Osmosis inside outside in between
On the cover: artwork by Ugo La Pietra, from the installation “Interno Esterno� at the Triennale di Milano, 1979
ARCHITECTURAL THEORY AND PRACTICES Politecnico di Milano School of Architecture and Society – Master Degree in Architecture Academic Year 2016-17 Professor: Prof. Arch. Ivo Ivica Covic Tutor: Nicola Petaccia with Jacopo Reale, Claudia Scaravaggi, Mehdi Zaiani
GROUP NUMBER 32 Student: ALICE CAMILLA / MARIANI Student: OLIVIERO / MARTINI Student: SERENA / MILANESI Student: SIMONE / NASELLI Student: ARCHAG / TOGRAMAJIAN Student: LORENZO / ZUCCHINALI
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Table of content 7-8
Abstract
11-14
Critical Paper
17-20
Theoretical Definition/s
23-24
Design Strategy
27-73
Design Theory
75-83
Design Practice
87-158
Research Scrapbook
161-163
References and Bibliography
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Abstract
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The architectural pratice involves the definition of the inside and the outside of the construction. The relation between the two dimensions can occur at the diaphragm of architecture. This study examines the relation that occurs between the interior, the in between and the exterior space of architecture. After discussing this relation in the work of three architects of the modern and post-modern movement, the survey proposes a story of today’s experience of architecture as a masked interior due to the massive use of artificial facades. The research is supported by the analysis of theoretical texts and definitions. Some belong to the design theories of the three architects, while others are the result of the group’s discussion regard to the theme. Moreover the initial theorization moves to the production of five models that provide the research a physical representation of the explored theories. At the end of this work it is added the research scrapbook that provides the lecturer of the main texts evaluated. The conclusion can be drawn that contemporary architecture is obsessed in the design of the in between rather than a clear analysis of the interior. In the current world this in between is mostly recognized in the element of the facade . In its process of osmosis among the inside and the outside space, the facade is able to reveal the interiors in the exteriors and is organized through a complex system of transitions in spacial and technic term. The relation among the interior and the exterior of the building is now hybrid, indefinite ; it is an osmosis that produces fictious facades.
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Critical Paper
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Architecture always owns an inside and out, an interior and exterior. Every dimension recalls immediately its opposite and one can’t exist without the other. The limit between the inside and the outside carries with it the concept of threshold, window and facade that determine physical and spacial change in a building. Architects have often overturned the relation among the inside and the outside in their design theories. In the 20th century the Modern Movement imposed to architecture the dogma of continuity between the two dimensions. Later on Postmodernism overturned this pursuit of cohesion by replacing it with divergent approaches. Early rejection of Modernism came in the 1960s most notably in the USA in the work of Robert Venturi and in Europe in that of Aldo Rossi. The influence of their theses had enormous effects on the formation of the architects of those years. Rossi lectured at the ETH of Zurich in the 1970’s and trained a prestigious group of architects that includes Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, in parallel the example of Venturi was introduced to Rossi’s studio by his assistants, who had an affection for American culture. The work of Rossi, Venturi and Herzog & de Meuron stands out from the architectural discourse as a compelling result of independent approaches toward the theme of the relation between the inside and the outside of an architecture. Robert Venturi’s (1925-) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) expresses the necessity of the architect for contradiction in architecture. Designing from the outside in, as well as the inside out, creates necessary tensions, which help make architecture. […] Architecture occurs at the meeting of interior and exterior forces of use and space (Venturi 1966). Venturi outlines his approach highlighting those architectures that work as a decorated shed. The shed refers to a structure governed by the program; the ornament is applied only independently. The Guild House (1963) designed by Venturi and Rauch is the major example of the architecture of the decorated shed. The contradiction resides in the decoration of the facade of the construction, which is not an expression of the internal space, by denying it in a symbolic way. On the top of the facade is present a continuous strip of white bricks that together with the bottom white wall divides the building in three different parts. This design contradicts the equal and internal six floors and recalls the proportions of a reinassance building. Critics have always considered Aldo Rossi (19311997) as the architect of the city. Indeed is mostly
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absent an exhaustive dissertation around Rossi’s architecture of interiors. This lack is to be found in the apathy of the architect concerning the design research of the interiors. The architecture appears completely empty; instead is full of emptiness. In Rossi’s works, this sense of desolation is the custodian of a space full of opportunities and stories. The spacial organization of the inside is intentionally to be commissioned to the future user, who stands as the perfect representative to generate a domestic and private interior. The inside is waiting to be inhabited by the memory and the life of the user and is autonomous from the outside that only stands as a scenography for the city. According to the vision of Jacques Herzog (1950) and Pierre de Meuron (1950), the surfaces of a building should always be linked to what happens in their own interior. How this relationship is materialized is a deal of the architect (Gabriella Lo Ricco 2011). Herzog & de Meuron quest for a neutral space, where the building has to be the formal result of its constructive logic and the interior is the direct consequence of the exterior and expression of the construction. Therefore, in the early architectures there is a connection between the inside and the outside, governed by simple and archaic forms. The Ricola Marketing Building (1999) is generally recognized as the manifesto of Herzog & de Meuron’s design theory. The building […] is an architecture that arises from a construction where form is an expression of logic and the space that the walls enclose - the simplest of rectangles - is neutral (Moneo 2004). Architecture is a celebration of matter, and form is the vehicle that makes it possible. The architects give importance to the construction through a research of new ways to use materials to communicate. Afterwards the approach of the two Swiss architects makes a turning point. The field of action is limited to the control of the facades and the materials are now used only to the definition of the skin. The structure is gone. In this manner architecture earns a double relation between the interior and the exterior; whether it stands as a diaphragm, a filter, or as a total separation among the inside and the outside. Architecture today appears interested only in the external skin, forcing the project to dismiss the relation that occurs between the inside and the outside. The contemporary city reveals itself as a text; architecture is displayed in its façade and it becomes liquid and immaterial. We believe that this event is the outcome of the continuous evolution of the consumer market and of the phenomenon of an increasingly world
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of specialized figures (architect, interior architect, landscape architect, designer, designer of the interior, urban planner,…). While searching for glory within a rapid and continuous evolution of the economy, the architect appear eager to state his own trademark, through formal aesthetics of the building and its shell. As Jean Louis Cohen summarized in his book: “The widespread search for singular and ‘original’ forms has led to the creation of generic spaces that are certainly more elaborated than those of earlier standardized housing projects and business centres, but equally banal, as the justaxposition of too many singular, provocative, forms produces in the end an effect of boredom.” The Future of Architecture (London: Phaidon Press, 2012) As a third dimension, a skin between the muscolar content of the interior of the building. The osmosis is a process that happens among the inside and the outside space and causes the facade to reveal the interiors in the exteriors or to close completely the architecture. The facade becomes a fictious, fallacious and ephemeral face of the architectural manufact.
