House of Rituals, Book I

A JOURNEY BETWEEN BORDERS OF SEEING

Vol.01

A JOURNEY BETWEEN BORDERS OF SEEING Technological University of Eindhoven Master Architecture, Building and Planning

AUTHOR Marco Sironi

SUPERVISORS Jacob Voorthuis Jan S chevers Sjef Van Hoof

WITH Floor Frings

ACADEMIC YEAR 2019-20

CONTE NTS

01 P R E FAC E

04 WH E R E TH E SKY M E ETS TH E LAN D

Themes ans Objectives

Marks

Revelances

The chain

Str ucture

Positive and negative

The Origin of the term

Heterotopias

Intellectualization

B etween myth and fantasies

Various inter pretations

Shakkei, borrowed scener y

Evolution of the term

Visual Koan

0 2 A R C H E O LO GY O F S PA C E

00 SOURCES

B eyond time and location

Bibliography

Appendix

Sitography and Filmography

[Re]Framing

Images

Immanent Architecture Cr ystallization The hidden meaning

03 IMMANENCE OF THE TRANSCENDENT The contemporar y example Intro S ensorial experience Under the sign of light B etween the sky and the earth From light to space Define space

01

P R E FAC E Introduction

THEMES AND OBJECTIVES About the graduation studio

The studio Masterly Apprentice - Learning from a Building, is deeply interested in the subjectivity of the learning process and prompts the individual students to dig and vivisect - like a scientist that studies a particular specie - into the story, the condition and all the elements of a chosen architect’s piece.

It is relevant to say that, the process of “learning from�, has to deal with a wide range of aspects that go form the material and immaterial reality at the same time.

If we consider the materiality of a building, we can detect the tangible aspects of the object through the observation of all the parts that made the physical entity.

By consequence, the process of learning derives from the analysis of all of those horizontal and vertical components of the building, likewise the ones that are in relation with it such us, the topography, the environmental conditions.

Interestingly, it can be noticed that, these elements, likewise, the techniques used to build the material artefact, are rooted into a vertical stratification of knowledges and traditions to which the architects had drawn and learned from as well during the design process.

On the other hand, we distinguish the impalpable with the subjectivity of the experience of learning.

An involvement that is directly related to us when facing the building. In front and traversing it, we live a momentum where our architectural perception is affected by, not only

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1.

Peter Zumthor, A feelaing of history

the contextual conditions of experience but also by our memory that, establishing specific relationships between images, time and feeling creates an emotional contact with the entity.

An example of this connection was well explained by Stendhal, when arriving at Pompei and feeling “Transporté dans l’antiquité” [1] , elucidated a clear understanding on how a particular object or image might set in action a particular strain of emotions and memories.

He mused, describing the trilling pleasure of experiential immediacy that: “face-to-face with the Antiquity, experiencing the ruins and the rubble first-hand, one immediately knows more than a scholar”.

In this case, for Stendhal the historical site itself induced a feeling of time travel, and the place revealed a feeling of history of a different sort – a sort that he found far more profound than scholarly history.

Through experience, the history of the place come alive.

The two sides described overlap, intersect and repeatedly combined to form a process of learning that rise gradually and developed into an architectural project. A design that will aim to answer, after a conscious reflection, some questions posed during the research on the theme given and also will be in relation or critique to the architect and the building chosen that with its specificity will work as a guide and lighthouse.

10

A. Rossi, (n.d.). La CittĂ analoga

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STR U CTU R E Reading guide

This booklet is the preliminar y research of the thesis from which the second phase – the isolation of a research quastion, the study of a specific problem and the design of a project has bloomed, using it as; foundation, reference and point of critique.

The work is divided in three sections. The first one is the investigation on the topic introduced by the graduation studio; Vernacular Architecture flowing then naturally into the subsequent investigation. This secon analysis consists in the specific studies on the reasons and conditions that prompted primitive people in the act of building of sacred site and thus the Origin of Place of Worship.

The third segment, is the obser vation and examination of James Turrell’s figure and career. An artist who become architect by enclosing the space, creating - although denying any relation to symbol or religion - threshold between the material and immaterial word that mat be considered today the pure example of sacred space.

An essential point of this phase is the analysis of one of his chambers (Skyspaces). A galvanising and critical moment, aimed to be the confirmation of the principles and elements found out during the research.

From these bases and after having isolated a problem which revolves around these thems and the contemporaneity, it has been possible to develop a design strategy that led to the project “House of Rituals”

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VERNACULAR T he origin of the term

Before starting the research for a building or an Architect to analyzed, it was necessary to get acquainted with the theme introduced by the studio to the generation I was part. The Masterly Apprentice graduation studio in fact, starts every three months with a new group of students that is been identified as a generation. In our case, the theme given was Vernacular Architecture.

From the dictionary, Vernacular is a notion that is in general referring to a language that is used in everyday life by the general population in a geographical territory.

Usually, it is informally spoken by socio-economic low classes in contrast with higher – prestige forms of language, such as national literary or scientific.

A Lingua Franca may be codified or distinguished in: stylistic register, a regional dialect or a sociolect independent language. [1] Even though language is nowadays affected by the phenomenon of globalization and standardization with the consequence that many dialects and popular languages are disappearing, it is interesting to notice that proverbs or popular sayings - reminiscences of those common and popular sayings coming from a distant past - are still part of our everyday life.

In this regard, Francesco Venezia told us, during a conference in Milan that: “Unsigned popular architecture is to architects as proverbs are to literature.

They are architectures that contain a truth.� [2]

1.

Definition Taken form Treccani Dictionary

2.

F. Venezia, Conference in Milan, April 2017.

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What does he means with “contain a truth”?

3.

B. Rudolfsky Architecture without architects, 1960.

Perhaps we can understand what F. Venezia meant with “Unsigned popular architecture contains a truth like proverbs in literature” by comparing the definition of Vernacular architecture - a type of construction performed “not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage that acts within a community of experience” [3] - with a popular axiom/aphorism that comes from the past.

For example, the phrase Gallina vecchia fa buon brodo Old hen makes good broth, contains in a short sentence a fact that is generally known. People with a long life, have seen and experienced a wide range of situations and therefore are wise. Undeniably, this cannot be applied to every matured person but certainly, elderly people have commonly a lot to teach since they may have already encountered certain problematic or situations.

Similarly, in architecture it can be comprehended, by observing for example the shapes of the roof of primitive houses, an eternal validity that have been transmitted through a hundred generations, arriving even to us.

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Fiesole, Pier Niccolò Berardi

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Therefore, the “truth� intrinsic of indigenous architecture may be held in the spontaneity of the collective action of building. An act intended as an answer to a certain condition or problem. Whereas, it is real that common sayings, that have survived till nowadays, contain verity in their simple phrases.

Eventually, pointing our attention on the original conception of Vernacular, it is possible to say that is a term which gives a name to a phenomenon that arise spontaneously by consequence to specific conditions and needs.

If we want to imagine the phenomenon of the origin of communal buildings, produced not by an intellectual process – a mental or cognitive process that is based on analysis, interaction and synthesis - but rather by a spontaneous action, we can visualize it in the growth of an autochthonous plant.

For example, the hedera, like other Arallaceae spices, grows accordingly to the conditions of a defined territory and spread during time in the landscape, making that place recognizable for that specific species.

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Eventually, true examples of this phenomenon can be seen in ancient dwellings around the world, in the way of how the landscape has been shaped by human and in the traditions of construction that during the time have become a “Maniera”.

One example is all the terraces that have been carved into the landscape for agricultural purposes and that now identify for instance the identity of the Chinese’s field of rice or the Italian winery.

An alternative pattern of a type of communal vernacular, spread in Central Europe, the Mediterranean, South and East Asia, is the proto-industrial architecture that includes water wheels, windmills and storehouse for food. These structures of granaries and storages are solemn, achieving almost monumentality due to their stylistic purity.

Another case, is the category of rudimentary house, obtained by subtraction or sculptured. For example, the Troglodyte’s dwellings cut from rock and hollowed out, like the town of Pantalica in the Anapo Valley by the Siculi or the Chinese dwellings that protected their dweller from the strong wind.

4.

B. Rudolfsky Architecture without architects, 1960.

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It necessary to say that the words Troglodytism and primitive do not necessarily imply a low cultural level. In Tunisia, the cave-dwellings of Gorem are sophisticated example of architecture sculptured by nature and wisely carved out from the cone rocks by humans. [4]

Pozzo Sant’ Attanasia, Sardegna

Pozzo Santa cristina, Sardegna

Dada Hair Stepwell, Ahmedabad, India

Chand Baori Step Well, Rajasthan, India

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Bete Church, Etiopia - Dongo Plateau, Mali - Mourabtine dweling, Turchia

Gorem, Turchia - Villa Katzura Japan, Alpine hut

Pantalica, SIcily - Ancoli, Italy Cerveter, Italy

Mediana, Marrakech, House boat, China, Slums

Caves of Guyaju, China Cappadocia, TurkeyApline Malghe, Switzerland

Cashba, Iran - Portugal - Ricefield, China

spigueiros, Casa do Penedo, Portugal - Albero Bello, Italy

Oia, Greek - Matera, Italy - Penon, Greek

Plan and section, Cappadocia, Turkey

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Rice fields, China

Persian aqueducts

Ycianrocktombs, Turkey

Pantalica, Italy

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I N T E L L E C T U A L I Z AT I O N First observation of the phenomenon

It can be said that, the firsts who studied the phenomenon of vernacular were archaeologists.

Archaeology is a discipline that embrace anthropology and that aim to study the origin of human social activities through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The field of study goes at the root of the human presence on earth, studying; artefacts, proto architectures, cultural landscapes and bio-eco-facts. During the years, this field of study has produced a great amount of evidences and discoveries, from which other discipline has acquainted.

One of these is indeed Architecture. As a matter of fact, even if the ancient structures, traditions and building techniques have been studied by archaeologists at first, the pioneer who intellectualized the term Vernacular has been Bernard Rudofsky in the book “Architecture without architects� written in 1960.

The Book has been a result from the exhibition Architecture Without Architects, shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art from November 9, 1964 to February 7, 1965 and funded by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

The retrospective for a study of non-formal and nonclassified architecture was commissioned by the Department of Circulating Exhibitions under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Both, the exhibition and the accompanying publication, were prepared and designed by the author, Consultant to the Department of Architecture and Design.

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1.

B. Rudolfsky Architecture without architects, 1960.

Bernard Rudofsky, with his book, made a step out from the boundaries of the field of architecture history, that at that time was skipping what was not considered “formal” architecture.

The exhibition in fact, focused on architecture that was not commemorative of power and wealth nor an anthology of, by and for the privileged merchants, princes and other powerful figures of the society.

He introduced into the contemporary discussion an unfamiliar concept on the “art of buildings” by avoiding prejudices and offering to the public a new point of view on the “unknown and unsuspected communal architecture – a nonpedigreed architecture produced not by professionist but by people”. [1] Throughout the book Rudolfsky, with the amazing collection of pictures achieved by chances or sheer curiosity and organised in categories of themes, is bringing us with him in the discovery of ancient way of living. The architect illustrates what the roots of architecture may have come from, without seeking the answer to the origin of architecture but alluding briefly to possible sources of the question of the beginning of architecture.

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Collage from the book Architecture awithout architects

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In addition, he tells us that there is much to learn from architecture and the origin of indigenous building forms and construction methods before it became an expert’s art and was lost in the distant past. For instance, assuming that the spontaneous and indigenous solutions have been transmitted to generations becoming heritage, but losing their originality like those proverbs that Francesco Venezia was explaining.

3.

