PB 03 FRANCESCO VENEZIA OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM online sample PREVIEW

Annette Condello

Annette Condello

ATTUNED TO THE SITE AND THE SUN

Everything “must” move around architecture, starting with the sun; architecture continues to live beautifully in a preCopernican conception.

- Francesco Venezia

In his 1978 book La torre d’ombre o L’architettura delle apparenze reali (The Tower of Shadows or the Architecture of Real Appearances), Francesco Venezia considers architectural existence in terms of the spectacle of the day, the sun’s brilliance, and master of the shadow. He analyses specific modernist elements within Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh works in India and refers to Paul Valery’s poetic writings which delineates the art of construction incorporated within Le Corbusier’s works. The “architecture of real appearances” theme resonates through the entirety of Venezia’s projects by building around it and seeking outside it through the mainstream of predictable measures.

For Venezia, the shadow of a building under the light of the sun moves, changing its shape, through the space of a day and being different every day, through the space each year. The shadow forms part of the reality of the building and yet it has a fascination of appearance: it is a reality in so far that it has a theoretically predictable and mathematically calculable effect; appearance in that it is linked to the unpredictable occurrence of other circumstances. [1]

Venezia’s works are attuned to the site and the sun, a pure architecture. An architecture that materialises as an elementary sold body in the immediate objective correlative of the typological, distributive, structural, decorative forms [2] project ideas that directed his attention towards

contemporary architectural spoliation. These traits continue to permeate through his projects especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

Deriving from his affinity with the memory of classical images like the Roman house and theatrical staircase as manipulated in Casa Malaparte (1938) on the Isle of Capri, quintessentially, Casa Malaparte was introduced to Venezia at an early age in his career. The house “mediates between magic and might. It is an ingenious artifice, a perverted mechanism creating a kind of delirium.”[3] Venezia’s role in reusing the inclined stair as an architectural fragment or spolium is evident in his designs, such as the open-air theatres in Salemi and Gibellina, and houses and urban projects in Sicily. Venezia exploits the nostalgic awareness of Casa Malaparte through actual fragments.

For the walls, Malaparte rejected the dazzling white urged by the modernist Adalberto Libera and chose a Pompeian red, a red that reminds one of the surfaces of Rome and of those ruined towns under the ashes. Malaparte, a contemporary novelist who saw himself as the bard of a triumphant modernist, built a house for himself that is anciently modern, mixing two styles, two epochs and two emotions – those of the past and those of the present. [4]

Venezia uses and reuses past and present emotions. He coordinates these as a series of spirit levels throughout his Casa Malaparte phase. Striking similarities of this house are evident in the contemporary spoliation of the Libera’s three-storey symmetrical topology. Venezia merges these arrangements with a Mediterranean neoclassical touch.

The repercussions of Francesco Venezia’s travels, such as those that take him always back to Casa Malaparte settlement in Capri, beyond the Mediterranean Sea’s sewers. Indeed, he always builds in depth on the foundations of our memory through emotions that ruins, uncertain materials or realized architecture have revealed to us softly.[5]

Evidence of these repercussions show up in Venezia’s and Vicente Colomer Sendre’s collaboration design for the rehabilitation of Alcoy’s Buida Oil distict in Spain (1988-89). Relating to the open-air theatre framework in Salemi as well as the Block of houses in Messina design (1985), Venezia shifts the theatrical ambiance into separate intervals of inclined stages and in the process provides spectacles for the occupants within the adjacent buildings. This design also accommodates and an underground multi-storey carparking lot together with narrow arcades all of which are “crowned by nothingness, the parapet is fretworked, the squares are elevated. They even assume the same strange excitement of the Toledo houses in El Greco’s topographical portrait.”[6]

Venezia focused on a revaluation of the links between the marginal quarter and the centre with an assertion of strengthening these edges through a system of pedestrian zones. “An air of naturalness links to the sinuous course of the slope especially in the afternoon, when the sun’s rays fall at an angle.”[7] We can interpret this project as a concoction of a departure of Graeco-Roman forms, an embracement of Novecento fragments deriving from Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan and Rationalist traces from Giovanni Guerini’s Palazzo dell Civilta designs, tendencies that are notoriously Italian. The Buida Oli district design complacently fragments Italian forms and exaggerates them to the point where a non-style predominates, as in the case of Casa Malaparte as well. These Mediterranean elements and the role of Casa Malaparte transfer equal levels of Italianita and Spanish architecture.

*

[1] Luca Ortelli, L. (1984) “Architecture of walls: Francesco Venezia’s Gibellina museum.” Lotus International 42: 121-122.

[2] V Savi, and Tironi, G. (1990) “Progetti recenti di Francesco Venezia.” Casabella 566 March: 4-17, 59.

[3] W Arets and van den Bergh, W. (1989) “ “Casa come me”A sublime alienation.” AA Files 18, p.12.

[4] JC Delorme (1994), Architects’ Dream Houses, Abbeville Press, p.5.

[5] G. Tironi, “Columns of Light and framed horizons”, Casabella, No.591, 1992, p.70.

[6] V. Savi, 1990, p.59.

[7] W.M. Vidal, “The Ara plan for Alcoy,” Lotus International, No.71, p.83.

IRREGULAR SEDIMENTS

The best that can be claimed for the new design of the Central Park is, that it is in part an attempt to reclothe its rocky frame with second-hand garments of the fashion thus truthfully characterized by the master to whose ability the fashion itself is a tribute of ignorant reverence.

- Frederick Law Olmsted

When considering the regeneration of architectural spaces within the existing built environment, Allen Weiss’ book Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (1998) raises an important awareness pertinent for today’s landscape treatment. This is especially the case with respect to landscape’s historical and modern management. Weiss noted the frustrated management of The Spoils of the Park: with a few leaves from the deep-laden note-books of a wholly unpractical man (1882) pamphlet within American Landscape design Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park design in New York in the context of Versailles, France. Rather than treating it as a forgotten and marginal discourse, Weiss discusses Versailles garden as a central park, central to landscape architecture discourse.[1]

Referring to Olmsted's design, in 1857, eleven citizens of New York were asked to prepare for the transformation of a broken, rocky, sterile, and intractable body of land, more than a mile square in extent, into a public ground, to stand in the heart of a great commercial city. Olmsted wrote the pamphlet “which placed the blame for its decline on politics – “spoils” being the word that nineteenth-century reformers used to describe the personal benefits that corrupt politicians grabbed from the public trust –and proposed that the Board of Commissioners be placed once again on a professional footing.”[2] It was mainly a report on corruption.[3] There was “a relinquishment of the spoils of office in the proposed work”[4] .

Twelve years later the Khedive of Egypt donated to the United States a granite obelisk (aka Cleopatra’s needle) spoil from Alexandria. Moreover, in 1881, the time when Olmsted was writing his pamphlet, American business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt funded the transport of the Egyptian obeliskspoil (aka Cleopatra’s Needle). This spoil monument was transported from Alexandria, Northern Africa, and erected in New York, the monumental spoil now exists inside an enclosure behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Presumably it was an environmental ode “to the victor” (to Vanderbilt) that the Needle, amongst other “spoils” be destined for the Park, as an early form of circular economy to waste not but want more out of something by transferring and connecting it to the land itself. In addition, at that time, the land would become “valuable for purposes other than those to be first had in view, and that crafty attempts would be made to obtain advantages from it for various selfish ends.”[5]

In 1886, Central Park’s Cleopatra Needle-spoil started to decay, and preservation attempts were actioned to keep it from crumbling and obstructing the Park’s design. Meanwhile 320 kilometres away east of New York City, the “rock oil” rush in Pennsylvania, a valuable national commodity, agitated the ground even more throughout the rest of the nation and made popular the petroleum industry, creating spoil waste deposits. [And in the mid-1870s Chicago a curious Great Fire memorial was designed replete with architectural spoil heaps.]

