Totem and taboo in architectural imagination

Pills A collection designed and directed by Francesco Trovato Scientific Committee Francesco Cacciatore Fabrizio Foti Paolo Giardiello Marta Magagnini

ISBN 978-88-6242-591-9 First italian edition: April 2017 First english edition: March 2022 © LetteraVentidue Edizioni © Alessandro Rocca Translated by YellowHub All rights reserved Any reproduction, even partially, is prohibited. It is the hope of the author and the publisher that, by having kept the cost of this book at its minimum, the readers shall be encouraged to purchase a copy of the book rather than spend an almost analogous sum in running photocopies. In addition, the collection’s pocket size format is an invitation to always carry with you something to read, as you move during the day. This is rather inconvenient if you think of a bunch of photocopies.

Graphic design: Francesco Trovato LetteraVentidue Edizioni S.r.l.

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Alessandro Rocca

Totem and taboo in architectural imagination

Contents 7 Ornaments, images, parodies in portable architectural archives 13 Images, an architectural taboo 49 Composition and post-production: montage 81 Another post-production: the end of the classic 94 Parodies, analogies and other imitations

Ornaments, images, parodies in portable architectural archives

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My reflection on architecture is explorative, a continuous journey along irregular paths between subjects both old and new. At certain times, it resembles a sort of wandering in which movement is fed by the desire for unexpected encounters, surprises, coincidences that help to open a new chapter. At other times, on the other hand, my path leads me back to the same old issues, those I have already addressed and which, propelled by contingency, once again seem important, perhaps after a period – be it short or long – of being forgotten. Because – and this is a feeling I am beginning to grow fond of – the sense of time is no longer linear; it has been changed by the digital revolution which mixes up and contaminates everything and, like the backwash of the sea, spits incoherent fragments of discussions back out, projects and thoughts that belong to different moments, different places. The recent past seems not to have passed at all and, in a way, we are all still contemporary and always will be. But in my opinion, this does not mean that everything that interests us is flattened on a single screen or database, and I do not share the widespread fears about single-mindedness and total homologation. On the contrary, it seems to me that we are fortunate enough to live in a dilated time, a long wave where everything is held and everything has a reason, as long as we are capable of orienting ourselves amidst the coordinates of its evolutionary processes. What is more, we must make an effort to recognise the active forces which, like chemical

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Images, an architectural taboo

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A few years ago, Valerio Olgiati asked forty-four architects – his personal selection of the finest around – to send him ten images that “showed the principles of their work”.1 The resulting collection is both unique and surprising. The first point, which I found to be quite disconcerting, is that many cobbled together disparate images, combining techniques and subjects that are incapable of connecting with one another in a comprehensible sequence. Furthermore, the random sequence of the architects, placed in alphabetical order, gives rise to very few coincidences, or contrasts, of any interest.

In short, we can say that the logic of montage has failed to work, the images do not interact with one another except in cases where they are linked by an explicit and literal relationship. For example, some Japanese architects collect very beautiful images organised into small homogeneous series, such as Junya Ishigami, Arata Isozaki and Toyo Ito, as well as Alvaro Siza with his sketches, and Jürgen Meyer H., whilst the American Meier, Richard, provides a surprising miniseries of three self-made collages, perhaps inspired by Mimmo Rotella, composed of fragments of Italian posters. What emerges, overall, is a picture of uncertainties and confusions where one can find everything along with its opposite, and where the use of images more often than not seems to be largely unconsidered, unremarkable and almost 1. Valerio Olgiati, The Images of Architects, Quart, Luzern 2013.

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the Prisons who designed by staging the results of a divided imagination: “on one hand, we find a disarticulation of the organisms; on the other, references to highly structured historical precedents”.10 With Piranesi, we are presented with a double phenomenon to which Tafuri attributes monumental significance: on the one hand, the full recognition of the architectural order, now seen from a consciously posthumous, later position; on the other, the declared desire to represent this order through its fragmentation, its negation, through “The isolation of the elements and their sudden breaking off... Piranesi presents organisms that pretend to have a centrality but that never achieve one”.11 According to Tafuri, Piranesi was exiled to a region dominated by language because naturalism “does not satisfy the world” and “the consequence of this indelible initial error is the condemnation to constant variation”.12 The architect, in Tafuri’s version, thus enters a “wicked” condition which, sparked and deployed by Piranesi, then becomes a sort of inevitable trait, an original sin, and therefore a destiny, which distinguishes the modern condition. Naturally, within this wickedness lies the end of the classical and, with it, the end of architecture as an 10. Manfredo Tafuri, cit., p. 26.

