perhaps more alarming is that among New York City’s high-rise office
buildings, the 39-story United Nations Secretariat is singularly without a
sprinkler system, which the city’s fire code normally requires. One of the
emergency exits available to delegates in case of fire is the third-floor roof
of the Conference Building, which “has deteriorated beyond repair and
needs to be replaced,” according to a proposed new budget. . . .
Joseph E. Connor, the Under Secretary General for Management, said that
the complex was made with good materials and has been maintained as
magnificently as possible. But, he added, “It is a 50-year-old building. . . .
But the United States, which persuaded the United Nations to settle in
New York and provided an interest-free loan to build the headquarters,
shows no interest in helping. It has yet to pay more than $1 billion owed
to the world organization in back dues and assessments. . . .
Renovating the complex has become a question of not just money but also
logistics, in finding alternate work space for 6,000 employees in New York.

49
 The options under consideration include the once unthinkable – moving
out of the headquarters, at least temporarily. . . .
The codes cannot be enforced in any case, because an agreement signed
by the United States prevents inspectors from entering the United Nations
compound without consent. A second agreement on diplomatic immunity
and privileges shields the United Nations from lawsuits. . . .
Mr. Connor said that making the headquarters more energy efficient
could achieve substantial savings. Unlike other buildings in Manhattan
that run east to west, the United Nations headquarters sits by itself and
runs north to south, exposing it to direct sunlight throughout the day. By
one estimate, $176 million in energy costs would be saved over 25 years
from renovation . . . .

Photograph by Veronica
Lanza

50
 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS:
AN ANALYTICAL POINT OF VIEW

Ilaria Boeddu

To plan starting from conceptual virtuosities is a postmodern practice 1

that, in the recent past, let the so-called starchitects garner popular- Nelson Goodman,
Languages of Art: An
ity, but it is also, in my opinion, a practice that is already destined to Approach to a Theory of
become extinct. In this kind of work, we encounter a concept intended Symbols (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publ.
to create iconic and immediately identifiable architectural designs, Co., 1976).
but these are entirely uncontextualized. Architecture that focuses
mainly on concepts is an architecture that lacks ontological aspects 2
Ibid., xi.
that ought to be essential to its nature.
Even the analytical philosopher Nelson Goodman – who, in the sec-
ond half of the last century, supported the possibility of ascribing every
art to a linguistic form – believed that there were some insurmount-
able obstacles to accepting this kind of similarity in architecture. In
his well-known, emblematically titled Languages of Art,1 Goodman
maintains that works of art, just like all other human cultural prod-
ucts, are symbols among symbols, and that reality itself, at least in
the eyes of man, is actually just a symbolic universe. When Goodman
speaks of symbols and symbolic systems, he has something similar to
the relationship that a sign has with its reference in mind: a symbol is
something that stands for something else (a picture, a word, a text, a
sound or even an architectural work), keeping in mind that, in general,
anything can stand for anything else, because the symbolic relation-
ship is always conventional.2 As a result, there could be many different
forms of symbolization, with denotation, exemplification and expres-
sion being among the most common. It is these “routes of reference”,
as Goodman calls them, that advance the fundamental process of the
production of reality by mankind. According to Goodman’s theory, in
fact, symbols constitute the real “bricks” with which humanity has

51
 built – and continues to build – the world around it. Here Goodman
is dealing with a constructivist vision that could be defined as radi-
cal, whereby the ontology is grounded on the pluralistic symbolic
structure of the various versions of the world. The idea of a fixed and
unchangeable reality leaves room for many different versions of the
world that are not at all unrealistic and that allow us, from time to
time, to consider one or more versions of reality to be true, depending
on the “point of view” assumed. In a universe that could be defined as
symbolic, it is quite obvious that everything is open to interpretation,
but this approach does not decline into pure relativism, because the
“ways of worldmaking” – the title of one of Goodman’s texts – find a
constitutive limit in the need for coherence once one is within a con-
struction of reality: conflicting truths are possible, but only within
3 different symbolic systems. To sum up, there are many ways of look-
Ibid., chap. 3 (“Art and ing at the world and, at the same time, of building it, using all of the
Authenticity”), 99–123.
entirely arbitrary and conventional symbols human culture affords,
but once inserted into a symbolic system, symbols lose their arbitrari-
ness because they depend on one another and must submit to the rules
of the system as a whole. The main idea behind Goodman’s theory,
which postulates that access to reality is never immediate and that
there is always a symbolic mediation that possesses a direct creative
potential, inevitably puts an emphasis on the arts. Even keeping in
mind that all symbolic systems (whether they be scientific, historical,
technical or any of the other disciplines into which human knowledge
can be divided) bring with them a general increase of knowledge and
understanding of reality, the arts, having creativity as their defining
character, are one of the primary vehicles of innovative signification,
for they are capable of actively stimulating our cognitive faculties. The
arts, therefore, and their “ways of reference” are the principal object
of Goodman’s analysis, which focuses its attention on the cognitive
value of the aesthetic attitude.
Without delving too deeply into Goodman’s complexly articulated
aesthetic theory, here it is enough for us to consider the fundamental
difference he establishes between the “autographic” and the “allo-
graphic” arts.3 For Goodman, an autographic artwork is defined by
its potential for being copied and by the fact that we can legitimately
distinguish the original from potential imitations. In a picture, as in
a sculpture or a sketch, even the smallest feature is pertinent, and the
most minor of variations can generate an enormous difference. It is
not possible to realize a copy of this type of work that has the same

52
worth as the original, because the symbolic system used in the auto-
graphic arts is both syntactically and semantically dense. In contrast,
the allographic arts, the first among these being music, make use of
a symbolic system with the character of notation, or of a linguistic or
quasi-linguistic code. What counts here in order to distinguish one
work from another is simply its correspondence to the “text”, what
could be called in the broadest sense the “score”. Allographic works
cannot be falsified, only reissued or reproduced, where each time there
is an adherence to the original “score”; thus, we can only speak of new
“samples”, as Goodman puts it, rather than fakes.
Now, it is interesting to see where Goodman places architecture
in his classification.4 “The architect’s plans”, he says “are a curious
mixture”, and thus he perceives architecture to be in a sort of “grey
zone”. The initial drawings of an architectural project are similar to 4
the sketches of a painter or sculptor, a fact that would justify placing Nelson Goodman, “The
Nature and Function of
architecture among the autographic arts.5 At the same time, if we Architecture”, Domus, no.
examine a project’s ground plans and elevations, above all in the case 672 (1986), 17–28.
of actual construction plans, we surely see a form of allography, for 5
the project at this stage has become as a sort of “score” that everyone But actually, when in some
realizing the work must follow or “perform”. However, even if a pro- cases the plan is made
directly through digital
ject is rebuilt identically many times, respecting literally every single signs, this type of identity
planning indication, the resulting buildings will never be exactly the is perhaps destined to
fail, giving lots of room to
same as one another, because each one will banally change the space notational forms.
in which it itself is ultimately situated and with which it is necessarily
called upon to converse; in other words, it is the context that changes. 6
Goodman, Languages of Art,
In the case of architecture, then, it is clear that the work as a whole 177–221.
is something the goes beyond the simple duality of allography and
autography: it may begin as a notational or quasi-notational form
identifiable with the projects, but the final product is something that
goes beyond the underlying relationship between a musical work and
a particular execution of it. The final architectural work, as Goodman
expresses it, is not more simply referable to its plans, in the same way
as there is not an exact correspondence between a definition and cur-
rent practice.6 The point is that the context belongs to the work and,
just like the work’s function, it partly determines the work’s form.
Obviously, however, a form is never created without a content: no work
by human hands is ever completely free of concepts.
Every form is an idea, and every idea is necessarily communicated
via some kind of form. What we are dealing with here is the old, philo-
sophically debated question of the relationship – and at the same time,

53

7 ture, just like all the other arts and sciences, actively participates in
Nelson Goodman and
Catherine Z. Elgin,
Reconceptions in Philosophy,
and Other Arts and Sciences
(London: Routledge, 1988),
32.
8 dedicates an entire chapter meaningfully titled “How Buildings Mean”
Ibid., 33.
54
the opposition – between form and content, structure and subject,
syntax and semantics . . . and concept and context. And it is in relation
to these polarities that we can discuss the complex concept of style,
too. This holds true for all of the arts, architecture included. Looking
back on the history of the discipline, we can easily recognize periods
or single projects in which there is a prevalence of the formal ele-
ment, where the structure communicates directly through its spatial
construction. In other cases it is the content, the conceptual element,
that overrides form, sometimes denaturalizing the context and often
producing a result that is truly spectacular (in the purely etymological
sense of the term). The ambiguity between form/function and concept/
meaning deeply concerns the nature of architecture.
Returning to Goodman’s theory, in fact, we can see how architec-
the process of the generation of symbols that increases our knowledge
and understanding of reality. However, architecture “builds” the world,
both in the broader sense used by Goodman for all disciplines of human
culture and in the material sense of a physical and tangible structuring
of the space. In his late work Reconceptions in Philosophy, Goodman
to the question of architectural ambivalence. He writes: “The archi-
tectural work is firmly set in a physical and cultural environment that
alters slowly.”7 In other words, in an architectural work, a practical
function is continually juxtaposed with an aesthetic one, and Goodman
hypothesizes that in this distinction lies the difference between the
architectural artwork and the daily planning of functional spaces
(spaces which are deprived of an additional meaning and not referable
to an artistic project). This type of theoretical argument is probably
the starting point that leads to purely conceptual planning, in which
attention is focused only on the symbolic function of a building, as
if this could be separated from its structural function: “A building is
a work of art only insofar as it signifies, means, refers, symbolizes in
some way. That may seem less than obvious, for the sheer bulk of an
architectural work and its daily dedication to a practical purpose often
tend to obscure its symbolic function.”8 Here Goodman’s thinking
seems to draw upon the theoretical proposals of another well-known
analytical philosopher, Arthur Danto, who has proposed the notion
of referentiality (“aboutness”) as a peculiar characteristic of artworks:
“Works of art are logically of the right sort to be bracketed with words,
even though they have counterparts that are mere real things, in the
respect that the former are about something (or the question of what
they are about may legitimately arise).”9
In the case of architecture, however, there is an element that can-
not be reduced to a linguistic form: that of space. In fact, when speak-
ing about real architectural works, or, rather, about the ones that do
not remain in a state of purely virtual planning, it is not possible to
abstract the building from the space in which it is inserted or from the
function that it is being called upon to serve. If we look at the architec-
tural work as a text, it is impossible to separate it from its context, and
this deeply influences the textual structures themselves. In a certain
sense we could say that architecture consists merely of creating con-
texts – designing contextual spaces to be filled with meanings that are
coherent with the symbolic systems in use at a given time in a given
culture. Goodman effectively uses the word “fit” to express this idea: 9
“Judgments of rightness of a building as a work of architecture (of how Arthur C. Danto, The
Transfiguration of the
well it works as a work of art) are often in terms of some sort of good fit – Commonplace (Cambridge,
fit of the parts together and of the whole to context and background. Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 82.
What constitutes such fit is not fixed but evolves.”10 Therefore, archi-
tecture has a fundamental role to play in the continuous remaking 10
of the world and many elements (contextual, conceptual, historical, Goodman and Elgin,
Reconceptions in Philosophy,
functional, etc.) are involved in this process. It is hard to decide if a 46.
building has indeed reached that perfect equilibrium, that particular
11
“fit”, that makes it an architectural artwork, but as Goodman says, “the Ibid.
particular determination of which works are right and which wrong
is no more the philosopher’s responsibility than is the determination
of which statements are true in a particular science or what are the
facts of life.”11

55
 THE OBJECT AS IDEA

Adrià Carbonell

1 What is an idea in architecture? Is there a direct and decisive relation-

Oswald Mathias Ungers, ship between an initial inspirational image or concept and the physical
Architecture as Theme (Milan:
Electa, 1982). materialization of a building? Is a conceptual model necessary for the
production of architectural values? In 1982, O. M. Ungers dedicated a
2
Ibid.
whole book to these questions, and arrived at a categorical answer. He
argued not only that “an idea can be realized, or in other words, that a
realization does not have to renounce an idea”, but that architecture
needs a theme in order to make it meaningful beyond its functionality
and to articulate the design process. He stated that “the theme defines
ideation, content and artistic expression in architecture. A purely
empirical architecture, an architecture without fantasy and ideas,
descends into the extreme banality of purely functional adaptation.”1
The themes of transformation, assemblage, incorporation, assimi-
lation and imagination were described as instruments of design: as
intellectual tools that served as the basis for composition strategies.
Whereas architecture was articulated on a theme, there was still room
for architecture to find its expression; it wasn’t determined by the
theme. Trying to escape from formal rigidity, Ungers wrote that “a
new dimension of thought and perception is opened up if the world is
experienced in all its contradictions, that is in all its multiplicity and
variety, if it is not forced into the concept of homogeneity that shapes
everything to itself”.2
Two years later, Peter Eisenman announced the end of classical
architecture and the beginning of a new era – the “not-classical” – that
proposed “an end to the dominance of classical values in order to
reveal other values”. He claimed that “architecture has been from the
fifteenth century to the present under the influence of three ‘fictions’,

56
representation, reason and history”, and that not-classical architecture
was “no longer a certification of experience or a simulation of his-
tory, reason, or reality in the present”, but a “representation of itself,
of its own values and internal experience”.3 Nevertheless, he did not
anticipate which new values would emerge – which principles would
serve as the basis for conceiving of and building a new architecture.
In a way, he freed architecture from the constraints of tradition by
claiming the need for intellectual autonomy, but at the same time
this opened up the field to arbitrariness. The conceptual discourse
turned into something more than the intellectual framework for the
development of design strategies: it became a stylistic prescription.
Abstract concepts or philosophical discourses were used as formal
directives for architectural language and composition in a new man-
ner of representation. 3
Thus, the contemporary scenario is characterized by the loss of Peter Eisenman, “The End
of the Classical: The End
referents and models, and by a wide variety of approximations. At of the Beginning, the End
any rate, after a return to autonomy, we are faced with a new shift in of the End”, Perspecta: The
Yale Architectural Journal 21
design paradigms. What has changed is the object of reference. If (1984), 154–73.
Renaissance architecture was a representation of classical architec-
ture, and if modern architecture was an essentialist representation of
positivist and functionalist principles and of the production mecha-
nisms of industrial societies, then at the end of the 20th century a new
architecture emerged, one that was free from doctrines and that was
based on arbitrariness. Whereas Ungers’s criticism of functionalism
denounced a strictly utilitarian and technocratic architecture in favour
of the search for a building’s theme – a creative, conceptual act that
would become a source for design – we might question the value of a
certain kind of contemporary architecture labeled as conceptual, argu-
ing that its weakness lies precisely in the fact that it has been reduced
to an initial, formal, physical idea. Buildings might refer to mountains,
palm trees or sails, as well as pictograms or letters of the alphabet.
Examples of this global phenomenon can be found in Dubai or
Shanghai, in Barcelona or Baku. The point of reference is always cho-
sen from outside the realm of architecture. With the turn away from
abstraction, there came a return to figuration. Or perhaps not; it might
have been a new kind of naïve, simplistic abstraction, as opposed to
a purification process intended to seek out an expression of the truth
or the essence of constructive and architectural elements, as it was in
modern architecture – the object is translated. Abstraction has gone
from representing the message and the meaning of architecture to

57
4 representing formal objects existing outside the discipline: elements
Jean Nouvel, extract from
the project brief for the
Agbar Tower, 2000–2005.
5
Manuel de Solà-Morales, “De
los rascacielos solitarios”,
Cultura/s, supplement to
La Vanguardia, 21 February
2007.
Jean Nouvel, Agbar Tower,
Barcelona, 2000
58
of nature or everyday objects. Ideas are not being represented; rather,
shapes are being copied. Thus, architecture is no longer a representa-
tion of the architecture of the past, or a representation of itself, but a
simulation of any randomly chosen object.
A great example of this paradigm shift can be found in the two
towers that Jean Nouvel built in Barcelona and in Doha. In both cases
a very similar response was given to a completely different urban con-
text. Nouvel described Barcelona’s Agbar Tower as “a fluid mass that
bursts through the ground like a geyser under permanent, calculated
pressure”. More precisely, “it is architecture of the earth without the
heaviness of stone, like a distant echo of old Catalan formal obsessions
carried by a mysterious wind off the Montserrat”.4 What its relation-
ship to a geyser or the Montserrat mountains might be doesn’t actually
matter at all, nor does whatever an “architecture of the earth” is, or
the meaning of a mountain-like building in a new urban central area.
The genius loci has been reduced to a postcard.
The Agbar Tower design is focused on the external shape of the
building and its ability to evoke whatever any creative mind has imag-
ined before. Because of this desire for formal purity, it leaves behind
the skyscraper’s main themes. As Manuel de Solà-Morales has pointed
out, “the elements that provide the most interesting urban spaces and
day-to-day experiences at present are groups of skyscrapers, a mix of
towers: how they relate to one another, regardless of the order of their
distances; what kind of formal interactions they promote. The shared
reflections, the possible types of contact with the ground and how the
lobbies are connected with public space open up areas of modernity
for contemporary urban design.”5 In this case, though, architecture
has been erected in absolute loneliness, in a demonstration of arro-
gance and egocentricity, without any attempt to articulate, connect
or interact. It has forgotten about its relationship with both the street
and the urban environment. With a complete lack of understanding
of its urban condition, it has been conceived as an isolated object in
a very complex and dynamic environment. With a total disregard for
its users, Nouvel has created an office tower where the workspace
remains in darkness and boasts no views in spite of being in the tall-
est building in the area. This kind of approach raises many questions,
not only about the design process, but also about the final purpose of
architecture. Can an architectural concept refer to a material form, to
an object? Is it possible to turn a geyser into a building? What happens
to architectural thought, in that case? The architectural value of a tree
or a mountain, a cucumber or a sand dune, is non-existent. Seeking
to reproduce a concrete form that exists prior to the design destroys
the creative process, the progress through correction and verification,
investigation and innovation. All context is neutralized. Or perhaps
concept has become the new context for architectural production.
Design strategies disappear entirely. Not only the ideas that shape the
building but the whole project can be expressed as a symbolic meta-
phor, whether true or not. Spatial practice is no longer relevant to the
design strategy, which is reduced to a single image and operates like
an advertising campaign. Experience is useless; there is no theme to
develop, only a form that has to be communicated.
This trivialized conceptual architecture has spoiled the world
of ideas, banalizing it to the point of attempting a direct translation
of its physical form. These simple mimetic representations are only
valuable as commodities; they are marketable products that are eas-
ily identifiable based on an original, unusual or distinctive quality.
Mimesis, or formal reproduction, is based on a mechanism of rep-
lication. Even disguised as poetics, it is still built on formal models,
on visual imagery, as opposed to artistic or spiritual expressions. It
has nothing to do with its shaper; instead it has to do with the anni-
hilation of architecture in favour of form (where form is an image).
The essential, differential element between Nouvel’s cucumber and
other fantastic buildings without sharp edges or corners is the way
architecture is conceived. As opposed to relying on the logic of space
and the construction of interdependent relationships, and instead of
operating according to the logic of discourse, it follows the logic of the
supermarket, where food becomes a product that should be wrapped
up, packaged and displayed in order to be viewed, admired and, finally,
purchased. Plastic-wrapped cucumbers are only selling an image of Jean Nouvel, High-Rise,
prettiness; the bigger, greener and shinier they are, the better. What Doha, 2000

lies under the skin or beneath the plastic is secondary, because the
first consumer response – the essential one – is purely visual. After
the “cucumber”, it’s all over. There is no discourse, no composition
or structure, no programme or context; there is just . . . the concept
(where concept is a shape).
But, of course, the same shape can wear different masks or skins:
you can play with it, you can adapt it to different realities. There are
better and worse examples. Whereas the cucumber that Nouvel planted
in Barcelona’s Plaça de les Glòries was said to have been inspired by

59
6 the mountains of Montserrat and is clothed in the colours of the city’s
Jean Nouvel, extract from
the project brief for the
Agbar Tower, 2000–2005.
7
Joseph Rykwert, The Idea
of a Town: The Anthropology
of Urban Form in Rome,
Italy, and the Ancient World
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1988).
60
football team, the one in Doha is covered in arabesque shutters in a
sophisticated version of the local style, presenting a ridiculous adapta-
tion of the idea to the local culture. In this case, the desire for cultural
adaptation is tantamount to putting on clothes with a moucharabieh-
like pattern. Nouvel stated that “tall and slim, glittering in its silvery
laced silhouette against the skyline, the tower is bound to become a
fine landmark on the Doha Corniche”. Despite its elegance, however,
the Doha project is even more anti-urban than the Agbar Tower. Its
contact with the ground is more developed, but it is even less related to
the street; the entrance is carved into the landscape and remains invis-
ible underneath a street-level glass canopy. Two car ramps – entrance/
exit – constitute the only link between the building and the sidewalk,
resulting in a total disconnection from context, even on a visual level.
The intention was clear from the beginning, as the virtual images of
the project reveal: its ideal setting is in isolation. Any other buildings
or obstacles that might obstruct the view of the absolute beauty of its
architecture have been erased. The building rises like a monumental
monolith – asphyxiatingly hermetic, depressingly autistic. Whereas
the real surroundings in this case are full of skyscrapers, which would
seem to indicate a field for typological investigation, as Solà-Morales
has proposed, the response is the same, implying an even greater
disdain for the urban characteristics of the location.
If the project in Doha was supposed to be a landmark on the
Corniche, Nouvel wanted the Agbar Tower to resonate against the
Barcelona skyline “like a distant mirage, marking the entry into the
diagonal avenue from the Plaça de les Glòries”. According to him,
“this singular object would become the new symbol of Barcelona the
international city, and become one of its best ambassadors”.6 But what
can a “geyser” or a “cucumber” symbolize? Iconography has flattened
symbolism into a single plane, into one visual dimension. According
to Joseph Rykwert, “nowadays if we think of anything as ‘symbolic’ it
is practically always an object or action which can be taken at a sin-
gle view”.7 In the same way that urban designers sometimes employ
metaphors when their urban ideas fall short, architects use symbol-
ism when the production of architectural ideas begins to be lacking
or when the intellectual discourse runs dry.
If there isn’t any theory that can exert some kind of influence
on contemporary architectural practice, is it still useful to think in
terms of theory and discourse, or to produce content in a context that
is subjugated to the immediacy of reproduction and diffusion in the 8
media? Can we even speak of an architecture of our times and accept it Ibid.

as the expression of the contemporary zeitgeist? Although its success

may be fleeting, does an easily identifiable architecture for superficial
and immediate consumption correspond to a society that lives in an
eternal present, and that values visualization above experience?
The truth is that some contemporary architectural practice works
with purely formal, non-discursive concepts; it actually works not with
concepts, but with illusions. When the symbolic no longer relates to a
“system of custom and belief” – that is, when it is no longer a “vehicle
for a culture and for a way of life”,8 and when the conceptual models
are nothing more than evocations of objects and shapes – then archi-
tecture fails and becomes nothing more than a rhetorical simulation.

61
 WITHOUT IRONY

Kersten Geers

Philip Guston went to Rome twice. Twice it changed his art.

The first time, the impact came late. In 1948, he received the Prix
de Rome.
In search of a particular kind of abstraction after a decade of mak-
ing wall paintings, he confronted his heroes and dismissed them. The
result was work that was seemingly abstract but, under the surface,
mute – a troubled set of signifiers, fragments of what mattered. It made
him famous for a little while.
But when the spell was later broken, it revealed another reality, one
more directly related to what he had seen in Rome, only at the time
he didn’t know it. He felt the actual impact of his experience fifteen
years later. He could not let go of the Renaissance.
When Guston went to Rome the second time, his work was in the
middle of a transformation he didn’t yet understand himself. Rome
gave him the context he needed to understand what he was after. In con-
frontation with the European pictorial tradition, he brought American
Abstract Expressionism to an end overnight. Fuck concepts! Context!
Guston’s silent revolution (in painting) was nothing less than the
annihilation of the concept of the painting in favour of the painting
as a context. The only thing that mattered was the narrative quality of
the work or what it was actually saying, though without speaking too
clearly, and saying many things at the same time.
Abstract Expressionism made a great effort to turn the concept
of painting into painting itself. More than Conceptual Art, whose
concept narrative is seldom about the concept as a gesture alone, or
Minimal Art, which was endlessly ambiguous about how it was sup-
posed to look, Abstract Expressionism celebrates the concept of art

62
and its abstraction as a precultural act. With Clement Greenberg as
its main advocate in the 1950s, the idea of a wild art – started from
scratch in the New World and about nothing and everything – was
the celebration of the Wild West. Hailed as the first new avant-garde
movement in art since the Parisian one of the 1930s (Guilbot), it was
an artificial celebration of the idea that “everything goes”, as long as
it is brutal and in-your-face.
In the 1970s, however, the period in which Guston developed his
own narrative context, painting was undergoing a revolution on its
own: abstraction had been replaced by soup cans, Expressionist seri-
ousness by popular tongue-in-cheek humour. At the dawn of Pop Art,
Guston developed non-ironic incarnations of his self-created context;
his was a heavy imagery.

Robert Venturi went to Rome and to Las Vegas. It changed his archi-
tecture twice.
After winning the Prix de Rome in 1951, he spent two years (1954–55)
in the Italian capital and the rest of Europe. As he was working close
to Kahn back then, at first the architecture of Rome provided him with
all the legitimation that the complex and mutated late-modern style
practiced in Kahn’s Philadelphia offices needed. Still, the aftermath
was hugely significant, and in the early 1960s Venturi began experi-
menting with a formal language that he perhaps was not quite able
to fully grasp yet.
It was only in 1966 that he published Complexity and Contradiction
in Architecture. It retroactively described the theory behind the work
that Venturi’s time in Rome had unconsciously triggered. As a gentle
manifesto, it ended the slick American, International Style modern-
ism overnight and presented the alternative of a self-conscious cel-
ebration of the unresolved. Rome and Europe had provided the main
thesis with its illustrations. Rather than presenting architecture in
a vacuum of conceptual – i.e., modernist – intentions, the hypotheti-
cal context of the personal historical narration of the architect is
the key. Complexity and Contradiction introduced the picture frame
as the place, the tableau in which one “tells stories”, as a remnant
of thought, or a remnant of culture perhaps, even when and, in fact,
because of being completely detached from it. The “difficult whole”,
the key idea of Complexity and Contradiction thus becomes a device for
creating a complexity that is essentially not there – at least, not where
the work sits. When Guston stated “I am sick of abstraction”, he was

63
 essentially sick of American abstraction, of Abstract Expressionism.
In opposition to this style, Guston and Venturi developed a way of
speaking without really saying anything. For both men, the key ref-
erence for this act of mute communication is Piero della Francesca.
As an enigmatic reference of an unelaborated perspective, Piero’s
paintings present the tableau or the frame as a complex composition
of people, objects and other elements in a flattened space, one that
is not yet fully three-dimensional, yet not two-dimensional either – a
context for an allegory, perhaps.

In his little book Telling Stories, David Kaufmann argues that Guston’s
late work (1970–80) investigates contemporary painting’s poten-
tial for being allegorical. Neither entirely abstract nor fully figura-
tive, the pictorial frame presents sub-narratives, personal stories,

Robert Venturi, Mother’s

House (Vanna Venturi
House), living room
objects and atmospheres, without succumbing to the pitfalls of Pop
Art or Surrealism. The same can be said of the early work of Venturi
(1956–66), for his complex and crooked compositions seem to cre-
ate a universe of their own. In a complex mise-en-scène, the depth
of the building is often literally flattened (the Vanna Venturi House
being the most evident example), thus resulting in a whole that has
no clear decipherable “story” to tell. None of the recognizable parts
of the composition make a simple, ironic reference; at most, one
can recognize different parts. These points of reference gives the
viewer/visitor a certain comfort. As opposed to the weightlessness
of American modernism, the “difficult whole” presents a heaviness
that can only be self-imposed.

64
 Guston’s relationship with Pop Art was ambiguous. While its
simple imagery did away with any ambiguity, its bluntness and irony
gave it a somehow overly easy detachment, and for that reason it was
not engaging enough. Pop imagery simply lacks weight. Nothing is
left unresolved, since no real issues are raised. In Guston’s work,
the unresolved perspective is how he demonstrates the impossi-
bility of leaving the thickness and the textured strokes of Abstract
Expressionism behind. In these complex compositions, Pop Art’s
lightness, however, is not an option. The clumsiness of the work gives
it an edge that is both more tactile and more three-dimensional.
Venturi’s early compositions, too, reveal a reluctance to deprive archi-
tecture of its primary tools, its tectonics. He did not have the guts to
do away with architecture’s architectonic-ness. Not yet, at least. The
young Venturi talked about architecture in the same way that the late

Philip Guston, Box Tree,

Rome, 1971

Guston talked about painting. In many ways the virtue of the (early
and late) works of both men lies in the struggle they have endured in
giving in to the extreme “weightlessness” of Pop Art. Early work by
Venturi is heavy and unresolved, as if he wanted to do things better
but lacked the tools, the guts, the ability to do so. In its complexity,
the work speaks in tongues – nothing is entirely clear, but everything
seems to matter. Venturi’s work is not ironic, as it is too busy dealing
with its own context, too busy with itself. Perhaps, in all its complex-
ity, his architecture presents the inability to deal with everything it
has accumulated, but even so, it is an inability it proudly expresses.
Until 1966, that is, when this engagement with context was elegantly
killed by the Pop concepts of Vegas.

65
 THE DELIGHT OF THE SITE:
CEDRIC PRICE’S CONTEMPLATIVE
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Pietro Pezzani

Space, through very definition, does not need occupancy, only graduated
identification.
Cedric Price

Looking at the whole of Cedric Price’s oeuvre, one might suspect that
the English architect was more concerned with the production of space
inside people’s minds than in the outside world.
Being famously uninterested in what he used to call the “enclosure
business”, Price was always looking for the most radical rearrange-
ment – or, rather, the subversion – of conventional premises, priorities
and tools of architecture. By means of sudden and unexpected con-
nections, short circuits, breaches and points of view (both literal and
metaphorical in his case), Price tried to question the very definition
and aims of the discipline.
In some ways, his projects work the way jokes do according to
Freud’s theory of humour, for they provide intellectual relief by break-
ing seemingly unbreakable barriers, by abruptly taking weight away
from the constraints of everyday reality and focusing our attention on
apparently peripheral or secondary elements of the whole in order to
reveal their relevance in the bigger picture.
Being primarily interested in people’s well-being, Price considered
architecture as a mere tool for provoking “delight”, a condition of
intellectual exhilaration and liberation produced through the unex-
pected widening of the realm of possibilities, through an expansion
of reality itself.
In so doing, he questioned the very necessity for architecture: the
“calculated indolence” he used to advocate could manifest itself in

66
the form of paradoxical inactivity (“The best technical advice may be
that rather than build a house your client should leave his wife”1) or it
could imply the abandonment of architecture in favour of surprising
assemblages of ordinary, often bread-and-butter technologies.
Even so, Price’s “strategy of indolence” would undergo a significant
transformation over the course of the architect’s career. This transfor-
mation would affect both the tools he used to create his designs and the
very substance of his projects, leading to a phase of production whose
inspiration and importance may have been previously underestimated.
On the one hand, the result of this evolution is a surprising, almost
unique grace. It is as though the natural reticence that characterized
Price’s later projects engendered a perfect balance between means and
ends, a trait that was somehow absent from his earlier work.
In fact, the radicalism of Price’s proposals had nothing to do with
the provocative visions produced in the same period by many of his
contemporaries. Projects like the Fun Palace were based on a profound
love of and respect for the everyday, and were rooted in a deep under-
standing of current regulations and available technologies. They were
impressive tours de force that radically challenged entrenched roles
and procedures, and for this reason would frequently be ignored and
were hardly ever executed.
In expressing my predilection for the lightness shown in Price’s late
work I do not mean to question either the power of his earlier, more
famous projects or their importance to his entire career. Instead, I
am suggesting that these projects, which were probably the source of
the legendary description of Price as a quixotic figure, undeservedly
condemned the rest of his production to historiographic oblivion.
In his later projects, Price would refine his humour-infused process
and find his most congenial register. His sketches would become more
and more synthetic and allusive, providing only what was absolutely
necessary to communicate his ideas and visions; his witty aphorisms
would lose some of their provocative quality, becoming calm and
illuminating calls for the reestablishment of reasonable priorities;
he would return with increasing frequency to textual instructions,
which were extremely far-sighted, but also loose and unpretentious
enough to cope with unexpected outcomes; he would even go so far
as to give down-to-earth recommendations.
On the other hand, this economy of means was accompanied by
a change in the attitude of Price, who became, in Robin Middleton’s
words, “more responsive to the whole environment and more humane,

67
Cedric Price Architects, even, than before”.2 In his later years, the English architect began to
IFPRI, competition entry resemble an elderly sage who quietly pointed out the things that deserve
drawing
our attention, as if the first and foundational act of every project should
consist of awakening people’s sensitivity to the most basic features
of landscape and to the local resources of places: views, sounds, air
quality, scents, seasonal changes, flora and fauna.
If we consider large-scale projects belonging to the second phase
of the architect’s production, such as Surf ’90 (1990), Ducklands (1989)
and IFPRI (1999), we can clearly appreciate this change in attitude.
Going beyond his usual scepticism about the need for construction,
Price rejected any practice of “space occupancy” and finally shifted to
a “zero-degree” architecture: one completely devoted to – and subli-
mated in – the perception and self-consciousness of the individual. His
last projects were conceived as disappearing devices that unveiled the
hidden beauty of their contexts and provided people with a complete
sense of “identification” with places.

