Connecting fragments by Sabrina Sagnotti Morreale

Connecting fragments An architectural encyclopaedia to create your own identity

Sabrina Morreale

Diploma 9 AA Diploma 2015-2016

A manual â&#x20AC;&#x153;Eventually everything connectsâ&#x20AC;? -Charles Eames

We usually cannot talk about architecture unless we are talking about those who have made the architecture. It is almost impossible to separate the author from the product. The architect declares his identity through his/her work, or is the work itself that creates the author? In the way we create, everything is connected through fragments. What we do, as architects, but as well as people, is connect. The way we put together our cultural environment, our knowledge, our influences, and how we make these connections is what makes our own persona, style, our own practice and is what defines our own life as a project. Our knowledge is fragmentary, you cannot know everything. But above all it is through this fragmentation we create links and manage our ideas. ever since we were born, we collect fragments of information which are then processed to create what we have become now. All we do is connect things, architecture does that too. It assembles contexts, places, programs, and users to construct a specific environment. Our duty is to join, to weave collectively. This is why; this thesis is an assembling of fragments, an encyclopaedia of relationships, which intertwined together, shape an argument: we create through fragmentation. This encyclopaedia is establishing the ground, which I walked 5

in these past seven years of architecture. These chapters are small stories; they can be read as small individual worlds or being connected in a hermeneutic circle. These are artefacts, people, places, and events, which describe a modus operandi in architecture. Many images are overlapped with each other, while others are in opposite directions while some are aligned with the previous/ next page. The way in which you can read the book is circular, both from the point of view of the chapters, which have no number and by reading it through the figures, vertically or horizontally. The thesis is the frame within these correlations take place, linking sexuality with our hands, the idea of collection with our private life and relating our work as a matter of chance perhaps. Therefore, this encyclopaedia can be read as a collective creation, following Heideggerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s question of what a work of art is: â&#x20AC;&#x153;the artwork and the artist, he explains, exist in a dynamic where each appears to be a provider of the other.â&#x20AC;? Here, the chapters are interlocking and the subject and the object are indistinguishable. In the action of creating any type of work, you are not able to comprehend the individual parts, without understanding the whole, but without understanding the parts, you cannot comprehend the whole either.

Hands â&#x20AC;&#x153;I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knotâ&#x20AC;? -Bob Dylan

Hands

Why hands? As an architect, the hand embodies an important history Quoting HonorĂ¨ de balzac: â&#x20AC;&#x153;A hand is not simply part of the body, but the expression and continuation of a thought, which must be captures and conveyed.â&#x20AC;? 1It is, in fact, no coincidence that Corbusier has depicted proportions in his modular system with the hand to the highest point. Nevertheless, hands have always been used as a symbol, and not only in architecture, both in Western and Eastern countries. Hands as identity Hands are the embodiment of sensory thoughts and of creative capacity. They are the first tool people used to recognize each other. They are a medium of identity and selfrepresentation, people are recognized through fingerprints. In addition, one of the most antique way of recognition, dating back to Babylonian times, were tablets on commercial transactions bearing footprints imprinted on their surface, used as a kind of personal signature, or as a way of sealing documents. This is because of their uniqueness, their difficulty to alter them, their immutability. Fingerprints 10

are formed in the eighth month of pregnancy and they do not change throughout life. In case of scratches or cuts on the skin of the fingertips, it regrows with the exact same characteristics. Tracing back in time, human hands already appeared in Palaeolithic paintings, these early imprints represented the individual who was taking care of the dwelling. At the same time, they were used as a chronological time lapse of children growing up. The image of the hand often appears in amulets, such as the Islamic hand of Fatima,2 in Christian iconography; Christ is referred to as the right hand of God. In many cultures, the right hand is clean, whereas the left is dirty. In Indian culture, it is a ritual to apply mehndi on both hands before getting married. All the ceremonies are remembered on the hands of each one. Each finger is associated with a sound, an element, or even a celestial guardian. In the Islamic belief, the five fingers signify proclaiming one’s faith, prayer and pilgrimage. The hand has an intrinsic value in itself; health in many cultures is strictly related to its physiognomy3: “The hand is the mind’s only perfect vassal, and when through age or illness the connection between them is interrupted, there are few more affecting tokens of human decay”. It is in countries such, as India, Tibet, and China that the culture of palmistry started spreading in the world. Philosophers as Aristotle and 11

