Sayable Space by LetteraVentidue Edizioni

Pills A collection designed and directed by Francesco Trovato Scientific Committee Francesco Cacciatore Fabrizio Foti Paolo Giardiello Marta Magagnini

ISBN 978-88-6242-480-6 First italian edition: November 2016 First english edition: February 2021 © LetteraVentidue Edizioni © Giovanni Corbellini Tranlsated by the author, copyediting by Carolyn Winkless All rights reserved Any reproduction, even partially, is prohibited. It is the hope of the author and the publisher that, by having kept the cost of this book at its minimum, the readers shall be encouraged to purchase a copy of the book rather than spend an almost analogous sum in running photocopies. In addition, the collection’s pocket size format is an invitation to always carry with you something to read, as you move during the day. This is rather inconvenient if you think of a bunch of photocopies. Graphic design: Francesco Trovato LetteraVentidue Edizioni S.r.l. Via Luigi Spagna 50 P 96100 Siracusa, Italy www.letteraventidue.com

Giovanni Corbellini

Sayable Space Narrative Practices in Architecture

Contents 7 Introduction 15 With 31 Without 45 After 65 During 81 Before 98 Index

Introduction

Space and stories seem to inhabit parallel universes, destined never to meet. The former is the reality in which we are immersed, whereas the latter engage it in a mediated, descriptive or imaginative, relationship, always out of synch with the time of experience. From the point of view of the creative work and its reception, they address and use conceptually opposite issues and tools. Space belongs to the field of synoptic arts, in which time compresses and expands in the interaction with the observer, and the aesthetic sensation involves directly perception, movement, use, matter. Authenticity is the engine of its value, based on the concreteness of a non-reproducible presence. Narrative, on the other hand, is the way sequential arts unfold linearly, through consecutive accumulations. The directionality of its communicative structure can be recorded and transmitted by notational devices, which nurture its tendency to immateriality and abstraction.1 ‘When a work reaches its maximum intensity,’ wrote Le Corbusier, ‘a phenomenon of ineffable space occurs.’2 1. A distinction between arts of time and space is in Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), see chapter ‘8. Movement’. 2. ‘Lorsqu’une œuvre atteint son maximum d’intensité, de proportion de qualité d’exécution, de perfection, il se produit un phénomène d’espace indicible. Les lieux se mettent à rayonner, physiquement. Ils déterminent ce que j’appelle l’espace indicible c’est-à-dire un choc qui ne dépend pas des dimensions mais de la qualité de perfection, c’est du domaine de l’ineffable.’ Le Corbusier, ‘L’espace indicible’, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1946), special issue Art.

With

Where does the specific content of architecture lie? What is that makes it as such? The first place where to look for some clue is probably in the difference from mere building. In other words, in the meaning that architecture is able to communicate, as the result of a specific intention – of clients, builders, designers... –, or recognized retrospectively in spontaneous and/or totally utilitarian structures lacking any aesthetic ambition.1 In spite of the decisive importance of the interactions of buildings and spaces with uses, and with social and informational constructs – with the context, in the broadest sense – the architectural meaning is hard to separate from the material and three-dimensional characteristics of the built ‘box’. In short, the content of architecture tends to coincide with the container. This kind of McLuhanian conflation of medium and message was famously called into question by Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi, who developed from the observation of commercial buildings in Las Vegas the idea of a necessary physical and conceptual separation between built structures and communication devices.2 The extreme functionalism of the Nevada 1. This meaning is not easy to grasp, however. Umberto Eco wonders ‘Why is architecture a particular challenge to semiotics? First of all because apparently most architectural objects do not communicate (and are not designed to communicate), but function.’ Umberto Eco, ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 182. 2. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las

metropolis, conceived as a machine to make money without any reverential awe of either the disciplinary tradition or the avant-gardes, questioned the Modernist ambition to make architecture ‘talk’ through an overall symbolic form in which program and construction issues were coordinated. The polemic attitude of the Venturis went as far as to compare the works of Mies, Le Corbusier, and their many companions and followers to a kiosk built in the shape of a bird to advertise the duck breast sandwiches sold there.3 In contrast to the coincidence between form and function of the Modernist ‘duck-buildings’, they proposed the example of the ‘decorated sheds’: conventional constructions made of generic containers for different functional needs, whose individual specificities are expressed by means of applied decorations, textual messages, signs ‘inflected’ towards the street, lights, colours, kinetic devices, and other autonomous communication tools, basically two-dimensional and selected for the ability to interact with the perception of the observers.4 Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977 [1972]). 3. The Venturis saw it in Peter Blake’s pamphlet, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Long Island’s ‘Big Duck’ was moved from its original site more than one time and now is a souvenirs shop. <http://gobigorgohomeblog. com/3222> [accessed 28 January 2016]. 4. The decorated shed theory was included in the subsequent editions of Learning from Las Vegas. It firstly appears in Robert Venturi and Denise ScottBrown, ‘Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed, Part I’, Ar-

