UNDERSTANDING THE TERRITORY OF NORTHERN ITALY

UNDERSTANDING THE TERRITORY OF NORTHERN ITALY With the help of: Mark Wigley, Constant and Archizoom

Amit Even February 2016

Let’s take a room, a classroom in university.

It’s rectangular in shape has four walls, one door, a few windows and floor and ceiling. The proportions are fit for a common university class room, for 50 to 60 students, in wideness and length and in it’s hight. The materials of the interiors are normal and common, the walls are plastered and painted white, the furniture are of wood and steel, all organized in an order, again, standard.

Yet, the people in this room don’t really understand what does it mean to be in this room. The room defined by it’s interior elements and white walls functions as if it was a white bubble detouched from the building of which it takes part in. The building is a system of rooms and the city is a system of buildings.

The room is also this:

This is an image of an ordinary building in it’s invisible dimension, it’s non concievable dimension from the side of it’s user. It’s an image of all of the building’s technical systems; plumbing, electricity, gas, communication and information, water and air, etc. In this image one does not see the room that he knows, he doesn’t find the concept he’s use to. This is what’s behind the building, the invisible side of it. These system of tubes and pipes are all around the room, inside the walls, above in the ceiling and under in the floor. The tubes can’t enter the room, they’re not aloud in it. They act like servants who support it. Like in old programs of a noble residence where a whole floor or a section of the house was dedicated to the servants. The section was usually separated from the rest of the house (the formal official part of the house or just the house it self), it had it’s own set of services and sometimes even it’s own set of stairs, elevators and corridors to permiting the separated circulation of the servants to function in parallel to the house it self.

The servants section is usually more modest in it’s appearance, materials and dimensions - purely

functional. The servants section is planed in a way that denies it’s existence. It is desired but in a discrete and limited manner.

And so are tubes; they give you something and than discreetly disappear. Pipes and tubes has to be extremely close to us but at the same time invisible, silent and orderless. Their unplanned eventual appearance is to unstable the belief in the room and it’s essence.

A pipe does enter the room in some cases, and when it does it will be only in disguise; to accept a pipe inside architecture it has to be architecture, and so, a pipe wares an architectonic disguise in the form of a small building designed to fit him inside a room, just like a jacket and a tie for a fancy restaurant.

A simple tap for washing hands is suggesting that it is not a pipe when actually it is. The tap exist to fit the pipe into the room, not the other way around, and the same goes for all the rest of the supporting systems in a building. Another example is that of the shower: when using it the person enters to a cell where water falls on him from above and drains downwards at his feet. Or maybe, it can be simply thought of as a situation where a person enters a tube, the shower is an open tube and the building’s water circulation, generally invisible, is now passing through a room. And so the bath room, which is composed by a series of elements where the user has interaction with the tubes and pipes, can be considered as external to the house, or, where the house stops.

So a building is defined to it’s user by a system of spaces each defined by it’s internal envelope denying the presence, or existence, of various systems passing in it.

This was in brief a description capturing a concept presented in a lecture that Mark Wigley gave in the AA School of Architecture in London in may 2013 with the title “Pipeless Dreams: Buckminster Fuller and the Architecture of Radio”. When taken in to cities and territories, in this papers - the territory of northern Italy, this concept can describe an existing reality.

“ The design, fabrication, assembly, monitoring and maintenance of this intense dance of pipes has now become an art form because there’s so many of them, an art form that the architect is not involved in. But the architect is still busy on keeping it all a secret. “ Mark Wigley If the Architect is not involved in the process of the ‘dance of pipes’ like Wigley calls it, and the plumber / technician / ingeneer is just making sure that it would work, that the fluidity won’t stop in speed and quantity, so who or what is the motor that keeps it running?

Northern Italy is historically composed by multiple important cities that in past times were each separated from each other, each having it’s own territory of sovranty. With the unification of Italy and the arrival of the industrial revolution (same period and maybe not by chance), a process of approaching betwin the cities broke way. Cities, towns and villages approached each other by direct means of roads, rail roads and the entrance to action of automobiles, connecting them, along with the growth of population and it’s concentration in big urban cores, expanding horizontally and thus shortening the distances betwin them. But they also came closer once sharing the same lifestyle, consuming the same products, working the same hours and watching the same TV shows in the evening. Like the physical law of ‘Communicating Vessels’ the whole territory is now culturally and physically balanced. The interesting question may be not what caused and led to what? rather than what is this territorial reality?

Examining some fact materials of the studied territory from wigley’s proposed perspective, it is possible to see some objective phenomenons. Looking at a map of the population density in northern Italy it is likely to see a continues sequence of urban presence stretching like two linear swarms, both parting from west Lombardy; one to the east of Veneto in the Adriatic sea in Venice and the other, to the south east towards the Adriatic riviera where it continues down south east along the Adriatic coast in a thic band between the mountains and the shore line. Between these two linear sequences passes the river Po, separating them and thinning the density with a series of agricultural fields historically positioned with relation to the river. Another bulk, somewhat separated, is that of the province of Turin and the other Piedmont cities to the north and south of it. This map represents, of course, the built territory: where people are found architecture is present and as we know, when architecture is present tubes and pipes pass through.

