A palpitating beauty by DIDA

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1&2.2014

ISSN 1826-0772

DIDA

DIPARTIMENTO DI ARCHITETTURA

Periodico semestrale Anno XVIII n.1&2 Euro 7 Spedizione in abbonamento postale 70% Firenze

luce e materia

In copertina: Edward Hopper, Tow studies for Rooms by the Sea (recto), 1951 Carboncino su carta Katharine Ordway Fund 2008.144.1 Photo Credit: Yale University Art Gallery

DIDA

DIPARTIMENTO DI ARCHITETTURA

Dipartimento di Architettura - DIDA - Direttore Saverio Mecca via della Mattonaia, 14 - 50121 Firenze - tel. 055/2755419 fax. 055/2755355

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Periodico semestrale* Anno XVIII n. 1&2 - 2014 Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Firenze n. 4725 del 25.09.1997 ISSN 1826-0772 - ISSN 2035-4444 on line

Direttore - Maria Grazia Eccheli Direttore responsabile - Saverio Mecca Comitato scientifico - Alberto Campo Baeza, Maria Teresa Bartoli, Fabio Capanni, Giancarlo Cataldi, Francesco Cellini, Adolfo Natalini, Ulisse Tramonti, Chris Younes, Paolo Zermani Redazione - Fabrizio Arrigoni, Valerio Barberis, Riccardo Butini, Francesco Collotti, Fabio Fabbrizzi, Francesca Mugnai, Alberto Pireddu, Michelangelo Pivetta, Andrea Volpe, Claudio Zanirato Grafica e Dtp - Massimo Battista Segretaria di redazione e amministrazione - Grazia Poli e-mail: firenzearchitettura@gmail.com Proprietà Università degli Studi di Firenze Gli scritti sono sottoposti alla valutazione del Comitato Scientifico e a lettori esterni con il criterio del Blind-Review L’Editore è a disposizione di tutti gli eventuali proprietari di diritti sulle immagini riprodotte nel caso non si fosse riusciti a recuperarli per chiedere debita autorizzazione The Publisher is available to all owners of any images reproduced rights in case had not been able to recover it to ask for proper authorization chiuso in redazione novembre 2014 - stampa Bandecchi & Vivaldi s.r.l., Pontedera (PI) *consultabile su Internet http://www.dida.unifi.it/vp-146-firenze-architettura.html

architettura firenze

1&2.2014

editoriale

Light is much more Alberto Campo Baeza

percorsi

James Turrell This must be the place: il Roden Crater Agostino De Rosa

La costruzione di nuove chiese e il tema della luce naturale Massimiliano Bernardini

Mangiarotti Morassutti Favini Il restauro della Chiesa di Baranzate Giulio Barazzetta

Studio TAMassociati Le stanze del silenzio Raul Pantaleo

João Luís Carrilho da Graça Una palpitante bellezza Fabiola Gorgeri

Yung Ho Chang Atelier FCJZ - Vertical Glass House Vetri Fabrizio Arrigoni

Kengo Kuma: Risarcire i luoghi attraverso vedute e trasparenze Andrea Volpe

Miti di luce effimera Alberto Pireddu

L’Arte dell’Architettura - La Scuola di Luciano Semerani Antonio Monestiroli

Laura Andreini - Archea Luce, Materia, Architettura Laura Andreini

MDU Architetti Luce e materia Marcello Marchesini

luce e materia

ricerche

atlante dida

eredità del passato

eventi

letture a cura di: english text

Maria Grazia Eccheli Riccardo Campagnola Riverbero tra i canneti

106

Lo spazio gonfiante del Mercato dei Fiori di Pescia una interpretazione Fabio Fabbrizzi

110

Danteum la luce si fa corpo Francesco Collotti

118

Dichtung und Wahrheit. Scarpa a Castelvecchio: l’invenzione della luce Riccardo Campagnola

128

Angiolo Mazzoni in Toscana Mostra itinerante Giulio Basili Galleria dell’architettura italiana Monestiroli Architetti Associati. Aule Salvatore Zocco Forlì, Musei San Domenico Liberty - Uno stile per l’Italia moderna Fabio Fabbrizzi Venezia 2014 Due passi e un salto alla Biennale Architettura Michelangelo Pivetta Roma, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca Eur sconosciuta Andrea Volpe Giuseppina Farina, Martina Landsberger, Fabrizio Arrigoni, Ulisse Tramonti, Riccardo Renzi, Ugo Rossi, Mirko Russo, Ezio Godoli, Silvia Mantovani

