/ MANIFESTO
/ DEFINING MY APPROARCH TO ARCHITECTURE
VIRGINIA SANTILLI /
/ MANIFESTO
/ DEFINING MY APPROARCH TO ARCHITECTURE VIRGINIA SANTILLI /
/ ROLES OF THE ARCHITECT / TU DELFT / TUTOR: HANS TEERDS
FINAL ESSAY / 27TH MARCH 2018 /
I envisioned this manifesto to define my position towards architecture as the introduction to the research essay of my graduation project. The structure of the following narration is inspired by Bergson’s “Matière et mémoire” and reflects my fascination of mixing literary narration and concise scientific assertations.
Brief introduction to the project / The suburban commons In the last decades, architects and urbanists observed carefully the effect of globalization on the city, but the effect on the countryside has been neglected. The suburban shopping mall became the main attractor, both commercially and socially. For the new generations that normalized the dichotomy of common space and the need to buy, this world interior of capital became the new centrality of the diffuse city. The research starts by redefining the genealogy of the città diffusa. Departing from Francesco Indovina and Bernardo Secchi’s theories about the Italian dispersed city, it slowly distances itself from them, amplifying the relevance of the Marshall Plan funds to Europe after the Second World War and individuating a European commonality in the development of this kind of areas. At the same time, observing the territory through the way it is lived and its institutions, the research overturns the idea of a project of isotropy for this area claiming a strong need for a centre sought by its populace.1 In a first phase the economic,
The project of isotropy is how Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò defined their project for the Italian dispersed city. 1
political, social and morphological processes on the territory, the Italian dispersed city in Veneto region, have been studied. The second phase, the phase of observation of the present condition, the approach to the project as a collective project has been carried out. Interviews to community, institutions, farmers, entrepreneurs and industrialists showed clearly the needs and the future evolution of all the elements of the territory. Moreover, a careful observation of the site in all its components has been carried out. When a solid general vision for the territory was defined, the research moved to the articulation of future scenarios for the cittĂ diffusa through the microstories.
FARMER
/ LIST OF PHASES
Architecture from contamination Architecture through observation Architecture as narration
/ LIST OF ASSERTATIONS
ARCHITECTURE FROM CONTAMINATION 1.1
The territory is made by different geographies
1.2
The study of the territory reaches its highest point when contaminated with other disciplines
1.3
Connecting disciplines is the main capability of the architect as intellectual
1.4
The power of architecture from contamination and mediation
ARCHITECTURE THROUGH OBSERVATION 2.1
Each research starts trough observation
2.2
The architectural project demands contextuality
2.3
Architectural design as a collective project
2.4
The fallacy of over-specialization
ARCHITECTURE AS NARRATION 3.1
The need for narration
3.2
The project as a form of narration
3.3
The refuse of strict planning for the contemporary project
3.4
The flexibility of narration leaves space for appropriation
/ MICROSTORIES / BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARCHITECTURE FROM CONTAMINATION It fascinates me to look at the territory as a set of geographies that intertwine with each other. As it is an extremely complex system, to be able to analyze thoroughly the territory, it is necessary to dissect it and then to reconnect the several elements of the same narration. Each of these narrations I name it geography. There is a geological geography that concerns the history of the physical, chemical and biological changes of the territory. There is an environmental geography that analyses the condition of external factors such as air, water, minerals at any time. Man-made geographies also represent a layer of the territory such as the built environment or a semiotic geography. Nevertheless, there is a set of geographies that does not strictly concern the physical space, as a human geography or a cultural geography. In this view, the key difference is that the territory is a priori of a cultural or aesthetic judgment, whilst the geography is made subjective through the eye of the observer. The territory is made by different geographies.2
The study of the built environment was born as a retrospective discipline towards the action of This key of interpretation of the territory arose during a conversation with architect Fabrizio Barozzi in 2013.
2
building and comes from the convergence of different disciplines together. In De Architectura by Vitruvius (I Century B.C.), the author defines the role and the profession of the architect and states that it is necessary to have notions on geometry, mathematics, medicine, anatomy, optics, law, theology and astronomy. The treatise itself wouldn’t have been written without the careful observation of the existing architecture and the study of the above-mentioned disciplines. In the same way, urbanism is rooted in other disciplines: topography, military science, geology, economy, sociology. The study of the territory requires the ability to manage complexity and to comprehend the different geographies (see 1.1). Especially since the current education of architecture and urbanism is increasingly specializing into branches and sub-professions, it is fundamental for me to reclaim the importance of its transdisciplinarity. The study of the territory reaches its highest point when contaminated with other disciplines.