11. Ibid., p. 27.

12. Ibid., p. 42.

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orderable system, an archive and a dictionary, and this definitive defeat and loss marks the start of the path to the avant-garde, a path from which there is no return.

Because for Tafuri, this is the immutable destiny of our architecture, condemned to the punishment of Tantalus, a search that can never end, that feeds upon its own end, that organises a continuous cycle of the staging of its own death but also, at the same time, of its inability to die, to find an end.

When Giorgio Agamben writes at length on the theme of parody, recognised as a distinctive trait of modern Italian literature, he clearly identifies a paradigm that could also easily be applied to the ideology of modern architecture. And this is not merely a question of postmodern irony, mannerism and appropriation, but something more substantial and long-lasting, something more internal. For example, Agamben writes that “The concept of ‘serious parody’ is, obviously contradictory, not because parody is not a serious matter (indeed, at times it is extremel serious), but because it cannot claim to be identified with the parodied work; it also cannot deny being necessarily beside the song (paràoiden), and thus it cannot deny its not having its own place”.13 An architecture that is expropriated, then, and animated by the desire for reunification, logical reconstitution, and material reconstruction, of the lost order.

13. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Zone Books, New York 2015, p. 40.

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Another postproduction: the end of the classic

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Giovanbattista Piranesi, using the project as a triggering device, staged the end of a compositional system; he introjected the signals, indicators and effects of this end and used them to express a wicked architecture, that is, following the etymology of the word – ‘scellerato’, as coined in Tafuri’s original Italian, from the Latin ‘sceleratus’, meaning ‘criminal’ or ‘sinful’ – , an architecture that has committed a crime, that lives as a replacement for something that it has deliberately killed and eliminated. Piranesi is therefore an illuminating example – a star shining with black light – of that Marxian style of creative destruction that has often been used to identify one of the distinguishing aspects of modernity.

Beyond the succession of authors and eras that we have seen over the last two and a half centuries, Piranesi returns among us as our contemporary, as the witness of a trial, a crime and a punishment that, especially for Italian architecture, represent permanent elements that remain, at least up to now, unsurmountable. His return, his simulacrum, forces us – as Peter Eisenman writes – to be “not-classical”, that is, substantially separated from that culture but, at the same time, wholly incapable of not remembering it. Eisenman’s not-classical model is therefore what Agamben would call a “serious parody” which involves “the preservation of formal elements into which new and incongruous contents are introduced”.1 1. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Zone Books, New York 2015, p. 39.

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Entirely stripped bare (much like Marcel Duchamp’s bride), the house is transformed into an unsolvable diagram, a mute crossword, and offers itself as an assemblage of a series of projections – geometric and proportional, functional, social in nature – which continuously enter into an internal conflict. And yet, despite the impossibility of synthesising and piecing together these discrete parts – because the problem, in the terms in which it is posed, has no solution – Wittgenstein completes the design of the project and builds it, and Margarethe proceeds to furnish and live in the construction created by her brother. The existence of the Wittgenstein house, therefore, is a demonstration ad absurdum of the fact that architecture as a practice is capable of resisting – perhaps by dint of its nature as a non-science – the conditions imposed upon it by a compositional theory (in this case, an implicit one) which is apparently not implementable: narrative is stronger than thought, the development of a collective, disciplinary history wins out over the rigour of the individual method. The desire – the plan – to build the house therefore survives the constraints imposed by the inextricable Gordian knot of contradictions and radical stripping away that it has been subjected to by the critical work of the philosopher-cum-architect. Inside the Wittgenstein house, man – in this case, a woman with her family and entourage – enters as the temporary inhabitant of an alienated universe where they are only temporarily permitted

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to find hospitality, comfort, home: ultimately, it is a finalisation, a clarification, of the modern condition expressed in all its compositional potential and deprived of its positivistic narratives, its reformistic illusions. For architecture, such a full execution, such an unscrupulous and self-destructive use of its potential as that committed by Wittgenstein is an extreme occurrence, perhaps only accessible to those who create architecture from an external position, drawing unreservedly on ideas and practices of alien origin. The architectural project and its construction thus become the experimental and empirical framework in which logical contradiction and nonsense are possible, demonstrating that a radical alternative exists in the shape of a space freed from the dictatorship of language.

Paradoxically, the extreme experience of the Wittgenstein house represents the only way in which modern architecture can still express a monument, a building that resists production logic and the pursuit of social integration, capable of representing something inarticulable, something that goes beyond its technical and aesthetic content. Of course, the reality is that architecture must continue, as indeed it does, to design and create monuments, albeit with increasing difficulty due to the apparent end of its aura, its charismatic ability to embody and convey messages with explicit ethical or political content. In other words, the category of the monument is consumed by the way it has been used by

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