Buildings that come to life

text published on C3 Magazine, n.351

versione italiana

A voluminous machine

In 1977, when the Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, was inaugurated, it was clear that the architectural space imagined by the architects was nothing more than a free volume whose support plants had become the space’s very reason for being.

The space evinces, in other words, a total preponderance of systems, of the engine of the building, which, instead of being a support for the building, acquire a new nature as a wall in their own right, a container, the boundary between interior and exterior.

A long process underpinned this vision of architecture; it arose from radical groups who, in the years immediately preceding, articulated a vision of architecture in which interior and exterior spaces do not exist, but are replaced by a generic, continuous free surface, fully air-conditioned and well-illuminated, and bearing no relation to exterior climate or natural lighting.

Concerning roofs, added and excavated volumes.

text published on C3 Magazine, n.344

versione italiana

When the sky falls.

In the early 1300s, Giotto concluded one of his most important works, the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, which included the Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The Life of Christ.
The building in which the paintings are found amounts to a small rectangular room with no architectural vestments, thus presenting the artist with a great blank canvas, a most appropriate spatial setting for his project. Giotto therefore decided to work through frames, each of which depicts one of the stories of the two protagonists in an emotional crescendo that culminates in the dramatic Last Judgment.

One source of Giotto’s fundamental importance in the history of art, among many, is the evolution of Byzantine language in his work, especially the transition to a more “real” human figure, wrought by a painter who seems to truly feel a strong empathy with the painted characters.
The Chapel in Padua offers a mere color change, a seemingly simple move, but one that is nevertheless revolutionary: From the vaulted ceiling of the building, a background of blue rains down, a blue that will become a trademark of Giotto’s painting and which will centuries later inspire artists of every period (the Klein blue, for example). Blue replaces the gold in the Byzantine mosaics, suddenly changing the perception of space into something no longer abstract, but immersed in human stories, yet still able to strongly bring out the figures, which have their own brilliance, as if light were contained within the limits of the body portraits.

It is no coincidence that the Giotto blue completely fills the vaulted cover of the chapel: The roof sums up the experience of the closure of the building, but the blue extends the spatial horizon of the place, as if the sky itself had been brought down to protect the paintings, but without enclosing them within limits, thus allowing them to explode outwards.

A triangle, a circle, a parallelepiped: a history of stereometry “in between”

text published on C3 Magazine, n.330

versione italiana

Geometry: a triangle wedged between rocks. The measure begins.

There are beaches in Sardinia that seem to have emerged from certain images of the Caribbean, so blue are the waters, white the sands, and cloudless the sky: great places to vacation, but which nonetheless also offer, in the hinterland, precious architectural jewels which suffer no diminishment in comparison with the natural amenities. These are gigantic monuments, sprouting from the landscape, giving the measure of the territory, so totally man-made, yet somehow remaining mostly natural.

The monuments are the Nuraghi, architectural organisms gifted with an amazing architectural brutality, an almost physical force, which radiates all around them, and which involves visitors in their wildness: the huge masses of rocks, piled one upon another, reaching tens of meters in height and about that in thickness, seem placed there by mythical giants, some superhuman character, able to compose a setting in which the almost baroque grace of the curves can stand in comparison with the crude appearance of the stones.

This, perhaps, won’t kill that

text published on C3 Magazine, n.329

versione italiana

With acts of faith

If, after these summary guidelines, someone would be willing to build for himself a Gothic cathedral, with a gigantic and narrow nave, even with plexiglass arches, this one should give up. The nineteenth-century neo-Gothic was, in the survey of eclecticism, one of the most serious and effective movements; yet has never produced a true work of poetry. The true Gothic is characterized by the fact that the hundreds of statues against the wall or enclosed in niches are beautifully sculpted also in the back, where nobody can see them; in our times the availability of such acts of faith is improbable.

Bruno Zevi, Storia e controstoria dell’architettura in Italia, 1997

There is something touching in the work of Masao Okabe, the Japanese artist who makes portraits of the city through the technique of frottage (which entails rubbing a soft pencil on a sheet placed above the surface of which one wants to capture the texture); something that leaves us speechless before the extraordinary work of an artist who has collected hundreds of sheets of paper on which he has reproduced surfaces of the ruins of the city of Hiroshima, devastated by an atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945.

All these papers were collected during the # 52 International Art Exhibition in Venice, in 2007, constituting an impressive portrait of the complexities of a city.

