city of the interior. what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

city themakes interior whatof is it that today’s homes so different, so appealing?

antonio di campli

progetto dello spazio aperto alternanza tra vuoto e pieno, tra aperto e chiuso

inversione tra interno ed esterno nelle pratiche dell’abitare, lo spazio domestico diviene spazio allestito, non strutturato; lo spazio aperto urbano tende ad assumere caratteri di un interno

• il concetto di interno urbano • i pessimisti, gli ottimisti • no-stop city. città catena di montaggio del sociale. ideologia e teoria della metropoli • the battle of the megastructures: no-stop city vs new babylon

la cittĂ come interno: spalato

/ palazzo di diocleziano

181 m

250,50 m

Opera incompia su cui lavorò per 13 anni, a partire dal 1923, i “passages” combiano testi, appunti, citazioni ed elaborazione teorica con l’obiettivo di indagare le origini della modernità a partire dalla realtà di Parigi colta in una miriade di dettagli eterogenei e marginali:

i passages la merce la prostituzione il flaneur il gioco la moda l’art nouveau la modernizzazione urbanistica di

Haussmann

il collezionismo

Walter Benjamin / I Passages di Parigi

interni urbani

Costruiti entro la prima metĂ del XIX secolo, (1823-28 e 1839-47) si trovano per la maggior parte sulla riva destra della Senna, nella zona dei Grands Boulevards

The idea of interior historically emerges in the nineteenth century in the context of the bourgeois domesticity, through a slow process of accumulation of traces and meanings sometimes obscure. Interior, however, is not a concept that refers only to architectural or spatial qualities.

The interior borrows the dimension of closure defined by an architecture, articulating it through the decoration, the coating of its architectural shell, defining itself not simply as a spatial phenomenon but also as image.

This dual character marks the separability of the internal condition from that of a closed configuration.

It is a material separability that enables us to say that the idea of interior is disconnected from that of architectural internality, a separation which is not intended as a total emancipation.

In 1851 Gottfried Semper describes what he believes are the four main elements of the architecture: the hearth, the roof, the fence, the embankment.

In his arguments against the idea that architecture configuration and tectonic structure are the same, the interior is freed from the structure.

Being inside is not a question of structural rigidity but of atmosphere.

la cittĂ come una schiuma

Siamo portati a considerare i rapporti umani come delle linee più o meno rette che collegano gli uni agli altri (secondo le strutture che già conosciamo: marito-moglie, genitore-figlio, amico-amico, produttore-consumatore, etc.), Sloterdijk al contrario ritiene che tali rapporti siano meglio definibili secondo l’archetipo della sfera, nella quale sono comunemente compresi non solo i singoli individui che compongono il rapporto ma anche (e per certi versi soprattutto) l’ambiente che li circonda.

Abitiamo un mondo che non è benevolo bensì è quello nel quale siamo gettati e al quale cerchiamo di far fronte, pertondo e schiacciato ai poli non sarebbe immagine migliore della congerie di bolle di sapone ritratte sulla copertina di Schiuma: una schiuma, appunto, in cui ogni bolla è un mondo a sé stante e ciò nondimeno legato al resto da uno o più lati; una ragnatela di interazioni curvilinee che trovano la propria miglior spiegazione nel rapporto fra l’uomo e l’ambiente. un rapporto che si inscrive a perfezione nella dinamica delle sfere: ossia, se storicamente l’assalto di un uomo all’altro era sempre avvenuto in linea retta (si pensi all’arma bianca, si pensi alla pistola), il globo schiumoso si caratterizza invece a partire dal dato di fatto che l’assalto di un uomo all’altro si identifichi con lo spostamento d’aria.

Questo mutamento ha una data precisa: il 22 aprile 1915, seconda battaglia di Ypres, i tedeschi attaccano gli alleati mediante gas di cloro; ne consegue che, a partire dal 22 aprile 1915, l’assalto dell’uomo all’uomo ha mirato a colpire la vittima sempre meno nel suo corpo e sempre più nel suo ambiente, nella sfera che lo circonda.

Il mondo delle schiume si caratterizza a partire da un istinto bellicoso che porta gli abitanti di una bolla a richiedere riconoscimento agli abitanti di una bolla vicina attaccando la bolla, l’ambiente: a sottrar loro il simulacro collettivo della stessa immunità.

peter sloterdijk

/ sfere

genealogie

crystal palace , londra ,

1851

Biosphere 2 is a manmade ecological system in Oracle, Arizona. It was used to test if how people could live and study in a closed biosphere, while carrying out scientific experiments.

It explored the possible use of a closed biosphere on spaze colonization, and also allowed the study and manipulation of a biosphere without harming Earth’s. The name comes from the idea that it is modelled in “Biosphere 1 - Earth”

edward p . pass , biosphere

2, oracle (az), 1987-1989

ant farm

Ant Farm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of 1968 San Francisco by two architects, Chip Lord and Doug Michels, later joined by Curtis Schreier. Ant Farm was an architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design practice ahead of their time. The group described themselves “an art agency that promotes ideas that have no commercial potential, but which we think are important vehicles of cultural introspection�. Interested in movement and impermanence, Ant Farm were self-nominated commentators rather than actual practitioners of architecture. They mainly operated through the display of experimental artefacts.

Their work dealt with the intersection of architecture, design and media art, critiquing the North American culture of mass media and consumerism. Ant Farm produced works in a number of formats, including agitprop events, manifestos, videos, performances and installations.

Their early work was a reaction to the heaviness and fixity of the Brutalist movement in contrast to which they proposed an inflatable architecture that was cheap, easy to transport and quick to assemble. This type of architecture fitted well with their rhetoric of nomadic, communal lifestyles in opposition to what they saw as the rampant consumerism of 1970s USA. The inflatables questioned the standard tenets of building: these were structures with no fixed form and could not be described in the usual architectural representations of plan and section. They instead promoted a type of architecture that moved away from a reliance on expert knowledge. The inflatables thus constituted a type of participatory architecture that allowed the users to take control of their environment. Events were also organised inside the inflatables, which were set up at festivals, university campuses or conferences to host lectures, workshops, seminars, or simply as a place to hang out.

ant farm

/ inflatables

La nozione di interno nella cultura del progetto urbano contemporaneo e più in generale l’attuale dibattito sulla tendenza a configurare spazi urbani come interni, sta assumendo un carattere problematico oscillando tra due posizioni contrapposte: una pessimista che vede l’interno soprattutto come enclave-rifugio o panic room per un ceto medio spaventato e aggressivo in cerca di contesti, spazi di vita, controllati e sorvegliabili; è la posizione ad esempio di Mike Davis che coglie in questa tendenza progettuale ormai ventennale, oltre che riflesso frantumazione del pubblico anche le spinte di logiche immobiliariste e di marketing urbano un esempio, secondo Davis, è la produzione anni Ottanta di Frank Gehry caratterizzata da dumb boxes e da superfici vandalproof, più recentemente possono essere rilette in tal senso alcune esperienze europee come quelle di Bolles+Wilson.

Su posizioni parzialmente simili poggiano le argomentazioni di Richard Sennett per il quale la visione intimista dello spazio, l’attenzione che nelle società occidentali è rivolta all’esperienza individuale e il conseguente svuotamento di senso della sfera pubblica, è esito di una “diffusa inquietudine sentimentale che si manifesta nell’apprensione per il modo in cui funziona il mondo”. “Il termine “intimità” evoca calore, fiducia, libera espressione di sentimenti. Ma proprio perché ci aspettiamo benefici psicologici da tutti gli ambiti della nostra esperienza, e la vita sociale, che ha un suo significato indipendente, ce li nega, il mondo esterno, impersonale, non ci soddisfa, ci appare monotono e vuoto”.

In tal senso l’attenzione al privato, la ricerca di calore o fiducia “non è un principio, ma una rappresentazione fedele dell’essenza della nostra psiche e dei nostri veri sentimenti” Questa sfiducia nello spazio pubblico sposta l’attenzione verso lo spazio del movimento portando a ridefinire lo spazio pubblico prevalentemente come spazio di transito e nodi di connessione, come dispositivo di connessione tra interni.

Si tratta di un modo di articolare lo spazio urbano che si può ritrovare anche nella produzione di architetti americani come Gordon Bunshaft che negli anni ’50 ha ripensato il ruolo e la funzione del grattacielo come torre che si appoggia su una corte semipubblica e soprattutto di Victor Gruen che ha definito il modello contemporaneo del centro commerciale come spazio introverso dove la dissoluzione tra strada e vetrina avrebbe permesso al cittadino del suburbio la pratica del “peepshow for eager consumers ”.

interni

/ i pessimisti

La seconda, quella di Andrea Branzi , è segnata da un’atteggiamento ottimista verso questo processo di “interiorizzazione”. Con questo termine Branzi intende due cose: “la prima è il risultato della sostanziale prevalenza degli spazi interni rispetto ai gusci dell’architettura che li contiene.

