Essay_The possible city

THE POSSIBLE CITY Project on contemporary relativity

Giulia Crotti 852089 1

Contents

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Liquid Architecture

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The redemption of the project

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Listen

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Bibliography

Liquid Architecture “C’è un rapporto estremamente intenso tra lo spazio fisico e chi lo abita, questo m’interessa altrimenti come potrei fare l’architetto?”

Giancarlo De Carlo

If it’s true that nowadays we have arrived in a moment in which the architectonic project and our cities aren’t able to realize the essence of the public values in contemporary society, which in fact don’t identify themselves in the existing urban spaces, this essay, that doesn’t want to explain all the issues mentioned above, but instead open an investigation on the traces or possibilities of an authentic reality, if it’s even possible to theorize it at the present stage of “liquid contemporaneity”, aims to discuss ideas for new possible urban scenarios and a possible field of action in which the architectonic process could be able to define them.

When confronted with the issues of urban space we are immediately placed in front of the discouraging truth that public space, today, seems more in crisis then ever when trying to find and authentic expression to the new values of society, albeit the architects’ efforts to produce new projects. Absurdly, the proliferation of experiments within this field is proportional to the increment of bitter findings reported by the sociology of space.This difference in outcome is symptom of a loss in meaningfulness of the urban tissue that has dissolved for a multitude of causes, which have progressively disadvantaged the inhabitants from being able to act freely on space turning them away from a comprehension of the city.

To understand how to fill the gap mentioned above, it is necessary to confront what are the origins of the fracture occurred in the identifying link between Urbs with Civitas, true knot of the problem of urban space.

With the end of the grand project of urban reform forwarded by the Modern Movement, what remains today of the research of the Avant-gardes is a linguistic system devoid of foundations because it is free of the structural reasons that had determined its rise and development, reasons that had seen the architectonic fact as bearer of a overview of the city and as formal component of a wider system. Following the opposite path of the Avant-gardes, the contemporary architectonic panorama has taken the city for granted, as an organism gifted of an impersonal rationality, to whose logic is not given access because it originates in a now mythical “elsewhere” now identified with globalization, now with the “natural laws” of the market.

A market that in the mean time is dressed up with empty, vague, playful forms given by today’s architectural production, fragmenting the construction of the city in its public spaces.

Today, the idea of a city conceived in an overall way is not possible for the idea of the general plan, of an overall plan, doesn’t exist anymore. No operation is thought of altogether, but only for speculative “speculations”, necessarily partial and circumscribed, whose breath is at most from the beginning to the end of the operation.

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Suffice to see how the chronicles of recent times, regarding the resonance of architecture through public media, demonstrate the increasingly pressing need of the economic power to represent itself and thus to be legitimized as the form and image of the city.1 Just think of the reality of new settlements, speculative operations in Milan, projects like area of the Ex-Fiera, Garibaldi-Repubblica, Isola, Massimiliano Fuksas’ Fiera, the transformation of the Central Station and many more.

In this sense, the language of architecture is today the perfect interpreter of a process of “naturalization” of political decisions and social contradictions of our time, a process that leads to the recognition of the substantial alterity of the city as if it were a “second nature“. That is why today there is no real contrast between the pragmatism of the market and the expressive freedom of language: they are two faces of the same will to yield to reality.

This scary sense of loss has found an analogous response to the decline in the theming2 process of public spaces, which no longer seem to convey the meta-communicative potential that has constantly characterized them. Increasing the substantial detachment and increasing citizens’ disinterest towards the urban interiors they should live.

Is the true legacy of modernity, thus, the Generic City theorized by Rem Koolhaas, in which the spaces of our contemporary cities and their future aspiration seem to be reflected? Are we really facing the submerging and devouring liquid spaces of the Junkspace?

In opposition to these fears, I feel that the right questions are: is a possible city, that to even be possible should be an alternative to the real city, still conceivable as project? And so, what are the eventual design processes that can give new voice to the architectural practice in the making of public space?

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1. It is no coincidence that today, many architects and urbanists call the most symbolic class of the middle class, the creative class, as the social subject of the urban. A social subject in which the highest technological progress coincides with the most frightening political regression, the creative class is nothing other than the representation of voluntary servitude towards the cultural horizon of the market, the horizon in which the general intellect - the individual’s ability to cooperate and create through communication - is completely absorbed by the sphere of labor and capitalist production. Pier Vittorio Aureli N. Privileggio (a cura di), La città come testo critico, FrancoAngeli srl, Milan, 2008.