In search of shadow, in search of wind

text published on C3 Magazine, n.327

versione italiana

Glowing shadow

Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.

One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness – and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the paths has its seduction. And it isn’t because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation – a bit of one’s own.

One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessor, excited, amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together – the kicks and the half-pence, as the saying is – the picturesque common lot that holds so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on – till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.

Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line, 1917

The words that open Joseph Conrad’s novel describe the crossing of thresholds that, in the course of life, force the man to cope with major inner changes, and to move in a clear and conscious way, from very young, to young, and then to adult.

Conrad’s preamble is also a short eulogy for an age that brings a contemporary sense of hope, a happy and natural acceptance of one’s own condition of life. In youth the man is able to distinguish good from evil and to place them on an equal footing, not as a consequence one of each other or in opposition, but as elements that are simultaneously necessary to give fullness to the self.

Sitting anywhere / City’s everywhere

text published on C3 Magazine, n.326

versione italiana

Sitting anywhere

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.

She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,

So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.

I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine.

We talked until two and then she said, “it’s time for bed.”

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.

I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.

And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown.

So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood.

The Beatles, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Rubber Soul, 1965

Going, walking, opening to the landscape. Museum stories told by books, listening to a song.

text published on C3 Magazine, n.322

versione italiana

Going, walking: about art, in moving 

Going walking working, 

A center, a list, 3 S: the tale of the small

text published on C3 Magazine, n.321

versione italiana

A temple as a center of gravity…

The monk, interpreted by Kim Ki Duk, climbs up laboriously to the top of the mountain, between bristling paths of dusty earth and layers of slippery ice. He brings a small statue and, tied to the body, a heavy stone, a symbol of an ancient guilt and of a physical repentance that may perhaps expiate the sins of the monk.

At the end of this difficult journey, almost surprised, the glance of the protagonist settles over the valley below and over the small lake closed in the green forest. At the center, like a magnet around which focuses the entire landscape, a building lies placidly: it is the temple from which comes the monk, a tiny pagoda, floating docilely on the still waters of the lake, now frozen.

On being on the top

text published on C3 Magazine, n.318

versione italiana

A picture painted by the Chinese artist Zhou Schen between the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries shows a mountain landscape rising above the opaque white of the clouds. Without colors, but with complex strokes, alternating dark and light patches, watered down, it sets a great landscape, although, strangely, calm. Some roofs, hidden among the trees, show us possible architectures, but the less well-defined stroke makes us understand that the focus should be placed elsewhere.

There, where the top of the mountain frees itself from drawing and returns white as the clouds, stands a figure, stylized yet full of details: the long tunic, with wide sleeves, a sword, the hair collected behind the nape. It is the person described by the title of the work (Poet on a Mountain Top), going forward slowly, due to the solemnity of the action, to the highest peak.

Nenikékamen, or about constrained geometry

text published on C3 Magazine, n.318

versione italiana

Nenikékamen (We have won) screamed Pheidippides when he arrived in Athens, in the summer of 490 B. C., to bring news about the successful battle of Marathon. After screaming the glad tidings, he died, destroyed by fatigue (not only from the stretch from Marathon to Athens, but especially for the 500 km travelled in the two previous days, between Athens and Sparta).

Luc-Olivier Merson, Painting of Pheidippides, 1869

The conclusion of the battle became epic and, for the first time, a distance became a legend. That distance is 40 kilometers, the distance from Marathon to Athens, which became even more intriguing because of a change made for the London Olympics in 1908, when it was decided to increase the distance of the modern marathon to 26 miles, and then again to 26 milesand 385 yards, to put the finish line just below the royal stage. Thus, for a little over one hundred years, the legend has set its final limits at 42 kilometersand 195 meters.

The 1500 years that separate the martial event from the sport one do not change the sense of the physical act: fixing a geometric distance which, contemporary, gives the measure to a time and a space. And, so, the pure geometry that fixes a line from one point to another can transform itself into poetry, contained in the tale of heroic deeds.

Measure, enlarge, unify: Spanish landscapes

text published on Dlle, n.2, 2010 – Spain Landscape 2010 – Urban Hybrids – Evolution in Regeneration

testo italiano su Arch’it

– Mire vuestra merced – respondiò Sancho – que aquellos que allì se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento, y lo que en ellos parecen brazos son las aspas, que, volteadas del viento, hacen andar la piedra del molino.-

(- Look, your worship; – said Sancho – what we see there are not  giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that  when turned by the wind make the millstones go. -)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, 1605.

