Acknowledgments: I am very grateful to Alberta Lai for the availability she has shown towards this exhibition with such an unconventional theme and form. Thanks to Michelangelo Sabatino for his advice, encouragement and generous trust in my work as an architect. Our common passion for the Mediterranean and its architecture, has not only united us over a long time, we have also studied and investigated it in different forms but with the same intensity. Thanks to Jean-François Lejeune, who gave me more than one useful comparison to clarify the scope of my research. I also thank the curators Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of the Chicago Architecture Biennal 2017 for having included this exhibition in the “Make New History” program. A thank you to Corrado Di Domenico with whom I have been sharing discussions, experiments and risks of the design of architecture in its theoretical and artistic meaning for years. Finally, thanks to Piera, Annaviola and Simona, who saw the birth of the Collages and discussed with me during the last, beautiful and hot Summer in Capri. Simona, who for twenty-two years has shared her life with me and architecture, participating with great critical intensity in this work, confirming her irreplaceable acumen. I dedicate this work to Virginia and Alfonso Gambardella.
ISBN 978-88-6242-259-8 First edition November 2017 © LetteraVentidue Edizioni © Cherubino Gambardella 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 allows reproduction for personal use only, provided it does not disadvantage 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 similar to committing theft and damaging culture. If mistakes or omissions have been made concerning the copyrights of the illustrations, we will gladly make a correction in the next reprint. LetteraVentidue Edizioni Srl Corso Umberto I, 106 96100 Siracusa, Italy web: www.letteraventidue.com facebook: LetteraVentidue Edizioni twitter: @letteraventidue instagram: letteraventidue_edizioni
Contents 5
Introduction Alberta Lai
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Open Air Rooms: Architecture collages by Cherubino Gambardella Michelangelo Sabatino and Jean-François Lejeune
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The sea as floor, the sky as ceiling Cherubino Gambardella
§ 23
The “Quadreria”
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The Collages
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Sinopia
§ 87
Built sources
§ 103
Italian texts
Le Corbusier, Beistegui apartment, Paris 1929. Top: the staircase to the open-air room; bottom, The open-air room with a fireplace and lawn as floor.
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Introduction
Chicago is without a doubt one of the world’s capitals for architecture, almost a citylaboratory, in which, for more than a century, the most brilliant architects have designed and created extraordinary buildings whose profiles create a skyline of singular beauty. As a tribute to the fundamental role that Chicago plays in the history of American and global architecture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) was created in 2015, the only kermesse in the United States, dedicated to architecture. As for every major international appointment in the cultural life of the city, the Italian Cultural Institute is actively participating in the second edition of CAB (September 2017 - January 2018), the theme of which is “Make New History”. In addition to the vast number of Italian installations on display at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Institute is contributing to the dialogue between tradition and innovation as suggested by the oxymoronic theme of the Biennial, by presenting “Open Air Rooms: The Architecture of the Mediterranean from Malaparte to the Contemporary World” by Cherubino Gambardella, which will be on display in the gallery of the Institute and which will serve as an intergral part of the CAB program 2017-2018. “Open Air Rooms” is a collage of 14 collages mounted in the shape of a starfish. The juxtaposition of ancient and modern architecture creates a dialogue, a new architectural fabric, which lends itself as a suitable interpretation of the theme “Make New History”. In suggesting the achievement of the dialectic between history and modernity, the aesthetic sublimation of the collage indeed creates a “new history”.
Alberta Lai
Director of the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago
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Top: Le Corbusier looking out from a “Mediterranean� balcony. Left: Le Corbusier, drawing for a Swiss geography with Lake Lemano and the house designed for his mother in the centre, 1924. Bottom: Le Corbusier, drawing for a Mediterranean marine geography with the solar cycle.