B. Rudolfsky Architecture without architects, 1960.

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“Troglodytes, are admirable in their talent for fitting their buildings into the natural surroundings. Instead of trying to conquer nature, as we do, they welcomed the vagaries of climate and the challenge of topography, drawing no line between sculpture, architecture and landscape�. [3]

Iran - Ice House (Yakhchal) of Yazd

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V A R I O U S I N T E R P R E TAT I O N S Definitions

After the first intellectualization of the phenomenon of spontaneous architecture, given by the architect and engineer B ernard Rudolfsky, many others have given their own interpretation and definition of the term.

Among the others that contribute to expanded the knowledge and alimented the discussion on the theme it is important to mention: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Pietro Belluschi, Frank Lloyd Wright and Hassan Fathy.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy “While she was first teaching history of art and architecture, her main education during these ‘apprentice years’, she stated, came from lecturing trips: These journeys — in the years between 1948 and 1952 I can count alone 34 — made me see this country in a way I had never known it before. I dis- covered a spontaneous building genius, now almost smothered by technological and specu- lation construction, which through its uninhibited originality seemed often superior to European folk architecture.

Moholy-Nagy German architectural and art historian. She was active in the critique as known Excess of postwar modernist architecture.

She was the wife of the Hungarina artist Làszlo Moholy-Nagy Heyen, H. (n.d.). Vernacular Architecture and the Uses of the Past.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, in the book American vernacular architecture observed that in search for an organic architecture for living organism, she started to focus her attention on the basic houses and work buildings had constructed out of an intuitive comprehensive vision of a specific need without the benefit of architectural theory.

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She discovered an astonishing number of examples in the Americas which combined her father’s classical ideal of form harmony and site response with the contemporary demand for functionality and adequate materials.”

Hassan Fathy March 1900 – November 1989 Egyptian architect. His designs were going on the other direction of that time (modernism) by working with traditional tecniques.

Fathy was given the Aga Khan Chairman’s Award for architecture in 1980.

Frank Lloyd Wright The American architect (18671959) beside his prolific production of designs, contributed significantly to the active research on the them, focusing on the Prairie Houses and the arcaic american architecture.

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Hassan Fathy He was appointed to design the town of New Gourna near Luxor. Having studied traditional Nubian settlements and technologies, he incorporated the traditional mud brick vaults of the Nubian settlements in his designs. The experiment failed, due to a variety of social and economic reasons, but is the first recorded attempt by an architect to address the social and environmental requirements of building users by adopting the methods and forms of the vernacular.

Frank Lloyd Wright “He described vernacular architecture as “Folk building growing in response to actual needs, fitted into environment by people who knew no better than to fit them with native feeling” suggesting that it is a primitive form of design, lacking intelligent thought, but he also stated that it was «for us better worth study than all the highly self-conscious academic attempts at the beautiful throughout Europe». ...a building designed by an amateur without any training

Frank Lloyd Wright

Inntellectualization of the phenomena Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, 1964

Allen Noble

Hassan Fathy Francesco Venezia

Ronald Brunskill

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy

Pietro Belluschi

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in design; the individual will have been guided by a series of conventions built up in his locality, paying little attention to what may be fashionable. The function of the building would be the dominant factor, aesthetic considerations, though present to some small degree, being quite minimal.

Local materials would be used as a matter of course, other materials being chosen and imported quite exceptionally.�

Pietro Belluschi Italo - American architect contemporary to Wright. He fully embraced the modern american ideals yet, merging the buildign often with the nature of the sorrounding by using local material or techniques.

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Pietro Belluschi He defined communal architecture as a communal art, not produced by a few intellectuals or specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting under a community of experience.

H. Fath. NewBarisSoukCourt

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EVOLUTION OF TH E TE R M Categorization

The discussion on the theme of common and spontaneous architecture has leaded at categorize three macro groups of vernacular architecture, making the distinction between Domestic buildings, Religious architecture and primitive industrial- agricultural structures.

Overall, all the interpretations given for vernacular architecture, after its first statement, see in the geographical factors, the survival of regional characteristics, materials and climatic solutions the common elements that are appearing to unite the definitions given.

By the comparison of the attributes of the three groups, it is evident that for the first and third category – Domestic and primitive industrial- agricultural - it can be summarised that the regional conditions of the place are mainly the cause from which the building arose.

Therefore, it appears clearly that these physical entities have been a direct result from a spontaneous action of building as answer to needs and activities.

However, if we take the second category - the sacred space and places of worship - under analysis, we can see that is not sufficient anymore considering the geographical factor, local conditions and functions as main reasons that prompted the action of building of these spaces.

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1.

B. Rudolfsky Architecture without architects, 1960.

By, underlining the spontaneous and anonymous nature of the phenomenon called vernacular, which as Bernard Rudolfsky wrote; “It is so little known that we do not even have a name it and for want of generic label, we shall call it vernacular, anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous, rural, as the case may be” [1] and having noticed the anomaly present in the category of sacred space, it seam misleading consider the word “vernacular” related strictly to geographical location and regional factors.

Consequently, it appears necessary to reconsider the causes that provoked the action of primitive people to establish sacred space and eventually, it is crucial to retrace the origin of these places and pose the questions.

Why it is not enough to consider the external conditions as the cause of the way of how the s acred building was constructed?

Which were instead the conditions that give birth at the ancient s acred places?

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First observation

Intellectialization & interpretation

Common patterns

geographical factors Formal solutions survival of regional characteristics materials climatic solutions building operations

Categorization

Domestic

Primitive industrial - agricultural

Places of Worship

Causes & Characteristics

Spontaneous action of building answer to needs and activities Regional conditions of the place

?

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R E LEVAN C E Thesis objectives

This work does not aim to be another theory on the origin of architecture nor a definition of vernacular but rather a reflection on its meaning as something that arose spontaneously in alternative as just a response to functions and needs. In fact, even if the architectural thought has forever devoted a deep interest to its origin - apparently testified to and justified by the word “architecture” itself, which is derived from the Greek word archè, meaning “beginning/origin” – the question appears to be impossibly answered with a unique thesis, remaining a myth or a mystery. After having reflected on the meaning of these spaces with which mankind bound his existence on earth, the work will try then to give a possible new interpretation or a new light to these places in response to a contemporary issue. Eventually, sacred architecture, intended as a getaway to a transcendent dimension and room for inner reflection may be used today to tackled the phenomenon of alienation that is spreading among people in contemporary society. To do so, it is necessary to trace the history, relying on studies made by philosophers such as Mircea Eliade and the literature produced on the latter question, identifying and isolating possible reasons, common relations and differences in the birth of places of worship. Therefore, learning first how recognize patterns shared by sacred site spread around the globe - archetypes crystalized over the time that establish specific relationship between images, time, memory and feelings – and second analyzing the specific case of James Turrell’s skyspace we will achieve the tools that will be used to create a project in response to the problem posed.

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02

A R C H A E O LO GY O F S PAC E Rsearch and method oring of sacred space

B E Y O N D T I M E & A N D LO C AT I O N Finding and evidence

What became immediately evident from the literature during the preliminary research, was that the reasons that brought spiritual spaces to be erected were related to what the space symbolizes, going beyond the location and its geographical position in the world. In this regard, borrowing a Michel Foucault term, they may appear as heterotopias. “Real places that do exists in a specific location undividable with longitude and latitude but that at the same time they are outside of all places�. [1] In fact, collected a relevant number of cases of sacred sites from an extend period of time - from the primordial cave to contemporary buildings, situated around the globe - it became evident that there are common patterns between these places despite; the context in which they are positioned, the local and specific histories that characterise them.

These entities appear to be sort of check points spread around the world sharing inner analogies. What emerged from the comparison of their plans and sections as well as from the descriptions is that, forms and operations with which the space was established have mutual characteristics and have been conceive similarly.

1.

M Foucault, M. (2006). Utopie.

Eterotopie

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Chanda Bori, India - Santa Cristina well, Italy - Tempietto monoptero, Italy

Yazd, Iran - Grotte della Garufa, Italy - Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Karnak, Egypt

Phanteon, Italy - Stonehenge, Scotland - Mausoleo di Teodorico, Italy

Ile Long, French - Nara Sim, China - The great bath of Mohenjo

Piramid Khufu, Egypt - Naba Playa - Fu Hao Tomb, China

Santa Sophia, Turkey - Ajanta cave, India - Mingtang ritual complex, China

Dada Hairir, India - Bete Church, Etiopia - Santa Croce, Italy

Yazd, Iran - Grotte della Garufa, Italy - Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Karnak, Egypt

Fenchu, China - Cerveteri, Italy Mahram Bliquis

Temple of Solomon - Naptan royal Tomb - Persepoli

Horus Temple, Egypt - Lombas Rsi Cave - Mausoleo di Augusto

Lycian chamber - Khasneh al Faroun, Giordan - Caitya hall, India

Moreover, other similarities were evident in the organization of the space and the relation generated with the environmental elements; the sun, the sky and the earth.

Nevertheless, especially from the analysis of pictures it was also clear how the context was as wall playing an important role in the determination of the appearance of these places, effecting the outer shell, the negative envelop.

2.

Alexander, C. (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,

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It was evident how civilizations of the past, with different background, distinctive conditions and unlike traditions were prompted in the act of building spiritual places by similar reasons. Using a common language, that may have formalized in different ways – styles, materials and orders -, great cultures and at first primitives have create a global communal way of building spiritual sites that appear timeless. [2]

Gonzalo Fonseca, White facade

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The ancestral experience of architecture presents a subtle dichotomy: on one hand, there is the geographical location that affects the appearance of the building. On the other hand, the analogies shared by these places, built in different time and divided by oceans and mountain.

Thus, it appears that we are now moving in the symbolic horizon and that the theory that states that is not possible limiting the explanation of the birth of building as a response to merely functions and needs is supported.

Therefore, having observed these formal analogies and links throughout time and space, it is evident the necessity to made a step back and reconsider the reasons that lead the primitives in the act of building of sacred site.

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F. Venezia, drawing, Lezioni d’Architettura

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APPENDIX Religion & S cience

To understand the impossibility of considering the context as the main and only promoter of the act of building for the place of worship, like archaeology, it is necessar y to go to the very beginning of architecture and, eventually, fell into the well of the question of its origin.

If for Bernard Rudofsky, it was necessary just to allude at the question of the origin of buildings, for us investigating is not only legitimate but bears heavily on the theme of the research. Therefore, moving carefully, it is necessary to examine the possible sources, giving and following one of the possible narratives.

Religious texts could be incomparable books of reference.

From the Sacred Scriptures (Genesis IV: 17) we learn that Adam’s son Cain built a city and named it after his son Enoch. Another possible interpretation given by the bible, for the sceptics who dismiss Enoch, is the Ark commissioned by the Lord Himself and built under His instructions. The Ark was not a ship because nautical crafts were not known as yet. Moreover, their existence would have defeated the very purpose of the Flood. When Noah landed on Mount Ararat he was 601 years old, a man past his prime. Thus, he preferred to devote the rest of his life to viniculture and left the task of building to his sons.

Shem probably put together some of the Ark’s lumber to create a hut for the family. In the same story there might be two interpretations: the ark as the first building and Shem’s hut. But yet, these interpretations are not giving an explanation to the question posed.

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dbv, d. (2006 11). The bible on architecture.

Darwin, C. (2003 28). Descent of Man.

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Synchrony, Science has served as a powerful frame for our discussion. “It seems that long before the first enterprising man bent some twigs into a leaky roof, many animals were already accomplished builders”.

Most likely, man got his first incentive to put up a shelter from his cousins, the anthropomorphous apes. Rudofsky, Bernard Architecture without Architects Darwin observed that the orang in the islands of the Far East, and the chimpanzees in Africa, build platforms on which they sleep, and, as both species follow the same habit, it might be argued that this was due to instinct, but we cannot feel sure that it is not the result of both animals having similar wants, and possessing similar powers of reasoning.

At another point in The Descent of Man, Darwin writes that “the orang is known to cover itself at night with the leaves of the Pandanus”; and Brehm noted that one of his baboons “used to protect itself from the heat of the sun by throwing a straw-mat over his head. In these habits, ‘ he conjectured, “we probably see the first steps towards some of the simpler arts, such as rude architecture and dress, as they arise among the early progenitors of man.

