Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man Francisco Gonzalez de Canales
The coming-of-age novel, or Bildungsroman, was a favoured genre for young men contemplating their first steps into an artistic discipline. Though diverse in scope, these narratives – ranging from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – all tended to depict the rites of intellectual initiation as a painful untying of existing natural or human bonds. According to these texts, the only way to forge a genuine intellectual or artistic personality able to confront the rigours of the absolute (of ‘High Art’), was to take the path of solitude and ‘self-estrangement from the world’.1 Promising young architects pursued their own paradigmatic version of these lonely explorations, in the form of the Grand Tour around the classical world that followed their academic studies and preceded their professional career. To the eyes of the novice architect these travels revealed the reality of what had previously existed only in prints and etchings: contemplative solitude then allowed the disciplinary knowledge contained in those drawings to be connected with the physicality of the built work. This kind of initiation would still hold for Robert Venturi, who opens the selection of architects in this volume. It was Venturi’s residency at the American Academy in Rome that provided him with the inquisitive eyes with which to read the flesh of architecture. 2 Rafael Moneo, Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman were likewise profoundly affected by their travels revisiting classical architectures. 3 But by the 1960s and 1970s architects were diverging from this established itinerary: a quite different experience underpins most of the ‘first works’ presented here. Right from the beginnings
Top left: Robert Venturi photographed while visiting the Acropolis in Greece, c.1955 Top right: Archigram at work: Peter Cook, Warren Clark, Ron Herron and Dennis Crompton constructing the Living City exhibition, 1963. Above: Morphosis’ first office c.1974
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1. This picks up Peter Sloterdijk’s argument in Weltfremdheit, in which he proposes that the history of culture – or more precisely of initiation into its highest spheres – should be read as a history of abstinence, of voluntary self-estrangement from the known world through physical abstinence, drugs, drunkenness and/or rituals. Commenting on the tradition of modern intellectual formation, he notes that initiated individuals were the only ones who had the right – and responsibility – to confront the sphere of the absolute face to face. See Im selben Boot. Versuch über die Hyperpolitik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), chapter 2, and Regeln für den Menschenpark (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 12ff.
2. Venturi was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1954, and studied and toured Europe for two years. For more on this see Steirli, Martino: ‘In the Royal Academy’s Garden: Robert Venturi, the Grand Tour and the Revision of Modern Architecture’ in AA Files 56, 2007, 42–63. This unmediated exposure to the pure visual stimuli arising from built facts – experienced through travel – served as a basis for Venturi’s early career and his celebrated first theoretical work, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 3. Rafael Moneo stayed at the Spanish Academy in Rome from 1963 to 1965, a period he considers fundamental to his career, meeting Zevi, Tafuri, Portoghesi and others (Márquez, Fernando and Levene, Richard, ‘Three Steps Interview’,
in El Croquis 20–64–98 (2004): 12–20). Eisenman travelled to Italy several times while working on his PhD at Cambridge. Visits to Palladian villas and other Italian architectures in the company of his mentor Colin Rowe were crucial to his formal reading of architecture; see the preface to Eisenman, Peter D. The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture (Baden: Lars Müller, 2006). Finally, one of the most lasting influences on Aldo Rossi’s intellectual work has come from his reassessment of neoclassical architecture, expressed particularly in The Architecture of the City. See his seminal text ‘Il concetto di tradizione nel neoclassicismo milanese’, Società 3 (1956), reprinted in Rossi, A. Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città, 1956–1972 (Milan: Città Studi Edizioni, 1975), 1–24.
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