Following on from Olmsted’s pamphlet, Weiss turns to modern American sculptor Robert Smithson 1970s land art and who was attracted to unused oil rigs. More specifically Smithson’s Spiral Jetty installed at Rozel Point at Utah’s mud and salt crystal lakes, sponsored by the Virginia Dwan Gallery of New York, made to reconnect with the environment and Weiss discusses Smithson’s last essay concerning Olmsted and the “Dialectical Landscape.” Smithson observed that Olmsted had found the “dialectics of landscape” in his original vision of the park, blending the beautiful and the sublime. Smithson’s project excavates not only New York earth but also the underpinnings of Central park as a “man-made waste-land.”[6] Apart from Central Park’s transferral of Cleopatra’s Needle and the jetty’s refusefull land art and demonstrative of landscape spoliation in the progressive sense. What are the derivations of Olmsted’s landscape spoliation? How did American land art affect the Italian environment in the 1970s and 80s, specifically through Alberto Burri’s earth-insertion in Sicily?

When Olmsted visited the Gulf of Naples, in Campania, Kingdom of Sicily, in 1856, little did he know that the walk along Chiaia’s extraordinary coastal promenade collocation with its luxuriant vegetation in its public grounds of the Villa Reale would inspire him to design a park for New York. Both Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed the Greensward Plan a year later. The Greensward Plan would later be adapted into Central Park’s design and

ARCHITECTURAL SPOLIATION

The building never ceases to surprise us with its hidden secrets. -

Francesco Venezia

The process of fragmentary architecture, which structures its intentional accumulation of cultural implications, reveals historical sources to take form as a trajectory, permitting the analysis of such compositions in specific sites. This theory and practice started to regenerate into fragmentary compositions from the end of the Middle Ages through to post-modernism. Apart from recent work in the southern Mediterranean countries, the practice of spoliatory architecture features more prominently, rather than the connotation of the fragmentary. As Vesely writes:

Fragmentation is thus a distinctly modern phenomenon. Today, it appears everywhere, even in places where we are not aware of it. Its manifestations can often be misleading and obscure. Fragmentation can appear as an object but also as a structure or as a complete and coherent system.

A building or large development, for instance, may appear complete, well-integrated and unified, while it is only a large fragment, unsituated and empty of any meaning. . .. The memory of the original situation can only be suppressed, as it happens in science, or restored, as it happens in poetry . . . [1]

The practice of fragmentary architecture has seldom survived the totalizing tendency of rationalism, from neoclassicism to post-modernism. The discussion drawn from the historical material presented in the previous section is sufficient to outline its post-World War II departure point in Italy, especially through Carlo Scarpa’s modern work.

Mediterranean Modernism prompted the condition of misunderstood architecture, works appeared as though they were stripped of forms. I maintain that the Italian Rationalists tried to unmask the modern tradition by proposing a synthesis of the Mediterranean vernacular and the classical. [2] The members of the Gruppo 7 stated: “the skeletons of buildings continue to be hidden in reinforced concrete, with a disordered application of former styles. Since every relationship with the general structure has been severed, facades become organisms in themselves, decorative devices, insincere projections.”[3] The interpretation of this manifesto is taken as a consequential point for my reassessment of Venezia’s projects throughout this book. The design of Casa Malaparte (19381940) represents a disordered application of previous works. Venezia’s transferred buildings address the potential of the Rationalists and NeoRationalists.[4] I specifically use Casa Malaparte as an influential register to ground the interpretation of Venezia’s spoliated compositions. The enigma of fragments presents an important aspect found in Venezia’s work - one that separates his work from the rest of Post-modernist, Regionalist and Deconstructivist architecture. The spoliated projects of Venezia, rather, illustrate the emergence of and close relationship between “biased” fragments that produce engaging results. His series of projects places emphasis on the memory of spolia, which appear to depart from the poetic procedure of Carlo Scarpa, without exhibiting the obsessive ziggurat forms.

In Carlo Scarpa’s reconstruction of the National Gallery of Sicily, Palermo, formerly Palazzo Abatellis (1953 to 1955) bombed during the Second World War,[5] Frascari re-introduced the idea of the Italian term “spoglia”. This gallery demonstrates Scarpa’s careful transitions of spolia, which are strategically located within the building. His varying states of spolia are reflected in Italian architecture as an incomplete series of projects, indicating certain modern open-ended compositions. According to Frascari, Scarpa's manipulation of fragments initially takes place by melding the joints,[6] a technique that conceals the surface treatment of the material. The exposure of the material conflict expressed by Scarpa could be seen as a fabricated sequence intertwining the “arabesque . . . varied profusion and . . . chaos” with spolia. [7] The transformation of post-war ruins in Sicily demonstrated the preservation of modern spolia. The shifts of material contrasting the old with the new fragments have been integrated carefully in the National Gallery. This porch reveals the continuation of the brick paving as a plinth at ground level. Scarpa projected the importance of preserving the fragment, not merely as a museum piece. In its new location it stands as a continuous plinth (rising to knee height). His work responds to the viewer’s sensibilities and the interiors; corresponding gestures of the body are placed according to the orchestration of movements through the reconstructed spaces.

Scarpa treated each spolium sensitively, since the piece is placed on a platform, not as a relic of a “dead” order to be revered, but as an element in a continuum of cultural-material experience. Another example is the use of antique fragments in the project for the entrance to the Architectural Institute of Venice University (IUAV), designed in the 1960s. There, he proposed three schemes that cover the ground of the design, which was not completed in Scarpa's lifetime. According to Marco Frascari, “this fragment, an anatomical piece lying on the dissecting table of reflecting water becomes an entry gate to the realm of images within the architecture of spoils.”[8] These architectural shifts evoking the “dissection” of the platform demonstrate the linkages of the “pools of water” to the amniotic city of Venice: a city composed of spolia deriving from Byzantine and Greece, and the antipodean impact in Scarpa’s 1974 Villa Ottolenghi near Lake Garda, northern Italy, reflected in Southern Italian architecture.[9]

In Monsters of Architecture, the late Marco Frascari elucidates the term “the architecture of spoils”: “Every architectural piece echo other piece into infinity, weaving the fabric of the text of culture itself.”[10] He argues that all these elements have meaning; they possess an appropriate method for manipulating architecture, in contrast to the post-modern puzzle of forms. In pursuing a discourse on the architettura di spoglio, I refer to “monstrosity” (or deformation), which enables the construction of a meaningful architecture unified by specific detailing, “the margins or joints,” which enable a passage of meaning.[11] Discussing the derivation of the grotesque from the word “demonstration”, Frascari argues that “monsters” are conceptual juxtapositions of architectural figures, which reveal or demonstrate. His lucid analysis of the issue of demonstration analyzes old and new concepts of bodily fragments in relation to the constructed world. He argues that “it is in the margins or joints that the misplacing of meanings produced by the spatial measure of the existing constructions become a physical expression of a meta-basis of a passage to the other in built form.”[12] Frascari’s interpretation of spoils forms the basis to trace the shift in the transformation and assimilation of other buildings, since “the building elements are compelling demonstrations of how we inhabit the world.” [13]

Manfredo Tafuri offers an insight into what I perceive as the genealogy of extended “trapezoidal” practices of spoliation. He argues that the firstgeneration modernists, such as Mario Ridolfi and Ernesto Rogers, evoked the gravity of history in a fragmentary manner.[14] The gravity of unanalyzed works, preceding both classicism and modernism, forms the basis for an understanding of the contingent agendas between the fragmentary qualities of trapezia. In re-constructing new grounds and buildings, the problem with the residue of architecture is a result of the “crisis of fragments.”[15] When Tafuri referred to the “formal residue” of architectural works of the Roman School in the 1970’s, he described them as being “tempered

[1] Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of the Fragment” in The Idea of the City (1996), Edited by Robin Middleton. London: Architectural Association, p.111.

[2] See Alan Colquhoun, Modernity, and the Classical Tradition: architectural essays 1980-1987 (1989), The MIT Press: Cambridge, for a discussion of modernism and fragmentation, concerning vernacular classicism, which distinguishes between classicizing and Medieval works of composition.