Surf ’90 was a competition entry for the redevelopment of a large

leisure beach on Sagami Bay, a coastal area south of Kanagawa pre-
fecture, near Tokyo. The project shared the ambition of rethinking
an entire territory as seen through the lens of a single socio-eco-
nomic activity with some of its predecessors, such as the famous
Potteries Thinkbelt (1964). In other words, it used a specific site as
an opportunity to renegotiate the boundaries, role and future of a
social institution.
The Potteries Thinkbelt dealt with the relationship between edu-
cation and the local economy, challenging the enclosed model of the

68
university campus as a manifestation of the educational system’s
detachment from productive sectors.
Surf ’90, for its part, was an attempt to transform an entire land-
scape by evaluating its touristic quality – and the nature of tourism
itself. Here, Price was interested in considering tourism less as an
industry than as a state of mind enabled by a specifically non-productive
use of time. Considering tourism as the “appetite for the determin-
ing where, what and why is the difference in life patterning”4, Price
wanted to blur the subtle distinction between leisure and work time.
The project consisted of a series of scattered interventions on the
“precious quality of the physical fabric, land and sea”3 that would
facilitate a responsive, contemplative relationship with the environ-
ment, and ensure its future preservation and harmonic development.
Architectural and infrastructural devices that were part of the project
didn’t have much relevance in and of themselves: by providing con-
nections, points of access and simple structures for the “refreshment
of mind and body”,5 they were merely a “physical means to achieve
pleasurable recognition and understanding of the present and the
future”,6 almost invisible tools that enabled the space–time distor-
tions typically associated with the activity of tourism.
For the Potteries Thinkbelt, Price treated his native North
Staffordshire as a depressed region to be revitalized through the
installation of a complex system of temporary, diffused educational
and housing facilities that made use of the former industrial railway
system.
In contrast to the Potteries Thinkbelt, the core of the Sagami Bay
project wasn’t a major infrastructural development, but rather the
projection of an interiorized state of awareness on a regional scale: a
special regard for the environment that would be carried out through
an expansion of individuals’ capacity to perceive and appreciate the
present time and space.

Ducklands was a competition entry for an international ideas workshop

dealing with a redundant area of the docks in the city of Hamburg.
After considering the geographical importance of the harbour with
respect to the seasonal routes of migratory waterfowl, Price proposed
transforming the site into a nature reserve for this kind of fauna.
By shifting attention to such an aerial and apparently ephemeral
element as migratory birds and their needs – which was a liberating
choice in itself that recalls Italo Calvino’s praise of lightness – Price

69
 succeeded in binding all of the aspects of the proposal to the complex
fragility of the existent environment, from the selection of vegetation
to the design of discreet and highly technological footbridges over the
water. Through an apparent “strategy of retreat”, Price expanded the
context of his design to a whole ecosystem, whose extent was much
broader than that of the docks area. The site was thus transformed
into a “space of coexistence” of species that would require a fresh,
responsive and responsible attitude on the part of its visitors.
Much of Price’s previous work had to do with acts of looking and
understanding, for they provided viewpoints or subtle distortions in
the perception of reality that made social and political processes more
transparent in our everyday environment. In the Ducklands project,
this approach was taken to the point where architecture was almost
sublimated, and the site itself was transformed into a life-size pano-
rama. As a diagrammatic map of the project beautifully shows, the
whole docks area was conceived in terms of views and the pleasure
they provided.
The Ducklands project marked a shift from the scattered construc-
tions – all kinds of observatories – that peppered much of Price’s earlier
work to an interpretation of the gaze as a diffused, horizontal param-
eter capable of pervading and informing an entire architectural design.

Price’s IFPRI project was an entry for the first competition for the
Canadian Centre for Architecture Prize for the Design of Cities held
in 1999. The project represents the apogee of Price’s “strategy of inac-
tion”, and could be considered one of his most inspired projects of
landscape architecture. It also represented a proposal with a clearly
Facing page: exemplary ambition, and it was a project indissolubly linked to the
Cedric Price, Ducklands,
ineffable charm of the site.
sketch on picture of the
site The competition site was a large area in Manhattan’s West Side that
was almost entirely occupied by infrastructures and largely covered by
railroad tracks. Price’s proposal was based on an acknowledgement of
the site’s rough beauty and a recognition of the need to maintain the
site’s vacuity. This recognition led to the decision to use this unique
urban void as a “city lung”, a corridor for channeling fresh air into the
urban fabric from the Hudson River. Thus, Price’s project treated the
context of Manhattan as an artificial ecosystem whose life needed
to be protected and sustained with care and delicacy. Specifications
were made in order to monitor the soil’s drainage pattern, foster the
cleanness of the river’s water and preserve the harsh, uncultivated

70
71
 character of the ground as well as its distinctive clean scent. The great
attention paid to the movement of air masses in order to foster the
eventual – and much welcomed – production of mist make the IFPRI
seem like a more casual and relaxed ancestor of Philippe Rahm’s
“meteorological architecture”.
The text that accompanied the proposal – although one could say
that the text was the proposal – was something between a humble list
of recommendations and an ambitious manifesto for the 21st-century
city, a city that would be devoted to “mental, physical and sensory well-
being” and the “comprehensive and continuous improvement of its
citizens’ health”.7 The text was a both a description of the project and
an invitation to the citizen to identify with the site as it already was at
the time of the competition. It was a description of a future vision that
differed from the existent site in a very subtle way, a verbal version of
Price’s skeletal, almost transparent perspectives.
By limiting his design to the recognition of the necessity of main-
taining what already existed, Price could indulge in the luxury of
arbitrary, apparently unnecessary details; it was as if that first pro-
grammatic choice had opened up an enormous realm of freedom
for further enjoyment and exploration. In this sense, the “cascade of
fused blue-glass balls the size of cannonballs”8 that had to cover part
of the soil was coherent with the general register of the project rather
than being a designer’s frivolous whim: it was an unpretentious yet
imaginative invention that created an atmosphere of enchantment
with a minimum of resources.
The practical yet also dreamy description of this gleaming field of
glass balls (“Cleaned by rain and mist, self-draining, they glisten in
the sun while brooding darkly under snow”9) created a blurring effect
between the real and the possible that was substantially different from
any other conventional design. In fact, Price was not trying to provide
any kind of solution through the means of architecture. Rather, he was
interested in enhancing and celebrating the “delight of the site”,10 a
state of sober hedonism that made the appropriation and enjoyment
of the unique beauty of the place possible – in Shumon Basar’s words,
“an almost picturesque kind of aesthetic pleasure: like a minor version
of a sublime experience”.11

72
 THE POSSIBILITY OF DISAPPEARING

Giovanni Piovene
Photographs by Stefano Graziani

1
“Il Clarissimo Signor Vettor
Pisani, fu del Clariss. Signor
Zuanne, gentilhuomo di
I. The Client molto giudicio, e generosità
d’animo, al pari d’ogni altro;
“In 1576 the illustrious Vettor Pisani, son of the great Signor Zuanne and tutto c’hauesse fabriche
a gentleman of great sagacity and generous spirit who was the equal of in fraterna ne’ poderi di
any man, shared the ownership of a number of houses in the area around Bagnoli, volse nondimeno
edificar da se, per hauer
Bagnoli with his brother. Nevertheless, he wanted to have a house built luogo presso Lonigo per
for himself so that he could be close to Lonigo and enjoy the healthier air.”1 diporto in aria più sana . . . ”
Vincenzo Scamozzi, La
Vincenzo Scamozzi built a villa for Vettor Pisani from 1576 to 1580 in idea dell’architettura
Lonigo. Although he already owned a suburban villa designed by Andrea universale (Venice, 1615).
Palladio from 1544 to 1545 located a few kilometres south of Lonigo, All translations are the
author’s.
Pisani desired a place of idleness and distraction, disconnected from

73

2 family. The path that connects Lonigo to the Rocca is steep and ends
“Questo colle, e molto
grazioso da vedere, per
esser di forma quasi
rotonda, e piacevolissimo
al salire dalla costa d’altri
minori colli, & è spiccato
quasi all’intorno.” Ibid.
3
“Tutte le Colonne &
ornamenti di questa fabrica
sono di pietre cauate
nello istesso colle; e però
non si meravigli alcuno
se per la facilità di esse
si compiacquero meno il
Padrone, che l’Architetto di
tali ornamenti.” Ibid.
74
any activity bound to the land. This was the moment of the restoration of
neofeudal landholding by the Venetian aristocracy, which corresponded
to a transition from a patriarchal system to a patronal one. This period
also witnessed the shift from Palladio’s golden age to Scamozzi’s.
II. The Approach
“This hill is lovely to behold due to its almost round shape, and it is very
pleasant to climb up from the lower hills surrounding it on all sides,
which it dominates.”2
The Rocca Pisana is clearly a summer house: Vettor Pisani could only
spend the warmer months of the year there. One should therefore imag-
ine reaching the site in the middle of a torrid summer, running from
the humid, suffocating plains full of rice fields owned by the Pisani
with a long straightaway leading to the house’s main entrance, with
the villa becoming more and more imposing due to the intensified
perspective from below. The way Scamozzi designed the surrounding
landscape helps to enhance the solitary state of the villa, for a hemi-
cycle of trees fences in the Rocca’s rear from east to west, making it
clear that the villa is an end point – possibly the highest one.
Viewed from without, the Rocca – all of whose sides are visible from
the plain below – is a fortress, a rough, prismatical monolith closed to
its surroundings. Unlike the Rotonda, the Rocca is closed on three of
the four sides of its square plan, and the pronaos of the fourth side is
shifted backward and kept within the square perimeter.
Scamozzi paid dearly for this choice, being seen by critics as
Palladio’s stupid epigone who lacked an understanding of his mas-
ter’s poetics and skills. How could you imagine closing off the plan of
a villa with a site far more propitious than that of the Rotonda, whose
hillock Palladio had made such an effort to enhance? Though they
never appear in the drawings, high, solid buttresses sustain the role
of the Rotonda in the landscape, putting it on a pedestal and therefore
impeding any connection with its closest surroundings. In contrast,
the Rocca sits directly on the top of the hill, its only compromise being
a cellar hewn out of the soft rock under the ground floor.
III. Contact
“All of the building’s columns and ornaments are made of stone quarried
from the hill itself, and it is not surprising that this convenience pleased
both the patron and the architect responsible for the ornamentation.”3
As one draws closer to the Rocca, its massiveness becomes more Rocca Pisana, plan
intense. In the extremely short description above, the architect tells
us about the material used for the villa’s exterior architectural details.
The uncarved local limestone highlights the awkward nature of the
building’s elevations: what from a distance seems like a line or a
band gains thickness when viewed from closer up, emphasizing the
strong corners and the floor levels on the façade. Up close, the Rocca
is unfriendly; it is not exactly what you’d like to encounter after a long
ascent in the heat, and it is possible proof of the supposed doctrinal
dullness of poor Scamozzi. There is a point, however, from which the 4
gaze can pierce the villa from one side to the other,enjoying a view of “Questa fabrica è talmente
concertata, che stando nel
the sky beyond the northern loggia. mezzo della Sala si hanno le
quattro vedute in croce da
quattro gran portoni, e dalla
IV. Going In / Coming Out loggia, e da’ Salotti d’oue
“This building has been laid out so that from the centre of the hall there viene il lume orizzontale
is a four-sided, crosswise view through the four large portals toward the nella Sala, & anco dal di
sopra, e la maggior parte
loggia and the small halls, from which light enters horizontally while more delle apriture di una
light enters from above. It should be noted, especially in the rooms used faccia incontrano quelle
dell’altra: la qual cosa si dee
for relaxation, that most of the windows face another one opposite, both osseruare, e massime ne’
because of the view this arrangement affords and to freshen the air.”4 luoghi da diporto; così per le
The Rocca Pisana is a villa which takes all the possible freedom of vedute, come per il purificar
dell’aria.” Ibid.
being seasonal. There are no doors separating the pronaos from the

75
 hall, and no windows enclose the north, east and west loggias. Massive
wooden shutters, which are part of this architectural machine, are
the only source of protection from the surrounding environment.
Therefore the villa, which could be closed up during winter, functions
in the warmer seasons as a large portico – like a nomadic tent with
different degrees of enclosure. This effect is reenforced by the open
cupola that lets in light and air and allows the rain to fall freely into
the hall. As the architect states in his text, a locally generated wind
flows through the building.
The main hall – a triple-height vaulted space plastered in white – is
indeed the heart of the villa, as two perpendicular crosses intersect
at its centre.
The first of these – the one the architect speaks of – connects the
four loggias, whose farthest sides open with precision toward the four
cardinal points. The contrasts in light that result from the building’s
orientation are extremely sharp, especially if we compare them to
the nuances Palladio achieved by rotating the Rotonda 45° from the
cardinal axes. At the Rocca, the south pronaos is bathed in light, the
north loggia frames the dark, saturated wood, the east one lets in the
horizontal morning light and the west one faces the summer sunsets
and lets their light filter into the main hall. The retracted pronaos actu-
ally functions as the main reception room of the house, with three of
its sides closed and the fourth open to the Po Valley landscape.
The plan’s second cross is rotated 45° and connects the glass doors –
framed by four large niches – that lead diagonally to the rooms of the
main floor. These rooms, which find their place at the corners of the
square plan, could be closed up. Four chimneys allow the regulation
of the indoor temperature.

V. Fading
The Rocca is the result of a subtle interplay between the representative
function of the exterior and the interior’s search for solace. In aligning
the building with the site’s geography so precisely, the young Scamozzi
fully accomplished Pisani’s assignment: to build an extraordinary
retreat that was not bound to the earth but linked to the territory. The
Rocca is a platform crossed by wind and transformed by atmosphere,
where even the furnishings seem to be dark objects floating in an open
white field. If, at first sight, the villa conveys a strong appearance, it
then plays with the possibility of disappearing.

76
77
78
79
 BUILDING CONTEXT:
WHEN ARCHITECTURE
BECOMES THE
BACKGROUND
Nicola Russi
“There is nothing more elegant than the pure line
of viaducts in a geographically varied site”, said Le
Corbusier, when explaining his project for São Paulo
in the 1930s. So how has the relationship between the
figure and the background changed since then?
When Paul Virilio provocatively affirmed in 2004 that
“the very last ‘hill’” is “the rotundity of the Earth at
its very last extremity”,1 the dialectical opposition
between architecture and its background was
upset. At the time, new design conceptions were
overcoming the dizzying collapse of modernism and
the individualistic refusal of postmodernism.
Not yet summarized by a common definition,
there are new theories that are proposing the next
step beyond modern and postmodern thought by
exploring the contemporary connection between
project and context, and the way in which these two
terms have become interchangeable again today.
This new conception of architectural design
cannot simply be considered as the result of a shift
from “object architecture” toward “landscape
architecture”; rather, it is a result of a shared desire
to recognize and include a range of “other” spatial
qualities in the architectural project that were not
traditionally associated with architecture. The empty
space is the most relevant of them. As Geert Bekaert
has said, “the empty space is no longer characterized
80
as negative from the very start but as equal to the
built space. It no longer serves as background for
figures in the foreground”.2
Placing object and background on the same level
of significance doesn’t mean that architecture is
obliged to design everything, but it does give any
architectural project the right to design anything,
including its absence.
I. Modernism: Objective Context
According to Le Corbusier and most other modernist
architects, the context of architecture was conceived
as a common background that was a generally
heterogeneous, disorderly sum of historical and
natural shapes that had to be reorganized and
redefined by modern culture.
This endless context was a pre-existing background
that could be objectively described, measured and
transformed: geometry was superimposed on the
organic in a perfect aesthetic balance.
The resulting tabula rasa was merely the effect
of an architecture that always conceived itself in
opposition to its background, thereby creating
a dialectical relationship between architecture
and its context that sometimes became a sort of
overpowering of the one by the other. Broadacre
City is the best example of this process, as it is a
project that designs everything and superposes it
on the natural landscape, treating the territory as
a single object – a kind of blanket or isotropic plate
that excludes the unexpected, the disorderly, the
heterogeneous, thereby pursuing the dream of the
equipotential space.
II. Postmodernism, Part 1: Subjective Context
The gradual realization of the impossibility
of ascribing the whole of reality to a single
interpretation of context led some architects to
design their buildings following abstract rules of
their own creation without any relation to their
background. In these cases, architecture engaged in a
sort of self-estrangement, whereby an individualistic
product resulted from a highly personal world.
In his Autobiografia scientifica, Aldo Rossi, who is
considered one of the most contextual of architects,
described his process of elaborating his designs by
starting from his personal history and focusing on
his subjective world and his relationship to it.
When describing his project for the Jewish museum
in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind explained his design
process as being the result of an irrational matrix
defined by the invisible lines connecting the Jews and
Germans living in the same city.
This kind of removal from a more objective reality
produced different contexts, one for each architect –
real subjective worlds that have driven architecture far
from any functional set of rules.
The internal dialogue between the context of the
architect’s mind and the architectural object produced
biographical projects instead of rational ones. Even
the most rigorous and seemingly neutral building
was not initially conceived in relation to any human
use or scale; instead it was the outcome of a complex
system of vectors, grids and axes that were sometimes
followed, but sometimes rotated or distorted.
In contrast to the work of modern architects, such
projects testified to a rejection of the totalizing
aspects of the architectural project and its ability to
represent and transform society, which corresponds
to the achievement of complete freedom and
autonomy from reality.
Buildings became like sculptures, and master plans
like board games. Architecture’s relationship to the
real context was not a part of things; as personal
dreams replaced collective thought, the era of the
starchitects began.
III. Postmodernism, Part 2: Relative Context
Fuck context!” didn’t really mean “Forget reality!”.
This becomes clearer if we consider what happened
in most projects from the 1990s through to the first
decade of the new millennium. Reality seemed
too complex to be synthesized into a common
background and architecture wasn’t able to change
it in any way. As a result, architects just “rode
reality” and “surfed” the city, describing it as a sum
of differences and decoding it as an overlapping
of layers. The decoding of reality through partial
scientific analysis was supposed to be the most
objective and rational way to understand and
intervene in the complex world.
This idea was much more about analyzing,
investigating and describing instead of conceiving
context as the result of a design culture.
The context wasn’t the whole scene in which the
project was carried out, nor was it the general
framework to be included as part of the project’s
vision.
When the book Mutations was published in 2000,
its description of the world seemed to coincide
with its design. Instead of project solutions and
design strategies, the architects who wrote it were
concentrating on gathering and collecting case
studies, pictures and graphics regarding all sorts
of strange urban phenomena. The project, when
developed, was conceived as the overlapping of
objective responses to the problems analyzed, layer
by layer.
By canceling the planning aspect of the analysis, the
only strategy for surviving the contemporary chaos
was reducing architecture to a sum of simple layers or
simple concepts: “My building is like . . . ”
In a way, by giving up the transformation of its
context, architecture became its own sacrificial
victim: there was analysis instead of projects,
layering instead of formal design, statistics instead
of spatial design. At the same time, geography,
sociology, anthropology and photography moved
in to occupy the territory that architecture had
abandoned.
81
IV. Prelude: The Silence and the Darkness
In an interview in 1966, John Cage said: “I realized
that a real separation between sound and silence
doesn’t exist, but only between the intention to
listen and to not do that.”3 In his revolutionary score
4’33’’ (Four Minutes and Thirty Seconds), the music is
completely absent.
Cage assumed that such an absence didn’t really
mean the absence of sounds. He invited the audience
to listen to the world – the noise in the auditorium, the
hum of the city, the wind, the rain. “I decide that what
I listen to is music”, said Cage, bringing into his work
the “negative”; what was traditionally considered
to be the absence of music became part of it thanks
to the awareness of this absence. This aesthetic
revolution overcame the opposition between music
and silence, demonstrating how the background
could be a product of our own culture.
About twenty years later James Turrell started
working on a theme that he would explore throughout
his career, the relationship between artificial light
and natural light. He didn’t focus on lighting fixtures
or objects illuminated by light; instead, he worked
with light itself, light and its antithesis, darkness.
John Cage’s musical score
entitled 4’33”
82
In one of his best works, Skyspace, which was installed
in Villa Panza in 1975, Turrell gave tangibility to what
is by definition absence: the darkness of the night.
The artificial light that frames the skylight enters into
a relationship with the lighting variations of the sky.
When it’s totally dark, it looks like a ceiling painted in
black; the vacuum appears solid, and the background
becomes an object of art.
V. Learning from Melun-Sénart
What OMA did in Melun-Sénart was everything but
“Fuck context!”
The project of shaping landscape vacuums without
altering them and designing a master plan around
them was the clearest example of how to include the
setting as a structural part of urban design instead of
simply considering it as its background.
Of course, there were many other structural
landscape projects before this one (e.g., Olmsted’s
American parks, the Smithsons’ green corridors
in West London), but what was conceived here was
substantially different. OMA considered object
and context as equally important to the point of
constantly treating the figure as background and vice
versa. This meant designing the shape of the absence
of architecture in long ideogrammatic strips and
allowing the objects to be created freely.
This new field of action raised fresh questions and
investigated the role and shape of architecture beyond
the boundaries that it had already set for itself.
This transformation of the empty space through its
consideration as culture rather than nature has meant
the erasing of the hierarchical relationship between
object and background, which radically alters the
meaning of today’s architectural projects and their
capacity to intervene in the contemporary space.
The struggle between architecture and its context has
been overcome. Since OMA’s project, architecture
has had the opportunity to design everything, even its
absence.
 background on the same plane of importance rather
than offering architecture the licence to intervene
in its contexts in the most radical ways. This meant
neither that architecture had to design everything
nor that it should design nothing; rather, it gave any
project the right to design anything, including its
absence.

VII. Negative Spaces

The erasure of the hierarchical relationship between
object and background overturned the meaning
of the project and its capacity to intervene on the
contemporary urban space.
The vacuum was perceived as a spatial condition
OMA, Melun-Sénart which belonged to artificiality as much as to fullness.
diagrams. © OMA
The “negative space”, as Lieven De Boeck and Xaveer
VI. The Artificiality of Absence de Geyter called it, opened a new field of action in
The roots of the design approach to the Melun-Sélart planning: it was not intended solely as a support
project date back to 1977, when Koolhaas explained a for “zero-volume architecture”, “one-metre-high
project called “Green Archipelago” that was developed architecture” or “landscape art”, but acquired a formal
in a seminar organized by Oswald Mathias Ungers autonomy of its own that was not born as the opposite
in Berlin. The project’s aim was to identify the parts of constructed space.
of the city that were worth being saved. In response, This point of view was apparently an evolution of Colin
Koolhaas proposed the opposite, whereby architecture Rowe’s Collage City, but it proposed a radically big
made sure to exclude itself and proposed artificially leap. In Collage City, the vacuum is identified through
creating the vacuum, which is the ultimate spatial
element in which architecture can appear.
The definition of the vacuum was the main goal of
this project, and nothingness supplied with meaning
is the ultimate goal of contemporary architecture:
“The absence of architecture is not only a preliminary
condition,” said Koolhaas in Berlin, “but could also be
the project’s outcome.”
Later, in the 1980s, this approach became more and
more drastic. In an article written for L’Architecture
d’aujourd’hui entitled “Imagining Nothingness”,
Koolhaas said: “Where there is nothing, everything is
possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is
possible.”4 The conceptual hyperbole that Koolhaas Sol LeWitt, Map of
was proposing put architectural objects and their Amsterdam (detail)

83
the absence of buildings, and this kind of investigation
highlights once again the pattern of the buildings’
density.
In de Geyter’s After-Sprawl, the vacuum isn’t conceived
as the sum of the open spaces between buildings, but
as “the space that is not consciously designed” – the
places upon which a project did not directly focus.
This conception overcame the traditional distinction
between full and empty, figure and background,
artificial and natural, and led to a new understanding
of the project in relation to its context.
VIII. A Part for the Whole
“The big scale doesn’t belong to what must be built
but belongs to the total project of the contemporary
city”, said Bernardo Secchi in reference to a project
that recognized the need to intervene on the whole
without designing everything. In his projects he
only investigated the design of the vacant open
spaces, foreseeing the chance to work on a wider
transformation of the contemporary city over time.
In Secchi’s opinion, it is the current fragmentation of
the urban landscape rather than the built areas that
shapes the vacuum, the potential place in which to
imagine a continuous project that merges with and
includes the established parts of the contemporary
city without acting directly on them.
84
Even more perceptive is the approach of Manuel de
Solà-Morales, who proposes the design of the vacuum
understood as the distance between the buildings.
Solà-Morales’s project for Antwerp was much more
focused on the correct spacing of the buildings and
their interaction with the site than on the overall
form they would have in the end.
In this case, architecture neither wants to control
the whole by designing everything, nor focuses
exclusively on the parts on which it acts with its own
materials and rules. This new approach to the project
was conceived as the result of a design strategy that
planned the influence that objects would have on
their context and gave new cultural meaning to
things that already existed without directly altering
any of them.
New figures set against their background thus
defined a new urban context created by the constant
and unpredictable relationship between them and
the complex reality of today.
IX. Background Architecture and the Cat
Ishigami doesn’t deal with urban projects
frequently. His works are much more often about the
intermediate scale that links buildings and design,
but it is only their appearance that make them seem
far removed from any reflection about context. There
Manuel de Solà-Morales,
new harbour area in
Antwerp

Junya Ishigami’s flying
balloon in the atrium of the
Museum of Contemporary
Art, Tokyo
is something in his works that makes them more
than static figures set against their background,
more than perfect works of architecture superposed
on their sites.
In one of his latest works, the installation he
designed for the Barbican Centre in London, his
fifty-three slightly visible columns emphasized
the perimeter of the curved gallery and its heavy,
tectonic structure. The space looked somehow the
same, but the thin columns rising from the ground,
each of 0.9-millimetre-wide white carbonium,
offered a new way of interpreting the context by
treating it as the fundamental aspect of the project.
Without changing anything, just by “exploring the
atmospheric qualities of transparency and trying to
push the boundaries of architecture, in a well-scaled
space”, to use Ishigami’s own words, he generates
a sort of constant inversion of figure and ground
in all of his works. In his project for the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Tokyo, for instance, Ishigami
filled an anonymous double-height hall with a
flying architectural work filled with helium. This
floating volume of air defined a constantly changing
interstitial space between its outer surfaces and the
fixed walls of the hall. Here, too, he worked on the
shape of the interaction between his architectural
objects and their location. The object of the design
was thus transformed from the single artefact into
the entire context, which could be manipulated and
become architecture itself.
One of Ishigami’s most relevant designs is
Architecture as Air: Study for Château, which he
personally built in the Arsenale for the 22nd Venice
Biennale. He created the silhouette of a full-scale
model of a building constructed out of spindly
carbon-fibre pillars. The background walls and the
sealing of the spaces of the Arsenale became a sort
of projection of the vacant surfaces of Ishigami’s
architecture. Here again, the design site became an
active part of the design concept; and here again,
the whole context became the ultimate object of the
architectural design.
The night before the Biennale’s opening, after he was
given a Golden Lion award, legend has it that a cat
got into the building and, playing with the thin fibre
strings, caused the model to collapse.
The space of the Arsenale was turned into a mute
background once again; destroyed in its entirety, the
context lost the significance it had acquired through
architecture.
1 3
Paul Virilio, Ville panique: Interview with Michael
Ailleurs commence ici Zwerin, 1966.
(Paris: Éditions Galilée,
2004); the quote was taken 4
from the following English Rem Koolhaas, “Imagining
translation: City of Panic, Nothingness”, in idem and
trans. July Rose (London: Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, ed.
Berg Publishers, 2005). Jennifer Sigler (New York:
The Monacelli Press, 1995).
2
Gert Bekaert, “The Hereafter
of the City”, in Xaveer
de Geyter, After-Sprawl
(Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
2002).

85
 NOTES ON CONTEXTUAL
ARCHITECTURE

baukuh

I. Context can be defined by re-using Wittgenstein’s definition of “the

world” in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: context is “everything
that is the case”.

II. Contexts are details of a global context. They are intelligible only
with respect to this.

III. Architecture is the physical transformation of contexts.

Transformations of contexts are the product of conscious decisions.

IV. Contexts do not produce architecture by themselves. Spontaneous

architecture does not exist. There is no architecture without architects,
only architecture with unknown (i.e., poor and forgotten) architects.

V. Architecture is a knowledge to read and decode, and a technique by

which to formalize and encode contexts.

VI. Architecture is nothing but the toolbox comprising all previous

solutions developed in all given contexts.

VII. Each single case (the context, the episode) provides the opportunity
for a further accumulation of knowledge. Architecture evolves case by
case: precedents suggest how to operate in new contexts.

VIII. Monogamy is not the rule in the relationship between contexts

and architectural tools. Tools migrate, adapt and, therefore, change
(and by the way: types do not exist).

86
IX. Both as a knowledge of places and as a technique of spaces, architec-
ture needs to be precise and attentive. This type of attention requires
a certain humbleness. Architecture can better confront contexts by
avoiding any “concept” or “content” of its own. So, please, no ideas.

X. Contextual architecture needs to be critical, formalist and without

ideas.

XI. Contextual architecture is critical. It can understand because it

does not automatically accept.

XII. Contextual architecture is formalist. It turns random combina-

tions of matter and events into formalized sequences and spaces.

XIII. Contextual architecture does not need ideas. There is a given

situation to understand and there is a given body of knowledge that
facilitates its understanding. The two just need to be combined.

XIV. The task of contextual architecture is to formalize the given – to

understand the reality as found and to discover its potential, to use
the specific case as an opportunity to produce new knowledge, to
recognize each fragment as a part of a possible universal architecture.

XV. Architecture becomes an exercise demonstrating that the different

possible experiences of space “are not strangers to one another, but
are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated
in what they want to express” (Walter Benjamin on languages in “The
Task of the Translator”, 1923).

XVI. Contextual architecture goes from the particular to the universal.

It understands difference; it does not produce difference.

