Giovanni Corbellini
exlibris 16 keywords of contemporary architecture
ISBN 978-88-6242-335-9 First Italian edition February 2007 (22 Publishing) Second Italian edition January 2016 (LetteraVentidue) First English edition November 2018 (LetteraVentidue) © 2007 22 Publishing © 2018 LetteraVentidue © 2018 Giovanni Corbellini No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, even for internal or educational use. Italian legislation only allows reproduction for personal use and provided it does not damage the author. Therefore, reproduction is illegal when it replaces the actual purchase of a book as it threatens the survival of a way of transmitting knowledge. Photocopying a book, providing the means to photocopy, or facilitating this practice by any means is like committing theft and damaging culture. LetteraVentidue Edizioni Srl Via Luigi Spagna 50 P 96100 Siracusa, Italia www.letteraventidue.com
exlibris© 15 kb 16 keywords of contemporary architecture Theoretical-critical self-therapy. Read the following information carefully before you start taking this product. What exlibris© keywords are and what they are used for Ex Libris keywords are thematic paths in contemporary architectural theories, mainly tracked through paper publications and integrated with references from cinema, television and the internet. The formulation includes links to multi-disciplinary facts and issues, especially in the fields of the arts, sciences and literature. These keywords may help to get orientation in the architectural debate of the new millennium. What you need to know before you take exlibris© keywords These texts contain compressed information. Add further sources in order to get an operative knowledge. The keywords work as connecting systems, highlighting superficial relationships rather than providing in-depth analyses. Keywords are devices, they don’t represent a theory in themselves; they are maps, not the territory. How to take exlibris© keywords This product is suitable for both linear reading and occasional consultation. You can assume it as a traditional book, from the beginning (‘Words’) to the end (‘Extreme’), according to the production sequence, or take the keywords in the order you prefer: following the hypertext links, obeying momentary impulses, organizing your own research paths. Possible side effects This book can induce curiosity. Hypersensitive subjects can experience some difficulties in immediate comprehension: in case, increase the doses. How to store exlibris© keywords The active ingredients are partly volatile. It is recommended to personally update references and links and report to the manufacturer. Contents of the volume and other information Each 15 kb (about 2,000 words) keyword includes an average of 29 bibliographic references and a post scriptum of 15-71 additional indications. The total number of books, journals, articles, and other references collected in the formulation is 964. Quoted authors, groups, schools and movements amount to 1063. Highlighted keywords allow for random itineraries intersecting the main issues-entries. Manufacturer Giovanni Corbellini, giovanni.corbellini@polito.it.
words event density mobile diagram surface dictionary collision indeterminate absence big beautiful? play context fast extreme
011
021
029
037
045
053
061
069
079
087
097
105
115
123
133
141
Alessandro Rocca 2015
This is a very useful and clear book, with a beautiful surface of elegant writing. But it is also a hermetic book, crossed by a dense plot of implicit messages, undeclared theories, unspoken criticism. Each reader will trace the most secret clues according to her or his knowledge and interests. I limit myself to indicate those that seem absolutely evident to me. The first of these messages, in my opinion, is that words are important. Nanni Moretti had already said it, possessed by a purist obsession, but Giovanni Corbellini, on the contrary, maintains or better suggests this attitude with a subversive intent, with the ambition to erode boring habits and other intellectual laziness. And we must admit that, in order to undertake and bring to fruition this meritorious and liberating action, he takes some risks, as when he unconventionally ignores arguments – words – that for many of our teachers, and for many of their disciples, are essential references. The words excluded, in this agile dictionary of sixteen entries, are very important. They are those that every architect hears and reads continuously, at the university, in conferences, in magazines, and which are the cornerstones of a jargon for insiders that feeds