CONTENTS
█ INTRODUCTION 009 THE AFFECTIVE CITY Stefano Catucci, Federico De Matteis
021 BUONA NOTTE Sara Spinelli
█ ATMOSPHERES 025 URBAN ATMOSPHERES AND FELT-BODILY RESONANCES Tonino Griffero
051 THE MIND/BODY THOUGHT Empathic cognition from Einfühlung to embodied simulation Paola Gregory
077 THE SONIC EFFECT Soundscape and 20th century urban and architectural research Maria Clara Ghia
097 TENSIONS AND CONVERGENCES BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY Michela Comba
109 RUIN FRAGMENT PATINA Restoration and the bodily perception of the Ancient Simona Salvo
227 AFFECTIVE SUSTAINABILITY IN THE REWRITING PROCESS OF PLACES Rosalba Belibani
█ PRACTICES
133 FEELINGS, RITUALS AND THE CITY
241 THE CITY OF MIGRANTS Urban transgressions and new affective geographies
Stefano Catucci
Fiamma Ficcadenti
163 GATHERINGS Politics and visibility beyond
257 THE INFORMAL CITY AS AN EMOTIONAL PROCESS
contemporary urban
Deborah C. Lefosse
phantasmagorias Fabio Gianfrancesco
185 THE CITY AS AN ORGANISM
█ NARRATIVES 275 FEAR OF SPACES, SPACES OF FEAR
The evolution of biological
Federico De Matteis
metaphors in urbanism Giacomo-Maria Salerno
199 ON THE ARCHITECT’S ATMOSPHERIC RESPONSIBILITY Francesco Camilli
297 STILL-IMAGE ATMOSPHERES Elisa Morselli
317 NOTES FOR AN AFFECTIVE CARTOGRAPHY Liselotte Corigliano
█ CITIES 213 NEW IMAGINARIES
337 AFFECTIVE DRAWINGS
The public city from representation
Alfonso Giancotti
to affective experience Luca Reale
THE AFFECTIVE CITY
STEFANO CATUCCI FEDERICO DE MATTEIS
In the last two decades, affects and their forms have appreciably entered the debate concerning the configuration of inhabited spaces. This advent, prepared by pioneering studies spawned from the field of “New Phenomenology”, has coincided with the contemporary philosophical disciplines’ affective turn, a theoretical challenge whose breadth has touched rather distant fields: from the relationship with neuroscience to ethics, from art criticism and sociological studies to ecology, up to the questions arising from a novel outlook on the animal and vegetal world. Although we are still fully embedded in the current generated by this new perspective, we can argue that it represents the most substantial repositioning since philosophy’s linguistic turn at the end of the 20th century. For its transversal nature, based on analytical tools common to various traditions of thought, it also forms what is likely to be the most significant bridge across the historical opposition between two cultural spheres that has nearly become a common place: “analytical philosophy” vs. “continental philosophy”. Despite the fact that – both theoretically and in terms of social practices – the reflection on emotions has never truly ceased, the confinement of affect within the domain of subjective phenomena, either individual or collective, has long coincided with a sort of removal, as if it an were “all too human” aspect which, for its very nature, disallowed the construction of a rational discourse. The result has consisted in a form of lobotomy, effectively separating two spheres of intellectual inquiry: on one side the activities dedicated to the forms of communication and social interaction, on the other transmissible contents and values. The latter, in particular, was often attributed to strategies – either sophisticated or intuitive – for the manipulation of taste and opinions. After the end of the Cold War, which marked the eclipse of the ideological struggles that fed most of the 20th century, nothing has contributed to relocating emotions at the center of the public scene more than politics, boosting both the effects of manipulation and the need to grant emotions a more precise voice. Most recently, the growth of aggregations based on uncertain, unreliable or altogether false information, on conspiracy theories that demand no empirical proof or are driven by the fear of what is classified as “enemy”, have showcased the centrality of emotional responses on the spectacular stage of political phenomena. This process has unfolded to the point of questioning the rational and discursive image of democracy which, for example, had been the centerpiece of some of the late 20th century’s most influential philosophical systems, such as John Rawls’s juridical-contractualist approach (1971) or Jürgen Habermas’s argumentative perspective (1992): ideas which, on the other hand, had already been widely problematized at the dawn of democracy, finding in Plato’s opposition between the duty of truth and the quest for consensus a critique vividly resounding to our day. 8/9
capable of resonating with both the ambiance they are inspired by and with their viewers/readers. What these descriptive tools have in common is the ability of uncovering a lived reality that is manifest in experienced space, but that configures no distinct materiality that can be easily pinned down. The authors of these essays provide a vast array of ideas, perspectives, alternative views, all striving for a daunting task: that of placing a feeling subject at the center of the urban discourse. The emotion-blindness of Western modernity and its material accretion in the city-object has accumulated a situation that, despite all good intentions, far too often affords inhabitants fear more than comfort, anxiety rather than serenity, blandness over interest, sadness more than joy. The blame can certainly not be entirely placed on the way cities are designed, since they are the complex manifestations of a community’s social and economic structure, where deliberate planning efforts can only act within a rigidly defined framework. Nevertheless, we believe that this cannot be an excuse to – once again – lock emotions in a closet, pretending that cities are far too important a thing to give them up to some whimsical, uncontrolled feeling. The stakes are high, and affect must claim its – long overdue – space in urban thought.