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Theoretical definitions
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Autonomy Freedom from external control or influence; independence. Communication “Communication governs the space as a fundamental element in architecture and landscape” Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour. “We will focus on the image to declare that architecture bases itself on past experiences and on emotional relations, and that these symbolic elements may be often in contradiction with shape, structure and program.” Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. 30, 122. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972. Connection The action of linking one thing with another. Context Genius loci. Totality of the social, architectural and economical charachteristics that define a place, an environment, a city. It indicates the character of a location. Continuity The unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over time, state of stability and the absence of disruption. Contradiction “(..) architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, [...], are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable. [...] I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties.” Complexity and contradiction in architecture. 16. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966. Diaphragm A device that is forming a partition.
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Decorated shed “Là dove sistemi di spazio e struttura sono direttamente al servizio del programma e la decorazione è applicata indipendentemente da questi.” Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. 119. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972. Experience Practical contact with and observation of facts or events. Façade “A metonym for architecture as a whole, the façade is the element most invested with political and cultural meaning. Hence the rise of “facadism”, the focus on the façade to the detriment of the rest. The façade is also one of the few remaining elements that has not been forgotten by architects - yet most now lack the competence to design the increasingly complex details demanded by contemporary façades.” Koolhaas, AMO, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. Elements. Facade. 1. Marsilio, 2014. Interior Exterior The external beauty borns from a different source than the one of the internal. [...] But the internal beauty borns from the growth of the consciousness that you took with you thousand times. Together they match in your individuality. Indeed it is not true that the exterior will be a reflection of the interior and viceversa. Osho.com. “Chapter 27: Crossianity”. Accessed November 25, 2016. http://www.osho.com/iosho/library/readbook/online-library-outer-inner-beauty-body627e94f8-fb7?p=ac16db43a99efa289200e06 9e4b4ce31. Limit “The concept of limit carries with it that of threshold. (...) The threshold determines physical and temporal change and imposes the transfer and the crossing over the limit between inside and outside.” Antonello Boschi. Fenomenologia della facciata. 31. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2010.
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Mask What is evident. Exterior device applied on architectue, that becomes a scenographic wing. The mask appear to be wheter an expression of the interiors or a free and conflictual connotation of the outside. Metaphor A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. Ornament Decoration added to embellish something: ‘Gothic buildings notable for their finely detailed ornament’. Shell Any of various objects resembling such a covering, as in shape or in being more or less concave or hollow Tension A relationship between ideas or qualities with conflicting demands or implications. Trasparency Easy to perseve or to detect. It refers to a material that allows light to pass through so that objects behind can be distincly seen.
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Design Strategy
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Design Theory
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Intro From the beginning man had the necessity to shut himself in a diverged environment from the wild one, represented by nature. The primary purpose was to build a shelter to protect from physical and environmental threats. This, as far as the primitive era, was the first sign of how man has decided to relate to the surrounding environment. Temporally following, the most valid example is the Greek temple, in which, the “naos” (the cell that housed the statue of the deity) was preceded by an environmental filter, generated by the extension of the long side walls of the cell (naos) able to constitute the so-called “ante” (antae) laterally delimiting the portico (pronaos); this primitive type was precisely called “in antis”, just for the extension given by the cell doors. The way the Greeks discovered to relate the holy building, the most important place for them, with the surrounding environment, through the usage of a filter (portico and colonnade) can make it clear how much ancestral is the need to maintain a certain degree of separation from what we consider exterior, however not completely opposing to it, but maintaining a contact albeit filtered. Nature, context and the environment which surround us, appear to be in any case a recall and a hidden need for the man, and the need to maintain a dialogue with them, a certain type of relationship, will be the perennial.