Yet even before men and beasts walked the earth, there existed some kind of architecture, coarsely modelled by the primeval forces of creation and occasionally polished by wind and water into elegant structures. Natural caves, especially, hold a great fascination for us. This leads us to think that even Science may dismiss the question too easily, without considering the act of building as a volunteer action.

G. Romana, Costruzione dell’Arca

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[RE] FRAMING Following the alternative

In the architectural field, from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, the myth of the first building has been told over and over.

Architects and thinkers have questioned themselves on the origin of buildings whereas on the birth of architecture.

Eventually, before starting our analysis on the question, it is needed to say that there might be a distinction that must be made. On one hand, there is the origin of building - a construction made by Fabers, in another word, builders as named Vitruvius. On the other hand, the birth of “Architecture, an entity with a symbol and meaning.

An idea materialized with measurements that relates it with man, it is a constructed idea.” [1]

1.

C. Baeza, in Iodice, F. (2015). Cavity and Limit.

In light of the interrogation posed, we will follow the research made by Ivica Brnic and published in 2013 inside the San Rocco Magazine, Winter 2013 as a guideline. A volume which title is “What is wrong with the primitive hut?” that analyzed the matter of the interpretations given for the birth of the first Building with a wide range of articles made by different authors.

“So far, the dawn of enduring architecture has always been allied with the Neolithic revolution, intending the gradual transition after 9000 BC from hunter-and-gather society to a settled way of life based on agriculture and livestock breeding”. [2]

2.

Patrick Nuttgens, Die Geschichte der Architektur

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The theory that architecture grew out of people building shelters from external condition has been reinterpreted in numerous versions grew out of Vitruvius’s metaphor of the primitive hut, including those of Filarete, Violet-le-Duc, Semper and especially Laugier, with its pragmatic focus.

These accounts were primarily concerned with how architecture should be made and its thus its “vices”.

Epistemological accounts that tried to trace the limits of the discipline and describe its method, never aimed to answer the ontological question, Why.

3.

Pollione, M. V. (1997). De architectura.

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“Here we are not describing the birth of architecture, but the origin of buildings”. [3] Today, a possible understanding of the reason why human committed themselves in the act of erecting can be found following the interpretation on the theory of the birth of architecture based on the archaeological site of Gobelik Tape. This new finding reinforces the idea that the first Architecture may have had been a sort of proto temple and is also giving us a key to understand why the conditions of the place are not only enough to explain the category of sacred sites.

The primitive hut, M. A. Laugier

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I M MAN E NT ARCH ITECTU R E On behalf of space

As it has been already mentioned, until today primitive buildings were considered answers to functions and needs, translated in pragmatic construction built by nomadic hunters and gatherers.

“Archaeology told us that the development of permanent architecture had been a gradual change cause by the periodically temporary dwelling in the same territory, the relation between the growth of the population and the shortage of regenerating natural resources.

Example of this kind can be found in Prezletrice near Prague – dated 600.000 years old – and Terra Amata near Nice (380.000-230.000 years old).

These primitive constructions, go back even to the age before the completion of the full development of Homo sapiens. Naturally, those days the hominids used to live nomadically. Therefore, although some of the sites were inhabited repeatedly or periodically, they cannot be defined as permanent settlement”. [1] Therefore, what encouraged primitives to periodically settle in the same place?

1.

Beaune, Aux origins de la construction. Extracted from San Rocco magazine #8

Answering this question will bring us also to understand the reasons of the act of building of primitive people that until that moment where living perfectly in temporary dwelling.

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2.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

“In the lig ht of the e ve n ol d e r set tl e me nt s re ve al ed b y re ce nt e x c avation b y arch a eol og i st K l au s Schimidt on the Anatolian mountain Gobe k ly Tape , it c an be que stioned the ontol og ic al d educ tion proposing that the or ig in of pe r mane nt archite c ture lie in the shif t on man’s mainte nance e conomy.” [2] The oldest layer of the site appears to date back to around 9000 BCE. The structures, called Göbekli Tepe, consist of several circular dry-stone walls, each of which contains monolithic pillars of limestone up to 3 meters tall. Since there is no indication of any roof covering, it seems that the circles were open-air ritual chambers. The floors consisted of a concrete-like substance made of burnished lime. A low bench runs around the inside of the circle walls. The pillars show detailed relief of foxes, lions, cattle, wild boars, herons, ducks, scorpions, ants, and snakes, all executed with great skill.

What went on in these spaces is not known, but the ceremonies most certainly had links to ancestor cults and might have been used in conjunction with mortuary rituals.

“In regard to Göbekli Tepe we can clearly talk about permanent architecture, for its structures endured two thousand years and represent the oldest solid, preserved ones of this magnitude yet discovered.

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Gobekli tape

Nabta Playa

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3.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

What is significant in this archaeological site is not only its dating, but even more so the fact that the excavation did not reveal any trace of the usual activities of typical settlements in the surrounding area. The archaeological evidence is characterized by extraordinary monumental and symbolic content. The finding indicates the mounting of lavish feasts.

This fact leads us to interpreter the megalithic structure as a place of “worship”, although as we saw, the exact circumstances of the ritual acts cannot be reconstructed.

The extent of the effort in erecting the constructions makes it possible to assume, with regard to the suppositions about the size of social groups at the time, that several groups of hunters and gatherers joined together in the act of building.

This, then, make it possible to assume there was a level of organization that extended beyond the single group.” [3] Another example of this kind of structures is Nabta Playa in what is today southern Egypt, some 80 kilometres west of Abu Simbel.

What is important to distil form these str uctures is that Priests and their associated clans probably came to live in these places, with the population swelling periodically with the seasonal arrival of herder tribes who would have come from far afield with their cattle for large celebratory events.

Examinations carried out by archaeolog y and anthropology as well as the study of architecture’s origins suggest that

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Gobelik Tape plan

Gobelik Tape construction

Narvali Cori, drawing by Harald Haumptmann

Catalhoyuk, drawing by James Mellaart

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the primitive hut was replaced by the temple. Clearly, it appears evident that places of worship, as bearers of symbolic meaning, are what developed into architecture and acted as the catalysts of sedentarism.

By consequence this makes possible to understand the nature of the act of building itself, and therefore to architecture’s ver y essence as a human act that f rom the origin has intended to reach more than mere functionality.

4.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

“ The act w ith which mankind bound his existence to the ear th turned into a sor t of axis mundi. With this in mind, primordial architecture would no longer be simply a pure response to need; instead, it would become a catalyst of civ ilization.� [4] This thesis is assuming that nomadic groups at that time could sur vive without stable shelters despite the inhospitable weather conditions and the nomadic hut, even though it was inhabited over longer period of time, cannot be considered as a stable and permanent architecture.

C onsequently it is certainly possible to say that the structure that stood over the time and developed into architecture is the proto temple with its cult-related and not the precarious, repeatedly rebuilt hut.

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Mezhyric Construction of mammoth bones, drawing by Netural History Museum of Kiev

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C R Y S TA L L I Z AT I O N Rituals to signs

Eventually, what interests us here and it is important to distil, is what Mircea Eliade with his book “Sacred and Profane” tell us. That is; “mankind gathered around an event, most likely a circle, and that during the time, with a genuine gesture, humans bound their existence to the layers of earth, sky and cosmos, establishing threshold between the sacred and profane.” [1] In the architectural realm Gotfrid Semper, unlike Laugier, goes back to this point in his book “The four Elements of Architecture” when explaining the origin of building, arguing that it was a matter of human beings gathering around a fire. This, narrative, itself symbolic, elucidates what fire might have meant and where it come from.

The social space of human ring closes and opens itself again and again, becoming increasingly intense until it eventually formalizes in the form of ritual. [2] These rituals made by the primitives in specific site along the land, gradually solidified achieving a narrative and symbolic meaning.

1.

Eliade, M. (1968). The sacre & the profane

2.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

R ITUALS SIGNS AR C H ITE CTU R E

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3.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

Social groups by leaving traces in the landscape, over different period of time, started establishing relationships with it. “ The nomadic population’s relationship to the landscape was not static; nevertheless, recurring places and geomorphologically distinct landscape helped with [3] orientation.”

Eventually, what was a generic landscape started to be a site plan in which the social group was building over and over again. Its topography and morphology – rivers, rocks, creaks and trees – acquired meaning.

Sings start to be made, demarcation and recognition became more and more important and as a consequence the context started changing. These demarcations were not a matter of defence but eventually an establishment of a symbol, elements that represent something, just like language does; consequently, they make it possible to convey connections over spans of time and so Architecture goes beyond merely building for a practical purpose.

In fact, as we saw for the Göbekli Tepe site, this landscape scripts, that used to play dominant role as a material tradition until the religious based on written scriptures developed, they have become keepers of the memories of a group’s deceased members.

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4.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

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“ The group, which is gather around the fire, ad Vitruvius and Semper have told us, loses fundamental individuals with the passage of time and as a result of its moving through the landscape. To avoid the collapse of its social structure, the group’s social space stretches to the hereafter, and the lost individuals become concrete points of reference within the landscape.

This develops to the point where their entire social structure is reflected in the landscape as a building and the social space of the group finds counterpart in a building, one that unifies all the member of the group, both living and deceased, as well as the past and future, one that both is here and represent the hereafter.

The demarcation of the landscape through layers of constructed nature establishes a metaphysical dimension in the activity of building. Certain chosen places started to stand out from the landscape and acquire superabundant meaning. Using the words of Mircea Eliade, taken from his book The Sacred and the Profane, “hierophany”. The act of differentiation of the landscape onto different areas of meaning. The resultant enclosing boundaries, which could be materialized to different extents - cavity, limits and so on - could already be considered as a sort of protoarchitecture.” [4] As it has been called by B. Zevi the Zero Grade of Architecture.

Serra, R. (n.d.). West - Est

Voth, H. (1980). City of Orion

Long, R. (n.d.). Space

Turrell, James. (n.d.). Roden Crater

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THE HIDDEN MEANING Symbolic analogies

This act of establishing sings onto the landscape generated proto architectures around the world that, despite the different results, shared common patterns due the naturality of the simple action made by ancient people. A primitive form of a natural act of building.

During the time, these primordial places have crystallized in the common heritage, becoming Archetypes. Forms and models that recall ideas.

The term archetype comes from the ancient Greek 1Tὰρχέτυπος with the meaning of image: arché “original”, tipos “model”, “brand”, “exemplar”; it was used for the first time by Filone di Alessandria, then by Dionigi di Alicarnasso and Luciano di Samosata.

Archetype, in ancient philosophy was the original model of which the sensitive things are copies. The notion was elaborated by the Neoplatonist Plotinus and Proclus: God first produces ideas or archetypes and then the sensitive world on the model of them. [1] The concept was taken up by the Fathers of the Church. For Augustine archetypes are thoughts of God and constitute the model of the things he creates; they are also the condition by which man grasps the essence of things.

In the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung. The archetypes are primordial images (for example: The Great Mother, the Child, the Elder) present in the collective unconscious, they are therefore heritage of all humanity. Constituted as a repository of the experiences made by the human species and also by the forms of inferior animal life, they resurface

1.

Plato through the Demiurge

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as symbolic elements in dreams, in the hallucinations of the mad, in myths, in the legends of peoples. They also function as forms or schemes that organize the individual experience.

In the case of sacred space, Siegfried Gideon, explains that when man began to settle permanently, there was a gradual change in his relationship with the invisible forces. The idea of the temple as well as the representation of the sacred in the world of man arose. This is translated in all mythologies, in the identification of a centre. The pivot is an absolute, fixed point, the founder of a cosmos. The potentialities of the base are, on the other hand, of cosmological order: it is not limited to order the configuration of the building but, through its irradiation, it virtually structures the globality of physical space.