on clichés and phrases, excludes others and, for us, is as boring as it is reassuring. The words of Corbellini are instead of everyone and nobody, they belong only to the dictionary, they go beyond the simplified and local jargon and aim to open and not to close, to move and not to stop. The second message is that books are important too. It is an affirmation advanced in an implicit way, with lightness and nonchalance that however touches a crucial point of cultural communication. After all, it is obvious, this is a book about books, but there is something more. In the era in which it many instruments deprive the book of the centrality it has always had, it must reinvent itself and experiment with new formats and new languages. And in fact Ex Libris does it, with an experimental path that crosses and overlaps different genres: the dictionary, the reasoned bibliography, the collection of independent essays. Moreover, it is a book that is born on the web, on the other side of the barricade, and that has used a digital space, arch’it, as a laboratory and as an interface with readers. However, there is no doubt that books are important because they guide thinking and designing. The author, albeit indirectly, maintains it, but I think he knows very well that this – whether unfortunately or fortunately, depends on your attitude – is not completely true. So, what is the purpose of the study, the readings and the writing that produced this book? To build a work, a scenario, a project that has as its first aim the realization of an imaginary world. In Flatland, an epic novel dedicated to geometry, a sphere explains to a square that there is also a three-dimensional
world. The sphere insists for a long time, to persuade the incredulous square, and one of her most convincing demonstrations is a didactic inspection in the world of one dimension, a nothing inhabited by a single point, exaggeratedly happy of being himself. When, finally, the square understands and tries to convince his two-dimensional fellows that there are different worlds with a greater number of dimensions, he undergoes a condemnation of perpetual exclusion from his own world. Ex Libris, like Flatland, convinces us step by step, word by word, that there is a different architectural world, which has its own dimension, that of the book, where Corbellini / Alice in Wonderland leads us to discover incongruous spaces, parallel times, hidden kinships, judicious approaches and more or less dangerous liaisons. And we too, if we believe fully in the Corbellinian world, risk being no longer recognized by our fellows; Dr. Corbellini’s Pills, to quote another of his beautiful books, should be taken with imprudence, regardless of the side effects. Because the world of Ex Libris reminds Solaris, a planet where dreams come true but where, unfortunately, even nightmares come true... So you have to take the author – who is very good at not getting excited or depressed, at least in appearance – as an example, letting the words, not the feelings, tell their truths. The title, of which I am guilty, has a clear correspondence with the content of the book but also has a more personal origin, a persistent memory of the motto contained in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s ex libris: ‘I have what I have given.’ To associate this generosity to the book seemed to me perfectly matching Corbellini’s writing, which is always and mainly an act of donation. The transfer of knowledge that the author offers the reader, with great awareness and consummate skill, is much less didactic than relational, to use a lucky idea of Nicolas Bourriaud. It is from here that flows the lifeblood that inspires and enriches these texts, which makes them open, conceived to generate other discourses, ideas and projects. These considerations convinced me a few years ago to ask Giovanni Corbellini to gather the keywords he published on arch’it in a book of the series that I was directing for 22 Publishing. And today I am happy for this English version of Ex Libris, because this important and original contribution to the development of the intelligence of architecture deserves more and new readers.
superficie
010
words event density mobile diagram surface dictionary collision indeterminate absence big beautiful? play context fast extreme
Calvino, Italo, Six memos for the next millennium (Harvard University Press, 1988). fast
This is Not Architecture: Media Constructions, ed. by Kester Rattenbury (Routledge, 2002). absence
Magritte, René, ‘Les mots et les images,’ La revolution Surrealiste, 12 (15 December 1929).