2. We can describe the process of theming as that long pathway that leads to materializing an instance of social representation in a physical place of the city, involving the material environment in the complex dynamics of building the collective identity of the entire Civitas.

F. Lenzini, Riti urbani _ Spazi di rappresentazione sociale, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2017.

Gizmo, Stazione centrale _ Vizmo #3, Milan 2015 https://vimeo.com/144341180 5

The redemption of the project

In answering these questions, first of all, we must be able to recognize what are the traits and values of contemporary society characterized by multiple identities, included in the same urban fabric, the conditions of the place, with its dynamics, its urgencies and its potential.

By interpreting contemporary reality as dense with a multitude of discourses, codes and practices, it is not necessary to bring it back to recognizable and understandable meanings. Instead, it presupposes the necessary acceptance of a coexistence of meta-communicative languages that act simultaneously. The ability to collectively share different meanings with the same elements that make up and organize the syntax of space opens today to a new complexity.

The next step is to focus again on conventional practices that take place in public space to re-elaborate them as collective instances to materialize formally. It is necessary, in other words, to recognize common themes in the new possible practices, which, upstream of the individual interventions, can create a shared heritage of design that can lift us from a chronic self-referential self.

That is, from the architectural point of view that the slow construction of a different awareness of the city achieved in recent years cannot be expressed except through specific new narratives, i.e. by building a different order of things.

Narration not as modeling reality nor as a mythical tale, but as a research strategy and questioning of the city.

It is not a matter of wondering how to “represent” or “signify” the urban condition through the single architectural fact, by mimicking its complexity or fragmentation (Junkspace), but on the contrary it is to understand how architecture can build a “language of the city”, that is to say a language through which the form of the city manifests itself as a concrete and visible place of social consciousness.

In other words, the role of architectural discipline in the city is to address the problem of “building” the context of the project, that is to say, in the various materials that make up the urban scenario, an operational field within which the construction of the architectural form, though discontinuous, can make a significant transformation.

Unlike utopia, which has no form or place, the architectural design has no way of being there without a form and a concrete place to act on. Even though it is an expression of long-term historical awareness, the project is always realized through the eventua

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lity of the event, the manifested opportunity-exception, conceived by the project as a concrete lever to change things. For this reason, the fundamental task of the project is not only to solve the contingency of events, but also to extract from them exemplary character in order to constitute mentalities and attitudes other than those imposed by common sense. The project, unlike utopia, is a deliberate conjecture about the future.

Therefore, I believe that we must accept as fundamental the challenge to design contemporary public space as the creation of a polygenic space3, sharing the belief that the role of architecture will be to develop a syntactically unified speech through new narrative structures that recognize the historicity of their foundations and of their linguistic codes and allow the possibility of their reconfiguration.

3. F. Lenzini, Riti urbani _ Spazi di rappresentazione sociale, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2017.

Such structures must be able to doubt themselves, recognizing that their values are hypotheses destined to be falsified, whose purpose is to build identification systems that base our perception of the world and allow our judgment, in opposition to political neutrality that presents the city as a “natural� background in which architecture falls.

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Listen

To be able to return to think the architecture and the project of the city as vessel of architecture, it is necessary to rethink the programmatic and formal moment of the decision making, in order to not fall in the ambiguity of the alleged role of the creative star – which means the architect as decorator that offers an image to a given form and program. Thus the relation architecture-city, that is the city seen from the decisive and concrete moment of design, remains the privileged place where to build alternative scenarios for the contemporary city, grasping its new liquid nature and trying to add new values to it.

“The rule is listening to the city in the way it is lived.”4 With this consciousness in mind, I am not able to state what could be the more authentic image of the city (also, since it is constantly evolving) and what are the most exhaustive tools available for achieving it.

Nowadays, we continue to question what process can be considered valid for understanding the complexity of urban dynamics.

I think that, in the Italian scenario, among the most significant examples in this sense, we find the two different experiences of Ugo La Pietra and Giancarlo De Carlo.

First of all, the research on “Life in the City”, the study of urban elements by Ugo La Pietra, with the intention of better defining the way of living in the city not only to “use” the city but to live there; therefore, to make it its own, he aims to offer to the inhabitant those tools that allow him to improve the individual and the community’s environmental conditions through a reconsideration of the way of living, interacting, “being creative” of and in today’s society. The slogan “Living is to be everywhere at home” states that La Pietra’s intentions are to ensure that man would feel already inserted in his habitat; he does not feel alien to it; he is an integral part of it.