La qualità di un luogo urbano non è più costituita dall’efficacia dello scenario architettonico, ma piuttosto dalla sofisticazione dei vari interior design, dai prodotti presenti nelle vetrine, e anche dal pubblico che invade le strade e le piazze. […].

In altre parole si è sostituita la vecchia città, fatta di scatole architettoniche (ridondanti e non più percepibili nel contesto della complessità dello scenario urbano), con un’altra città meno visibile, meno esibita, più estesa e più vitale, che però fornisce emozioni, merci, informazioni; ma non costruisce cattedrali.”

Come in una città mediorientale scompaiono le piazze e prevalgono gli spazi interni, le “esperienze immateriali, da sistemi pulviscolari di micro-progetti e da sotto-sistemi ambientali, che complessivamente non possiedono una forma esterna, ma sono come le viscere di un corpo, che non si vedono ma sono i luoghi di una intensa produzione endocrina che di fatto alimenta lo sviluppo e la vitalità di un organismo”.

La seconda pur derivando dalla prima riguarda altre questioni, “l’architettura comincia finalmente ad avviarsi verso un livello di “astrazione”, cioè di superamento del proprio vecchio limite “figurativo”, per diventare anch’essa (come l’arte, la musica e la letteratura) un sistema, una semiosfera non da guardare ma da sperimentare”. Se questa è la direzione verso la quale l’architettura si sta avviando, come fase matura della complessità metropolitana da lei stessa avviata, vuol dire che l’architettura sta diventando un’esperienza “interiore”, cioè non solo fatta di spazi “interni”, ma di logiche mentali, di spazi psicologici”, viscere.

interni

/ gli ottimisti

i pessimisti

i pessimisti.

“design for a better outdoor indoor. victor gruen

Southdale was the first mall ever built and still stands today.

Here Victor Gruen wanted to bring the community feeling of the European arcade to the suburbs.

Oddly, this most suburban American invention was supposed to evoke a European city centre. Hence Southdale’s density and its atrium, where shoppers were expected to sit and debate over cups of coffee, just as they do in the Piazza San Marco. Gruen exiled cars, which he thought noisy and antisocial, to the outside of his mall.

victor gruen. southdale mall, edina, minnesota,

1956

victor gruen. southdale mall, edina, minnesota,

1956

dispersal and decentralization for defence

victor gruen. northland mall, detroit,

1954

gordon bunshaft. lever house, new york,

1952

frank gehry, danziger casa e studio,

1968

How insert high property values and sumptuary spaces into decaying neighbourhoods?

Gehry’s Danziger Studio in Hollywood is the pioneer instance of what has become an entire species of Los Angeles “stealth houses”, dissimulating their luxurious qualities with proletarian gangster facades. The street frontage of the Danziger-on Melrose was simply a massive gray wall, treated with rough finish to ensure that it would collect dust from passing traffic and weather into a simulacrum of nearby porn studios and garages. A design “introverted and fortresslike”, with the silent aura of a “dumb box”.

Dumb boxes and screen walls form an entire cycle of Gehry’s work, ranging from his American school of Dance (1968), to his Gemini G.E.I., both in Hollywood.

dumb boxes come esito della frantumaziome del pubblico (keller easterling) i pessimisti.

frank gehry

casa gehry,

1977

Regia di David Fincher con Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker.

Thriller, colore, 100 minuti, USA 2002.

Per Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) e sua figlia Sarah è la prima notte nella nuova casa: papà se n’è andato con una modella, ma ha lasciato loro sufficienti soldi per comprarsi una nuova casa ai confini di Central Park. Quattro piani, giardino, numerose camere da letto e, come optional, una panic room, una camera blindata inespugnabile dove, in caso di necessità, ci si può rifugiare e da lì osservare il resto della casa attraverso dei monitor. Ed è lì che si rifugiano le due donne quando, nel cuore della notte, scoprono che in casa sono penetrati tre rapinatori. Il problema che ciò che essi cercano si trovi proprio in quella stanza: ma loro non possono entrarci e Meg e Sarah non possono uscirne. Inizia così un perverso gioco del gatto col topo, dove la panic room, dapprima sicuro rifugio, si trasforma in una trappola infernale: la ragazza infatti soffre di diabete, ma le iniezioni di insulina si trovano al piano di sopra...

panic room

/ la casa come spazio insicuro

Tomohiro Hata / Belly House, Kyoto

Tato Architects / house in Hieidaira

Tatsumi Orimoto, In the Big Box, 1998

In many ways this kind of strategy also looks at some innovative forms of dwelling which describe a kind of inversion between interior and exterior in contemporary forms of dwelling: the house becomes a sort of set up space, not a structured place but a kind of exterior to be colonized, where ona has to carve out niches.

la concezione della vita pubblica di gehry, bunshaft e gruen “la visione intimista del mondo si sviluppa nella misura in cui la sfera pubblica è abbandonata, in quanto vuota. Su un piano strettamente fisico, l’ambiente induce a ritenere priva di senso la sfera pubblica, in quanto organizzazione dello spazio urbano”.

“L’importanza attribuita dalla società americana all’esperienza individuale sembrerebbe indurre i cittadini a valutare in termini personali ogni aspetto della vita sociale. In realtà, quello che emerge oggi non è un sano individualismo ma una diffusa inquietudine sentimentale che si manifesta nell’apprensione per il modo in cui funziona il mondo”. “il termine “intimità” evoca calore, fiducia, libera espressione di sentimenti. Ma proprio perché ci aspettiamo benefici psicologici da tutti gli ambiti della nostra esperienza, e la vita sociale, cha ha un suo significato indipendente, ce li nega, il mondo esterno, impersonale, non ci soddisfa, ci appare monotono e vuoto”.

“Quello che noi cerchiamo nel privato non è un principio, ma una rappresentazione fedele dell’essenza della nostra psiche e dei nostri veri sentimenti. Abbiamo cercato di rendere la vita privata – che consiste nello stare da soli, con i familiari o con gli amici più intimi – un fine in se stessa”.

Sennett sostiene che gli architetti che progettano grattacieli e altri grandi edifici sono stati tra i primi a lavorare entro queste concezione della vita pubblica.

richard sennett

gli ottimisti

La seconda, quella di Andrea Branzi , è segnata da un’atteggiamento ottimista verso questo processo di “interiorizzazione” che secondo lui: è “il risultato della sostanziale prevalenza degli spazi interni rispetto ai gusci dell’architettura che li contiene. La qualità di un luogo urbano non è più costituita dall’efficacia dello scenario architettonico, ma piuttosto dalla sofisticazione dei vari interior design, dai prodotti presenti nelle vetrine, e anche dal pubblico che invade le strade e le piazze. […].

Si è sostituita la vecchia città, fatta di scatole architettoniche (ridondanti e non più percepibili nel contesto della complessità dello scenario urbano), con un’altra città meno visibile, meno esibita, più estesa e più vitale, che però fornisce emozioni, merci, informazioni; ma non costruisce cattedrali.”

Come in una città mediorientale scompaiono le piazze e prevalgono gli spazi interni, le “esperienze immateriali, da sistemi pulviscolari di micro-progetti e da sotto-sistemi ambientali, che complessivamente non possiedono una forma esterna, ma sono come le viscere di un corpo, che non si vedono ma sono i luoghi di una intensa produzione endocrina che di fatto alimenta lo sviluppo e la vitalità di un organismo”.

gli ottimisti “viscerali” andrea

branzi / interiorizzazione della città

no stop city

The No-Stop City, developed by the Florentine group Archizoom between 1970 and 71, is, along with the Continuous Monument by Superstudio, the best-known and more studied and interpreted project of the Italian Radical Architecture. It should be noted that this is not a unitary project with defined boundaries, but different crystallizations of an idea due both to the different stages of its development and the occasion that motivated them (internal research, journal publications, competitions…). Even if the grouping of these proposals constitutes a single metaproject that can be discussed under the denomination of No-Stop City, quite often its pluralistic nature has not been taken sufficiently into account.

In the “political reference” submitted by Archizoom to the proceedings of the congress Utopia e/o Rivoluzione, held in Turin in April 1969, the group tried to define its position in the intense debate about the relations between politics and architecture that was taking place in Italy. Many of the ideas that were later embodied in the project were already featured in this text: “Until now, the depth of buildings and typologies remained anchored to the limits imposed by spontaneous equilibrium: natural lighting and ventilation, and surface per-capita are the result of an image of income and balanced life with general economic conditions that, defnitely, needs to be blown to pieces. But the problem is not imagining new working-class neighborhoods linked to better typologies, but rather imagining amorphous or monomorphic structures, whose utopian content is performed only in quantitative terms, not imagining the organization of a different society, better and fairer, with more beautiful houses. At the moment, we are only interested in them being much larger”

At the beginning of 1970, the members of the group begin to capture graphically the result of their thoughts about a quantitative city.