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought, and Reality (MIT Press, 1956). Foucault, Michel, Le mots et les choses: Une archèologie des sciences humaines (Gallimard, 1966), Eng. tr. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Tavistock,1970). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
011
words
When Italo Calvino was invited to Harvard to give the prestigious Norton Lectures, he decided to discuss the contemporary condition by using certain keywords. The result, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, owes much of its efficacy to a method capable of producing significant crosssections of complex situations. These memos reveal a particular compatibility with the issues examined: on the one hand, with the contemporary world (the terms proposed – ‘Lightness,’ ‘Quickness,’ ‘Multiplicity,’ etc. – seem to make direct reference to its specific qualities), and, on the other hand, with literature, which is ultimately composed of words. In discussing architecture, however, words and reality experience an inevitable distance. And when the discussion shifts from constructions to their critical analysis, we run the risk of generating the effect of two mirrors facing each other: reality is infinitely multiplied, but it gets smaller and smaller, farther and farther away. This activity may seem vaguely onanistic; it is undoubtedly pleasurable for those who perform it, but it can lose touch with the object of its reflections (as Kester Rattenbury warns us). After all, the fact that there is often an irreconcilable gap between things and words (between objects and their representations) has been clearly demonstrated by René Magritte. Nevertheless, it is precisely this gap that allows words to influence reality, beyond their descriptive capacities or incapacities. ‘Language speaks us,’ warned Heidegger (together with Benjamin Lee Whorf and other theorists of linguistic determinism), and this transitive nature resurfaces in the anthropology of Michel Foucault, as well as in the paradoxical cause-effect inversion between media and messages investigated by Marshall McLuhan. An intrinsically projective discipline like architecture, therefore, could not help to extensively lean on words, giving writing an irreplaceable role, complementary to that of other representative tools and comparable to that of construction itself, especially in determining specific directions of research. For example, all that remains of Leon Battista Alberti’s drawings is a plan for a thermal
words
012
Leon Battista Alberti: La biblioteca di un umanista, ed. by Roberto Cardini (Mandragora, 2005).
Thoenes, Christof, Bernd Evers, Architectural Theory (Taschen, 2002).
Benjamin, Walter, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,’ Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 1936, Eng. tr. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ Illuminations (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). beautiful?
Hugo, Victor, Notre-Dame de Paris (Charles Gosselin, 1831), Eng. tr. (T.Y. Crowell & Co., 1888). absence
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (MIT Press, 1972). mobile diagram surface play fast
baths building (shown in Florence in the exhibition ‘The Library of a Humanist;’ Cardini, 2005). It is not particularly memorable, apart from its documentary value, and it lacks any apparent connection to his De re aedificatoria (1452). His treatise on architecture, like that of Vitruvius before, was conceived without images (illustrated editions became possible only with the advent of printing: in 1511 Fra’ Giocondo produced the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius, while Alberti’s text was completed with drawings by Cosimo Bartoli in 1565; Thoenes, Evers 2002). The absence of images did not prevent the decisive influence of ancient treatises on later generations and the constructed environment. In actual fact, it probably added impact to a message with which not even the constructed examples (those of Alberti, which were to become very famous, and the hypothetical works of Vitruvius) could compete, as they lacked mobility, readiness for reproduction, capacity for conceptual development, communicative penetration and even the durability of the texts. The contemporary situation, in spite of – and thanks to – the explosion of information technology, has further intensified the role of writing. The ‘distracted reception’ that, according to Benjamin, is the fate of architecture, has been intensified by the invention of printing, indicated by Victor Hugo as the cause of the decline of cathedrals. Unexpectedly enough, this condition tend to involve also other means of visual communication. In spite of their pervasive, omnipresent nature, today’s images call for explanations (in museums most of the visitors spend more time reading captions than looking at paintings and sculptures): they require the support of words. Often the latter replace the former, as in the case of territories subjected to quick perception – for instance the Las Vegas from which the Venturis ‘learned,’ and also our suburban commercial zones. There, the volumetric composition of architecture is replaced by surface graphics and the immediacy of written messages. So it is no surprise that among the leading figures of modern architecture there were many who have combined professional practice with
013
words