STEFANO CATUCCI – FEDERICO DE MATTEIS
BUONA NOTTE VISUAL WANDERINGS IN THE AFFECTIVE CITY It is difficult to describe my visual and mental process. The idea for Buona Notte originated from waiting tirelessly night after night for a phone call from a dear friend that never came. Every day he would promise “I’ll call you tonight, I’ll definitely call you tonight ...”. Inevitably it would never happen. Then, on a distant January 1st, 2009, I resorted to summarize what I hadn’t been able to tell him about my day in a photograph. An image whispered like a lullaby, murmured softly in the hollow of a friend’s ear, like a last invitation before plunging into the heart of the night, I came to wish him: Good night – Buona Notte. I grew up in a family where one’s intellect was the only way to communicate. Hence ever since I have been trying to find my own language, path and vision. In the search for my way to communicate, I found photography. In every “shot” I am trying to tell a story, night after night each image reflects my state of mind and the fleeting perception that occurs in that precise moment – freezing it and preserving a particular object, person or place. Almost in spite of myself Buona Notte became a journal of my thoughts and wanderings, an emotional diary. Sara Spinelli New York City, March 2021
In this book, all photos without a caption are from Sara Spinelli’s Buona Notte.
RUIN FRAGMENT PATINA ITALIAN RESTORATION AND THE BODILY PERCEPTION OF THE ANCIENT
SIMONA SALVO
The scientific discoveries on the human body’s cognitive abilities in the fields of neurology and neurobiology are also tracing the way to a new approach in the realm of architectural conservation, soliciting a reconsideration of the process of value assessment at the base of the Italian culture of restoration. Within this approach, three structural concepts structural concepts – ruin, fragment, and patina – represent the footprints of a specific propensity to rely on the role of the affective and bodily relationship to the witnesses of the past. This paper attempts to recompose the discourse, following a historical narration and analyzing the reasons of the very different attitudes reserved to the built heritage, according to age and conditions, paving the way to a more holistic vision of our approach to the memory of the past which could finally call back into play the bodily and affective faculties within the today’s extensive broadening of the realm of conservation to nearly every aspect of life on the planet.
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Fig. 2 – Stern’s Colosseum spurs
SIMONA SALVO
Fig. 3 – Valadier’s Colosseum spurs
The 19th-century development of restoration theory will follow this partition although observing a geo-cultural criterion, sustained by authors habitually identified with the Ruskin/Viollet-le-Duc dualism and supplemented by the contribution of the “Romantics”, sensible to the interactive dimension between monument and observer. In this sense, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy fought for a conservation of monuments in situ to preserve their relationship with the surrounding setting. The rationalism of stylistic restoration formulated and practiced by Viollet-le-Duc, and structured by criteria of homogeneity and analogy of style – above all Gothic style – was countered by John Ruskin’s Romantic/ conservative vision and by the faction of architects and intellectuals who founded SPAB and the Arts & Crafts school. “Traditional” materials, with their warm and ‘mancrafted’ surfaces, natural colors and textures softened by the signs of time, were considered to elicit feelings and emotions in the observer, appealing to the memory of the past and communicating values of sincerity, truth, and “humanity, other than metals, glass, and cement which, already used in the construction world for a century, represented the estrangement and dehumanization of industrial civilization” (Ruskin, 1960; Mallgrave, 2013, pp. 183-187). This can still be seen from Ruskin’s pencil and watercolor sketches accompanying his writings, imbued with RUIN FRAGMENT PATINA
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PRACTICES
AFFECTIVE SUSTAINABILITY IN THE REWRITING PROCESS OF PLACES
ROSALBA BELIBANI
How can the rewriting of places be defined as sustainable? Place has an autonomous specificity and strength that determines a cognitive dimension, a state of the spirit of the person who builds the space inside himself, thinks it, lives it and generates different forms of affectivity. Just as the culture of architecture is an aspect of spatial intelligence and is synergistic with the affective sphere, the life of a place is constituted together with the memory that we have or that recurs in that particular space. As a consequence, the inhabitant lives a relationship with the space that surrounds him and the affection can translate into propositions for improving, interpreting, or maintaining a status quo. In this vitalism the interpretation is open: in a conservative mode, where value is protection and defense or transformation. This attitude is interesting in the regeneration interventions of a place that are not always able to reconstruct the known fabric or a new fabric of affectivity. The rewriting intervention must, therefore, work with the places’ cultural and affective data in the same way in which it works with the spatial physical datum on which it intervenes.
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NARRATIVES
AFFECTIVE DRAWINGS
ALFONSO GIANCOTTI
This essay is intended as the implementation of a series of research efforts undertaken in recent years that, through the composition of images of invented architectures and landscapes, investigate the character a space can take on in the eye of the person using it. The purpose is to employ drawing as a filter to assess the possibility, on the purely affective level, of grasping – through the use of imagination and vision – the nature and atmosphere of unreal spaces. This choice specifies the objective of defining, in this way, a series of interpretative codes whose validity will then be verified against decidedly real contexts.
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02 Desire …The image is a kind of ideal for the feeling, it represents for the affective consciousness a limiting state, the state in which desire is at the same time knowledge (connaissance). [72]
ALFONSO GIANCOTTI
03 Margin To posit an image is to constitute an object in the margin of the totality of the real, it is therefore to hold the real at a distance, to be freed from it, in a word, to deny it. [183]
AFFECTIVE DRAWINGS
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