Regional borders Provincial borders Residents / 1km2 up to 36,3 36,4 - 77,5 77,6 - 151,5 151,6 - 353,8 353,9 and more

Map of density of population per square km, northern

The next map is taken from an interactive map viewer of mobility and transport of the European Commission’s web site. The map represents all the mobility and transport european corridors passing in the studied territory. The blue set of lines represents the Baltic - Adriatic Corridor, the green set of lines represents the Mediterranean est-west Corridor, the pink set of lines represents the Scandinavian - Mediterranean Corridor and the orange one the Rhine - Alpine. Each set of lines is composed by different axis: railways - fright/passengers, planed and complete roads, high speed or conventional. The map includes also important nodes of rail-road terminals, ports and airports. This scheme, more than representing northern Italy’s mobility and transport structure, gives a view at the bigger european scale as one whole.

Europe is in a constant and intense process of unification, started in the end of the second world war and probably because of it’s resaults. Borders are being erased and like the cities in northern Italy, the various countries are approaching each other. these corridors can be considered as tubes and pipes like the ones invisible in Mark Wigliey’s white walled room. The cities and countries are the architectonic spaces and the corridors are the pipes. Milan’s Central Railway Station, for example, can be in this perspective the architectural design of the pipe (rail road) once entering the city - the water tap. A quick look at Milan and Verona suggests the comparison to a whole ‘bath room’, being points of interaction of multiple european corridors.

Map of Mobility and Transport European Corridors in northern Italy (taken from the European Commission’s website)

Another interesting material would be that of the european scheme of gas infrastructure - The System Development Map. The scheme presents: “existing infrastructure & capacity and planned infrastructure and capacity outlook from the perspective of the year 2014” in the european territory. It presents “transmission capacities between countries, storage & LNG capacities according to the interconnection and transmission systems and installed gas, red power generation capacity, and the capacity outlook for the next 5 years”.

The interesting fact about it is it’s intense interconnectivity inside the continent and out of it towards the middle east, north Africa and into Russia and Asia. It’s as if there is no such thing as a stand alone country when it comes to gas infrastructure, and it would be probable to guess that it’s not only the case of gas infrastructure. Supporting the same idea of a big scale network passing through the territory where the users of the goods are not concious of it’s existence and dimension. The users know very well that the use gas as an energy source but they don’t know where it comes from and how.

European gas infrastructure System Development Map (2014)

GIE - Gas Infrastructure

The same goes with communication, internet and mobile phones. It is likely to think of it as wireless, as radio signals, transmitted from powerful stations and satellites flouting in outer space transmitting directly to our own personal units in our pockets or hands.

The next map shows the global scheme of communication cables of Vodafone, passing under the oceans’ water, connecting continents together physically and through technological means of communication of information. All to maintain an ever continuous fluidity through the people and through territories.

Vodafon’s Global Network Reach Map (2015)

Another interesting and well known work of Mark Wigley is his research of the dutch artist Constant and his most important project “The New Babylon”, presented in the book “Constant’s New Babylon_The hyper-Architecture of Desire” and in the exhibition held at Witte de With, Centre of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Holland, from the end of 1998 till the beginning of 1999, written and curated both by the same Wigley.

Through a period of almost 20 years, from the mid 50’s till the early 70’s, Constant continuously developed his mega project of “The New Babylon”, creating manifests, numerous immense models and big scale drawings, videos, collages and fotomontajes. The New Babylon is an architectonic project in a global scale, a building covering the whole world, connecting it into one, leaving the individual to drift in it’s infinite interiors for days, weeks, years.

“ New Babylon is in fact not a city, in the traditional sense. A city has until now always been a utility; a fortification during the middle ages, a trading place during the renaissance, a functional city during the industrial era. But now we slowly come to a stage in our culture in where the so-called useful elements of our life become less important because of the automation, the industrialization. And mankind stays behind as a no longer useful creature. For the First time in the history of mankind we get the opportunity on a large scale for a playful life. For the first time mankind can free itself from the force of labour that turned his world into a vale of tears. No longer ‘ora et labora’ is it’s moto but ‘be playful and creative’.