Secondly, the wish of Giancarlo De Carlo regarding architecture in the Seventies is that it would be characterized by participation. In interrogating the meaning and implications of participation, De Carlo comes to define an idea of a non-static but interpretative project and to reflect on new possible paths of a listening-based architecture. Participation is designed as a comparison with the place, intended as a residential area, paying attention to the “material of the project”.

In addition, he states the need for a reflection on the role of the designer (which must not be taken for granted but must be associated with a wider design process) and the need to translate the project into a process openly capable of welcoming, listening, joining the tensions of the city and its citizens. The actors and the story to be played are what matters instead of the scene. The project becomes so attempt and assumes 8

4. G. De Carlo, L’architettura della partecipazione, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2013.

Ugo La Pietra, L’informazione alternativa, Paris 1973 http://www.arengario.it/ sync/2015/12/lapietra-1973-foto-tubi-di-scarico-parigi-02.jpg

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Ugo La Pietra, Riconversione progettuale, Attrezzature urbane per la collettivitĂ , Amaca, Milan 1979 http://www.culturaitalia.it/opencms/export/sites/ culturaitalia/thumbs/800x800/images/Ugo_La_Pietra__Riconversione_progettuale.jpg 10

Ugo La Pietra, Riconversione progettuale, Attrezzature urbane per la collettivitĂ , Gazebo, Milan 1979 http://foto.cambiaste.com/Foto/ Ridotte/1/138152/138152.jpg

Studio Giancarlo De Carlo, 2nd exposition of the Villaggio Matteotti project, Galleria Poliantea, Terni 1973 11

a greater commitment than the simple creative act, so architecture should be judged not at the time it is completed, but then later on by those who spend their time, from whom the space is appropriated.

Essentially, architecture of participation is the possible critical review of the project and those who articulate it. It is an invitation to contaminate the place, the definition of a deviation on the tracks of a precise role; it’s the courage of choosing to build the aspirations of others within their own world.5

5. Sara Marini, G. De Carlo, L’architettura della partecipazione, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2013.

Although it has never really come out of the scene, today, participation has again become one of the nodal issues of the diverse architectural scenario: participating and sharing echo today, in the literature of the industry and the achievements, as paradigms characterizing individual buildings, gardens, orchards, escape spaces, existing artifacts, and substantially new ways of sharing space in response to the current crisis situation.

In conclusion, in order that architecture is participated, not only do we need to involve people in its realization, but they should be active in its construction, not in a tectonic way, but in a cultural one. It is necessary that society takes interest in architecture, to build its own space of existence.

With the hope that the aforementioned ideas and research on urban space can contribute to the creation of a new possible city, I find comfort in the words and the artistic and intellectual commitment of the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, who in his project Third Paradise states: “Every person is in itself society and must be knowledgeable and participant in every function that concerns society itself. [...] Individuals can produce a transformation into society, starting from their individual dimension, and even reflection, within their own existence. [...] Every human being must become more and more aware of his responsibility as a “gardener”, that is, to become the creator of his own environment.“6

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6. M. Pistoletto, Il Terzo Paradiso, Marsilio editori, Venice, 2015.

P. Brueghel the Elder, Spring, 1565, oil on panel http://www.sothebys.com/ content/dam/stb/lots/N09/ N09003/239N09003_6WH6D.jpg 13

Bibliography

P. V. Aureli, The city as a project, Ruby Press, Berlin, 2016.

Z. Bauman, Modernità liquida, Laterza editori, Bari, 2002.

M. Cerasi, Lo spazio collettivo della città, Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, Milan, 1976.

G. Debord, La società dello spettacolo, Baldini&Castoldi srl, Milan, 2001-2002.

G. De Carlo, L’architettura della partecipazione, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2013.

R. Koolhaas, Junkspace, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2006.

U. La Pietra, Abitare la città, Alberto Allemandi & C., Turin, 2011.

U. La Pietra, Attrezzature urbane per la collettività : cinquantasette disegni di riconversione progettuale 1977-1979, Corraini edizioni, Milan, 2013.

U. La Pietra, I gradi di libertà, Jabik & Colophon editori, Milan, 1975.

F. Lenzini, Riti urbani _ Spazi di rappresentazione sociale, Quodlibet srl, Macerata, 2017.

M. Morandi, La città vissuta, Alinea editrice, Florence, 1996.

M. Pistoletto, Il Terzo Paradiso, Marsilio editori, Venice, 2015.

N. Privileggio (a cura di), La città come testo critico, FrancoAngeli srl, Milan, 2008.

S. Robinson, Nesting. Fare il nido_Corpo, dimora, mente, Safarà editore, Pordenone, 2014.

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