[3] In a 1927 article by the Gruppo Sette,“Architecture (III): Unpreparedness - Incomprehension - Prejudices.” The difference between my approach of reconfiguring fragments and the “Learning from Las Vegas” approach of American post-modern architect Robert Venturi would be one of respect for the experience embedded in materials. Such respect would be repelled by the championing of spectacular surfaces, such as the “decorated sheds” which is the substance of the Venturi mode of post-modernity. See E Shapiro, “Il Gruppo 7. Architecture (1978) in Oppositions 12: 93.

[4] Excluding any references to Mario Ridolfi or Aldo Rossi’s modern hybrid buildings.

[5] Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991), Savage, MD: Littlefield Publishers, p.3.

[6] Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991).

[7] As already discussed by Ross Jenner in relation to Fulle and Schlegel in Modern Fragmentation.

[8] Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991), Savage, MD: Littlefield Publishers, p.61.

[9] Marco Frascari, “Pneumatic Bathroom” in Plumbing: sounding modern architecture (1997). Edited by Lahiji, N. and Friedman, D.S. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 162-180.

Francesco Dal Co, F. and Polano, S. (1988) A + U Italian Architecture 1945—1985 (1988) Japan.

[10] Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991), Savage, MD: Littlefield Publishers, p.22.

[11] Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991), pp.21-22.

[12] Frascari discusses the Russian film director Sergei M. Eisenstein’s essay in discussing Piranesi’s works. Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991), Savage, MD: Littlefield Publishers, p.45.

[13] Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in architectural theory (1991), Savage, MD: Littlefield Publishers, pp.89-109.

[14] Mario Ridolfi and Rogers both make references to vernacular, Medieval and Byzantine heritage. There are other constituent elements of the architectural culture of Southern Italy, which include the Punic and Islamic traces.

[15] Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 19441985 (1989), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

[16] Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 19441985 (1989), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp.122-123.

[17] Spolia as formal residue are referred to throughout this book as irregular buildings. Also see Annette Condello, “Architectural Spoils: Francesco Venezia and Sicily’s spogliatoia” (2003) in Constructing Place: Mind and the Matter of Placemaking, edited by Sarah Menin, Routledge: London.

[18] Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 19441985 (1989), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

[19] Here I am referring to de Solà-Morales: “In an act of constructing that presents itself as contingent, as something unnecessary yet at the same time desired, the contemporary architect, in her or his solitude, individually confronts history. . .. When analysing a particular place, the architect will encounter a simulacrum in personal memory - through strictly autobiographical episodic suggestions - of a trace based on which he or she can establish the difference that avoids repetition. Or, as Deleuze would have it, the architect will invert Platonism will deny the primacy of the original over the remembrance of its image.” Ignasi de Sola`-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (1997), Translated by Graham Thompson. Cambridge: MIT Press, p.111.

[20] Francesco Venezia, “Transfer and Transformation. The Architecture of Spoils: A Compositional Technique”(1985) in Daidalos 16: 103.

[21] Here I am referring to the “aural” (in a Benjaminian sense) or the communicative power of the transferred fragment, and the relation between emplacement and meaning capacity for signification. Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of the Fragment” in The Idea of the City (1996), Edited by Robin Middleton. London: Architectural Association, p.120.

[22] Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of the Fragment” in The Idea of the City (1996), Edited by Robin Middleton. London: Architectural Association, p.120.

[23] Francesco Venezia, “Transfer and Transformation. The Architecture of Spoils: A Compositional Technique”(1985) in Daidalos 16: 93-104.

[24] Jencks defines the term pastiche noting that it has “two popular meanings, both of which are rather pejorative; it means a work of art which is a medley of various sources, and a work which recalls the style or subject matter of a well-known author.” Charles Jencks, The Presence of the Past (1980), Venice Biennale, Academy Editions: 31.

[25] Thomas Raff, “Spolia- building material or nearer of meaning?” (1995), in Daidalos 58, December: 71

[26] Thomas Raff, “Spolia- building material or nearer of meaning?” (1995), in Daidalos 58, December: 71

THE ROLE OF CASA MALAPARTE

Two hands embrace a gesture, two worlds usually placed in contact with one another: the geometry dominates a mysterious underworld and a solar world.

- Francesco Venezia

The eternal presence of the celebrated Casa Malaparte on the Isle of Capri off the coast of Naples, Italy, resides in Francesco Venezia’s projects. It reappears as if it was a tapinu de mortu, a carpet traditionally used for funerals, exhuming a trapezoid configuration.

In Constructions, the philosopher John Rajchman describes the “geo-logical” manner of the topography and refers to dynamic or skewed geometries:

It is not a matter of the Earth-ground and the weight and materiality of tradition, region, or context. It is rather the question of another conception of the earth itself and of its materiality, no longer separated from the city or caught in the opposition between artifice and nature – the question of a new “geo-logy,” where the earth is no longer seen as what anchors or grounds us but what releases in the midst of our multiple material manners of being other light, dynamic spaces. [1]

In considering the application of the “geo-logical” method in the transposition of religious groundings, specific chthonic references are found. This is especially the case with those structures emanating from pre-Christian culture, which are implied in trapezoidal-type projects in Naples.

The idea of the trapezoid is essential to understanding Venezia’s experimental phase. In addition, the role of Casa Malaparte is inherent in his projects with its trapezoidal flight of steps leading to the roof terrace. The resonance of the non-orthogonal alignment of buildings, in this case deriving from the submerged topography of the Mediterranean region, establishes the interrelation between the spoils and the idea of the trapezoid. Herein the term “trapezoid” refers to a building consisting of transferred spoils in the landscape. Uncovering the “genealogy,” a term used by Manfredo Tafuri where he proposed it as a “construction,”[2]such as an instrument to be consumed by the historian, influences the meaning capacity of the trapezoid which supports Venezia’s creative methodology. Most significantly Casa Malaparte’s trapezoidal staircase is “re-found”[3] in his projects. In the context of preceding cultural trapezoidal tendencies, Venezia’s analogical appropriation of Casa Malaparte will be generating other well-intended constructions in the landscape.

The city of Naples continues to exist in a state of palimpsest of spoils. Naples is informed and affected by its buried topography, the overlaying of past cities, buried passages and excavations. A concept deriving from the cross-section of the underground passages of the city is Francesco Venezia’s “Neapolitan section.” I use this concept to discuss the trapezoidal methodology applied to Venezia’s variegated compositions. Behind Mount Vesuvius in Avellino, for example, lies Venezia’s first landscape architecture project, Lauro square[IMG 06] (1974-76), which fuses the idea of spoils with the trapezoid, a conflation considered in a sequence of other projects, analysed herein. Rather than pursuing the obvious vernacular or perspectival connotations that the trapezium presents, such as the Baroque Palazzo Spada in Rome, the preceding sacred structures particularly those deriving from Punic culture by demonstrates the form’s symbolic capacities in Venezia’s poetic projects. Venezia’s explanation for using the “Neapolitan section” supports the idea of the trapezoidal method that provides alternative grounds for the construction of new projects.

GENESIS OF THE TRAPEZOID

Architectural critics have rarely discussed the intentionally formed sacred structures of the Neolithic era as relevant references for the reassessment of contemporary projects. The configuration of the trapezoid within architecture and the landscape is two-fold: it is considered as a designed sacred structure based on the silhouette of the body, vertically and horizontally; and as a natural topographical phenomenon it is usually caused by the impact of earthquakes, other natural disasters, or war catastrophes, which have distorted buildings and provided us with this aesthetic. Aside from the resulting devastating impacts on the landscape or the form of derelict buildings, the trapezoidal figure served a more significant role in the development of chthonic cults. The making of contemporary

constructions is linked to a much earlier model of Mediterranean buildings: evidence suggests that the chthonic is apparent, imbuing architecture with significance.