an intense activity of writing (also beyond design issues), to the point that often the writing preceded and influenced the practice. The young Adolf Loos made a living in the United States by working as an opera critic and, in addition to becoming a very effective writer in his own disciplinary field, he extended his sharp gaze commenting on the widest cultural issues after returning to Austria (in newspapers and also in his magazine, tellingly named Das Andere). And Le Corbusier was originally the nom de plume of a critic who, in this change of identity, also shifted his attitude as an architect. He meaningfully repudiated the work he designed as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (through a publication, of course: the first volume of his Œuvre Complète makes no mention of his houses at La Chaux-de-Fonds). His output as a writer was so vast (over forty books published, recently revisited in an exhibition curated by Catherine de Smet) as to lend credibility to the ‘homme de lettres’ profession he declared on his ID card. The links between communication and project are so close, in both Loos and Le Corbusier, as to have triggered Beatriz Colomina’s smart interpretation of their architectures as mass-media devices. The recent turn of the millennium has also witnessed an architect deeply involved with writing. A journalist, screenwriter and film critic, before and during his studies at the Architectural Association started in the late 1960s, Rem Koolhaas produced true literary projects (as other, important contributions of those years gathered by Jeffrey Kipnis in Perfect Acts of Architecture). In an interview with Cynthia Davidson, Koolhaas explains that he wrote his first book, Delirious New York, with the aim of creating the conditions in which to put his specific architectural approach into practice, in pursuit of a total equality between the level of the project and that of writing. Talking with Jennifer Sigler, he clarifies the role of the successive S, M, L, XL in getting beyond a moment of serious crisis of his Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The writing of the book laid the groundwork for the foundation of AMO, a sort of interdisciplinary think tank that transfers the architectural methods developed by
Loos, Adolf, Das Andere, 1-2 (1903).
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Œuvre Complète 1910-1929 (Birkhäuser, 1999 (1929)). context
De Smet, Catherine, Le Corbusier, Architect of Books (Lars Müller, 2005).
Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994).
Kipnis, Jeffrey, Perfect Acts of Architetcture (MoMA, 2001). Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York (Thames & Hudson, 1978). density big
Koolhaas, Rem, interviewed by Cynthia Davidson, ‘Why I Wrote Delirious New York and Other Textual Strategies,’ Any, 0 (1993). Koolhaas, Rem, interviewed by Jennifer Sigler, ‘Rem Koolhaas,’ Index Magazine (2001). Koolhaas, Rem, OMA and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, ed. by Jennifer Sigler (Monacelli Press, 1995). dictionary collision indeterminate absence big beautiful? context fast extreme
words
014
Koolhaas, Rem, OMA/AMO, Content, ed. by Brendan McGetrick, art directors &&& (Taschen, 2004). collision absence big context extreme
Koolhaas, Rem, Harvard Project On The City, Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mutations (Actar, 2001). context
Millard, Bill, ‘Banned Words,’ in Rem Koolhaas, OMA/AMO, Content, ed. by Brendan McGetrick, art directors &&& (Taschen, 2004). collision absence big context extreme
OMA onto an immaterial plane. The success of the book, with its unusual sincerity in displaying the conceptual ‘cooking’ of projects rather than vaunting their formal results, contributed to the international star status of an architect who had, until then, only completed about a dozen projects. (Perhaps this is why the title of his latest book, Content, expresses a certain satisfaction, alongside its more direct meaning.) Yet the writings of Koolhaas do not simply promote his professional activity or act on the conditions in which it takes place: every OMA project starts with ‘a text – a concept, ambition, or theme that is put in words’ (see again the interview in Any, 0). The initial written formulation – pithily contained in one page – allows the projects to respond to clearly defined questions or hypotheses, directing the results toward the sphere of the ‘sayable.’ Their revisitation proposed in Content through the simulation of a hypothetical ‘Patent Office’ confirms their describable, quantitative character, detached from the poetic dimension and from the sensory experience of specific contexts. The question of intellectual property connected with processes of innovation, ironically addressed by ‘patenting’ projects, is significantly foreshadowed by the use of words. Faced with the increasingly rapid change of urban conditions, Koolhaas proposes an update of the disciplinary dictionary as an indispensable tool with which to think about transformation. With his teaching program at Harvard – Project on the City – he developed a series of ‘copyrighted’ terms (initially proposed for the exhibition ‘Mutations’), variously composed of neologisms, acronyms, particular meanings of common terms, or abused, abandoned words that are revived as readymades. The practices of Duchamp, in fact, are not extraneous to an idea of architecture that is both pragmatic and paradoxical, where the strategic shift of vantage point requires a continuous reformulation of its conceptual tools (also through their virtual elimination, invoked by Bill Millard in Banned Words). The impact of Koolhaas’ production, and especially of S, M, L, XL, has contributed to a revival of the book form as a tool for legitimizing projects, so much
Mastrigli, Gabriele, Volume, 1 (2005).
