This volume has been realized thanks to the Fund for University Researchers, FRA 2015, University of Trieste.
ISBN 978-88-6242-270-3 First edition, July 2018 Š 2018 LetteraVentidue Edizioni Š 2018 of photography and texts: their authors No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information retrieval system) without permission in writing form. Book design: Francesco Trovato LetteraVentidue Edizioni S.r.l. Corso Umberto I, 106 96100 Siracusa, Italia www.letteraventidue.com
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Telling Spaces Giovanni Corbellini
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Poetry and Construction are the Same: When Architecture Tells a Story Gianfranco Guaragna
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Rooms and Verses: Nothing but Architecture Giuseppina Scavuzzo
debate
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Form Follows (Non)Fiction Giovanni Corbellini
workshop
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The Architect, the Player, the Storyteller: Using Games to Make Places Speak Cristina Ampatzidou
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A Hidden Dimension of the World’s Prose: Coffee Tales Maria Rita Baragiotta
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Border Stories Alberto Iacovoni
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(Without) Rhetoric: In the Age of Design by Choice Peter Ĺ enk
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debate
Telling Spaces1 Giovanni Corbellini
‘Language is an analysis of thought: not a simple patterning, but a profound establishment of order in space.’2 Michel Foucault (1966).
‘Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.’3 Richard Buckminster Fuller (1938). 8
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here does the real content of architecture lie? From a semiotic point of view, what makes different architecture from mere building is its meaning, a meaning directly delivered by the ‘box’. In other words, the container is actually the content of architecture. This kind of McLuhanian conflation of medium and message was called into question by Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi, who advocated the idea of a conceptual and physical disjunction between sheds and their communication devices. The dialectics between applied decoration and intrinsically meaningful architectural objects, where form represents or is shaped by function, seems now giving way to the latter: media facades constitute an interesting but limited phenomenon, at least in comparison with other, more widespread approaches. The renewed attention to embedded or ‘structural’ ornament (as in Farshid Moussavi’s recent books4) is just one manifestation of the quest for spectacular, sculpture-like objects, which aspire to renew the ‘Bilbao effect’.5 Looking closer at these two different strategies – framed by the Venturis with the opposed categories of the ‘decorated shed’ and the ‘duck’6 –, it seems quite clear that the communication task of the former is to deliver a clear message, like in brands or ads, while the latter, despite its origin as a tautological sandwich kiosk, mainly communicates through a sort of body language – ambiguous, oblique, subliminal. This sounds true especially now, when the symbolic connection of architectural form with specific meanings is almost completely lost: only highly educated scholars are still able, for instance, to see in the obelisks above some Venetian roofs the insignia of an admiral, and we need Richard Sennett to remind us that the geometric order of religious spaces, compared to the highly irregular patterns of medieval towns, was the sign of a shift in power and rules –
something that could save your life.7 That’s why, by the way, postmodern architects felt free to put broken columns (symbols of death) within rather secular, commercial or residential, projects. Worringer’s empathy8 is therefore the communication device modern architecture mainly leans on. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin is probably the most representative example of this trend, with its various sophisticated tricks to deceive perception, induce uneasiness and make the visitor feel the burden of the holocaust history. It is not by chance that such an effective ‘telling’ outcome occurs in an architecture deeply tied to tragic events and, ultimately, to death. It was Adolf Loos, in his famous description of a mound in the forest ‘six feet long and three feet wide, raised to a pyramidal form by means of a spade,’9 who stressed the attitude of the architecture of death to perform the sheer idea of architecture. But what about different subjects of communication? Is architecture still able to deliver other messages and survive? Pushed to the extreme, Scott Brown’s and Venturi’s analysis of commercial buildings seems to say the contrary: the farther from the architecture of death, the more the architecture of communication explores the death of architecture...