The historiographical approach towards analysing trapezoidal spaces and the use of these spaces in sacred structures seldom recognizes their use to be legitimate. This is particularly the case for Nikolaus Pevsner, for example, and in relation to Rationalism, the hegemony of the right angle or the disregard of expressionism in the post-war period, including the anti-Rationalists. [4] The Rationalist ideology of modernism excludes such structures as aberrant in relation to its discourse. The concern with trapezoidal spaces is diverse. Resonances of this “groundwork” are introduced as traces of a buried body as a conjectural analogy between the Southern Italian cultural landscape and specific contemporary projects. Emphasis is placed on the topography informed by traces of the absent body. “The experience of the absence” is one that “draws the contours of the metropolitan subject.”[5]

The trapezoid uncovers a buried history of ancient Mediterranean architecture. Sardinia’s Punic culture in particular shows traces of a disorder, which metaphorically houses a female figure: a contemporary absence. Originally, the trapezoid merely indicated a table where a victim was slaughtered. The etymology of the Greek word Trapezos, a town on the southern shore of the Black Sea, and the topography of the modern town Trebizon (Trabzon) suggests its form. [6] Punic culture also reveals the trapezoidal figure, for instance, the goddess Tanit (a trapezium topped by a disk), painted or carved on stelae (stone markers) or votive offerings.[7]

In southern Italy archaeologists have uncovered Punic sanctuaries that show the Tanit symbol, which served as a mark of fecundity, sacrifice or a silhouette of a female body. In Hellenistic and earlier contexts in Sicily, for example, variations of the Tanit symbol became good luck charms to protect the household. They were embedded in marble cubes in the red flooring which became common in Sicilian house paving and represented regeneration. [8] And in Cagliari, Sardinia, Punic settlers also placed Tanit symbols in their floors. Thus, the trapezoid acted as a tabula rasa, which was seen to have had protective or “apotropaic” properties.

One Nuragic (late Neolithic) sacred structure, the Santa Cristina well in Paulilatino, near Oristano, in Sardinia reveals, a significant Tanit symbol horizontally, which spatially comprises a trapezoidal flight of steps leading down to the well. Lining the structure is an encasement of two twisted trapezoidal surfaces, evident in both the graded ceiling and in the design of the walls, and gradually opens to the sky. Assumptions have been made as to how the was designed, but there is no evidence that the Mycenean builders had any influence on Sardinia’s Nuragic

into the rock and then explains the return of the underworld in modernity, specifically referring to Le Corbusier’s modern works. From here, Venezia proposed the concept of the “Neapolitan section,” which he explains its application as establishing a building above the caves. And it creates an intellectually orchestrated quarry of spoils. There is a problem, however, how the trapezoidal spoil informs a space. Venezia’s literal trapezoidal projects absorb preceding structures and so the chthonic transfer extrapolates and re-founds new platforms of meaning.

*

[1] John Rajchman, Constructions (1998), The MIT Press: Cambridge, p.51.

[2] Manfredo Tafuri raises the issue of genealogy by referring to Nietzsche. See Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: avant-gardes and the architecture from Piranesi to the 1970’s (1987), translated by Jessica Levine. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp.8-9.

[3] On “re-founding” see Ignasi de Sola`-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (1997), Translated by Graham Thompson. Cambridge: MIT Press, p.86.

[4] Here I am referring to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design (1991 edition), Penguin Book: London.

[5] Ignasi de Sola’-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (1997), p.65.

[6] In the 1960s, one of the first triangular settlements with semi-subterranean shrines (ca. 6500-5500 BCE) was excavated in the Iron Gate region at Lepenski Vir in northern Yugoslavia. See M Gimbutas, The civilization of the goddess: the world of old Europe (1991), Harper San Francisco: New York 82, 284, figure 7-100-101. Compare these structures with the long houses excavated in the 1930s in west Poland.

[7] S Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians (1973), Cardinal: London, pp.265, 277

[8] R Holloway, The Archaeology of Ancient Sicily (1991), Routledge: London, p.156

[9] Babro Santillo Fritzell, in Sardinia in the Mediterranean: a footprint in the sand (1992), edited by Tykot and Andrews, Sheffield Press: England, pp.262-269.

[10] Babro Santillo Fritzell, Sardinia in the Mediterranean: a footprint in the sand (1992), Sheffield Press, pp.262-269.

[11] H W Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity (1988), edited by Ging, Routledge: London; and Paulo di Martino, Trentadue domande a Francesco Venezia (1997) Clean: Napoli, pp. 8, 61

[12] H W Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity (1988), p.84.

[13] H W Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity (1988), p.85.

[14] P Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic (1995), Claredon Press: Oxford, pp.99-100

[15] Van Millingen, Byzantine Churches in Constantinople (1974), Variorum Reprints: London, p.56, figure 12.

[16] Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings (1992) London: Verso.

[17] J Robert, Casa Malaparte (1993), in L’architecture D’aujourd’hui, 289 October: 129.

[18] Francesco Venezia, “The hidden part” in The presence of the past: 1st International Exhibition of Architecture, the Corderia of the Arsenale, La Biennale di Venezia (1980), edited by Gabriella Borsano. London: Academy Editions.

OUTSIDE ARCHITECTURE

To make cities safe for everyone, the configuration of medieval planning practices had to be altered. “Earthquake-inspired planning can be found in various degrees of sophistication throughout the areas of the New World and Europe affected by seismic activity.”[1] These alterations occurred through the enlargement of streets to assure passage through post-earthquake rubble. “The wide straight radiating streets were neither “arbitrary” nor showed “absolute power” but rather were elements of an intelligently planned city with safe escape routes and internal areas of refuge”.[2]

From the Middle Ages onward the extensions of the fragments strewn across the landscape eventually deviated into uncanonical forms. This is the unstable ground of earthquakes specific to Mediterranean culture. Natural catastrophes in this area and other seismic regions acquired a wealth of mythical and intuitive orientations, which accumulated diverse meanings that are very different in Southern Italy from other countries. The planning strategies exemplified in Sicily can be contrasted with the more recent version of the “foreign” influences constructed in the 1980s.

In Salemi, Sicily, an example of an earthquake-inspired building, revealing vernacular construction, remains incomplete. On the first floor, objets trouvês, found debris, litter the incomplete building. Its kitsch reification of the fragment of tradition could be described as exemplifying an “ungrounded construction.” To shift to its previous cultures or rather to accompany what was in its original site, the discarded parts where buildings were located appear to be “re-acknowledged”; this is particularly true of the Trapani region. Towns in this region indicate the neglected fragmentations of structures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from the previous traces of Elima (Punic, Roman, Arab, and

Christian cultures).[3] This palimpsest of influences re-acknowledge new or abandoned architectural traces, viewed here as informative frameworks. Many of these “ghost towns” recall the regenerative architectural manes of Elima culture: the spogliatoio[4] (or dressing room) as a place of apparitional experimentation with the ground.

The 1968 earthquake destroyed many towns in the Trapani region, in the west corner of Sicily. Subsequently, the towns throughout the Belice Valley were relocated and rebuilt, providing ample source of material for architects to make new foundations. A Sicilian urbanistic program in Salemi, The Belice Laboratory of 1980, marked the beginning of a period whereby rubble was appropriated into architectural projects. This Laboratory was coordinated by Pier Luigi Nicolin with the combined efforts of the town mayors and lecturers at the Palermo Faculty of Architecture. The old towns of Gibellina, Salaparuta and Poggioreale were relocated. Gibellina had been destroyed by the devastating earthquake.[5] Its relocation demonstrates an unsuited basis for the contemporary town planning strategies. Certain architects of The Belice Laboratory deployed such seismic activity in forms of an architecture that arrive at practical solutions to produced aesthetic. Massimo Cacciari would describe this activity as the construction of a “shattered”[6] platform revealing obvious fissures: between the spolium in question and the new territorial passage. The Laboratory provided conceptual platforms, through the transferal of spolia. This outcome developed the tectonic displacements of its location as conceptually “catastrophic events.”