015
words
so that books themselves, according to Gabriele Mastrigli, can be seen as the sites of architecture’s extreme realization. In the play of mirrors between reality and writing, therefore, it is the latter that is gradually assuming an active role, in which the reflections, instead of sending back images of events that have already taken place, construct the possibility for events to happen. ‘Writing in architecture is a form of architecture,’ stated Beatriz Colomina. This makes sense only when words become design tools capable of modifying reality, hacking its structures, producing a proliferation of consequences.
Colomina, Beatriz, Volume, 1 (2005).
words superficie
016
POST SCRIPTUM Verb-Boogazine is a book-magazine hybrid that deals with monographic issues identified by single words: • Verb: Processing (Actar, 2001). fast • Verb: Connection (Actar, 2004). • Verb: Matters (Actar, 2004). • Verb: Conditioning (Actar, 2005). big • Verb: Natures (Actar, 2006). diagram • Verb: Crisis (Actar, 2008). density From ancient treatises to recent proposals, the architectural debate fed itself with a lot of theoretical books and histories about them, among which: • Colomina, Beatriz, Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg Press, 2014). • Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993-2009, ed. by A. Krista Sykes (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). • Vidler, Anthony, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (MIT Press, 2008). • Jencks, Charles, Karl Kropf, Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture (Academy, 2006). • Hale, Jonathan A., Building Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Theory (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). • Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. by K. Michael Hays (MIT Press, 1998). • Leach, Neil, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1997). absence • Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995, ed. by Kate Nesbitt (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). • De Fusco, Renato, Cettina Lenza, Le nuove idee di architettura: Storia della critica da Rogers a Jencks (Etaslibri, 1991). • De Fusco, Renato, L’idea di architettura: Storia della critica da Viollet-le-Duc a Persico (Etaslibri, 1968). Thanks to an unintentional coincidence, Florence hosted in the same days of the exhibition about Alberti’s books also the International Festival of Architecture ‘Beyond Media 05’ (1-11 December 2005) whose theme, ‘Script,’ addressed the various influences of writing in contemporary architecture: • Script, ed. by Marco Brizzi and Paola Giaconia (Compositori, 2006). • Spot on Schools: Script, ed. by Paola Giaconia (Compositori, 2005). On the interaction among design, text and ideologies: • Crucial Words: Conditions for Contemporary Architecture, ed. by Gert Wingårdh, Rasmus Waern (Birkhäuser, 2008). • Markus, Thomas, The Words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language (Routledge, 2001). Many architectural magazines focus more on text and theoretical writing than on the description of the design outcomes. One of the most interesting, born form the collaboration among Archis, AMO and the C-lab of Columbia University, is: • Volume (2005-). extreme Textual reflections were also the centre of the journal ANY, with its 28 monographic issues published from 1993 to 2000, and of the new creature of Cynthia Davidson: • Log (2003-).
Among the most long-lived and radical, in its renunciation to images, the journal of Renato De Fusco: • Op. cit. (1964-).