Even today, these physical models function for architecture, as proverbs work for literature. They are reminiscences of lost pastes that are intrinsically part of our daily lives and represent something immaterial connecting mankind though out spans of time. Moreover, they set in motion particular emotions which relief a feeling of “time travel”.

This can be true even if such a place is only marked by a tumulus covering a corpse.

2.

Adolf Loos, Architektur (1910)

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“If we find a mound six feet long and three feet wide in the forest, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, then we become serious and something in us says, ‘someone lies buried here’. That is Architecture.” [2]

Regolini-Galassi Tomb

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It is at this point that a gateway to the transcendent dimension opens itself in architecture through the latter’s marking of the landscape. It becomes clear that material world has acquired immaterial content.

In Martin Heidegger’s often-quoted text “Building Dwelling Thinking”, the act of dwelling becomes the central of a kind of spatial thinking, expanding up to a point of congruence with the being and then sublimated. Heidegger goes on the state: Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities.

In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.

The dwelling here becomes a mediator between the sky and the earth and is not a case that [3] :

4.

B. Rudolfsky Architecture without architects, 1960.

3/5.

Brnic, I. (2013, winter). Was the primitive hut actually a temple?

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“The houses of the dead were constructed far more solidly than those for the living”. [4]

With this analysis in mind, we can see now how the conditions that give birth to primordial spiritual architecture would no longer be simply a pure response to needs nor the place conditions but instead something immaterial, related to the existence of human. Indeed, the act of building here is a genuine gesture with which mankind bound his existence to the layers of earth [5] , sky and cosmos, and establishing threshold between the sacred and profane.

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IMMANENCE OF THE TRANSCENDENT The contemporary example - James Turrell

THE CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLE How does James Turrell relate to the theme?

During this investigation, where I immersed myself in a profound fascination to the origin of mankind and the act of singing our presence onto this earth, I travelled throughout time and civilizations. When I started looking for a building and an architect to analyzed, I took a moment to reflect on the architecture that I directly lived. Certainly, my mind stopped on the many examples of chapel or holy sites. Places that also recall ancient buildings such as, the Pantheon or San Vitale in Italy but yet these architectures, are reference of references coming directly from the stratification of history. Eventually, I realized that I had to go at the source, finding something that was pure and disinterested from formal or morphology solution but rather just light of its principle and its declination.

Nonetheless, I was looking for an artefact that should have had a system of theoretical values capable of explaining through its entity the consideration previous analyzed.

Therefore, with still vivid in mind the feelings perceived when I visited the Chichu museum of Tadao Ando and the dark house in Naoshima – a space hermetically sealed to the surrounding of the island, in the internal sea of Japan – I started investigating some Japanese architects such as Nishizawa San and Ando San at first, shifting my attention then to the figure of James Turrell.

I still remember acquired when I picked up spontaneously one book form a pile in an Architecture library, it was nicely done, the paper at touch was smooth and the cover invited to open it and discover what was inside.

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Among others works in the book, there were pictures of the same space I visited few months ago in Japan.

The memory of this place came alive immediately and connected me with a different myself. The person who was sitting in that place, in that sunny day of the beginning of the spring.

That was the moment when I felt that his figure would have been the one on which I would have dig for the further period.

Even though, Turrell is not labelled as an Architect but instead an artist, it came immediately evident that the choice just made could not have been better taken.

In fact, by being an artist, who devoted himself to his artistic research, his attitude has been always loyal to dig and extract the essence in the roots of things. Whereas architects often, for the nature of the discipline that overlaps and intersects with others fields, use notions as references, time to time de-contextualized.

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Ban, I. (n.d.). Chichu Art Museum

Image of the author (2019).

Teshina Art Museum, Nishizawa Ruye

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In particular, among his many art piece and installations that he produced throughout his career, I decided to choose one of his Skyspaces situated in the Engadin Valley, a place immersed in the Swiss Alps.

The building, called Piz Uter, is a solo tower, an art installation embodied with deep metaphorical power.

He created many of this kind, giving at the word contemporary mediators between the sky and the earth. In fact, like the examples of primitive, whereas more recent, sacred site previously analysed, these chambers go beyond their literal presence and their existence in the physical world becoming threshold where the insurmountable distance between us and the universe is just visibly cancelled out.

Like those spiritual places, that the primitives started erecting at the dawn of mankind, their reasons to be grounded cannot be explained only by merely looking at the conditions of the place but in order to understand the forces in action we need another point of view.

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Turrell, J. (2006). Sky Space

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INTRO Why is Turrell considered an architect?

The character of James Turrell is a complex figure. He produced a relevant number of art piece, architectural artefacts and he directly contributes not only on the contemporary artistic research but moreover to the investigation on the limit of human perception. Putting himself in between positions of being, hovering among art, architecture, philosophy and psycholog y.

To understand his figure as well as how he has produced a great number of “Proto-Architectures” it is necessary to retrace his life trying to distil the strongholds of his poetics.

Although his personality as well as how he developed his artistic research is not easy understandable, by tracing back his life with the help of Agostino De Rosa - an architectural professor of the IUAV University of Venice, who had the chance to work directly with the artist, devoting part of his career on his work and collaborating also with the architect Tadao Ando - it was possible to isolate some main events and experiences that shaped him and his poetic.

In the process of investigation of James Turrell’s figure and opus, his help was essential. Undoubtedly, before the interview with De Rosa I had a fragmented understanding due to the complex themes that revolve around Turrell and eventually because he personally does not exhaustively explain his work. However, everything untied and become clear after the conversation with the known professor.

He patiently told me Turrell’s story, referring to him like

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an old friend. He also revealed some unique anecdotes and directly narrated to me his experiences with the artist, with and through his art.

After a long period of emails exchange, we could had arranged our meeting in a late summer evening. Followed by the introduction of ourselves, De Rosa started the story by remembering his first meeting with the ar tist, when he went for the first time to the States to his most famous masterpiece, the Roden Crater. The opera on which the Venetian professor draw carfuly its chambers and thresholds, producing an extraordinary and exhaustiveive analysis.

D.R .

De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

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“They picked me up and took me to where he was eating, a place that was a tavern near Flagstaff (Arizona). I arrived with all the cameras and here there was; a man with a beard and the singing hair that, despite its relatively young age, outline the somatic features of a biblical prophet.

As soon as he saw me, he laughed and said: “What are you doing with all this stuff? You do the crater experience and then you take the pictures if you have to.”

Actually, he was right. These are places where you need an experience. The key word is how much of land art or Environmental Art requires bodily immersion in an environment where you eliminate your ties to daytime consciousness.

J. Turrell, Roden Crater, Arizona, USA

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De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

M.

A conscious consciousness, which is in mechanism or action every day.

D.R

Yes, like in Ando’s architectures, when you get to Jim’s architectures, you’re crossing a threshold. You leave the secular world behind you to enter something different.

In Ando’s case there’s an aspect that is declared mystical - sacred. In his architecture there is always something to do with Shintoism. In Jim’s case, it’s something different. Maybe you felt it too when you walked in. It’s not exactly related to the sacred but something more connected to the spiritual.

I know the difference is subtle and it may seem a little trivial to you but it’s something different. There’s a different level of detail.

With this story is already possible to understand two of the many aspect that are present and plays in Turrell’s poetic.

The first one is Buddhism - a faith to which he came closer when he was involved in the rescue missions of monks in Tibet during the Vietnam war. And the second one, the spontaneous inclination and ability in creating space, in particular sequences of thresholds and architectural wombs.

“From the first aspect derives the fact that, like a Bodhisattva, the artist is inviting us to experience it because words are not sufficient. He does not speak the language of the initiate, he does not pervade his underground spaces with hermeticism,

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Turrell, J. (n.d.). Skyspace Lech

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but he talks himself directly to our most basic communication system, the sensorial one, urging us to make an experience that awakens us to a physiological, almost biological, threshold of attention to the modes with which we see, feel and perceive.

Rather than explaining the path, it invites us to make the journey.” [1]

2.

Rosa, A. D., Inerwiev, October 10.2019

1/3 Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

4 Crotti, S. (2006). Figure architettoniche: soglia.

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“Like a prophet leads us to undertake the experience. Alike in the case of the professor De Maria, he brings us on the threshold, but then living us without knowing the next step.” [2] On the other hand, this imply a place where to occurred the experience. A place shaped in various radiant and acoustic forms with archetypal resonances. Turrell, through caliginous sections immersed in the inside of a geological formation and wells of light, skilfully controls and alters the gradual transition from the splendour of natural light to the silent hypogeal spaces “intoxicated with shade”. [3] “A limit, materialised into the threshold - disputed interval between opposing fronts that it corresponds to both, but neither of them coincides” [4] - where the visitor knows how to become massively hollow, receptive to every photonic presence, it comes from the sun, the moon, but also to every sound coming from the earth’s surroundings both from the immense sidereal space that surrounds us.

Image of the author (2019). Chichu Art Museum, Tadao Ando

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Sections of the Roden Crater, Arizona

SENSORIAL EXPERIENCE Artistic research

Consequently, it is necessary to make a voyage in his story to read his figure, understand his interest in human perception and consecutively how he started erect spontaneously installation of proto architecture that now are spread around the world. A journey where it is indispensable to pay a particular attention not only to his art but also to his personal life.

The figure of Turrell is a like the nimnik, a German game composed by the small rectangle place on top on the other to form a tower which stands in balance thanks to its single elements. Each piece represent something distinct but at the same time fundamental one to another.

D.R You don’t really understand, given Jim’s vast culture, what the affiliations of his space solutions are. There are a number of things that have acted on him. Some things, paradoxically for us, are irrelevant. Like the young trips to the Watt Towers a Los Angeles by Simun Rodia with his father and brother. A craftsman who had some kind of Gaudi-like ambition who built these very strange architectures made of metal tubulars, helicoids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. There are many factors that plays an important role in James artistic development.

Moreover, it is through a whole series of somewhat atypical approaches that Jim had with various areas of scientific knowledge from which he then extracted some parts that are essential to his artistic

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De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

language and expression, involving and linking his work to complex metaphorical references, ancient philosophical and spatial models.

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles and grew up in Pasadena, California USA. His father was an aeronautical engineer and he worked in education. His father’s interests were not limited his field but ranged from astronomy to psychology and philosophy. The rich collection of books that the father had, has been a key role for the young Turrell, introducing him to ideas that would occupy him later in life.

Agostino De Rosa starts his story eventually suggesting me to read two volumes, present in his father’s bookshelf, that formed the artist: Light and Colour in the Outdoors by Marcel Minnet and Ecology of Perception by Gibson.

Marcel Minnet is a B elgian biologist, who was interested in visual perception.

In the book the professor describes all the phenomena of visual perceptual illusion, mainly that occur with the atmosphere at low altitude and high altitude. For example, he describes the phenomenon of the morgana fairy and of approaching and moving away from a thing or apparitions of distant objects, phenomenon known as land emerged.

He states than that many installations are decipherable by reading this volume.

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Minnaert, M. (1993). Curvature of the light ray

Minnaert, M. (1993). Curvature of the sky

Gibson, G. (1986). Visual axes

Minnaert, M. (1993). Morgana phenomenon

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The second book, written by Gibson, had a huge influence on Turrell. The idea that we are an ecosystem and above all an aspect mentioned by Gibson is the one in which he says that we are blind, deaf and dumb and that we only have acoustic, visual, olfactory and perceptive sensory projections of the world but the world around us is unknown. This is a problematic aspect of Gibson’s theory which has been somewhat eroded by the critics but is actually what works most in Turrell’s poetics. It is a poetic essential not only for him but also for Robert Herwin’s, who is the artist closest to contemporary living artists working on the same wavelength.

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Collage from the book Light and Color in the Outdoors

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UNDER THE SIGN OF LIGHT What is it and what appears?