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ompared to other media, architecture is limited, slow, sharpless. As Benjamin pointed out, it is exposed to a distracted reception:10 a condition that became widespread in the same years in which the German philosopher was writing. Francesco Tentori comments for example the shift of Mussolini’s interest from architecture to cinema, defined as ‘The strongest weapon for the State’.11 And Victor Hugo’s famous chapter of NotreDame de Paris, entitled ‘Ceci [printing] tuera cela [cathedrals],’12 traces back this condition to the first development of 9
Poetry and Construction are the Same: When Architecture Tells a Story Gianfranco Guaragna
‘Linguistic evolution goes hand in hand with the technical progress of a civilization, since they have an identical structure that allows man to relate to the world by forging utensils and linguistic symbols.’1 Umberto Galimberti (1983). 14
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e believe, beyond any doubt, there is a correlation between literature and architecture, a connection that traces back to the origins of man since both relate to that human ability to interpreting, describing, imagining and modifying the context. Gottfried Semper’s remark that it is generally possible to determine the cultural stage and characteristics of a civilization by examining the production of crockery2 was pushed even further by Adolf Loos, who noticed that an Egyptian vase, or a Greek one, could potentially unveil the topography, the hydrography, and thus the whole scenery of the places they belong to.3 Rocco Scotellaro (whose tomb, designed by the BBPR, helps keep his memory alive) applies similar interpretations to language. He alludes to a consideration of Carlo Levi, who said that the dialect of a region could be used as a measuring system for the landscape, for the people, and also for the region.4 This becomes a sort of corollary for the assertion that a specific language – as Darwin says in The Descent of Man – cannot have two different places of origin. Both these considerations, despite they may seem unrelated, express similar concepts, since they highlight how tools and language maintain tight connections to man’s environment; their structure hints to the place where they were born and the way they developed. They precisely point out a very important aspect, confirming LeroiGourhan’s thought: ‘not only is language typical of man as much as his tools, but both are unique expressions of man’s capacities.’5 After all, it is known that a culture expresses its content in its language. According to Umberto Galimberti, ‘there are no linguistic materials that do not act as symbols of real meanings. That happens because linguistic evolution goes hand in hand with the technical progress of a civilization, since they have an identical structure that allows man to relate to the
world by forging utensils and linguistic symbols.’6 Therefore, if there is an undeniable connection between language and tools, given the fact both relate to the same mental ability of man, the same principle applies to poetry and architecture as consequences of the same prerogative. The latter two, besides correlating with language and tools respectively, must accordingly connect one to another. We could say that architecture represents to utensils what poetry is to language, thus we know that architecture and poetry are closely related, just like utensils and language.
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his analogy is better observed in the Imperial Gardens of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, where lines of poems were translated into real landscape architecture.7 The same connection comes up again, in a different and more incisive form, in the words of the Catalan writer and poet Joan Maragall, not only because he claims Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia ‘is not architecture, it is poetry of architecture,’8 but because of the union between the mystical delirium of religious fundamentalism and uncompromising Catalan independentism, which makes the Sagrada Familia a reflection of Maragall’s poetry and vice versa. This means that temple and poetry are reflections of one another, mainly because the Catalan poet, indirectly, was the creator of this Barcelona’s place of worship.9 These statements are supported by the ‘anti-material’ attitude typical of Gaudi’s work, but it must not to be confused with an aversion against matter, since it is mostly a continuous resistance to its seductiveness – incarnation of sin – thus it could be read as a search for emptiness. In his works he creates such configurations that seem able to tame and mould air into rigorous, physical shapes,10 therefore it is the very nature of his architecture, where materials cease to be as such, that aspire to an exchange with the incorporeal nature of poetry. 15
workshop
The Architect, the Player, the Storyteller: Using Games to Make Places Speak Cristina Ampatzidou
workshop assistant
Mattia Marzaro
students
Monica Bidoli Mirko Borjanovic Roman M. Bozorov Federico Bullara Sara Calcich Gianluca Calligaris Giulia Casolino Elisabetta Castellan Mattia Comelli Michela Contin Sergio Coretti Estella Delbianco Valentina Devescovi Eleonora di Stefano Daniela Divkovic Alice Feruglio Paola Grison Ziga Judar Tomas Lippiello Maja Lukic Dora Maitan
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Andrea Martin Isabella Morgera Daniela Muzzolini Vera Novello Debora Paulin Nikola Pintaric Annalisa Pockay Peter Ridolfi Lorenzo Rigonat Giorgio Rodaro Tullia Romagnoli Matteo Ros Lara Slavec Alessandro Squitieri Milisav Stankovic Eleonora Stefanoni Cristiano Stivoli Elena Trombetta Enrico Vidulich Lucija Zorko
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n the 6th of July 2016, Pokémon Go was released in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, bringing millions of people to the streets. By the end of 2016 and its subsequent release in other countries, Pokémon Go had more than five hundred million users worldwide. In this game, players, who are logged in the app on their mobile phone, need to move around the city in search of pokémon, collect them, train them and fight with other players to advance in the game. The main difference with other computer games is that, to play Pokémon Go, one has to physically be out in the streets. This was both praised as promoting physical activity, acting as encouragement for socializing and bringing increased footfall in several shops and public spaces. However, it was also criticized as a nuisance and because it lead to several accidents.