Hippocrates also popularized this magical practice for both personal pleasure that clinical procedures: “Lines are not written into the human hand without reason. They emanate from heavenly influences and man’s own individuality.”4 It is perhaps this need for individuality, which many artists have wanted to hold, much more than a drawing of their hands: a mould. D’Annunzio has been one of the most intriguing writer and poet, symbolizing the Decadent period in Italy. He did not just collect books and fragments but towards his last years of life, but became obsessed with his hands. D’Annunzio showed his hand to his friend, Renato Damiani, noted scholar of palmistry who noted an extremely smooth hand conical-square hand, a well-developed and harmonious lines showing a strong will, perfection of synthesis, a long and eventful life and the maximum intellectual evolution which a man can reach. Since that happening, the will be called the prophet, due to his particular concentric circles on his fingertips. Hans became a lyric that is part of paradisiac poems. Here D’Annunzio shows his devotion to his feminine side.5 D’Annunzio loved his hands, so different from those of all other men. Sometimes artists do not limit their 12

creation to their projects, but through alter egos, they create people. With his hands, he was allowed to be another person, perhaps a woman and dream about this new life. Through the casting of his hands, he was creating a hybrid, a real metamorphosis into a young beautiful lady. He was not the only one, think of Duchamp, renaming himself Rose Selavy. Her name sounds like Eros, c’est la vie, or “Eros, that’s life.” Part of Andy Warhol’s work was very much related on transforming himself, his movements and his body, as can be seen in “Eight Wigs, two days of posing, 16 contact sheets, and 349 shots,”.6 It is intriguing to notice that it was in the period between 1890-1920, that artists had the strongest fascination with changing themselves and representing parts of their body. Max Ernst’s alter ego was not a gender variant or tormented doppelgänger: it was a bird. Ernst was fascinated with feathered species, but instead of wings, he maintained his hands, and duplicated them. This metamorphosis had the significance of having complete freedom as a bird but maintaining the most recognizable human element: the hands. For Frida Kahlo, it was used as totems against misfortune, Picasso made her earrings with a note written: ”You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand”. 13

Not just in art but in a schooling environment as well, Maria Montessori inserted hand gesture into her educational methodology as a form of individuality. Starting from the idea that knowledge is normally supposed to reside in verbalised concepts, then if language is missing, the medium through which we can understand each other is hands. Hand gestures are a way of thinking through; this action of using our hands to describe and transform an idea is essential in the creative work, as in learning. The Montessori Method7 has been applied to any subject through sketching, drawing, tracing numbers and letters to learn the alphabet. One of the emphases of the method is the complete freedom of the child in the use of hands to create, to make things. Each subject has its own workshop, history classes are implemented with manual works such group collages, construction with models or live debates. In this way, the activities, that each child is experimenting with, become imprinted in its mind through the same action of doing them. In this case, the procedure of using hands as learning become part of the identity of this school and it transformed into a platform for every other institution to follow.

Hands as power It might be because of these characteristics that, until today, hands have been used in multiple essences diverting from loving gestures, becoming symbols of political power or creative tools. Our occupation can be revealed from our hands: from blacksmiths,carpenters, musicians surgeons. Architects are obsessed with their hands. Firstly because they are the tool which they use to translate an idea into a project, secondly because they explain the projects and direct the people around them. Andrè Wogenscky, draughtsman of Corbusier, described: “It was his hands that revealed him, as if his hands betrayed him, they spoke all his feelings, all the vibrations of his inner life that his face tried to conceal… hands that one might have thought le Corbusier had drawn himself, with that trait made of a thousand small successive traces that seemed to look for one another but that In the end formed a precise and exact line.”8 Each architect uses his or her hand in a different way. This catalogue of pictures analyses not just the relationship between the architect and the project itself, but also the stage of every portrait: the architect’s table. Through changes in context and time, the only element that always remains constant is the 15

table, used both as a work board and as component in which the architect organizes and arranges his way of living. The way the architect acts around the table, and the arrangement of objects around it, define the way he or she wants to be portrayed. The table becomes a stage where drawings, books, and hand shadows are casted into a portrait of authority and force. Every architect represents him or herself with a particular gesture. In the architectural world, most women are portrayed in a defensive pose, their arms and hands hidden, crossed over their bodies. For men, hands are always up in the air or pointing at something. Together with body postures and the relationship between speech and hands, movement is very specific in political speeches. Most Prime Ministers have learned through the same school about which sign to use and how to gain attention from the masses with one finger. Hands were used by dictators, as a greeting and a salute to their companions. Different directions would say different things, giving respect for a military or performing to the people. The way Mussolini for instance, started to associate speeches and hand gestures became a portraiture but as well a political tool. Mussolini, thanks to his experience as a journalist, politician and trade unionist, who had brought him to a more direct contact with those who are less educated and uneducated, 16

used a new mode of communication that took into account the cultural level of the people to whom it is addressed. Mussolini, therefore, abandoned the language of tradition-literary classic, dignified and sublime, directed mostly at an audience educated and trained. In fact, poetry and literature of the early twentieth century, with the linguistic experimentalism of Pascoli, D’Annunzio and Ungaretti, has created a total separation between the popular and the literary forms of expression, making culture an aristocrat know, difficult and unattainable for the people rude and ignorant. . The gesture, in oratory, has a fundamental value, because it is able to give a more evocative and more power to the word when the latter has only a value to be transmitted but also the function of activating a direct, almost emotional, between the masses and the leader. In fact, when the Duce’s speech is slow and calm, the gesture is static, tense and solemn, when in fact, the tone of the speech becomes faster and violent, with it, the gesture becomes more dynamic and vibrating. The simplicity of the speeches of the leader is due to the use of agricultural terms, as the hands.9 Hands as tool Giorgio Agamben in his essay “Notes on gesture”, wrote that “a society that has lost its gestures seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while 17