About Koolhaas as a writer: • ‘The architecture of Publication,’ El Croquis, 134-135, II (2007). Information flows in the urban space: • Mitchell, William J., Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City (MIT Press, 2005). context The design of words: • Apeloig, Philippe, Au coeur du mot / Inside the word (Lars Müller, 2005). • Busch, Akiko, Design Is... Words, Things, People, Buildings, and Places at Metropolis (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). • Jones, Wes, Instrumental Form: Design for Words, Buildings, Machines (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). mobile Words in art: • Holzer, Jenny, Söke Dinkla, Friedrich W. Block, Jenny Holzer: Xenon for Duisburg: The Power of Words (Hatje Cantz, 2006). • Holzer, Jenny, Truth Before Power, ed. by Eckhard Schneider (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004). • Kruger, Barbara, Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances (MIT Press, 1993). • Linker, Kate, Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger (Harry N Abrams, 1990). On the organization of knowledge, putting issues and concepts one after the other, a novel: • Pirsig, Robert, Lila: An inquiry into morals (Bantam, 1991). The intersection of critical paths trough books finds a model in the analogous construction that drives the stories of: • Calvino, Italo, Il castello dei destini incrociati (Einaudi, 1973), Eng. tr. The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). A very interesting book, both for its content and the amazing ability of its author to keep a constant dimension in its 98 chapters: • Farinelli, Franco, Geografia: Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo (Einaudi, 2003). The Architectural Association of London publishes since 2007 the series ‘Architecture Words’, see, amog others: • Ito, Toyo, Tarzans in the Media Forest (Architectural Association Publications, 2011). • Scott-Brown, Denise, Having Words (Architectural Association Publications, 2009). • Eisenman, Peter, Rem Koolhaas, Supercritical (Architectural Association Publications, 2007). Writing manuals for architects: • Wiseman, Carter, Writing Architecture: A Practical Guide to Clear Communication about the Built Environment (Trinity University Press, 2014). • Schmalz, Bill, The Architect’s Guide to Writing: For Design and Construction (Images Publishing Dist Ac, 2014).
words superficie
The two ‘big books’ produced by Koolhaas’ studio at Harvard: • Inaba, Jeffrey, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, Great Leap Forward: The Harvard Design School Project on the City, ed. by Chuihua Judy Chung (Taschen 2002). big fast • Inaba, Jeffrey, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping: Harvard Design School Project on the City 2, ed. by Chuihua Judy Chung (Taschen, 2002).
017
words superficie
018
Between words and things, writing and architecture, literature and the city: • Telling Spaces, ed. by Giovanni Corbellini (LetteraVentidue, 2018). • Corbellini, Giovanni, Lo spazio dicibile: Architettura e narrativa (LetteraVentidue, 2016). extreme • Havik, Klaske, Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture (NAi010 publishers, 2015). • Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity, ed. by Sarah Edwards, Jonathan Charley (Routledge, 2012). • Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, ed. by Alexandra Lange (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). • Writing Design: Words and Objects, ed. by Grace Lees-Maffei (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). • Oase, 70 (2009), Architecture and Literature. Mario Carpo focuses on the operative thinking processes triggered by the relationship between design and communication: • Carpo, Mario, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press, 2011). diagram • Carpo, Mario, L’architettura dell’età della stampa: Oralità, scrittura, libro stampato e riproduzione meccanica dell’immagine nella storia delle teorie architettoniche (Jaca Book, 1998), Eng. tr. Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (MIT Press, 2001). On architecture as a narrative device: • Coates, Nigel, Narrative Architecture (Wiley, 2012). • Psarra, Sophia, Architecture and Narrative: The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning (Routledge, 2009). • Volume, 20 (2009), Storytelling • Zimm, Malin, Losing the Plot: Architecture and Narrativity in Fin-de-Siecle Media Culture (Axl Books, 2005).
019
words superficie