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Michelangelo Sabatino and Jean-François Lejeune
Open Air Rooms Architecture Collages by Cherubino Gambardella Cherubino Gambardella’s fourteen architectural collages on display at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial conjure places and spaces that are part real and part fiction. Gambardella has been producing his mixed-media collages for decades and as such belongs to a small yet significant group of architects − ranging from Mies van der Rohe to Richard Meier – who have explored this medium not merely as a form of escape from the challenges of making “real” buildings but as a way of exploring the formal, spatial and material possibilities within his built work. An accomplished architect and educator with a practice based in Naples, Italy, the work of his firm Gambardella Architects (he works alongside his partner Simona Ottieri) spans from the design of objects and exhibitions to buildings of varying scale for private and public clients. Chock-full of juxtapositions and overlaps, contrasts in color, signs, and thickness, Gambardella’s collages here on display explore the architectural type of the open-air room (stanze all’aperto). Since he undertook his architectural education in Naples and Rome, Gambardella has been fascinated by the complex relationship between the ancient Mediterranean world (both classical and vernacular, both “high” and “low”) and new expressions of modernity and modernism that, over time, have transformed the built and natural environments that surround this vast sea. At first glance, the open-air room might appear a paradoxical hybrid insofar as we are accustomed to understanding rooms as enclosed spaces with walls (occasionally the walls are pierced with windows) and capped with roofs. Yet, given the mild climate of the Mediterranean, opportunities abound for architects to design enclosed rooms for leisure and activity that are entirely or partially open to the sky such as balconies, patios, piazzas, and terraces. To be sure, the theme of “framing” an open sky (whether with walls or windows) has fascinated twentieth-century artists and architects alike working in and outside the many countries of the Mediterranean. Recall for example the surreal rooftop room designed by Le Corbusier for Charles de Beistegui in Paris (1925). European émigrés to America such as Ludwig Hilberseimer proposed the courtyard house for his horizontal New City (1944) whereas Josep LLuis Sert designed a patio house
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Cherubino Gambardella
The sea as floor, the sky as ceiling Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep-sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering whirpool. Gentle or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. T.S. Elliot, “Death by Water”, 1922
A closed and jagged shape. From a satellite, it looks like a blue stain. The walls are full of different shades of colour, from green to the ochre of the desert. The Mediterranean is an architecture where the floor is shiny and threatening as only the blue of the sea knows how. In this basin, I see a large room that, from the Columns of Hercules, reveals a magical and contradictory space. A door or passage is necessary to enter and pass, going past Gibraltar, from the leadcoloured reflection of the ocean to the thousand turquoises of the inner sea. As Georges Perec said, the door “forbids osmosis”1, and moving from one place to another, from an open to a closed one, is a strong emotion. The room, with its blue floor, is not only the sun, the white walls, happiness and salvation from the unknown. There are dramas of death under that blue with a thousand reflections. Along with the solar happiness, there is the eclipse of the death by water of Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor evoked by Thomas Stearns Eliot in his The Waste Land2. Thus, leading the Mediterranean myth into an open-air room is a highly powerful adventure. The architectural transfiguration of images is, in my opinion, both a continuous collection of design ideas and the reason for this exhibition.
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Top right, the project of the “Quadreria� (preparatory sketch) is born from both the desire to collect the many forms of collages as in a bourgeois house of the end of the eighteenth century as well as from being inspired by the Mediterranean through the stylized mutation of its perfect and inexact form: the starfish (at the bottom) surrounded by multi-coloured propaganda like the rocks of a mysterious backdrop.
The “Quadreria”
The almost heraldic composition of the “Quadreria� gives an iconic power and wealth that are at the base of the Mediterranean myth and its open-air room.
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Cherubino Gambardella, Open rooms Carpet.
The Collages
Cherubino Gambardella, Spatial pools. Free interpretation of the open-air room designed by Bernard Rudofsky as a pool for the garden of Costantino Nivola’s home, avant-garde artist. The space is transformed into a sequence of vertical rooms all uncovered and facing the sky. The base upon which this labyrinthine architecture is based is the embossment of the Sicilian house where the writer Andrea Camilleri envisions the adventures of the most famous character of his thrillers: commissioner Montalbano. The choice of this unique terrace overlooking the Mediterranean emphasizes the internal sea belonging to this dream building. (Mixed technique on printed paper with writing traces, Dimensions 36x46 cm).
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Cherubino Gambardella, Incunables under the sun. This collage reinterprets a unique hexagonal-style architecture made by Gio Ponti on the roof of the Hotel Royal in Naples. Bridges block the view of the Gulf, making it possible only by a small red ladder. The space deforms into a continuous zigzag of open rooms, canopies and coloured stairs so as to become a small city of water excavated under the sky of Naples. (Roller, pastels and water colours on printed paper, Dimensions 76x56 cm approx.).
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Cherubino Gambardella, The first Sinopy, 2017
Sinopia
The idea of transforming Le Corbusier’s most exclusive and elite project comes from the potential of this site that lends itself to being seen from within and from the outside as a powerful architecture. The Beistegui apartment in Paris becomes the pretext of obtaining another polygon in an open-air room, almost a baptistery without a roof generates a long line of continuity with far-reaching and popular architectures. That is exactly why I like to prepare a dissonant project that enriches the Ville lumière with unexpected tones.