XVII. Genius loci does not exist and, more importantly, should not be
invented.

87

1 For several centuries context was not the tangible condition determin-
“Context”, in Adrian Forty,
Words and Buildings: A
Vocabulary of Modern
Architecture (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2000),
132–35.
88
CONTEXT, ENFORCED
Fabrizio Gallanti
ing the cohesive body of architectural expressions and languages to
be followed (or to be opposed, eventually), nor was it the spontaneous
translation of the cultural values shared by a community into built mat-
ter. In fact, the word was absent from the architectural discourse. Its
surge in the early 1970s derives, as Adrian Forty has pointed out, from
two parallel trajectories. One was a fortuitous back-and-forth between
Italian and English involving the Italian concept of ambiente developed
by Ernesto Nathan Rogers in the late 1950s, its subsequent critique by
Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the City, the translation into English
of that word as “context” and then its return into Italian as contesto.
The second was Colin Rowe’s introduction of the term in 1966 in his
Urban Design programme at Cornell University. While Rogers’s and
Rossi’s interest was mainly historic (even if they diverged from one
another), Rowe’s was formal, proposing the possibility of extracting
a sort of geometrical guidance for new projects based on the reading
of urban morphology.1 Even if they are different, however, these three
positions are all characterized by an analogous lack of precision in
analyzing the historical processes and decisions that were at the base
of the development of urban contexts.
For Rogers, the ambiente is a sort of immanent reality that exists
before transformation by architectural design. Rogers writes of “pree-
sistenze ambientali”, quasi alchemical pre-existing conditions that are
composed of the urban fabric, traces of the past and monuments (and
sometimes the ruins of these). These “‘preesistenze”’ are just simply
there; one has to “feel” them and then translate this almost emotional
understanding into new design. Taking them into consideration almost
seems to be a matter of politeness, whereas, in actual fact, it is the
consequence of Rogers’s humanist attitude. For Rossi, this approach
was too weak, for it failed to consider architectural forms as concrete
abstractions of the economical processes underlying the evolution
of the city (a perspective inspired by Marxist theory). And for Rowe,
context was the background for design, the place in which to mediate
between modernity and tradition.
In fact, contexts – if considered as the combination of urban mor-
phology (in plan and elevation), materials and construction techniques,
typological repetitions and architectural languages – must be under-
stood as carefully crafted political projects.
Since the Renaissance, especially in strongly centralized states, the
city has been one of the principal sites of the expression of sovereignty
articulated by an intricate web of laws and regulations. The shape and 2
dimensions, alignment and character, and materials and finishings Qinghua Guo, “Yingzao
Fashi: Twelfth-Century
of buildings, and therefore the morphology of entire areas of cities Chinese Building Manual”,
have been the consequence of the application of construction regula- Architectural History 41
(1998), 1–13.
tions issued by different governing bodies at the state, provincial and
municipal levels. Regulation happened in the spaces that were not
directly invested by the symbolic appearance of the state as mediated
by architecture. Context has become the inescapable manifestation
of political authority, beyond the overly narrow economic rationale
insinuated by authors like Rossi. The rise of the nation-state in Europe
coincided with the rationalization of architecture and construction
under political and administrative control. This phenomenon had hap-
pened before in other places: in China in 1103, during the flourishing
of the Song Dynasty, the “Yingzao Fashi” – literally the “Treatise on
Architectural Methods or State Building Standards” – by the Chinese
intellectual Li Jie was adopted by the Emperor Huizong as a regulatory
document that established architectural canons for builders, architects
and literate craftsmen as well as for the different building agencies
operating under the aegis of the central government. Almost unique
in its genre, the book, which is organized into thirty-four chapters,
combined the scope of an architectural treatise with the regulatory
mandate of a legislative bill in text and drawings.2 Through the defini-
tion of specific architectural qualities, it was a tool for the expansion
of the Song Dynasty’s power.
In Europe, the affirmation of the directing role of the state in mat-
ters of architecture and construction appeared and gained strength
later than in China. It is particularly interesting to consider the specific

89
case of France, for the development of the administrative and legislative Facing page:
procedures applied to construction established in the Ancien Régime Frontispiece of Nicolas de
La Mare, Traité de la police
was to become the model for subsequent analogous endeavours, which (Paris: Jean et Pierre Cot,
were undertaken throughout the continent and then exported to 1705–10)
the colonies. Directly under the king’s authority, the jurisdiction of
construction, called the Chambre des bâtiments was established in
1268 at the end of Louis IX’s reign and was placed under the respon-
sibility of the Maçon du Roi, a magistrate responsible for overseeing
the construction and maintenance of the royal properties. But it was
not until the edict of 1607, issued by Henry IV, that strict rules were
enforced with reference to new constructions and urban organization.
Article 4 of the edict declared that both uncoated wooden structures
(pan de bois) and cantilevered balconies and rooms were prohibited
for fear of fire, and the alignment of streets’ profiles was introduced, 3
with particular emphasis on the verticality of façades. Already in The edict’s introduction
by Henry IV reads: “Ayant
1599 Henry IV had created the role of the grand-voyer, first assumed reconnu cy-devant combien
by Maximilien de Béthune, the first Duke of Sully. The responsibility il importoit au public
que les grands chemins,
of the grand-voyer was mainly to monitor the physical infrastructure chaussées, ponts, passages,
of circulation, making sure that bridges, roads, country paths, riv- rivières, places publiques
ers, public squares and streets were kept free of obstacles in order to et rues des villes de cestuy
nostre royaume fussent
guarantee an ease of movement.3 It is interesting to note that the first rendus en tel estât que,
principles of the regulation of construction derived from questions pour le libre passage
et commodité de nos
of mobility: the expansion of the centralized state’s political power sujets, ils n’y trouvassent
over its own territory was increased through axial and linear connec- aucun destourbier ou
tions, and what was built along their edges needed to be monitored empeschement; nous
avions à cette occasion,
and controlled. It is not a coincidence that between the 17th and 18th fait expédier nostre edict
centuries, the Baroque composition of the urban fabric and often of du mois de mai 1599, pour
la création du titre d’office
nature (e.g., the park at Versailles, but also entire regions, such as the
de l’estat de grand-voyer de
Black Forest), which were articulated with focal points and rectilinear France”; Henry IV, Edit́ sur les
axes, the first geographical surveys, measuring territories by triangu- attributions du grand-voyer,
la juridiction en matière de
lation and the introduction of construction regulations, all happened voirie, la police des rues et
at the same moment. chemins, etc. (December
1607).
The expansion of sovereignty through the creation of new legisla-
tive and administrative bodies was accompanied by an extension of 4
royal governance, not through the acquisition of new land, but rather An extended description
of the roles of the police
through an imposition of norms on land’s uses and form. Almost natu- in Paris, including building
rally, Paris became the testing ground for this process as well as the surveillance, is at the core
model for the epoch. It is important to note that the administrative of the notorious book by
Nicolas de la Mare, Traité
body mandated to control all constructions in Paris was the police, de la police (Paris: Jean et
which had extended responsibilities.4 In 1628 the function of the Pierre Cot, 1705–10).

91
5 grand-voyer was absorbed by the Bureau des finances. Then in 1667,
The pervasive level of control
can be perceived in several
decrees, for instance in the
“Déclaration du roi portant
règlement pour les fonctions
et droits des officiers de la
voirie”, issued 16 June 1693,
which opens with an explicit
obligation to communicate
and obtain approval for any
construction and includes
an extremely detailed list
of architectural elements
that are regulated because
they might have an impact
on public space: “Faisons
défenses à tous particuliers,
maçons et ouvriers, de
faire démolir, construire ou
réédifier, aucuns édifices ou
bâtiments, élever aucuns
pans de bois, balcons ou
auvents cintrés, établir
travails de maréchaux, poser
pieux et barrières, étais ou
étrésillons, sans avoir pris les
alignements et permissions
de nos dits Trésoriers de
France, à peine contre les
contrevenants de vingt livres
d’amende, pour lesquelles
permissions d’apposition
d’étais, pieux, barrières,
travails de maréchaux et
auvents cintrés, il sera payé
aux dits commissaires de
la voirie cinq livres. Toutes
permissions ou congés
pour apposition des objets
ci-après: Abat-jour, Appuis
de boutiques, Auvents,
Barreaux, Bouchons, Bornes,
Cages, Châssis à verres
saillants, Comptoirs, Contre-
vents ouvrant en dehors, Dos-
d’àne, Échoppes, Enseignes,
Établis, Étalages, Etaux,
Éviers, Fermeture de croisée
ou de soupirail ouvrant sur la
rue, Huis de cave, Marches,
Montants, Montoirs à cheval,
Montres, Pas, Portes,
Plafonds, Perches, Râteliers,
Seuils, Sièges, Tableaux”.
92
under Louis XIV, the “Ordonnance de police sur les pignons et pans
de bois”, inspired as a counter-measure after the Great Fire of 1666 in
London, determined the maximum height of street façades: 16 metres
from the ground to the cornice, a limit that still exists today in central
Paris. From 1783 to 1784, a series of royal edicts established for the
first time that the height of buildings was to be determined by the
width of the street. The succession of regulatory documents from 1667
until the late 19th century established precise modalities of control
over almost all actions related to construction, thereby determining
a significant increase in the administrative personnel assigned to
the tasks of monitoring the transformation of the city. The objectives
of these policies were twofold: on the one hand, they promoted the
symbolic value attributed to the beauty of the urban environment as
an expression of power, and on the other, they gave expression to the
control of the state on the modest scale of everyday life.5
Almost all regulations of the nascent nation-states in Europe
through the 18th and 19th centuries developed a technique of con-
trol by legislating buildings’ alignment, their dimensions in reference
to the amount of public space and the materials and construction
techniques with which they were built. Specialized corps dedicated
to the survey of new constructions were often created as part of police
forces with mandates that were more or less intrusive and authorita-
tive, depending on the organization of a given state.
Modern building codes in Europe and North and South America are
based on this previous accumulation of legislation, whose beginning
often dates back to the pre-capitalist period. Their sanitized technical
language comprising equations and written descriptions still embodies
a political strategy aimed at inscribing control and order in the built
fabric of the city through the use of geometry and other means associ-
ated with architecture. The operative tools, and often the material con-
sequences, of this historical process are still active today, although the
power of the state has often waned. Especially when operating within
the oldest cities, “context” or ambiente, or perhaps l’urbain, to revive
the notion of Henri Lefebvre, is neither a neutral scenario, to be read
only in its form, nor the embodiment of sometimes overly simplistic
derivations from economic theory. It is an articulated stratification of
which history has generated several variations through time and in
which conflict and oppositions are constantly morphing. Rather than
ignoring it, this is where architecture could find its greatest excitement.
 CUT-UP ARCHITECTURE:
TOWARD A UNITY OF TIME AND SPACE

Eric Lapierre

[A] characteristic of great art [is] that it just doesn’t force itself on you
at all, but rather completely merges with its context, almost vanishes in
nature. A Greek temple basically says that the olive tree standing beside
it is much more beautiful than it is; and, vice versa, the olive tree says
that the temple is much more beautiful. They are one and the same thing;
things interpenetrate each other. There is really a unity there which is not
present in such, how shall I say, run of the mill consumerism, because in
this, the love of something as art is not the primary thing. It is more of a
routine of commercial attitude.
Joseph Beuys, What Is Art? Conversations with Joseph Beuys, 2004

Today, contextual architecture has become a style. This situation is

paradoxical considering that we should be inclined to imagine that
a contextual attitude would lead to solutions that are well adapted to
specific situations, or “tailor-made”, and therefore difficult to associate
with a repeatable formal style. However, following Colin Rowe, and
after a biased reading of the work of Aldo Rossi, the lovers of the “stone
city” have confiscated the question of context. What is more, they tend
to make it meaningless by reducing it to a generalization of supposedly
traditional shapes that have been transformed into decorative ones by
contemporary construction techniques employed in geographic and
historic situations they have nothing to do with. An example of this
can be found in the Paris suburb near Eurodisney, where supporters
of typo-morphology have built fake Parisian or London city fragments
in the middle of nowhere.
In every architectural object two dimensions coexist: one referring
to a universal discourse on architecture and another that constitutes a

93
 response to the object’s specific local situation. The former addresses
the permanence of the discipline, while the latter is temporary; the
former makes reference to a universal language, while the latter draws
upon the vernacular language associated with a specific place. The work
of any architect could be characterized by the relationship between
these two aspects, or, in other words, by the distance the architect
maintains from the context in which he works, or by what we might
call “the depth of field” with which he defines that context.
The context is an image that the architect has the responsibility
of constructing. To take up a position in relation to a given context
consists of reducing context’s true complexity to a series of character-
istics that then create the image within which the new architectural
object will take shape. As a result, before a context is anything else, it
is first of all something imagined by the architect through the analy-
sis of factual data. The creation of this image imposes or determines
a depth of field that can be more or less significant. We can therefore
define two cases in which the contextual depth of field is minimal.
One is when adjustment is made to the immediate context without
a sense of critical distance such that a building only responds to the
trivial constraints of the site – i.e., the parcel’s shape, local planning
law, etc. – and almost literally apes the architecture of the neighbour-
ing buildings without transcending it as a result of loftier ambitions
or giving it new meaning. The other case is when adjustment to the
local context is made from a defined horizon that is clearly detached
from a blurred foreground – in other words, when a building only refers
to itself and ignores the place in which it has been built, i.e., when it
adopts a form that establishes no ontological relationship with its site.
In spite of their seemingly opposing natures, both of these attitudes
are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, for both involved the renuncia-
tion of a relationship between a building and its location.
This relationship, however, is the foundation of every complete
architectural act. Let’s propose the hypothesis that architecture, by
its very nature, is the privileged place of a mise en correspondance of
space and time, and that the main task of the architect is to condense
time into space. The relationship between the building and its context
accounts for the first form that this “temporal condensation” takes.
By definition, the context pre-exists the new building. But once that
building is constructed, it then belongs to that context, becoming part
of it. Thus, after construction begins, the building essentially melts
into itself. Pre-existing elements and new buildings both participate

94
in a single reality, so it is through its place in an existing context that
an architectural object performs its first temporal condensation, or,
in broader terms, that architecture proves its capacity for relating
past, present and future.
So, how should we insert a new architectural object into a given site?
What relationship should it forge with pre-existing elements in order to
make this temporal condensation feasible? Upon first consideration,
we can agree that the new building has to overcome the simple fact
of its newness in order to make it look like it has always been where
it is. The intended spatio-temporal alloy can then come into being.
A second observation immediately arises, however. The fact that a
building looks like it has always been where it is – that it never looks
totally new but instead possesses a degree of timelessness – cannot be
ascribed merely to its mimesis of its surrounding context. Contrary to
what has often been said, contextual architecture cannot be implicitly
reduced to the addition of camouflaging surfaces to new construc-
tions by following the supporters of Contextualism. Whether Colin
Rowe likes it or not, the question of context is not a gestalt one about
figure and background. The supposed conflict between the isolated
architectural object and the space in which it is found doesn’t actu-
ally exist. Many projects based solely on the correspondence between
figure and background have failed to be an extension of the city or to
blend naturally into their context, while in contrast Schinkel’s projects
in downtown Berlin demonstrate that a city composed of detached
objects can be very successful.
Similarly, we should consider the temple of Segesta as it can be seen
from the vantage point of the theatre built on the facing hill. This ruin
of sculpted stone, almost completed, rises up from the surrounding
maquis. The power of the Doric order manifested by the sturdiness of
the columns emerging from the ground like trees fills the landscape
and reaches the sky above. No mimicry is sought here, and yet the unity
of this man-made form with the nature that surrounds it still seems
fresh and tangible today. It is like the monastery of La Tourette, whose
inelegant grey shapes naturally find their place in the landscape of an
equally charmless countryside, or the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne,
whose geometry bends to adapt itself to the curve of the street in a
singular interpretation of Roman tradition without losing a sense
of coherence. The large residential building by Hans Kollhoff on the
KNSM Island in Amsterdam, the office building by Diener & Diener
on Basel’s Hochstrasse, the building by Auguste Perret on Raynouard

95
 Street in Paris, Max Bill’s Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, the
extension of Villa Garbald in Castasegna by Miller and Maranta, the
Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Allegre by Alvaro Siza – all of these
buildings, whatever their programme, were built in harmony with
their respective contexts.
This principle of unity is in opposition to the kind of contextual-
ism that is rooted in formal mimicry. All of the buildings cited above
share the fact that they are strong, clear, positive architectural works,
and this is even one of the reasons that make them truly contextual
projects. The fact that a contextual building looks like it has always
been where it is means that its presence has taken on an unquestion-
able, obvious character related to a form of imperious necessity that
has nothing to do with its literal formal identity or its neighbourhood.
This external coherence depends on an internal coherence, which
is what the integrity of an architectural form rests upon. A building
has to demonstrate its capacity to constitute its context in a powerful
way. Consequently, it should not dissolve into its context, as primar-
ily mimetic contextualist buildings do; rather, it must present a clear
formal intelligibility. We must then push this further and assert that
only an architecture that is formally strong and intelligible can be
truly contextual.
However, many architectural works correspond to this definition
but cannot be claimed to be contextual, for they don’t achieve the
requisite unity with their context. To achieve this unity, the project
must be the result of the significant depth of field mentioned earlier,
which is not what happens with either mimetic, non-critical buildings
or spectacularly “innovative” ones. In relation to their context, the
projects belonging to the latter category seem like part of a cadavre
exquis: they are similar to a word or preposition added blindly to an
already-begun sentence, which ends up being either nonsensical,
anecdotal or, more rarely, an enduring poem.
On the other hand, applying the literary notion of the cut-up, an
aleatory writing technique invented by Brion Gysin and experimented
with by William S. Burroughs, is a potential means of accomplishing
the desired unity of building and site. This process consists of using
scissors to cut up an existing text or multiple texts and then recompos-
ing the resulting pieces in a new configuration, changing the order of
fragments in an haphazard manner. The artists of the Beat generation
employed it to evoke the state of consciousness one experiences under
the influence of mind-altering drugs and, in particular, to reproduce

96
the spatio-temporal distortions that this state generates. Burroughs
has explained that when we experiment with this process of mise en
forme, we perceive that “some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts seem
to refer to future events”.1 The cut-up process also provokes the tem-
poral syncopes and spatial short-circuits associated with the feeling
of déjà vu, the strange sensation of recognizing an unknown space,
which is also linked to psychotropic experience.
These feelings of déjà vu and temporal condensation are at the heart
of architectural perception, which can be analogously compared to
Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which describes the return of a previ-
ously repressed – and thus, on a conscious level, forgotten – feeling in
response to a new stimulus. What results is the feeling of recognizing
something in what is actually an unfamiliar situation, thereby creat-
ing a ternary relationship between the known, the unknown and the 1
re-known.2 From a lecture entitled
“Origin and Theory of the
By scrambling and recomposing the elements of one or more texts Tape Cut-Ups” given by
in order to create a new text whose complexity and temporal depth William S. Burroughs at
the Jack Kerouac School of
are greater than those of the original sources, the cut-up constitutes a Disembodied Poetics at the
model for an architecture that is both powerful and truly contextual. Naropa Institute, 20 April
Indeed, in order to achieve the challenging contextual depth of field 1976; consulted at http:
//www.larevuedesressources
required to guarantee the unity of a building and its context, an archi- .org/IMG/mp3/Burroughs
tectural project must aim for a level of significative complexity that can -William_Origin-and-Theory
.mp3.
be likened to the mixing of formerly separate sedimentary layers of
intentions and references. Just like the pressure and high temperatures 2
that transform superimposed strata of sedimentary rock into homo- See Eric Lapierre, “La Beauté
du laid”, in Le Point du Jour:
geneous stone, the project’s approach allows the harmonization of the Une architecture concrète
multiple, sometimes conflicting intentions of which an architectural (Paris: Le Point du Jour and
EL Text, 2011); this was also
work is composed into a coherent architectural alloy. Architectural
published in English as “The
elements and apparatuses – some coming from a response to a con- Beauty of Ugliness” in Le
text considered in all its depth, and others from the process of giving Point du Jour: A Concrete
Architecture.
form to an autonomous shape that is coherent in itself – are joined
in an indivisible unity to create an object in which it is impossible
to distinguish that which is related to the internal coherence of the
shape from that which has come from a response to the context. In a
single object, the new building, through the unity of its apparatuses –
materiality, composition, form, typology, space, ambience, etc. – gives
shape to a coherent form and expresses a collection of relationships
with the various aspects of its context. What results is a sequence of
connotations that evoke relationships with the physical context of the
building and its purely architectural context, one after the other, in

97
 more or less explicit ways. The notion of a purely architectural context
refers to the fact that the ultimate setting of any architectural work is,
in fact, architecture itself: a building is always located not only in a
physical space, but also in a conceptual and historic one, for it neces-
sarily refers, whether consciously or not, to other buildings, which are
in turn related not merely to a physical space, but also to a group of
things constructed over time that constitutes the milieu from which
any new construction derives its meaning.
As a discipline, architecture operates by establishing links both
with its own history and with an imagined physical place that we have
come to call “context”. For this reason, only architecture that is strong,
clear and sometimes even brutal can truly be contextual. As a result,
only the spatial and conceptual coherence of a building can generate
its unity with its physical context. Seen from this perspective, a con-
textual architectural work is best likened to an alloy forged from the
unification of the universal history of architecture and a conjectural
response to a specific physical context. This alloy is what allows for a
mutual reinforcement of construction and context, and this mutual
reinforcement deserves to be pursued, because it is through this
fusion of reality into an indivisible whole that architecture achieves
a condensing of time into space and maintains its fundamentally
collective nature.

Facing page:
Temple, Segesta, 5th
century BC.
Photograph by Henri
Stierlin

98
 ARGUMENT VS. CONCEPT:
THE CITY IS NOT AN EGG
AN IMAGINED DIALOGUE
BETWEEN A TUTOR AND
A STUDENT
Federica Pau, Sabrina Puddu
and Francesco Zuddas
Tutor:
I am glad to see you again so soon. So, you decided to take
my class.
Student:
Yes, sir. I have found it very challenging and, as
you asked during our first meeting, I have already
started jotting down a few ideas for my project.
Actually, I must say that your request to “try to define
our approach” proved a bit difficult . . . Anyhow,
after analyzing the study area and looking at some
references, I think I’ve come up with a rather
convincing initial concept. Let me explain it briefly.
I’m planning a city for an initial population of half a
million, a new administrative centre for the region.
As migration from North Africa is likely to continue
in the years to come, my design hypothesis is that the
city has to be able to grow consistently, reaching three
million over the next fifty years.
So, the underlying question informing the project
is: how can we conceive a city capable of providing
for the possibility of its own growth while at the
same time proving capable of building a strongly
integrated and interactive multi-ethnic community?
That’s my aim. A highly connected and permeable
100
city, both within its own boundaries and in relation
to the surrounding region.
After brainstorming with a colleague of mine, a strong
concept emerged. I think it satisfies all the requisites
and stands as a guideline for the project: the selective
sponge.
Are you therefore imagining a city in the form of a
sponge?
Not at all! I don’t think that this concept should be
understood in terms of “image”. The point is not
to replicate the appearance of the sponge as a city
environment. Rather, I’m interested in how the sponge
performs.
I thought: the city’s not really comparable to a proper
sponge as it’s not meant to absorb everything. It’s
supposed to manage absorption through careful and
controlled selection. In my mind, it takes shape as
an organism capable of expanding and contracting
at need; cities go through periods of growth and
shrinkage, don’t they? Moreover, the sponge
concept, if we insist on that, could handle the issue of
ecology. The city, for example, could optimize water
consumption, perhaps by storing and gradually
releasing rainwater via a special technological
drainage system.
Here’s a quick sketch of what I was explaining before.
I tried to redraw the structure of a sponge, so as to
understand its spatial character. Is it clear?
[The student hands his sketchbook to the tutor.]
Absolutely. You want to design a city that performs like a
sponge. But, could you provide a reasonable explanation
for why the selective sponge as an urban model could be
the best option?
I think the answer, again, lies in understanding the
very way in which a sponge works as a formal structure
capable of supporting a community. Browsing on the
Web, I found an article in which a biologist describes
the sponge as a sort of welcoming city: “No matter . . .
the sponge, even the simplest have internal canals and
cavities through which currents of water continually
pass. . . . If various sizes of internal cavities are
available, why not colonize them? . . . When I remove
one of these sponges to study [it] under magnification,
I find all kinds of small creatures darting among
the pores that take in and expel water. . . . Some
inhabitants grow so large they can never again leave
the sponge, but that doesn’t seem to bother them
overmuch. Their eggs and larvae easily escape to join
the outside world of plankton and, if they survive,
they’ll eventually be drawn into another sponge during
their travels.” And then he concludes: “I wonder if there
are sponges anywhere in the world that do not support
a community of residents.”
Let’s try to reflect on this. What is it that you are
proposing, exactly? A city based on a conceptual model.
“Well, yes. Urban concepts are often used in designing
projects for the contemporary city.” [The student takes
a book from his bag.]
If you scan through this dictionary of advanced
architecture, and through other books, you find a
variety of urban and architectural proposals
described in terms of the concepts underlying them.
There’s the “pixel city”, and the “brain city”. The cell
city, the rhizome city, the swiss-army-knife city . . .
For example, as regards the concept of the city as
being made of pixels, I noted this quotation: “Pixels
are an operative strategy when we divide the space
of the project into equal parts for the purpose of
interacting with the environment by incorporating
sensors that cause the external stimuli to flow in an
orderly manner, as on a computer screen. The result
is always variable, never static.” The pixel structure is
that of a pattern based on a grid in which each single
piece, which is potentially different from the others,
contributes to the creation of an overall system. The
city, like an image made of pixels, is indeed dynamic by
definition, and differentiated, too.
Surely difference is a feature of a city. That is why last
time we had class I referred to the city by parts. However,
what you just said makes me wonder: why the sponge
and not the pixel? The point I want to raise, based on
a larger suspicion I have regarding the use of concepts
by architects and urbanists, is that there is a risk in
employing concepts as if they were interchangeable
possibilities drawn from a toolbox. But I do understand
why we use them. It relates to a more general and broader
problem: to what extent can we rely on things that
apparently belong to an outside realm? In other words, I
am questioning the very boundaries of the discipline we
are discussing. Where should an architect or urbanist
find the reason for his or her projects? What should that
reason be rooted in?
Well, maybe the point is not only what you consider as
a project’s origin, but also how you look at it.
Excellent point. Again, I understand the need
for concepts. I understand that there is a sort of
inevitability in looking beyond the discipline. Perhaps
the sponge, as a porous structure, has something
to teach us. I think that there are positive studies
that attempt to transpose the structural and formal
understanding of “organisms” – to employ the term you
used before – into projects for the human environment,
either on the scale of a single building or on the scale
of an entire city. But then you have to handle this
twofold shift carefully. It is a disciplinary shift, for
you are bringing something from outside the official
boundaries and vocabulary of architecture into play.
And even once it appears as if you are succeeding,
there is the issue of moving between different scales.
In other words: are you sure that the spatial structure
you perceive in a sponge is capable of handling the
complexity of the city and its project?
This is something I should put to the test.
It appears as if you are confident in the idea that a
single concept – in your case, the sponge – is capable
101
of handling such complexity. But, let me ask you
something: what is this thing we call “a concept”?
Well, “a concept” is a powerful idea that is also
connected to an image – an image with a strong
identity that is capable of knitting various systems
together. Isn’t it?
If I manage to keep the original concept in mind
throughout the whole design process, I may
avoid distraction, mistakes, incoherence . . . In
addition, I have found that it’s a powerful tool for
communication, because it allows us to explain a
project to a non-professional audience, precisely
because it’s not trapped within our discipline’s usual
boundaries.
That is correct. But then, we should be careful not to
confuse the communication of the project with the
project itself. Otherwise, we are simply designing
a motto. And that, unfortunately, I must say, is the
way in which we too often tend to describe projects.
Just like “the hand” and “the airplane” in the cases of
Copenhagen and Brasilia.
Yes, I get your point. And I also think that another
inherent risk is falling prey to the temptation of
playing a sort of game. Like when you use pick-up
sticks or dice to kick-start diagrams for a project! I
wonder if in such cases the “concept” has truly played
a driving role in the design process or whether it
has been used as you were suggesting, just as an a
posteriori communicative strategy.
Actually, we could also question whether playing with
pick-up sticks or dice to generate the form of the project is
an instance of using the concept a priori. But again, I do
understand the need for some kind of design stimulus,
and also for finding a tool that enables the synthesis
of the thousands of parameters involved in the design
process. All of this is clearly leading us to acknowledge
the complexity of a concept-based approach and, allow
me to add, the easiness of misusing it. This leads us to
102
the difference you were noticing, the one between using
a concept as an image or employing it as something from
which to derive structural principles or performative
rules. I definitely agree with you that treating the concept
as an icon is the most useless and simplified approach to
it. However, I also doubt the tendency of overestimating
it as a means for deriving structural principles or
performative rules.
That is something which is extraneous to architecture,
but from which we can extract a performative principle
that can also be applied to architecture . . .
Yet I feel that this question has yet to be answered:
what is a concept? If we don’t provide an answer, it is
impossible to continue this conversation, or your project.
Let’s begin with what I see as the primary limitation of
the common use of concepts: the idea that the concept
can synthetically solve all problems and challenges.
I am afraid to argue that it pretends to do it by means
of refusing to deal with complexity. That is because
its domain of action is different from that of the city in
its concrete existence. It is a parallel domain made of
images or simplified slogans that do not belong to the
realm of architecture and urbanism – sponges, pixels,
hands, etc. Would you not agree that the description of
Copenhagen’s plan as an open hand is at the very least
reductive and maybe even irrelevant? It is probably
an easy-to-communicate slogan, capable of holding
an attraction for a superficial and generic audience.
Nevertheless, it is not overly useful for someone like
you who is supposed to understand and engage more
deeply with the structure of the city and its principles of
construction and transformation.
You are referring to the need to understand the project
of the city as something that requires a broad scope of
reasoning, right?
Correct. Nevertheless, the reasoning should encompass
domains of economics, politics, philosophy . . . We
cannot pretend that a sponge helps us do that. Rather,
we should understand that the project for the city calls
for arguments rather than concepts. Indeed, I like to
perceive the theory of the city as being built through
argumentative reasoning.
Are we denying that conceptual models are still
useful in deciphering the city? I’m reading a book
that actually makes the opposite point. It argues
that because city theory is boring and complex, as
architects we are called upon to provide conceptual
modelling that can lend support to urban actors,
planners, politicians, developers . . . And it reminds
us how Cedric Price, too, for example, conveniently
described the city in history through the use of the
concept, the metaphor – that of an egg, in his case.
You see, I often feel that it has been the architect who has
contributed to the distortion of the proper notion of the
concept due to his anxious need to translate everything
into graphic form. As a result of this anxiety about
visualization and representation, the concept ends up
being reduced to an icon the size of a stamp. You find a
concept that you see is easy to communicate, to share.
Then you feel it is strong enough to use, and you dedicate
your energy to making every single aspect of your project
fit that original concept. A concept is not only a means of
communication, as we were saying.
A concept is the Universal seized by thought. It is
different from both the Particular and the image as it
cannot be reduced to unrepeatable specificity. So, for
instance, the concept of man does not correspond to
“this” man with his specificities. Rather, it relates to
the idea of man that we all share, thus allowing us to
communicate. Are you following me so far?
Yes. So, for instance, are Type and Typology the result
of a true conceptual attitude applied to architecture?
If we agree on the definition I just gave, which comes
from philosophy, then we could say they are.
What I want to warn you about is the need to think
about the project of the city as a strong critical
statement, or as an argument, and not as the distorted
version of a conceptual attitude.
For instance, we’ve mentioned the plan for
Copenhagen. Undoubtedly, this is often presented
in histories of city planning by its cover image: an
open hand, one palm and five fingers. However, such
an image – or concept, if you like – is the superficial
expression of an argument about the form of urban
living in post–World War II Europe. How can a midsize
European city define a scenario for its own growth,
one that is capable of responding to the challenges
of modernity and the need to reconstruct our idea
of urbanity? How can it cope with expectations of a
steep increase in urban population and of the growing
physical impact of communication infrastructure? The
“Finger Plan” provided an answer. And that cannot be
assumed to be completely embedded within the image
of a hand, not even in the form of a hand. Rather, it
argued that the boundary of what the city is as opposed
to what it is not can be redefined only if we go beyond
the dichotomy of urban and suburban understood as
two opposing realms. In trying to do so, the city becomes
a combination of settlements with some suburban
taste but conceived as an integral part of the “city”
in the “traditional” sense of the term – a dense and
diverse space for human living. This is the argument
that supported the real growth of the city in the decades
following the Finger Plan’s approval, constituting the
constant backdrop of successive projects. However,
since it was an argument, it also provided the
opportunity for us to question it. I am referring to the
fact that those successive projects were called upon
not to accept the form of a hand passively, but rather to
question the argument via reflections, interventions
or projects that work on the level of the Particular. So,
for instance, the development of housing typologies –
the collective residential dimension of what is located
far from the “centre”, in one of the linear extensions of
the urban fabric – is an attempt to evolve a reasoning
regarding sub-urbanity.
103
I get it. I see that my sponge doesn’t offer any
possibility for proper discussion, unless the discussion
is not sponge-centric. Which cavities of the sponge will
be inhabited, how to design the internal canals . . .
During our first meeting you already talked about
the notion of an argument, asking me to define
the argument underlying my project. I checked the
definition of “argument”. According to Wikipedia,
“In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt
to persuade someone of something, by giving reasons
or evidence for accepting a particular conclusion.
The general structure of an argument in a natural
language is that of premises (typically in the form of
propositions, statements or sentences) in support of a
claim: the conclusion.” In short, an argument is a sort
of debate, isn’t it?
I would not call it debate. Rather, an argument is
reasoning itself. Therefore, in broad terms, it constitutes
the grounds for debate rather than being the debate
itself. Strictly speaking, an argument corresponds to
a discursive method whereby statements are linked to
one another with the overarching objective of providing
evidence for and a reason behind a thesis. Argument thus
allows the advancement of discourse. It is multi-lateral –
it keeps more than one path of thought open. And at the
same time, it aims to impose and demonstrate a specific
perspective. Conversely, an image or slogan synthesized
by an a priori concept – or even one chosen a posteriori –
determines a reduction of a complex whole to a single
keyword that leaves little scope for debate. Urban
concepts persuade and stimulate agreement, not debate.
What do we do, then?
Well, if we now reconsider the application of conceptual
models to the project for the city, it is clear why the
universality of the concept interpreted as a capacity
for universal communication can be an attractive tool
for architects, and it explains the proliferation of an
attitude that relies on images imported from beyond
104
our discipline’s boundaries, or on words derived from
outside a disciplinary vocabulary. Conceived in this way,
urban concepts – and the architects who created them –
reduce universality to a simplified “creative gesture”.
Perhaps, we should first of all be wondering if there is a
universal answer capable of coping with the problem of
the city and its design. In your particular case, as well as
in many others, I would argue that this is extremely hard,
as the synthesis of universality requires the articulation
of very complex reasoning. We struggle with that, and
when we realize our defeat, we retreat into the concept.
It is like surrender. Do you think it would be better to
attempt to define a partial answer, then?
Probably, yes. Indeed, it could act as the starting point
for building an overarching argument.
So, how should I proceed? What should my next step
be?
I understand the difficulty of turning what we are
discussing into practice. Obviously, there is no such
thing as a universally valid approach. Anyhow, we have
a long list of “sources of inspiration” to draw upon, all
of which share a similar argumentative and critical
mode of reasoning. They are examples – either drawn,
written or built – of answers given mostly from within
our discipline’s boundaries to the various layers of
questions involved in the project for the city. They
either consider the city as a whole or a particular piece
of it, reminding us of the need for reasoning on multiple
scales simultaneously when dealing with the city. Have
a look at the list of references I gave you: The Rule and
the Model. Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital. Lafayette
Park. Gruen’s malls. Garden Cities of To-morrow. The
Berlin Block. The Seattle Public Library. The Viennese
Hof. Costa’s Plano Piloto. The Potteries Thinkbelt.
Delirious New York. L’unitè d’habitation. Collage
City. Mies’s Patio Houses. Amsterdam Zuid. The
Architecture of the City . . . I am sure you will resist the
temptation to conceptualize them!
 LIBERATING AND GOVERNING
MECHANISMS