Gilberto Corretti draws a continuous space supported by huge triangulated trusses inspired by Mies and a magmatic and obscure volume that fills a valley in the wake of the Continuous Monument by Superstudio. Andrea Branzi produces a series of diagrams with a typewriter in which the paper is patterned with a grid of exes and dots representing, respectively, the bearing structure and the dimensional grid of a continuous space without clear limits. Sometimes, calligraphic signs, forming clouds, colonize areas of this space overlapping the isotropic grid. One of these diagrams has an enlightening label: Homogeneous Habitational Diagram.

Hypothesis of non-Figurative Architectural Language.

The first publication of the project, with generous graphic content and an extensive text, happens in 1970, in the July-August number of Casabella, with the title: CittĂ , catena di montaggio del sociale. Ideologia e teoria della metropoli.

No-Stop City, CittĂ , catena di montaggio del sociale. 1970

The project shows already most of the items that will make it recognizable: an homogeneous structure of pillars, elevators and floor slabs with undefined facades and number of floors. Sometimes it is depicted as a series of massive prisms in the landscape, while other times it seems that only the orography or the coast may contain its spread. Indoors, the horizontal continuity is interrupted, either by landscape elements that occasionally emerge (rivers, rocks), or by straight and curved free standing walls or divisions between rectangular and pedestrian areas. In one of the plans there are even some courtyard houses of clear Miesian filiation even if, in this case, the patio is provocatively covered.

This is a catalog of different situations in which the project shows its absolute flexibility of both implementation and use. The object system, which will be so important for the image of the proposal, has not yet appeared, probably due to the fact that the scale of the plants is very small.

No-Stop City, CittĂ , catena di montaggio del sociale. 1970

Following this publication, Archizoom focused on thinking how life and objects would be like in their new city model. They designed a set of clothes, adapted to life in a micro-conditioned environment, published under the name Nearest Habitat System. They also put forward the Armadio Abitabile, a furniture of considerable size containing everything needed to dwell any point of their homogeneous city.

The next stage in the project development was the proposal that the group submitted to the international competition for the Università degli Studi of Florence convened on May 1970. Although it is an attempt to adapt its abstract model to a specific case, their lack of interest in implementing their proposal is clear by the fact that, breaching the confidentiality required in the competition brief, they sign the proposal and are automatically disqualified.

The chosen motto was “projects should be signed”. The proposal explains how the previously developed system is colonized by different teaching, residential, administrative and recreational functions. Transport infrastructures run in the basement and lower levels. This stratification of uses is described in a section that has been frequently published. As it happens in all the stages of the project, the written content is essential: “The only architectural form that we would have liked to propose was [...] a wandering fog bank over the plain between Florence and Pistoia. Not so much as an inspiration or poetic invention, but in the sense that we refuse to design an object, and prefer to design its use instead. [...] In this sense, there is no formal difference between a productive structure, a supermarket, a residence, a university, or an industrialized agriculture sector.”

The final stage of development of the project comes at the beginning of 1971 with its publication in the number 78-79 of Design Quarterly in charge of Peter Eisenman and devoted to conceptual architecture, and soon after, in March of that year, in Domus. For the first time the name No-Stop City appears. The title in both publications is almost identical: No-Stop City. Residential Park. Climatic Universal System in the American magazine while in Domus the original Park was replaced by Parkings.

These publications include a new batch of graphic material and an essay in Domus.

The study of possible ways of colonization by the inhabitants is further developed including habitats that are unfolded from equipped walls or large furniture that can be moved from one place to another using mechanical forklifts. Forms of sedentary habitats are also proposed through dwellings configured by functional stripes that could be accessed, only, from the elevators. In Domus there are views of interior scenes of the No-Stop City, named Paesaggi Interni and Struttura teatrale continua, which are a particularly valuable contribution to the image of the project. They are dioramas of sectors of the city colonized by furniture and objects of consumption in which an illusion of infinity is achieved through the use of mirrors.

These publications were the last development of the project. Later on, Archizoom produced urban proposals and furniture, interior and clothing design that followed the wake of the No-Stop City and complemented it, which have been occasionally published as part of it. These includes Allestimenti di stanze (1971), Distruzione e Riappropiazione della CittĂ (1972) and Dressing design (1972).

A city without architecture This is not, therefore, a conventional project but a generic habitat that has no precise function, location or form. The system is defined by the invariants maintained throughout its evolution: A reticular and isotropic structure of pillars and elevators holding continuous floor slabs, and air-conditioning, lighting, electrical and informational networks housed in modular suspended ceilings and (presumably) under a technical floor. Nothing else. These few elements constitute the minimum common set that allows to house the maximum number of vital functions.

No-Stop City, bosco residenziale, 1971

No-Stop City, bosco residenziale, 1971

No-Stop City, bosco residenziale, 1971

No-Stop City, tipologie continue, 1971

No-Stop City, Residential Parkings, 1971

No-Stop City, Residential Parkings, 1971

Architecture is no longer responsible for the programmatic adaptation and, as it happens in the B端rolandschaft, a system of objects and mobile partitions is the only thing that functionally qualifies the different sectors of the city.

The representative character also goes into crisis as architecture is reduced to the bare minimum role of neutral and tempered container, a sheer background for objects and life. The entire iconographic load is transferred to the consumption objects that populate it, causing the almost total semantic emptying and absolute blankness of the built. The system of objects absorbs, therefore, functions that traditionally have been in charge of architecture but escaping from its control and getting rid of its values.

B端rolandschaft (SOM: Weyerhaueuser Company, Washington, 1963

From the point of view of Archizoom’s young members, the anomalous would not be the typologies that take advantage of this new technological environment for becoming independent from the outside (the factory, supermarket, parking ...) but those typologies that have not done that yet. The environment technification, taken to its extreme consequences, allows the most remarkable and transcendent decision of the project and to which, in fact, owes its name: to establish an unlimited constructed depth, a potentially endless building. Thereby, the system not only encompasses all kinds of functions but, ultimately, the entire city.

Although, in some images, the project shows different forms of containment, these limits and shape they define are understood as trivial and inconsequential: “The outer perimeter of the whole is not identified or represented: we do not care about its shape since it will be determined by the result of certain quantitative ratios�. In most plants the edge of the building is not shown (unless when it is an insurmountable geographic feature) and the drawing is trimmed by the illustration frame suggesting an unlimited expansion.

The primacy of plants and interior views over exterior representations, together with the total absence of elevations, emphasize the project latent infinitude.

What is paradoxical about this operation is that as architecture grows, occupying everything homogeneously, it loses most of the defining characteristics of the canonical architectural object that depend on its finitude and heterogeneity: its own object condition, its shape, facade, hierarchy, compositional nature, representative and iconographic capacity or the typological and functional specialization. A dissolution of architecture with few precedents and not at all involuntary; in its first publication Archizoom claim: “The ultimate goal of modern Architecture is the ‘elimination’ of architecture itself”. The difficulty of analysis of this project, if we stick to its graphic content, lies precisely in the fact that it is very difficult to study under conventional categories (volumetry, implementation, composition, hierarchy, function, distribution) because it simply lacks them.

The intuition that the proliferation of systems and technology could end up shaping a new type of habitat that would turn the traditional building into something superfuous and unnecessary was, somehow, in the air.

In the years in which the Radical was brewing in Italian universities, Reyner Banham said: “When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi re-verberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters -when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?”

Reyner Banham, “A Home is not a House”, Art in America, n. 2/1965

Another even more extreme example of the solvent potential of technology on architecture is the science- fiction film THX 1138 by George Lucas, a speculation about a future society, marked by electronics, strictly contemporary with the NoStop City (it was filmed in 1969 and released in 1971). The film shows a space, in this case of imprisonment, which is a white, homogeneous, infinite and pure background devoid not only of architecture but also of objects.

The No-Stop City, attempting to liberate man from architecture, also points toward that potential disappearance that was in the air, but does so, and this is important, grounded in the most absolute technical realism.

While many other proposals of the neo-avantgardes of the 60s and 70s based much of its visionary and provocative load on a technology pushed to the limits of plausibility and close, sometimes, to science fiction; the No-Stop City seems to avoid any boast or speculation: the deployed technology is limited to what was already available, was commonly deployed in offices and supermarkets and, therefore, did not pose any challenge. In this sense, the project proposes nothing new.