James have started to develop his art, perhaps unconsciously, form early age. One thing he always says is that nine months before his birth in 1943 he was conceived on a specific day and he knows what it is. His parents were in Pasadena because his dad worked there.

D.R.

If you go to see Los Angeles time or the magazines that are online, you can see the archives where there is a strange phenomenon recorded on that particular day. An apparition of lightning in the sky, probably globular lightning.

Interestingly James’s birth seams would have occurred under the sign of light, particular weather events.

Sadly, in this story, American soldiers also died because of those lights. On sighting, some planes rose into the sky - it was the time when the Californian coast was afraid of being attacked by the Japanese - and in the confusion, the antiaircraft attack the same American pilots who died under friendly fire.

Because of the great turmoil and to avoid future problems, the government decided to enact a law stating that all windows and verandas overlooking the sea must be shielded by heavy curtains. In Turrell’s house, which had a veranda where his father used to breed canaries, these curtains

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De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

remained until Jim’s early childhood.

He goes to school, comes home and starts making holes in the curtains. The mother, who is a doctor, doesn’t pay much attention, maybe the child is alerted by the shock of going to school. Continuing on, the parents ask him what he is doing because the holes were different and arranged differently.

When they ask him, he says he’s making a stellar one.

A stellar that works exactly the way his installations work.

They allow us to see things that daylight could not allow us to perceive and how in his father’s greenhouse we would see the stars during the day, when the stars are not possible to see.

That is his proto installation on which all his work has started and is based; Showing things that you could not normally see.

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Drawing of the author (2020). Bear constellation

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B ETWE E N TH E SKY AN D TH E EARTH Thresholds of perception

James spent in air a great part of his life starting to build his own air plans at a very young age. With his toy models he was dreaming to fly since at the age of sixteen when “He got the wing”. Once again, this passion derives from rear edition held by his dad, The book of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 – 1944) the light the sparkle of his fascination.

In the story, Saint-Exupéry wrote about his own experience as a pilot. For instance, he wrote about how variable air pressures can create spaces between airspaces. These, are not defined by physical boundaries, but only by light itself.

The artist has frequently described his own flying experience in relation to these spaces within an airspace; “For me, flying really dealt with relation to these spaces delineated by air conditions, by visual penetration, by sky condition. These are the kind of spaces I want to work with – large portion of space, dealing with as few physical materials as I could”.

Turrell J., Interview, September, 2016)

Flying always have accompanied the artist. Beside allowing him to earn a living during the difficult beginnings of his artistic career, both as an air mail-man and as a fertilizer sprayer, his high-altitude experiences in extreme conditions, for example; travelling in snow or in electrical storms and in complete darkness, made him lived the sensation of Soaring. A feeling of individual isolation and, at the same time, immersion in the landscape difficult to share with others.

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Turrell J., Interview Air Mass, (1993)

“Your experience is such that it becomes almost impossible to talk about it. It seems to be pointless to communicate it. It would be easier to make others feel the same feelings by making them fly […] During night flight, when light or darkness advances, you feel the feeling that the atmosphere advances forming extraordinary spaces that you can only enter in flight”.

The glider, the favourite typology of aircraft that Turrell prefer, then becomes in Turrellian mythology the instrument with which man, through the minimum of technology, can return to inhabit a place. The atmospheric space, now abandoned if not for commercial purposes, but which in past ages has been approached by sapiential civilizations, such as the Tibetan one - which not surprisingly placed its most important temples on the peaks of the Himalayas likewise, the Native American Hopi, ethnic group, who chose the Arizona highlands as their home.

Air flight, therefore, is a form of expansion of the “self territories”, but also as a place where it is possible to access the visual and anthropological perspective different from the ordinary one, offering sight and hearing a more direct contact with the universe that surrounds us, both above and below us. An auroral perception derived from a sort of internal hallucination, known among pilots as “Sky myopia”. It is no coincidence that James Turrell defines, the sky, his great study.

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Drawing of the author (2020). Sky myophia

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SILENT AND LIGHT S edimentation and sentiment

Turrell’s mother belonged to the religious fellowship known as Quaker and the artist himself was raised in that faith.

Quaker believe that each of us can experience the divine within ourselves. They refer to this spiritual experience as “Inner Light”. Turrell remember how his grandmother used to tell him “go inside and meet the light”. “My grandmother believed the porous of meditation or contemplation was to wait upon the lord and met up with the light”. Similarly, how the dwellers that Martin Heidegger were awaiting the divinities as divinities.

This “ecological” receptivity is resonance of the inclusive, concave nature of Turrell’s art is all one with the Quaker profession of welcoming the faithful, silence and light into the mystery of the descent of the Holy Spirit. Turrell’s maternal grandmother’s recommendation to go to community meetings, to “enter and welcome the light” into one’s innermost self, was translated, in Turrell’s words, into the paradoxical professional choice to make an art of which the light is “external”.

Furthermore, in Quaker rituals, people wait collectively and in silence for the inner light during their gathers, quietly sit, often in circles, on benches that recall the one in Gobekly Tape. Perhaps feeling similar emotion to the one perceived by primitives under the open vault.

Is not a case that the structure of the Turrellian skyspaces is always characterized by a bench which name, given by Turrell himself, is sacrificial altar.

Turrell J., Interview, September, 2016)

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TO U C H I N G WITH TH E GAZ E Physical perception

Turrell, for both academic and personal training, has chosen light and the vast field of acoustic and apathetic visual perception as the cornerstones of his art.

D.R.

When you ask Jim what he thinks about light, you’re surprised he says, “light is like wine to me.”

The wine that needs to be well kept, protected, sip, tasted and the thing he always says surprisingly is that he would like to make a work of art with fire. Because the fire of a fire is already enough to create an illusive effect or a total suspension of credulity that there is no need for anything else.

With his work, he attempts to remove the object from the ground of art, leaving visual perception in its empty centre in its purity, free from associative and symbolic thought, leads him to elaborate installations without a fire, in which it is possible to expand one’s sensations to the point of “touching with the gaze”.

Turrell’s art is not about light and perception, but is physically made by light and physiologically by perception.

The artist uses light and shadow, perception and space, entities whose manipulation generates an art that is freed from the cumbersome presence of objects.

“It is not about what is in front of us, but about what is behind our eyes - the preconditions of seeing and the limits of perception”. [1]

De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

1.

Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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The American artist works with light in a completely different way from the traditional approach of art. He considers light in fact not a pictorial subject but instead a physical matter that can be shaped and meticulously structured. His works and installations can be placed among new artistic currents, which can be traced back to the so-called Light-Environmental Art.

2.

Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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If we consider the traditional art of painting, the desire to represent the light radiation and its effects in an intellectualized form, i.e. providing light as an icon that mimics, in a more or less realistic way, the behaviour, phenomena or optical perception, prevailed, despite the innovative character intrinsic to each individual artistic personality. In this figurative universe made up of chromatic layers superimposed on a flat surface - canvas, panel, wall - the real light, the physical one, the one that could be recorded through photometric instrumentation was confined outside the representation and was transformed, in a sort of alchemical modification - white lead, oil painting, etc.. - deputed to imitate it on the pictorial support.

From this comes the dialectic tension between the immaterial light that tends to dematerialize objects, the solid material of painting and the solid materials of the world that it illuminates. [2]

Heizer, M. (n.d.). Circles

Cristò, V. J. (1972). Running Fence

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Consecutively, light has been often bent to narrative, symbolic purposes, however, to something else by itself.

For example, in Renaissance painting, light has the scenic task of emphasizing objects.

If we take in analysis Raffaello’s school of Athens the illumination given by the sapient use of light makes the entire perspective structure more adamantine and shining with the result of exalting the architecture surfaces and the entire scene.

In other case, the bright aura of the light has been used for emphasizing the symbolic value, such as religious icons.

On the other hand, in Rembrandt’s painting, where the light source - a candle, an oil lamp, a holy poster - is inserted in the scenic frame, the light dissolves into the shadow and unleashes, by virtue of this conflict, all its dramatically expressive power. Similar expression can be seen by being in front of a Caravaggio’s piece, where the contrast between darkness and spot light with which the subjects stands form the dark and deep backdrop, reveals powerful emotions.

Or perhaps, in the artist William Turner, to whom the accomplishment of having represented the atmospheric dispersion of light. Even latest artistic movement, such as the Impressionists with their attempts to return the light reflected by objects, use this element as a tool to reveal and transmit, in this case atmospheric emotions and feeling.

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Raffaello, S. (1509). La Scuola di Atene

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After the post-modern period, the artistic research moved his interest towards a different direction. Although, the beginning of this shift is not directly address to the OpArt, is with this movement that there is a change in the role of the observer in relation to the light perceived as a pictorial subject.

In few words, the bases of this artistic trend can be summarised by saying that this form of art subjects the observer’s eyes to a retinal “stress”. It is composed by a work of geometry and constructions that form almost endless motifs. This curated and complex geometric chromatic form tires the eye and the sight reacts like an overheated mechanism. Thus, the work of art does not primarily act as an aesthetic object to be perceived but rather as an external cause.

Therefore, for the first time it seems that light claims its own status, hidden by centuries of representative art.

Consecutively, it is only with Light-Environmental Art that light abandons this position and instead immerses the viewer in its radiant flow. In other words, does not represent or cause light, but is physically made of light.

In the case of James Turrell, light is and remains, a tool that allows the widening of one’s perceptual boundaries.

It is empty of information because it is information itself.

From his youthful works, Turrell recognized the hazed boundary between light and darkness as the chosen

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Drawing of the author (2020).

Op-Art

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territory for his work. A compound that can be stylistically squared in the milieu of so-called Californian minimalism.

A movement of the years 60s interest in the investigation on the altered states of perception.

D.R.

De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

Artists at that time induced forms of alteration of perception, for example, by depriving themselves of sleep.

There were musicians who worked in the same area, such as Terry Reid, who gave concerts that lasted from the afternoon until the next day, from 18 to 20 hours. There were people who would bring their sleeping bags and you could wake up and fall asleep hearing the music in a certain fragment that was built like an Indian raga.

Works where, in the case of the American artist with the use of light and shadow as sensory domains, man can annul his own physiological limits and explore his inner dimension. “I am deeply interested in the boundaries of perception and in working with them, playing with the absolute limits of what we can and cannot see. We have learned to participate very uniquely in our culture, and unlike other cultures, our perception is compromised by prejudice�.

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Lim Lee, K. (1999). Circle and Ellipse

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The process of isolation of light, decided by perceptual experience, induces in the user a new - and perhaps sculpted - awareness of cognitive processes that are normally taken for granted.

For Turrell, this “sensory awakening� allows the observer to see the act itself.

He is thus poised between rational knowledge and intuition, between tangible reality and dreamlike immateriality, constantly forced to evaluate his own cultural superstructures in order to transcend.

For him, It becomes important to access this pre-cultural state of vision which, when de-contextualized, returns to its archetypal and functional role, almost tactile, thanks to which, observing the sky from a crater or sitting in an almost totally dark space, either an ordinary person, an astronomer or a physicist can experience something similar to childlike amazement.

The revealing experience lies in realizing how our senses are reacting, rather than what we are looking at.

It is not a case in fact that Turrell himself has repeatedly stated that his purpose is to continue to rebuild the cave of the Platonic myth so that his secret is continually revealed.

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Sanraedam, A. (1604). Plato’s Cave

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Una stanza immaginaria che si trova in una posizione indefinita tra il cielo e la terra, si dice sia il modo originario per rappresentare il concetto di ma. Immaginiamo simultaneamente sia l’incertezza spaziale che quella temporale: la stanza non è né in un luogo né nell’altro, è in uno spazio indescrivibile

F R O M LI G HT TO S PAC E Another means of exploration

It is in the liminal zone of conflict between “what is” and “what appears” that Turrell’s work is placed.

By the term “look” we mean that scopic action in which the observer performs an interpretative function of the intellectually analyzed image.