Mark Lee

Liberating vs. Governing Mechanisms

In order to understand how paradigm shifts throughout the course
of history are affected by the changing roles of design mechanisms, it
is important to focus on the methodology of their applications rather
than on the degree of efficacy among the respective design mecha-
nisms. The question is not if one design mechanism is more valid than
another, but rather how the fundamental roles of these mechanisms
contribute to a larger discourse and reflect upon where architecture is
now. To forward this line of inquiry, it is useful to outline a framework
in which all design mechanisms fall into one of two categories, the

105

1 vicissitudes of the reception of Jackson Pollock’s drip technique.
See Ben R. Rich and Leo
Janos, Skunk Works: A
Personal Memoir of My Years
of Lockheed (New York: Back
Bay Books, 1996).
106
“liberating” or the “governing”. Liberating mechanisms free building
from constraints in order to enable the assertion of material form
while governing mechanisms build from the voids left by the process of
liberation in order to actively produce material form. While liberating
and governing mechanisms are typically perceived to be separate and
distinct, there are often moments when their delineation fluctuates. All
paradigm shifts occur when what are initially liberating mechanisms
evolve into governing ones. The dynamic relationship between liber-
ating and governing mechanisms in design can be illustrated by the
following examples from developments in aerospace, architecture and
painting: first, the technologies that led to the design of Lockheed’s
Stealth Fighter; second, the transformation of the utilization of Le
Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino in the design process; and third, the
Stealth Technology and Electrohydraulics
The two main technological developments responsible for the design
of Lockheed 117A, commonly known as the Stealth Fighter, are stealth
technology and electrohydraulics.1 Ever since the use of radar in war-
fare became ubiquitous, making big objects appear small within an
electromagnetic field became the priority of warplane design. Stealth
technology provided the ability to calculate the radar visibility of any
given two-dimensional configuration, thus allowing a three-dimen-
sional airplane to be designed from a collection of flat panels in which
individual radar signatures are incorporated in order to determine
the airplane’s total visibility. However, the implementation of this
breakthrough would not have been possible without the development
of electrohydraulics, a technology that aerodynamically improved the
airplane’s short tail and wingspan by executing thousands of tiny elec-
trohydraulic adjustments to the plane’s control surfaces. By freeing
airplane design from the tyranny of aerodynamics, electrohydraulics
enabled the implementation of stealth technology. Electrohydraulics
qualifies as a liberating mechanism, while stealth technology falls
into realm of governing mechanisms: the former technology paves
the way for another to create form, and the latter technology is built
on the success of the former.
Le Corbusier and the Maison Dom-ino
Liberating and governing mechanisms in design paradigms are not
always stable and clearly delineated. Their roles are in constant flux,
so that one mechanism could be used for liberation at one moment
in history but for generating form in another. The evolution in the
interpretation of Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino in architectural
debate is a clear illustration of this shift. Developed with the engineer
Max Dubois in 1914 as a structural system designed to free walls from
the responsibility of bearing load, Maison Dom-ino made way for
the “ineffable” curved walls of Le Corbusier’s early villas. While the
design was a liberating mechanism for the development of the free
plan at its inception, Maison Dom-ino was recuperated as a governing
mechanism by Peter Eisenman half a century later when he deployed
it as an abstract primitive for the transformation of interrelational
structures.2 Through a structuralist reading of the Maison Dom-ino
as a self-referential sign, Eisenman transformed what was once a lib-
erating mechanism enabling planimetric freedom into a governing 2
mechanism as an index of the transformational process. See Peter D. Eisenman,
“Aspects of Modernism,
Maison Dom-ino and the
Jackson Pollock and the Drip Self-Referential Sign” and
“Notes On Conceptual
The changing role of design mechanisms as they oscillate between Architecture, Towards a
being liberating mechanisms and governing ones over the course of Definition,” in Eisenman
time is critical to the understanding of paradigm shifts in design. Art Inside Out, Selected Writings
1963–1988 (New Haven and
critic Dave Hickey poignantly illustrated this point when he observed London: Yale University
how the reception of Jackson Pollock’s drip technique of the late 1940s Press, 2004).
was transformed from an emancipating exemption into a restrictive 3
mandate.3 When a photograph of a Pollock painting appeared on the See Dave Hickey, “The
cover of Life Magazine, it emanated the liberating message that the Heresy of Zone Defense,” in
Air Guitar (Los Angeles: Art
technique of dripping paint, which had previously been considered Issues Press, 1997).
to lie outside the norms of traditional painting, was being incorpo-
rated into the norms of painting. However, within a matter of a few
years, Hickey observed that in art schools the message shifted from
“It is okay to drip paint” to “It is bad not to drip paint, for it means you
have no soul!” For Hickey, it is important first to recognize that the
liberating mechanism that civilized us yesterday will inevitably seek
to imprison us tomorrow, and then to identify the precise moment
when a mechanism ceases liberating and begins to limit us.

The Diagram as Design Mechanism

From a historical perspective, one could construct a lineage of archi-
tectural mechanisms that came into prominence as liberating mecha-
nisms but then later became marginalized when they were mistaken for
governing mechanisms, and vice versa. If one takes into consideration

107
 the role of the architectural concept in recent advancements in design
research and theoretical inquiries, it becomes evident that it has gone
from being a liberating mechanism to becoming a governing one.
Surveying the architectural production of the last two decades, the
diagram has been transformed from the guiding principle for the
development of a design into the raison d’être of a building. Often in
the guise of a representation of a concept, buildings became subsumed
under an overriding concept and were constructed as built diagrams.
While the diagram as a mechanism once liberated the design process
from the hegemony of the traditional architectural parti, bringing the
promise of being less hierarchical, less rule-driven, more malleable
and more adaptable in order to accommodate contemporary needs,
it now imposes itself on the design process as its governing precept.
With architectural production suffering under the tyranny of the
diagram, the architectural concept, which used to be developed from
the contextualized parameters of a project, has been launched into
an orbit of its own.
In order to understand how this transformation of the architectural
concept occurred, it is helpful to examine a moment in history right
before it became detached from reality, a moment when the design
mechanisms of concept and context had a reciprocal relationship. This
particular moment in history can be illustrated through the lens of two
projects of divergent scales: Fire Station No. 4 in Columbus, Indiana,
and the residential block in the San Rocco district of Monza outside
Milan. Both projects were conceived in 1966, a year when their respec-
tive architects – Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi – published the treatises
that defined their respective careers, Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture and The Architecture of the City.

Fire Station No. 4

Robert Venturi and John Rauch began the design of Fire Station No.
4 the year Venturi published his “gentle manifesto”. Situated in the
suburbs along a highway punctuated by a “rhythmic foreground of
utility poles”, the plan’s trapezoidal shape directly reflected the shape
of the lot. The building’s plan consists of a simple distribution of the
programme, with a large “apparatus room” for fire engines on one side
and storage with living quarters on the other. In the centre between
the two halves is a hose-drying tower, which thus differentiates a
single large volume from a group of smaller ones with “almost equal
duality”. With a Gropius-like rigor in the expression of function, the

108
volume containing the storage and living quarters is lower in height
than the one housing the apparatus room for the fire engines.4
The apparent functionalism generated by the building’s orga-
nization belies Venturi and Rauch’s concept of projecting an image
of monumentality and civic grandeur onto a utilitarian building. In
order to convey the station’s importance as a public building, Venturi
and Rauch utilize the plane of the façade facing the street. First, a
parapet is extended from the lower volume to enhance the scale and
unify the front. Second, white-glazed bricks are applied in contrast
with the plain red construction bricks of the rest of the building. The
resulting symmetrical graphic design lends flatness to the façade by
being irreverent to the building’s apertures, which are placed and
sized in response to the building’s programme. This lack of depth is
enhanced by the sharp contrast with the depth of the garage doorway 4
and further reinforced by the truncation of the volume of the circular See Stanislaus von Moos,
Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown
hose-drying tower. The gold-leaf lettering of the number “4” in the (New York: Rizzoli, 1987).
manner of Robert Indiana at the top of the tower and the over-sized
flagpole on the front lawn complete the isolated façade by giving an
image of unity and monumental scale.
The use of a heuristic device as a design mechanism, in this case
the model of a city hall with a symmetrical façade anchored by a cam-
panile, underscores the primary design concept behind Fire Station No.
4. But what is significant about this project is that rather than adopt-
ing the diagram of a city hall, the diagram evolved naturally from its
programmatic context. The functional manifestation of the project –
the programme’s almost equal distribution horizontally and the
verticality of the hose-drying tower – already embodies the morphol-
ogy of the typical city hall diagram. Consequently, the alteration of
the façade of the utilitarian shed in order to achieve a sense of civic
monumentality never feels forced or out of context, as the richness
of the building results from the play between the functionally driven
model that the building needs to be, and the heuristic model of the
city hall that it strives to be.

The San Rocco Residential Block

Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi collaborated on the design of a residen-
tial block in the San Rocco district of the city of Monza the year Rossi
published The Architecture of the City and one year before Giorgio Grassi
published The Logical Construction of Architecture. Situated on the out-
skirts of the sprawling Milanese metropolis, the site is surrounded by

109

G. Grassi and A. Rossi, San
Rocco residential complex,
competition entry, 1966
5 dimensions of the courtyards are influenced by domestic and urban
See Peter Arnell and Ted
Bickford (eds.), Aldo Rossi
Buildings and Projects (New
York: Rizzoli, 1985).
6
See Rafael Moneo,
Theoretical Anxiety
and Design Strategies
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 2004).
110
a generic mixture of dilapidated residential and industrial buildings
typical of northern Lombardy, with an existing road bisecting the site
roughly in half. The organization of the residential complex is based
on the courtyard type, whereby a grid of two-storey housing blocks
defines a series of small courts. Two larger courts, four times the size
and twice the height of the others and more public in character, are
situated near the centre of the site. One sits next to the existing road,
while the other straddles it. A third larger court of the same footprint
but half the height is set alone in the northeastern area of the site.5
Rossi and Grassi’s original impetus to create “a precise and recog-
nizable form” displaying “absolute rationality” within the chaos of the
industrial suburb led to the imposition of a Roman grid. Combining
regional precedents with modern housing complexes, the forms and
architecture, from Lombard cloisters and farmhouses to the modern
Zeilenbau of the 1920s. The diagram of the grid field, while foreign
to the context of Monza, is grounded here by the familiarity of the
courtyard figure. The result is a dynamic coexistence of field and fig-
ure, where the field of small courts, with varying degrees of complete-
ness and incompleteness, form variations of enclosures and infinite
extension.6
The significance of San Rocco as a design precedent lies in two
specific design mechanisms that further ground and contextualize
the project. The first is the way one of the larger courts straddles
the existing road and engages in a tangential relationship with the
body of water. While the courtyard connotes a sense of finitude and
completeness, allowing the road to traverse through it suggests an
opening within the sense of closure and insinuates an extension
(which is reminiscent of Rossi’s proposal for the central business
district of Turin four years earlier). The second mechanism is the
slight offset of the entire southern portion of the grid in relation
to the northern portion. While the grid suggests a sense of infinite
extension, the offset transforms the field into a figure, with one
part asymmetrically mirroring the other (similar to Rossi’s later
proposal for the City Hall of Muggiò with its fractured symmetry,
a project not far from the original site of San Rocco). While the two
design mechanisms are external to the diagram of the grid, they
work reciprocally with the systems inherent to the grid, serving to
contextualize its repetition and segregation through individualized
spaces and variations in scale.
The Architectural Concept in Orbit 7
Jean Baudrillard categorized the phenomena of Third World debt, See Jean Baudrillard,
“Transeconomics”, in idem,
the nuclear arms race, the stock exchange and the population time The Transparency of Evil
bomb as “orbital” structures, structures that have left the immediate (London and New York:
Verso, 1993).
contexts in which they were formed to follow orbital trajectories of
their own.7 A case in point is the stock market, which has crashed two 8
times in the 20th century, once in October 1929 and then almost sixty One could compare Fire
Station No. 4 with Venturi
years later in October 1987. Although the Black Monday crash of 1987 and Scott Brown’s National
surpassed the magnitude of the 1929 crash in many ways, it had much Football Hall of Fame of
1967, and the San Rocco
less of an effect on the local economy than the post-1929 Depression. residential complex
Baudrillard reasoned that the gap between imaginary economies and with Rossi’s San Cataldo
real economies had grown so far apart over the sixty years between Cemetery in Modena of
1971 as examples of the
the two crashes that the stock market no longer referenced the real architectural concept
economy, and had therefore assumed an orbital trajectory. Baudrillard adopting an orbital path.
further argued that such rogue trajectories exist as parallel universes
The author would like to
to their local contexts, develop autonomous values and economies thank Yvonne Fissel for the
and, in the event of a catastrophe, have little or no relationship to their drawings of Fire Station No.
4 and San Rocco residential
contexts of origin. To borrow Baudrillard’s framework, the world of complex and Lindsay
architectural concepts has similarly flown off on an orbital path in Erickson for in the editing of
the text.
contemporary architectural discourse. It has reached a state of auton-
omy in which tangible context has been transformed into conceptual
context, and in which a set of real circumstances has been replaced by
one of intangible ideas. The precedents of Fire Station No. 4 and the
San Rocco residential complex provide a model for what architecture
could be before the architectural concept became disengaged from
reality and went into orbit.8 They serve as a reminder of the potency of
the architectural concept when it is at the threshold between liberat-
ing and governing mechanisms.

111
112
 VENTURI’S FIRST

Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

In the addendum of his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,

a joyful and artistic treatise on the possibilities of architectural lan-
guage and form, Robert Venturi includes a small body of his early
work. Next to the vastly published Guild House and the iconic Vanna
Venturi House, a modest building of eccentric intensity stands out:
the North Penn Visiting Nurse Association Headquarters, Venturi’s
first built project.
The Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) Headquarters is in many
ways an ordinary building. Located in Ambler, Pennsylvania, a small
town near Philadelphia, it was built in 1960 as a typical small-town
doctor’s house. Like almost every publicly functioning building in
suburban America, it has an adjacent car park with a footprint equal
in size to its own.
Despite its everyday use and context, it is an utterly strange yet
extremely ambitious building. While the Guild House and the Vanna
Venturi House seem highly cultivated and fully worked out, the VNA
Headquarters exudes rawness and energy.
Built against a slope, the massing of the building seems to be
developed from the rear. Anchored only by its right angle, the structure
seems to leap forward towards the street. A chain of interconnected
autonomous planes forms its distorted shape. The resulting plan has
a loose gentleness without being overtly expressive. Yet as a volume,
the building develops a powerful volumetric presence. It appears to
be put together by a series of paper-thin independent façades, each
possessing an intense surface tension. The roof’s extra-thin edging
board and the delicate windowsills make the building appear fragile
and unreal, calling more to mind a model than a building.

113
 The main entrance, located in a full-height recess, is the only inter-
ruption of the continuous surface of the façades. Here, Venturi creates a
grand entrance situation by mounting an arch on two diagonal beams,
shielding the actual entrance doors, which possess an institutional
matter-of-factness.
Its rectangular internal organization is sober and contrasts with
the building’s complex, distorted perimeter. It is a simple plan con-
sisting of a central corridor with three rooms facing the street and one
large room at the rear. According to Venturi, the building is designed
“from the outside in”. The main entrance is pushed toward the centre
of the house. It is unclear whether the half-flight of stairs is forcing
the corridor into a detour or whether it is being brutally pushed into
a once larger hall. The loggia motive on the front façade forms space
for poché-like cupboards that mediate the angular corners and give
the façade an appearance of depth.
The street front is clearly articulated as the building’s principal
façade with a central recessed window resembling a loggia. It is con-
ceived with an underlying symmetrical intention recalling the façade
composition of Venetian palazzi. There as here, loggias and windows
create local symmetries, which together form powerful contrasts
between plasticity and surface. Here the loggia is flanked by two open-
ings of different dimensions, one of which is blind. The small basement
windows have delicate borders making them seem larger and flatter.
These window pairs create visual supports for the large openings on
the main floor, creating somewhat of a piano nobile. Their flatness
emphasizes the paper-thin surface quality of the plaster façade and
creates a contrast to the powerful volumetric insertions of the tri-
partite window motif. Venturi’s treatment of the façade’s surface as
a thin membrane devoid of any materiality recalls some of the villas
by Andrea Palladio in the Veneto with their tense plaster surfaces and
sparse decoration. Venturi and Palladio both wanted to reintroduce
powerful architectural elements into their buildings. Both understood
that in order not to overburden their buildings with architectural
pathos, they needed to stress the thinness of their plaster façades,
thereby giving their buildings a delicate, almost fragile appearance.
The VNA Headquarters is an ephemeral building that remains
difficult to grasp. It survives only in a series of elegant black-and-
white photographs taken by George Pohl shortly after its completion.
Still, the set of Pohl’s photographs is confusingly inconsistent. In the
early pictures, the deep wooden window reveals on the street façade

114
are painted white and appear as folded-in planes, in continuation
with the thinness of the façade. The later pictures, however, show the
reveals painted in a dark colour. The result is a reading of the window
openings as being carved out of a mass, with the façade covering the
building like a mask. Strangely, both readings of the building seem
to coexist successfully.
While the Guild House has survived and the Vanna Venturi House
has been lovingly taken care of, the VNA Headquarters has met a
comparatively unpleasant fate, for a brutal extension and a recent
thoughtless renovation have defaced Venturi’s early masterpiece
beyond recognition.
In this building, Venturi shows a keen interest in infusing his pro-
jects with the richness and subtlety of pre-modern architecture. He
shows us that it is possible to meld contemporary pragmatism with a
cultural ambition that sees history as a frame of reference. Architecture
is about what buildings can become, and not about what buildings
can demonstrate. In Venturi’s projects, the relationships between the
elements are, in fact, architectonic, not conceptual.
Even though Charles Jencks called the building the “first anti-
monument of Post-Modernism”, its design is not yet restricted by
the theoretical preconceptions of postmodernism. Its architectural
elements are woven into the building’s fabric; they are neither self-
conscious nor mere decoration. Here Venturi uses historic precedents
without having to apply “symbolic” elements, and without the “every-
day”. The North Penn Visiting Nurse Association Headquarters is not a
“decorated shed”; rather, it is a simple building infused with complex
architectural ideas. It is such a wonderful building precisely because
it avoids the rhetorical use of architectural elements that is central to
the later Venturian discourse. As a result, the building is hence time-
less and does not seem to age.

115

1 Alison Smithson published the first atlas1 describing “how to recog-
The exhibition (and
catalogue) titled Atlas
¿Cómo llevar el mundo a
cuestas? revisited the theme
of the atlas in the work of
Aby Warburg. The collection
of images around a field can
be systematic or not, but
either way it represents a
framework by itself, one
imbued with the author’s
personal view of the world.
Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, November
2010–March 2011.
2 the mat-building has a defined horizontal character4 and a high inter-
See Alison Smithson, “How
to Recognize and Read
Mat-Building: Mainstream
Architecture as It Has
Developed towards the
Mat-Building”, Architectural
Design (September 1974),
573–90.
3
See Bernard Rudofsky,
“Architecture without
Architects: A Short
Introduction to Non-
Pedigreed Architecture
(New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1964).
116
BEING IN-BETWEEN:
THE AMSTERDAM MUNICIPAL
ORPHANAGE BY ALDO VAN EYCK
Ariadna Perich Capdeferro
nize and read mat-buildings” in 1974.2 One of the examples she chose
was the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage (1955–60) by Aldo van Eyck.
Although she would have been able to use documents of the finished
work to illustrate it, she selected an aerial view of the project during
the construction phase instead. This image of the building process, in
contrast with the saturated and model-like image seen in the photo-
graphs reproduced most often, looks like a city-architecture of objec-
tive forms, seemingly at once inhabited, completed and timeless. This
interpretation emphasizes that the orphanage is part of the vernacular
architectural tradition.3
According to the definition in Smithson’s article, the architecture of
connection and association of all its parts, and is supposed to be able
to grow (or decrease) in size and transform itself over time. Instead of
reducing certain projects to the idea of an archetype, Smithson pre-
sents the mat-building as an open structure that focuses not so much
on the final form, but on the system of rules that shapes it. Within the
collected genealogy of mat-buildings, the different projects are either
developed through the use of a mesh, or net, or by additive methods of
composition, like the accumulation of elementary units. How, then,
does an architecture that has been essentially formulated via internal
logics behave when it has to confront the specificities of a site?
In the case of mat-buildings, this confrontation between the archi-
tectural object and its surroundings becomes particularly interest-
ing due to the systematic conditions of its structures. In some of the
attempts to classify the types of relationships between architecture
and the city that establish the big urban blocks with functional 4
content in modern architecture,5 mat-buildings have often been Shadrach Woods first
called this type of building
placed in the category of almost self-sufficient entities analogous to a “groundscraper”, in
a city. This characteristic turns them into buildings of a somewhat allusion to its horizontal
nature and potential for
ambiguous character, particularly in the way that they relate to their endless expansion, at the
site. On the one hand, they are autonomous objects because their Berlin Team 10 meeting
morphology is closely linked to their inner structure; on the other, (also known as “the matrix
meeting”) in 1973.
they have the potential to adapt themselves to any context because
they originate not from a fixed shape, but from a system of spatial 5
See Oriol Bohigas,
relations. This duality ascribed to the idea of the mat-building has “Variaciones de Hertzberger
resulted in the production of both splendid projects and dramatic sobre temas del Team
failures. The case of Van Eyck’s orphanage belongs to the first group, 10”, Arquitecturas Bis
(January 1976), 22–26; and
for here the neutral concept of the mat-building has been applied to idem, “Aldo van Eyck or a
and altered by the concrete characteristics of the site without losing New Amsterdam School”,
Oppositions 9 (Summer
its structural order.
1977), 21–36.
Aldo van Eyck received the commission for the project in 1954 from
Frans van Meurs, the Director of the old Municipal Orphanage, in large 6
Jan Wils, Olympisch Stadion
part because of the client’s interest in the school and playgrounds that Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
Van Eyck had designed previously. The site of the new orphanage is a Holland, 1928.
plot situated on the southwest edge of the city, far from the old one,
7
which occupied a former monastery building in the city centre. Van Herman Hertzberger,
Eyck’s interpretation of the site content is summarized in a beautiful Centraal Beheer, Apeldoorn,
Holland, 1968–72.
site plan diagram. This drawing, formed by a circle with its centre at
the entrance of the orphanage and a diameter of approximately 500 8
meters, includes a fragment of the Olympic stadium6 in the upper part, At the meeting in Otterlo,
Aldo van Eyck presented four
a canal, two streets (one of which is an important route to the centre of his current projects; the
of the city and the airport) and four parallel lines representing the orphanage, which was then
still under construction,
flight path of the airplanes flying diagonally over the plot. The project was one of them. See Oscar
is represented with the building’s footprint drawn in black, showing Newman (ed.), CIAM ’59
the proposal’s perforated character and irregular perimeter, as well in Otterlo (Stuttgart: Karl
Krämer, 1961), 26–34.
as the corner position that the volume assumes on the site.
We could say that using the concept of the mat-building in such
surroundings is already in itself a contextual response on Van Eyck’s
part. The 336 small domes of the roof not only cover and unify the
gamut of spaces he created for the children, but also establish a scaled
and direct dialogue with the large oval of the stadium. The architec-
ture of the orphanage protects but doesn’t exclude the children from
the outside world, and it is conceived as an intense configuration of
intermediary places that try to articulate all the transitions by means
of defined in-between spaces.8

117

Following pages:
p. 119 The structure
on the roof: open plan
and modular extension.
Drawing by Ariadna Perich
p. 120 The structure on
the ground floor: walled
constructions and the
space in-between. Drawing
by Ariadna Perich
p. 121 The enclosed space
of small objects and sites.
Drawing by Ariadna Perich
118
Because of the juxtaposition of demands that Van Eyck incorpo-
rates into the built form, the orphanage can be seen and explained
as many different buildings at the same time. In contrast with other
projects – such as the Centraal Beheer offices by Hertzberger,7 where
the built form emerges directly from the repetition (and stacking) of
a module that was previously defined as a constructive, spatial and
functional unit – with the orphanage, the modular extension and
open plan suggested by the reticular framework of the roof don’t cor-
respond to the actual spatiality of the ground floor, which is generated
by a concatenation of enclosed spaces (like walled structures) gathered
around the entrance square; the grid structure draws together these
various and dispersed elements but doesn’t entirely define their form.
This reading needed to be represented with drawings of the orphan-
age that didn’t exist before. These documents try not only to describe
the ethos of the project, but also to contribute new interpretations of
it, knowing that they themselves structurally transform the original.
Van Eyck specifically anchored this large house/small city to the
northern edge of the plot. There, he located the entire administrative
program, and by splitting it in two, he generated the large space of
the entrance. The longitudinal volume of the teachers’ apartments
on the first floor formed a wide porch, one of the first thresholds the
children would have to cross in order to go in or out. Then an internal
corridor – which had the same qualities as an open-air street, in both
a physical and functional manner – provided access to and enhanced
the cohesion between the different classrooms. These staggered units,
like courtyard houses overlooking the main garden, multiplied the
experiences at the perimeter of the building by generating a sequence
of intermediate spaces, porches and patios that also mediated the
transition between inside and outside. Inside these units, a marvel-
lous and carefully planned collection of small objects and places (a
puppet theatre, a small kitchen, a stage, etc.) provided for, as Van Eyck
called them, those “necessary” and “necessarily nice” things that all
kids should be able to do. By isolating this range of artefacts, which
also modify the topography of the floor in an inverse operation with
respect to that of the domes in the ceiling, we get an impression of
the orphanage as a large exterior playground enclosed and covered
by a porch. Here instead the games gained interiority and played
an important role in the configuration of the building as a kind of
a micro-community superimposed on the structural and construc-
tional principle of the roof.
119
120
121
 As a perfected combination of Van Eyck’s previous design experi-
ences and the nature of the site, the proposal for the orphanage suc-
cessfully explores some of the potentialities of the mat-building in
relation to the question raised at the beginning of this discussion.
Among other things, the project introduces centrality into a structure
whose nature is to expand horizontally, interweaves two spatial sys-
tems (represented by the ground-floor and roof plans) and reconciles
all the conflicting polarities brought into play by the programme and
the site by using the in-between spaces.
The Orphanage under the The orphanage then, in contrast to how it seems at first glance, it
trees, waiting. is not a preconceived object dropped onto the site, but an architecture
Photograph by Maarten
Neering that lies perfectly in-between.

122
 PARALLEL CONVERGENCES:
TWO EXAMPLES OF ARCHITECTURE’S
RESILIENCE IN THE STRUGGLE
BETWEEN CONCEPT AND CONTEXT

Guido Tesio

Giuseppe Valadier and Gottfried Semper are two very different archi-
tects – respectively probably the most conservative and the most pro-
gressive of their time. Despite this, the projects for the Piazza del Popolo
in Rome (1793–1822) and the Zwinger Forum in Dresden (1836–78)
display an unexpected affinity. Both Valadier and Semper operated
in binding physical and dramatic historical contexts, and, ironically,
they ended up operating in the same manner.
Both Valadier and Semper were forced by the circumstances in
which they were obliged to work to expose their concepts to an endless
tour de force of renunciations, revisions and compromises. Reality
broke through, or simply provided resistance through its sheer exist-
ence, erasing previous possibilities, increasing limitations and rede-
fining the frame within which the architects operated. The context –
comprising a mix of existing buildings, erratic patronage and unpre-
dictable events – functioned as a violent force from both the past and
the present confronting the architects, goading Valadier to be far less
conservative and Semper far less radical than they probably would
have liked.
Although both Valadier and Semper tried to resist it, the context was
simply stronger than they were. In the end both of them accepted this
and, without surrendering, adapted to their respective circumstances
with surprising intelligence, pragmatism and opportunism in order
to create urban ensembles that are much more powerful and far less
predictable than we might have expected. Even if Valadier and Semper
could not do what “had to” be done, the context provided them with
the opportunity to produce projects that display what architecture
can surprisingly be.

123
 In opposition to the rhetoric of the “concept” that reduces architec-
ture to autistic performance and deprives it of any ambitious (social)
dimension, the story of Valadier’s and Semper’s architectural enter-
prises reveals that architecture displays its true potential only once
it is exposed to reality in all its fragility.

I
In 1793, Giuseppe Valadier submits his first draft for a new arrange-
ment of the Piazza del Popolo in Rome to the pope. The square, which
lies within the northern gate in the Aurelian walls between the Pincian
Hill and the Tiber, has already been the site of ambitious interven-
tions by Michelangelo, Della Porta, Bernini, Fontana and Rinaldi,
and after serving as the main representative gateway to the city over
the preceding four centuries, it has now become the booming centre
of the urban expansion of Rome.

In 1836 Gottfried Semper is asked to design the pedestal for a statue of

King Friedrich August I to be placed in the courtyard of the Zwinger,
the court’s festival arena in Dresden. The architect is called upon to
revise an earlier proposal by Schinkel, but he seizes the opportunity
to propose a much more ambitious scheme for the area stretching
between the Zwinger and the River Elbe that directly faces the main
institutional and representative buildings of the city: the Court Palace,
the Hofkirche and the Schinkelwache (guardhouse).

II
Valadier’s first project is fully in line with the Renaissance tradition
of the square. Two narrow wings join the latest homes on the Via del
Babuino and Via Ripetta, with the gate designed by Bernini reproduc-
ing the same trapezoidal shape originally envisioned by Rinaldi to be
a support for the churches of Santa Maria in Montesanto and Santa
Maria dei Miracoli. The wings house two military barracks and frame
the void of the square with a continuous architectural perimeter.
Going even further than his predecessors in his faithfulness to the
Renaissance ideal, Valadier also proposes raising the obelisk intro-
duced by Sixtus V in front of the fountain designed by Fontana over an
arched pedestal in order to restore a perfectly centralized perspective
of the square when viewed from the entry gate.
Many reasons lead to the project’s rejection, but we can easily sup-
pose that among the problems was the fact it appeared too conservative –

124
even for the Pope – especially if compared with many other contem-
porary proposals inspired by the new “revolutionary” French taste.
Valadier seems to be committed only to the pursuit of his own private
agenda. The introduction of the barracks is absolutely specious, com-
ing as it did from the program of a competition for the area dating to
1773, not to mention the unrealistic proposal of raising the obelisk.
While the city is seeking a venue for public and social life, Valadier is
proposing a monumental gateway for a city that in the meantime has
expanded beyond it.

Given Dresden’s long-standing need for an opera house, Semper’s first

design proposes placing a new theatre north of the area near the river
and linking it to the existing Zwinger complex with a narrow orangerie,
thus imposing a radically new order upon the site. The statue would
be placed in the centre of the old courtyard, while a series of other
sculptural monuments would be located along the new main axis of
the Forum, running perpendicular to the orangerie. The arcuated
shape of Semper’s theatre reacts with the concavity of the Zwinger’s
courtyard. The connection between the two poles is entrusted to a
linear element, the orangerie, which also defines a straight boundary
between the Forum and the gardens beyond. On the eastern side of
the area, the angled position of the Hofkirche and the Schinkelwache
introduces into the project a balanced dialectic between old and
new. Demonstrating his great persistence, Semper travels to Berlin to
submit the project to Schinkel, who, in turn, convinces the Dresden
theatre director to put pressure on the King. Despite the many objec-
tions raised about entrusting a relatively inexperienced architect with
such a prominent commission, the authorities approve the project in
1838. Nevertheless, during construction, the theatre is moved closer
to the Zwinger, and moreover, due to a lack of money, the orangerie
linking the theatre with the Zwinger is not realized, thus irremediably
compromising Semper’s urban vision.