Innovative alternatives were provided by other architects within the disruptive terrains of other towns. Both Gregotti and Quaroni were partly responsible for the urban planning of the new town of Gibellina, a settlement which literally appears displaced. It is almost entirely made up of mis-taken “conceptual” ruins, perhaps due to the displacements of foreign fragments that together create an alternative non-place.[7] Both architects participated in designing projects in this. In Quaroni’s and Anversa’s design of the Catholic Church, specifically the remainder of the exterior walls, there exists half a dome and the other half remains in rubble, a result of faulty workmanship.

Ungers’ incomplete apartments demonstrate the waste of funds, the rest being corruptly squandered. Giuseppe Marinoni has described the new town of Gibellina - “the appearance of a vast building site under construction.”[8] Accumulated in these relocated towns are a-cultural expressions, both in architecture and urban design planning. Distinct from these physically incomplete works are the reconstruction projects for the new town of Gibellina, Salaparuta and Salemi by Venezia, Roberto Collovà and Alvaro Siza.

Venezia's works create meaningful distortions out of the destructive effects of the topography.[9] In a similar vein, the sculptural impact of Burri’s white Cretto (fissure), provides a contemporary Italian garden which covers the old town of Gibellina.[10] Although criticized by some as money spent unwisely,[11] I would refer to it instead as a unique spoliatory platform, one that covers the epicenter of a major seismic fault. It has, through analogy, become a pertinent “buried” metaphor in contemporary architectural theory in Italy as a whole: this decaying seismic carpet indicates a vast area of “grounded” axial distortions resonating in Southern Italian projects. As an exemplary “metaphysical or psychological landslide” it deserves attention. The old town of Gibellina could be described as an epic “touchstone” resembling a gigantic salt pan. This fissured “carpet” physically covering the metaphorical gestures of absent bodies reveals the submerged mould of an ancient and medieval abandoned town, a “grave foundation,” or tabula rasa.

The issue of the “foundation” is exemplary in the project for a garden in Alcamo designed by Venezia with the collaboration of students from the Faculty of Architecture in Palermo.[12] In referring to this “garden of Eden,” in which the role of dimensions and effects of perspective are “irrelevant,” Venezia writes:

The project takes on the appearance of an archipelago of fragments, different in shape and unified in the detail: the walled garden - the gates - the bases - the fountain of spolia . . . The system of fragments creates the conditions for an emphasis of existing situations by setting up new relationships. In this way a platform is formed on which stands out . . . [a] small church . . . [13]

Here Venezia introduces “the fountain of spolia,” evidence of a conceptual process used to construct desolate theatres within which the space is constructed. The idea of building a gesture, informed by the process of measuring, or adjusting the deformation of the previous derivation of form, establishes new relationships. Specific site conditions provide architectural parameters which encompass the various positions of spolia: these positions produce the architectural gesture within the composition. I would describe the oblique tendency in this project as what de Solà-Morales might describe as a “casual distortion.”[14] The project is an investigation into the devastated terrain of Sicilian towns, for these reconstructed atria (open-air enclosures) evoke the earthquake metaphor, affording “rich” architectural results.

The metaphorical earthquake appearing in these architects' works reveals the narrative of the passage. Used as a poetical device and not as some romantic play which positions antique ruins in a dislocated region, the buildings of Venezia, Collovà and Siza react with the display of museum

pieces. The resonating narrative of the earthquake theme as a “seismic passage” is seen as a part of the creative process in forming expressive compositions. This aspect reflects the practical problems caused by the delays in the construction process and the roles in which spolia play in the transformation of the displaced fragment (in its relocated position). All three architects recuperate the modern, but not as post-modernists or romanticists: their architecture constructs the ground, depicting Sicily as “anti-quarian,” spolia removed from the “quarry.” As a result, the transition from the spolium to a collective building in a specific context pertains to different categories of an aesthetic strategy, the gap or rather “divorced” passage releasing discordant horizon levels.

In 1993, Cacciari developed an elaborated concept of the “void,” in which he argues that the fragments of a departed unity cannot be re-incorporated, a “lost” unity. Discussing the cultural context of contemporary architecture in relation to the concept of negative thought, it is within the context of his argument that the embodiments of absent elements are juxtaposed not unified. Absent elements are examples of “a marked and precise gestural summation of metamorphosed “shatterings.” [15] As a result, the spoliatory work creates a variegated concept of trapezial architecture. Such works, evoking the influence of the earthquake metaphor encompassing the gesture of spolia, are appropriate vehicles to explicate an architecture of displacement. The placement of the spolium within one or many parts of a building accomplishes new meaning. Perhaps this practice, in which the distortion of the spolium indicates the “weak” influences of modern architectures that develop into complete or incomplete geometries, exemplifies the problematic gap between the interior and exterior, and between the individual and the social. An architecture of metamorphosed spolia, such gaps subvert or ends, what Cacciari would refer to as the “plundering” of architecture: the fabric of the city has shifted, and its fragments have become the material for insightful re-found compositions. [16]

INCIDENTS AND SPATIAL LIBERATION

The Mediterranean architecture of Portugal, and the political dimension of social housing projects of Alvaro Siza built after the 1974 'so-called Revolution of the Carnations,'[17] has impacted on the Southern Italian schools of architecture.[18] Architects had the desire for quality construction, and this points to the theory of the fragment as a strategy for analyzing the work of Venezia.[19] Both Siza and Roberto Collovà pursue a similar approach that involves references to a rich topography reflecting the spoliatory process: the construction of conceptual platforms.

Siza’s observation offers an insight into the transformation of fragmentations in Sicily: He said, “something remains. Pieces are kept here and there, inside us, perhaps fathered by someone, leaving marks on space and people, melting into a process of total transformation.”[20] Siza raises the question of how to treat an idea of what may be described as the “liberation”[21] of space and its corresponding gesture. The primary assertion of the transfer, juxtaposing the topography, is inhabited by continuous or absent planks, which inform the construction process. Such transfers support liberated spoliated paths. As completed constructions, these spaces are no longer imprisoned walls and floors, but are “de-constructed”[22] edifices and when combined form the structure of the divorced passage.

In 1983, Collovà indicated what he saw to be a critical aspect in discussing the relationship of modern architecture to fragmentary compositions, in discussing Siza's condominium blocks on the Atlantic coast of Porto, in Portugal. In relation to what Collova` refers to as “incidents” reflected into buildings, he reveals the problem of the difficulty of resolving unforeseen construction details in drawings on site. [23] He is convinced by Siza's physical expressions, his “action building” on a one-to-one scale and through on-the-site photographic documentation. Collovà further observes Siza’s gestural construction process: “Siza was living through his compound euphoria . . . “at other times, making a sketch of a house or a summary relief of a fountain, measuring off the whole and its details with big paces or the span of his hand.”[24]

In comparison, the Alcamo “fountain” is indicative of Venezia's system of spolia. Collovà interprets a citation by Robert Musil, who notes that “inebriation is a condition of art. . . . The essential: a sense of increase in strength and fullness.” He then follows the “thread of this action,” specifically in relation to Musil’s citation of Nietzsche, and the emphasis of “leading features, so as to make the others disappear.”[25] He views this as a test conducted on a construction site, and defines this as Siza's whole relation with architecture, as an expression encrusted, but still full of potential. As Venezia observes, Siza:

makes use of techniques congenial to himself that he has already used: insertion, the “impossible” proximity of different bodies, promiscuity as an expressive form . . .. At Evora he refines, together with other techniques, a different one, one that [evokes the] . . . ambit of “visual acoustic”. . .. the old walls, with their clefts and the gaps of doorways opening onto emptiness - determine a feeling of a time of cyclical ineluctability.[26]

CONTINGENT MISPRIZES

We are no longer in the domain of architecture but of construction. - Francesco Dal Co

Constructing contemporary spoliation may be paralleled with the act of misprision, the result of the physical and conceptual manipulation of influential sources. Etymologically, “misprision” relates to the term “misprize;” the French translation is mepris, the eponym of Jean Luc Godard’s film. In 1973 Harold Bloom used the term “misprision” in The Anxiety of Influence relating to poetic analyses. “Misprision of spolia” is not about poetics or semiotics, in the sense used in textual analysis, nor is it about the sign. Instead, the act “diverges” the influences of Casa Malaparte, including the work of Le Corbusier, in Venezia’s projects. The act of the reversal of “swerving” produces new meaningful configurations in the sense referred here, the spolium derived from previous projects is transferred and displaced into a construction. The architect methodically houses its potentiality in another context, building around architecture.