It is the application of two constructive types well settled at that time: the Domino system by Le Corbusier and the B端rolandschaft.

A clear evidence of this absolute technical prudence is the structure of the project based on a pillar grid of 5x5 meters: dimensions that are, and were then, surprisingly modest.

+

But this is not just a crisis of architecture, the city that arises from this operation is, by no means, a conventional one. In the proposal definition, not only the hypertrophy of the built environment is crucial, but also the fact that this happens in a continuous and homogeneous way.

By pushing out any interior void and ignoring the outside, a concave city is generated.

The definition of this model, by Andrea Branzi, as a “city without architecture” is best understood if we consider that it is also an “interior city”.

The disappearance of urban fragmentation, of the succession of solids and voids that shapes the traditional city, deepens the crisis of representation pointed in the interior configuration of the proposal: the vanishing of the limit that was shaping the different elements and the whole city entails the vanishing of the meaning or, at least, of all meaning linked to architectural and urban form. We find ourselves in a city without qualities, devoid of any attribute other than the pure undifferentiated and homogeneous extension.

Therefore, the infinity and concavity of the No-Stop City are, not only unusual and provocative traits of the project, but the essential characteristics that shape it and the key to its solvent and subversive potential for the architecture and the city. As we have seen, available technology allowed such a construction to be thought of.

However, the pure technical feasibility does not fully explain the project. There are other reasons that explain Archizoom’s bet for an infinity and a concavity that are not accidental: we refer to Marxism and Pop art.

Marxist Roots of Concavity Regarding this, it is essential to understand that we are facing a manifesto, and that the drawings and images of the proposal are, also, the illustration of its written content. Texts that very explicitly want to reflect the political activism of the members of the group in the field of Marxism. Field in which, on the other hand, were included most of their radical fellows and a good part of the Italian architectural and intellectual environment.

The “quantitative” concept appears recurrently in the project, from the time prior to its first formulation (in the group contribution to the congress Utopia e/o Rivoluzione) until its last publication in which they claim: “Nowdays the only possible utopia is quantitative”.

Through this concept the members of the group sought to develop a “non figurative” architecture and move away from figurative utopias and visionary architecture which had been condemned by influential figures of Italian Marxism like Mario Tronti, Manfredo Tafuri or Massimo Cacciari. It is important to remember that one of the three laws of dialectical materialism stipulates, precisely, the passage from quantitative changes into qualitative changes.

The operation by which the No-Stop City is generated as an endless and interior city can be seen as a radical application of this principle of the “official” philosophy of Marxism. As we have seen, through the boundless increase of the built depth (a

change, in principle, strictly quantitative) a number of radical qualitative changes are triggered: not only the architectural and urban form and the associated figurative load disappear but, ultimately, the architecture and the city itself as we know them.

This dissolution by hypertrophy (as architecture grows, it loses its architectural character) represents a true quantitative revolution able to completely redefine the built realm. The mentioned use of a relatively low-tech construction, compared with other contemporary projects, cannot be accidental. What Archizoom seems to be telling us with this operation, both simple and sophisticated, is that forcing technology and pushing it to its limits is not necessary in order to put forward an innovative and provocative proposal: it would be enough to extend the established technology without quantitative limits.

A very important influence in the work of Archizoom was the Operaismo, a tendency of the Italian “new left” that had Mario Tronti as his main ideologue.

This trend intended to overcome the impasse that the workers struggle seemed to have reached with the connivance of the parliamentary left parties and trade unions. For the Operaismo, the labor force is the ultimate contradiction of capital.

The worker occupies the economic centrality being his work indispensable for the capitalist system of value creation, and that should enable him to transform the system in his favor. The task is not to resolve the capitalist system contradictions, but to use them to take control over it.

The liberation from the system occurs, therefore, from within the system and in order to take control of the economic cycle, not to destroy it. The project concavity can be read as an abstraction of the operaista “against from within” principle.

If subversion against the system must come from within the system, subversion against the city happens from within the city. Besides, the No-Stop City functional homogeneity, that merges production, consumption and residence, as well as its boundless extension over the territory, are in debt with two concepts of Marxist filiation: the “society as a factory” by Tronti and the “city territory” by Tafuri and the AUA. These two concepts occupied a central role in the debate about the city that took place in Italy in the early sixties and inevitably influenced the young radicals who were students then.

Mario Tronti publishes, in 1962, the article La fabbrica e la società in Quaderni Rossi, where he detected an unstoppable process of capitalist integration in which the factory (the production) is extended to the whole of society, fully occupying it: At the highest point of capitalist development, social relationships become a ‘moment’ of the relations of production; the entire society becomes an ‘articulation’ of production, which means that all society lives according to the factory, and the factory extends its exclusive dominion over the whole of society”.

Tronti formulated this analysis in highly metaphorical terms and without pretending that an alternative urban model should derive from it. However, and almost inevitably, his equation of factory and society wastaken by many young architects, orphans of alternative models to the bourgeois city, as an appealing proposal for a new and genuinely Marxist urbanism in which the total coincidence between the social space and theproduction space would take place.

At the same time, Manfredo Tafuri and his fellows of the AUA (Architetti Urbanisti Associati) were developing a concept, the “city territory”, that was very close to the thesis of Tronti. The year in which this term is proposed is, in fact, the same in which La fabbrica e la società is published. The city territory sought to advance toward a greater territorial integration that would transcend the city-countryside division and the traditional concentric arrangement of functions to respond to the new needs of the productive apparatus, and the imbalances caused by the rapid urban growth. It was an “open” urbanism unconcerned about urban form.

The infuence of these concepts in the work of Archizoom is easily traceable already in their student projects of mega-structures such as the 1964 Città Estrusa. The name of the project refers to the extrusion of the city into a previously agricultural land (the Piana of Florence) that would allow its systemic integration: “A true extrusion of the elements that constitute the current production system”. The presence of these ideas is also evident in the No-Stop City. The text of its first publication in Casabella, in the summer of 1970, is, first and foremost, a political manifesto on the relationship between economic system, society and city, full of explicit references to Mario Tronti, Tafuri and other Marxist intellectuals, and significantly entitled City, assembly line of social issues.

The city overflow on the territory does not imply, in the case of No-Stop City, the integration of the rural world but, rather, its exclusion.

The introversion of the project highlights the absolute ignorance of its exterior alternative, of the realm that the city has traditionally confronted with. A lack of interest in the agrarian that is also ideological. Moving away from its rousseaunian roots, Marxism sees the countryside and agriculture, rather than as a happy arcadia uncontaminated by industrial capitalism, as the lair of reactionary and counter-revolutionary values. Marxism distrusts the countryside and the rural, and it is aware that it owes its origin, as ideology and as political movement, to the development linked to the industrial city. It is also aware that the city, despite being the maximum theater of capitalist exploitation, is a much more fertile breeding ground for the workers struggle that the rural world. The writing

by Friedrich Engels “The Housing Question”, from 1872, clearly influenced the urban discourse of Tronti and Tafuri and, as Branzi recalled recently , we know that it was circulating in those years among the Florentine architecture students.

For the Marxism co-founder rural areas: “produced only servile souls […] Only the proletariat created by modern large-scale industry, liberated from all inherited fetters, including those which chained it to the land, and driven in herds into the big towns, is in a position to accomplish the great social transformation which will put an end to all class exploitation and all class rule.”

Pop and Unlimited Commodification Pop Art is another fundamental influence in the work of Archizoom.

The evident interest of the group in this phenomenon and, more generally, their clearly Anglo-Saxon cultural background, coupled with their political militancy (an apparently absurd and contradictory position between communism and consumerism shared with other Radical members) earned them criticism both from the most uncompromising Italian Marxism and from opposed ideological positions in the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, the ideological and politicized rereading of popular culture and consumerism carried out by these young Italians, is not only a specific feature of the Italian Radical Movement that distinguishes it from other neo-avantgardes (with less political content or more ideological prejudices), but it also explains much of the interest, the signficance and the remarkable cultural depth of the movement. Although in the No-Stop City the building (the microconditioned and homogeneous container) seems to have been entirely freed from the sharp Pop image of earlier proposals of the group , the presence of this trend and of the reflections that it triggered are latent in the texts and the images of the project. The economical, sociological and iconographic centrality of the consumer product is an ingredient of the proposal that, while being completely alien to the most orthodox Marxist discourse and its moral values (although not so distant from the operaista motto “more money and less work�) is, however, perfectly coherent with the influence of Pop.