simultaneously recording that loss”. If we think about silent cinema, the whole narrative is made out of hand actions, movements, and indications. Hands are the cinematic element in the films of Georges Méliès or the Lumière brothers, which described gestures rather than images. In the contemporary age of technology, 3d printing and machines which can reproduce what the human hand used to make; in this day and age, speaking about craft might seems odd. Yet it is this huge gap that in recent years has meant that people regained an interest in artefacts and in what is handmade. 10Nowadays there is the need to document what otherwise is going to be lost: the method of production of objects, of chosen materials constructed only by the tactile experience. “Il Capo” is a documentary of a moving camera panning from the marble quarry to the hand of the man who is in charge of directing, as a musical orchestrator, a set of huge cranes.11 The chief, performs through his hand (and missing finger) the efficiency of cutting the marble slabs. The non-verbal code suddenly, becomes utterly contemporary in a world of architectural construction. The documentary show what is hidden in most projects: the pre-production. This work has translated in 2015 what Michelangelo or Donatello were doing in the Renaissance. “The hand gesture” also follows the same poetics. The 18

film is set into an old foundry in Milan, where through the various spaces the viewer follows the gestures and movements of works of art from the first to the last stage. Here, the preproduction also emphasizes the beauty and the skill of manual labour. It is clear that every indication has to do with the hierarchy of the employees in the factory, from master to apprentices and how each gesture means and follows a precise direction. In this case, the bronze dog is first moulded with wax, and then enters a second room where a metal structure is added until reaching the last step in a museum. Every gesture follows a camera movement; every detail is done by a human finger. There is a continuity in these gestures, which can be felt while watching the film. That precise action will be reproduced forever, and the result will be the exact perfect one. The idea of continuity in hand gestures also applies to daily life: while cooking, throwing something away, or caressing someone. Certain gestures remain eternal: Pollockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s translation from brush to hands is one of the most original moment in history. 12

(Endnotes) 1

Leone, Giuseppe-”Honoré de Balzac, una

creatività “sempre recidiva, mai stanca” – Con lui il romanzo s’è fatto uomo”, su “Ricorditi di me...”, in “Lecco 2000”, Lecco, febbraio 1999

2 Drazin, Israel- Maimonides and the Biblical Prophets. Gefen Publishing House Ltd,2009 3 Arthur Schopenhauer-Religion, A Dialogue Etc: Physiognomy, 1772 4 http://www.nsa-slovakia.com/classroom-news/ palmistry-factorfiction 5

Mary Ann Frese Witt-,The Search for Modern

Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France,2002 6 http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/ articles/castronuovo/castronuovo_it.html 7 Cecilia Motzo Dentice di Accadia-Il pensiero e il metodo di Maria Montessori,1971 8

Andrè Wogenscky ,Les mains de Le Corbusier,

éd. de Grenelle, 1987

Luisa Quartermaine- Mussolini’s Last Republic:

Propaganda and Politics in the Italian Social Republic 1943-1945 10 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/ n22noys 11 http://www.ilcapo.it/ 12 Eva Cockcroft- ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’ in Artforum vol.12, no.10, giugno 1974, pp. 43-54.

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Collection â&#x20AC;&#x153;If this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.â&#x20AC;? -Josiah Royce

Collection If you take an isolated fragment, it would be meaningless compared to the magnitude of the whole. As architects, we are collectors as well. A great number of people has been collectors; from stamps to tea pots, they all shared the same obsession. Artists and intellectuals have the tendency to use and to relate to something inanimate in order to explain their ideas. From Sigmund Freud to Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon, or perhaps Michael Thonet. Each one has had a different relationship with fragments. This is because everyone who observes, has the capability of recognizing pieces which are out of the ordinary. With this concept,â&#x20AC;&#x153;the Kunstkammer1â&#x20AC;?, or cabinet of curiosities started being developed. It was an encyclopaedic collection, almost a micro cosmos, keeping the memory of specific pieces together. As collectors, the fantasy is to find undiscovered treasures, of putting puzzle pieces together, or perhaps just having something that everybody else would appreciate. The essence of collecting is not about bringing order to disorder. Its beauty lies in its assemblage, the action of placing something together. The connections from these fragments, also make the space around them very particular, where the culture and the heritage of each piece is intertwined with each anothers. 124