III
In 1798 the French troops led by Napoleon march to Rome and pro-
claim the Republic. In order to curry favour with the new patrons in
town, Valadier cooperates with the army in the selection of works of
art to be taken from the Vatican and brought to Paris. Once again in
1810, in order to overcome a rival architect in his attempt to be named
the official architect of the new government, he sends a project for

125
Valadier 1793
7 10

6 8

4 5

3
9

Valadier 1811

Valadier 1816-22

1 Gate
2 Santa Maria del Popolo
3 Obelisk
4 Santa Maria in Montesanto
5 Santa Maria dei Miracoli
6 Via del Babuino
7 Via del Corso
8 Via di Ripetta
9 Pincian Hill
10 Tiber

0 50 100 200 m

126 N
Piazza del Popolo to Paris that envisions a huge garden dedicated to
Napoleon linking the Tiber and the Pincian Hill. This new proposal
radically differs from the one of 1793. The project – which necessitates
the demolition of the houses adjacent to the convent of Santa Maria
del Popolo as well as those located between the square and the Tiber –
completely distorts the original organization of the Piazza del Popolo
by introducing a transversal east–west axis perpendicular to the his-
torical north–south one. Valadier’s efforts demonstrate surprising
opportunism and pragmatism, but despite his professional cynicism
he still seems unable to fully escape his aesthetic prejudices and make
the radical move toward contemporary taste, which implies a new con-
ception of public space in terms of scale and the relationship between
architecture and nature. A certain ambiguity pervades Valadier’s sec-
ond draft. The architect superimposes the detailed design of a fence
connecting the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and a new building
at the beginning of the Via del Babuino on the park stretching from
the hill to the river, which he simplistically treats as a flat green sur-
face. This ensemble is then mirrored on the west side, thus preserving,
at least in plan, the trapezoidal, elongated shape of the square. The
demarcation of this shape is entrusted exclusively to the placement of
the two fences, which recall the organization of the original project by
Rinaldi that he had incorporated in his first design in 1793. In order
to impose an even greater sense of north–south symmetry, he also
suggests modifying the façade of Santa Maria del Popolo (designed
by Bernini) according to the aesthetic of the other three proposed
buildings. The project, which is initially approved by imperial decree
in 1811, undergoes endless modifications. The French committee
overseeing the project would like a scenographic design inspired by
the Place de la Concorde or Versailles, while Valadier is putting all of
his effort into trying to preserve the appearance that the context has
acquired after centuries of purely architectural intervention; while the
committee pushes for an absolute dissolution of the boundaries of the
urban space, Valadier works to achieve a clear definition of its edges.
Valadier’s inability to realize this radical transformation leads to his
dismissal from the project in 1812 and his replacement by the French
architect Louis-Martin Berthault. The new architect is decisive in the
introduction of a double semi-circular concavity centred around the
obelisk. He also concentrates on the aspects his predecessor had left
unresolved – beginning with a detailed design of the access to the park
over the Pincian Hill – envisioning a reinforcement of the slopes of the

127
 hill with a series of ramps to the west and a semicircular arrangement
of trees to the east.

Semper proposes his second comprehensive design for the Zwinger

Forum in 1842, after years of proposals concerning the project for a
new art gallery – a new edifice that, like the theatre, has long been
considered an important priority for the city. Although the site initially
favoured by the authorities is located on the east bank of the Elbe,
Semper produces many designs proposing different locations for the
building, all of them centred around the Zwinger complex. When the
King asks another architect to build his new orangerie in a different
location away from the site – thereby eliminating the architectural
link with which Semper hopes, sooner or later, to connect the thea-
tre to the Zwinger – Semper responds by integrating a new project for
the art gallery – envisioned as an extension of the eastern wing of the
Zwinger – with a narrow storage building connecting the theatre with
the western hemisphere of the complex. The Schinkelwache would then
be removed from its original location and placed northward along the
river. The design also foresees an alternative location for the gallery
outside the western hemisphere of the Zwinger, radically differing from
the previous one. Compared to the project of 1836, the court area of
the Forum is now almost doubled. The location of the new art gallery
opposite the storage building and the consequent displacement of the
Schinkelwache emphasize the regular and symmetrical set-up of the
Forum, providing the project with a much more monumental feel. Any
relationship between the city and the Forum is now precluded. The
art gallery defines a rigid boundary in the east–west direction, while
the Schinkelwache, centred at the end of the main axis of the Forum,
breaks the visual connection with the river.

IV
In 1814, the French government leaves Rome and the pope regains
control of the city. Berthault’s project has reached an advanced stage
of completion by this point, and Valadier is entrusted with its oversight
once again. He has no choice but to accept Berthault’s semicircular hol-
low scheme, and therefore focuses on achieving a clear definition of the
four corners – beside the arches – that delimit the square. He designs
the buildings that provide the scenography of the twin churches. He
also introduces a low structure along the flank of Santa Maria del
Popolo. He designs the links between the Via Ripetta, the Tiber, the

128
 4
Semper 1836

5 7

Semper 1842
4

2 1

4 Semper 1851-78

3
2

1 Zwinger
8 1
2 Schinkelwache
3 Hofkirche
4 Court Palace
5 Santa Maria dei Miracoli
6 Via del Babuino
7 Via del Corso
6 8 Via di Ripetta
9 Pincian Hill
10 Tiber

0 50 100 200 m

N
129
 Gate, the hill and the Via del Babuino, the fountain around the obelisk,
the statues and bas-reliefs that adorn the fountains at the centre of the
semicircles and the rostral columns on the side of the Pincian Hill. The
final result is surprisingly powerful. Given the dominant park–river
axis imposed by Berthault, the Piazza del Popolo appears irremediably
alien to the Renaissance and Baroque context of the city. Nevertheless,
through the careful placement of the different elements, Valadier man-
ages to introduce a strong sense of architectural order into the square.
The conflict between the historic north–south axis and the east–west
axis of the park is magisterially resolved. The obelisk, now surrounded
by a new fountain, has become the centre of the whole design. Two
fountains at the centres of the semicircles provide a counterpoint to
the gate and the twin churches on the opposite side of the square. The
statues and bas-reliefs that adorn the fountains enhance the sense of
enclosure, defining a clear visual boundary between the square and
the park. Contrary to what Berthault proposed, here nature is used to
underscore the geometry of the square, as a curtain shaping the void
and hiding, on the west side, the disparate façades of the buildings
beyond. At the same time, the rows of cypresses following the line of
the two semicircles give the illusion that the space is expanding toward
the park, thus providing the square with an unexpectedly dynamic feel
lacking from all of Valadier’s earlier proposals, yet always envisioning
a rigid balance of purely architectural elements.

In 1846, after ten years of attempting to promote his vision in the face
of innumerable bureaucratic and political obstacles, objections to
Semper’s project are raised once more, ranging from the risk of fire
resulting from the proximity of the buildings to the excessive amount
of money required for relocating the Schinkelwache and obtaining
more land. As a result, the enterprise fails once again. Moreover, in
1849, after producing a new proposal, the relationship between Semper
and his patrons dissolves. After having taken part in the uprisings that
had swept through Dresden, the architect, a committed republican,
is forced to leave the city. In the end, Semper’s final scheme for the
Zwinger Forum is only completed in 1878, including a new theatre
built under the supervision of Semper’s son after the original burned
down. The result of this unlucky sequence of compromises and defeats,
however, is surprisingly pleasant and shows, despite Semper’s disap-
pointment, unpredictably positive qualities. The art gallery is rotated
by ninety degrees, closing the northern side of the Zwinger courtyard.

130
The fundamental link – at least in the eyes of its designer – between
the theatre and the court complex is removed, and the Schinkelwache
is not displaced. By simply closing the Zwinger’s courtyard, Semper
restores and emphasizes the east–west axis as being the main one of
the court complex while at the same time providing the art gallery with
a spacious and monumental courtyard. As a further consequence of
this closure, both the art gallery and the theatre receive space toward
the city and a clear hierarchy is established between the different
urban spaces. Contrary to Semper’s earlier proposals, yet always envi-
sioning a continuous architectural scenography, the transition from
the city into the Zwinger is now filtered by an open court defined by
the river and the art gallery in one direction, and by the theatre, the
Schinkelwache and the Hofkirche in the other.

131
 THE CONCEPT IS ME:
RICHARD MEIER AT THE
GETTY CENTER
Jack Burnett-Stuart
Film still from Concert
of Wills: Making the Getty
Center, Maysles Films Inc.
© 1997 J. Paul Getty Trust
At some point, a work of architecture must take its
place in the world without the help of its architect.
This is not when the architect finishes the job,
but when the voice of the architect fades into the
background and is no longer obviously directing the
experience of the building. The architect sets up a
framework, which is then slowly subsumed by the
life that transpires within it. Fifteen years after its
completion, the Getty Center has yet to achieve this
degree of self-sufficiency. The voice of Meier remains
stubbornly in the foreground, discouraging, even
after frequent visits, any appropriation of the place in
the mind of the user.
132
The long, drawn-out and difficult process of realizing
the Getty Center is documented in two forms: the
book Building the Getty by Meier himself and the film
Concert of Wills by Susan Froemke, Bob Eisenhardt
and Albert Maysles (the latter directed, together with
his brother, David Maysles, such classic documentary
films as Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter). The
filmmakers followed the project for twelve years,
interviewing the principal figures and filming many
of their meetings. The film is, needless to say, a good
deal more entertaining than the book. One might
suspect that the conflicts showcased in the film were
exaggerated by the filmmakers’ need to tell a good
story, but Meier’s text largely corroborates the film’s
version of events.
The film follows Meier’s struggles to keep control
over the design through a series of defensive actions
taken in response to constant threats to his primacy
as architect. The Getty’s site was an undeveloped
hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains, overlooking
Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. The isolation of
the site and the lack, initially, of a clearly defined
programme or budget allowed Meier’s architecture,
an exotic import from the East Coast, to grow
without much constraint, like a successful culture
in a Petri dish. While topography, view and climate
were invoked by Meier as determining factors for
his design, the overwhelming impression is of the
multiplication of his established formal mannerisms
on an unprecedented scale. Wildness has been
kept at bay by a plantation of live oaks around the
complex, which were set out on the same grid as the
building and take no account of the topography.
Meier writes: “This idea appealed to me because I
appreciated the virtue of imposing an abstract order
on such an undulating and unruly site.”1
The possibility that this could simply be too much
“Meier” – or, to put it another way, that the scale of the
project required a less convoluted formal language
than his smaller projects have – does not seem to
have occurred to him. And as the project grew in
scale, the difficulty of maintaining his normal degree
of control grew. Even within his office, he admits that
staff turnover was high because it was hard to keep
architects interested in drawing window and railing
details for years at a time.2
Obstacle 1: Whiteness
The owners of houses below the site managed to
impose various restrictions on the Getty as part of the
rezoning process. A height limit meant that much of
the building actually had to be underground. Fearing
the legendary whiteness of Meier’s architecture,
they insisted on the use of stone cladding, thinking
that this would help the building blend into the
landscape. Meier eventually decided on Roman
travertine, which would give the buildings an
acceptably innocuous cream colour when seen from
a distance. One suspects that the associations with
Rome – seriousness, permanence, authenticity –
held an appeal for both Meier and the Getty, and
could be seen as a deliberate distancing from the
“faux” Getty Villa in Malibu as befitted a now-serious
cultural institution. In any case, Meier is satisfied
with the resulting whiteness: “It’s not white, no
one wants white – like my shirt – but it has a certain
whiteness about it in the sunlight, which I think is
good.” Presumably the neighbours were not warned
that, in time, the sun would bleach the travertine
even whiter.3 Arriving at the Getty by tram on a sunny
day, in fact, the whiteness is already blinding, as the
ground is paved in the same travertine as the walls.
Don’t forget your sunglasses!
Obstacle 2: The Garden
Meier perceived the central garden, located in
the valley between the museum and the research
institute, as an essential part of his concept: it was
to be an extension of the formal language of the
buildings as an Italianate terraced garden. The
Getty, however, getting cold feet about the extent of
Meier’s aesthetic control, commissioned Los Angeles
artist Robert Irwin to design the garden as a “site-
specific work of art”. Irwin was not about to take
direction from Meier; he reversed Meier’s concept
of the garden as an overlook by sinking the central
space of the garden so that there is no view out. “It’s
an irresponsible act,” said Meier. “Bullshit,” replied
Irwin. After their meeting, Meier lost his control
for once: “For one person to say, ‘I want my object,
I want my piece, to be more important than the
larger landscape of the city, to be more important
than a perspective, a sense of this place’, . . . makes
me furious; [it] just makes me angry beyond belief.”
Meier later wrote: “Irwin was being treated as an
artist while I was being relegated to the secondary
status of architect. His creative work was regarded
as sacrosanct and subject to only token cost control,
while my contributions were fair game for everyone.”4
Obstacle 3: Gallery Interiors
Museum director John Walsh insisted on enclosed
gallery spaces, coloured walls and low natural-light
levels, even in transitional spaces, all of which put
him in conflict with Meier’s unified and (preferably)
white approach to interior and exterior. Walsh’s wish
for the decorative arts collection to be displayed in
rooms recreated in 18th-century French style was
obviously beyond the pale for Meier, so the Getty
hired the exceedingly dapper Thierry Despont to
design these interiors. The film shows Despont
explaining his colour concept, lovingly fingering a
sample of red velvet, while Meier looks on in disgust.
Obstacle 4: Occupation
On a walk-through of the almost complete building,
Meier and his right-hand man, Michael Palladino,
approach a manager of the café. Meier says: “Hi, how
are you? Do you have anyone to line up the tables and
chairs and keep them straight, rather than have them
133

Film still from Concert
of Wills: Making the Getty
Center, Maysles Films Inc.
© 1997 J. Paul Getty Trust
skewed all over the place? I mean, you know, it just
looks very chaotic the way it is, and it would be nice to
have them lined up and straight in both directions.
Maybe we should give you a plan, and show you where . . .
[Turning to Palladino] Why don’t we send them a plan
so they know how to keep it? Good, thank you. [Aside,
to Palladino] No one tells them anything, you know.”
The strangest thing about the Getty remains – and
this had nothing to do with Meier – the selection of
the site. Why did the Getty think that it was a good
idea to put the complex on top of a hill? Historically,
there have been good reasons to put fortresses,
observatories or monasteries on top of hills, but those
reasons do not apply the Getty. By all rational criteria,
a large cultural institution should be sited in an easily
accessible location where it can readily become part
of the life of the city. Culture, after all, is not separate
from the city, but one of its principal products.
On the most prosaic level, it takes a long time to reach
the museum. Public transportation to the base station
is not good, so you drive, and then it is necessary to
wait to take the tram to the top of the hill. And once
you are up there, it is time to start worrying about
the inevitable gridlock on the San Diego freeway if
134
you stay too long! There is no possibility of “dropping
in” to this museum, as you could, for example, with
the Museum of Contemporary Art if you worked in
downtown Los Angeles. As a matter of urbanism,
there is no possibility for the Getty to be a catalyst for
local networks that might grow up around a large
institution. For the employees, for example, there
is no ready alternative to eating in the Getty’s own
facilities. Indeed, the Getty is said to store a two-week
supply of food in case of a natural disaster. Even in
the benign climate of Southern California, there are
days when the lack of shelter from the wind makes the
Getty a bleak place. In the film, John Walsh attempts
to rationalize the selection of the site by saying that the
view is a way to entice people to come to the museum.
This is not very convincing: you don’t go to an art
gallery for a view. On a symbolic level, the hilltop site
inevitably conveys the message of “culture standing
above the city”, which is far removed from the actual
policy of the Getty as an institution. It was telling that
shortly after its completion, the Getty had to run an
advertisement campaign across the city bearing the
slogan “Your Getty”.
Another architect might have acknowledged
these problems and striven to mitigate them, both
functionally and conceptually. One senses, however,
that Meier was entirely untroubled by the issue.
Living in an isolated house on the site, he could
wander around his creation in the early morning and
photograph it as it looked best to him – without people.
And when people come to the completed building now,
they don’t linger on the overexposed travertine stairs
leading to the museum, as Meier envisaged, but rather
head down to Irwin’s garden, to lie, in a disorderly way,
on the grass.
1 3
Richard Meier, Building the Ibid., 189.
Getty (Knopf, 1997), 91.
4
2 Ibid., 131.
Ibid., 110.
 THE OFFICE AND THE LOGGIA:
GIORGIO VASARI’S ARCHITECTURE
FOR BUREAUCRACY

Francesco Marullo

I
Referring to the disunion between the plebs and the Roman Senate
in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, Niccolò Machiavelli
contested the traditional cult of civic concord by asserting that conflict
and turmoil were a necessary foundation for and driving force of state
power. A healthy republican institution had to derive, in fact, from the
resolute and dynamic opposition of its constituent parts, and not from
their steady reciprocal equilibrium.
In this sense, a 16th-century city aiming to extend its hegemony
over neighbouring territory like Florence had to rely on both the faith-
ful support of a popular army and the art of government of its prince,

135
The Loggia and Piazza
Grande in Arezzo in 1967;
from Bildindex der Kunst
und Architektur, cat. no.
800.722

whose virtuosity was supposed to be focused on controlling the intes-

tinal humores of the newly conquered provinces through the measured
deployment of defensive and managerial institutions.
Therefore, apart from military fortifications, whose development
paralleled innovations in the technology of firearms, one fundamen-
tal form of Renaissance utilitarian architecture was the construction
of office buildings and administrative apparatuses in response to the
emerging forms of immaterial production and capitalist accumulation,
such as banking, insurance enterprises, and trading and forensic activi-
ties, which demanded a calculated spatial relationship between the
expansion of the state’s dominions and its managerial infrastructure.
As a result, the archetype of the loggia, meaning an open-sided
roofed or vaulted gallery that is either freestanding or positioned along
the side of a building, proved to be the most effective device for medi-
ating between severe office architecture and its surroundings. In the
vocabulary of urban forms, in fact, the loggia can be considered as the
opposite of the city wall: it does not include or exclude anything, but
rather creates a space in which to frame and “measure” people, move-
ments and goods, thereby modifying the very contextual conditions

136
 The Uffizi in Florence in
1940; from Bildindex der
Kunst und Architektur, cat.
no. 1.295.228

in which it is placed “from within” as a sort of internal threshold. An

office structure with a loggia thus presented a perfect synthesis of
the two main types of power: the political and the managerial, or the
representativeness of the State and the effectuality of its governance.
According to this logic, Giorgio Vasari’s Uffizi in Florence and his
Loggia in Arezzo could be considered as two exemplary projects that
effectively combined the seriality of the office building with the open 1
permeability of the loggia in a unique administrative framework in the Cosimo’s impressive military
expansionist politics
context of the economic and political renovatio that was carried out by required an ambitious
Cosimo I de’ Medici from 1537 to 1574 and that transformed Florence programme of fortifications
and the reorganization of
into the capital of a new state, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. armed forces on land and
Cosimo, who had inherited the ingenuity and sharp obstinacy of his at sea in order to control
father, the renowned condottiero Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, primarily commercial traffic in the
annexed territories, which
used architecture as a strategic political instrument in order to replace extended from Arezzo,
the obsolete communal institutions with modern managerial infra- Siena and Pisa to the
Mediterranean coast and the
structures. As if on a battlefield, he carefully inserted an archipelago Stato dei Presidii.
of monumental interventions to order and shape the city’s mediaeval
urban fabric according to the main routes of trading businesses and
production.1 The plan was implicitly evident already in 1540, when

137
2 Cosimo moved his residence from the Palazzo Medici on Via Larga to
“[B]ecause, just as those
who draw landscapes place
themselves below in the
plain to contemplate the
nature of the mountains and
of lofty places, and in order
to contemplate the plains
place themselves upon
high mountains, even so to
understand the nature of
the people it needs to be a
prince, and to understand
that of princes it needs to be
of the people.” See Niccolò
Machiavelli’s “Dedica” in Il
Principe (1513); the English
translation cited here is The
Prince (London: J. M. Dent &
Sons, 1958).
3 ning with a careful analysis of its productive forces. He then ordered
Vasari’s first proposal for the
Magistracies was redrawn in
plan by his nephew, Giorgio
Vasari il Giovane, who
developed the governmental
office typology even further
in his projects for a Tribunal
and a Customs House; see
Andrew Morrogh, Disegni
di architetti fiorentini 1540–
1560 (Florence: Gabinetto
Disegni e Stampe degli
Uffizi, 1985), cat. nos. Uffizi
4881A and 4858; see also
Giorgio Vasari il Giovane,
La città ideale, ed. Virginia
Stefanelli (Rome: Officina
Edizioni, 1970). For the
projects for government
offices and public buildings
by Bartolomeo Ammannati,
see La Città: Appunti per un
Trattato, ed. Mazzino Fossi
(Rome: Officina Edizioni,
1972). For a general account
on Giorgio Vasari, see
Claudia Conforti, Vasari
Architetto (Milan: Electa,
1993); Leon Satkowski,
Giorgio Vasari: Architect
and Courtier (Princeton:
Princeton University Press,
1993) and idem, Studies on
138
the old Palazzo del Popolo in the very heart of the historical city, sym-
bolically validating his new political project by aligning himself as heir
to the republic’s glorious communal past and consolidating his regime
around the Piazza della Signoria, the epicentre of the Grand Duchy.
As Machiavelli asserted, power is inseparable from its subjects, and
it is only by assuming a popular perspective that it becomes possible to
truly understand the nature of the prince and of his mandate.2 Cosimo
always perceived reality as the unstable product of fluctuating power
relations, with their continuous and unpredictable overturns and shifts;
his reality could only be confronted dialectically by understanding the
political cartography of its conflicts and acknowledging the claims and
deepest exigencies of its subjected population. For these reasons, when
the state achieved a critical dimension after the annexation of Siena in
1555, Cosimo carried out its general economic reassessment, begin-
a general territorial survey of the Duchy, with a detailed investigation
of its natural and human resources, including a statistical census of
its inhabitants and their professions. He also issued a series of impor-
tant fiscal and legislative reforms, reducing the autonomy of guilds,
individual craftsmen and peripheral local powers and placing them
under the jurisdiction of his centralized government.
Along the same lines, in 1549 he ordered a progressive ration-
alization of the state administrative apparatus, which began with the
Capitani di Parte Guelfa, who were made responsible for Florence’s
public works, and culminated between 1561 and 1563 with the unifica-
tion of all of the single magistracies in a single office building (uffizi)
intended for the publicae commoditati (common good), a sort of forum
which had to be built at their own expense and through the heavy
taxation of Florentine citizens. Besides Bramante’s tribunal palace in
Rome, or the Castel Capuano tribunal court in Naples, there were no
typological predecessors for such a building, whose purely administra-
tive function did not require any symbolic or flaunted authority, but
demanded a rather strict economy of means and a minimum impact
on the historical urban fabric. Cosimo, in fact, rejected the first free-
standing, palace-like proposals,3 ordering the simple disposition of
the magistracies along the two sides of the Strada Nuova, a new street
that he opened in 1546 to connect the Piazza della Signoria to the bank
of the Arno.4 Definitively named chief architect of the state in 1560,
Vasari elaborated a project that was a direct result of its particular
urban conditions and was characterized by an irregular rectangular Vasari’s Architecture (New
plot measuring 147 metres long and 76 metres wide that was shaped by York: Garland, 1979).

several important preexisting structures: the Loggia dei Lanzi and the 4
Mint at the north-west end, and S. Pier Scheraggio at the north-east end. The Siege of Florence, a
fresco executed in the Ducal
Deeply influenced by the iterative modularity of the mediaeval Palace in 1560 under the
Procuratie Vecchie in Venice, but even more by the longitudinal tension direction of Giorgio Vasari,
of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, Vasari’s final solution, a three- meticulously recorded
the topography of the city,
storey building arranged in two symmetrical but unequal wings, turned including the demolition
the Strada Nuova into an hybrid, open public courtyard, a perspecti- ordered by Cosimo I to
facilitate the creation of the
vally oriented “stage” set between the absolute volume of the Ducal Strada Nuova.
Palace, with its “choral” group of statues by Michelangelo, Bandinelli
and Ammannati, and the private residences of the ducal court across 5
The system would be
the Arno, including the Palazzo Pitti, the Boboli gardens and the Forte implemented with the
Belvedere. In this way, the “bureaucratic machine” of the Uffizi com- construction of the corridor
for the ceremony of the
pleted Cosimo’s renovatio by providing a concrete visual infrastructure
marriage between Cosimo’s
that connected and distributed the loci of power around its longitudi- son, Francesco I, and
nally oriented piazza, just as Bramante’s Belvedere for Julius II or even Joanna of Austria in 1565.
The Corridore was a half-
Caesar and Nerva’s Roman Fora had done.5 kilometre-long suspended,
In order to accommodate the eight magistracies and the five guilds, covered street running from
the Palazzo Ducale, through
despite their varying importance and functions, Vasari designed a
the Uffizi, over the Ponte
modular volumetric unit that could be easily halved or doubled accord- Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti:
ing to the occupants’ needs. This sort of “typical plan” comprised by camouflaging itself within
the existing urban fabric,
an almost cubic, double-height audience chamber that was directly it allowed secret and safe
accessible from the continuous external porticoes and furnished with movement between the
benches and a fireplace. There were also three service spaces at the back buildings of the court.

for secretarial activities and storing records, as well as a storage area

on the mezzanine level that was accessible from a side staircase. The
tripartition of the module was rationally repeated in elevation as well,
for it was marked by pronounced cornices that divided the upper and
lower loggias from the piano nobile, with its large series of windows
in alternately triangular or arched tympani that provided light to the
ducal workshops and laboratories.
The basement floor was organized with a radically abstract trabeated
loggia, which displayed Tuscan-Doric columns to praise the mythical
Etruscan/Tuscan origin of Florence’s power and was covered with a lon-
gitudinal barrel vault lightened by low rectangular openings, as found
in Roman crypto-porticoes. The disarticulation of the façade from the
internal distribution of the modules allowed the perfect integration The wooden model of the
of an incredible variety of programmes (including a church, a theatre, Loggia in Arezzo; from C.
Conforti, Vasari Architetto
a library, a mint, an art gallery, a mediaeval tower, warehouses and, of (Milan: Electa, 1993)

139
6 course, offices) despite the site’s irregularities, literally transforming
Colin Rowe and F. Koetter,
“Crisis of the Object:
Predicament of Texture”,
in Collage City (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1978).
7 marking the shift from a power imposed through military force to a
Agamben investigates
the origin of the concept
of the “officium” and its
theological development by
way of the term of “liturgy”
(from the Greek leitourghia,
comprised of laos, or
people, and ergon, or work)
or the Christian ministerial
public cult that realizes the
effectuality of the Opus Dei.
In the liturgy, the priest’s
identity is defined by the
act he is performing and,
vice versa, the liturgical act
could only exist thanks to
the role of the priest: the
liturgy or sacraments are
never re-presented, but
always “presented” in their
effectuality. Therefore, in
both the civil and holy officia,
the agents and their actions
were mutually blurred within
a unique duty: the priest, as
the functionary, was both an
“animated instrument” of a
superior power and a subject
individualized by his single
performance. See Agamben,
Opus Dei: Archeologia
dell’ufficio, vol. II.5 of Homo
Sacer series (Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri, 2012), but also
its recent review by Antonio
Negri, “Il sacro dilemma
dell’inoperoso”, Il Manifesto
(February 2012), and Augusto
Illuminati, “Opus Dei o
Opus incertum?”, in Libera
Università Metropolitana
(March 2012), www.
lumproject.org.
140
the building into a “product” of its context – a city within a city.
By making the modern administrative centre of the capital city
coincide with an open void, Vasari interiorized the public space of the
Strada Nuova as the propelling core of the whole Grand Duchy, clearly
power exerted more abstractly through management, i.e., through
taxes, legislative decrees, financial strategies and obedient armies of
functionaries. As an expression of the emergent state bureaucracy, the
Uffizi’s severe architecture not only anticipated the formulaic repeti-
tions of the 17th- and 18th-century apparatuses of governance, but also
constituted, through its reversal of the figure–ground logic of traditional
architectural “objecthood”,6 one of the most important paradigms for
modern spaces of immaterial production, from the urban arcades of
the 19th century to contemporary office landscapes.
II
An office is what it does. It is a praxis that coincides with its own effec-
tuality, an operation that defines itself and its agents only by being
performed: it resembles a behaviour more than a thing. It does not
refer to specific subjects or end-products; rather, it depends upon the
conditions in which it is placed. In other words, its “content” coincides
with its “context”.
By simplifying the plan and reducing it to a series of hollow volu-
metric modules and thereby creating a permeable, generic structure
embracing a civic space, the Uffizi precisely entailed this conceptual
evolution of the office “as space” – a rigidly circumscribed produc-
tive domain – into the office “as service” – an action that is based on
its embedded operativity and can be performed in a broader field of
application. This “service” or “action” is simply supported by a flexible,
uncluttered layout devoid of obstructions: a pure and clear frame for
the human theatre of production in the foreground.
As recently pointed out by Giorgio Agamben, the Latin term officium
was traditionally linked to the verb efficere, meaning “to work out, to
make efficacious, effective”, rather than to opificium, or the proper
“production of an opus, a work”. The difference is not irrelevant. The
intrinsic operativity of the former, in fact, coincides with neither the
“acting” nor the “doing” of the latter, but with the particular idea of
“sustaining, administering, conducing” (gerere) or “conveying some-
thing to effect” (aliquid ad effectum adducere).7
 This explains why Cicero employed the term officium in his De 8
Officiis as the translation of the Stoic principle of kathekon, meaning Cicero, De Officiis, bk. I, 7–8.