One of Constant’s models for New Babylon

I See New Babylon as a web, a network covering the entire world. Living in a fixed place is not really part of the life in New Babylon. This sedentary way of life originates from the last stone age when mankind started to produce, when man founded settled communities and by adopting agriculture. Before this era he was roaming, a nomad, a hunter. My hypothesis is that the disappearance of monotonous labour will remove the need for individuals to stay in any one place. In New Babylon there are no single houses. The whole city is one immense covered collective house. A house with countless rooms, halls and corridors, in which one can roam for days or weeks, but where one can also find small spaces for privacy. New Babylon is a labyrinth inexhaustible in it’s variations, a space with a thousand rooms. ” Constant, from the film “New Babylon de Constant (1962)

One of Constant’s drawings for New Babylon applied in the city of Amsterdam

Looking at Constant’s New Babylon models feels a little bit like the contemporary metropolitan reality; the repetition, the chaotic spaces leaving the man in an out-of-scale machine-world, the loss of of the ground floor to automobiles and the ever weakening relation to nature. Above all stands out the loss of conciousness of the whole. Like a fish that is not able to perceive the sea, the individual in New Babylon looses the sense of external and internal, it is all a big infinite internal and there is no external.

“ One of the reasons it’s super important to look again (at - New Babylon) is that it was a very prophetic project, at the time it was done it was half between science fiction and documentary, so it was unclear if it was about the future or recent past. Now it looks like documentary, it shows you the way things are, in some aspects. A life of continuous interconnectivity of drifting from event to event, of relationships formed with whoever you meet in electric space or physical space, that the relationship you have is not with somebody you were born with, but could be with somebody from the other side of the world. Of course it was a project trying to understand: ‘is there a society possible in which nobody is considered to be a stranger, that every body is welcome and every body has the same status?’.

A kind of post-marxist dream of no longer the dignity of the worker, because now nobody works, but the dignity of the player. Horizontal architecture for a horizontal society. ” Mark Wigley on Constant’s New Babylon in Salon|Architect Talk| Constant’s New Babylon Art Basel June 2015

Another highly important point of view on the contemporary metropolis is that of Andrea Branzi, starting from Arichizoom’s project NO-STOP CITY. Archizoom, composed of Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini, was a group of architects all graduated from the Florence Faculty of Architecture, developing experimental work in the design and architecture fields from the late 60’s till the early 70’s, considered one of the main pillars of the Italian Radical Architecture of those years (along with Superstudio and UFO). Archizoom’s NO-STOP CITY was a vision of a probable present and future, a reality in which the whole world is one territory all covered with a horizontal urban tissue, crawling everywhere with no control or rational architectonic sense behind it. If Constant’s New Babylon is a man made big global scale architectonic project, planed and built by man for man, NOSTOP CITY is not planed by man but still exists, a phenomenon that slowly appears, expanding and covering the face of the planet. The result might seem similar but the process and essence is completely different: New Babylon is architecture without a city (similar to Superstudio’s project The Continuous Monument), and NO-STOP CITY is a city without architecture. Archizoom than and Andrea Branzi still today, were and is studying the mechanism of the this phenomenon reality more than the city itself.

“ The problem, than, is no longer creating a metropolis which is more humane and better organised, but rather that of understanding the objective lows which control the shaping of the urban architectural phenomenon, demystifying the complex ideology which surrounds the discussion, and conditions the form it takes. According to the naturalistic myth of free competition, it was the city, as a centre of trade and commerce, that guaranteed ideal market conditions, making for a natural equilibrium between opposite interests, in the general background of the harmony between technology and nature. But now the use of electronic media takes the place of the direct urban praxis: artificial inducements to consumption allow a much deeper infiltration into social structure than did the cities weak channels of information. The metropolis ceased to be a ‘place’, to become a ‘condition’: in fact, it is just this condition which is made to circulate uniformly, through consumer products, in the social phenomenon. The future dimension of the metropolis coincides with that of the market itself. The intensively concentrated metropolis corresponds to the now superseded phase of spontaneous accumulation of capital. In a programmed society, the management of interests no longer needs to be organized on the spot where trade is to take place. The complete penetrability and accessibility of the territory does away with the terminus city and permits the organisation of a progressive network of organisms of control over the area. ” Archizoom, NO-STOP CITY_Residential car park, university climatic system Domus n. 496 march 1971 Returning to the territory of northern Italy, it is possible to say that there is indeed a mechanism of the capital market pushing cities to approach each other and create a continuos sequence of urban tissue, more connected, accessible and penetrable. More fluid. The society that inhabits this ever expanding metropolis loses it’s cultural conception of the city as it was perceived before, as if they become like the same fish not recognising the sea it’s inhabiting.

The society’s unawareness, of the metropolis dimension that surrounds it, is exactly like the man in Mark Wigley’s white walled room, not aware of the tubes and pipes surrounding him, passing close by his ear while he sits on the couch in the leaving room, scrolling tow fingers on his smartphone, absorbing quantities of information.

“ The future of the industrial societies won’t be one of order, of rationalism, of standardisation. It would be a future of complexities, of anarchy and development of offers, languages and behaviours, always growing in number and variety. “ Andrea Branzi