In fact, and not by chance, in parallel with its development, the group undertakes the study and design of furniture and clothing. An activity as designers to which they would later devote themselves on a priority basis. The project implies an assessment of consumerism as something not only unavoidable, but liberating. Unlike the Marxist debate on the city that emphasized the production, understanding consumption as something secondary and inconsequential for the urban form, the project equates these two moments of the economic cycle by being the simultaneous support for both, and poses a continuous and homogeneous system designed to offer no resistance to this cycle and to speed it up. For the group, Pop turns everyday life into art accessible to everyone, being, in this sense, anti-elitist. This trend flattens reality and dissolves the categories of high and low culture. The resulting scenario is very similar to the undifferentiated homogeneity of the No-Stop City. In fact, this trait of the project reflects an egalitarian society freed from social hierarchies, something also expressed in the horizontal nature of the proposal, free of skyline, and in the absence of center and periphery. The infuence of Pop is particularly evident in the project dioramas. In what looks like the epiphany of a consumption paradise, and in sharp contrast with the absolute abstraction of the building, a food of consumer goods saturates iconographically the space. In this sense, the contrast between the inexpressive stability of the building and the hyperexpressive transience of the mobile is striking. The tension between these two spheres reflects an increasing loss of prominence of architecture, despite the permanence of its presence and the provisionality of consumer products or, perhaps, precisely because of this. Faced with the growing complexity and constant renewal induced by the production system, the stability

of the built proves problematic. It is this constellation of highly obsolescent and continuously renewed objects of consumption which, more than anything else, constitutes human habitat, involving an increasingly secondary role for architecture.

It does not seem accidental that Branzi has always demonstrated an explicit admiration for Richard Hamilton, nor that his collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, considered one of the foundational works of Pop Art, appears illustrating several of his writings over the years. Let’s compare this work of the British artist with the interior images of the No-Stop City: what we see is, in many respects, a premonition of the interior city without architecture proposed by Archizoom fifteen years later. Not only because it is a scene built from consumer products, but because the environment that houses them is a completely superfluous interior. What makes this home so “different and appealing” is, precisely, everything that is not home: the set of consumer goods ready to meet any need, any desire, in short, the market.

A market that, as was felt even then, was beginning to have an unlimited dimension, to occupy everything. While Banham persuaded us that “a house is not a home”, Hamilton, by presenting in his collage the commodification of all spheres of life, including leisure and intimacy, shows us a home that, dissolved in the market, has ceased to be.

Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

Richard Hamilton uses popular images and symbols as fodder to explore an interior realm and to comment on the rapid and fundamental change of everyday existence. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Technological advancements are infiltrating this warped interior, with the presence of the television playing an ad of a woman speaking on the telephone, the obscure box-like recording device on the floor, the glitz and glamour related to the theater beyond the living room window, and the Ford hood ornament adorned on the lampshade.

The iconography of modernity, material comfort, and desirability present in Hamilton’s labor has opened the possibilities of Pop Art by assuring an idyllic realm of the upcoming buyer’s paradise, while relaying a doubtful and ironic tone – pronouncing the mode of sheer parody. This piece therefore becomes not only a visually creative playing field, but also a historical milestone in the world of art and in the context of societal criticism.

Pop detects and, at the same time, encourages the dissolution of boundaries between public space and private space, between exterior and interior.

If in Hamilton’s collage, this solution produces a domestic internalization of urban space and a simultaneous urban externalization of domestic space; in the No-Stop City it goes one step further by ending with the domestic as a category.

What is in crisis in the project is not the nature of the home, but its own existence as a protective sphere of privacy: everything is a home and nothing is a home.

The internalization of public space implies the disappearance of the traditional interior space, that of intimacy, something evident in most of the project images that present living as a nomadic activity.

Somehow, the relationship that the No-Stop City maintains with the domestic space is parallel to the one maintained with the rural sphere: pure omission. This interior space, public and urbanized, doesn’t accept competition and extends a panoptic domain over the whole of the existence that leaves no room for rural externality or private interiority. As the market does.

A Project Without Limits for a System Without Limits Ultimately, in their contribution to the project, Marxism and consumerism are not so far away. The materialistic and totalizing logic shared by both promotes the fusion of all built reality in an homogeneous continuum that, as these systems, lacks an outside, that is to say, alternative realities that limit and question it.

In this sense, the project reflects a profound change in the very nature of the urban reality that is not alien to the influence of Marshall McLuhan. It does not seem accidental that the text of its first publication already made reference to the “global village”. The city is no longer a specific place defined by opposition to another place, the countryside, but is understood as a condition: wherever information and consumption reach, reaches the city: “But now the use of electronic media takes the place of the direct urban praxis: artificial inducements to consumption allows a much deeper infiltration into the social structure than did the city’s weak channels of information. The metropolis ceases to be a ‘place’, to become a ‘condition’: in fact, it is just this condition which is made to circulate uniformly, through consumer products, in the social phenomenon. The future dimension of the metropolis coincides with that of the market itself.

The No-Stop City puts forward an infinite interiority because the urban has ceased to be a place, and has become a virtually ubiquitous condition. If the system occupies everything, everything is interior to the system and nothing is external to it. A project without limits and without outside for a system without limits and without outside.

Or, as Branzi recently stated: â€œâ€Ś a freed society (freed even from architecture) similar to the great monochrome surfaces of Mark Rothko: vast velvet, open oceans in which the sweet drowning of man within the immense dimensions of mass society is represented.â€?

climatic universal system

Un edificio talmente ingrandito da diventare di fatto invisibile nei suoi confini.

All’interno é uno spazio vuoto cablato, climatizzato e protetto dagli agenti atmosferici che può essere utilizzato per praticarvi qualsiasi attività; una distesa antropizzata dove tutto si muove, ma dove è possibile ritagliarsi un àmbito, una sosta al proprio errare nomadico.

Precedenti di No-Stop city sono il supermercato e l’officina con i loro spazi indistinti dove gli addetti o le merci circolano liberamente, cambiando nel tempo le loro reciproche posizioni e configurazioni. Ma sono proprio le dimensioni dilatate di No-Stop City che permettono tre nuove possibilità.

Si annulla la differenza tra architettura e urbanistica mostrando che, in una società fatta di flussi e di relazioni, il vero problema è la gestione dello spazio della comunicazione.

Si oppone alla logica dell’existenz minimum, fatta di muri e di barriere che delimitano ambienti angusti e tayloristicamente organizzati, quella della libertà del corpo e degli oggetti nello spazio illimitato.

Denunciano, attraverso l’attenzione per ciò che è immateriale, effimero, mutevole, la fine dell’ architettura tradizionale intesa come composizione di oggetti, di forme, di stili. Architettura senza qualità.

archizoom

/ no stop city, 1969

Una città controllata da sistemi elettronici, in cui i sensori costituiscono i cardini attorno ai quali far ruotare tutte le funzioni urbane.

No-stop city è immaginata come uno spazio dilatato ed indifferenziato, completamente cablato e climatizzato in cui, data l’estrema mobilità che lo caratterizza, risulta problematico – nonché impossibile – trovare dei punti di riferimento. Il modello al quale Archizoom fa riferimento, con un sentimento più di critica che di approvazione, è il supermarket per via della sua spazialità anonima in cui persone ed oggetti fluttuano liberi da vincoli.

No-stop city promuove uno spazio nomadico per gli uomini e gli oggetti, rinnegando la «logica di existenz minimun, fatta di muri e barriere» e proclama la morte «dell’architettura tradizionale intesa come composizione di oggetti, forme e stili, a vantaggio di tutto ciò che è immateriale, effimero, e mutevole.

È possibile vedere la Non-Stop City come un progetto-manifesto per “l’architettura non figurativa” collocandosi in un pensiero che non è del tutto interno all’architettura, ma piuttosto ad un punto di vista sull’architettura che appartiene agli artisti.

La cosa è nata tentando di definire “la città” come un indice di accesso, come standard o fenomeno fisico che funzione se c’è: “un ascensore ogni 100mq”; “un computer ogni 20mq”; “un gabinetto ogni 50mq”. la legge genetica senza la quale non si verificano le condizioni che strutturano la città.

Questo progetto è connesso ad un teorema politico.

In quegli anni si era verificata una diffusione della catena di montaggio a tutta la società; l’alienazione di fabbrica riguardava tutta la società e tutte le sue funzioni.

Questa è la premessa, ben rappresentata dai primi disegni, come quelli battuti a macchina dove si perseguiva un’idea di “inespressività” totale; da questo però derivano, subito dopo, questi altri disegni dove si vede uno spazio liberato, uno spazio creativo, non più ad alta densità come i primi, ma a bassa densità.

Qui c’è l’idea che l’omologazione è una forma di straordinaria libertà esistenziale, la rottura da qualsiasi genere di armatura caratteriale> un’architettura in meno, non una nuova architettura.