“what is convenient to be done according to circumstances”. The Stoics, 9

in fact, distinguished two kinds of actions: some accomplished an According to Karl Marx,
“By labour-power or
absolute and perfect rectitude (katorthoma) in relation to undeniable capacity for labour is to be
values such as wisdom, temperance or justice, while others indicated understood the aggregate
relative “neutral” deeds (kathekonta) that had to be deduced from the of those mental and physical
capabilities existing in a
contingencies in relation to which they were applied, such as “talking”, human being, which he
“posing questions” or “going for a walk”. Cicero defined this second exercises whenever he
produces a use-value of any
class as a commune officium, because it was essential to generic human description.”, and elsewhere
nature: it is what makes life governable, what truly “institutes” and he states that “the use value
“shapes” the human condition, while animals merely adapt to their which the worker has to
offer to the capitalist, which
surroundings through instinct.8 But the “ministry” of he who admin- he has to offer to others in
isters, governs or command is a form of performance of a charge that general, is not materialised
in a product, does not exist
is not productive per se, in the sense that it does not “make anything”.
apart from him at all, [and]
If the action refers to an end-in-itself, and the deed to an end-beyond- thus exists not really, but
itself, the idea of management does not have any end-product besides only in potentiality, as his
capacity”. See Marx, Das
its mere effectuality: the office is an “activity without work”. Kapital: Kritik der politischen
Therefore, the “office” should be conceived more as a relationship Ökonomie [1867]; the English
translation consulted here is
in which the subject and its action are drastically separated and inti-
Capital: A Critique of Political
mately connected simultaneously, and whose intrinsic operativity, Economy, vol. 1, bks. 6–7,
beyond questions of good and evil, connects its acting subject with online in the Marx/Engels
Internet Archive, www.
a function that is not really ascribable to him. As in the very act of marxists.org (last consulted
imperium, whereby the impersonality of the norm is always exterior 9 April 2012). Here the term
and accepts anything and everything because it merely “relates” and virtue, from the Latin virtus,
which is derived from vir,
“accomplishes”, the office gradually turns into an apparatus whose or “man”, and vis, or “force”,
actualization becomes effective only when it subsumes and organizes is intended to signify the
human ability to control
subjects and deeds, interconnecting who acts and what is executed – his natural faculties, or
being and praxis, what a man is and what he does – with a uniquely his ability to project and
indistinct and singular circularity. accomplish his intentions,
thoughts and actions, and
On the other hand, in order to become actual, or to pass from pos- modulate them according to
sibility to concrete reality, an office always requires the virtue of human the circumstances.
agency, wherein “virtue” is intended as the human predisposition to
confront and react to the unpredictable, dynamic situations of reality
by actualizing its own potential capabilities, its inner labour power.9
As in a vicious circle, the office “domesticates” this virtue by turning
it into an habitus, a custom, an acquired behaviour, while the virtue
improves the operativity of the office itself by extending the latter’s
range of application through the ceaseless accumulation of experi-
ences, knowledge and all of the other unexpressed and alternative

141
10
In the vast literature on
Niccolò Machiavelli and
the relationship between
fortuna and virtù, see
Roberto Esposito, Pensiero
vivente: Origine e attualità
della filosofia italiana (Turin:
Einaudi, 2010).
11
As Paolo Virno has remarked,
in the domain of cognitive
capitalism not only has
the concept of virtue
become the most profitable
expression of labour-power,
but the whole sphere of
immaterial production has
also gradually assumed
the same exteriority of the
virtuous political action.
Labour continuously
demands higher levels
of virtuosity, namely, the
capacity to perform and
communicate with others,
the ability to improvise,
vary and improve the
generic human intellectual
faculties and the dexterity
of speaking multiple
languages, articulating
discourses and formulating
innovative assumptions
beyond customary uses or
trends. See Paolo Virno,
“Virtuosismo e rivoluzione”,
Luogo comune, no. 4 (1993);
this was also published in
English as “Virtuosity and
Revolution: The Political
Theory of Exodus”, in Radical
Thought in Italy: A Potential
Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and
Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
Press, 1996).
12
Cosimo was extremely rude
to the Aretines. To subjugate
their freedom, and to tame
their wild opposition, he first
demolished the
142
“possibilities”. If the office is a way of governing life, then the virtue
of human agency is what allows it to become a constituent practice.
As Niccolò Machiavelli put it, it is precisely the externality of the vir-
tue and its arbitrary encounters with fortune that permit the profitable
performance of government and management. Rather than perceiving
the virtue as being a question of pure moral integrity and fortune as
the “turbulent river” inundating all human organizations, Machiavelli
conceived virtuosity as the one and only instrument capable of turning
the capricious uncertainty of the context into nourishment for political
power and a spark for igniting human potential.10
In this sense, both the office as “activity without work” and virtu-
osity as “performance of the subject” progressively became the two
complementary paradigms informing immaterial production – expres-
sions of a cognitive labour that ever increasingly assumed the forms of
a political action requiring an audience, an organized space, a social
dimension, a context.11
Therefore, if the office was traditionally conceived as a hierar-
chical structure of well-compartmentalized dominions, it later sup-
ported and reproduced itself only thanks to the amount of variety it
was able to process and homogeneously organize. In order to enlarge
its field of subsumption, since the Renaissance it has progressively
reduced its constraints and abstracted its spatial structures in series
of “typical plans”, becoming a neutral diagram of control capable of
turning possibilities into measurable facts, of neutralizing conflicts
within established compromises, of fusing dynamic war-machines
with bureaucratic apparatuses.
III
The Loggia in Arezzo constituted a first step in this gradual abstraction
of the office space as a conceptual completion of the Uffizi, an attempt to
unfold and extend that structure’s particular relationship with a public
street in a broader open civic space. Conceived as a financial outpost
of Florence’s administration, the Loggia was almost an appendage of
the nearby Medicean fortress built by Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane.
It was designed to control commercial exchange with the provinces
along the south-east border of the Grand Duchy and to provide a subtle
infrastructural space for the productive activities taking place in the
Piazza Grande.12
The Loggia primarily comprised a number of workshops, offices
and rental houses: it was a sort of “hotel” in which living and working
activities coexisted within the same building complex. On the ground mediaeval Palazzo Comunale
floor, there were workshops and stores similar to Roman tabernae and and the 11th-century
Duomo Vecchio, the city’s
stalls for moneychangers, all organized along a series of twenty arcades, two greatest “civic and
while on the upper level there were offices for the Monte di Pietà (a sort spiritual” monuments, and
then later commissioned
of municipal loan bank), the Chancellery of the Nove Conservatori del a new fortress and a new
Dominio (instituted by Cosimo to supervise the relationship between administrative centre in
the capital and the Medicean domains) and the Customs House, as order to replace the local
authorities with a class of
well as several apartments to be rented to either state functionaries subordinate functionaries.
or wealthy tenants. If the Loggia recalled the Roman basilica – par- Therefore, the Loggia had a
crucial political relevance.
ticularly Cesariano’s reconstruction of the Vitruvian Basilica in Fano On the one hand, Cosimo
with its attic extension – in its typological and programmatic features, used it to install the
structurally it resembled slightly earlier buildings, such as Vignola’s Chancellery of the Nove
Conservatori del Dominio,
Portico dei Banchi in Bologna or Falconetto’s Monte di Pietà in Padua. in order to reinforce his
The Loggia regularized the northern edge of the square with its con- control on Arezzo and its
financial affairs, while on
tinuous slab, measuring 126 metres long and 19 metres wide, thereby
the other, the Aretines
ingeniously responding to the complex topography of the site without used the Loggia to attract
compromising the overall equilibrium of the city’s historical urban fab- the attention of the central
government and to exploit
ric. The severe simplicity of the façade, which is devoid of architectural Florence’s economic
orders and only “drawn” by the lines of the sandstone cornices, gave resources in order to rebuild
the damaged urban fabric
the building the character of an urban backdrop whose recessed linear
surrounding the Piazza
flatness emphasized the preexisting volumetric masses of the Palazzetto Grande.
della Fraternita dei Laici and the apse of Santa Maria della Pieve.
13
Once again, Vasari “reversed” the traditional design procedure, The “potentially endless
conceiving the office building as a direct articulation of its constitu- set of pieces” is part of the
ent surrounding conditions rather than a volumetric imposition of an “abridged list of stimulants,
a-temporal and necessarily
autonomous architectural object. But even more, in the Loggia Vasari transcultural” object trouvés
literally reduced architecture to a “potentially endless set of pieces”13 presented by Colin Rowe and
F. Koetter in the “Excursus”
whose conceptual contiguity with the Greek stoa, the Roman Porticus with which they conclude
Aemilia or even the substructures of the Villa a Poggio a Caiano he had their book Collage City
already put to the test in the linear supporting arcades for the Corridore (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1978).
running along the Arno. As it had done in the Uffizi, this “mechanical
logic” allowed Vasari to epitomize the whole project in a single repeated
structural module, which was given expression in the form of a wooden
maquette displaying two of the Loggia’s bays. Since Vasari supervised
the entire project’s construction while far from Arezzo, the model was
sent to Alfonso Parigi the Elder, the building-site supervisor, in order
to ensure that the main proportional relations of the façade would be
respected.
In a way, Vasari’s “managerial” approach and his professional detach-
ment from the construction site could be conceived as consequences

143
14
Among the various
academies established by
Cosimo I de’ Medici, one
of the most relevant, the
Accademia delle Arti del
Disegno, was founded in 1563
and directed by Vasari.
15
Giorgio Vasari, “Introduzione
di Giorgio Vasari Pittore
Aretino alle tre arti del
disegno, cioè Architettura,
Scultura e Pittura”, in Le
Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori,
scultori, ed architettori,
ed. Gaetano Milanesi,
(Florence: Sansoni,
1878–85), vol. I, 37–38; for
the English translation,
see Vasari on Technique;
Being the Introduction to
the Three Arts of Design,
Architecture, Sculpture and
Painting, Prefixed to The
Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects, trans. Louisa S.
Maclehose, ed. Gerard B.
Brown (London: J. M. Dent &
Company, 1907).
16
See Manfredo Tafuri,
L’architettura del Manierismo
nel Cinquecento europeo
(Rome: Officina Edizioni,
1966); and Eugenio Battisti,
L’Antirinascimento (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1962), 236.
144
of his progressive understanding of the technical drawing, the dis-
egno,14 as an autonomous expression of the human intellect, or as a
pure formalization of abstract ideas imagined and fabricated within
the individual’s mind. Design, being naturally “cognizant of the pro-
portion of the whole to the parts and of the parts to each other and to
the whole”, could be reduced to the scientific question of distribution
and economy as the necessary counterparts of its material concreti-
zation, which was related to the intrinsic properties of materials and
construction techniques.15 It would be precisely this “mechanical”
dissection of architecture into parts and modular units that gave rise
to the later typological investigations of Vasari’s long-time collabora-
tor, Bartolomeo Ammannati, and Vasari’s nephew, Giorgio Vasari il
Giovane, within the cultural and scientific environment of the Dux
Mechanicus Francesco I, son and successor of Cosimo I. Both of them
collected a large “corpus” of plans, notes and drawings, envisioning
hypothetical ideal cities based upon a horizontal juxtaposition of offi-
cia that were mostly intended for social and welfare services (such as
schools, monasteries, hospitals, customs houses, markets, tribunals,
magistracies, prisons, barns, warehouses) and whose combinatorial
articulation constituted a sort of endless productive substratum that
did not distinguish living from working activities.16
In this sense, Ammannati’s project for a calonaca (a parsonage) and
Vasari il Giovane’s drawings of monasteries were already conceptually
contained in the plan of the Loggia, which presented no significant vari-
ations in the size of the rooms despite the fact that these were designed
to perform different functions: the bay of the portico, in fact, roughly
equalled the area of the storerooms on the ground floor, as well as the
area of the offices and the residential spaces on the upper floor. The row
housing, in fact, was served by a central spine for circulation that rendered
all the spaces almost equivalent by modulating the whole plan accord-
ing to a structural grid with only a few exceptions, such as the “saloni”,
which were vaulted while the other rooms had wooden floors and ceilings.
The more the “office” fulfilled its own effectuality, the more its plan
became empty, abstract and reproducible in order to prevent the limi-
tation of its subjects’ ability to act. This “typical plan”, which not only
abolished any programmatic differentiation of its interior spaces but
also rhythmically framed the adjacent contextual conditions, proposed
the possibility of creating an entirely homogeneous, continuous, flexible
layout that was capable of making any human material or immaterial
potentiality productive.
 THE ARCHITECTURAL
FORM OF A CONCEPT:
J. J. P. OUD’S DE KIEFHOEK
(1925–30)

Davide Sacconi

Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud (1890–1963) was not a genius. He never 1

had the intellectual stature of his master, Hendrik Petrus Berlage J. J. P. Oud, “Architecture
and Standardization in Mass
(1856–1934), or the artistic talent of his De Stijl colleagues Theo van Construction”, in Architecture
Doesburg (1883–1931), Pieter Cornelis Mondrian (1872–1944) and and Design, 1890–1939: An
International Anthology of
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888–1964). Nevertheless, he was stubborn Original Articles (New York:
and confident about his ideas about architecture. Whitney Library of Design,
In a series of articles on De Stijl written between 1917 and 1919, 1975).

Oud defined a clear direction for his work in the context of the fre- 2
netic process of industrialization then underway: “[M]ore than any Ibid.
other form of art, architecture has its root in human society and 3
depends on social considerations”.1 In contrast to art, Oud believed J. J. P. Oud, “Art and Machine”,
that architecture arises from a compromise between “necessity and De Stjil 1, no. 3 (1918), 25–27.

beauty”. Therefore, a “purity of expression” in architecture cannot be 4

achieved, but “only increased when aesthetic and utilitarian factors Ibid.
come to resemble each other as closely as possible”.2 Aspiring to that
unity, or achieving “style”, was the ultimate goal of the modern artist,
and it became possible in the age of the machine because “life and art
ha[d] acquired a more abstract accent”3 in moving away from the sub-
jective, the arbitrary and the unconscious toward the universal. With
its proper technical and aesthetic means, architecture, like art, can
give form to the universal, a form that is “a reflection of three factors:
the spirit (seen as a unit of intuition and consciousness), the material
and the method of production”.4
Yet Oud was a true architect whose main concern was not the
construction of a theory, but rather the definition of a field of prac-
tice within the physical, social, political and economic context of the
time. His belief in the practice of architecture as a “social art” led Oud

145
J. J. P. Oud, De Kiefhoek,
aerial view
5 public housing authority became the fertile terrain on which Oud was
“The Gemeentelijke
Woningdienst in Rotterdam”,
in Ed Taverne, Cor Wagenaar,
Martien de Vletter et
al., J. J. P. Oud: A Poetic
Functionalist, 1890–1963. The
Complete Works (Rotterdam:
NAi Publishers, 2001), 191.
6 production of housing and townscape design, but also for the signifi-
Ibid., 191–92.
146
to close down his private office and accept the position of architect
of the Rotterdam Gemeentelijke Woningdienst (Municipal Housing
Authority), which he held from 1918 to 1933. During his fifteen years
at the Woningdienst, he had the opportunity “to test his ideas about
urban development, block organization, construction technology and
the domestic floor plan against the practice of public housing con-
struction”5 through the realization of a small but impressive body of
work. The struggle to construct a sound and truly modern architecture
within the bureaucratic, technical and economic constraints of the
able to elaborate and build some of his most significant contributions
to architectural history, distancing himself from the intellectual and
artistic sphere of Mondrian and van Doesburg.6
In terms of Oud’s works from those years, De Kiefhoek, a workers’
settlement designed and built from 1924 to 1930, can be considered
the most exemplary, not only in terms of its investigation of the mass
cance of the spatial and formal solutions it presents in response to
the physical and cultural context.
Oud based the project’s design and his architectural decisions on
a specific concept of urban settlement, the “workers’ village”. This
concept explicitly manifests a contradiction: on the one hand we have
the “workers” as the rising class of the Großstadt, and on the other, the 7
“village” as the urban and social structure of a rural society. In com- Ibid., 45.

bining these contradictory terms, the concept of the workers’ village 8

reflects the historical context of The Netherlands in the 1920s, when “Since there was no
possibility of individual
the country was in the midst of a turbulent transformation from a rural variations, the architecture
society into an advanced industrial and highly urbanized one. From this of the houses was based
perspective it becomes clear how Oud’s project was designed to retain consequently on uniformity,
and the complex as a whole
the idea of the small and tight-knit community as the fundamental draws its character from
element of the Dutch territorial and social structure, thus mediating proportion, colour and
grouping”; J. J. P. Oud, “The
between the existing context and the rapidly changing circumstances. £ 213 House. A Solution to
Rather than a mere iconic preconception of architecture, the concept the Re-housing Problem for
appears to be a fundamental synthesis of the architect’s cultural and Rock-bottom Incomes in
Rotterdam”, The Studio 101
political position vis-à-vis his deep understanding of the given context. (1931), 456.
De Kiefhoek stands out in its physical context as a bright-white,
9
rigorously modernist settlement, sharply contrasting with the dark,
In the end, the settlement
pitched-roof housing of the surroundings. It was, for all intents and pur- was built of brick due to
poses, a “built-in intervention”,7 with the perimeter of the compound practical and economic
reasons related to the
already defined and occupied by commercially developed housing and organization of the Dutch
shops, and the layout of the internal streets largely predetermined building and material
industry at the time, which
by bureaucratic decisions. The extremely low budget, which was fur-
made brickwork cheaper
ther reduced during the design process, made the standardization of and safer in terms of
typologies and the mass production of construction elements more the skills offered by the
available workforce.
of a necessity than an ideological approach.8
The whole complex is based on a single standard unit, which 10
was originally designed to be built in reinforced concrete.9 As Oud Oud, “The £ 213 House”, p.
456.
describes, “The plan of the houses is the most compact . . . possible,
with no room wasted in corridors. . . . The accommodation consists
of a living room, kitchen and lavatory at the street level; a bedroom
for the parents and one for the boys and another for the girls, on the
first floor beneath the flat roof”.10
The harshly functional organization of the dwelling is further
emphasized by a severe and clear partition of the façades into three
horizontal layers: a mute and abstract band finished in white plaster
divides – as a sort of pause – the darker ground floor, with its exposed
brick and grey-painted joinery and pillars, from the yellow strip of
windows that crowns the building with a perfectly straight line of
industrially produced frames. The use of primary colours emphasizes
the rigorously geometrical composition of the elevation: red for the
main door, yellow for the upper-floor window strip and blue for the
tubular fences of the front yard.

147
11
The analysis of the plan
reveals that the standard
type is repeated in an
exactly identical way 288
times out of a total of 296
dwellings, but it is always
grouped in finite, linear
buildings that range from 4
to 26 units in length.
12
These variations include:
one type for the dwelling-
shop (two units), one for
the free-standing dwellings
on the short side of the
main blocks (four units),
one exceptional house that
contains the centralized
water-heating plant and one
house that has significant
variations due to its position
in the block. There are
also five standard types
located at strategic points
of the design that have the
addition of a round, plastic
balcony over the main door.
13
“In sharp contrast to the old
street picture, therefore,
in which the houses
are arbitrarily grouped
together, the modern street
picture will be dominated
by building blocks in which
the houses will be placed
in a rhythmic arrangement
of planes and masses.” J. J.
P. Oud, “The Monumental
Townscape”, De Stijl 1, no. 1
(1917), 10–11.
14
Oud, “The £ 213 House”, 456.
148
The uncompromised modernist language isolates the settlement
from its surroundings like a perfectly sealed envelope, but there is noth-
ing inhuman or alienating about it. Its clarity, rigor and isolation are
in line with the sense of close community typical of a workers’ village.
Indeed the village character is expressed in a clear spatial form
achieved purely by means of architectural decisions.
Every unit has the access, with a small, open threshold space,
and the living areas on the ground floor, thereby avoiding the use
of upstairs dwellings, which is quite common in Dutch housing.
Oud’s design deliberately concentrates on the careful composition
of the streetscape as a theatre of community life that downplays
the importance of the internal yards as common spaces. He system-
atically avoids completely enclosing the backyards within a typical
courtyard building. The corners of the blocks are always open, intro-
ducing an essential discontinuity in the urban fabric through which
the composition and grouping of identical – and thus theoretically
endlessly repeatable – units always assume the character of a finite
architectural form.11
The corner, a classic issue in the history of architecture, becomes
the key element that allows Oud to enhance his concept of the urban
environment. Indeed, the design’s typological variations, reduced
to a minimum,12 only occur on the corner, sometimes as a void, or a
pause, that reveals the intimate private space of the backyards, and
sometimes as a curve that plastically connects different elements,
emphasizing the role of the street. Moreover, the design of the façades
in horizontal strips is a sensitive artifice for concealing the monotonous
repetition of the standard unit within the “rhythmic arrangement of
planes and masses”.13
Continuities and discontinuities in the urban fabric are deliber-
ate and powerful architectural means exposed through the blank,
mute walls, the smooth, rounded corners or the sensitive addition of
exceptional details.
Last but not least, the design provides the community with two
typical family shops supplied with useful storage space, two precious
playgrounds for children and “a church belonging to the little village
that forms something of a culminating point in the general flatness”.14
This flatness – a geographical and subsequently also anthropological
condition of the Dutch landscape – coincides here with the flatness
of the surfaces of the mass-produced construction elements and the
social and economic constraints of a workers’ settlement.
 basic unit
ground floor, first level

basic unit
front - back

basic unit
front - back

basic aggregation
front - back

basic aggregation
first level

building block
ground floor

building block
front elevation

building block
0 1 2 3 4 5m
back elevation

149
15
J. J. P. Oud, “Orientation”, De
Stijl 3, no. 5 (1919), 46.
Detailed axonometric
projection of a “typical”
portion of the project
150
However, instead of constituting an inescapable limit, the context
is successfully turned into the building material of the project: stand-
ardization and mass production – together, the “miracle of technical
perfection”15 – are domesticated and orchestrated by means of a rigor-
ous architectural composition. In the predominance of finite archi-
tectural form over infinite repetition in this project we can read the
struggle between necessity and beauty, but also the physical, spatial
manifestation of the conflict between workers and village. The equi-
librium and the compromise inherent in the concept are pushed to
the limit in what I would call “radical reformism”.
 SKOPJE, OR HOW CONTEXT FUCKED
CONCEPTS AND VICE VERSA

Charlotte Malterre Barthes

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something
unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation always takes
place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that
we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall – that of
our consciousness – between the world and ourselves. . . . The adolescent
. . . is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to
reflection . . . The singularity of his being . . . becomes a problem and a
question. Much the same thing happens to nations and peoples at a cer-
tain critical moment in their development. They ask themselves: What
are we, and how will we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are?
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Pachuco and Other Extremes,
1961

On a summer morning in 1963, in the middle of the Cold War, the capi-
tal of the Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia was reduced to rubble 1
by a 6.1-level earthquake. In spite of the resulting death, destruction Milan Mijalkovic and
Katharina Urbanek, Skopje,
and desolation, this disaster would prove to be the biggest opportu- The World’s Bastard:
nity for the UN to demonstrate its unity and goodwill, as well as for Architecture of the Divided
City (Vienna: Wieser Verlag,
the “free world” to show its political solidarity to Tito in the face of 2011).
Stalin. For young architects, it was an improbable occasion offering
the chance to build a new city made of concepts – dare we say, one that
was context-free – from scratch.
What follows is the story of Skopje, the guinea pig of the hot,
young Metabolists, “the world’s bastard”,1 a ready-made tabula rasa,
an experimental playground for Le Corbusier’s worshippers, Paul
Rudolph’s students and Alvar Alto’s trainees: Skopje was a battlefield
of context fighting concepts.

151
2 In the days after the earthquake, Skopje became the object of the
The teams were: Slavko
Brezovski and the
Makedonijaproekt of Skopje;
J. H. Van den Broeck and
Bakema of Rotterdam;
Aleksander Djordjevic in
collaboration with the
Belgrade Institute of Town
Planning; Radovan Miscevic
and Fedor Wenzler of
the Croatian Institute of
Town Planning of Zagreb;
Luigi Piccinato and Studio
Scimemi of Rome; Eduard
Ravnikar and associates of
Ljubljana; Maurice Rotival of
New York; and Kenzo Tange
of Tokyo.
3
United Nations Development
Programme, Skopje
Resurgent: The Story of a
United Nations Special Fund
Town Planning Project (New
York: United Nations, 1970).
4 of the UN Centre for Housing, Building and Planning.3
Lin Zhong jie, Kenzo
Tange and the Metabolist
Movement: Urban Utopias
of Modern Japan (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 188–95.
5 of a functioning urban organism. In fact, Tange had accepted the
United Nations Development
Programme, Skopje
Resurgent.
6 Igor Kovač ević et al. (eds.),
Urbanity Twenty Years
Later: Projects for Central
European Capitals (Prague:
Centre for Central European
Architecture, 2010).
152
world’s attention. Expressions of sympathy were sent to its bewildered
population, and these were soon followed by the arrival of eminent
visitors. A dark-eyed Marshal Tito, who accepted the international
community’s condolences as well as offers of assistance in the name
of his people, was photographed hiking among the ruins of this city
of 300,000 inhabitants, fifty percent of whom had been left homeless.
Seventy-seven countries lent support in various forms (the Italians
provided emergency shelters, the Bulgarians promised to build a
concert hall, etc.). As part of this wave of solidarity, the UN made the
decision to sponsor an international world-wide design competition
for the first time in its history.
Two years later, the Yugoslav government and the United Nations
Special Fund invited four teams of local architects and four teams of
foreign architects to compete in designing the “Skopje City Center
Master Plan”.2 The former were a Macedonian team, a Serbian team,
a Croatian team and a Slovenian team, all of whom were citizens of
the Yugoslavian Federation, while the latter comprised Dutch, Italian,
American and Japanese teams, aka “the free world”. The winner was
to be awarded a prize of 20,000 dollars by Ernest Weissmann, Director
Kenzo Tange won. His Hiroshima Peace Centre and the Tokyo
island-city concept had already garnered recognition for Tange, who
was the founder of the Metabolist movement. With the award of the
Skopje project, his team was being asked to reconstruct 120 hectares
invitation to participate in the competition because he had thought
it represented “a model case of urban reconstruction”.4
According to the jury report on Tange’s entry, “the main concep-
tion . . . is based upon a contrast between the inner city and the rest of
the city center, . . . [with] a strong framing by large residential build-
ings which form [the] City Wall . . . , an imposing building group with
[a] transportation loop symbolizing the main City Gate”.5 In fact, the
proposal was founded on technocratic implementations employing
a symbolist language: it was a techno-utopia.
While some claim that the winning project was sensible and react-
ed intelligently to what remained of the city,6 one can only gasp at
the sight of the plan. Monumental elements, architectural gestures,
high-rise building and massive volumes encircle the competition
area’s perimeter; the Plan Voisin comes to mind. Was Tange’s Skopje
 Kenzo Tange, United
Nations Development
Programme, winning entry
plan, 1970; from Skopje
Resurgent: The Story of a
United Nations Special Fund
Town Planning Project (New
York: United Nations, 1970)

Master Plan “one of the most experimental of times for urban plan-
ning in the Balkans”7 or rather that dreadful moment when theoretical
speculations come true? Tange was given the chance to materialize
his Metabolist ideas on an urban scale, and in Skopje he surely found
fertile ground for implementing the “total plan” he had developed for 7
Tokyo. In Tange’s words, “Yugoslavia is a Socialist country in which Ibid.

land is not privately held, [so] the city government had sufficient power 8
to make it possible to introduce our total plan.”8 Zhong jie, Kenzo Tange.
This top-down approach is certainly symptomatic of a zeitgeist
relationship between architects and the authorities. Tange’s assertion
magnifies the inherent facilitation of implementing large-scale pro-
jects in regimes that do not have participatory or democratic political
processes. He describes the approach to his project as follows: “[A]n
ultimate form for the whole is designed on a virtually constitutional
basis and all development is made to agree with this form . . . [T]his
would make it possible to produce a total image”, a gesture one could
claim was only possible because of authoritarianism. But was Tange

153
9 really given carte blanche to implement his conceptual design of
United Nations Development structure and symbols?
Programme, Skopje
Resurgent. The Board of Consultants directed the process of implementing
Tange’s Master Plan. Firstly, the prize money was not all given to
10
Ibid.
Tange. He got only three-fifths of it, with the remainder being given
to the Croatian team (headed by Miscevic). This can be taken as the
first impediment to “a total plan”; it was more than just a symbolic
gesture, too, for it was decided that each competition entry would
be scrutinized so as to extract the best features and integrate these
into the winning entry. The Skopje Institute for Town Planning and
Architecture (ITPA) was to produce a conclusive plan by 1966, a task
they shared with Isozaki, Taniguchi and Watanabe from the Kenzo
Tange group, and with Miscevic and Fedor from the Croatian team,
along with numerous other consultants (traffic engineers, earthquake
specialists, officials overseeing historic monuments, etc. . . ). In early
1966, the conceptual layout was put into print. Several aspects that
had been present in Tange’s original draft were altered. The “City
Wall” apartment blocks were reduced in height and fragmented to
allow air circulation; while other elements were downscaled as well.
However, the Master Plan’s form was still recognizable. One of its cen-
tral elements was the railway station, or “Transportation Center”, a
paradigmatic project to examine in recognizing the underlying drama
of what happens when concepts lose to context. Tange conceptually
understood the Master Plan as a “transformer” whose mission was to
“translate the mechanism of contemporary society into a spatial struc-
ture”.9 Dubbed the “City Gate”, this interchange was to be a resolutely
modern elevated joint-core structure with parallel rows of high-rises
running along a central axis paired with multiple levels and looping
traffic flows (car traffic below, elevated railway tracks, detached pedes-
trian routes above) on “a more-than-human scale”.10
During the summer of 1966 in collaboration with the ITPA, the
town planning department and railway engineers, the Tange team
established detailed design guidelines and an overall programme for
the “City Gate”. The railway tracks were to be elevated to 8.5 metres
above ground at the passenger platforms. The space beneath them
was to accommodate the post office and the bus station. There were
only four tracks in the design’s first phase, but these grew in number
to eight in the second phase (1981–91).
Around this time, the Macedonian and Croatian teams, who
were somehow still involved, expressed concerns regarding the

154
seismological dangers of the “City Wall” and submitted an interim 11
report to the Board of Consultants. The resulting controversy seems Zhong jie, Kenzo Tange.

to have coincided with the Tange team’s gradual loss of control over 12
the project from this point onward. An obscure sentence concludes the Ibid.
otherwise carefully detailed UN report entitled “Skopje Resurgent”: 13
“This . . . of course, was a matter not so much of development planning Stephanie Herold, Benjamin
as of development control in the course of the plan’s implementation”. Langer and Julia Lechler,
Reading the City: Urban
Tange was obliged to leave the Board in 1967,11 and the first train pulled Space and Memory in Skopje
into the Transportation Center on 27 July 1981. (Berlin: Technische Uni
Berlin, 2011).
While Tang noted “that the urban planning authority of Skopje
required architects of individual buildings to abide by the master plan 14
and the building guidelines even in buildings” that he designed,12 Rem Koolhaas and Hans
Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan:
and while it is largely believed that this particular project was made Metabolism Talks . . . (Berlin:
by directly following Tange’s competition entry, the legacy of the Taschen, 2011).
original concept is elsewhere hardly recognizable. From above, some
elements are perceivable. Apart from the main axis and the volumes
of the “City Wall”, the City Shopping Center (1973) and the National
Macedonian Ballet (1981) were built. Along the “City Gate” axis, the
commercial bank tower was the only element of the programme to be
realized, along with the Transportation Center. Doxiadis, a long-time
collaborator of the UN, took over the supervision of the reconstruc-
tion effort in collaboration with Polservice (which had been in charge
of the reconstruction of Warsaw) and Wilbur Smith & Associates.13 It
is undeniable that the conceptual Metabolist essence of the project
became weakened. Isozaki, Tange’s main collaborator on the Skopje
project, explains the situation like this: “[M]ore and more came in,
more conservative people, over our heads. . . . And Tange said, “OK, it’s
time to compromise and go home.” So we did. . . . For me the Skopje
project basically died, or was killed, at that point.”14
The Skopje Master Plan and its implementation process perfectly
exemplify the hegemony of contextual factors over concepts – what-
ever gets built becomes contextualized by its very own presence. As
Tschumi states in the introduction of Event-Cities, “there is no archi-
tecture without context, historical, geographical, cultural”. By exten-
sion, this is certainly valid for urban planning, a truth that is magni-
fied in the case of the Macedonian capital. Not only was Skopje a city
before the Master Plan, but while the final layouts were being worked
out, its urban organism was also restructuring itself at a faster pace
than planning could ever hope to control or shape. At the same time,
the political forces and local powers at work were challenging the

155
156
project, while the country was struggling with financial issues, all 15
of which ended up perverting the fundamental concept. Finally, the Reyner Banham,
Megastructure: Urban
UN report claims with a lyrical zeal that “town-planning is essentially Futures of the Recent Past
team work: never has this well-worn phrase meant so much as it did (London and New York:
Harper and Row, 1976), 224.
in Skopje”. It also concludes by handing the project over to the locals:
“It is now for the local authorities not only to implement these plans,
but to correct any mistakes in them, and to revise and improve upon
them in the light of their own experience.”
If, as Reyner Banham claims,15 Tange is a “brutalist” due to his typi-
cal public buildings of béton brut, his architectural legacy is certainly
vividly evident in Skopje, more, perhaps, than his urban design – the
Master Plan – could ever be. While Tange’s concept got chewed up and
completely assimilated by the contextual forces at work on site, his
work also provided fodder for emulation and a fertile terrain for other Previous page, top:
visionary projects built long after he had left town. For example, Georgi The Transportation
Center, platforms, 2011.
Konstantinovski, a student of Paul Rudolph, produced two remarkable Photograph by Lorenz
buildings: the Skopje City Archive (1966) and the Goce Delcev student Bürgi
dormitory (1969), both massive volumes in pebbledash concrete, while Bottom:
the Telecommunication Center (1974) by Janko Konstantinov, who The Transportation Center,
2011.
left Alvar Alto’s studio to help with the reconstruction, incontestably Photograph by Fabian Roth
upholds Tange’s legacy. For Tange himself, the Skopje Master Plan
was a watershed in his career, for after working on it he was invited to
develop projects in several countries other than his own, including
Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Syria.
In the arena of concepts duking it out against contexts that Skopje
has been, the victory of the latter has been acknowledged, even if it
is not an unconditional one. Beyond the prosaic problem of mainte-
nance that master plans must confront, regardless of the success of
their implementation, one might suggest that of all contextual factors
the greatest adversary of concepts is the universal element of time and
the drama it introduces – the threat of the final moment, the caducity
of a project.

157
Comparative series:
Concept vs. context

158
 LOVE CONCEPTS!

Oliver Thill

I
According to Hans Sedlmayr, all art produced since the Rococo is 1
based on an idea.1 Hans Sedlmayr, Der Tod
des Lichtes (Salzburg: Otto
Because mankind had lost its belief in a universal god and the Müller Verlag, 1964), 205.
existence of the absolute by the time the Rococo style emerged, man
began to focus more and more on separate, isolated aspects of his daily
experience. Man became part of a more and more rational society in
which it is only possible to serve the idol of the moment – a false god
based on an idea (or in postmodern terms, a concept). From the Rococo
onward, the whole history of modernism can be read as a continuous
series of concepts: sensuality (Rococo), geometry (Boullée), architec-
ture parlante (Ledoux), the picturesque (England), the eternal classical
(Schinkel and Germany), the battle of styles (historicism), nature (art
nouveau), functionality (Bauhaus), rationality (Rationalism), tradition
(Heimatstil), context (critical regionalism), reduction (Minimalism),
deconstruction, sustainability, etc. Even the title of this issue of San
Rocco could be misunderstood as a brilliant concept.
This history of ideals (or concepts) is what separates us from antiquity.
Because of the limited focus of the concept, man has lost the ability to see
the bigger picture. Concepts have destroyed the complex, integrated and
balanced view of architecture and become a tool for emphasizing and
exaggerating single aspects of architecture in order to be able to satisfy
the more superficial expectations of society, the art world or politics.

II
In industrial and post-industrial capitalist society, “the concept” (or
better, conceptualism) has become an essential means by which the

159
 architect can communicate with potential clients. In developed demo-
cratic societies, the concept seems to be an unavoidable communica-
tion tool, and it has become the basis of the architectural profession:
the architect is now perceived as the great inventor or engineer of idols
(or chimeras). Therefore, architects search – often in panic – for the
“perfect one-liner”. In the words of Jeff Koons, “At one time, artists
had only to whisper into the ear of the king or pope to have political
effect. Now, they must whisper into the ears of millions of people.” The
concept – and not the executed and locally produced building – has
become the best means for clearly communicating through images to
a wider, less educated, inattentive and often even uninterested audi-
ence. The concept has become not only architecture’s selling point
but also its lowest common denominator, producing the 20th-century
typology of the “starchitect”.