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Greek Temple
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Three different shades In the article, Architecture and Landscape: Three Modes of Relationship, author Reuben Rainey describes the three ways that architecture and landscape can relate to one another. The three modes of relationship are contrast, merger, and reciprocity. Contrast is the term used to juxtapose the building against the natural landscape. A building will use the scale, profile, materials, and color to create a powerful counterpoint to the area immediately around it. A great example of this idea is Central Park in New York. Its meandering pathways and lush natural areas create a nice juxtaposition from the surrounding buildings. The opposite of contrast then is merger. In this case a building is meant to blend in seamlessly with the surrounding landscape. This creates an interesting play between what it means to blend as the very act of building on a space means that it is no longer natural. Merger becomes much easier when the surrounding landscape can be interpreted to a larger degree. Oftentimes when designing with merger in mind, we should design for what people think of nature as in the region. Much of Frank Lloyd Wright’s works, like Taliesin West or Falling Water, are great examples of merger. Reciprocity might be the most commonly used of the three relationships. It states that the building and the landscape should play off of, and influence one another. Building and landscape are thus both modifiers of one another. This may involve a less subtle approach of tying the building plan into these outdoor spaces, or a very subtle approach of designing a floor plan that involves organizing elements of the nearby outdoor spaces. Example for this method date all the way back to grand gardens like Villa D’este. This reciprocity can be seen for human’s long love of locating homes on the edges of grand, pastoral landscapes . This short article that sums up clearly the ways in which architects can create or delete a connection between the interior and exterior of an artifact, made it necessary and automatic the deepening of the “filter” as topic. An element, useful to mediate between the outside and the inside, able to make these two fields dealing, placing them in continuity, or to interpose between the two, eliminating any type of relationship. In this chapter, however, we want to stress on all those elements of which architecture is made of, physical and not, able to relate the internal space with the external one. The theme of “border” or “frame”, which delimits the filter space between the reality of the private internal space from the public outside one, will be treated.
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Giardini Villa d’Este, Cernobbio
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Frames and borders The need to enclose natural open space to create an artificial closed haven is at the origins of architecture. The form and structure of boundaries are parts of the language of architecture and determines the type of relationship established between the inside and the inside. This depends on what technical possibilities were available at different moments in time and on the relationship that needs to be created between man and space. Windows, openings, holes, transparent or translucent surfaces, dormers and skylights are among the main functional and expressive ways in which architecture establishes communication and creates links between interiors and exteriors, and produces its spatial concepts and its language. The coherence of the boundary is thus crucial in forming and configuring space, and attempts to strengthen this perimeter or remove altogether this contact between interior and exterior have occurred frequently throughout history. From the Egyptian pyramid, the most concrete expression of moldable, enclosed space, to the Farnsworth House by Mies, the prime example of the breaking down of boundaries between the inside and outside, the history of architecture supplies us with innumerable instances of different ways of separating open from closed space.
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Out-of-field references Window have been the symbol of the relationship between inside and outside, not only in real life but also in literature, art and cinematography, an endless source of inspiration, because it is the visual field that frames and excludes, frame that opens itself up to perception or which closes itself to the outside world. Dear theme to the Impressionism, the window was intended from Degas to Matisse as a vantage point from which the city-show can be observed, by participating in the street life. It was also a place through which people could be seen by focusing attention inside, as a secular bourgeois theme; an architectural landscape in which the private environment and intimacy are revealed. Schiele Expressionism, who paints a wall completely covered of windows, highlighted a voyeuristic tension, the passion for looking, for the way to obsessively look at something, that becomes a symbol of separation from the world. Boccioni Futurism, that represents the speed and dynamism of the city through an aerial view, a symbol of man’s power to dominate and control the world around him until getting to a melancholic realism by Edward Hopper, who represents in his portraits the loneliness of contemporary American life, through glimpses in which he classifies almost aseptically his characters, usually in moments of privacy, quietness, intimacy of the day. While painting is full of optical clippings filtering the reality of the outside world from the private internal one, almost an analysis of human consciences, even the filmography, some years later, offers us numerous examples, telling us about the influence that openings have on people’s life. Some of these movies are “Rear Window” by Hitchcock, where the photojournalist Jeff, forced to immobility because of a broken leg, spends time spying with a telephoto his vis-à-vis neighbors, but also “ A special day “by Scola and “Facing Windows” by Ferzan Ozpetek representing the look that becomes a real daydream. In the literary field other examples are certainly not lacking: if in Flaubert opinion the window is a synonymous of the unlivable and suffocating middle-class house, in Baudelaire, the closed windows reveal a deeper, mysterious and fruitful world, which is announced through the dazzling light of a candle at night.