The disciplines and geographies involved in the morphology of the territory state its complexity. It is clear that the capability of who studies the territory is complete when is able to gather knowledge from other disciplines. Therefore the capability to manage this complexity of cities and territories comes from the ability to make links between these different disciplines. Understanding
the different geographies of the territory allows who studies it to consider it as a whole. I reckon that the difference between the architect and the engineer lays in the capability of the architect in making connections, in having a broad, complete view of the territory to, then, develop the project. Figures as American urban theorist Jane Jacobs and Italian urban designer Bernardo Secchi are examples of this attitude that can bridge different disciplines and very different scales. Connecting disciplines is the main capability of the architect as intellectual.
Connecting different disciplines also implies connecting different visions and create a mediation between them. At the moment the architectural project is generated from a transdisciplinary mediation space assumes another layer of interpretation and meaning. This process is often intrinsic in the process of architecture due to the mediation between client and designer. Exactly in the moments when this transdisciplinary fields clash and the line between designers and commissioners blurs, space takes on an aura of potential poetics. A good example of it took place at the end of 1930s when architect Adalberto Libera engages a fertile and clashing dialogue with patron Curzio Malaparte for the design of a villa on a promontory overlooking the sea of Capri. It is not certain whether the Italian
writer and intellectual overcame the decision of Libera or if the architect eventually accepted the critiques of Malaparte to the initial project and cooperated until the end of the construction, nevertheless it is evident that one of the most charming and famous villas of the XX Century was the result of a process of collaborative design. The power of architecture from contamination and mediation.
ARCHITECTURE THROUGH OBSERVATION “We get out at the fourteenth floor; this floor is really there. It is in Sheffield, the entry to another School of Architecture. […] But there is a problem here as well because that ascendancy also signals literal and symbolic detachment. We look down at the city below and, at this distance, command it as an abstraction. The voices of people are lost; we just observe their functions. Buildings are reduced to form, roads to flows of traffic. Noises are measured, not listened to. Shapes are classified by type, not sensuously enjoyed”.3 As Jeremy Till denounces in “Architecture Depends”, architectural education is, in its Western modern paradigm, isolated from
Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 2009, p.7 3
reality. Secured in its monumental buildings, often in campuses outside the city, students look through books and websites previous example of architectural masters, but lack to understand the life of buildings in the everyday life, after the first perfect photoshoot. This entails an increasing number of projects conceived for one or two nice images, but no attention to the experience of the building, the materiality of it the sounds, the smells and other sensorial perception excluding the sight.4 At the same time, often, no contingency of the everyday life and unpredictability of reality has been taken into account in the design phase for a long time. Sparkles of reaction to this approach can be seen today, but I would say that it is still the leading doctrine. I believe that the phase of observation of the territory, the people and the environment is a fundamental phase of the research and constantly need to be recalled to the development of a project. For instance, the way space is appropriated by its users and by the environment itself is central to the formulation of any architectural project. Each research starts with observation.
As Pallaasma states, the strong ocularcentric tradition has always existed in Western thinking, but I would speculate that it increased because of the late manner of architectural education. 4
If the observation of space is the starting point of architectural research, the observation of a definite space (or series of spaces) is the starting point of the architectural project. From the most utopian project to the most pragmatic one, there is always a context to relate or depend on. The idea of context has many different facets, it can be a physical context as well as socioeconomic context, a political context and so on. In my project I started by having as a context a socio-economic condition (the arrival of Marshall Plan funds to European countries after the destruction of the Second World War), then I studied how this condition affected certain portions of the territory (suburban area that was rapidly urbanized in that time frame) and finally I carefully observed how one of this series of spaces has been since then, how it is today and how is going to be in 50 years. An architectural project would have been possible to be done at any of these three stages with a different degree of specificity but the same extent of contextuality. Sometimes architecture is defined careful to the context when only based on the morphological context of the space surrounding the project. The meaning I give to contextuality is deeper than this attitude and it is the result from the first phase “architecture from contamination” (the study of the multidisciplinary layers that influence reality) and “architecture through observation” (the genealogy of the project as a result of a
careful observation of reality). Contextuality involves the way people use space, the way the different geographies of the territory come together ( 1.1) and the way different scales overlay in the same space. When all these variables are observed, in my opinion, the project can consciously start to come to life. The architectural project demands contextuality.