The possibilities of relationship between ourselves and any fragment or collection of fragments, are immense. These can start as a method to build self esteem as in Peggy Guggenheim’s case or manifesting as a more constrained way of living; turning the collection into life’s first priority. 2 Today, we tend to consider the collection a specific hobby, as most designers have an obsession in collecting their tools, art collectors their paintings. Perhaps Peggy Guggenheim is the most famous example of using a collection to gain something else. Due to the death of her father in the Titanic, at the age of 23 she inherited a large sum of money, which she invested into travelling. She was not into art, she was not interested in business. She was into freedom and new discoveries. The way she combated her low self-esteem was through collecting lovers, and then collecting their oeuvres. The way she made herself famous is with to her private life. And every piece was very personal to her. “She loved art and sex in about equal measure, but she was also turned on by fame. Asked why she loved Max Ernst, the great Surrealist painter whom she married in 1941, she replied: “Because he’s so beautiful and because he’s so famous. It boosted my self-esteem and made me less conscious of my huge, potato-shaped nose”3 In this case, each painting was a 125

fragment, and more she added the more she felt satisfied with her life. Moreover, with every artist that she met, she exchanged countries, cultures and languages. Every work that she commissioned brought another opening of a gallery and if she were to suddenly stop collecting, her life would go to pieces. Peggy’s interest was indeed about the paintings, as well everything else around it, as she perfectly reassumed in a phrase “I am not a collector, I am a museum”.4 Through her fragmented life, she certainly was a live museum. Once you start collecting, you cannot really stop. The objects need you as much as you need them. Sigmund Freud started living in a combined balance throughout his life. Freud’s collection of antiquities contained almost 2,000 items, from images, to small African sculptures. He set these fragments in his studio as a divisor wall between him and its patients. The studio was altered with the presence of these antiquities. Between his desk and the sofa where his patients were used to lay down, there were numerous Egyptian and African handmade statues.5 These, were all looking towards the patient, creating a sort of surreal atmosphere, in which the patient would benefit from the distance, given from these inanimate objects. Behind the statues, 126

Freud took notes and was also estranged from the context: he himself could also profit from having a barrier, in order to be free from thoughts after each session. It is incredibly important to understand how objects, but also small pieces, can become a tool for the human mind. A further step in letting these fragments take control over your private life, was that taken by Gabriele Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;annunzio. He is one of the figures who has had a very intriguing relationship with its collection, changing his whole life around them. The Italian poet and intellectual transformed his villa, The Vittoriale, in the shell of his perversions. 6 The Villa covers about nine hectares along the countryside of Milan. As it was used to entertain people, its appearance was much larger than Freudâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio and it lost its house interior look. Here begins a journey between symbolic presences that tell the sacred value of the house: the Golden Gate, the seven steps, the seventeenthcentury choir stalls on the walls, a pastoral and a font, a stone column topped by a basket made of concrete with pomegranates, a fruit that Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Annunzio chose to the emblem of himself, as a symbol of abundance and fertility. After a very large room where the guests were usually invited to sit, the remaining areas of the villa were used for his collection. The entrance is 127

through two different antechambers. The Zambracca,7 name deriving from an ancient Provencal word meaning woman’s chamber, is the room where D’Annunzio spent more time and where he died as well. The room was literally stuffed with nine hundred volumes, even including musical scores and a rich collection of discs, a radio and a gramophone. Throughout his life, D’Annunzio continue to add rooms to his Villa, reaching 12 total spaces of curiosities. In this case, his life was devoted to his collection of memorabilia. The villa itself was shaped through the years, depending on D’Annunzio’s collection. 8 Who took a step further in the direction of reconstructing and shaping a private house into an accumulation of fragments was John Soane. As an architect, his vision was much broader. Following Piranesi’s step of a visionary view of reality, he keep adding spaces shaped on his torso and casts. Hence, the room was not a box but it went around each element. His action of displacement of his objects in Lincoln’s Inn Fields drastically changed the view on architectural collection.9 The house also became a public museum, generating new spaces and unexpected details and effects. Over the years, the flat and the collection became undistinguishable. The incorporation of these two aspects set a milestone in the architectural discourse. 128

The John Soane museum has in fact the capability of having multiple programs within the same building: a private house, a public museum, a monument, an archive, a cenotaph, a spectacular space.10 As well as displaying collections, Soane’s architecture started formalizing into a theatre of display. Therefore, the objects transcend their singular significance and they open into a matrix of information, inspiring new associations. The space offers a simultaneous effect of the visitor as viewer and participant. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his “The work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction” the reception of architecture is not an absorbed or passive contemplation, it is instead a distracted concentration and a concentrated distraction, a mode of attention that requires an active engagement with the matrix of information flowing toward the viewing subject.”11 Here, the pieces are not placed in a context, but they make the context itself. The space is subverted because of them, but not fully devoted to it. The Merzbau is the epic example of adoration and worship to a collection. The architecture is moulded from these debris: it becomes a hybrid of things and structural elements. Schwitters, 12 the Dadaist artist, first played with a limited amount of objects, creating 129

boxes of stuffed material. Then he decided to dramatically alter the interiors of his room in Germany. Within his four walls, he started amalgamating artefacts from friends, strangers, found objects.13 He devoted to each of his fragments a chapel that held a kind of relic, an object belonging to that person, such as, for example, cigarette butts, bits of pencil, pieces of nails. The room became smaller with cut out spaces and corners. The work was not meant to end unexpectedly with a bomb during the war, where the artist lost all his treasure. The intent was to keep working on it. With this action, he destabilized all the fundamentals of architecture, where we are not in charge anymore, but we are making decisions and scarifying ourselves in order to create something new.