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Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning 1950
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Openings are in fact not only places where to look and communicate; they allow us to create bond with light and air. Our well-being today is regulated by housing standards that determine the minimal acceptable amount, but something more than health issues is involved in the relation between open and filled spaces: colours, shapes, textures, the amount of light and darkness in the surroundings, even smells depend on the size and shape of openings, and they create feelings and sensations in turn. The way in which light infiltrates into buildings is also of crucial importance. In the case of some architectural genres, such as museums and sacred buildings, light (and shadow) is in fact one the most important elements in the construction of space, for technical reasons of visibility for the artworks in the case of museums galleries, and for symbolic and iconographic purposes in the case of religious buildings. Gothic cathedrals were the first to completely eliminate dividing walls, beginning the process of opening up wide surfaces bathed in light which are a central feature of modern architecture. Today windows do not merely frame the external world and filter the light; they protect us from the weather and from noise. Their shape and size is no longer dependent on technical constraints in their construction, because the 19th century technological improvements in concrete, iron and glass have allowed us to make enormous openings in walls, but, once health concerns have been satisfied, their form depends almost exclusively on what interpretation of space one wishes to offer, and on the expressive meaning one wants to impart. Modernity has thus brought a radical change to the relationship between the interior and the exterior, because it has caused empty space to take predominance over filled space, and has favored the construction of great surfaces of glass. Starting from the visionary interpretation of Scheerbart and the mythical treatise by Le Corbusier, architecture tests new relationships between inside and outside, made possible by new construction techniques. Here comes Mies who not only gets rid of the window, but the very concept of the wall. Reasoning by planes, he produces weightless buildings, without full, almost two-dimensional, but not devoid of fascinating spatial values. The aim is to extend spaces, abolishing limits, repealing the windows as the limits of the field of view. The architectural language is distorted, because it subverts the traditional relationship not only between full and empty, but between light and shadow. The glass completely realizes that interpenetration between inside and outside which is also one of the
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Mies van der Rohe, Model for “Second Scheme for a Glass Skyscraper� (Unbuilt), 1922
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fundamental themes of the contemporary architecture. When Gio Ponti wrote in 1957 “ Amate l’architettura”, he already perfectly understood what will be the path of architecture from modernity to contemporary: “ Una volta il rapporto tra muro e finestra si definiva “vuoto e pieno”: pieno perché il muro era un solido, vuoto perché le finestre erano un buco. E nel volume chiuso, il pieno prevaleva sempre sul vuoto […], oggi il muro non è più un vero muro, un solido, un pieno: è una superficie; è un rivestimento sopra uno scheletro di cemento armato, o di ferro, (un vuoto): la finestra è portata avanti sul filo esterno, non è più fonda, e si è fatta grande, prevalente […]. Con la finestra a filo […] il buco, il vuoto, è scomparso, esiste un piano solo e solo il pieno, l’architettura è solo pieno, volume integrale: e l’architettura è un cristallo, qua opaco e la trasparente. Il volume non è più forato. Al rapporto vuoto e pieno è sostituito il rapporto opaco e trasparente”. Ponti G., Amate l’architettura. L’architettura è un cristallo, Vitali e Ghianda, Genova, 1957, pp. 139 e 140. Gyorgy Kepes in “The language of vision” gives the definition of transparency about two figures overlapping into a work of art, namely transparency meant as simultaneous perception of different spatial situations. Rowe defines this condition as “phenomenal” to differentiate it from the most famous and classical transparency which stands out as literal transparency. A concert of transparency, therefore, totally different from any physical quality of reality. In this definition transparency ceases to be what it is perfectly clear to become, however, what it is clearly ambiguous. Phenomenal transparency, being a property related to spatial organization, will move and therefore more ambiguous and fluctuating, is more interesting. In this case, optical interpenetration between different areas is realized, between inside and outside, which will not necessarily be visible on the facade. Indeed, these games may even be contradictory to it. This stratification of vertical planes creates a dialectic between reality and implied spaciality and, because of this tension, several readings from the work and different interpretations get opened. This reading of Colin Rowe seems to be regarded as emblematic concerning the shift from mechanical universe of modernity to the material one of the post-industrial age. The architectural path from the industrial era to the computer one is, as Franco Purini writes, “a shift from matte to glossy”. In modernity the image postpones the use, while nowadays prevails the symbolic and abstract enjoyment of the building.
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Herzog & de Meuron, Library - Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus, Germany, 2005
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In some cases, the structural frame by Terragni and the concept of multidimensionality in the research of Cattaneo, for example, leads to the exclusion of the key sequence from the inside to the outside of the “cardboard houses” by Eisemann, since they are investigations on the concept of “deep structure” and neo-rational language exercises that explore the nature and meaning of form in architecture. These games about key sequences, about the visuals and the field’s depth, open the way to a wide range of contemporary architectures, that play on textures, on light as a material for the project. The progressive dematerialization of architecture thus continues the research of complexity, ambiguity, optical interpretation that opens different linguistic interpretations and different relationships between the interior and exterior of the building. The increasing downward pressure on the walls of architecture that abandons a representation of the wall and opaque façade to tend to the two-dimensionality of transparent envelope or transmitting screen, led in general to a protagonism of skins, condemning volumes to an inevitable superficiality. Rem Koolhaas helped to clarify this leading role in contemporary architecture, noting that, after the 90s , an explosion of scale previously unimaginable in Europe occurred, where history has still a very important role. From the compositional process theorized in Le Corbusier’s five points, the split between containing and content has continued to progress until almost the end of the Empire in favor of the prevalence of the Interior mainly as a place of action event. As Koolhaas says the extra large size reached by contemporary buildings further accentuate the non-coincidence between inside and outside, because the distance that exists between the perimeter of its skin and its center becomes so great that the envelope is not even able to hope to reveal something on the inside of the building. Interior and exterior thus become two separate projects. A final consideration must be done on the issue of the openings for the architecture of Steven Holl, because there is no contemporary architect who has thought more on the relationship between inside and outside than him. “Architecture is also the result of experience with place. The site of a building is not a simple component of his conception; it is a physical and metaphysical foundation. The definition of the functional aspects of the site and building, the views, the incidence of sunlight, the distribution of the accesses are the physics that requires metaphysics. Metaphysics of light even became, later in his