140 146 150 154 158 162 166

João Luís Carrilho da Graça

A palpitating beauty Fabiola Gorgeri

The void and the light are synonyms of some measure and relation. The vacuum is a sculptural expression to achieve a measure made of distances and absences: the relative size able to accumulate and densify the emotional values and transform the vacuum in space. The void is the condition of existence of the light itself, housing it as a inevitable material, giving it the shape and consistence of a desire: the immanence of the absence that becoming potential presence. All materials in nature are made of light was turned off, and this mass crumbled, called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to light. Thus the light is really the source of all being.1 In this lack which is also the distance between things, the light directs, moves, dazzles, confuses the glance: it is both a symbolic experience either an real part of the world; a dart of photons refracted by the atmosphere which becomes metaphysical and ontological nexus of knowledge. The sight presupposes the existence of the eyes, the thing, and also the light. The eyes do not see the light, but the object in the light. The light empty space. This empty space presupposes the movement of desire. The vacuum produced by the light remains a thickness indeterminate, but also the comparison condition with the other.2 The vacuum drenched in light is also the distance that is bridged by the intertwining of the phenomenological perception:3 the necessary hiatus between things individually belonging to a same totality so that the perceptual act is made possible. In this, the landscape is constructed such as a shade of a specific territory: as the atmosphere4 that unifies the multiplicity of the present things, objects and distances, so synaesthetic.

In the extension of Palácio de Belém, in order to achieve the Centre for Documentation and Information, the vacuum is a syntactic element of the narrative expression by the repeated presence of the gardens, and a mode, by suspending from the ground and the overhang. The works of Carrilho da Graça dosing, blur-free, clear-cut areas of shadow in the clarity of full and direct light, generated mostly by suspended volumes and a careful integration orographic places. In Belém, a grass platform is the new reference level from which the project originates and the articulation of the complex is spread, creating a semi-underground system, connected the presidential palace, according to a distribution of functional and autonomous spaces, collectives and private, willing in L shaped. The place retains monastic cloisters and italian style gardens as fragments of memory, which return by a palingenesis of light and shadow, presence and absence. The geometric planes that constitute this architecture are references both physical and ideal, concrete and abstract, with the materiality of the turf and the purity of white, which enter into a kind of harmonic resonance with the context, so determining landscape. The planes shape and define the void. The void is the space of the light. The light evokes the desire to cancel the gravity, enphasizes the lightness of the “inhabited wall”, hanging in the balance on a basement of shadow: a vacuum that cuts horizontally at the base, the wallscreen, which is measure the surrounding open spaces. The external surface, as an abstract paint of Malevich, accept upon itself only the soft graphism, dotted and changing, from the shadow of the trees that surround it.

Documentation Centre and Archive Belém Palace Lisbon, Portugal 1997-2002 Competition First Prize, 1997 Project: João Luís Carrilho da Graça Team: Anne Demoustier, Giulia de Appolonia, João Maria Trindade, Mónica Margarido, João Manuel Alves, Susana Rato Landscape Architecture: João Gomes da Silva Structural engineering: Pedro Morujão Photo: © Maria Timóteo Fabiola Gorgeri

St. Antonio’s Church & St. Bartolomeu Social Center Portalegre, Portugal 1993 - 2008 Project: João Luís Carrilho da Graça Team: Inês Lobo, João Maria Trindade, Flávio Barbini, Maria João Barbini, Luís Barros, Filipe Homem, Paula Miranda, Susana Rato, Pedro Ricciardi, João Manuel Alves, Inês Cortesão, Joanna Malitzki. Structural engineering: Pedro Morujão Photo: Fabiola Gorgeri