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(Endnotes) 1

Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, and wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of objects

Lisa Immordino Vreeland- Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, 2015

Peggy Guggenheim -Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict,1987

Peggy Guggenheim interview, Venice 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypdXJx5-dEg 5 Sigmund Freud-Totem and Taboo, 1913 6 Gabriele D’Annunzio- The pleasure, 1889 7 Zambracca: messy and sloppy waitress

Annamaria Andreoli- Il Vittoriale, Milano, Electa,

1993,

John Soane-Memoirs of the Professional Life of an Architect, 1835

Dorothy Stroud-The Architecture of Sir John

Soane, 1961

Christopher Webster -R.D. Chanterell (1793– 1872) and the Architecture of a Lost Generation, 2010 12 Elizabeth Burns Gamard- Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, Princeton Architectural Press 2000 13 Megan Luke- R., Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013

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Chance â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessityâ&#x20AC;? -Democritus

Chance In recent decades, artists have progressively expanded boundaries of art through the experimentation with the uncanny, the unknown, and the risky. The word chance derives from Latin, and it literally means, â&#x20AC;&#x153;the falling of the diceâ&#x20AC;?. T1he human mind is set up to take no account of chance, although, most of artistic evolution happened due to random events: being at the right place, at the right time, with the right people. What if Peggy Guggenheim had not discover Pollock? What if Duchamp had not embraced randomness in his work? Most of the artists who employed chance as a modus operandi in their production of works of art, have revolutionized our world today. In art history, chance has been used in working methods including readymade, collages, expressionist paintings, or art performances. Most of the time, the idea of chance is considered as a playful element of a game, allowing an infinite number of possibilities, and therefore effects. Nevertheless, chance is not the medium through which the project is made, but its outcome. Chance is the final goal. Moreover, the idea of chance should not be devoted only to art, but also included in architecture. Chance as possibilities 178

Chance has mostly been used to characterize a very broad spectrum of practices, including most commonly Dadaism and Surrealism. These projects stand as canned chance, the rules are dictated by the artist itself, therefore, it is related to a game within rules which are set by a person and not completely random. One of the most iconic ways to think about chance is the method used by Tristan Tzara to construct his poems: “To make a Dadaist poem. Take a newspaper. Take the scissors. Choose an article in the newspaper, which has the length that you plan to give your poem. Cut out the article. Cut carefully each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake floor. Bring out so each crop, one after another, into the order in which they left the bag.” It is important to understand how the mechanism of production is linked with the idea of randomness, of the stream of consciousness, which allow the artist’s mind to be free from the laws and constrains of the everyday life. Hence, the idea to select some words at random puts the artist in a position where he or she has to orchestrate the poem, depending on a random choice. In the same way, the poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” 2is the premise to its gradual slide towards the surrealist aesthetic evolution. Stéphane Mallarmé combines words in an unusual typographic layout. With 179

this poem, the idea of chance has transcended from a purely abstract concept to an aesthetic construction. Both pages and words have movement. They intertwine within each other in a vortex of pure randomness. Chance in this case, arises from disorder. Here, the artist affirms his or her capability in creating an effect on the outcome. The words are singularly thrown and they do not depend on each other. It is a pure free production without consequences of a choice. The words can be exchanged and the beauty of the poem will not change. In the words of Bataille: “Chance is more than beauty, but beauty derives its sparkle from chance.”3 As well, Ernst developed the decalcomania of chance, wherein ink was spread between two sheets of paper, which were then pulled apart. In Surrealism, there were numerous techniques, which experimented with chance: “Frottage” was a semiautomatic process for obtaining patterns, rubbing paper on different surfaces and then creating an image.4 In the “Cadavre Exquis”, the image was created by multiple participants, who each added pieces to a folding paper. The latter technique marks a break from previous experiments: there are several artists (players) and everyone is obliged to keep adding to the previous one. It is then, a matter of chance in receiving a random starting 180