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Le Corbusier, Notre-Dame du Haut Ronchamp, France, 1955
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research, a powerful formula that is materialized in the concept of porosity.� Permeability becomes the device through which adjust openness and transparency and it is the transposition on the whole edifice of tactile taste for the materials. The interface established between inner and outer space. The appearance, texture, shape, size and quality of these borders can be very different and depend on the action that you want to take in dealing with the world. You can frame an entire piece of landscape or focus on surfaces or elements and isolate them from the context in a frame. The frame is both the effect and the symbol of modernity, understood as the epoch of art aestheticism, namely the period when beauty ceases to be an attribute of reality to become the product of aesthetic reaction. The frame and clear glass are an essential formal requirement of the modern aesthetic benefit. The curtain wall expresses the maximum visibility of the exterior and the strict isolation from the inside. Richard Sennett argues that modern architecture, born with the idea of creating experiential unity between the inside and the outside and the communitarian and organic harmony between man and nature or between citizen and citizen, ended up giving rise to decidedly anti-social environments, self-referential and substantially closed. If modernity was the epoch of art aesthetization by the use of frame, post-modernity, as a result of the market globalization, is the culture of the removal of spatial and temporal barriers, of the frame disappearance, of the weakening of the place, of the confusion between interior and exterior. The superseding of modernity has coincided with a shift away from transparency towards non-materiality and a new relationship introduced between subject and object, through the subtle intervention of digital technology. Yet since Futurism and Cubism already put forward the concept of simultaneity and led the way into the ambiguous world of optical interpretation, perhaps it is time to retie certain threads and look at the art and architecture of recent years in terms of their continuity with experiments carried out first by the vanguard and later by the neo-vanguard.
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Steven Holl Architects, Sarphatistraat Offices Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1996-2000
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Triade
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Contradiction
Robert Venturi
(Philadelphia, 25 june 1925)
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“He has been credited with saving modern architecture from itself by making it possible to accept the casual and the improvised; after Venturi issued his now famous “less is a bore” responde to the Mies van der Rohe modernist dictum “Less is more”, Architecture has not been the same” - announce for the Prizker price in 1991 Robert Venturi was born in 1925 in Philadelphia. He graduated in Princeton University when he was 22 and started working in some studios. Meanwhile he traveled in Europe, continuing his studies in Italy. Then he came back to USA where he met Louis Kahn and started his own studio. The praxis to break up a complex phenomenon into easier different parts in order to analise them separately has the roots in the galilean scientific revolution and express itself in the illuminism. This is a substantial point in the history of thinking that put under question the aristotelic issue (the “all” is more than the summatory of the single parts) and supported that the division into parts contained undiscovered power of progress. For a century and a half this new theory worked very well and brought to a sudden development of new tecnologies. It’s not exagerated to say that the industrial revolution, that was also a phenomenon of contradiction, was an economy and cultural emancipating factor for countries, societies and people. The main idea was an unlimited progress, vector of a neverending growth of richness and wealth. The second half of the XX century had the burden to demolish this faith and, moreover, to bring back the complexity of things. This approach will be called holistic and will interest different fields such as economy, biology, psicology, sociology and Robert Venturi’s architecture. The holistic approach binds different facts that could seem contradictory. For Venturi exists a kind of architecture made of layers, some of them in contradiction. So this is the “and-and” phenomenon in architecture that shift the attention to the relation between the facade and the inside of the building. The essential purpose of the interiors of buildings is to enclose space and to separate the inside from the outside. Kahn has said: “A building is a harboring thing.” The function of the house to protect and provide privacy, psychological as well as physical, is an ancient one. Contrast between the inside and the outside can be a major manifestation of contradiction in architecture. However, one of the powerful twentieth century orthodoxies has been the necessity for continuity between them: the inside should be expressed on
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Alvar Aalto, MIT dormitory Cambridge, Massachusetts,1948
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the outside. But this is not really new, only our means have been new. The Renaissance church interior, for instance, has a continuity with its exterior; the interior vocabulary of pilasters, cornices, and drip mouldings is almost identical in scale and sometimes in material with its exterior vocabulary. The result is subtle modification but little contrast and no surprise. Perhaps the boldest contribution of orthodox Modern architecture was its so-called flowing space, which was used to achieve the continuity of inside and outside. Aldo van Eyck has said: “Architecture should be conceived of as a configuration of intermediary places clearly defined. This does not imply continual transition or endless postponement with respect to place and occasion. On the contrary, it implies a break away from the contemporary concept (call it sickness) of spatial continuity and the tendency to erase every articulation between spaces, i.e., between outside and inside, between one space and another (between one reality and another). Instead the transition must be articulated by means of defined in-between places which induce simultaneous awareness of what is significant on either side. An in-between space in this sense provides the common ground where conflicting polarities can again become twin phenomena.” Contradictory interior space doesn’t admit modern architecture’s unity and continuity of all spaces anymore. Sometimes contradiction is not between the inside and the outside but between the top and the bottom of the building. Sometimes the relationship is between front and back. Venturi refers to the M.I.T. House Dormitory by Alvar Aalto, which through two different fronts makes different interiors and new tensions with the context and so the surrounding landscape. In the same way he sees Alvaro Siza’s museum, Serralves Foundation, in Porto Alegre: it is hard and solid towards the mountain and smoother and fragmented towards the gulf. Designing from the outside in, as well as the inside out, creates necessary tensions, which helps in making architecture. Since the inside is different from the outside, the wall becomes an architectural event. Architecture occurs at the meeting of interior and exterior forces of use and space. These interior and environmental forces are both general and particular, generic and circumstantial. Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and its drama. And by recognizing the difference between the inside and the outside, architecture opens the door once again to an urbanistic point of view. A city is made of full and empty spaces. We usually