Undoubtedly, playing Pokémon Go made several people visit areas in their cities, which they had never seen before and walk down roads that had never walked before. It also led to several interactions in these spaces that would be difficult or impossible under normal circumstances. In many different ways then, we can say that this game offered its players new ways to experience the city. Pokémon Go is perhaps the first popular use of augmented reality, location-based game but it is definitely not the first of this kind. In many different ways, urban spaces have always been places of play. From children playing outdoor in streets and courtyards, to the Situationists’ playful derives, and more recently, skateboarding and the popularity of the parkour as ways to playfully appropriate contemporary concrete jungles, architecture and the built environment have always formed
‘Franco Basaglia: Mystery in the Madhouse’, storyboard by Elisabetta Castellan, Daniela Divkovic, Lorenzo Rigonat, Tullia Romagnoli.
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‘The Eleven Days of Giulia’, storyboard by Tomas Lippiello, Daniela Muzzolini, Debora Paulin, Alessandro Squitieri, Eleonora Stefanoni.
magic circles. What PokĂŠmon Go makes more clearly visible is that nowadays the relationship between city and play becomes increasingly more complex as the use of information technologies influences this already intricate relation. Urban games, be they analogue or digital, old school or contemporary, are often used to tell stories connected to the specific sites in which they take place. And they are not alone in this. On the contrary, games build upon a very long tradition of spatial storytelling that is as old as the first inscriptions in caves. Think for example of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, which is believed to be the actual path Jesus took on his way to crucifixion and which in the 14th century developed into a structured pilgrimage along with regular stops recounting the episodes that took place. This situated story developed further into the Via Crucis, a more generic adaptation 54
of the site-specific narrative, which revolved around fourteen specific incidents that could be enacted anywhere. More contemporary forms of spatial storytelling include historical re-enactments, graffiti, and other spontaneous interventions that commemorate events, interactive street theatre and of course location-based and pervasive games. So, while other forms of spatial storytelling have been around for a long while, urban games, both commercial or artistic, leisurely or critical, are a rapidly developing medium of spatial storytelling. Much of their recent growth is owed to the widespread use of smartphones that provide certain affordances, such as continuous connectivity, location tracking, integrated accelerometers and more. The influence of new technologies in the ways we relate to and use urban spaces is already a rich field of study. Looking at architecture and urban
‘A Patients’ Journey to their Freedom’, storyboard by Michela Contin, Eleonora di Stefano, Andrea Martin, Milisav Stankovic.
environments specifically through games problematizes the role of space as both the object and the container of a narrative. Space can be the background of a story, can be augmented with layers of technology, or can be the defining protagonist of the gameplay.
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he Reader, the Medium and the Message
Architecture and urban planning are about giving shape to spaces and thus conditioning the stories that are situated within them. All our experiences and our memories of these experiences are situated within a given space at a given moment in time. So, every story about a personal experience is connected to a place and a time and vice versa, a particular space brings to our mind an experience we can identify with. In his Poetics of Space,
Gaston Bachelard offers a beautiful passage explaining how hard it is for writers to keep their readers’ attention, as once they start describing a space, the reader’s mind immediately recalls the spaces they have themselves inhabited.1 Kevin Lynch, in his seminal The Image of the City, introduced the terms of ‘legibility’ and ‘imageability’ to discuss the ways with which people navigate cities, but also how they attach meaning to urban spaces, based on the history of the place and their own personal experiences.2 However, spaces are not only experienced, but are also designed. Design of spaces can encourage specific behaviours or elicit specific emotional responses. They tell stories through their change in time and through their relations to other spaces. Their design, and subsequently the stories they communicate, are influenced by the media the architects have used. In a 55
Border Stories Alberto Iacovoni
workshop assistant
Emanuele Crovetto
students
Valentina Andriolo Ivana Banfic Emmanuel Batista Pierfrancesco Boaro Stephanie Bortoli Giulia Bratos Davide Cepach Mariagrazia Cipolletta Simone Culot Cristina Del Bello Caterina Dijust Anna Ferigutti Carla Furlani Riccardo Gergolet Federica Giannelli Klara Glad Tomas Linternone Laura Luparelli
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Valentina Marion Elisa Mariotti Manuel Milone Bernardino Not Mathias Oblach Andrea Romanzin Elisa Sandrin Annamaria Spezzigu Dimitrije Stankovic Giada Tomasin Valeria Tombolato Micole Tricarico Giulia Vallone Francesco Villani Alberto Vittor Ivana Vukovic Alessandra Zei Federico Zotti