With the term “see” we allude here to a more physiological and direct approach, in which the work almost dissolves and, instead, the perceptive act of its purity appears.

The combined action of photonic solicitations and natural responses is at the heart of this art, which questions us about the boundaries of our sensory world and whether these can be violated, returning to the gaze an auroral state.

This process establishes a relationship between the artist’s research and the environment that becomes the tool to create the work. This is no longer the colour, the brush, the canvas; but the walls, the spaces, the light, the openings towards the outside as in an architect’s constructions.

They are the architect’s tools. He designs the void where the experience manifests.

D.R . We are in an area close to extreme eastern architecture or close to the idea of extreme eastern aesthetics, the concept of Ma.

De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

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Ma - Japanese concept of space.

An interval, a void between objects , in between space. Between souns there is silent, a pause. A. Isozaki.

It is an aesthetic, philosophical and artistic concept, frequently used also in everyday life. It is also linked to MahÄ yÄ na Buddhist philosophy, in which the doctrine of emptiness is central.

It is the Japanese caligram that indicates space, interpreted in the Far East, as in Turrell’s case, as an interval that joins whereas, the place that separates like the Western concept of emptiness.

The void in the West separates, distances things from each other. In Japan or in extreme eastern aesthetics, it unites; it is a unifying element. It also unites space and time in a single synaesthetic experience. Occurrence is been encountered in a reservoir; the enclosed architectural space, a viable and liveable interior. A uterine form where the way you perceive space changes completely. You go back to seeing how perhaps our prehistoric ancestors saw and perceived space. It crumbles the cultural superstructure of seeing and understanding because it is a borderline experience.

The inclination of design spiritual place - a pure sanctuary, hermetically close, where dreams and oneiric sleeps are prompt, is combined with the ability of shaping the landscape. Actions of marking the territory that recall the ancient civilization.

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Nonetheless, is not a case that with Turrell we can speak about arche-astronomical sites. The dimension of Turrell’s major work – the Roden Crater - is that of the great constructions, such as the pyramids, the ritual site of central America or likewise the structure of the Asian temples which survive humanity itself. His vastest opera, which is still under construction, again like the great works of the past that where built for centuries, it is consider already a ruin and therefore an archaeological site.

The astronomer who worked with him on the Crater until his death by heart attack in 2015 and together with the other astronomers of the NOFS (Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station a great centre that studies the apparent displacement of celestial bodies – believed that when the crater will be completed, there will no longer be a man on earth. In his vision, that Agostino De Rosa considers a final image that’s a little bit Hollywood. The crater walls will collapse and then the solidified lava, the soil, the sand and the deserts will begin to descend and the tunnels will inevitably emerge.

D.R.

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It is an apocalyptic vision. He also imagines that the only beings that will populate the crater will be wolves. From this image he told me a very heartfelt story of a wolf who, as the only visitor to the crater tunnel, crosses it on the only day of upper lunilstizo where the moon is perfectly cantered by the lock shaped section. The animal will then howl at the moon without any human listening.

Drawing of the author (2020).

Roden Crater

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Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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James Meyer, “Minimalism”, Phaidon Press, 2005, pp. 15-17.

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“ Turrell’s proven attraction for places like the Egyptian pyramids or the bunkers of the Maginot line shines through in this liminal character, as these are spaces where light only breaks through at certain times of the year - crossing a forced border and illuminating the face of a statue or sarcophagus for a few moments. Or in which the spectator acts an explicit defensive act - looking at the outside world through slits that imply the fruitive mode poised between fear and scopic activity.

The inside and the outside inter penetrates and, in this way, the observer naturally stands on the edge of the two spaces, right where they meet, not inhabiting either one or the other, in an alienating perceptive condition.” [1] In his work there is a consistency in the idea of creating or digging a pure space, without any physical element that structure its inside. However, the cultural, historical and environmental inspirations of the specificity of the place seem to guide him and effecting the aesthetic result of the different artefacts.

Comparably, for the ancient spiritual place and sites that share internal spatial analogies whereas the negative – the outer skin of the structure – is effected by the territorial and cultural conditions, here is no denying that the history and position of the location plays a significant factor in the execution of the final design. [2]

Tempio di Nettuno

Chillida , E. (n.d.). Mount Tindaya

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D E F I E S PAC E S IV phases

This ability of creating space derives from an evolution in his career that for a better understanding, can be divided in few phases. During this time, the relationship with architecture evolved parallel to his artistic research.

Cross Corner Projection This milieu of works derives from a previous type of creations, called Shades and Shadows, bidimensional painting characterized by a dry and abstract Mongiana depiction.

It Is with this type of representation that he introduced the ontological conflict between the phenomenological world – where the shadows are generated by the effect of concrete lights that illuminated solid objects – and on the other hand, the world of representation in which in-human eyes - centres of projection to infinity - look and depict, with coherence, constellations of points held together by imaginative forces that escape any physical law, where dotted or dashed lines perforate bodies without destroying their cohesive nature. [1]

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Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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In the series Cross Corner Projection Turrell, started experimenting and playing with light and our perception, by crating now a fluctuating volume composed of nontangible material such as light and moment later, a window opened to the outside. With type of work the game and conflict between the revealing experience and disorienting feeling is being stressed.

These installations have been produced and experimented in various form. It is a work based on geometrical and perspective construction, almost like the perspective table of Brunelleschi. Whereas, they combine different means of artistic representation, using the principle of the prototype of film projections invented by the brother Lumièr.

The structure is composed by Metal or mirror plates, working as a slides, which are projected onto the corner of vertical surfaces with precise angulations and inclinations.

These pure and white walls, deep of darkness, welcome the light that exercise a non-physical pressure but rather perceptive.

These slides have different shapes and forms, generally the projection increase their size and outline. When the light is pointed towards the angles of the room the result is an impression of a solid volume which is fluctuating.

In front of this solids – that seem to respond to the linear perspective rules - the viewer suspend its judgment by the fact of not able to distinguish their identity of threedimensional object or bidimentional plane.

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J. Turrell. Geometric construction.

Crossconrener projection

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Essay Human Understanding (London 1690) – natural extension of the Cartensian thought – the philosopher believed that, before the experience, the human intellect was absent of particular attitudes and specific possibility. Therefor, for him, every knowledge derive from the external experience – sensation – and at the same time from the internal one – reflection. He takes back the Cartesian concept of cogito, made by mental operation, giving a new idea of chamber. An architectonical space where inside the comprehension of the external phenomena and the world takes place.

The role of the mind is an enclave with respect to phenomenal reality.

These works trigger a game between the role of the environment and the revealing, or disorienting, action of light. The architecture starts to be necessary to the representation. Not only the relief effect is increased by the real three-dimensionality of the room that have become the canvas but more importantly the light comes only after the place has been completely isolated from the outside light. This gesture highlights an act of creating space. Although light is not representation but reality by being almost in its solid form, this type of representation is somehow still linked with classical stylistic approaches by the fact that the wall planes constitute a sort of trace of the iconic Renaissance plan. Yet, not delineated by the edges of the frame like a classical painting.

Become evident with this typology of work a theme that is a core of Turrell’s poetic, the architectural idea of the “Room”. An archetypical structure that revolve around most of his installations. It is directly subjected to complex metaphorical reference. For instance, with the place where knowledge occurs described by the philosopher John Locke. [2] The aim of the artist is to lead the observer of his “angular projections” to reflect on his own perceptive capacities rather than to understand the ecological world outside him.

The installation turns out to be a sort of externalization and reification of the ocular organ, in which it is as if we see ourselves in the act of seeing. The result is that the viewer find himself in the focal point of the visual process.

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J. Turrell. (1966). Afrum (White)

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James Turrell - Juke, Still Light Series (1990)

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Ganzfeld The couples of years between the 1968 and the1970 were a focal point in the formation of Turrell interest and experience in the world of sensory perception. During this period, the artist came into contact with Doctor Edward Wortz – psychologist head of the division Life-Science of the Gerrett Aerospace Corporation - with who worked at the project Art and Technology organized by the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. Together, they studied possible application of sensory deprivation techniques on the artistic field.

The project consisted in the realization of sealed environment form external acoustic and visual stimuli in which the visitor would have been connected to his sensorial faculty leading to a controlled meditation status.

The word “Ganzfeld” means in fact a spaces or visual field without visible inputs where is impossible to establish any cardinal reference points.

In these “rooms” the angles and connections between walls ceiling and floor are smooth as possible and everything is painted with pure titanium white.

By consequence, light is thus unmodified and its source becomes irrelevant. In the space there is a glittering mist, caused by the homogeneity of the monochromatic illumination. This environment, leaves the eyes unable to adjust its focus making the visitor feeling the space infinite or even given a sort of internal hallucination. Turrell is very familiar to this atmosphere. In fact, similar sensations are lived by pilots flying with extreme conditions.

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J. Turell, Apani (2011)

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In fact, the loos of functional capacity of the visual mechanism is a familiar phenomenon in aviation, where the response to a comparable absence of stimulus is known as “Sky myopia�.

Turrell for almost six years worked in his laboratory, an ex-hotel renovated to the ideal place where to experiment and produce his installations. The Mendota Hotel was the studio where he started developing the relationship between art and architecture. The structure and layout of the building was constantly modified, demolished and rebuilt to create a sequence of spaces. He had been directly involved in the process of modification of creation, achieving the knowledge of the construction site, learning how to built and design architecture with fine details.

Between the 1968 and 1974, the artist created the famous Mendota Stoppages, a series of visual and light experiences distributed along the day in different spaces.

During these years, the studio become a sanctuary, closed in itself. Inside, was another space, another world.

The rooms of the Mendota stoppages were consciously and meticulously opened in some point, allowing the light to come in. They were distributed along cardinal axes and accordingly to the different seasons. The space was conceived as a camera obscure recalling the metaphor of the window.

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J. Turrell. Detail of Ganzfel room

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Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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Descartes, in the Traité de l’Homme (1662) describes how the individual should leave the knowledge based on the empirical comprehension in favour of the exercise of the doubt. An action of awaking and voluntarily alienation form the daily life experience. The philosopher compares it to looking outside the window, in research of a truth that cannot be doubt.

“He establishes that the characteristics and identity of our mind are actually more relevant than the mere and deceptive perception of external objects. Referring by way of example, to the perceptive experience of a wax ball that becomes moldable when approached by a heat source, Descartes concludes that, although its physical state changes, the ball remains always wax in our eyes, and this not by a faculty of imagination but exclusively by virtue of an act or a mental intuition. Internal knowledge acts in such a way that we forget the difference between what we actually know and what we can only infer.

The change, therefore, cannot be traced only to the sensory action of “seeing”, a deceptive action when it comes to estimating what or who we observe looking out of a window [3]

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Skyspace

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Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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The metaphorical themes of the room, the cave and the window, lead progressively the artist to deal more with the physical entity of architecture. From the Mendota stoppages, and the crosscorner projections, emerges gradually not only the material and corporeal aspect of the light, but also the “tactile”.

By consequence of these conditions, his particular formation, his relationship with ancient culture and its interest in the pure nature of light, emerges spontaneously his urge to create pure spaces, reminiscences of antique enclosed sanctuaries, thresholds to another unmapped spatial sphere, where our sensation expand, arriving at look at our own looking, see ourselves seeing, like in the myth of Plato’s cave.

It is precisely this imprinting of claustrophobic isolation that exalts the seer body in its dreamlike dimension and the ability of framing portion of sky, letting the physical light entering sapiently into his chambers that lead Turrell to erect pure space on introspection, reflection and connection. “In the series of Skyspace, the Turrellian user that have left the ordinary reality behind, crossing the threshold of the installation, erases his secular movements, his habitual perceptions, discovering, with fear but also with wonder, that his dormant senses can access their purest function, not aimed at sensorially recording an object, but at becoming one with a “looking space” and with the physical phenomena that such space inhabits.” [2]

J. Turrell. (2005) Piz Uter

J. Turrell. (2005) Piz Uter

J. Turrell. (2005) Piz Uter & Salzburg

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These enclosures, have been erected form a pure and clear action. The reasons that led the artist to create space are closer to the motivations that prompt our ancestor to put in pace the fist stones or piles of wood to cr ystallise the ritual of gathering, contemplation and memory. Therefore, the turrellian chambers can be place among the other examples of spiritual spaces blending with their section and plan profile.