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Alvar Aalto, MIT dormitory Cambridge, Massachusetts,1948
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think about the full ones but emptiness is a dense matter and sometimes becomes the basic element of the project and its relationship with the context. This implies a resonance with the prehexistent: “knowing how to design an open space, to know how to valorize an empty space among buildings, to know how to make it the main character of the city is an hard challenge (…). There’s a new idea about the project, which is not an isolated object anymore with only a special shape, being an exception, but a project thought as dialogue with the context”. This suddenly brings to a new definition of borders as “complex topologic filters that mediate a relation between in and out”. The choice of an urban dimension shifts the attention from a research strictly related to the structure to a new level in the urban fabric based on the articulation of the empty and the full. Here comes the need to amplify the concept of space as dwelling to the urban dimension. These considerations can find an application through Venturi’s theory. The architect observes how the contradiction of these two different spacial conditions is architectonically complex. Part of this complexity is generated by ambiguity between the inside and the outside because of a lack of correspondance, that is actually built through a detachment or a deformation of the building shell. An architecture that focuses in the shell as the main element able to absorb the tensions of both the spaces. A kind of complexity that works for complementary and opposite forces in constant balance, without a direct correspondance and identity. Under this circumstances the shell can be a solid made of different surfaces or a thick and full object, maybe deformed, in order to make different elevations inside and outside. The constrast is necessary to highlight something. Architecture is based on previous experiences and on associative emotions. These symbolic elements are often in contradiction with shape, structure and programme of the same building. This contradiction has two main manifestations: •
•
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The architectonical systems of space, structure and programme are covered and distorted by a overall symbolic shape. This type of buildingthat-becomes-sculpture is called “the duck”; The architectonical systems of space and structure are under the service of a programme and the decoration is applied indipendently from them. This is called “decorated shed”.
Alvaro Siza, Serralves Foundation Porto, Portugal,1999
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An applied example of decorated shed is the Guild House, building started in 1960 and finished three years later by Venturi and his studio. The starting point was the relation with the context. The building doesn’t stand out against the city as many buildings do becoming in the same time symbols. Moreover, the symmetric organization of the construction with the two lateral arms backward makes the building it in a perfect central perspective with the road in front of it. Nevertheless, the main topic the project is based on are the contrast between his parts, and obviously a programme and a structure well defined. The plans offer different apartment typologies. About the exterior, the decoration is explicit. It contradicts the shape in a symbolic way. The material used is the common brick. On the top of the facade is present a continuous strip of white bricks that, together with the bottom white wall, divides the building in three parts: ground floor, main floors and attic. This contradicts the effective six floors all equal and recalls the proportions of a reinassance building. The white wall marks also the focus and the entrance stairs and extends the ground floor until the balcony of the second floor. This symbolism already quoted several times also implicates the use of ornaments and of images. The image is another important topic in Venturi because everything is and becomes image in the moment in which is seen by someone. This explicit symbolism of the Guild House is called by Venturi himself “ugly and ordinary” and also the bricks are “a little retro”. With these words he’s actually defending the building from all the critics it could receive concerning its aspect. Indeed, the image is iconic and so the building becomes heroic and ordinary as architecture and as element of comunication, breaking and at the same time being a part of the city. Architecture should be thought as a configuration of intermediary spaces clearly defined. This breaks with the modern idea of spacial continuity. In this way a middle space is the common field where opposite polarities can be new twin phenomena.
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Robert Venturi, Guild House Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1963
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Autonomy
Aldo Rossi
(Milano, 3 may 1931 – Milano, 4 september 1997)
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Aldo Rossi (3 May 1931 - 4 September 1997) was an Italian architect and designer. He was the first Italian to receive the Pritzker Prize for architecture. His earliest works of the 1960s were mostly theoretical and displayed a simultaneous influence of 1920s Italian modernism. He became extremely influential in the late 1970s and 1980s as his body of built work expanded and for his theories promoted in his books The Architecture of the City and A Scientific Autobiography. In his writings Rossi argued that a city must be studied and valued as something constructed over time; of particular interest are urban artifacts that withstand the passage of time and the collective memory of the community. Rossi’s works appear as incredibly empty. Architecture is only a volume, whithout any desire of design of the interior. In its absence, the inside space proposes itself as an emptiness full of opportunities. The interior waits to be inhabited by the residents and their objects. The life and the presence of the items that belong to the domestic life fill the space. On the contrary the exterior stands as a monumental presence beyond signs of ornament or particular configuration. As Rossi claims “in questo privato poco ed essenziale deve essere l’intervento dell’architetto” (in this private (dimension) small and essential the role of the architect has to be) and “in verità ritengo che ciascuno dovrebbe disporre la propria casa secondo i propri gusti, così come sceglie le tappezzerie e i quadri” (actually I believe that everybody should organize his own home following his taste. Both the quotes are included in the book Questi progetti by Alberto Ferlenga, 165-166, 1987) . As they will live the interiors, the residents are the ones appointed to arrange the space with their stories, whishes and most importantly objects. In many of Rossi’s works is rarely included a description of the destination and the uses of the space. There are only indicated the bathrooms. The architect’s intention is here to leave the space as the perfect stage for the life and the memories of its inhabitants. In this sense is clear that Rossi aspire to an architecture full of Memory and that this Memory is the moving tool of the design process.