The white volume sums up in itself the warm light of Lisbon, almost indifferent to vary the hours of day: it is a counterpoint and a complement of the dense shadow of the ancient woodland in the margin. The basement is at the same time a slot of light, continuous and dynamic, for the interior space into which it flows, with its mutability, vibrant and reflected by a water surface. A palpitant light that fades the threshold of the forms, fills the void as amniotic fluid. A brightness, corpuscular and radiating, dampens the boundaries creating mutual and osmotic adequation of exteriority and interiority, where the light is measures a dilated time such as space: the limits of space and time become transparent thresholds, light modulators, on which the reflected images are superimposed with fading, as in the crevices of memory. This is an architecture generated in section, which elects the voids as spaces of life and the human as the first principle of measure. Inside the daylight, soft and touchable, penetrates from above, blends with the

diagonal light from a small bright well and with the horizontal light from partly opal borders, glides on smooth shiny surfaces of the floor and with the consistency of a crayon on the pale green walls, permeates the masses and dematerializes the margins of the shape. This inner chthonic space becomes the detector core when the natural light fades. As an image at the negative, the places of shadow, which declare the clarity of the composition made of planes and extended visual horizons, often highlighted by the wrinkled opacity of dark materials, become, in the evening, source of light, declaring the fragmented aspect of the complex. At the same time, the palpitate of the light as a beating of cyclical time, reveals the stratigraphic essence of the whole. The project marks certain geometric lines, which make analytical the temporal stratification of architectural events. So, the white wall acts as a fragment of a much larger abstract totality, to which it refers with its allusive incompleteness. If from

Previous pages: Documentation Centre and Archive Belém Palace 1 Suspended Wall photo © Maria Timóteo Courtesy by Carrilho da Graça Arquitectos 2-3 Section and Plan Courtesy by Carrilho da Graça Arquitectos 4 View from the hanging gardens photo Fabiola Gorgeri

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one side, being a screen, denies its role tectonic, so suspended, it alludes to a potential construction or of the which it constitutes a possible residual permanence. The suspension of the plane-wall, in which and from which the light flows, suggests a rarefied atmosphere and a suspension in the logical-deductive understanding. This ambiguous opening in the objectivity of abstract sign enables the sign itself to evoke and mean other landscapes. The neutral visual plane to make possible the imagination and a mnemonic reference to the banks of the Tejo, the specificity geographic of place and also the landscape of Alentejo, dotted with white architectures. The building acts as a remembering fragment, that belonging more to nature than artifice. The abstract simplicity that characterizes this integration to the exi-

sting architectures contributes to the serenity of a peaceful place, which finds in the intense plasticity of the architectural sign, that is together fragment, measure and landscape, partly devoid of causal reasons, a concise rule of reading for the entire complex. In BelĂŠm, the light is the narrative voice of a palpitant beauty5 revealing the clarifier passage of time and of an idealized poetic abstraction that become sign of order. Line after line, around a nightmare of desire, a movement of obscurity, and the obscure glow... life seems to reach a unity where everything is confirmed: the time and things.6 The light can act as a ostensive medium of multiple presences. In the Museo do Oriente in Lisbon, the lighting, almost baroque, sculpts narrative images of the history of

portuguese colonial, told through objects and artifacts of art and material culture. The background of architecture is undefined in the almost absence of scattered light, while the presence of the objects of the collections becomes themselves a source of reflected light. Artificial light returns an unit of path to the heterogeneity exhibition, reveals the objects in the darkness giving them simultaneously singularity and thematic commonality. The same art of showing, in the bright clarity natural, discovers and shows the order implicit in the territorial structure from which the works originate and to which they belong as figures and background. On the periphery of Portalegre, the parish complex of dos Assentos tells its presence in the dazzling light of the High Alentejo, with the precise harmony of a

shadow theater, between what the shape represents and its tectonic virtuosity. The walls, continuous and silent, that redefine a whole urban block, follow the orographic and give homogeneity to the social and religious centre, similar to the near buildings but different for a greater extent. The light dematerialized the already white walls, turns them into optical planes that receive and cast shadows; penetrates between the planes that delineate the spaces, in the cracks left by their missing intersections: emphasizes the dynamism of the neoplastic box, accentuating the open spatiality. The entrance to the complex is an interruption of continuity: an anomaly of shadow generated in the limit of the volume, by a raised floor that invites you to enter: a threshold for stopping, waiting, sheltering from the sun; a break

and a transition from an heterogeneous and dispersed urbanity to another that is more intense and concentrated. The church is set back and the space in front of it plays the role of the churchyard in the function that is proper and in the reference that the collective memory found in the typological sign; but it is also the cloister with multiple functions and social facing in it; and domestic mediterranean patio, light tank, where the volumes become sundials of everyday life. The entrance to the complex is an interruption of continuity: an anomaly of shadow generated in the limit of the volume, by a raised floor that invites you to enter: a threshold for stopping, waiting, sheltering from the sun; a break and a transition from an heterogeneous and dispersed urbanity to another that is more intense