point, but then, the drawing must follow a line. There is an awareness, on the artist’s side to create work that is subjective but yet, strictly dictated by randomness. Using chance as a methodology of working has completely shifted the way we do art, as well as the way in which we approach our work and ourselves. Quoting Jean Arp: “Chance opened up perceptions to immediate intuition.” Pollock himself, related all his production as an act of freedom: “When I am in my painting I am not aware of what I am doing, it is only after a sort of “getting acquainted” period that I see what I have been about”. Chance as assemblage Duchamp was perhaps the first artist to move away from only using words or painting on a canvas; deciding to use chance to find objects, assembling them together and creating works of art that speak for themselves. Duchamp essentially made a move on the object of objective meaning, resulting in allocation of new identity, if an ordinary object is located out of context and placed in an unusual place, such a plinth, it is automatically elevated to the rank of a work of art, with a reckless assertion of aesthetic nihilism. Duchamp started to randomly rename 181

objects of everyday use, shifting the idea of chance from a playful level to an intellectual one. The urinal, the bicycle wheel, the coat hanger, the bottle rack are found items, with no specific aesthetics. 5Through the assemblage of these objects, the artist requires the viewer to observe and then reflect on the notion of art. Art cannot be separated from real life and Duchamp wanted to hit the audience with a stimulus derived simply from completely random choice.He detached himself from the work itself, directing from a distance. Through the use of chance,the work becomes authorless. The role of the artist shifts from the creator of things, to the director of things. In the words of Jean Arp: “The law of the case, which encompasses all laws and remains incomprehensible to us as the first cause waves originates life, can only be known in a complete abandonment to the unconscious. I say that those who follow this law create life.” Duchamp created life through chance, creating life in objects. 6 Another artist who assembled objects in a similar way was Joseph Cornell, who created a boundary to chance: a wooden box. His works were composed of a wooden box, closed by a glass in which he assembled the same “ relics “ that were part of his collection. The criteria for the assembly was somewhat random, in fact, he believed that objects taken in the most distant corners of the city and compounded 182

together could create a work of art. The city had an infinite number of interesting objects in an infinite number of places. The artist’s job was to make connections: his work, as he defined it: “ is only the natural consequence of my love for the city .” Cornell is part of Modernism thanks to the reconstruction of a personal world from fragments of a world rediscovered by wandering the streets of New York. If before, an object represented chance, now it is a framed moment of causality. Chance as reality The first time chance was used as a large-scale method was with the Situationists in the 1950s. What they called Psychogeography, was originally developed from the older concept of flâneur; significantly present later on in the work of Walter Benjamin. Their exercises consisted in wandering in the urban jungle, without directions, discovering and observing reality without following an end. In the context of architecture and urban contemporary design, this was for flâneurs, one of the ways to approach the psychological aspects of the construction of buildings. The architect Jon Jerde, for example, designed his Horton Plaza and the Universal CityWalk, building it around the need to provide surprises, distractions and sequences of events for walkers. For 183

the Situationists, chance demanded the rejection of functionality in order to create a new urbanized space, where the citizen was constantly exploring, free of determining factors. As Guy Debord says: “The new space creates a possibility for activity not formerly determined by one besides the individual.” Observing the city through a random path was the beginning of its documentation through the artist’s eyes. Therefore, they followed a person through a camera. The Situationists reassessed the city not as an entity in itself, but as a subjective and personal place. With this began the first documentaries in which shifted the camera shot from eye level, to a standpoint of observation, with fast chases and details that changed from scene to scene. Vito Acconci took from the Situationists, the idea of using chance to wake up the audience: “ I have eliminated the “spectator as corpse” and I have sought the conscious and physical involvement of a public that was formerly passive and homogeneous in order once again to lead it to the trauma of art and to wake it up out of stupidity. “ Acconci’s films try to avoid any philosophical or rational thought. He is deeply engaged in deeper understanding of the visual knowledge and your own body embedded into the city itself. The result is a continuous exchange between the human and 184

architectural domain. 7In “Following Piece”, each day is a chase of a different person, travelling in the streets of New York, until you reach a private space. The city or the person does not matter, what matters is the vitality of the work. Each trip is a ritual, and it produces an outcome, which does not depend on anything else but the travellers. What you are left with are traces so chance can be recorded. Twenty years later, Sophie Calle, together with Jean Baudrillard, started conceiving Venice as a game plan, keeping a detailed diary of every day’s route. Unlike certain late modernists who devised chance events, such as the writers of the Oulipo Group, or William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Calle had no particular belief that ‘chance’ could break the code of randomness and reveal a hidden meaning. What she was interested in is the emptiness of what is left. She presented the empty space of chance as it appeared. She was not inside the scene, but recording the moment of chance. If Vito Acconci represented randomness through subjectivity, Calle showed randomness itself, returning to an objective level. Vito Acconci followed a different path everyday: Calle, instead, followed the traces of chance. This way, she used 185

these tracks to distance herself from her work. The viewer exist only in the trace of the other. In his essay Please follow me” Baudrillard says: “Therefore, it is not to discover something about the other or where he is heading, all of this is not particularly seductive. And yet this experience is entirely a process of seduction.” 8 In this way, Calle is the director of these accidents, becoming a mirror of these events, shading away from the frame, leaving reality as a priority.As with Kierkegaard’s mirror: “ You seduce yourself into the other’s destiny, the double of his path”. Calle has penetrated the space of chance, taking back to us a feeling of being reflected into it.