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very space is the scene of a story. Better: every inhabited space is a narrative space, not just because it is the background where the inhabitants live their stories, but also because it interacts inevitably with their movements, modulating, facilitating or impeding their relationships. However, there are spaces in the history of architecture that more than others have been designed as the scene of specific narratives, rituals, ceremonies, plays. Spaces where a precise narrative predefined the disposition and the movements of the inhabitants/actors – such as temples and churches mostly, but also theatres, stadiums, tribunals and assembly buildings. Then there are the pictorial spaces. Imaginary spaces conceived solely on the basis of the narrative that the painting or the fresco staged, made sometimes of impossible architectures, without a precise function, background scenery constructed in accordance with the dialogues and movements of its inhabitants – philosophers, saints, commanders. This relationship between space and history seems to have gradually disappeared with the dissolution of the great narratives – capitalism is a pure abstraction that has found in the rhetoric of transparency its best interpretation, and in the transition from iconography to icon, from poetry to logo, its extreme reduction. And along with the stories, its actors have disappeared, no longer philosophers and saints but figures reduced to pure marketing agents, reification of the social roles. No enigma, no mystery in the little humans inhabiting the images of contemporary architecture, only the obscenity of life simplified, sweetened and compressed in a thirty-second spot. Nevertheless, we cannot do without narrative in architecture, since to accommodate human life is its ultimate goal. ...
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mong the contemporary spaces that, more than others, escape narrative, there is the border: once materialized by walls and gates, as well as by divinities like Janus, the god of transitions, today the border has disappeared, it has become a pure abstraction, it assumes different geographies depending on the nature of goods and people traveling across the globe. Yet we do not talk about anything else. We have seen thousands of people, men, women and children crossing eastern Europe, clashing with borders of various kinds; a US president elected also thanks to the promise of building a wall for hundreds of kilometres to ‘defend’ his country from the illegal entrance of people looking for a better future. Not to mention the border between Israel and Palestine or the Mediterranean and its coasts. The border escapes the narrative because it is not a space: it is a device of exclusion that does not contemplate inhabiting – etymologically coming from habere, to have –, namely the appropriation by those who cross it. The border excludes the possibility of settling stories, unless it is understood as cum-finis, a common end shared by contiguous territories, as highlighted by Piero Zanini in his Significati del confine (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000). More than others, the border is the place that architecture does not deal with, view, tell, design. It is a place of countless dramas, endless expectations; a line of attraction for temporary settlements. ...
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he proposal for this workshop came from a series of images I started working on while the exodus from Syria to Europe swelled like a river in full, and televisions and newspapers talked about thousands of people marching through the borders between the various states. Men, women and children who until recently lived 87
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White Tongue Davide Cepach, Riccardo Gergolet, Elisa Mariotti. It was the dawn of a day so similar to the previous ones. It was however the beginning of my journey. I had already prepared some supplies. Few things: bread, cheese, dried meat, a bottle of wine and water. I watched the sunrise beyond the sea. Now that I was going to leave, its reddish colour seemed different from any other dawn I had seen in the past. I turned to my bed on which I put my outfit. I wore it with care. In a corner, near the entrance door, there was a stick a half-meter long. It was an old olive branch, carried by the sea in front of my house in one of its frequent moments of anger. Who knows where it came from? Anyway, I carved it with my hunting knife. Given a last glance at my old house, I came out knowing I would not want to get back anymore. So I went east, from where the sun rises. After some days, I finally came to a wall, white like an ivory tongue, which stood between my goal and me: an immense high wall emerging from those arid lands and stretching out to the sky. This is what came to my eyes when I got to that distant land. I will try to be more accurate in describing what I saw, which certainly surpassed what hikers and pilgrims told me. The simple exterior, arid as the landscape, enclosed a city full of life and architectures, where cultures met and merged. Long caravans of pilgrims who crossed deserts and seas filled up the place where I entered. As I climbed up to a huge stairway, I arrived in a square of granite slabs. I had heard a lot of that place and its markets, with spices and objects from the whole world, and street artists performing their show. A mixture of smells hit me and I immediately recognized laurel, thyme and lavender while, in the distance, I noticed large saffron and turnip mountains.