Windmills, Castilla La Mancha, Spain, photo by chiara quinzii

A journey in the shadow

text published on C3 Magazine, n.316

versione italiana

LSD, black. 

Benjamin L. Willard sails, with his four companions, along the Nung River toward Cambodia – a slow journey, unsustainable, which throws the spectator to the claustrophobic anxiety of the wet dark of the jungle; a devastating journey, an LSD hallucination on the contrary, in which all colors are replaced by the lack of them.

It is 1979 and Francis Ford Coppola, with the movie Apocalypse Now, pours into the film the worries of a harassing search, set in a place and time where pure madness is the norm and the unfolding events are altered by the perceptions affected by the fanaticism and mental disorder that destroy the young soldiers.

And so Willard sails, trying desperately to find Colonel Kurt, not only physically, but also and above all, mentally – to grasp its essence, its soul. He will find him at the point where the madness is at its peak, with no face, a black oval that shows only one ear, a jaw, and then complete darkness.

Along the river, before the encounter, the boat that brings the soldiers into the unknown lands in a surreal place, a sort of a little Las Vegas thrown into the Vietnamese jungle. It is an island, bordered by a row of bulbs surrounding a large stage. On one side of this, a huge crowd harbors hundreds of celebrating soldiers, in spasmodic waiting for the helicopter that will take them three Playmates taught to improvise a dance.

Additions and Insertions

text published on C3 Magazine, n.315

versione italiana

We are adding

Soon, upon the demand of the readership — which was everyone, Uprighter and Sloucher alike — The Book of Antecedents included a biennial census, with every name of every citizen and a brief chronicle of his or her life (women were included after the synagogue split), summaries of even less notable events, and commentaries on what the Venerable Rabbi had called LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF LIFE, which included definitions, parables, various rules and regulations for righteous living, and cute, if meaningless, sayings. The later editions, now taking up an entire shelf, became yet more detailed, as citizens contributed family records, portraits, important documents, and personal journals, until any schoolboy could easily find out what his grandfather ate for breakfast on a given Thursday fifty years before, or what his great-aunt did when the rain fell without lull for five months. The Book of Antecedents, once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing…We are writing…We are writing . . .

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is illuminated, 2002

It’s not a coincidence if someone built a chapel on the ruins of a temple to Hercules. And it is not by chance that it is dedicated to the Holy Power. Because, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps with an enlightened vision of the future, this small church will have to withstand the city’s urban growth.

To empty. Social housing in Monte Hacho

text published on C3 Magazine, n.310

versione italiana

 

The Tower of St. Pancrazio in Cagliari, designed by Giovanni Capula in 1305, soars 36 feet from the street level, dialoguing with the nearby Tower of the Elephant. The city, which is built against remarkable backdrops, finds a spatial foothold between the two towers, establishing two points within the city around which the urban can develop itself horizontally.

The Tower of St. Pancrazio proposes its actual modernity thanks to an amazing building system, consisting of two materials―limestone and wood―that form a continuous system of oppositions. The stone, with its massive static, defines a box C-shape within which it builds a construction made of light wood floors embedded in the C itself. The stone, despite its heaviness, is clear in color, almost white; the wood, in contrast, is dark, gloomy. Climbing the tower involves a dizzying ride, with wooden floors that seem to fly above the city, projecting the appearance of evanescent solidity that is almost removed by the strong stone perimeter.

Remembrances

text published on C3 Magazine, n.310

versione italiana

Metaphors

Nature is a temple in which living pillars

Sometimes give voice to confused words;

Man passes there through forests of symbols

Which look at him with understanding eyes.

[…]

Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences, The Flowers Of Evil, 1857

When, in 1857, Baudelaire talks about correspondences, he describes a fictional universe that takes us into a well-known world that is yet new and mysterious. He does so by using rhetorical devices – metaphors – that somehow organize a sort of unedited remembrance for the reader. The power of metaphor, in fact, comes from the imaginary constructed in the mind of the reader, from its own personal feelings and its own personal memories. The world described by the writer doesn’t exist, but one who reads the poem probably has the feeling of being there, of having lived in the narrated place. From this point of view, perhaps, the rhetorical device used by Baudelaire defines itself through a life, a past, whose relationship with the text permits one to reconstruct the image provided by the poet, the other meanings that words alone cannot tell. A renewed past, therefore, links text and metaphor, and it matters little that the past exists or not.