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Aldo Rossi, Edificio ad appartamenti sulla SĂźdliche Friedrichstadt Berlin, Germany, 1981-88
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“Come scrivevo ne L’Architettura della Città, il locus in senso palladiano ha una grande importanza. Il luogo o i ricordi, o la bellezza del tema. [...] In questo caso, diciamo, che la memoria, il vivere, ha il sopravvento su tutto il resto, e direi che sono i casi più felici.” (As I wrote in The Architecture of the City, the term ‘locus’ as intended by Palladio has an incredible importance. In this sense we say that the memory, the life take over everything else and I can say that they are the happiest cases) Rossi, Di Battista, Magnago Lampugnani, 1990 Rossi’s desire of autonomy regarding the interior from the exterior of the construction is profoundly divergent from the common architectural pratice of those years in Milan. Infact many other masters as BBPR, Albini, Ponti, Gardella, Dominioni were very much involved in the design of the interiors. Once again, it is evident that Aldo Rossi doesn’t consider the architecture of interiors as a marginal practice but as an opportunity to be given to the residents.
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Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Casa in via Vigoni Milano, Italy, 1961
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Connection
Herzog & de Meuron
(Basel, 19 april 1950) - (Basel, 8 may 1950)
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According to the vision of Jacques Herzog (Basilea, 19 aprile, 1950) and Pierre de Meuron (Basilea, 8 maggio, 1950), “[…] the surfaces of a building should always be linked to what happens in their own interior. How this relationship is materialized is a deal of the architect .” (Gabriella Lo Ricco 2011). Initially, Herzog & de Meuron search for a neutral space, where the building has to be the formal result of its constructive logic and the interior is the direct consequence of the exterior; architecture need neither depend on function and program nor find personal expression such as language or style. The interior is an expression of the construction. Therefore, in the early architectures there is a coherence between inside and outside, governed by simple and archaic forms. A manifesto of this thought is represented by the Ricola Marketing Building (Laufen, Switzerland project 1997, realization 1998-1999) that “[…] is an architecture that arises from a construction where form is an expression of logic; it is architecture as the conspicuous structure, the space that the walls enclose - the simplest of rectangles - is neutral.” (Moneo 2004). The research of the origins and the archaic elements bring out a simplification of form and a question about nature and the potential of materials; the interior is the direct result of the construction and the materials help to define the structure which is exposed to the view. The architecture of Herzog & De Meuron endeavors to work toward the specific from the universal and The Ricola warehouse perfectly exemplifies this attitude where the space is the direct consequence of the construction. Wall and roof, generated by a simple rectangle, are the primary and primordial architectural elements and the sophisticated wall is born of the architect’s desire to solve all the problems in one stroke. To make architecture is to build and to give life to materials allowing them to express themselves as what they are. Materials are what makes form emerge, in Ricola the nature of the wooden panels is what brings about the texture of the wall and it is here that the construction manifests itself as an architectural form. The importance of Ricola warehouse was to make the construction visible and tangible and to do this the architects have manipulated the skin of the void generated by the rectangle. The logic of construction is so evident that any temptation to let aesthetic parameters come into play is forgotten and when it becomes the physicality of the architecture the identity becomes the controlling condition of the work.
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Herzog & de Meuron, Ricola Marketing Building Laufen, Switzerland - project 1997, realization 1998-1999
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For Herzog & De Meuron, architecture is a ce lebration of matter, and form is the vehicle that makes it possible; they give importance to the construction through a research of new ways to use materials to communicate. For them, “make architecture is to build� and to do this they first design only elementary volumes from which arise the internal space. At the beginning, Herzog & De Meuron ignore iconography, renounce expression and communication, in order to win back to architecture the gravity of construction and bring about a joyful rediscovery of the fundamental nature of materials. In this phase, they reject the iconography: the image does not exist. The essence of architecture lies in making material talk, and for this reason, the construction needs only the most elemental volumes. However, the attitude of the Swiss architects changes: their field of actions is limited to the control of the facades and to the definition of the skin that is obtained by the use of different materials. Gone is a structural condition of the solid that mesmerized us in the early works. The facades that characterized these works often coincide with the surfaces that conceal the structural elements and that reach an aesthetic definition. In this way, we have a different relationship between interior and exterior. In some works of Herzong & de Meuron we have a continuum; in others a diaphragm, a filter, a separation. The facade is an important element characterizing the building, from the unity of the project to the separation between interior and exterior. A modern masked scenography, made by decorated panels, serigraphy and images. Herzog & De Meuron’s architecture in the late eighties and after changed respect their early works, in these er can find more details of outside influence that turn the buildings into communicating machines. New Ricola Krauterzentrum (Laufen, Switzerland - project: 2010-2013 realization: 2013-2014) is characterized by a facade composed by polycarbonate panels on which the architects reproduce, by a serigraphy, the repeated image of an Achillea. The serigraphy gives to the building a precise iconography used as a mechanism for reincorporating the image and the elemental shape.