However, the long history of split behaviour between walls and ornament that the Venturis called upon to support their theory (showing as supporting evidences Palazzo Farnese and other similar Italian examples) did not prevent even Las Vegas from becoming, in a few years, a collection of ‘ducks’. The shift to more ‘normal’ customers – with gamblers progressively replaced by families – and to different modes of perception – from the car to the airplane – has revived the constructed form as an effective narrative device: the latest generation of hotels and casinos must be recognizable from aloft and the three-dimensional articulation is for them more efficient than supergraphics and neon lights.5 The building thus becomes a sign, albeit in the false and instantly recognizable version of the icons recycled in Las Vegas: the Manhattan skyline reproduced in Hotel New York-New York, the glass pyramid of the Luxor, the synthetic Venice of the Venetian...6 chitectural Forum (November 1971), pp. 64-67, and ‘Part II’, Architectural Forum (December 1971), pp. 48-53. 5. See Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, ‘Las Vegas after its Classic Age’, Domus, 787 (1996). The ‘solidification’ of the Nevada city is discussed also in ‘Relearning from Las Vegas,’ Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas, in Jeffrey Inaba, 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 (Cologne: Taschen, 2002), pp. 590-617. 6. City Center, the last big real estate operation in Las Vegas recently completed, introduces a further evolution towards Modernist ‘ducks’. More than a million and half square meters, and seven billions dollars, are divided in five clusters on a common base. Gensler coordinated the project, which involved,

Without

Architecture, in comparison to other media, is expensive, slow, heavy, and less effective. The phenomena of separation between the building structure and the apparatuses dedicated to transmit its meaning are in part a consequence of this condition. As noted by Walter Benjamin, ‘Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.’1 This intrinsic feature, linked to its use value and to the background role that buildings and cities play in people’s lives, becomes even more evident in the very years in which the German philosopher writes about mechanical seriality triggered by new technologies and the transformations it produced in the various fields of art. Italy between the two wars is a good example of this, not least for the political aspects so central in Benjamin’s reflection. Francesco Tentori dealt several times with the public role of architecture under Fascism, addressing its relationship (and competition) with the disciplinary publishing, the general press, and other media.2 My old mentor traced the gradual shift of Mussolini – who founded his political career 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1936), Eng. translation in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2008), p. 40. 2. See Francesco Tentori, P.M. Bardi (Milan: Mazzotta, 1990); Francesco Tentori, ‘Periodo 1933-1944’, in L’architettura contemporanea in dieci lezioni (dividendo per undici) (Rome: Gangemi, 1999).

After

AMO comes as a reaction to a painful failure. Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s project for the new Universal Headquarters (Los Angeles, 1995-99) proposed exciting size and complexity, along with a curious pseudoFreudian implication, particularly intriguing for an architect who has repeatedly indicated Mies as a reference. The company was recently acquired by Edgar Bronfman Jr., the grandson of that Samuel Bronfman who, as Seagram’s owner, commissioned the German master to design the famous New York skyscraper (1958). Further mergers and acquisitions, completed and potential, have gradually made the project unable to comply with the necessary speed to constant changes of scenarios and economically as well as conceptually unviable its construction.1 In addition, the exposure of a media giant to the dynamic evolution of the Internet at the moment of its explosion – and the consequent evaporation into the virtual of many consolidated structures – did the rest. The idea to transfer architectural experience and approach into the immaterial worlds of communication came therefore from the frustration at this waste of time and work, but also from the intuition that, once liberated from the need to build, architects can take care of the most interesting and rewarding design aspects, with 1. See ‘Universal HQ: Babylon Falling’, in Rem Koolhaas, OMA/AMO, Content, ed. by Brendan McGetrick, art directors &&& (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), pp. 118-125.