III
From this perspective we cannot discuss the relevance of the “strat-
egy of the concept” as such, even if we don’t like concepts at all. We
cannot escape from the rationalistic and mechanical basis of society
and return to the more holistic world of antiquity. We can, however,
discuss the relevance of single concepts. It would seem that there
are concepts that are closer to the core of architecture and others
that are more alien to it. It also seems that some concepts are part
of an inner logic of the art of building (when building is understood
as a refined social, technical, aesthetic and historical process) while
others are fed by sources external to architecture, which can be unex-
pected, often strange and sometimes even dangerous. Viewed in this
manner, concepts can be separated and compared. Those belong-
ing to architecture’s “inner logic” would be concepts like geometry,
harmony, symmetry, rationality and context. Alien concepts would
include sensuality, architecture parlante, the picturesque, nature
as metaphor, belief in historic styles, functionalism, surrealism,
programme, etc.
Maybe it is possible to distinguish between good and bad con-
cepts, and maybe this is even necessary. If we are unable to escape
from or avoid the concept, then we can at least try to support and
develop good ones.
Maybe it is possible to combine concepts in order to develop a less
obvious conceptualism, a more hidden one (the hidden concept) that
could bridge the gap between the past and the future.

160
 Maybe is also possible to imagine a re-conceptualization of ancient
architecture in order to make it part of the arsenal of daily architec-
tural design practice again.

IV
The Rococo style emerged around 1720. Looking back at the nearly
300 years of conceptualism (to use another word for modernism) that
have passed since then, we can see that the lifespan of concepts has
been getting shorter and shorter because of the increasing speed of
media communication. While the Rococo and Classicism “survived”
for periods of fifty or even a hundred years, the lifespan of 20th-century
concepts like art nouveau, functionalism, art deco, brutalism, clas-
sical postmodernism or deconstructivism has not been longer than
a decade or two. In the even faster-paced digital age, projects can be
“conceptually strong” during the design stage but, because of the
long development process, already old-fashioned when the project is
realized just a couple of years later. It seems that the successful new
architect has become a screaming market trader in an uncontrolled
neo-liberal economy who has to announce the invention of a new
architecture every Monday morning.

161
162
 THE TRIANGLE AND THE ERASER:
NOTES ON THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW
OFFICES OF THE ITALIAN PARLIAMENT
BY GIANUGO POLESELLO

Andrea Zanderigo

Zeus
Certainly he did not lack confidence in his architecture. Gianugo
Polesello chose the name “Zeus” for his iconic entry in the 1966 com-
petition for the new offices of the Italian Parliament in the centre
of Rome. The competition brief asked for a set of functional spaces
(comprising underground parking, a huge archive, some offices for
the deputies’ assistants and a restaurant) to be added at the back of
Palazzo di Montecitorio on a very irregular site facing the small Piazza
del Parlamento to the north and two narrow streets to the east and
west – the Via di Campo Marzio and the Via della Missione – with the
latter dividing it from the palace itself. The site was a back courtyard
occupied by some forgettable additions and located behind a side
building included in the Parliament complex.
The Parliament compound began its life as the Palazzo Gaddi in
the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1571 it was sold to Cardinal
Cesi, who asked Martino Longhi il Vecchio to restore it. After passing
through the hands of numerous owners, in 1653 it was finally bought by
Prince Nicolò Ludovisi, the nephew of Pope Innocent X, and renovated
by Gianlorenzo Bernini and Mattia de Rossi. The renovation work was
suspended two years later when the prince died, and was only begun
again in 1694, when the palace was bought by Pope Innocent XII and
transformed into the headquarters of the Papal Curia under the super-
vision of the architect Carlo Fontana. After that, nothing important
happened until 1870, when it became the seat of the brand new Italian
Parliament, whose first session was hosted in a temporary room con-
structed of iron and wood added by the engineer Paolo Comotto behind
Palazzo di Montecitorio. In 1907, the Liberty architect Ernesto Basile

163
 was asked to demolish a set of buildings in behind the palace and to
replace them with spaces adequate for Parliament’s activities, while
leaving its main historical elevation in the front unaltered. Basile added
a massive, regular quadrangular building, the top half of which dis-
plays a brick exterior and the bottom half of which is revetted in white
marble, that was crowned by four towers, one at each corner. Given
that the 1966 competition yielded no results and Polesello’s Zeus was
never constructed, the most recent modifications to the palace have
continued to make reference to Basile’s interventions.
In this extremely complex and historically rich site, Polesello pro-
posed the masterful insertion of Zeus, which had the highly simple
geometrical form of a regularly extruded isosceles triangle that was
as tall as the adjacent palace. Zeus was conceived as a pure, window-
less white-marble building (it remains quite unclear from the draw-
ings whether the poorly illuminated interior was actually capable of
serving the structure’s purpose) that employed the same material
cladding the bottom floors of Basile’s building but in a smoother way.
As something truly modern and astonishingly abstract, we might say
that Polesello’s project is as sharp as the eponymous deity’s lightning
bolt, and yet it would have nonetheless been miraculously capable of
Gianugo Polesello, Zeus, inserting itself into the site and eliminating the latter’s picturesque
site plan: clumsiness with economical means.
1 Piazza del Parlamento
2 Via di Campo Marzio The project drawings and model show that Zeus was a perfect
3 Via della Missione example of an act of sprezzatura. It assertively occupies the irregu-
larly shaped site, creating an elaborate sequence of compressed and
expanded urban spaces around it while nonetheless maintaining its
splendid autonomy. Zeus runs parallel to the Parliament building along
the narrow Via della Missione, creating a small, precise square where
Polesello placed a Baroque fountain. A gap between the triangle and
the existing buildings creates a pedestrian shortcut for reaching the
Via di Campo Marzio. A group of ancillary elements (such as a multi-
directional connecting bridge and external vertical connections) fur-
ther defines the square while alluding to the fact that in the interior and
on the roof of the platonic shape there is a greater freedom of space.
A little further along, the main pedestrian entrance opens toward the
Via della Missione, punctuated by seven unadorned columns pasted
to the abstract façade and strengthened by three additional columns
located within the opening. The sharp corner of the triangle emerges
along the south border of the Piazza del Parlamento, bracketing the
long façade of Basile’s building on the right when it is viewed from the

164
Gianugo Polesello, Zeus,
ground floor plan

165
166
oblong square. On the other side, the triangle progressively expands
the width of the Via di Campo Marzio, broadening the connection
with the square and creating a subordinate open space that hosts the
ramps to the underground parking levels as well as a tall, free-standing
column (supposedly decorated with some art à la Trajan’s Column).
What at first sight might appear to be a violent and irresponsible
response to the spatial complexity of the historic fabric of the city
actually displays, in the end, an incredible (and lucky!) ability to medi-
ate, reshape and improve, all without renouncing being proudly con-
temporary and different. Zeus is simultaneously extremely rigid and
extremely sensitive.

Novissime [Prologue]
In 1964, two years before designing Zeus, Polesello participated in
the competition for what was then the new island of Tronchetto in
Venice. He was part of a large group of architects and planners from
the local university, the Istituto universitario di architettura di Venezia,
who were led by the school’s dean, Giuseppe Samonà, and included a
bunch of its young teachers and assistants, such as Costantino Dardi,
Luigi Mattioni, Valeriano Pastor, Gigetta Tamaro, Luciano Semerani
and Egle Renata Trincanato, as well as Polesello himself. Their entry, Previous page:
which was significantly (and ironically) called “Novissime”, or “very Novissime, competition
perspective, 1964
new”, reveals a highly specific attitude regarding modern architecture
built in historical contexts, an attitude that might be seen as a signifi-
cant precedent for Zeus’s fortuitous design. The Novissime project is
radical but also extremely elegant (in other words, it isn’t radical in a
bellowing, Archigrammesque kind of way). Asked to provide a realistic
design for the new island of Tronchetto, Samonà’s team responded
by rethinking the urban system of Venice as a whole. The two bridges
connecting the city with the mainland were removed and replaced by
a lighter suspended monorail like the one in Wuppertal. Two sleek,
oblong objects set in the lagoon close to the city’s edge were supposed
to act as transport interchanges. Along with these, to continue the
process of physical erasure, all of the borders of Venice were returned
to their condition in the 18th century, before a supposedly imperfect
version of modernity had clumsily ruined the city’s shape. Obviously,
even the Tronchetto island was not there anymore. The Novissime
project is a cogent utopia, one that is undoubtedly tinted by more than
a hint of nostalgia for the city’s supposed golden age. It is radically
modern while being radically classic. Though employing a different

167
 degree of pragmatism in response to its specific circumstances, Zeus’s
approach does not seem far removed from that of the Novissime project.
A further analogy linking the two projects lies in their shared act of
erasing: both are modern projects designed primarily as an erasure –
a physical one in the case of the Novissime project, and a conceptual
one in the case of Zeus’s smooth, white extruded triangle lacking any
tectonic sign or decoration, which is an extremely precise emptiness
that replaces a clumsy urban void. For all its massiveness, Zeus is a
Baldessarian erasure.

Repetitions [Epilogue]
After designing Zeus, Polesello quickly became obsessed with triangles,
using them in spades in every project. After a quick review of his later
work, one finds 26 of them in no more than 17 projects (he was not
extremely prolific as a designer and, unfortunately, few of his works
have been built) – 17 triangles in plan and 9 in section or elevation,
to be precise. Never again did he employ the triangle with the ease
he demonstrated in the design for Zeus. Sadly enough, his triangles
morphed into highly personal symbols of who knows what, or, at the
very least, mere signatures.

Gianugo Polesello, Zeus,

model

168
 AN AIRPLANE HAS LANDED
IN THE DESERT:
MYTHS, SHAPES AND METAPHORS
RELATED TO BRASILIA

Martino Tattara

Much of the criticism of the project for Brasilia, the new Brazilian capi- 1
tal built between 1957 and 1960, has focused on the form of the city. Lucio Costa, “Memória
Descritiva do Plano piloto”,
This form results from the intersection of two axes – one residential, in idem, Registro de uma
one monumental – and was meant to derive, according to its architect, vivência (São Paulo: Empresa
des Artes, 1995), 283–95.
Lucio Costa, from the “primary gesture of one who marks or takes pos-
session of a place: two axes crossing at right angles, the very sign of 2
the cross”.1 In contrast, architectural historians and critics have often Ibid.

used a series of other shapes to describe the appearance of the new

urban organism built in the middle of the Brazilian Planalto Central
region. The form of the two axes, with the residential one adapted
“to the local topography, the natural drainage of the area, and . . . the
best possible orientation”,2 according to the project report, ended
up looking very differently: in the words of many critics, it seemed
either like an airplane had landed in the middle of the desert, or like
a hammock, which the Brazilians love so much and of which Costa
himself later designed a version for the famous Brazilian pavilion at
the Milanese Triennale of 1964.
In the case of Brasilia, the process of the abstraction and figura-
tion of the urban form has often been used as a weapon to bolster
fierce criticism of the political decision to build a new capital city in
the middle of a completely unknown and largely unexplored part of
the country. The use of these shapes has reinforced a common under-
standing of the new city as being the result of an arbitrary choice and
argued the project’s socio-political insanity.
However, while proposing how certain urban forms resemble cer-
tain shapes is a legitimate exercise that has often occurred over the
course of the history of architecture, the associations made by historians

169
 and critics in the case of Brasilia have been rather problematic, for
they seem to suggest most of all that the very act of giving a form to
the city represents a fundamentally foolish endeavour. But when one
reads Costa’s project report, it is clear not only that the architect didn’t
disregard the importance of the act of giving the city a form, but that,
on the contrary, he explicitly understood the crucial role of this in the
attempt to insert the new capital city into the collective imagination of
the country as quickly as possible. Whether the city really looks like an
airplane or a hammock, the case of Brasilia reveals that the shaping of
urban form is a complicated matter and that making figural associa-
tions with the form of cities can lead to an overly superficial understand-
ing of something that is primarily (and disciplinarily) a complex issue.
Although the social, economic and political premises of the new
Latin American capital have been much debated, critics and histori-
ans have nonetheless failed in understanding that the city is first and
foremost the result of a careful understanding of the territorial, geo-
graphical and environmental features of the region in which the city
was built, and thus represents the perfect conclusion of the long pro-
cess of discovery and exploration of what was, at the time, a completely
unknown area. If historians and critics were to look more closely at
Costa’s project, beginning with the competition report, the plan and
sketches, and the numerous texts written about it after the competi-
tion results were announced, as well as at the city itself, they would
understand that Brasilia was not built in the middle of a desert in a
context that was a tabula rasa; rather, the entire process of construc-
tion was the result of a very long and complex effort to understand the
very specific territorial conditions of the region in which the city was
built. Moreover, a more careful analysis would reveal that the project
is actually a thoughtful interpretation of these geographical features,
and that the reports of the exploratory missions carried out at the end
of the 19th century perceived them as being potential assets for the
future city. Contrary to recurrent criticism of the poor quality of the
city’s open spaces, Costa’s project was the only competition entry that
established an interpretation of the geomorphological conditions of
the Planalto Central, and, perhaps more importantly, the only one that
invested the region’s surrounding landscape with a political meaning.
Following the establishment of the Ministry of Culture and
Education in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, Costa was appointed head of the
Office for National Historical and Artistic Heritage (SPHAN), and in
this position he was able to develop a new architecture that was the

170
synthesis of modernist, regionalist and neo-colonialist attempts to
distil a new language for the Latin American res-publica. The result
was the creation of an architectural “order” serving the public domain
that had little to do with the orthodox modern European tradition of
the Athens Charter but offered a formal vocabulary for the creation of
exceptional typological solutions. It was Oscar Niemeyer who largely
created this “order” in the Plano Piloto with great invention, while
Costa concentrated on offering a precise framework and support for the
placement of these monuments. Costa left the design of all of the monu-
mental buildings and political institutions to Niemeyer and focused
on the design features of the open space – of the large city’s embank-
ments, and of the greenery and the vegetation – in creating Brasilia’s
basic civic form. The result was the Superquadra, a 300-by-300-metre
composition of radically simple residential blocks interwoven with a
complex network of open spaces.
Contrary to common opinion, the contemporary city (meaning the
complex of the Plano Piloto and the various satellite towns that the fed-
eral district comprises today) is closely related to the original plan. The
contemporary urban form is the physical manifestation of a territorial
project whose constituent principles informed Costa’s original project,
as the competition report clearly states. In other words, the Plano Piloto
was not simply a plan for the city, but also the result of research into the
definition of a model that could steer the future development of the city
over the entire territory of the federal district, where the landscape and
the vegetation of the cerrado, the ecological region in which the new
capital was built, would become the main components in the design.
In this respect, viewing the form of Brasilia through the lens of the
traditional critique of the modern city, as is often done, is misleading.
In the Plano Piloto the relationship between built fabric and open space,
in contrast to what a figure–ground diagram would reveal, is closer to
that of the ancient European city, where the form of private space is
defined and controlled by the form of public space. If pattern, density
and the degree of interconnection between built fabric and open space
are the elements that shape the principles of modern urban planning,
then Brasilia is certainly not the application of the tenets of modern-
ism; rather, it represents the imagination of a new urban paradigm in
which there is an equilibrium between urban centres and the land,
between the intimate dimension of the city and the monumental scale
of the landscape.

171

1 The Gardens of Babur, or the Bāgh-e Babur, are an eleven-hectare walled
Jonas Benzion Lehrman,
Earthly Paradise: Garden and
Courtyard in Islam (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1980).
Facing page:
Babur Gardens, plan
1 Babur’s tomb
2 Shah Jehani mosque
3 Pool
4 Ruins of the Queen’s
Palace
5 Pavilion
6 Caravanserai area
7 New pool
8 Kabul River
172
-
BAGH-E BABUR
Ludovico Centis
photographs by Romano Martinis
enclosure in Kabul extending over fifteen terraces located between the
western slopes of the Sher-e-Darwaza Mountain and the Kabul River.
Far from being the expression of a unitarian design, they are the
result of a syncopated stratification. Their interest lies in their cha-
meleonic resilience to all of the vicissitudes their history comprises,
and in the openness of their hybrid status. From both a geographic
and a chronological point of view, they are somewhere in the middle
between ancient Persian gardens and the Moghul ones of the 17th
century; in fact, the Gardens of Babur represent the key moment of
the shift from the former to the latter. This can be only guessed at by
consulting texts, archaeological remains and paintings, however, for
neither the Timurid nor the early Afghan Moghul gardens have sur-
vived intact to the present day.
In the Islamic tradition, there is a complementary coexistence of
the garden and courtyard typologies.1 The first is often divided sym-
bolically in four parts, with a centrally located pavilion or palace sur-
rounded by greenery. The second is usually enclosed within a building
and has a hard surface, in contrast to the garden’s soft one. Water rep-
resents the common element, flowing through channels or contained
in pools and fountains. The considerable amount of space required by
gardens results in their often being located on the outskirts of the city,
while the relatively limited size of a courtyard makes it adaptable to
a denser urban environment. Some hybrid examples in which a non-
designed element is enclosed by a building do exist, as can be seen in
the Takht-i Süleyman palace, with its natural lake surrounded by the
palace and a colonnade. These exceptions relate more to the peculiar
 1
N

2 4
3

7
6
8
Aerial view from the east
(around 1930). Reproduced
with the permission of The
Fine Arts Library of the
Harvard College Library

geographic conditions and historic stratifications of the site, however,

than to the birth and development of a new typology.
Babur was a charismatic figure. After spending three years in the
forest to train his army, he launched a military campaign that led
him to become the founder of the Moghul empire. These events were
recorded in the Baburnama, the first autobiography of the Muslim
world. During his stay in Kabul, prior to the conquest of India, he
established the Gardens of Babur as an open, terraced space conceived
in close relationship to the plain to the south-west, where he and his
entourage hunted. As the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and
Timur, and as a member of a tribe with Turkish and Persian origins,
Babur undoubtedly carried with him from Samarkand and Herat
memories of the Persian chahār bāgh, a quadrilateral garden divided
by walkways and running water into four smaller parts that recalled
the garden of Eden, whose four rivers and four quadrants represented
the world. The essential elements of the chahār bāgh consist of shade
provided by trees, walls or pavilions, and water, a source of soothing
sounds and cooling, drawn through the qanat (an underground tunnel
running below the water table) and a system of well-like devices. This
model dates back to ancient times: based on archaeological evidence,
the earliest example of the Persian quadripartite garden plan can be
found in Pasargadae, not far from the grave of Cyrus the Great (who
died in 530 BC and was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire), which
was enclosed by a grove.
The 16th-century Gardens of Babur had neither the archetypal aura
of ancient Persian enclosed gardens nor the rigid formal symmetry

174
Pasargadae Takht-i Süleyman Bibi-Khanym Mosque
Madar Soleyman (Iran) Tazeh Kand-e-Nosrat (Iran) Samarkand (Uzbekistan)
4th century BC 1265-1282 AD 14th century AD
archaeological archaeological remains current situation
reconstruction

Bagh-e Babur Ram Bagh Tomb of Humayun

Kabul (Afghanistan) Agra (India) Delhi (India)
1528 AD 1528 AD 1569 AD
current situation current situation current situation

175
2 of Indian Moghul ones. Contrary to the Persian gardens, the passage
Catherine B. Asher, “Babur
and the Timurid Char
-
Bagh: Use and Meaning”,
in Environmental Design:
Journal of the Islamic
Environmental Design
Research Centre 1–2 (1991),
46–55.
3 of the fruit-orchard enclosures of Central Asia. Babur built a total of ten
Ibid.
4
Robert Byron, The Road to
Oxiana (Pimlico, 2004), 369.
5 located in the way that serais were usually built. As he progressed in
Luca Mozzati, Islam (Milan:
Electa, 2002), 105.
6 Sikri and Dholpur. Even today we can find a further hint of the role that
They provide an easy pretext
for a number of stolid
interpretations. Byron
reported this conversation
in his book: “This morning
at the legation I met a
Colonel Porter who asked
what my share in the world’s
work was. I said I had been
looking at Mohammadan
architecture. ‘Mind you’,
he replied, ‘I’ve seen a
good deal of Mohammadan
architecture one way and
another, in Palestine, Egypt,
and Persia, and I’ve given
a good deal of thought to
the matter. I can tell you
the key to the problem if
you like.’ ‘Really. What is it?’
‘The whole thing’s phallic’,
he uttered in a ghoulish
whisper. I was surprised at
first to note the influence
of Freud on the North-
West Frontier, but soon
discovered that for Colonel
Porter the universe itself
was phallic.” Byron, The Road
to Oxiana, 376–77.
176
between the outer and inner spaces was defined not by a fencing wall,
but simply by the design of the ground: a rational, artificial insertion
in a natural, untamed landscape. While Babur later declined a more
rigid geometric layout in several gardens in India, beginning with
Ram Bāgh garden in Agra, in Kabul he opted for a terraced solution
characterized by shade and water that came closer to the atmosphere
gardens in and around Kabul. They constituted for him an “imprima-
tur upon the land”,2 a form of representation of power, both practical
and symbolical. Following the Timurid tradition, gardens were used
as both residences and military camps, and they were strategically
his conquest of India, he “marked” the territories he annexed, giving
the order to design new gardens in Agra, Panipat, Gwalior, Fatehpur,
Bāgh-e Babur had as a model for subsequent gardens in the toponymy
of several Indian cities, as in the case of Panipat with its Kabuli Bāgh.3
Not only did Babur give instructions regarding the general layout
of his gardens, but he was also personally involved with the choice of
plants. He precisely indicated the species of trees, flowers and fruit that
had to be cultivated. The fruit also assumed a political role, for it was
consumed by Babur and his men in a symbolic ceremony or donated as
a special gift to his followers, thereby reinforcing the bonds of loyalty.
Plants and flowers continued to play a key role in Afghan politics
for centuries. In his The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron ironically noted
that flowers were still the main diplomatic tool for British diplomacy
in Afghanistan in the 1930s.4
Babur gave instructions to build the Bāgh-e Babur in Kabul in 1528
AD (935 AH), choosing it as his final resting place. The nomadic popu-
lations of the Middle East produced astonishing mausolea for their
rulers over the centuries, from both a symbolic and a structural point
of view. One of the greatest examples is Gunbad-i Qabus, where the
body of Qabus was conserved in a glass coffin that was suspended at
an incredible height in a massive, hollow brick tower and illuminated
by the morning light.5 If these mausolea punctuating Central Asia are
bold declarations of immortality,6 then the Gardens of Babur are prob-
ably the most understated, surprisingly delicate mausoleum that a
founder of an empire has ever chosen for himself. It was only later that
the garden became the characteristic Mughal setting for tombs: while
the tombs of Babur’s descendants, like that of his son Humayun, are 7
usually stone mausolea set in the centre of a chahār bāgh, Babur gave Charles W. Moore, William
J. Mitchell and William
instructions to have his grave “open to the sky, with no buildings over Turnbull, Jr., The Poetics of
it, no need of a door-keeper”.7 His desire was fulfilled in 1544 when his Gardens (Cambridge, Mass.
The MIT Press, 1988), 179.
body was moved from Agra, where he had first been buried, to Kabul.
Bāgh-e Babur survived many interventions. In the 17th century a 8
fencing wall was constructed all around the garden, a prayer platform, Federico De Renzi,
“Esilio e rinascita degli
an inscribed headstone and a marble screen were added around the eredi di Gengis Khan”, in
tomb and a mosque was built on the terrace below. Then in the 19th “Afghanistan addio!”, Limes –
Rivista italiana di geopolitica
century, a central pavilion and a residence now known as the Queen’s 2 (2010), 167–78.
Palace were constructed. In the 1930s the Gardens became a public
recreation area, with the construction of a large water reservoir, pools
and fountains, and finally during the 1980s, a modern swimming pool
and a greenhouse were added.
After 1992, during the war, the Gardens became a no-man’s-land
for several years, as well as a source of firewood for the population still
living in the area. Babur’s grave, located on the fourteenth terrace,
was significantly altered during the early 20th century. Now a replica
of the carved marble grave enclosure (based on fragments found on
the site and on Charles Masson’s sketch of 1832) surrounds the tomb,
while some arghawan trees with their red blossoms provide a colour-
ful counterpoint to the white marble screen.
The Gardens serve as the main stage for the festivities of the spring
holiday of Nawruz, the Persian New Year, a tradition dating back to
Moghul times celebrated by the different ethnic groups that inhabit
Kabul, in particular those, like the Hazara, that still have strong bonds
with Persian culture.8
Today, thanks to recent restoration work implemented by the Aga
Khan Trust for Culture, Bāgh-e Babur is the largest walled public enclo-
sure in Kabul, providing the urban population with a rather informal
space for picnics, walking and swimming, as well as being a source of
fresh water for people living nearby.

177
 -
Bagh-e Babur: The marble
screen around the tomb
of Babur

178
 -
Bagh-e Babur: Shah Jehani
mosque

179
 RITUALS, OBSTACLES AND
ARCHITECTURE
(FRAGMENTS OF AN ESSAY I WILL
NEVER BE ABLE TO WRITE)

Pier Paolo Tamburelli

Photographs by Stefano Graziani and Giovanna Silva

I
In one of the few fundamental pieces of writing about architecture
ever produced, Adolf Loos argued:

Our culture is founded on the recognition of the all-transcending great-

ness of classical antiquity. Our manner of thinking and feeling we have
adopted from the Romans, who taught us to think socially and to disci-
pline our emotions. It is not mere chance that the Romans were incapa-
ble of inventing a new order of columns, a new ornament. The Greeks,
who invented the mouldings, were individualists, scarcely able to govern
their own cities. The Romans invented social organization and governed
the whole world. The Greeks applied their imagination to the elevation,
which is individual, the Romans to the ground plan, which is general.
The Romans were more advanced than the Greeks, we are more advanced
than the Romans. The great masters of architecture believed they built
like the Romans. They were mistaken. Period, place, climate frustrated
their plans. But whenever lesser architects tried to ignore tradition,
whenever ornamentation became rampant, a master would appear to
remind us of the Roman origins of our architecture and pick up the
thread again (Loos, 1910).

Though hermetic as usual, Loos was precise here: he recognized

the particular attitude toward architecture developed in the Roman
cultural context and suggested that this experience still provided
the basis for contemporary architectural practice. In other words, for
Loos – no matter what changes have happened in the meantime – con-
temporary Western architecture was still “encompassed within the
limits of the natural evolution of Roman architecture” (Grassi, 1997).

180
 What does this mean? Should we follow Loos’s perspective even
today?

II
In his Invention of Law in the West (2008), Aldo Schiavone writes that
Romans invented the Law, thereby opening up a new space for interac-
tion in human society. According to Schiavone, it was the particular
formalism of their religion that provided Romans with the possibility
of creating and exploring this new-found social dimension. Indeed,
Roman religion relied on extremely codified procedures. In time,
the formalism of these procedures survived the disappearance of
the religious meanings associated with them and evolved into a set
of secularized but still formalized (and thus juridical) interpersonal
relationships. Schiavone speaks of the “invention of Law”, just as
Christian Meier locates the “origin of the political” in classical Greece
(Meier, 1980), Karl Polanyi argues that “the free market was planned”
in 18th-century Great Britain (Polanyi, 1944) and Edouard Pommier
talks of the “invention of Art” in Renaissance Italy (Pommier, 2007).
In all of these cases, what appeared was not altogether a new prac-
tice (the economy, of course, existed before the 18th century), but the
possibility of individuating and exploring a new specific – and clearly
separate – facet of the organization of society, or of looking at human
behaviour from a new point of view – a legal point of view, a political
point of view, an economic point of view, an artistic point of view. In
these moments, the legal, the political, the economic and the artistic
became independent and non-obvious: they appeared within the
visual field and defined the set of possibilities of a new discussion.
Jan Assman observes:

What Christian Meier defines as the political is not just political order. It
is something like an Archimedic point from where it is possible to reflect
on political order and search for the best political institutions by compar-
ing alternatives (Assman, 2000).

For the Romans, the relationship between places and actions was
not obvious; landscape became available for transformation, space
appeared. This appearance of space was a consequence, once again, of
Roman religion’s particular formalism and of its particular relation-
ship to landscape.

182
III
The Roman gods were not as exuberant as the Greek ones. They were
fixed, silent, relatively obscure figures who were precisely identified
by a restricted field of competence and by an incredibly precise set
of rituals to be performed. Indeed, there were no myths in Roman
religion, at least before the Hellenization of the 3rd century. Roman
mythology seems to have disappeared before historic times, leaving
behind a collection of petrified scenes to be repeated over and over.
Myths were somehow transformed into a series of rituals that were
totally disconnected from the original narrations that would have
imbued them with sense. A Roman priest like the Flamen Dialis oper-
ated as if he were a “living statue” (Kerényi, 1971), somehow staging a
religious picture his entire life.
Roman religion required no faith (at least if we understand this
word according to its contemporary meaning inspired by monothe-
ism); the Romans simply had to perform a complicated set of rituals
that punctuated both their calendar and their landscape (Sabbatucci,
1988). Not to repeat these procedures meant to destroy the equilibrium,
to put the entire community in danger and to regress to a condition
of brute violence. This performed religion touched all aspects of life:
Romans had a ritual (and a terribly precise one) for every little thing.
The correct execution of these rituals was essential:

Roman religion is based on the correctly performed (rite) ceremonial

act. In this performance the ius divinum, or divine law – the relationship
between the human and the divine – is realized (and concluded). For both
pietas and religio, Cicero gives the following definition: iustitia adversos
deos, “justice toward the gods.” . . . What is essential for religio, is that no
errors be made during the act of worship, that nothing is done incorrectly,
that nothing conflicts with the proper application of the norm (Kerényi,
1971, quoting Wissowa, 1902).

For the Roman religion, places were directly linked with rituals,
without the mediation of any myth, and so Roman architecture did not
need to say anything abut the ceremonies it hosted. There was no nar-
ration associated with places – no concept, no figure – only a content,
literally something contained inside: gestures contained in space, or
contained gestures and containing walls. The temple did not directly
relate to the gods, but to the ceremonies hosted within it; this, in later
Following pages:
times, also influenced non-religious architecture: the thermae did not Photographs by Giovanna
refer to water or to hygiene, but just to the sequence of warm and cold Silva

183
184
185
 baths. The surprising abstraction of Roman architecture came directly
from the frozen world of the voiceless Roman gods.
In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote:

How do words refer to sensations? – There doesn’t seem to be any problem

here; don’t we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? But
how is the connection between the name and the thing named set up?
This question is the same as: How does a human being learn the mean-
ing of names of sensations? For example, of the word “pain”. Here is one
possibility: words are connected with the primitive, natural, expressions
5m
of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries;
0
and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sen-
Bantia, the templum
tences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. “So you are saying that
(Torelli, 1969)
the word ‘pain’ really means crying?” – On the contrary: the verbal expres-
sion of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it” (Wittgenstein, 1953).

In a similar way, Roman architecture hosted actions, but it did

Visual axis
not describe them. And it replaced the actions it referred to with new
Templum in
terra
( formalized) ones. Roman architecture operated as a technique for
turning actions into rituals. The relationship between spaces and ges-
tures was immediate but not literal. No explanation was needed. The
3m relationship was just between the form and the gesture; there was no
0

Bases of the plateau on which the

secret meaning, no hidden origin – just a certain gesture performed
augur sat
Poles to enclose the templum in a certain place and with a certain form. The abstraction of form
Piles inscribed in templum
enveloped and protected multiple dimensions of reality, somehow
Bantia, observatory for the distancing and protecting the unpredictable, the inexpressible. The
flight of the birds (templum direct, immediate relationship between entirely abstract forms and
in terra) (Carandini, 2000)
fundamentally pre-rational gestures not only introduced a surprising
Mons Albanus
SE
Horizon
complexity into Roman architecture, but it also charged the Roman
space with a sublime potential difference. Abstraction and the uncon-
View on the
romanus
ager
scious coincided in a truly multidimensional space.
Roman architecture was formalist. “Formalism” here is not to be
Pomerium
understood as an attitude within architecture (i.e., the formalism of
Pomerium
Pomerium

View on
the urbs
Carlo Rainaldi or Richard Meier) but as a more general cultural attitude
Palatium Cermalus
Pomerium of the Romans that came before (and produced) architecture. Indeed,
it was the formalism of Roman religion that produced Roman archi-
Reconstruction of the tecture. Formalism depended on the desire – which was religious in
templum in terra (in grey) origin – to give form to the environment, to define the scene for ritual
and the Roman templum
in aere (hatched) used by actions, to underscore and exalt gestures by building a stage around
Romulus to inaugurate the them. Everything needed to be more defined, more perspicuous, more
Roma Quadrata (Capanna)
apt to receive a precise position in memory. Formalism came from a

186
desire to turn circumstance into ritual: to frame gestures, to stage Roma

Ager Romanus antiqus

events, to give form to actions. Architecture formalized the given.