their homes, their villages and towns, places of millenarian traditions and memories, suddenly deprived of land, space, hospitality. A whole humanity looking for shelter in everywhere, advancing and stopping repeatedly at every boundary to cross. Beyond the many more serious issues, this exodus carries with it a sense of impotence of architecture over this catastrophe, a sense of impotence stronger than in other cases of emergency: no function that can be transformed into space – tents are the most adequate and immediate response – no emergency architecture here as in other similar situations. Rather, the need for a continuous emergency architecture, which cannot be a pure defensive space, but must 89
become a welcome space. Moreover: a space to celebrate the welcome and to remember, a monument dedicated to the stories of these migrants. ....
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n 2000, with the Stalker group, on the occasion of three exhibitions (at Villa Medici in Rome, the Venice Biennale and Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana), we decided to tell our experience at Campo Boario in Rome, with the migrants living
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there, through the Transborderline. This is a playful device that we called a ‘inhabitable infrastructure for the free movement of people,’ a linear and permeable space that recalled the shape of the barbed wire marking the boundaries, reversing its meaning and function. The Transborderline was above all a pretext to reclaim a reflection on how to accommodate those who cross the borders, bringing their stories into the official spaces of art and architecture.
Buffer Zone Ivana Banfic, Klara Glad, Ivana Vukovic. ‘‘Peace, laugh, friendship, family, faith, ambition... those are the words i used to describe my life and my city, before one night. That one night when the lights went off. I lost everything. I became a prisoner in a separated city. In just one night, the worst dream came true. I was exiled from my city and my life. Leaving my city behind me, I saw it again in front of me wondering if this is reality or just an illusion. I am approaching closer. Am I losing my mind? Oh, now I see this is not my city; it’s just its reflection. I really left it behind. I am coming closer hoping to find new life behind the river, behind the border, but there is an illusion, a picture I cannot explain. I am here; I am starting my journey across the border and entering into the reflection through an opening. There is a forest around
me, I am in a burned forest and I see myself everywhere. My feelings are back, everything reminds me of my hometown. Am I going on or going back? I am not going back; I am going ahead into my future. I am walking on, crossing the stream in the middle of the space. Suddenly, everything is green. In next moment, I am standing in a room that is connecting me with faith, pray and religion. My thoughts are completely calmed down now. I do not want to leave this space, but I have to. I need to find my new life. Since the night is falling, I am coming into the next space. It is dark in here, but there are some beds, I want to sleep here. I am lying down and looking up. I see the stars, everything is calm, and I feel safe now. The desire for old feelings is stronger, so I am going on; there is one more door to pass. Right at the entrance are the ladders and I am climbing up fast. Finally, I am sliding up into the future!
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Double Spiral Stephanie Bortoli, Maria Grazia Cipolletta, Bernardino Not. A large spiral-shaped building rises between two continuous walls that do not let you see a passage. Only a big gap is in front of me at the beginning of the spiral, but I cannot glimpse beyond. Moving ahead, I see precarious shelters carved in the masonry. They seem like excavated
in a distant past by the flow of a torrent. In one of them, I see the legs of a chair and, getting closer, other objects around it. The dim light of a candle lights the interior. Nobody is there. I leave and continue my journey. The space between the walls becomes tighter and tighter, and oppressive. I keep going to the end of this path and I stand in front of a slit. I bend forward, trying to see what is going on. I see a man.
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Wall-City Cristina Del Bello, Elisa Sandrin, Francesco Villani. Day 1. Today I leave from my country in war to seek salvation. I know of the existence of a west border wall and I will have to overcome it. Day 2.That’s two days I’m wandering around in the desert, water supplies scarce. I hoped to arrive earlier at the border. Day 3. Today I managed to get to the border, before me there’s an infinite wall, impossible to pass. The only solution is to try to survive in this place. Day 4. This morning, other people came to this arid place. We started to build shelters to get through the night. We are not skilled builders and therefore we will build something simple, with the scarce material at hand. Some Years After. Several years have passed since the last time I wrote this diary. The situation changed radically, many houses have been built along the border, on both sides. Every day more people arrive: men, women, and children seeking salvation in this place. The border is getting populated. Many Years After. Houses cling to the wall, dwelling on it and creating a huge city. Buildings are getting higher so that the two parts of the border are now connected. We have built squares for trade, across the border, for a large and active community. The wall is no longer an unsurpassed obstacle, now the border is just a support.
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