Bloom’s concept of “swerving”[1] determines Venezia's expression by the interrelation between a pluralist and semiotic relationship. What makes architecture “exceptional” in relation to its “prized” context demonstrates how Venezia’s own work deviates from his sources. Various spoliatory projects generate a panoply of “misprizes,” indicating the credibilty of this function as the basis for an architectural practice. These projects, and their influences, tend to camouflage dispositioned fragments, allowing for the creative production of luxurious architecture. Venezia's work interacts within the limits of grounded locations.

Misprision fabricates the history of architecture into new cyclical foreign sources. Influences are evident in all fields (so too in spoliatory

practice); the essence of the production of works is camouflaged by the process through which they develop in culture. The act of contemporary spoliation is affected by other architectural influences that can further articulate the architect’s actions in a new composition. Although the underlying sources of some projects are clear, the very naming of such sources presents problematics fundamental to architecture. Appropriation verifies both the theory and the practice of architecture. The intentional direction operating in Venezia’s architecture, a position emphasizing the reversal of the spoliatory process, relates to Harold Bloom’s theory about influence relations.

The impact of influential conflicts in buildings parallels Paula Young Lee’s argument as to how the “idea of influence” implies the process of history writing in relation to modern architecture. Discussing how influences “initially had nothing to with history,” she notes that it was “still associated with inexorable power capable of shaping human events. . . ” [2] Modern architects were unaware of such consequences in associating the “turning” of fragments out of the destroyed territories, or how to go beyond the mere reconstruction or construction of historical spolia . Lee argues that “the changing sway of an influence denoted a conceptual shift in relation to time as to objects. . . . [as] it shifted from astrology to teleology,”[3] and this thinking bears resemblances to Benjamin’s passage on “building the action” of “unforseen constellations.” Lee explains this: . . . as an uneven constellation of built facts, cultural assumptions, and mental pathways that have accumulated over the centuries, the idea of architecture-as-influence has much to do with smooth logic. Importantly, these sorts of 'invisible' metaphors are by far the most 'influential' . . . because they do their work and produce an effect without ever being perceived. [4]

The influence of the invisible relates to Frascari’s concept of “troping”: the influence of the spolium that reveals itself and is then “turned over” to the architect. Lee then elucidates the term “influence as influenza”: “It spreads diffusely, penetrates invisibly, and is recognizable not through its agents as through its eventual effects. Beliefs are not germs [or] viruses. . . . when ideas become influential. . . . its pathways are insidious as well as indirect . . . all around, and in the air.”[5] This “spreading” parallels Bloom’s interpretation - “Influence is Influenza - an astral disease.”[6] Demonstrating variations of a transformative practice, such “influences” of anxiety emphasize the generating force behind the spolia found in projects that may express distorted buildings. Venezia’s architecture resonates such traits through what he referred to (in relation to his own work), as “promiscuity as an expressive form,” demonstrating works containing an “entangled freedom”: appropriated “misprizes.”

The practice of “misprision,” as I have used the term, is contrasted with European post-modernism. It is not a simple matter of appropriating collages, in the post-modernist sense, or juxtaposing different fragments. Instead, it spoliates the concealment of fragments found beneath the building distortion. The term is taken as the intended meaning of an architectural work to “swerve” and develop a new array of disorder. “Misprision,” more accurately, is a process of spoliation, of pursuing the conflicts of materials by putting in, and taking out proportional fragments according to the dimensioning of the cthonic platform. The “swerving” of various influences evokes the “trajectories of spolia.” These features are incorporated as part of the the “misprision of architecture,” and it is in this way that I use the term “misprision” in relation to a form of neglectof the value of the site - the last act of spoliation in another context. This process is then about deliberately exposing the conceptual “swerve” of the “richest” qualities of preceding projects. Bloom’s introduction of the term “misprision” brings fresh insight to the composition of new architectural works. The depiction of the arrangement of spolia within the 'trapezial' composition might be approached in a productive manner. This permits me to advance beyond simple characterization of unusual or “excessive” qualities, as trapezial spaces they transcend the expansion of skew spaces that certain projects indicate.

APLOMB STRATEGIES

In his 1988 essay “Sopra un fregio antico” (On an Antique Frieze), Venezia alludes to “aplomb” strategies by poetically describing what he refers to as a “compromised equilibrium.” [7] He compares a frieze from the Temple E of Selinunte, Sicily, noting the oblique lines of the figures that made the tangle of imagery in each metope with Le Corbusier’s “elongated contours”[8] in the Capitol of Chandigarh, India, and the complex at Firminy, France. Revealing its conflicting gestures, the metopes at Selinunte enabled Venezia to use this poetic idea:

A kind of opposition, of conflict took the form of narrative. At the very moment in which the right angle cut with Doric precision into the triglyphs, it was as if seduced - again - by the oblique lines of the figures that made up the tangle of imagery in each metope. Equilibrium. Disequilibrium. Orthostasis. Animal tension of bodies. [9]

He has integrated other projects by Le Corbusier as a way of encompassing the “compromised equilibrium” of his buildings. Venezia analyses of Le Corbusier's projects and writings question the cthonic platform, which becomes a crypt, but one which cease to be a shelter. Venezia questions the sketch of the Church of Tremblay (1929):

[1] Harold Bloom provides a post-enlightenment view of the importance of the self-using Nietzsche and Freud as his major sources upon a “theory of influence.”

The romantics emphasize the necessity to construct selfhood. Bloom argues that Eliot’s use of words from Keats is different from Ben Jonson’s use of words from classical writers. The latter is striving to make a dignified allusion, whereas Eliot is being dubious, underground. This controversial book opposes traditional views of history, instead it suggests that meaning struggles and roams around to the point where it becomes misread. For him, “misprision” is the analytical study of the life cycle of the poet. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), New York: Oxford University Press, p.14.

[2] “To the medieval mind, 'influences' were astrological forces that controlled man's earthly lot.” Paula Y Lee, “Modern architecture and the ideology of influence”(1997), in Assemblage 34: 8.

[3] P Lee, “Modern architecture and the ideology of influence”(1997), in Assemblage 34: 9.

[4] Lee notes that “like the now-discredited belief in the influence of the stars, however, the propensity of architecture to work in this way should be regarded with a sceptical eye.” Paula Y Lee, “Modern architecture and the ideology of influence”(1997), in Assemblage 34: 11,12.

[5] She notes that it is “circular, because it equates effects with their causes; one-sided, because it systematically represses the possibility of reciprocation. The ideology of influence only works in one way. When its direction is reversed, so, too, is its polarity: no longer positive but negative, influence becomes infection and death is the result.” Paula Y Lee, “Modern architecture and the ideology of influence”(1997), in Assemblage 34: 12,19,21.

[6] H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), New York: Oxford University Press, p.95.

[7] Francesco Venezia, “On an Antique Frieze”(1989), In the Footsteps of Le Corbusier, Italy: Rizzoli, p.209.

[8] Refer to Francesco Venezia’s Scritti Brevi 1975-1989, Clean Napoli.

[9] This passage may be compared to Rowe's interpretation of Le Corbusier's La Tourette Monastery: “A certain animation of contour - the oblique cut of the parapet and the intersection with the diagonal of the belfrywill focus his eye and lead him on.” Colin Rowe, The mathematics of the ideal villa and other essays (1976), The MIT Press: London, p 188.

[10] On Venezia’s reference to Le Corbusier's La Tourette Monastery.

[11] Colin Rowe, The mathematics of the ideal villa and other essays (1976), The MIT Press: London, pp. 185201.

[12] Colin Rowe, The mathematics of the ideal villa and other essays (1976), The MIT Press: London, p 187.

[13] For example Venezia’s sketch of the Santa Maria in Zivido Church, Milan.