IV Tusculum

on
Bovillae

ri z
The relationship between Roman men and Roman gods needed the

Ho
Lake
Albano Mount Albano

mediation of landscape. For the Romans, it was simply impossible Aricia

Alba Longa

that a god would not have “his own place” (Dumézil, 1966). Cults had
precise locations. Rituals needed to happen not only in certain places, Scheme of Romulus’s
but with certain orientations before certain elements of landscape. templum in aere for
inaugurating
5 km
the Roma
In contrast to the Greeks, who were only interested in the excep- Quadrata
0 from the Palatine
tional points where the gods appeared, the Romans were interested in Hill (Capanna)
Scheme of Romulus’s templum in aere
areas – the surfaces where human actions transpired and established for inaugurating the Roma Quadrata
from the Palatine hill (Capanna)

a relationship with the gods. Roman architecture regulated activities Velia

on a surface that was never lacking in gods. Indeed, their original land- Porta
Sacelum Larundae

Porta Mugonia
Romanula m
iu
scape, the Ager Romanus, was entirely sacred to the Romans. or
at Palatium
gu
r
Au Curiae
Veteres
Roman architecture was made of plans exactly because the Roman Lupercal
Cermalus Centre of
system

religious space was extracted from a continuous surface. Roman archi- Porta?

tecture was made of enclosures, gaps and obstacles in an extension of Ax

is
sp
ec
tio
space that was meaningful from the beginning.
Roman architecture transformed a landscape understood primar- Ara Consi
Alba Longa

ily as a depository of platforms for rituals, machines for visualizing the 0

100 200 m

divine in a given geographical context, devices that needed to be cor- Scheme of Romulus’s templum in aere

rected in order to assure the precise execution of those very same ritu- for inaugurating the Roma Quadrata
Scheme of Romulus’s
from the Palatine hill. The drawing
includes the visual axis, the vertices of

als. The landscape was consequently adapted in order to comply with templum in aere for
the pomerium and the four places of
worship chosen from Tacitus to localize
inaugurating the Roma
the mentioned above vertices and the
the requirements for a highly codified communication with the gods. city walls with the three ritual doors.
Quadrata from the
(Capanna)

The temple (templum) was such a platform. Etymologically, a tem- Palatine Hill. The drawing
includes the visual
plum is a portion of space cut from the sky – an ideal column of space axis, the vertices of the
corresponding to a certain portion of soil (Carandini, 2006; Torelli pomerium and the four
and Gros, 2007), a volume depending on a surface, on a plan. The tem- places of worship chosen
from Tacitus to localize the
plum is a platform from which to look at the surrounding landscape, a aforementioned vertices
room for observation, a machine of vision. The templum defines where and the city walls with
the three ritual doors
one looks out from, what one looks at and how one looks at this (the (Capanna)
Roman templum is not an object to look at in the way that the Greek
temple is). For instance, the auspicium (a ceremony in which the augur
interpreted the flight patterns of certain birds as an answer to a ques-
tion raised by the person requesting the auspicium) depended on the
reference grid defined by the templum in aere and the templum in terra.
The two rectangles of the “temple in the air” and the “temple on the
Following pages:
earth” defined a geographic/geometric construction that allowed the Photographs by Stefano
messages sent from the gods through the flight of birds to be decoded. Graziani

187
188
189
 The nature of these conversations with the gods does not seem that
different from that of the attempts to communicate with aliens in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. The aliens land in a very particular area of
earth’s landscape (Devil’s Tower, Wyoming); the Americans try to com-
municate with them through the unending repetition of hyper-formal-
ized (and super-silly) keyboard melodies. The whole thing has a decidedly
archaic Roman tone that is somehow similar to that of the description
Devil’s
Devil’s Tower,
tower, Wyoming
Wyoming of the inauguratio of King Numa as narrated by Livy (1, 18, 5–10).

V
The Romans used construction as a means to ensure the correct
repetition of rituals. The religious obligation to repeat complicated
ceremonies in precise locations led the Romans to modify those very
same places in order to avoid possible mistakes in the performance
of future rituals. The interpretation of ritual was thus encoded into
the physical organization of the place. By doing this, the Romans
invented architecture.
This (quite uncommon, quite counter-intuitive) use of built mat-
ter as a tool with which to control human activity appeared simply
because the Romans could afford no mistakes in their dealings with
the gods. Following their characteristic combination of pragmatism
and formalism, the Romans simply built obstacles to the potential
misinterpretation of the landscape. Architecture thus emerged as a
relatively practical tool for avoiding religious mistakes. In the gloomy
atmosphere of ancient Rome, architecture became a technique for
the correction of landscape aimed at the precise repetition of ritual
gestures: a technique for the repetition of gestures by means of physi-
cal constraints, a technique for the control of movement by means of
immobility, a science of obstacles.
The result of such a hyper-conservative relationship to their original
terrain is the production of an entirely artificial (formalized) landscape.
Out of the pure fear of possible misunderstandings in the future, the
Romans ended up completely redefining the original geography they
had initially aimed to preserve.
Roman architecture was an attempt to control the future, to make
sure that the future would be precisely like the present and the past,
and that the equilibrium of the present and the past would be main-
tained. Roman architecture was explicitly built against the future to
reduce possibilities, to prevent mistakes. It was a technology of repeti-
tion born from a desire for correct execution.

190
By coupling rituals and places, gestures and spaces, the Romans
opened up the possibility, to put it in contemporary terms, of relat- Palestrina
ing space and programme to one another. Places were connected
to gestures by means of construction; spaces were used to produce
Alban
Monts Lepini
gestures, to enact behaviours. Here, the specific field of interest of Hills

Western architecture – the relationship between spaces and human

activity – was clearly defined. The Roman technology of repetition
was the starting point for innumerable further investigations of the
relationship between spaces and actions. This link between spaces
and actions, through time, underwent all kinds of different interpre-
tations and, in the end, finally allowed architecture to perform as a
mechanism by which to produce events: Tyrrhenian Sea

In 1966, I first heard of a brief moment in time – the Constructivists in the

Soviet Union, 1923 – where the most intimate details of daily life became 5 10 km
0
the legitimate subject of the architect’s imagination. I could not resist my
Palestrina
late participation – to think of architecture not as form, but as organiza-
tion, to influence the way lives are lived, an ultimate form of script writ-
ing (Koolhaas, 2004).

It is possible to write this, and it is possible to criticize the vio-

lence embedded in 19th-century architecture as is done in Foucault’s
Surveiller et punir (1975), only because of the mutual influence of space
and gestures introduced by the Romans. From this point of view,
Jeremy Bentham, the Constructivists and OMA are nothing but Roman
epigones. Architecture can be understood as a device for producing
innovation, as the Constructivists did, only because it was originally
Axonometric view of Palestrina’s
invented as a device for producing repetition. Axonometric view of
sanctuary (Kähler, modified by author)
Palestrina’s sanctuary
(Kähler, modified by author)
VI
If we now return to Loos’s conclusions after these provisional con-
siderations, what should we think? Do we still build like the Romans?
The answer is twofold: yes and no. Yes, contemporary Western archi-
tecture still considers the relationship between spaces and gestures Perspective view
Perspective view from from the
Palestrina’s
sanctuary upper terrace
(now understood – in a secularized version – as programmes) as the obvi- upper terrace
Perspective view from Palestrina’s
sanctuary upper terrace
ous centre of the discipline; but no, the relationship between gestures
and spaces is no longer abstract the way it was in Roman architecture.
Indeed, Western architects abandoned the abstraction of Roman
architecture shortly after achieving its unsurpassed masterpieces Perspective view of Palestrina’s
sanctuary upper terrace
with Bramante and Vignola. Starting with Serlio’s demented idea Perspective view
Perspective view of of the
Palestrina’s
sanctuary upper terrace
(in Book VI) that the gentleman’s house should look different from upper terrace

191
 the tradesman’s (sorry, why?), the immediate, abstract relationship
between spaces and gestures inherited from Roman architecture was
lost. Ever since then, all sorts of “modernisms” have desperately tried
to produce buildings that could describe the actions they contained
and explain how they should be used. This impatient desire for a mes-
sage ended up erasing all complexity from architecture. Architecture
started to be filled with its own content; it no longer accepted being hol-
low, and it immediately ceased being receptive to the world around it.
It would be better to do exactly the opposite of what is being done
in contemporary architecture: to consider other possible approaches
to architecture beyond the Roman one (which you can summarize
as: Context!) and go back to the abstraction of Roman architecture
(which you can summarize as: Fuck concepts!). In fact, only a con-
scious abstraction would allow today’s architecture to respond to the
complexity of our contemporary reality with the necessary precision
and detachment. Architecture can be multiple, open, unpredictable,
only if it is entirely abstract, conventional, separate, consciously empty,
deliberately hollow. It is only without a content that architecture can
be appropriated and inhabited; only if it is free from desires of its own
can it accept external desires; only as a hollow container, as an empty
receptacle, can it be filled: only a dry sponge is capable of absorbing
events from the outside. Here indifference means generosity, and ano-
nymity means richness. Or, to put it in other terms, abstraction is the
precondition for realism; reduction is the precondition for curiosity;
formalism is the precondition for attention; classicism is the precon-
dition for a non-Eurocentric architecture.

VII
The fact that contemporary Western architecture is still based on the
development of some presuppositions that are grounded in Roman
architecture means, among other things, that we tend to attribute to
all historical forms of architecture a character that is typical of only
the Roman and post-Roman ones. In other words, we see all differ-
ent historical manifestations of architecture through the lens of the
Roman experience. So, when we talk about Mayan architecture or
Khmer architecture, the word “architecture” is, to a certain extent,
misleading, for its meaning in our society has been so fundamentally
defined by the Roman experience that even speaking of “Mayan archi-
tecture” or “Khmer architecture” already gives a distorted interpreta-
tion of these phenomena, just like talking about “Incan law” or “the

192
Babylonian market”. Recognizing architecture as a Roman invention
is a first step toward defining the premises for a comparative approach
to architecture: to understand what a certain society demands from
buildings and allows buildings to do – what built matter is asked to
do in a certain cultural context.
Recognizing the Roman origins of our architecture also allows us
to understand that architecture is not a “natural” activity based on
pure necessity. Architecture cannot be taken for granted; it cannot be
considered a shared notion, independent from its cultural context. We
also cannot be so naïve as to consider this difference in the cultural
understanding of architecture as being something of the past – some-
thing that our contemporary globalized society has entirely surpassed.
In fact, contemporary cities are more complex and dirtier than recent
descriptions suggest. Traditions, superstitions and beliefs did not
vanish (and certainly they will not vanish just because Western archi-
tects need to push their garbage according to their idiotic formats).
The point here is that the confrontation of Western and non-Western
architectural traditions can take the form of either an exchange based
on the awareness of cultural differences (which needs, first of all, to be
grounded in a new reading of the Western tradition) or as a marriage
of two mutually mirroring ignorances, as in Dubai, if you need a clear
example of a catastrophe that we kept on trying to consider cool (by
the way, Dubai is not cool; slavery is not cool).
In its total lack of awareness of its own Eurocentrism, contemporary
architecture is still unbelievably ignorant about other traditions, and
unbelievably naïve in the receipts it stubbornly proposes everywhere.
This Eurocentrism is not the product of any cultural agenda, however
imperialist. Contemporary architecture is, in fact, just a tired repetition
of some rotten modernist ideas that are now being repeated with the
brutal, indisputable arrogance of contemporary “practical men” – the
ones “who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual
influence and are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”, as J.
M. Keynes once put it. This kind of automatic Eurocentrism is precisely
what results from ignorance and haste. Still, a critique of the arguments
of contemporary “practical men” also needs to involve a critique of the
defunct economists who provided them with their ideas. A narration of
the origins (ritual, plural) of Roman (Western) architecture is an implicit
critique of the modern narration of its supposed origin (as being natu-
ral, necessary, individual, utilitarian). A detour through ancient Rome
is an implicit critique of the sad and false fable of the “primitive hut”

193
 (but we can discuss that another time). A serious critique of concepts,
Dubais and all kinds of unfunny jokes needs to start from an appar-
ently anachronistic critique of Serlio, Laugier and Ledoux.
Such a critique would provide the basis for a comparative approach
to architecture. This would mean imagining a phenomenology of
Hindu architecture in the spirit of Louis Dumont, a history of mod-
ern architecture in the spirit of Karl Polanyi or a critique of Laugier’s
“primitive hut” in the spirit of Marcel Mauss. A comparative approach to
architecture would mean continuing the work that Aldo Rossi seemed
to promise us in a few extraordinary fragments of The Architecture
of the City, getting rid of our “obsolete functionalist mentality” and
imagining an architecture that could give attention to the complex-
ity of the world we live in: a universal architecture as realistic and as
generous as the one in Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff. And certainly
the places from which to begin developing an understanding of the
complexity of contemporary cities are not the central business districts
of “global cities”. It would be better to look more at the background,
the provinces of the empire, the unknown, dusty cities of five million
inhabitants in Pakistan, Turkey, Vietnam, Mexico. These are certainly
the laboratories of the architecture of the future, the places where new
hybrid conditions have the potential to develop.

VIII
Contemporary architecture now has to do precisely what it did not do
in the 19th century, when the classical tradition was, for the first time,
confronted with other traditions: to know precisely – case by case –
that all architectural traditions are one.
In the 19th century, Western architecture’s reaction to this chal-
lenge – Eclecticism – was pretty obtuse. Classicism surrendered and
Eclecticism emerged (and Eclecticism is not over, by the way; indeed,
modernism and all kinds of postmodernisms are just versions of
Eclecticism in which traditions are differentiated according to time
instead of according to space). Eclecticism is the use of all formal tradi-
tions because they are different; in contrast, Classicism is the use of all
formal traditions because they are the same. Eclecticism presupposes
sameness and tries to produce variety, whereas Classicism presupposes
complexity and tries to produce clarity. For Eclecticism, reality is bor-
ing and is in need of new inventions: architecture is fiction.
For Classicism, reality is already sufficiently rich: there is nothing
to invent, and observing with precision is already enough.

194
195
 foto: giulio boem

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 CALL FOR PAPERS
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terpretations of the case studies. B Additional cases might be sug-
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Architecture is scary.
It is not just difficult to deny this; it is impossible.
Architecture involves something oppressive. Dictators
by definition love architecture. Nothing is more typical
of dictators than gigantic, tasteless architecture (this is
the difference between dictators and gangsters: gang-
sters only need gigantic, tasteless cars). In Hollywood
movies, bad characters are always hidden behind sev-
eral layers of stone. Good characters usually just have
a little house, a very ordinary one, possibly made of
wood. Clearly, if you need architecture, something is
wrong with you.
Probably this has something to do with the origin of ar-
chitecture. Indeed, architecture appeared at a moment
in time when society became more hierarchical, more
established. Slavery appeared at the same time as ar-
chitecture (as did writing, for that matter). Whether a
cause or a consequence, architecture is somehow re-
lated to an increase in hierarchical structure and ine-
quality. Architecture exposes the oppression embed-
ded in our society; it reminds us that our great-great-
grandfathers had to slaughter the hunter-gathers in
order to produce our lovely boulevards.
Architecture is scary because in order to build, one
must destroy. Architecture changes habits, alters tra-
ditions, erases the existing, in order to introduce some-
thing else. Architecture forbids: its only way to enhance
something is, in fact, to forbid the opposite. Architec-
ture is possibly the supreme act of creative destruction
(consider, for instance, how Bramante quickly and bril-
liantly razed old St Peter’s to the ground in order to en-
sure the realization of his new scheme).
Architecture is scary because it introduces an exagger-
ated time-span into our daily life. Architecture not only
involves a distant past, but it also includes a distant fu-
ture. Architecture is simply too slow and too cumber-
some not to think over the (uber-)long term. Its asso-
ciation with kings and dictators is not just the result
of a sadistic passion for oppression: architecture likes
201
kings, tyrants and dictators because they are the only modern, and this oppression is not only that of the
politicians who think about buildings and infrastruc- working class: it is also the oppression of the bourgeois
ture for the long haul, and not just in megalomaniac/ architect as well as a deeper, somehow unspeakable
monumental terms, but also more reasonably in terms oppression, a universal Unbehagen. Similar nightmares
of the fortune they leave to their heirs; indeed, kings in- indeed appear in the work of architects as different as
vest in palaces because their sons will inherit them. It Ricardo Bofill, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Kiyonori Kikutake,
is the time-horizon of dictators, not dictatorship itself, Hans Poelzig, Paul Rudolph and Carel Weeber.
that is sympathetic to architecture. San Rocco 5 tries to deal with the horror of architecture.
Despite all recent attempts to reduce the lifespan of ar- What should we think of the architects who have decid-
chitecture and dream up buildings that could easily dis- ed to scare the rest of the world deliberately? And what
appear (from Futurism on), architecture still disturbs about buildings that are not just big and uncanny, but
the perfect flatness of contemporaneity, suggesting deliberately dark, windowless, gloomy, repulsive, anti-
a longer span of time. And maybe this is what is really human? Is scary architecture just a desperate quest for
scary about architecture: a longer time-horizon una- love? As Black Sabbath would put it, “Happiness I can-
voidably ushers a new character onto the stage: death. not feel and love to me is so unreal”.
Architecture is scary: this is a truth, not a choice. Still,
scariness can also be a choice, a precise desire to scare
(one’s enemies? one’s subjects? one’s allies?). The Par-
thenon, for instance, is a machine designed to scare
people. Given the absurd amount of money invested in
its construction (a gigantic potlatch?) and its incredible
precision, the Parthenon’s emergence in the relatively
shabby Athens of the 5th century can be understood
only as a colossal menace. The precision of the Parthe-
non is the precision of a weapon of mass destruction.
For all the legends about aliens building the pyramids,
the most likely building to have been built by aliens is
the Parthenon, the scariest object ever constructed on
this planet.
So architecture is scary, and making architecture can
be a reaction to the discovery of how fundamentally
scary architecture is. If architecture is the most tangi-
ble sign of an oppressive architecture of society, design
can be understood as an expression of this original evil.
Guido Canella understood architecture in these terms.
The dedicated desperation of Canella’s architecture is
committed to the exhibition of this primitive oppres-
sion. As much as Canella’s ideological construction is
awkward, and as much as his architecture is repulsive
(and we’re talking about his best period), he had some-
thing there. The offensive ugliness that Canella labo-
riously erectedin the 1970s in the barren outskirts of
Milan is not just the consequence of the impoverished
life of the proletariat, for these nightmares are not only

202
 Cases
• Scary Architects: A Portrait Gallery •
Send us a portrait of your favourite scary architect!
• Ricardo Bofill, Scary Architect •
Ricardo Bofill understood from very early on that he
himself would be the most despotic and, hence, also
the most rewarding client. After a bizarre stint during
which he had practically taken over a project of former
friends, enlarged it and famously/supposedly driven
its developer bankrupt while at the same time build-
ing some of the most exciting megaliths on the Span-
ish coastline, he founded the Taller as a self-construct-
ing, post-hippy “community”. The magnificent Walden 7
complex soon became the epitome of a social commu-
nity driven berserk. As a city-within-the-city of gigan-
tic proportions, it had more in common with the Death
Star than a building. Unfortunately, after all of this the
prolific mind of the (self-declared) genius began to suf-
fer delusions of George Lucas–like proportions. New gi-
gantic design opportunities inspired a bizarre version
of an all-encompassing classicism. Bofill became the
unstoppable Sun King of a new palace-inspired, mir-
rored-glass classicism. Only the French could embrace
this Jean Michel Jarre–style complete lack of self-rela-
tivity without any irony; lasers and columns can be sur-
prisingly similar.
• Kiyonori Kikutake, Scary Architect •
Kiyonori Kikutake fought a lifelong battle with the per-
manence of the built object. He started his research
on impermanence with a project of an intimate char-
acter, the construction of the Sky House for his family
in 1958. His research got progressively out of control,
however, and ended with the creation of gigantic mega-
structures floating on the most extensive and generic
surface on the Earth: the ocean. His tendency toward
impermanence, material and spiritual lightness, and
a social and physical interchangeability finally gener-
ated monstrous concrete accretions intended to pro-
vide the infrastructure for plug-in inhabitable cells. Ki-
kutake’s designs for floating nomadic cities that were to
be sunk to the ocean floor once no longer useful to hu-
mans, perhaps to serve as an artificial reef for marine
life (Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo would have fun swimming
through them), foresaw a romantic future for these
massive cruise settlements, far away from Japan’s post-
atomic nightmares and the pressure generated by his
native country’s explosive mix of land scarcity, overpop-
ulation and brutal economic development.
• Morris Lapidus, Scary Architect •
During his long life, Morris Lapidus designed over 1,200
buildings, including 250 hotels around the world. He
brashly said things to which culturally engaged archi-
tects would never confess and he coined slogans like
“Too much is never enough” – pure treason for Miesian
loyalists – or “I gave them the kind of backdrop to make
them feel ‘I really have arrived’”. More or less conscious-
ly, Lapidus set the standard for both gaudy leisure ar-
chitecture and the tastes of ambitious newcomers to
the criminal milieu (the Scarface set designer definitely
owes something to him).
How can we not feel at least a little sympathy for some-
one who, after his retirement, feeling angry and bitter
about his reputation, burned fifty years’ worth of his
drawings?
• Hans Poelzig, Scary Architect •
In his book Das Antlitz der Zeit, August Sander described
the state of society during the Weimar Republic. In a
group whose every element had to represent an entire
class, the subjects he chose were unavoidably carica-
tures: the notary wore a light-coloured coat and was ac-
companied by a black Doberman, the span of the ser-
geant’s moustache equalled that of his shoulders, the
butcher was bald and fat . . . and the architect was Hans
Poelzig.
• Paul Rudolph, Scary Architect •
Paul Rudolph (the Brutalist one, not the early modern-
ist from Sarasota) liked to impress people, or better,
he liked to daze and scare them. It’s at least as hard to
confute this as it is to deny the fact that he was terri-
bly good at it. Indeed, his preference for using the sec-
tion as the main tool for controlling and describing his
203
architecture is deeply related to the task most of his
buildings were asked to perform, i.e., vertigo. His ob-
session with spaces that were at least triple-height,
with hyper-complex, vertically connected, interlocking
spaces and with endlessly free-falling, edgy volumes
becomes clear once you accept a continuous quest
for vertigo as the core of his work. Similarly, his pref-
erence for diagonals, whether this was manifested in
the geometry of the masses or the tension in the in-
ner voids, helped cause the same kind of dizziness. And
we shouldn’t forget how he used to handle materials,
pushing their defining qualities to almost disturbing
extremes, from the super-shiny, mirror-like polished
steel of the handrails to the abrasive roughness of the
béton brut. His famous apartment in Beekman Place, as
a true self-portrait of the architect, condenses all his
obsessions into a relatively small-scale project and dis-
plays them with extreme clarity.
Imagine that a party was held last night. You wake up
barefoot, lying on the super-thick Loosian carpeting.
Still drunk, you drag yourself to the kitchen and sip a
coffee. Your eyes wander over the space. Above you, a
movement attracts your attention: three floors up, peo-
ple are fucking in the glazed-bottom bathtub.
• Louis Kahn in Dhaka •
In the middle of an endless landscape of slums there is a
castle. In the perennial grey fog, this grey castle emerg-
es, just a castle surrounded by water in the middle of a
lawn in the middle of slums. It is surreal, scary . . . and
entirely absurd. But to be fair, what would make sense
in a place like Dhaka? Maybe here Louis Kahn’s terrifying
dishonesty finally became strangely reasonable.
• Stanley Tigerman’s Black Barn,
or the Dark Side of the Force •
In 1973–74, some four years before Star Wars came
out, Stanley Tigerman was already envisioning the main
traits of Darth Vader’s devilish black mask. In charge
of renewing a barn and turning it into a house, he was
able to condense an almost tangible negative aura in
this small, potentially banal building. And he was able
to convince the client to build it, too. Although the
barn is still there and its proportions are familiar, at
204
the same time it is an obscure, alien object in the flat
Michigan landscape. The structure is completely clad
in black asphalt shingles and all of the glazing is grey-
tinted plate. The openings are pierced into the flat
surfaces in a variety of triangular shapes, suggesting
arrows pointing at the ground (like a divining rod, Ti-
german has said). No recognizable element helps us
determine the true scale of the structure. A theatre or-
gan located downstairs pervades the central free-fall
of connected spaces with its sound. Beside the build-
ing, a pond with white swans (white swans!) reflects its
dark profile.
• And Justice for All! •
Beginning in 1750, Carlo di Borbone and his architect,
Ferdinando Fuga, started an ambitious construction
programme dealing with the enormous amount of poor
people in the city of Naples. The first building of this
programme was the beautifully gigantic, and still un-
finished, Albergo dei Poveri (Hotel of the Poor), which
was erected on the eastern edge of the city. The poor
were relegated to this area and fed in exchange for a
bit of work and disciplined behaviour. The problem of
getting rid of the bodies of the dead among the poor
with a little decency was solved through the erection of
a scarily rational cemetery for the masses, which was
established in 1762 further east. The so-called Cimi-
tero delle 366 Fosse (Cemetery of the 366 Graves) was
a proto-Enlightenment machine for processing bod-
ies. Its name derives from the number of mass graves,
one for each day of the year, including the 366th in a
Leap Year. The graves are arranged in a grid-like man-
ner, in boustrophedonic order. Each day, the bodies
were thrown in the proper pit, which was then closed
in the evening to remain so for an entire year. The bod-
ies were pressed against a horizontal iron grid by their
own weight, thus accelerating the process of decom-
position and allowing the periodical clearing of the
bones. Any trace of rite was erased from the event of
death, which was treated in purely logistical terms.
Perhaps for the very first time, the foundation of the
modern city – the (Lumpen)proletariat – was under-
stood as such and was directly transformed into the
stuff of architecture.
 • Scary Modernism •
Modernism dealt with quantity. It terrifyingly organ-
ized masses of people within a Cartesian space: the
houses of Pagano, Diotallevi and Marescotti’s Città
Orizzontale were distributed among city blocks ac-
cording to the number of members a family had. Pi-
geonholed as if placed in the methodical cabinet of an
obsessive entomologist, dwellers’ interrelations were
strictly classified and predetermined on the basis of
physical quantities: singles, couples, three-person
families, four-person families, and so on . . . In a sort
of desolated metonymy, apartments stood for inhabit-
ants, city-blocks for groups of people, cities for mass-
es. In such a non-human landscape, people acquired a
surreal quality. Surprisingly, human figures appear in
Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt perspectives.
As shapes cut out in black shown in groups of two and
equally distributed in space, they stand on the bridg-
es that the architect kindly provided. You won’t notice
them at first glance, but they are there nonetheless.
You have to wonder if their inclusion was a joke . . .
• Phalaris Takes Power •
In his Politics, Aristotle recounts that Phalaris (who
lived from around 570 to 554 BC) was a Greek archi-
tect entrusted with the building of the temple of Zeus
Atabyrius on the acropolis of Agrigentum. Phalaris
is, by far, the greatest “success story” if we consider
the historically one-sided relationship between ar-
chitects and politics, in which the latter almost al-
ways strong-arm the former. Indeed, after receiving
the commission for the temple, Phalaris lamented the
lack of resources for the project and asked for more
money and more workers. After his request was ac-
cepted, he used the money to arm the workers and
installed himself as the tyrant of the city. Under his
rule, Agrigentum seems to have attained considerable
prosperity.
Phalaris was renowned for his excessive cruelty. His
alleged atrocities included cannibalism: he was said
to have eaten suckling babes. Phalaris is also famous
for his brazen bull, which was invented, it is said, by
Perillos of Athens. The tyrant’s victims were shut up
inside the bull and a fire was then kindled beneath it,
roasting them alive; their cries were supposed to rep-
resent the bellowing of the bull.
Phalaris’s exploits (except the bull, maybe) somehow
remind us of everything Manfredo Tafuri always want-
ed (but never dared) to do: quit architecture, jump
into politics, seize power.
• Julius Caesar’s Bridges •
Julius Caesar allowed the construction of two bridges
across the Rhine during the Gallic Wars in 55 and 53
BC. The construction of the first bridge most likely oc-
curred somewhere between Andernach and Neuwied,
downstream from Koblenz. Book 4 of the Commentar-
ii de bello Gallico provides technical details about this
wooden-beam bridge. With over 40,000 soldiers at his
disposal, Caesar built the first bridge in only ten days.
He crossed with his troops over to the eastern bank and
managed to burn some villages, but he found out that
the ur-Germans had been smart enough to escape fur-
ther east. After eighteen days without any major battle,
he returned to Gaul and burned the bridge. Two years
later, close to the site of the first bridge, possibly where
the modern town of Urmitz is found, Caesar erected a
second bridge, again built in just “a few days”, accord-
ing to Book 6. His expeditionary forces raided the coun-
tryside but did not encounter significant opposition, as
the Germans had retreated once again. Upon returning
to Gaul, the second bridge was taken down as the first
had been.
Caesar used his technological superiority to scare more
than to conquer. The bridges were, in reality, utterly
useless, for the army could have crossed the river in all
kinds of different manners; Caesar just wanted to put
on a terrifying show for his enemies.
• A Career as a Scary Architect •
Even though there are scary architects who have enor-
mous firms, it is the smaller practices that are argua-
bly the most interesting. These small firms are almost
invisible and operate in stealth. They seldom have real
offices, and this makes their practices extremely ag-
ile and opportunistic; sometimes they even use an-
other practice to make what they want to make. They
rarely take full responsibility for what they actually do,
205
but they leave no doubt about their involvement in the
things for which we think they are responsible. They
play hard, drive fancy cars, but have no proper office.
Perhaps their work could be considered the equiva-
lent of hit-and-run investment. By the time one realizes
what these scary architects are like, they have already
vanished, or at least the myth and the reality are so in-
tertwined that one doesn’t exactly understand what re-
ally happened. Here, there is never liability, and traces
of their involvement are hard to find; their presence is
felt in their absence. Since scary architects are hard-
ly there, people take for granted that they are every-
where, all the time. Extreme examples of the type would
probably be Bramante and Carel Weeber. Their absence
created their niche. In both of these cases, it turned out
that that niche was so big that it almost encompassed
the whole market.

• Pentagons •
Is there something inherently scary in pentagons?
Indeed, pentagons are among the most violent shapes
in Abbott’s Flatland (even more than squares, de-
spite Abbot’s belief that the fewer the sides, the nas-
tier the shape). In architecture, pentagonal ground
plans are very rare (it is a pretty uncomfortable geo-
metric form requiring rare skill to be employed). None-
theless, they do appear sometimes, and they are al-
ways strangely associated with power. The two most
famous pentagonal buildings are the Pentagon at Ar-
lington, Virginia, and the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola.
In confirmation of this theory, the Palazzo Farnese was
used as Pinocchio’s prison in the Italian TV series of
1972.

Following pages:
Pasquale Poccianti
(b. Bibbiena, 1774; d. Florence, 1858)

Hans Poelzig
(b. Berlin, 1869; d. Berlin, 1936)
Photograph by August Sander

206
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 SAN ROCCO • FUCK CONCEPTS! CONTEXT! baukuh on
contextual architecture * Ilaria Boeddu on Nelson Good-
man’s Languages of Art * Jan Bovelet in defence of concepts
* Jack Burnett-Stuart on Richard Meier’s Getty Center *
Adrià Carbonell on ideas * Ludovico Centis on the gardens
of Babur * Amir Djalali on Dürer’s monument to the peas-
ants * Fabrizio Gallanti on urban rules * Kersten Geers on
Philip Guston and Robert Venturi * Matteo Ghidoni on the
contexts of the Continuous Monument * Diederik de Kon-
ing, Laura van Santen and Thomas Cattrysse on banknote
bridges * Eric Lapierre on realism * Mark Lee on Grassi, Ros-
si and Venturi * Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan
on Venturi and only Venturi * Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
on Kenzo Tange in Skopje * Francesco Marullo on Vasari’s
loggias * Ariadna Perich Capdeferro on Aldo van Eyck’s or-
phanage * Pietro Pezzani on Cedric Price’s contemplative
landscape architecture * Giovanni Piovene compares Pal-
ladio’s and Scamozzi’s villas * Matteo Poli on enclaves * Fed-
erica Pau, Sabrina Puddu and Franceso Zuddas discuss the
city as an egg * Nicola Russi classifies notions of context *
Davide Sacconi on J. P. Oud’s De Kiefhoek * Pier Paolo Tam-
burelli on the invention of architecture * Martino Tattara
on Brasilia * Guido Tesio compares Giuseppe Valadier’s Pi-
azza del Popolo in Rome with Gottfried Semper’s Zwinger
Forum in Dresden * Oliver Thill kind of likes concepts * An-
drea Zanderigo on Polesello’s triangle * Cino Zucchi writes
a letter to conceptualists * with photos by Stefano Graziani
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