framework. His focus shifts from rejecting the imposition of the colonnade, to designing around the column as a fetishized and fragmented object. He sketches it as a pilaster but clearly it is not. The power of this sketch lies in its ambiguity. He sensually indulges in the act of designing a yonic resemblance on paper, contouring this form twice with a darker updown stroke on both sides, creating a double rimmed contour, and strongly framing it within the open void created between the two side walls. This tension between the written and the drawn pilaster is what makes its translation into built form compelling.
repetition is symptomatic to his repression, as he indulges in his symptom through the construction of the interior facade. The architect’s submission to the architectural rule of an idealistic vision is itself a vehicle for the colonnade becoming the object of fetishization through its repetition. Indeed, the architecture is about the colonnade.
It is possible now to introduce the translation into architecture of the still frame from the Conformist where the act of debauchery by the minister with the woman, seen through the eyes of Clerici, is happening in front of the fascist symbol within an interior constructed «The architectural object of the Italian facade. The act of him preferring the system Rationalists, but that of over the individual is exactly Libera in particular, is the the act of repression. The symbolic object of a facade reduces the conceptual order that for it representation of the moral to be meta-historical in codes to purely aestheticized respect to […] the dominant forms, where there is no i d e o l o g y, r e s u l t s i n externality to the system, generating pregnant—but there is no way of escaping metaphysical—images of an it, one can only exist inside all interior of of it. 22 propaganda.» With Libera, the act of Thus the object-column is a indulgence is the pillar-like cause of desire of an idealist column. This is not vision which Libera engages happening on the front of in through obsessive the palazzo, rather in the repetition. The moment in interior facade. T his which he realizes being ultimate architectural object repressed, is the moment in is embodying the way in which he indulges in the which repression is «per pilastri ric. e Congr.» system. By justifying himself Study for pilasters in the rear lobby of the internalized and sublimated Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi, ca. 1938 for the columns twenty years into pleasure, by the later, saying that they held a architect who has become, in formidable weight and that the process of designing this they are columns of a rationalist,23 he building, the conformist himself. demonstrates that he was consciously repressed by the same architectural construction of the system he was part of. Libera’s obsessive
Vieri Quilici, «Adalberto Libera : l'architettura come ideale» p. 22. «L’oggetto architettonico dei razionalisti italiani, ma di Libera in particolare, è l’oggetto simbolico di un ordine concettuale che per essere meta-storico rispetto ai processi reali di trasformazione urbana e al tempo stesso funzionale all’ideologia dominante risulta generatore di immagini pregnanti-ma metafisiche- di una «città di propaganda» tutta interiore» 23 Adalberto Libera, La Mia Esperienza Da Architetto. see note 9 22