For the architect as intellectual, the act of connecting disciplines and the observation of the territory keeps his subjectivity as a filter to look at reality. Nevertheless, this subjectivity is a lens to focus on the object observed and not blind authoriality. The architect embodies the role of the observer.5 This observation is a constant exchange with the reality observed. Interviews are perhaps the main tool and show how the observation is never self-referential, but in a constant exchange. The architect works for the In the previous draft I used the term “reader”, that I now substitute with the term “observer” to differentiate it from the meaning that Elizabeth Keslacy gives concerning the use of gaming techniques in the article Fun and Games: The Suppression of Architectural Authoriality and the Rise of the Reader. The role of the designer in my view is akin to Keslacy’s, but the tools are different. KESLACY, Elizabeth. Fun and Games: The Suppression of Architectural Authoriality and the Rise of the Reader. FOOTPRINT, [S.l.], p. 101-124, dec. 2015 5
society and uses its capability to connect discipline and to observe to develop the project. Nevertheless, the project, because of its development through the observation and exchange, is not an individual activity but a shared gesture with and for the actors of the territory. In the last decade, due to an increasing awareness of this matter and the increasing experimentation on bottom-up projects, few urbanist and architects started taking into greater account the phase of approach to the site. Projects as Play The City show how the participation of the different actors in the project is so important that needs special capabilities and tools to become a specialization itself. Through the act of playing, entrepreneurs, developers, citizens, contractors, investors, institutions and other actors involved in the process of new projects come together to imagine future scenarios for the city and the territory. Even though Play The City uses a very specific tool, the strategy and vision of architecture as a collective project can be pursued in other ways and should be aimed by practices. Architectural design as a collective project.
All disciplines are increasingly specializing and architects and urban planners are looking at the project site with a zoomed-in lens. As I already stated, I firmly believe in the intellectual role of the architect. I reckon that the difference
between the architect and the engineer lays in the capability of the architect in making connections, in having a broad, complete view of the territory. It lays in the economic and social understanding of the area and in the use of design as a political tool. Examples as Play The City are extremely relevant because they show new strategies for valuable approaches, but I reckon that practices should use the same care for the territory and its actors in each project. I firmly believe that at the moment knowledge is becoming so specifically divided into sectors, the value lays in the capability of connecting and observing knowledge. The fallacy of over-specialization.
ARCHITECTURE AS NARRATION “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences”.6 In the first half of 1930s, Walter Benjamin focuses on the theme of experience and the connection between BENJAMIN, Walter, Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows, in: Orient und Occident, 1936, introduction 6
experience and narration. According to him the collective trauma of the First World War led to the impossibility to make experience.7 Consequently, the crisis of experience causes and involves the crisis of narrating. Decades after, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben resumes Benjamin’s theory on the experience and links it to the end of the Twentieth Century.8 He states that contemporary human is incapable to make experience, not anymore because of a collective void as the First World War for Benjamin, but due to the modern overexposure of information that we are witnessing today.9 “Standing face to face with one of the great wonders of the world (let us say the patio de los leones in the Alhambra), the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should”.10 The overexposure of stimuli Agamben writes about is even more actual today and it 7 BENJAMIN, Walter, Experience and poverty in Selected Writings: Volume 2, part 2, 1931- 1934, Boston, Harvard University Press, 2005 8 AGAMBEN, Giorgio, Infancy and history. On the destruction of experience, Verso publications, London, 2006 9 I wrote about this parallel between “black and white blindness”, linking Benjamin’s and Agamben’s theories on experience through the words of Portuguese writer José Saramago, in my theory thesis at TU Delft in Spring 2017. https://www.academia.edu/36069382/Of_architecture_and_e xperience (accessed, 22-03-2018) 10 AGAMBEN, op. cit., p. 15
deeply affects the way people experience space in their everyday life. If Benjamin already said that “architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by the collectivity in a state of distraction”, today this distraction is amplified by the overwhelmed amount of inputs we receive from the world.11 Consequently to the incapability of making experience reaches its peak the lack of narration. The need for narration.
I would speculate that this lack of narration affects the architectural field in the way the project is thought. The necessity and the rapidity to give a quick spatial answer that focuses on the aesthetic paradigm rather that the analysis of the territory is to me one of the main issues today in architecture. This problem comes along with the impossibility of the architect and urbanist to imagine and narrate future scenarios. The quote from Benjamin’s “Storyteller” in the previous paragraph can be easily applied to architectural design today. I reckon that our generation largely lacks the capability to imagine the evolution of everyday life in 10, 20, 50 years and are satisfied by rendering a new building into the present way of living. On the contrary, I reckon that the aim of the architecture project is to BENJAMIN, Walter, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, London, Penguin books, p. 239 11
shape the change of how the city and the territory will be lived and the imaginative power of the architect is the main tool for this. In my project, the main output of the research phase has been imagining how future life will shape the territory and, at the same time, how an architectural intervention can play a role in the transformation of everyday life. A series of microstories has been imagined to envision the change of space and society. The first part of the project itself lies in the capability to narrate the future. The project as a form of narration.