All together they work as passports, heterotopias that are space in between, or in other words, liminal places.

Despite the location, the cultural and climatic conditions, these sits belongs and creates a network, connected with invisible lines that go beyond spans of time.

During the time, they might have become ruin, sanctuaries or eventually completely merged and become part of the landscape but their spiritual aura remains vivid impressed onto their surfaces and breathable in the air that compose the void.

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J. Turrell. (2005) Roden Crater

J. Turrell. Missoula museum

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The first skyspace was built in Italy in 1976. This original enclosure was part of some installation in the house the earl Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. After having seen the work of the artist during a trip in the states, the art collector invited him to realize various work in his house, a Villa among the Alps near Varese, Italy.

Skyspace I reaches is maximum splendour and effect at sunset. In fact, the optimal meteorological conditions are when the inclination of the late sun rays are entering in the cubic room. As the Sun describes its arc and approaches sunset, the external brightness decreases and symmetrically manifests itself as the internal neon becomes dominant.

The passage from one condition to the other is underlined by the constant change of the light colour of the framed portion of the sky, going from the cobaltic blue to red and then shining gold to change again in yellow mixed to the green, violet concluding in the dark of the night.

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J. Turrell. Skyspace I. Villa Panza

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Right there, in that moment, you realize that the night has come. The internal lights are specif ically studied to hide the stars at the viewer till the end of the light game. This effect it is like the atmospheric phenomena during the day.

Microcosm and macrocosm show similarities in str ucture and function.

Richard Bright

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“His heat was intense. I’d never seen him so blue. I couldn’t touch him, at least not w ith my hands, but w ith my eyes I could. It was an inner drama. You could feel his changes as he grew darker and darker. But was that color just a memor y, or maybe a dream? [...] Now it was black, a black so deep it drove you crazy. Looking through the opening, I couldn’t see stars, but I knew they were out there. But it wasn’t a dark nothing: it was full of something from the past and w ith the potential of something yet to happen.”

J. Turrell. Skyspace I. Villa Panza

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WH E R E TH E SKY M E ETS TH E LAN D Confirmation of a journey

MAR KS Where are we?

At this point the essential and critical moment has arrived.

In order to understand the theories and analysis conducted until now, it is necessary to observe with an analytical eye a contemporary example. Therefore, hence by the urge to have the confirmation through a concrete example, the research focuses on Piz Uter, the Skyspace which James Turrell built among the swiss Alps.

This last chapter it is structured like a traveller diary or more like a scientific journal kept by the many adventurers that travelled the world. Like Charles Darwin, when in 1831 set sail to observe, colect and document the Galapagos Islands’ many diverse and unique species.

Thus, Like Turrell suggested to Agostino De Rosa to directly live and experience the place, this last chapter is the report of that experience. A voyage to Piz Uter that started from climbing the high Engadin valley. A place with forests and glaciers on its high peaks where the individual cannot help but just silently observe.

Surrounded by the powerful alpine landscape, the artist, embodied with conscious and sensible gestures the void that remains open to the atmospheric events. Spontaneously, the act of building that characterised our ancestor when involved in erecting spiritual site, has been repeated. In this place, which origin might be confused, the human perception is amplified and expands to different spheres.

It is a place, like the sacred archetypes previously analysed, for retrospection, inner reflection and connection to the power of the depth.

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Turrell, J. (2010). Zug Zuoz

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Images of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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The building is located nearby a small town called Zuoz, in the beautiful Upper Engadin valley. An old basin conformation situated among the imponent Swiss Alps.

These mountains, like the other around the globe, in the history of art, has always been an important reference point, since ancient times. For example, already in prehistoric times rock paintings and graffiti on rocks are often found at high altitudes; with the first civilizations, when man manages to develop complex social ties. The mountain is in a certain sense worshipped and symbolized by imposing architecture from pyramids to ziggurats, with perfect geometric shapes that are present in every part of the world.

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Michelone, G. (2017, October 30). Segantini co riflessioni sulla montagna nella storia dellarte.

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The mountain, therefore, in both ancient and modern culture, is a magical, fantastic, mysterious, fairy-tale, even divine and sacred place, from the Olympus of the Greek Gods to contemporary works such as the novels The Enchanted Mountain by Thomas Mann. [1] These ancient gods are solemn and surrounded by a powerful landscape. They are framed by high rocky picks with glaciers, dens of pine and larch forest which make the place changing completely its appearance and atmosphere during the passage of season. These mutation from summer, when the lower land it is painted by many colours of the many flowers, to winter when the snow covers everything, stopping the time and every sound are well captured by the Italian artist Giuseppe Segantini. The painter and Turrell seams both to have well understood and share the mystical experience that these giants are giving.

Segantini. Engadin Valley.

Switzerland

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Territrial map

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THE CHAIN Art and Place

The Building is part of a system that works as a chain throughout the valley. It is a network developed from a research project of the Zurich University of Art and Design in collaboration with La Plaiv.

In 2001-02 the project “public plaiv - Gegenwartskunst im Landschafts- und Siedlungsraum La Plaiv” focused in particular on the local reference of the artwork and also in the landscape and building settlement of the area with the aim to create a model for dealing with contemporary art in the region.

The interest was posed on the question of the extent to which targeted artistic interventions in the living space can contribute to increasing people’s ability to perceive the manifold qualities of their natural and designed environment, but also of their social environment.

Consequently, the result was the designs by commissioned artists of new works of art that enter into a fruitful dialogue with the public.

Regarding the artifact chosen, on the occasion of Turrell’s concurrent exhibition at the Kunshaus Zug, the idea for a so-called Skyspace in Zuoz, Engadin was born thanks to Rudi Bechtler an art collector who would commission it.

Thus, in October 2005, a circle of friends of the arts gathered at the Hotel Castell for the opening of the Walter A. Bechtler-foundation’s new Skyspace Piz Uter, one of the first public Skyspace in continental Europe.

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Museums

Art Installations

Muzeum Susch National Swiss Park Museum Segantini Museum Mr. Karsten Greve Galerie Nietzsche Haus Torre pendente di San Maurizio Museum Alpin Engadiner Museum Berry Museum St. Moritz Museum Buolf Mus-chin Andrea Robbi Museum Castello di Tarasp

Peter Fischili & Davida Weiss, Surili 1989 Peter Regil, Hacking, 2002 Martin Kippenberger, Transportabler UBahn, 1997 James Turrell, Piz Uter, 2005 Roman Rigner, Wasserfenster, 2011 T adashi Kawamata, Felsenbad, 1997 Atelier Van Lieshout, Mini Capsule, 2002 Ken Lum, Il Museum Buolf Mus Chin, 2001

Galleries & Ateliers

Theastres

Galerie Tschudi AG Galerie von Bartha Via Maistra 41 Galerie Gmurzynska & Co Atelier Segantini Vito Schnabel Gallery Stalla Madulain 107 s-chanf

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Walter Bieler, Theaterturm

The Art system in the Engadin Valley

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Public Buildings - City Hall City, Hall Archives , Forestal office La Plaiv Office, Station and Turist Information - Schools - Lyceum Aplino, Lyceum, School, Kindergarten, Lybrary - Churches - Evangelische Church San Luzi, Katholische Church Santa Chatrigna, Chappella San Bastiaun

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Galleries & Ateliers - Gallery Tschudi, Gallery De Cardenas, Gallery La Lanterna, Chesa Planta, Werkstatt Hildegard Schenk - Art Installations - Piz Uter, James Turrel, Felsenbad, Tadashi Kawamata, Wasserfenster, Roman Signer

P O S I T I V E A N D N E G AT I V E Dicotomy and game of dualities

Approaching the cylinder, the visitor is surrounded by the alpine powerful landscape. Arriving at the end of the road with the sing Hotel Castell, the stone surface start to be visible.

In summer and during the worm months, the sun reflects its rays in the corrugated texture of the granite which its molecular composition constituted by many bright minerals appears to have small pieces of mirror inside.

On the plateau of the imponent Castle, the cylinder stands out in continuity with a vertical rock wall. A surface that has the same identity and appearance of the Turrellian piece.

The cylindrical space enclosed in stone walls is a reminiscent of a mountain chapel or a mediaeval turret tower of defence that at the time where constellating the side of the valley. “Other archaic sacred site also come to mind, whose architecture is based on observing or symbolizing light and the inverse, for instance the Kiva of the Pueblo people, a Stupa or the Pantheon. Old often abandoned structure of this kind interest Turrell; they represent a heritage that is explicitly reflected in his Autonomous Structures.� [1]

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Haldmann, M., & Turrell, J. (2010). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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Site Plan

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In the cold and more dark months, when the life seems to be paused, the appearances of the artefact mutates simultaneously with the characteristics of the season.

The atmosphere changes as soon the white flacks start to fall at the beginning of a cold day and begins to accumulate.

Everything that pose on top of what was before a colourful landscape is being covered with a thick white turf.

In this situation, the building froze under the weight of the solid white matter becoming a stone that perhaps was already present in the landscape before the first human settlement. It is a hut for hunters and wonder or it is a chapel for pilgrims. The feeling perceived by standing beneath its presence is to go and discovered the precious embodied contents.

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Images of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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Haldmann, M., & Turrell, J. (2010). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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A narrow trail climbs up to the Skyspace Piz Uter, prominently placed on the mountain slope near Hotel Castell in Zuog. There, the gaze pans to the sweeping chain of mountains on the other side of the steep, open valley, bathed in the beautiful bright light that is so typical of the Engadin skies. [2] Crossing the thick vegetation, you hear the sound of the gravel under your feet, the wind stroking your skin and the light embracing you all around. up, the vegetation that before was blocking your view, opens up completely making possible to see the entrance of the chamber. At first what seemed a high structures reveal is proportion which is characterised in length by a ratio of one on fifth more of the height of the building.

The elevation appears to be almost a block of stone that is been cut out from the quarry. However, looking closely, the pattern of the blocks appears in detail. A refine texture that although manifests its composition also shows the attention and ability of the swiss maestranze whose skills have been refined during the centuries. A silent maniera handed down from forefathers. A way of doing that rise spontaneously like the other constructions techniques that can be place into the world of vernacular.

Proportion study

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Image of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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Image of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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Haldmann, M., & Turrell, J. (2010). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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Following the trace on the ground, composed by the same mineral of the façade, you encounter a sudden opening excavated in the rock. A significant change of material that recall the entrance of a sacred cave, made by the water erosion or by primitive people seeking shelter. The gap has a particular shape, everything is studied with a meticulous attention to proportion. In front of the entrance, after having aquire the breath temporary lost by the hike, the visitor is invited to enter with a sudden change of height.

A step guides to way into what is a threshold shaped as a cone that shrinks toward the centre. In the small fracture of the chamber, the passage to a different kind of space is enfatised by the proportions that allows almost just one person entering at the time. “Turned in to the grandeur of nature, visitors enter the bare concrete room, sit down on the bench and look up through the circular opening in the ceiling at the radiant skies above, it is a welcome and welcoming spot for hikers to rest.

For patient art lovers, it is likely to be the beginning of the protracted perceptual experience that actually motivated them to come afar, like pilgrims, to sit in this small and empty room.� [3]

Turrell, J. (2010). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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H ETE R OTO P IAS Where we really are?

What is happening above us?

Step by step into the dark and fresh threshold your eyes will adapt to the sudden change of light arriving to see a chamber, a cave. A space of introspection and remembrance in solitude and tranquillity.