[14] See The Role of Casa Malaparte.

[15] Marco Frascari, “Pneumatic Bathroom” in Plumbing: sounding modern architecture (1997), edited by Lahiji, N. and Friedman, D.S. New York: Princeton

Architectural Press, pp.177, note 10.

[16] Marco Frascari, “Pneumatic Bathroom” in Plumbing: sounding modern architecture (1997), edited by Lahiji, N. and Friedman, D.S. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp.177, 164.

[17] Frascari discusses Scarpa’s plans of the Masieri Foundation in Volta di Canal in Venice and Villa Ottalenghi in Bardolini, Verona, which he describes as a “cthonic villa, the roof of which is a threshing floor, a cosmological representation under which the dwelling takes place.” Marco Frascari, “Pneumatic Bathroom” in Plumbing: sounding modern architecture (1997), edited by Lahiji, N. and Friedman, D.S. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 167, 178, 171.

[18] See Galvano Della Volpe’s Critique of Taste, “The Crucial Question of Architecture Today”(1991).

[19] P Carter, The Lie of the Land (1996), Faber and Faber: London, p. 4. [20] Here I am referring to Gianni Vattimo’s sense of the legitimization of the project.

[21] M. De Michelis, “At the end of the cycle” (1994), Lotus International 81.

[22] De Michelis, “At the end of the cycle” (1994), Lotus International 81: 8.

[23] Pippo Ciorra, “Francesco Venezia - Alcoy, Amiens, Berlin” (1994), Lotus International 83: 91.

[24] Francesco Venezia, Luce Da Sud Sui Fronti Nord: due edifici universitari ai piedi della cattedrale di Amiens (1998), Avellino: Ordine Degli Architetti.

[25] Quoted in A. G. Raventos, Francesco Venezia. Due case tre edifice pubblici, Hunter Douglas: Chile (1994), p.30.

[26] Raventos 1994: 26.

[27] Pippo Ciorra, “Francesco Venezia - Alcoy, Amiens, Berlin” (1994), Lotus International 83: 91.

[28] Pippo Ciorra, “Francesco Venezia - Alcoy, Amiens, Berlin” (1994), Lotus International 83: 91.

[29] For a history on how the Romans organized space, specifically on tabernae and atrium houses see JC Anderson, Roman Architecture and Society (1997), John Hopkins University Press, pp.330-331.

[30] Yehuda Safran, “Francesco Venezia: Museo nazionale di Corea Laboratorio prove materiali IUAV” (1996), Architettura Intersezioni 3 June: 60-67: 151.

[31] Francesco Venezia, “Oppositions”(1995) in Korean Architects: 132: 152; and Francesco Venezia, “Laboratorio prove materiali a Venezia Mestre”(1996) in Casabella 633 April: 12.

[32] Francesco Venezia, “Oppositions”(1995) in Korean Architects: 132: 152.

[33] Francesco Venezia, “Laboratorio prove materiali a Venezia Mestre”(1996) in Casabella 633 April: 12.

[34] Conversation I had with Francesco Venezia in Naples on 1 May 2000 at his studio.

[35] Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 19441985 (1989), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp.122-123.

[36] See Ignasi de Sola`-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (1997), Translated by Graham Thompson. Cambridge: MIT Press

[37] Refer to P Nicolin, “Contextualism and Internationalism in Italian architecture”(1994), Lotus International 83.194: 32-41.

[38] See S Whiting in the Introduction to Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, de Sola`Morales 1997: xv.

RUIN-PROOFING POMPEII

The death of objects can release a grief even more bewildering than the death of a loved person.

- Susan Sontag

I have always had a preoccupation with the remains of organic matter or discarded architectural spolia. A constant need to know what came before me in the place where I stand or the space I occupy. I am intrigued as to why some people are apathetic to accepting natural or artificial imagery. Is it because of their lack of concern for remnants or relics when they have passed their so-called use-by date or simply a lack of empathy, sympathy for the material past? What has little been studied is the antique form of timber spoliation and how preceding modern architectural imagery is integrated into contemporary architecture. This is especially the case when observing the absorption of deadpan art in contemporary architectural relics.

The concept of ruins and Pompeii’s “ruin lust” ignites a dialogue with the modern context and how its spolia (or reused fragments) integrates art and architecture. Deadpan art and photography and the “embodiedness” of the plaster casts analysis are significant. This form of art connects with how “ruin porn” is perceived and provides an alternative interpretation of luxury as “deadpan”. Francesco Venezia’s timber spoliation of the temporary pyramid in Pompeii develops a new understanding of the fragmentary implications for material constructions. This is especially the case through the space of spolia.

Five years ago, at Western Australia’s Maritime Museum in Fremantle, what piqued my interest was a video of the construction of Francesco Venezia’s pyramidal-ark installation at Pompeii’s Amphitheatre. A structure existed temporarily in the middle of a Pompeii’s amphitheatre.

The exhibit was an interesting take on the storeroom/ archive/ morgue as the museum and Venezia’s design evokes respect for the victims.

Evoking a Neoclassical remnant or rather a relic, the temporary structure demonstrates Venezia’s infatuation with past decay and natural disasters. His temporary pyramid design at Pompeii incorporated sustainable luxury materials (in this case timber and fibreboard), by using fast state-of-the-art construction rather than recycle/upcycle the slow and laborious, and expensive, stone or marble. Venezia’s intriguing architectural folly presents us with a trick. You think the construction is supposedly or should be made using stone, but it is not. You might think it is heavy and grounded, but it is not. It is a deceiving structure aimed at architects plundering of other designs, the embodiment of the arts and the fast pace constructing industry.

Ruin-proofing the ancient city’s two millennia worth of its material past is no easy feat. Because of over-tourism, digital display has taken over archaeological sites. However, other than the stagnant museums as a destination to view fake ruins in-situ, one is exposed to think about these dead objects without meaning. This includes the spolia or building fragments themselves as isolated objects within or outside their contexts. Tired objects that remain within their building facades, floors, or the ones that lie in the ground haphazardly or those within their dreary displays is nothing out of the ordinary. Rather than remain in the ground, the unidentified human-cast spolia are transformed in another more meaningful manner. For Venezia:

“Buildings in ruins are stimuli allowing our minds to journey towards the indefinite, the distant, the remote to satisfy the aspiration for the infinite… Here the present-day is never divorced from a sense of timelessness and universality.” [1]

Previously, Venezia designed exhibitions at Naples’ Archaeological Museum, for example, the Pompeii and Europe (2015), featuring a fascination of Pompeii’s archaeological site of for artists and the European imagination from the start of excavations in 1748 to its dramatic 1943 bombing.

Turning attention away from ruins and thinking about spolia, that is, the reuse of artefacts and buildings embedded with new meaning, Sontag’s death of objects “releasing grief” extends to how tourists might be bewildered by legends about turning people into stone as punishment for their meanness. In Alberto Toso Fei’s Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories (2002), for example (an unusual guide to visit mystical Venice), he mentions the ruins at the Campo dei Mori in Venice whereby hypocrites

were mystically turned into white sepulchres. Fei notes that “if a person who is of pure spirit lays his hand on the statue’s chest, he might even hear his heartbeat” [2] Reusing images of ruins as spolia has affected the stories about buildings for centuries as a form of architectural excess.

Related to this the kind of “architectural excess”[3] is the display of rare artefacts expressed in modern buildings, such as the Chicago Tribune Tower with its 150 fragments or architectural spolia from famous structures and historic sites around the globe which are embedded on its ground level, as something stagnant, and embedded or set apart. This tradition commenced in the US in 1914, after WW1. “The taste for ruins is a modern invention” (or as Brian Dillon noted as post-Medieval) where “one had to have sliced the past into discrete periods and imagined one’s own past was advancing have blind into the future, to think that history was speaking from the stones. Their message was ambiguous from the outset or ruin aesthetics, or “Ruin Lust”, originally a German term, which Dillon says was “resurrected in Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins. [4] Ruin aesthetics are associated with spolia, especially ones that hold reuse value.