Envisioning the project through microstories forces the architect to reach a great level of detail to reflect on everyday elements of the future way of living without the necessity of forcing the strictness of planning. It allows to understand which are the critical points and the improvement to be made that will influence the transition between present and future, but it leaves rooms to the uncertainty of reality and freedom of users. A traditional, comprehensive urban masterplan as it was done until a decade ago would result completely anachronistic today. This is why it is necessary to read, to study and to translate the territory in a much deeper way to find out the crucial points to intervene on wisely. First of all, because the public economic resources are not enough anymore for great
interventions and architectural intervention are now often related to the metaphor of acupuncture. Secondly, because the world is changing so fast (politically, culturally and economically) since the great development of telecommunications on that a large, “definitive� intervention may risk to result obsolete within the time it is finished. Lastly, because contemporary architecture learned from modernism and post-modernism that a top-down approach only isolates our discipline away from its users and that a project is successful not only according to its mere aesthetics, but also to its capability to be appropriated and used by people. The refuse of strict planning for the contemporary project.
The narration as a tool to design and to envision future scenarios is connected with the need for the architect to observe and be on the field. The idea of the architectural project as a collective project (ďƒ 2.3) does not only apply to the observation phase of the design, but also to while envisioning future scenarios and formulating the project itself. This takes place when the architect does not dictate how to live and how to act to the future users of the project but leaves room for the unpredictability of the appropriation. Nevertheless, it is important to underline that the act of leaving space for appropriation does not mean giving away a part of
your responsibility as an architect, but accepting the contingency of real world. Microstories always carry an element of exemplification of the uncertain that remains flexible, differently from a masterplan. The flexibility of narration leaves space for appropriation.
/ MICROSTORIES Few examples from the project
WHEN THE EXTERIOR BECOMES INTERIOR /
FUTURE COMMERCIAL FABRIC /
FARMER
WORK IS WHERE THE WIFI IS /
LOCAL FARMERS FOR LOCAL CONSUMERS /
HOLIDAYS ON THE DIFFUSE TERRITORY /
CAMPOSAMPIERO TO PADUA
PROMINENCE OF THE HEALTHCARE CENTRE /
COMMUTERS AND TRANSPORTATION /
AGEING IN THE DIFFUSE TERRITORY /
BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKERMAN, James S., Architectural practice in the Italian Renaissance, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol 13, n. 3 (1954), pp. 3-11 AGAMBEN, Giorgio, Infancy and history. On the destruction of experience, Verso publications, London, 2006 AVERMAETE, Tom and TEERDS, Hans, The Roles of the Architect: Toward a Theory of Practice, in Lexicon n.1, On the Role of the Architect, edited by Salomon Frausto, The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, 2016 BENJAMIN, Walter, Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows, in: Orient und Occident, 1936 BENJAMIN, Walter, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, London, Penguin books BENJAMIN, Walter, Experience and poverty in Selected Writings: Volume 2, part 2, 1931- 1934, Boston, Harvard University Press, 2005 BORASI, Giovanna, The other architect, Spector Books & Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016 DOUCET, Isabelle and CUPERS, Kenny, Agency in architecture: Reframing criticality in theory and practice, in Footprint #3 (2009), pp. 1-6
DOUCET, Isabelle, Counter-projects and the Postmodern User, in Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, edited by Kenny Cupers, London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 233 – 247 GECAN, Michael, Going public. An organizer’s guide to citizen action, Penguin books, 2004 HIRSCH, Alison, Facilitation and/or Manipulation? Lawrence Halprin and ‘Taking Part’, Landscape Journal, January 1, 2012 vol. 31 no. 1-2, 117 – 134 JACOBS, Jane, The economy of cities, Vintage books, 2016 KESLACY, Elizabeth. Fun and Games: The Suppression of Architectural Authoriality and the Rise of the Reader. FOOTPRINT, [S.l.], p. 101-124, dec. 2015 MUSCHAMP, Hebert, An Idea of Architecture, an Architecture of Ideas, in The New York Times, 18 June 2000 SASSEN, Saskia, The Global City, Princeton University Press, 2011 SENNETT, Richard, Together, Penguin books, 2013 SENNETT, Richard, lecture The open city at Harvard Graduate School of Design, 23 October 2017. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PoRrVqJFQ&t=1152s (accessed 13-12-2017)
SECCHI, Bernardo, La cittĂ nel ventesimo secolo, Laterza, 2008 SOHN, Heidi, KOUSOULAS, Stavros, BRUYNS, Gerhard, Commoning as Differentiated Publicness, in Footprint #16 (2015), pp. 1-8 TILL, Jeremy, Architecture depends, MIT Press, 2013
ROLES OF THE ARCHITECT / VIRGINIA SANTILLI /