Ridurre, per arrivare a questa specie di Nirvana. la Non-Stop City, l’origine è in questo passaggio con questa valutazione. L’alienazione, la perdita di identità, la standardizzazione della società di massa.

Perché si deve continuare a difendere questi valori che non hanno mai prodotto nulla? E quindi tabula rasa, si microclimatizza e ognuno poi fa quel che gli pare.

Un progetto come un’ipotesi di grande liberazione.

La Non-Stop City all’inizio produce dei prismi, può sembrare iper-figurativa, mentre invece quelle volumetrie sono da intendersi intese semplicemente come dei “contenitori di gelatina”.

Come trasferire rappresentare un’idea di spazio come riproduzione possibile della società?

Qui inserisce anche il discorso di Cedric Price (Fun Palace) di una architettura fatta di impianti e di prestazioni immateriali, microclimi, strutture in movimento…

Nella Non-Stop City ci sono due tipi di disegni, quelli battuti a macchina ed altri più tradizionali (assonometrie, fotomontaggi).

Nel progetto della Non-Stop City emerge un sentimento di indifferenza verso l’architettura; questo progetto si oppone a tutte le teorie della forma della città, vedi “L’architettura della Città” di Aldo Rossi.

Nella storia di Archizoom tutto appare eccessivo, generoso, ingordo. L’architettura degli inizi, siamo a metà degli anni sessanta, si coniuga al superlativo: è “Superarchitettura”, il gruppo alter-ego è “Superstudio”, il loro primo grande oggetto di design è il divano in poliuretano “Superonda”…

“… la superarchitettura è l’architettura della superproduzione, del superconsumo, della superinduzione al superconsumo, del supermarket, del superman e della benzina super…” “ la superarchitettura accetta la logica della produzione e del consumo e vi esercita un’azione demistificante. È un’architettura con una forte carica di figurabilità, capace cioè di evocare immagini rigorose e di ispirare comportamenti, capace cioè di indurre il suo stesso consumo, è un’architettura con la carica eversiva della pubblicità, ma ancor più efficace perché inserisce immagini cariche di intenzionalità in un grande disegno e nella realtà della città con tutte le sue permanenze e la sua storia.”

the battle of the megastructures:

no-stop city vs new babylon

1922, Le Corbusier In 1922 Le Corbusier presented the first of his “ideal” cities. La ville contemporaine pour trois millions d’habitants was an urban layout of cruciform skyscrapers, housing slabs and a carpet of parks intersected by juxtaposed grids of car infrastructure. In this urban plan Le Corbusier was not only aspiring for a greener, denser, centralized, bureaucratic, car oriented city, but the plan suggested the ideal conditions for Modern Architecture to flourish.

The Ville Contemporaine was like an abstract diagram. When the modernist plans started to take shape on real cities, first in Paris with the Plan Voisin (1925), then in the rest of the world with the Ville Radieuse (1935), the image of Le Corbusier oscillated between a visionary and a madman. His preoccupations were clearly fundamental problems of his time, but the formalization of his ideas were not always welcomed. Even if the cities of his time had needed more hygienic and organized schemes, buildings that were more suitable to live in, collective housing that distanced itself from the Haussmanian family flat and an overall vision that complied better with the new technological advancements, the people were not ready for Le Corbusier.

Alongside with the criticsm generated by his ideal cities, the core urban values of travailler, habiter, circuler et cultiver le corps et l’esprit, adopted by the CIAM and integrated in the Athens Charter (1933), turned out to be the focus of attacks after the Second World War broke out in Europe and left the urban and social situation in a much worse and urgent condition than the one that Le Corbusier had rebelled against in the 1920’s.

Bifurcation After evidencing the destructive side of modernization (of warfare), the social and economic conditions at the end of the war put under harsh scrutiny the urban plans which aimed to bulldoze the old city centers away.

The love for the old city was politically reinforced by the collective memory.

With this situation in the background, a young generation of architects willing to continue to explore the possibilities of the modern plan (Team 10 being one of them) wished therefore to distance themselves from the highly criticized urban visions of Le Corbusier.

The war with its obliterating outcome not only represented the destruction of the old-European world, but marked the meltdown of the urban visions of Le Corbusier. After the war a halt was put to the avant-garde and its city, at least on European soil.

However, the year 1956 saw three distant although simultaneous events that marked the fate of the avant-garde for the remainder of the 20th century, not only giving new life to the plans of Le Corbusier, but creating new forms of urbanism.

Unfairly overlooked, these events characterize key moments in the development of an international program for “the� city

1956, BRASILIA In 1956 Brasilia started construction. The Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek orchestrated the creation of the new capital with the construction of the first government building by Oscar Niemeyer, and with the “Plano Piloto de Brasília” competition which was won by Lucio Costa a year later.

Anchored on a virgin site, Brasilia was the apotheosis of the modernist city; a tabula rasa without the bulldozer. Was Kubitschek the client Le Corbusier always wanted?

At first sight Brasilia makes its aesthetics recognizable to the modernist lens.

But, even if in the the Brazilian capital the spotlight tends to shift to the features of Niemeyer’s concrete monoliths and radically thin slabs, a closer inspection reveals an even deeper connection with the Le Corbusian city. The layout with its centralized government, its concrete housing slabs, its grid of streets and avenues, and with the years, the park within the city –all the vegetation and trees— not only appear so strikingly similar but reinforce the belief in the city of the four values. Modern Architecture in a Modern City. Brasilia was, after so many defeats, a victory for the modernist front.

1956, NEW BABYLON In 1956 Constant was gestating the ideas of Brasilia’s antithesis: New Babylon.

While the first urban avant-garde was evaporated from the post-War Europe and re-launched as poured concrete and asphalt in Brazil, it was in the old continent again where a “new” avant-garde was to set its second attack on the contemporary city.

Constant’s model for urbanization was comprised of an ever-expanding, evermutating series of sectors that were to hover above the old European city like a weightless cloud. New Babylon was one of the first Megastructures: colossal complexes that could mix programs and be developed ad infinitum. Architectural plankton accumulating in the urban ocean.

Using automation as the tour de force of the new city, New Babylon proposed to abolish the city from the core values of a Le Corbusier driven urbanism. If Brasilia was centralized, bureaucratic and predictably pre-programmed, New Babylon didn’t have a center, possessed no cars, and its people needed no recreation since there was no need to work. New Babylon was the apotheosis of the laissezfaire lifestyle, an Eden for drifters.

In New Babylon even environmental conditions like daylight were evaporated, giving the homo ludens that inhabited it total freedom to drift à la dérive. The first proposal of a perversely naïve post-war avant-garde, New Babylon was betting on the originality of a plot that like a form-less black hole was to absorb everything into designed disorder.

1956, SOUTHDALE CENTER Meanwhile in 1956 Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center, the first air conditioned, enclosed shopping mall, opened to the public in a Minneapolis suburb. Southdale Center was the first of a series of buildings that—like the Megastructures—were to create an artificial environment that would free the users from the complications of the city. A shelter from crime, dirt, and any kind of environmental problem, the shopping mall represented the ultimate achievement of commercial architecture; the apotheosis of consumer culture.

The Shopping mall offered a new type of facsimile reality enclosed in a cluster of walls and juxtaposed corridors. Soon these programs would mutate –like the promise of the Megastructures—to include all kinds of uses, from theme parks, to museums, to housing, working and recreation, in a kind of forced marriage between Le Corbusiean urbanism, and New Babylonian dreaminess.

Was Victor Gruen the architect New Babylon needed? Or was New Babylon the Shopping Mall of the avant-garde? How can the ultimate capitalist enterprise coincide with the ultimate Marxist project? Was the post-war avant-garde dreaming about what the most commercial of enterprises was already achieving?

Or was the commercial architect revealing a parallel form of urban avant-garde far from the utopian orthodoxies of Europe?

Aprés Garde This series of urban aspirations and confrontations: the Le Corbusiean city as the Modernist city Brasilia as a Le Corbusiean city New Babylon as the anti-Brasilia Southdale Center as the anti-New Babylon reveal at least two outcomes that are opposed to the general perception of the role, potential, and limitations of the urban European avant-garde, and highlights the existence of other simultaneous forms of non-European urban intelligentsia.

At first hand, while it can be argued that Le Corbusier didn’t accomplish on European soil the plans envisioned in his first three urban models, the fact that it was in Brasilia that the unavoidable triad—client, urbanist, architect—was finally summoned to concretize the modernist master plan, highlights if not a relay of the avant-garde in South America, a parallel version of it, and exposes the vindication of what at first seemed to be just a frustrated attempt by Le Corbusier to frame the contemporary city with his modernist values.