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(Endnotes) 1

Karl Popper- Of Clouds and Clocks: an approach to the rationality and the freedom of man, included in Objective Knowledge. Oxford Clarendon Press. 1972

Roland Barthes- “The Metaphor of the Eye”.

In Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. 1963 3 Michel Surya- Georges Bataille: an intellectual biography; Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres

David Hopkins- Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst:

The Bride Shared (Oxford, 1998).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ this-britain/fountain-most-influential-piece-of-modernart-673625.html

Jean Arp: from the collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1972. 7 http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci_remote.html

Sophie Calle and Jean Baudrillard -Suite Venitienne/Please Follow Me 1983

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Sexuality “I was inventing a language for people to see..” -Francesca Woodman

Sexuality It is not common to talk about sexuality in architecture. Most of the time, sexuality has been related to femininity, to the female body and to nudity. Much has been written about sexuality in architecture as synonymous with feminism in architecture, presenting artists as Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler, Helena Almeida or Eleanor Antin. This leads to a confusion between sexuality and feminism. In fact, these artists have inhabited the space, using their sexuality as a tool to provoke, instead of transcending the idea of sexuality in space. Yet, they are not conceiving the space itself as a territory for sexual encountering. Following Mark Wigley’s words: “feminist theory occupies a stereotypical feminine space, situating itself in the sexualized, emotionalized, privatized, erratic sphere of the home and bed chamber rather than in the structured, impersonal, public realm.”1 The introduction of sexuality in architectural details instead has witnessed the foundation of modern aesthetics. It is not through the body but through the architectural construction that the space can become sexualized. But how can we construct a seductive space in architecture? The moment of departure for almost any sexual encounter is the balance between the male and female subjects and the objectification of one of them. This concept is what Freud in his paper “On fetishism” called the “the Voyeuristic-Scopophilic look. This “look” is a crucial part in photographs, and films, but also a milestone in the 216

architectural discourse. In images and in cinema, the Voyeuristic-Scopophilic look might be much easier to read. Many photographers played with voyeurism, including Helmut Newton who in “selfportrait with wife,” releases an immediate sexuality embodied in his work. The model poses at the centre, while Newton is behind her with a raincoat jacket holding his camera. 2His wife is sitting next to the mirror, which is reflecting the whole scene. There are several elements, embodying this binomial of male-female-objectification. Firstly at all, the image of the model reflected into the mirror and therefore her back on the front, is the central focus of nudity in the image. It translates the sexual freedom of the model posing in front of the wife, who is watching the scene. Every element in this picture is erotic, from the model’s heels to the second pair of legs showing from the left side, to the gaze of Newton’s camera ending with the figure of his wife controlling the whole scene. The wife embodies the voyeuristic essence of catching a private view of the husband’s job. Using Freud’s words: “every active perversion is accompanied by the unconscious of wanting to watch.” 3 Furthermore, there is the presence of the overdressed Newton standing behind the nudity of the model. The choice of Newton raincoat depict as well a sexual connotation as the “men in dirty coats,” which can easily be linked to the image of frequent buyers in sexy shops. In this photograph, the three elements of the Voyeuristic-Scopophilic look are clearly seen: the man (Newton), the woman (the model) and the objectification, which in this case, is not as it might seems the nudity 217

of the model itself, but the role of his wife, who watch from a distance. Newton is almost standing in the model space, his wife is taking Helmut’s place, and the other elements around the scene, as legs, heels, embody a sensual significance. Therefore, the whole place becomes a perverse space. However, even if the scenario had changed, for instead, if instead of his studio, it had been set in a park, the outcome would have been the same, as the three main elements of male/female and object are maintained. A correspondence with this image can be traced with the photograph of Robert Doisneau, “Un regard oblique,” where the wife is looking at the showcase, while her husband’s eyes are shifted towards the naked model portrayed in the painting. In this case, the voyeur is the photographer. The image is sexual because you can see the deep longing of the husband, careful to do not be seen by his wife. 4 In the same way, in cinema, in order to create a sense of sexuality in space, these three correspondences are often used. Hitchcock’s films experiment with a voyeuristic approach to his narratives. A home characteristically marks the formal place of departure for the story; usually the apparent calm is suddenly broken by the appearance of the first protagonist, either a male or a female. The visual language of cinema, although confined within the rectangular space of the screen frame, strains towards a sequentiality of views and eye catches. 5In Notorious, he juxtaposes not only the male versus female binomial, but also adds multiple readings within the same protagonist. Hitchcock presents 218