During

In order to inhabit the fluid and evolving worlds of communication, and tell its own stories, architecture, however, needs still to be conceived, designed, and built, and the ‘Bilbao Effect’ is evidence of this necessity.1 Gehry’s work shows precisely how the changes in information technologies that invested the media intersect also the multiple layers of design reflection. The latter deals with an increasing complexity of actors and technical knowledge involved in environmental transformation processes, such as to make the management of their relationship and of communication tools one of the main issues, if not the most decisive of the current debate. As a result, it does not appear accidental that the most interesting architectures of the last thirty years show an unprecedented attention to the ‘kitchen’ of the project and its recipes. What was once jealously hidden today is made explicit: in other words, the conceiving processes and their negotiation with reality reached an importance comparable to that of their formal results and physical concretizations. It is a phenomenon variously connected to the transition from the analogical to the abstract, from formal to conceptual, facilitated by the ‘technological 1. This issue involves also more ‘theoretical’ architects: ‘Without the enduring presence of ’ Loos’ ‘paradoxical and intellectually complex buildings, an essay like “Ornament and Crime” would be no more than a historical footnote.’ Stan Allen, ‘Without the Built Production, the Writing Loses Force’, Clog (2014), Rem, p. 43.

reproducibility’ and which involves the most varied productions, in other arts fields too. More specifically, with regard to recent architecture, digital tools and thinking seem to take it to the extremes and in both, opposite directions. On the one hand, we see an increase in photorealistic representation, managed by specialized professionals, whose results are often produced and directed out of the studio. It happened also, long before the digital revolution, with models. Many among my teachers’ generation, almost all passed away, rarely realized models and just in order to explain architecture to those who did not understand the drawings. Three-dimensional computer simulations seem to be mainly used in the same way, as an effective means of communication with clients, the media, and the general audience, rather than act as operative tools of thinking of and inside the project. On the other hand, various forms of abstraction have gathered around the phenomenon of the diagram as a device capable of binding the reading of situations to the hypothesis of their transformation. This form of graphical and textual schematization performs various functions. It is usually employed as a selective, reductive machine, able to manage the growing complexity of contemporary design processes. Thanks to its summarizing capacity and immediate comprehension, it acts as a sort of lingua franca among different specialisms, cultures, desires, and needs, thus facilitating the sharing of decisions. Besides people, it connects things, times,

concepts, becoming a powerful mechanism of thinking. It is also a generative and proliferative device, able to conceive of potential fields within given parameters so as to produce unexpected solutions, thus separating the author's formal intention (his or her talent) from design outcomes and translating the project process on the ‘speakable’ level.2 The diagram, therefore, goes along with and feeds the tendency of recent architecture to move from traditional thinking of structures defined in space to a more dynamic approach, often intended to ‘design the project’ rather than the object. It acts, according to Deleuze, as an ‘abstract machine’, able to interact with the changing contemporary contexts and connect analysis and hypothesis of transformation in unpredictable ways, even giving meaning to completely immaterial solutions such as that practiced by Lacaton & Vassal in Bordeaux. This shift from the object to the process, from ‘natural’ beauty to the more complex and paradoxical idea of aesthetic fulfilment that runs through the most advanced artistic practices of the last century, has witnessed a gradual infiltration of textual materials into the specific techniques of each creative field, until their radical transformation or replacement. Even architecture, albeit 2. At the turn of the millennium, various books and journals made the diagram the core of their reflections. A synthesis of this debate and the main references are in my ‘Diagrams: Instructions for Use’, Lotus international, 127 (2006), pp. 88-95.

Before

The relationships between design, reality, and fiction are far from linear: actual conditions determine the manners of their interpretation and these latter, in turn, change the way things are seen, establishing new conditions in a spiralling process of mutual influences. Parametric design promises to dramatically accelerate these and other feedback loops, closing the gap between users and solutions, up to the virtual elimination of the architect: if needs and desires can be met immediately it is clear that mediators are no more needed.1 It is a goal that information technology made more at hand but, of course, not a new one. Every architectural theory – whether prescriptive in terms of language or keen to build a stronger connection with reality – aspires to dictate for every situation an ideal, ‘scientific’ design response, even knowing that, more plausibly, one can only try to limit the range of possibilities and set the stage for convincing and acceptable solutions. The authority principle transmitted by treatises, where the classical orders and their combinatorial mechanics acted as an infinitely reproducible set of signs and grammar rules, 1. ‘In a digitized design and production process, the Albertian cutoff line that used to separate conception and construction is already technically obsolete. But if Alberti’s allographic model is phased out, the traditional control of the designer over the object of design (as well the author’s intellectual ownership of the end product) may be on the line, too. If variations may occur at any time in the design and production process, and if parts of the process are allowed to drift openendedly, interactively and collaboratively, who will authorize “what” in the end?’ Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), p. 43.