We float

text published on C3 Magazine, n.310

But now we float

Take life as it comes

PJ Harvey, We float, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, 2000

In some moments in the history of architecture, architects have felt the need to relate buildings to more dynamic forms of construction, often producing utopian projects. Among such projects are the Walking City by Archigram, or trenchant texts such as this which discuss one of the famous machines à habiter:

Anonymous engineers, mechanicals working between the forge and the grease of the factory, have designed and built formidable things such as steamers. We terrestrials are not able to appreciate, and it would be nice, to teach us to admire the works of the “regeneration” that we were given the opportunity to walk the miles corresponding to the visit of a steamer.

Le Corbusier, Towards an architecture, 1923.

More than a century earlier than Le Corbusier, in 1804, the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux published Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, de moeurs et de la législation. This text contains 125 tables of drawings, to which others would be added when Daniel Ramée compiled his two-volume work about Ledoux in 1847.

To graft

text published on C3 Magazine, n.311

 

10 years later, an album

 

Sometimes you must wait ten years to listen to a masterpiece.

Sometimes it doesn’t happen. Sometimes your name is The Beatles and you churn out milestones once a year.

But sometimes you must wait, perhaps ten or eleven years.

In 1998, Portished released the CD Live in Roseland New York, a collection of live performances from their astounding first two albums. The Bristol revolution seems to have ended here, with a very brief production, despite the following work by Massive Attack, Tricky and other groups on the Bristol music scene.

Yet, more than ten years later than last unedited collection, Third seems a repetition of a miracle: songs that fit into one another, the creation of an emotional atmosphere and some songs that stand out as masterpieces.

One of these songs is The Rip, the first single: a withering ride, burned in two strophes, built on the juxtaposition of the musical base, underpinned by instruments, and the incredible vocals of Beth Gibbons. Treated as independent objects, they seem to follow parallel paths: the music with a slow gait, initially acoustic, then gradually faster and richer in sounds and instruments; the voice flat and quiet, almost detached from the music. Yet, at the end of the strophe, when the singer comes to the last question (Will I Follow?), the two paths magically cross and the voice grafts itself onto the musical background, as an added instrument. A long note melds instruments into vocals and creates an indefinable lament, not human, not electronic, that becomes a sigh of pure melancholy.

This perfect joint clearly shows the effect of overlap between entities that are separate in space, time, and quality. It seems that the background music has always been there, and can continue into eternity. It is the unique voice that makes the difference. And this unique element places itself in the musical weft in a well-defined temporal point. Now the voice and music follow the same track in unison.

To construct ground – Plates. Rolex Learning Center, La Llotja de Lleida

text published on C3 Magazine, n.308

urbanizr says:    I want rollerblades!     February 17, 2010 at 4:11 pm

archipod says:  It makes me want a sandwich.  February 19, 2010 at 8:50 am

Plate tectonics: two projects in comparison.

It is still not clear what moves the world, and the ground on which we stand, but an aid to understanding comes from Alfred Wegener, who, in 1912, formulated the theory of continental drift, which led to the theory of plate tectonics. One theory that was confirmed in the 1960s and contends that the outermost part of Earth’s crust is divided into a dozen stiff fragments of different size: the plates. They move in relation to each other, giving rise to phenomena such as earthquakes, eruptions, but also shaping the continents as we know them. Plate tectonics tells us about the enormous energies that compress and expand the Earth’s mantle and the forces that powerfully form and deform the topography of the land, creating the landscape that we admire every day.

To delimit. Museum of Memory and Human Rights

text published on C3 Magazine, n.307 1003

Memories

pictures from http://architettura.supereva.com/sopralluoghi/20040127/index.htm

In 1949, Michele Fiorentino and Giuseppe Perugini attended the opening of the Mausoleum of Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, a project that commemorated the civilian victims of Nazi soldiers in 1944.
The Mausoleum is a perfect Euclidean box, in deliberate contrast to the surrounding wavy terrain and the nearby caves: a clear mark in the territory, that reminder of an event which should never happen again.
A painful universe, almost crushed by a heavy volume of materiality, hovers at the site of the massacre, closed to the outside except for a few glimmers of light. It is a sad canto, which destroys at once the heavy legacy of Fascist architecture, and denounces the dictatorship that caused this tragedy.