The circular space open up and reveal its atmosphere of other place. The visitor has passed a threshold but he finds himself in another space in between, achieving a sense of calm increases awareness and responsiveness to our own perception. Small changes become significant: a passing cloud, modifications in the light, a cool draft, the resonance of the silence. The outdoor physically recedes, but it does not fade; the window like section transform it into an image in space, a phenomenon. Gently, this semipermeable place removes visitors from the ordinary circumstance of their lives.

It is a threshold that opens and reveals, by closing of.

The intensity of the daylight pouring in is enhanced by being reflected off the inside wall. Onto this wall, the sun projects a luminous, imperceptibly shifting round shape; it captivates our probing eyes.

The considered articulation of emptiness and silence in conjunction with reality recalls the music of John Cage, which was seminal to Turrell’s artistic beginnings. The Skyspace is a natural sound space, especially when it is raining or the snow is melting. Like the sunlight, the distinctive sound of the glistening curtain of water fills the small room.

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The reverberating acoustics turn the concrete structure into an unbundled aural space of infinite depth. The polyphonic dripping, dribbling, burbling water, bird calls from the surrounding woods, the sound of traffic rising from the valley below and the occasional airplane merge into a sculptural and physical aural event. The empty space has become a body of sound and we are immersed in it.

The circular space is according to Turrell where the consciousness of seeing “Daydreamer” inhabit. Turrell aims to galvanise visitors to superimpose real imagined spaces in their mind.

For him, art is not something external and material but rather an extention of a mental space, as a “frame of mind”. This establishes a link between familiar/outer and imaginative/inner seeing. Spending time in the room, we become conscious of time and space as a self-contained framework that are erratic in relation to eyes, brain and body. It is here, in a cilindrical womb opened to the celestial vault where the overlaid light, in which the real space is embodied, produce another space, a “Sensing space”.

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Image of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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Turrell, J. (2010). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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B E T W E E N M Y T H A N D F A N TA S I E S Altar of Sacrifices

When the visitors sit on the bench in the room in Zuoz and look through the entire trace at the opposite side of the valley, unexpectedly they will see a mountain with a truncated peak, the Piz Uter. It resembles a volcano. The portal of the Skyspace that from a far distance seemed a hole in a block reveals his shape thus frameing the mountain after which it was named, thereby alluding to its distant relative. The Roder Crater.

Observing the space, one can immediately notice that the room has two materials, concrete for the bench and plaster for the upper part.

The bench that hide a passage, is divided in 15 sections, and the lines of the joint are visible in the concrete.

Being linked with the opening in the ceiling, the portal establishes a visual relationship between earth and sky, also an important theme of the Roder Crater, which has been called the “planetary uterus”.

The benches for viewers to lie down and watch the sky are even called Human Sacrifices.

Turrell’s study in seeing make powerful metaphorical use of symbols, myths and fantasies.

We already mentioned the “planetary uterus”. The unlimited perceptual space unfolds monument-like spaces of perceptions: “sites of initiations” of magical-real seeing.

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Turrell, J. (2019). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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SHAKKEI, BORROWED SCENERY Light and Time

Immerse in watching, the individual forgets time.

The eyes now have adjusted to the suggestive environmental light, that is entering and diffusing on the white curved surfaces.

Outside and inside correlate, much like to the response of temperature and space. Life has slows down and its pulse is synchronized with our breathing. We no longer keep clock time and heed only the temporality of our perception.

The serene play of colours of the sky, the passing of a cloud or a singing bird coalesces into a metaphorical experience of becoming, being and passing. The general modulation of flowing and circling are informed with the cyclical energy of ritual. The light and its time subdue hectic daily life, allowing for a mental journey to another, broader and deeper mythopoetic space.

Like the cultures that were living with the linking observation of stellar path with the rhythm of their own lives. Footprint to the Sky The phenomenon called by the American artist, Light Transport, literally caariess the individual from the limited temporal corridor of daily life to a vast and luminous cleaning.

The permanent centre of the cave in Zuoz has been converted by Turrell into a movable atrium of light that transport us to another world and into ourselves.

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During the day, the space appears stretch toward the sky that is framed by the vault opening.

Through experimentation, Turrell consider the round space better suitable to the field of perception than a rectangular one. Moreover, the intensity and brightness of the with in the upper part of the room not only make the sky seam flatten than it really is, but also make its colours deeper and darker; outside the intense, luminous ultramarine is but a pale greys blue. The same is evidently not the same and we cannot trust our own eyes: they see more than is actually there.

In consequence, photographs cannot capture the distinctive optical effects of the skyspace.

The impression is moreover linked to our private perception. The visitor’s vision is blurred due to the fact that the building is off balance and the lower part of the wall, where people leaning against it is slanted. This automatically points the attention towards the circular opening. Due to the visual confusion the ceiling seems to become an introverted vault, turning the circular opening into a receptacle for a hemispherical sheathed.

Sky and space are now physically united and thus become a “Skyspace�

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Turrell’s ability and experience accumulated during his career in modelling the architectural surfaces here reach a very fine result.

The circular opening has a sharp bevelled edge that reinforce the impression of flatness.

In this regards Agostino De Rosa tell us that all of his skaspaces use the techniques of “film colour” and that the operation of cutting frames in surfaces has roots that come from the Asian tradition.

D.R.

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It’s a technique that many contemporary architects use, find the affiliation and who copied who is a bit complicated but the dates help.

For example, Ando - when I was a student like you, I spent a year working and writing my doctoral thesis in his studio - still uses it. It’s a technique that is similar to Jim’s, that is to capture a celestial fragment. Literally almost in the biblical sense, bringing it to earth, bringing what is high down, breaking the link with the geographical horizon so that this sky is not far away but appears perceptively close, almost as if it were sealing the skyspace hole.

It is an extreme oriental technique that was used

by Japanese gardeners to create landscapes in the houses in fondaco. Gardens that were very small but they wanted to include within their perimeter what was in the background. Through the attitude of some plants inside the small courtyard where there was the private garden; a cut of a tree, the

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De Rosa A., Interview, October 10, 2019)

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opening of a hedge, made those who observed the garden believe that the landscape in the background belonged to the garden itself. This technique has a Japanese name and is called Shakkei which literally means borrowed landscape.

It is a technique that Jim had seen on his many trips. The same technique is also used by Ando for his architecture. He used to explain to me when I was working with him that usually the houses or buildings that the master made have holes that select a part of the landscape, thus avoiding that the background noise of the city or what is visually disharmonious enters the building creating a kind of unbalance.

K.F.SchinkelI. (1803). dealized Landscape with City on a River

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Rosa, A. D. (2007). James Turrell.

Geometrie di luce. Roden Crater.

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This same technique is transformed into the structural cut that characterise the turrellian skyspace. Inside of these chambers, the movement of the sunlight, traced on the inner walls establish a precise link between space and time, making us participants in cosmic circulation.

“The slow and inexorable movement of sunlight and its shadows on the internal walls of Turrell’s installations offers itself to the observer as a sort of metaphysical sundial; the hours, the seasons, the atmospheric conditions are introduced into these spaces in order to induce, within them, a rarefied consciousness of reality, in turn based on the correspondence between creation and individual.

The movement of the projections allow us to spatialize time, that is to say to experience the linear and cardinal dimension of its becoming and at the same time, to temporize space. These two experiential conditions, but also existential, merge and offer themselves to us as a continuum.” [1] Turrell’s immaculate walls, like the archetypal walls of a cave - illuminated through natural cracks in the rock - or of a building - on whose roof an oculus opens - are the screen of a projection of the cyclical landscape of time, echoes of ancient philosophical and architectural models.

Image of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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VISUAL KOAN What is happening above us?

The light of the day, is brought down to the skyspace by the artist and shaped into a virtual body.

Light is a sculptural material for Turrell and through his artefacts he makes it physically palpable, like sound.

Moreover, the artist makes no distinction between artificial and natural light since the source of both is a burning element.

At nightfall, the ribbon of light sapientelly hidden with a sharp architectural detail in the wall and consisting of white, red, blue and green neon tubes turn generates and artificial sky. Another horizon therefore appears due the shadows spread and caused by the fading daylight. “As the daylight gradually fades, the impression of flatness increases even more, while the depth of the space gradually shrinks before our eyes until, finally, the radiant field of light, the celestial vault above the now shared room, acquires a visible presence of its own. The circular negative shape has become a positive shape, a physical image floating on the ceiling. Its impact is not even affected by a passing bird or a cloud and we become aware of what we no longer recognize and what we perceive in a different way: the virtual seams real, the real virtual. The compact circle is now the luminous screen where clouds, moon, airplane and birds make an entrance as actors in the drama of visibility, briefly interacting and existing on the other side.� [1]

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Haldmann, M., & Turrell, J. (2010). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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At dusk a total of some fifty colours constantly overlap and blend with the natural light, making the sky changing colour delicately and animate the space that first, expand to shrink immediately. Colours sometime wonder around between the white horizontal surface and the sky, instigating a dialogue between outdoors and indoor.

The night program conveys a dialogue between artificial and natural light – between the skyspace and the spacesky.

Therefore, establishing a complex place of spatial interaction with plural meaning.

The changes of lights are extremely fast that the eyes of the visitors do not have time to adjust to any point of focus. Thus, the observer is put plunged a moment into blindness. The constant shift of light suggests a form of aerial movement. Like in a solar eclipse the figure and the ground are inverted.

The eye of the viewer is in constant confusion, as soon it has a normal view of the sky overhead, the shimmering play of colours comes back, dragging the observer in a state of morphia.

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Turrell, J. (2019). James Turrell Zug Zuoz

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The pilgrim, embodied in the constant interchange of light, deeply immerged in the game of showing and hiding is galvanized. They are completely immerse in the pure act of contemplation and the shifting of colors reflects the constant action of closing and opening of the eyes. The dynamic of diverse nature fuses and makes the observer perceive spectral perceptual images between memory and imagination.

This game between infinite and finite, physical and immaterial, real and virtual deliberately breakdown the conventional orientation making possible to see the subject matter of light. Colors, light arouses unfiltered sensations and emotions, where sensual information is perceived as object. It is an exchange between seeing and seen that Turrell calls “visual koan�.

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Image of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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The play of colors become even more striking and impressive as darkness descends. Gradually the artificial lights eclipses whatever weak light still remains in the night sky and the opening in the ceiling slowly closes, until it looks like a compact, black lid. It prefigures the night, though the latter never achieves such intense blackness.

It is as if the real room and the natural light had been immersed in profound darkness, there becoming compact and dense.

The less can be seen, the more the impression of a mysterious presence is felt.

Turrell, J. (2004). conversation with Ana Maria Valencia

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“Without image, without object, without focus, what is there there to look at? I think it is possible to look at your own looking, to see yourself see.� Like In Plato’s cave.

Image of the author Turrell, J. (2019). Piz Uter Zuoz

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The Skyspace summarizes, in its structure and functioning, the configuration of a visual organ, which now turns its gaze to the sky and yet, in this “looking space” we are also observers, paradoxically intent on looking outside and inside us. It is liminal experience, where the limit is constituted in a phenomenology of time to see, a time that, little by little, will end up building the place as such.

G. Didi-Huberman, the Fable of Place.

“The true borderline character of the work is due to the fact that its place fluctuates or transits between our awareness of the built space, which we penetrate, and our oblivion of the place-chora, where a significant part of our existence is found and stirs in our dreams.”

The border experiences provided by his art relate to our experience of the planet and the universe; they inspire personal sensation of physical and mental expansion. The distant and alien spirituality of archaic cultures is given a contemporary, sensual spin. The artist believes “in the need and thought of spiritual sensibilities it dimensions beyond us”.

It is at this point, when profoundly shaken, we leave the mysterious, evocative site and climb back down in the darkness. The memory of the light and a host of thoughts resonate long afterwards, overlaying the searing brightness of daily life.

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