5 Shadow and light photo ÂŠ Maria TimĂłteo Courtesy by Carrilho da GraĂ§a Arquitectos 6 Slot of light photo Fabiola Gorgeri

and concentrated. The church is set back and the space in front of it plays the role of the churchyard in the function that is proper and in the reference that the collective memory found in the typological sign; but it is also a cloister with multiple and social functions that face on it; and domestic mediterranean patio, cistern of light, where the volumes become sundials of everyday life. In this vacuum, the light draws a movement of geometric planes of shadow that reflects the duality of emptiness and fullness, transit and stasis, mass and lightness; It expresses the theme of the content slightly empty - present in other works such as the School of Music and the Pavilion of Knowledge in Lisbon - defying the gravity of the suspended masses and contrasting the dynamics of spiral paths to the static nature of a confined space.

The transparency of limits allows the alignment and visual continuity of sequential spaces that from outside lead to a eloquent depthy. It reveals the nature of the immeasurable room, of Mies, brought into one undivided space. This consequentiality of spaces favors a mystic gradation, with three different modulations of light, where the religious courtroom occupies the center of two hollow landlocked: the space of the social community and the space of the contemplation. The access is in asymmetrical position, through the transparent, reflective and tilted, plane, even here, of the absent base. This is emphasized by the black color and a thin outcrop of nature, gravel and grass, which anticipates and limited the spaces. The relationship between these spaces in continuum is also a calibrated relationship between limits, where light is absent or

reflected, unites and divides at the same time, draws immaterial walls. The tripartite spatiality corresponds to a syntax of construction, revealed in section, of a frame system placed directly on a rock outcropping quartz- This is both tectonic expression and symbolic: it refers to the territorial structure of reference like procedural support for the project, starting premise, but it is also evocative fragment. Inside the decorative power is granted only to nature: the white walls, the floor in black resin, glass surfaces in the lower part to unite sociality and sacredness, create a suspended atmosphere, defined by the material and generative presence of the rock mass. The light is diffused and constant; it is necessity and truth, so thematizes and differentiates the central, centripetal and community, space from the verticality of the side aisles. On the rock, which is

also presbytery background, the light is variable, reflects in the water mirror and reproduce a repeated and continuous movement, denouncing another presence. The strong abstraction of volumes establishes with the fragment of nature, a clear dialogic relationship between nature and artifice, which is a new landscape. The space is neutral frame,7 place of union, in which the human is the relationship itself between the things and the entity. In the analytical phase of the design process, the fragment is a cognitive device that makes it possible selective abstraction; in the expressive phase, the extreme synthesis focuses in the fragment that constitutes the work itself, the sense of the whole. Fragment of artifice and fragment of nature determine the unity of work. The light unifies the two fragments in their distance.

It is this being in the place and beyond the place that characterizes the works of Carrilho da Graça, allowing them the creative modification8 of a territory.

Louis I. Kahn, Light, (1973), in John Labell, Between silence and light. Spirit in architecture of Louis I. Kahn, Shambhala, Boston 1979, p. 22. 2 Emmanuel Levinas. Totalità e infinito. Saggi sull’esteriorità, Jaca Book, Milano 1987, p. 195. 3 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Il visibile e l’invisibile, Bompiani, 1969. 4 See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Asthetik,Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1995. 5 Herberto Helder, Lugar Lugares in H. Helder, Os passos em volta, Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa 2009, p. 49. 6 H. Helder, Poeta oscuro in Ibidem , p. 165. 7 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Un colloquio con Mies in Vittorio Pizzigoni (edited by), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gli scritti e le parole, Einaudi, Torino 2010, p. 171. See also Christian Norberg-Schulz, Rencontre avec Mies van der Rohe, in L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, LXXIX (settembre 1958), n. 29, pp. 40-41. 8 See Vittorio Gregotti, Infinito in V. Gregotti, Il sublime al tempo del contemporaneo, Einaudi, Torino 2013, Ebook , pp. 1362-1466.

Previous pages: St. Antonioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Church & St. Bartolomeu Social Center 9 Parvise photo Fabiola Gorgeri 10 Light and shadow into the void Entrance photo Fabiola Gorgeri 11 Nature and artifice photo Fabiola Gorgeri 12 Baptismal chapel in the side aisle foto Fabiola Gorgeri 13 Central hall photo Fabiola Gorgeri