Next, in Architectural Agents (2015) Annabel Jane Wharton’s association of “death” with “spoils”. She argues that buildings abuse their human users. In treating buildings as bodies, she diagnoses their pathologies and their traumatic sites as well as the unhealthy spatial behaviours of other spaces. She notes that precious artefacts and the display of them provide their proof of superiority in buildings. More importantly, “The display of rare artefacts remains the privileged function of museums, though memorialization… has gained new prominence. … Museums function progressively as destinations for entertainment and consumption.” [5]

Wharton also discusses the “Embodiedness” of buildings’ bodies, which are poked and prodded, such as the Las Vegas strip.

“That buildings have bodies is also apparent in the way we judge them according to the length of their lives. It is presupposed that young structures should look and behave youthfully; old structures are allowed their decay. Buildings that don’t act their age are disorienting.” [6]

Moreover, in 2016 Paul O’Kane’s insightful interpretation of spolia as pre-loved remnants or relics pushes the concept of spolia as a sort of “creative compost”: “spolia increasingly becomes the morbid air that we breathe, a form, of death in life.” [7]

Related to this point is that the space of spolia within Pompeii’s ancient architecture borrows modern imagery and spaces to create new spoliations, new luxury spaces for the dead. As a surreal form of spolia as

sculptured marble statue remnants, these plaster cast bodies are full of perfect imperfections as deadpan luxury artefacts.

As a carefully planned spolarium in the true sense of the word, it resembles a dressing room, but not for gladiators. Ultimately, there are many layers to this installation. The scale of a pyramid alludes to a joyful but deadpan fragment as, for example, Giorgio de Chirico’s The Evil Genius of a King (1914) painting, alluding to a Northern African sun-clock.[8] The temporary building works as a theatre prop in an open-air theatre where the plaster casts are the actual players. The timber-crafting of the temporary pyramid therefore remains as a digital relic, as a reaction to the absurdities of the circular economy. Today landscape spoliation has significance with unlimited compositional information.

*

[1] Francesco Venezia, (2015) Forty Eight Pages: Francesco Venezia, Mendrisio Academy Press, Silvana Editoriale, p.49.

[2] Fei, Alberto Toso (2002) Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories: A guide to Places of Mystery in Venice, Elzeviro, p.48.

[3] On “architectural excess” see my chapter in Condello, Annette (2014). The Architecture of Luxury, UK: Routledge

[4] See Rose Macaulay’s (1977) Pleasure of Ruins. London: Thames and Hudson.

[5] Annabel J. Wharton (2015) Architectural Agents: the delusional, abusive, addictive lives of buildings, University of Minnesota Press, p.32.

[6] Annabel J. Wharton (2015) Architectural Agents: the delusional, abusive, addictive lives of buildings, University of Minnesota Press, p.xvii.

[7] Paul O’Kane (2017) Spolia as Speculation. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 15 (2-3), p.206.

[8] For a full interpretation on de Chirico’s painting see Ara H Merjian’s (2014) Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris, Yale University Press.

Francesco Venezia, Plan of the Refurbishment of the Posillipo apartment in Naples, 1993.

IMAGE 05

Francesco Venezia, section through the refurbishment of the Posillipo apartment in Naples, 1993.

IMAGE 06

Francesco Venezia, plan of Lauro Square, outside Naples, 1973.

IMAGE 07

Francesco Venezia, Palazzolo Acreide plan (unbuilt) 1989, Syracuse in Sicily.

Francesco Venezia, plans and sections of Salaparuta’s Gardens and Squares (unbuilt) , 1986.

This project demonstrates the rhomboidalization of the right angle with old and contemporary landscape spolia.

IMAGE 13

Francesco Venezia’s Pavilion with a chapel for the XXI Milan Triennale, 2016. A summary of all his projects, a contemporary timber spoliation.

IMAGE 14

Detail of Venezia’s contemporary spoliation-niche within his Pavilion at the XXI Milan Triennale, 2016.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Ana Leal and Tomás Lobo from AMAG PUBLISHER to contribute to the notes on architecture series. Initially, my research on Francesco Venezia was undertaken many years ago before meeting him in Naples. In 1997, in Naples, Venezia introduced me to Francesco Dal Co, and we talked about architecture at a restaurant in front of the Castell’Ovo (where the Roman poet Virgil supposedly placed a magical egg into the building’s foundations to support the fortification). A series of other conversations between myself and the architect in took place in Naples between 2014 and 2018.

I would like to acknowledge Mauro Marzo and Teresita Scalco for providing me access to Francesco Venezia’s project archives at the Università Iuav di Venezia (IUAV). In Naples, I thank Francesco Venezia for his generosity, intriguing and intelligent conversations on his projects, including Gabriele Petrusch, at the two studios over many years. I also want to thank Paulo di Martino, the late Bibi Leone, Pasquale Culotta, Teresa Cannarozzo, Manfredi Leone, Roberto Collovà, Michele Sbacchi, Alfredo Buccaro, Olivia Longo, Giacinto Cerviere, Marcella and Giovanni Condello. And other conversations I have had relating to his projects and subjects with the late Marco Frascari, Mimmo Jodice, Andrea Cosenza, Alessandra Como, Francesco Jodice, Dietrich Neumann, Lia Dykstra, Nigel Westbrook and Christopher Vernon. Aspects of this research was delivered at the following conferences: Brown University, Providence, and at the College of Art in New York (USA), the University Federico II in Naples, the University of Brescia (Italy), and at the UIA networking event at the 10th World Urban Forum in Abu Dhabi. And I want to thank Lionel Devlieger from ROTOR (Brussels) for inviting me to talk about “spolia as luxury” at the 2017 DECONSTRUCTION international symposium on the practices of off-site reuse in architecture at TU Delft.

Sketch of Annette Condello by Francesco Venezia in Posillipo, Naples, October 1997.

CREDITS

TITLE BUILDING AROUND ARCHITECTURE FRANCESCO VENEZIA OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM

AUTHOR © Annette Condello 2022

ARCHITECTURE Francesco Venezia

IMAGES

Photograph by Christopher Vernon © image 1

Photography by Annette Condello © images 2,3,10,11,13,14

Unknown photographer image 15

All drawings of plans, elevations and sections redrawn by hand by the author images 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12

Sketch portrait of Annette Condello in Posillipo, Naples, by Francesco Venezia, 1997 © image 16

COLLECTION

Pocket books

SERIES Notes on Architecture

COLLECTION CONCEPT Tomás Lobo

PUBLISHER AMAG publisher

EDITOR Ana Leal

EDITORIAL TEAM Carolina Feijó Filipa Ferreira João Soares Tomás Lobo

PRINTING lusoimpress LEGAL DEPOSIT 475406/20 ISBN 978-989-53905-5-7

PUBLICATION DATE November 2022 RUN NUMBER 1000 numered copies

OWNER AMAG publisher

VAT NUMBER 513 818 367

CONTACT hello@amagpublisher.com

FOLLOW US AT www.amagpublisher.com

FRANCESCO VENEZIA OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM

Francesco Venezia is an Italian architect who graduated at the Faculty of Architecture in Naples in 1970. That same year he opened his architectural practice. He has taught at various institutions, such Venice’s IUAV and the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in Switzerland. Venezia was also visiting professor at Lausanne, Berlin, and at Harvard University. His work embraces architectural spolia, pre-Christian archaeology, modern and the contemporary. He has won many awards and his writings and projects have been widely published. Venezia won the prestigious 2019 Piranesi Prix de Rome for lifetime achievement.

Annette Condello (PhD, The University of Western Australia) teaches architectural theory and urban design at the School of Design and the Built Environment, Curtin University, Australia. Annette was the School’s former Director of Graduate Research and Director International. Her work has appeared in arq, archithese, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, and other journals. She has published The Architecture of Luxury (Routledge), co-edited and authored Sustainable Lina: Lina Bo Bardi’s Adaptive Reuse Projects (Springer Publishers), and Pier Luigi Nervi and Australia: Outback Modernism (Black Swan Press).