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Herzog & de Meuron, New Ricola Krauterzentrum Laufen, Switzerland - project: 2010-2013 realization: 2013-2014
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There are similarities with the first job as far as attitude is concerned: the same pragmatism in the floor plans and the same lack of prejudgments in assigning new uses to materials. But there also are greater differences: in the first Ricola building is related to a research of archaism based on making construction the substance of the form; in the second the architects seem to have been preoccupied with discovering the potentials of materials. In the New Ricola the architects used industrial materials in the construction and the architecture gained an unexpected iconographic component. In that a common curtain wall acquires new status and the serigraphy satisfies the desire for an architectural work that testifies to an artistic intentions. In De Young Museum (Golden Gate park, San Francisco, California, USA - project: 2000-2002 realization: 2002-2005) the Swiss architects arrive at a design solution where the relationship between the context of intervention, the building program and its shell are much more complex. In the project, the key role is played by the skin of the building consisting of copper plates embossed and perforated according to designs made by digital reworking of a picture of the Golden Gate Park vegetation. This attitude of Herzog & de Meuron conceals a precise aspiration of the Swiss architects: sustain to the “normality� of the external shape of the building the innovation of its surface.
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Herzog & de Meuron, De Young Museum Golden Gate park, San Francisco, California project: 2000-2002 realization: 2002-2005
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Osmosis
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The passage from modern architecture to contemporary one marks substantial expansions of the meaning of shell, the autonomous surface, which is able to reveal the interiors in the exteriors. The traditional facade, premodern, with the function to support cladding, summed up in itself the architectonical characters of the building, in general attributable to a wall structure; on the other side, the contemporary facade, being completely autonomous without structural elements, is free from any tectonic predetermination and can refer to something else: It becomes a screen, a diaphragram, a filter, a mask. The external and superficial aspect, what we see, doesn’t reflect anymore, as was in the past, the internal spacial and formal structure. Rem Koolhaas talked about Bigness, the condition in which a building becomes so large that it “cannot be controlled by a single architectural gesture”. Among the consequences of Bigness is that it triggers the autonomy of its parts, and with that autonomy, the traditional humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects. Designer’s focus moved from the internal organization of the plans, as it was in the modern age the creator of the space, and so the volumetric articulation, to the design of the shell. In this ideologic context the use of some kind of materials, such as glass, and the arrival of new ideas, such as transparency, answered the modern paradigm of constructive truth. Nowadays the connection along a building’s skin can be considered as an osmosis between the inside and the outside. When physically materialised, what gives it its effect is not only the design and the execution, it is also the experience and the way one perceives it, and sees the surrounding through/with it. The theoretical research now encouraged the construction of five different models which are the phisical rapresentation of the discovery of previous design approaches and the contemporary one.
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Design Practice
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Contradiction
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Autonomy
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Connection
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Osmosis
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Mask
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Research scrapbook
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Table of content
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90-108
Robert Venturi, Complexity and contradiction in architecture. 70-87. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966)
110-121
Robert Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. 119129.(The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972)
122-124
Remment Koolhaas, Junkspace. 13-15. (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2006)
126-129
Aldo Rossi,The Architecture of the City. 30-35-36 (The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies, New York, 1982)
130-139
Rafael Moneo, Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects. 362-371, 375-376, 391-392 (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004).
140-146
Carlo Mazzeri, Dentro Rossi. Giocattoli, cabine, spazi angusti e altri spazi interni. 5-7, 6063 (Bachelor diss., Politecnico di Milano, 2016-2017).
148-158
Antonino Terranova, Fabrizio Toppetti, Teorie, figure, architetti del Moderno Contemporaneo. 133-142 (Roma, 2012).
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Bibliography
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Adam Caruso, “Whatever Happened to Analogue Architecture,” AA Files 59 (2009): 74. Adrian Forty, Parole e edifici. Un vocabolario per l’architettura moderna, (Pendragon, 2005). Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1966). Aldo Rossi, Autobiografia scientifica (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1981). Antonello Boschi, Fenomenologia facciata (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2010).
della
Antonino Terranova, Fabrizio Toppetti, Teorie figure architetti del modernocontemporaneo (Gangemi, 2012). Carlo Mazzeri, “Dentro Rossi. Giocattoli, cabine, spazi angusti e altri spazi interni” (Bachelor diss., Politecnico di Milano, 20162017). F. Ippolito, Dalla finestra. Sguardi sull’architettura (Genova: Il Melangolo, 2011). Gabriella Lo Ricco, “Gli involucri significanti di Piano, Herzog & de Meuron e Nouvel,” Gizmo (2011), accessed February 1, 2014, URL: http://www.gizmoweb.org/2011/10/gliinvolucri-significanti-di-piano-herzog-demeuron-e-nouvel/ Lea Catherine Szacka, “The 1980 Architecture Biennale: the street as a spacial and rrepresentational curating device”. OASE 88 (2012). Cao, and Catucci, Spazi e maschere (Roma: Meltemi editore, 2001). Rafael Moneo, Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004). Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (The Monacelli Press, 1978).
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Rem Koolhaas, Quodlibet, 2006).
Junkspace
(Macerata:
Rem Koolhaas, AMO, and Harvard Graduate School of Design, Elements. Facade (Marsilio, 2014). Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972).
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