On the other hand, the struggle of New Babylon to break away from the values of the Le Corbusiean city displayed not just the incapability of the post-war avantgarde to draw a new urban program, but the failure to precede its commercial counterpart in America when trying to “invent” a new form of Megastructure or contained city.

This reinforces the idea that a new form of urban intelligentsia that differs from the pre-established canon of the European avant-garde was not only a possibility, but already a fully fledged reality, creating what could be the first urban AprèsGarde: a group of architects that not only managed to complete the unfulfilled dreams of the avant-garde, but that were able to “invent” the forms of urbanism that were not yet “created” by the avant-garde.

In this sense, these two “discoveries”, the afterlife of the modernist city, and the birth of the Après-Garde, not only highlight the vital possibilities of the avantgarde in a post-Pruitt-Igoe world full of post-modernist non-sense, it emphasizes other forms of urban innovation. And even if it might well be true that these new forms of urban intelligentsia have existed parallel to the avant-garde, the avantgarde’s inherent potential, even with misconceived or untimely proposals is that it is and will always be just a beginning.

new babylon

constant nieuwenhuys, new babylon

Another situationist project was New Babylon by artist-architect Constant Nieuwenhuys.

This project proposed an interactive labyrinthine structure across cities; a completely internalised space where the ambiance and climate could be controlled as people wandered freely and this in turn would lead to new social relations. While more architectural than the “constructed situations” – and hence critiqued by fellow situationis Debord – this was an attempt to produce an interior environment that was not fixed or static but in a process of perpetual becoming. “The ambiances will

be regualry and consciously changed, with the aid of every technical means, by teams of specialised creatore who, hence, will be professional situationists”. Urban interiorists as professional situationists. Techniques here for an urban interiorist include the idea of producing a structure within which to enable interactivity and responsiveness, with the potential for changing and controlling the climate – very interiorised. There is something of the New Bablylon in the “continuous interiors” of malls designed as spaces of “individualised-interiorised territory”.

urban interiorist as professional situationists

New Babylon è un modello di città adatto ad una popolazione nomadica sempre disposta al cambiamento, senza legami con vecchi modelli sociali che si rifanno alle “ormai obsolete ideologie della proprietà privata e della sedentarietà”. Gli accampamenti dei nomadi e i parchi gioco sono i suoi modelli ideali.

New Babylon è temporanea, mutevole, ipertecnologica, ludica, nomadica la creazione delle situazioni è spontanea e naturale, il desiderio ed il suo soddisfacimento la fanno da padroni (e ne sono lo scopo).

Constant, inizia ad ideare una città per una nuova era dell’umanità, in cui tutto il tempo libero, unito ad una visione della vita assolutamente nomadica, senza occupazione fissa del suolo, senza appropriazione fissa dei mezzi di produzione, deve essere utilizzato solamente per creare quegli oggetti e quegli strumenti in grado di sostenere la libertà creativa del nuovo homo ludens.

La città appare come sospesa, senza né strade, né marciapiedi, non essendoci una vera e propria città, ma uno spazio senza confini o, comunque, dai confini instabili, sempre mutevoli in base ai desideri alle esigenze che si manifestano.

Se si cerca di trovare dei punti di riferimento che possano chiarire una sua comprensione, in base ai canoni classici di città comuni a tutti, è tempo sprecato, non si troverà un centro urbano, dove sono collocate tutte le attività terziarie, o governative che siano, non si troveranno delle enormi periferie con caserme-dormitorio, né enormi strade per un continuo andirivieni casa-lavoro, lavoro-casa, per il semplice fatto che nella società di New Babylon non c’è lavoro, è stato eliminato, tutta la produzione è stata automatizzata. New Babylon è la città per una società del desiderio dove l’uomo dedica tutta la giornata alle attività creative.

Non si troveranno cartelli stradali che ci indicano direzioni, non essendoci direzioni da percorrere, ma una semplice erranza.

Constant stenta a definire New Babylon un progetto, almeno nel senso architettonico del termine, preferendo la denominazione di programma artistico. Si può parlare di uno spazio, dai confini instabili alla cui esplorazione dedica gli anni dal 1958 al 1973, con tutti i mezzi artistici che gli sono congeniali (modellini dei singoli settori, combinazione dei modellini, acquerelli, schizzi a matita, a penna, collages, sculture, fotomontaggi, installazioni multimediali) Feroce avversario del funzionalismo, dei miti illuministici, della città razionale e dell’ideologia lecorbusieriana della macchina per abitare, Constant dal 1956 al 1960 è stato compagno di strada di Guy Debord. Segnato dall’insegnamento di Van Eyck, dalle teorie del Team X ma soprattutto dalla lettura di Homo Ludens di Huizinga, l’architetto olandese ha propugnato la città non stanziale e, pertanto, l’abolizione della l’organizzazione dello spazio in funzione dell’ottimizzazione dei processi, delle routine e delle abitudini. Intendendo la vita come un viaggio infinito attraverso un mondo che cambia così rapidamente da apparire sempre un altro. “L’urbanistica, per come viene concepita oggi – afferma Constant – è ridotta allo studio pratico degli alloggi e della circolazione come problemi isolati. La mancanza totale di soluzioni ludiche nell’organizzazione della vita sociale impedisce al’urbanistica di levarsi al livello della creazione, e l’aspetto squallido e sterile di molti quartieri ne è l’atroce testimonianza ”.

Centrale nel discorso di Constant è il concetto di situazione cioè “ l’edificazione di un microambiente transitorio e di gioco per un momento unico della vita di poche persone ”.

Che trova concretizzazione nell’invenzione di una città ideale, pensata sino al dettaglio e battezzata New Babylon, per sottolineare l’obiettivo di confondere le lingue, destrutturare i comportamenti acquisiti, rifuggire dalle città ordinate e zonizzate e acquisire tutto ciò che là vi è precluso.

E anche per riacquisire all’uomo la condizione nomade degli zingari, in cui l’architettura si confonde con il paesaggio in un continuum senza frontiere, senza fine. In aperta opposizione alla concezione heideggeriana dello spazio, inteso come luogo cristallizzato, idolatria dell’immobile e negazione della dimensione temporale del divenire.

Il Settore arancione è un’enorme struttura sospesa dove fili, tiranti, puntoni giocano a organizzare uno spazio variabile sempre mutevole, libero da strutture fisse. Vi sono solamente tre piloni laterali che poggiano a terra e hanno una funzione strutturale. Un intricato gioco di trasparenze, di materiali leggeri per una dimensione enorme, indefinita e ancora una volta mutevole. Prende il nome di Settore arancione e vuole essere il primo degli infiniti settori

Settore arancione

della città di New Babylon, un quartiere, a cui seguiranno il Settore giallo, Settore rosso, e quello dei “divoratori di spazio”, splendide sculture in plexiglas sospese sul terrain vague della città.

Gli spazi di New Babylon vengono immaginati seguendo queste derive della mente, e creati i suoi quartieri trasformando il metodo di lettura in metodo di costruzione degli ambienti.

Nel “quartiere giallo” nascono: la zona dei giochi d’acqua, la zona del circo e del ballo, una piazza verde sopra una bianca. Percorrendo l’intero quartiere è possibile ritrovarsi nella casa labirinto dove una serie di percorsi a tema invita all’esplorazione, all’avventura su infinite scale a chiocciola che conducono, nella sala sorda, o nella sala della riflessione.

Settore giallo

Spaziodivoratori

Combinazione di settori

Gruppo di settori

Constant’s New Babylon was to be a series of linked transformable structures, some of whichthemselves were the size of a small megastructure. Perched above ground, Constant’s megastructures would literally leave the bourgeois metropolis below and would be populated by homo ludens--man at play. (Homo Ludens is the title ofa book by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.) In the New Babylon, the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic responsibility would be discarded. The postrevolutionary individual would wander from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations.

Gruppo di settori

Settore orientale

guy debord

/ internazionale situazionista

I situazionisti sono un gruppo di artisti che hanno l’idea di rivoluzionare la società attraverso una nuova visione di arte sperimentale, libera da qualsiasi precedente tradizione culturale. Per attuare questa sorta di sovvertimento (che presuppone un sovvertimento della stessa società) essi fanno uso di diverse forme d’arte come: la letteratura, la poesia, il cinema, l’architettura e la pittura; ma sarà l’architettura a rivestire il ruolo principale e a rappresentare, in qualche modo, il fulcro dell’ipotesi palingenetica e rigenerativa della società.

Nella città ligure di Cosio D’Arroscia (Imperia), i componenti dei gruppi CoBrA, Internationale Lettriste, Comitato Psicogeografico di Londra, il Movimento Internazionale per una Bahuaus Immaginista (MIBI), e tutti gruppi artistici operanti nell’Europa del secondo dopoguerra, nel 1957, formeranno un più ampio raggruppamento che prenderà il nome di Internazionale Situazionista.

Questo gruppovuole creare dei nuovi paradigmi per una società più libera dove a predominare siano le stesse passioni creative e spirituali dell’animo umano. Lo scopo principale che si prefigge il movimento è quello di “creare delle situazioni”, definite come “momenti di vita concretamente e deliberatamente costruiti mediante l’organizzazione collettiva di un ambiente unitario e di un gioco di eventi”.

Queste situazioni, avrebbero dovuto trovare attuazione all’interno di un ambiente unitario, concepito come unità fisica, reale, dove momenti di vita liberi da vecchi condizionamenti culturali e sociali, sottoposti alle sole regole del gioco e del comportamento ludico, avrebbero creato nuove opportunità creative.

I situazionisti sviluppano quella che è chiamata la Teoria dell’Urbanismo Unitario, che diventa la generatrice del processo creativo dei nuovi ambienti unitari.

Nello specifico, i situazionisti cercano di creare un ambiente reale e concreto, in cui attuare la dimensione ludica della vita e il libero dispiegamento delle passioni. L’architettura è usata per ricreare nuovi ambienti per la vita quotidiana, attraverso la realizzazione di nuovi quartieri tematici o “quartieri di stati d’animo”: “quartiere dell’allegria”, al “quartiere della passione”, al “quartiere della sorpresa”, al “quartiere del sogno”, al “quartiere della paura”, in cui vengono esaltati gli stati d’animo più semplici.

The shift to question of function and program as distinct from architectural fabric and site brings different techniques and thinking to hand as a process of interior-making where the equation with room as architectural moud is not implicated as a starting point.

Instead energies and forces become part of the composition. The practices od the 1950s avant-garde group the Situationists aimed to transform the stasis of the architectural fabric into “constructed situations”. “the comrades who call for a new free architecture” Debord warned “must understand that this new architecture will primarily be based not on free, poetic lines and forms – in the sense that today’s “lyrical abstract” painting uses those words – but rather on the atmospheric effects of rooms, hallways, streets, atmospheres linked to the gestures they contain.

were provisioanl and lived.

These “constructed situations” have been referred to as gesamtkunstwerk- a total work of art – which is interesting because this term is used in interior design in relation to an interior environment which has been designed in every detail. The interior nuance of these constructed situations is palpable.

“Each constructed situation would provide a décor and ambiance of such power that it would stimulate new sorts of behaviour, a glimpse into an improved future social life based upon human encounter and play. The Situationst as an urban interiorist. The shift from site and architectural space to situation and construction through a foregronding of the temporal invokes an urban interior which shifts from one which relies on only on spatial inversion.

Architecture must advance by taking emotionally moving situations, rather than emotionally moving forms, as the material it works with. And the experiments conducted with this material will lead to unknown forms” .

Techniques such as the dérive and détournement were used to identify and construct situations from existing forms to produce momentary ambiances that

the situationist as an urban interiorist

no-stop city vs new babylon

/

Constant fa lo stesso ragionamento che è all’origine della Non-Stop City.

I due progetti si collocano in un pensiero che non è del tutto interno all’architettura ma, diversamente da Branzi, Constant sembra dirigersi verso il brutalismo.

Campo per zingari, Alba (CN) , 1957

layering

rete

bürolandschaft / microclima

creazione di situazioni

“un’architettura (nirvana)

sorvolo dell’esistente

in

meno”

articolazione interna inespressività / spazio isotropo assenza di lavoro spazio labirintico

entrambe condividono: abitante come soggetto nomade desiderio di dissoluzione dei caratteri di domesticità dell’interno borghese

Andrea Branzi, Toyo Ito, Spugna sonora, Gent, 2006

Questo progetto è nato da alcune idee generali, condivise con Toyo Ito, relative al ruolo degli spazi interni, protagonisti della città contemporanea. Spazi interni che come i sistemi fisiologici interni agli organismi viventi svolgono una funzione non visibile all’esterno ma sofisticata e vitale, perchè producono gli enzimi funzionali e qualitativi fondamentali, adattandosi in maniera dinamica ai cambiamenti che a avvengono nella società e nella cultura.

Questo progetto è costituito da un unico grande organismo interno, contenuto dentro a una teca di vetro trasparente e indifferente, una sorta di acquario autonomo.

La sala Concerti è concepita come una forma aperta, attraversabile, del tutto diversa da quelle sale Concerto blindate, interpretate come macchine acustiche, rigide e destinate a creare condizioni scientificamente perfette di ascolto, secondo un concetto di perfezione che non si è mai realizzato nella storia della musica, e che non corrisponde alla complessità del fenomeno musicale e alla sua natura imperfetta e evolutiva .Questo progetto si allontana dunque dalla attuale tradizione di sale da Concerti dove la musica è interpretata come separazione e specializzazione, sia ambientale che sociale .

L’attenzione si rivolge infatti a una concezione nuova e diversa della musica, intesa come una qualità ambientale espansiva e orizzontale, che invade gli spazi e fuoriesce dai recinti delle sale Concerto, per disperdersi nella città, aperta ai rumori della città, perché prodotta dentro a perimetri attraversabili e difesa da filtri leggeri.

Le opere di Philip Glass, di Brean Eno, di Keit Giarret, di Peter Gabriel, e di molti altri, prevedono infatti una dimensione ambientale della musica, una sorta di vibrazione acustica, armonica ma non organizzata secondo i dispositivi classici della composizione, che prevedono una ouverture e un finale, ma piuttosto un procedere senza un inizio e una fine. Dunque una musica come tessuto illimitato, espansivo, che sfuma i perimetri e invade gli ambienti.

Si tratta dunque di un tipo di cultura musicale con cui l’architettura deve cominciare a confrontarsi, perché essa richiede dei sistemi spaziali diversi da quelli tradizionali, basati su una separazione rigorosa tra dentro e fuori, .

La sala Concerti di Gent si prenta dunque come un organismo multiplo e teoricamente illimitato, una sorta di spugna che si riempie di musica, dove tutti gli ambienti sono tra loro connessi: una architettura nuova dunque per una musica nuova.

Dieci Modesti Consigli per una Nuova Carta di Atene | Andrea Branzi 1. La città come una favelas ad alta tecnologia.

2. La città come un computer ogni 20mq.

3. La città come luogo di ospitalità cosmica.

4. La città come un tutto-pieno microclimatizzato.

5. La città come un laboratorio genetico.

6. La città come un plancton vivente.

7. Ricercare modelli di urbanizzazione debole.

8. Realizzare confini sfumati e attraversabili.

9. Realizzare infrastrutture reversibili e leggere.

10. Realizzare grandi trasformazioni attraverso micro-progetti.

“Questi progetti non sono destinati a essere realizzati. non sono utopie per la città del futuro ma riflessioni sulla città del presente.

Il mondo è cambiato ma la cultura del progetto non ancora cambiata.

La città attuale non è più un insieme di scatole architettoniche ma un territorio di uomini, servizi, oggetti, informazioni, relazioni immateriali. I modelli di urbanizzazione debole cercano di fare convivere architettura e agricoltura, tecnologia e metrologia, le merceologie con le vacche sacre.

Noi oggi viviamo in un mondo che non ha più un esterno, nè politico nè geografico; un mondo globalizzato costituito dalla somma di tante crisi loali economiche e ambientali.

Un mondo infinito ma non definitivo: illimitato ma con limiti di sviluppo; monologico ma ingovernabile; senza confini ma privo si una immagine globale: Un mondo costituito da tanti mondi; opaco, inquinato , dove tutto si fonde e si espande; per sopravvivvere esse deve riformarsi quotidianamente con nuove leggi, nuovi statuti, nuovi progetti, per gestire il proprio indotto fuori controllo. Ogni intervento deve essere reversibile, incompleto, elastico, perchè tutto ciò che è definitivo è pericoloso.

Un mondo infinito in cui spazio è riempito dai corpi di sette miliardi di persone , da flussi di informazioni e da un numero incalcolabile di merci, che formano cerchi , aggregati e vibrazioni che riempiono totalemente la scena urbana. L’unica riforma possibile della città è da cercare all’intero degli spazi intersteziali, nelle economie domestiche , nelle relazioni umane, all’interno della nostra mente.”

Andrea Branzi. Biennale Architettura 2010

“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego” Vladimin Nabokov, Pnin

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Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, The Mit Press, Cambridge (MA), 1996.

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Mario Praz, La filosofia dell’arredamento. I mutamenti nel gusto della decorazione interna attraverso i secoli, Longanesi, Milano, 1964.

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