the image of femininity as a multipurpose signifier. The opening sequence of Notorious is constructed around a chain of signifiers that connote active looking from the masculine subject. The woman is the spectacle and it is possible to recognize a fundamental binary relationship between her and her interior. The interior contains a sense of femininity, domesticity, desire and anxiety. As a result, according to the logic of the masculine/feminine distribution of the voyeuristic drive, the viewer wants to keep watching the female character.6 If Hitchcock associated woman with mystery, sensuality and risk, he also created a division between the outside and the inside. Showing the interior of the house is automatically related to the womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interiority and enigma. In this case, architecture embodies the female character and vice versa. In the same way, Olympia in Metropolis, personifies the female beauty of artifice: a female android, covering herself with a mask, which exerts the draw of the forbidden space inside. Both Olympia and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious are a metonymy for a specific place, a world in itself. If we think back in time, the way Hitchcock portrays his female characters resemble antique myths. One of the immediate examples is Pandora, sent from the gods to seduce and destroy Epimetheus. Pandora had an iconographical attribute: a large jar. She was an artefact, a living trick. There was a dislocation between her appearance and her essence. She embodied complex and revealing symbol of femininity. This leads the spectator to analyse the woman image as puzzle, a 219

rebus of multiple meanings. These myths have increased the projections, which we have on the female universe, in both rhetoric and iconography. The jar which is opened is not a simple metaphor of Pandoraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creation of the world, but it is Pandora herself who is released into the world.7 The jar is linked with the female body, trapped, until it is opened. It stands as a representation of the enigma and threat generated by the concept of female sexuality in a patriarchal culture. In the same way, the biblical story of Adam and Eve depicts not just the forbidden fruit but a forbidden space: Paradise. Here Eve is watched throughout her temptations, until eating the fruit. Her enquiring mind will stop her from entering paradise in eternity. The topography of the woman has been related to an enclosed space since ancient time. 8 It is then not surprising that in architecture as well, the first place to start creating sexuality is the interior. Loos explored domestic voyeurism in most of his projects. For instance, the Muller house was constructed following a stage set of strict views. Once inside, the guest tends to find him or herself right in the middle of the house, at the centre. There is a sense of security produced by the furniture which is set in circles, so that any intrusion would soon be detected. Although the main room is not at the centre of the house but pushed outside, it becomes a theatre box, having an element of control and of intimacy at the same time. There is almost no contact with the outside world, as all the windows are covered with curtains. Using Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Loos once told me, a cultivated man does not look out of the window, it is only to let the light in, not 220

to look through.” The arrangement of his furniture in fact, seems to avoid the contact with the windows. This even happens with internal windows that look into other interior spaces.9 The inhabitants of Loos’s house are both participants and spectators of a family. Therefore, whenever you are watching someone, the other can see you as well. Object and subject constantly exchange places. The guest becomes a voyeur and the family member becomes a protagonist, and vice versa. As Silvia Kolbowski described once: “I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern, I can be seen from behind as well, through the windows of the street, and this made me feel so vulnerable”. There is a continuous dichotomy between outside and inside, exterior and interior, public and private. And it is this element of wanting to keep playing, to keep watching which makes the house extremely erotic. Also in the choice of furniture, the house is divided between the feminine places, such as the living room and the kitchen. And the male ones, such as the libraries, the leather sofa and the chimney. It is like being in a domestic battle, although confined to an enclosed room. The house is not a platform for viewing. But a viewing mechanism that produces internal characters. As Loos described: “a place where people are born, live and die.” One of the most used devices to convolute the relation of voyeurism between inside and outside is using mirrors. In the Steiner house, Loos place a mirror beneath each window, right at eye level. In Freudian theory, the mirror represents the psyche, the reflection in the 221

mirror is a self-portrait. Loos played with reality and illusion, between the boundary of your exterior and your deeper side. In a house for Josephine Baker, translated her charisma and mystery in the construction of the space. Following Baker’s character, the main element of the house is a swimming pool at the centre of the house. The swimming pool is lit from above and from the inside; the windows appear as reflective surface. As Oswald Ungers wrote: “the entertainment of the house consist in looking”. Josephine Baker is the only protagonist, while all the guests are all voyeurs. Loos contrived a method to construct architecture around the body, where the interior space is wrapping around the protagonists. The exterior of the house, Loos writes, should resemble a dinner jacket, a male mask. The interior is the scene of sexuality and of reproduction. A house for Josephine Baker is an “architecture of pleasure”, an “architecture of the womb”. Using Colomina’s words: “the inhabitant is both covered by the space and detached by it.” In all of Loos’s projects, you lose the feeling with reality and everything seems staged. Most of his models are constructed in such a way to be divided between the inside and outside, in order to work on them simultaneously. Every house is a sexual experience; therefore, there is always a moment of maximum tension, of climax. In the Moller house it is the raised alcove protruding from the street façade, in the Josephine Baker house it is the small windows at the boom of the pool. 222

While Loos brought all the attention towards the interiority of the house, to a single room; Corbusier, had a complete different approach to sexuality. In Villa Savoye, the guests are pushed to discover the periphery of the flat. The windows are free from any barrier; the house itself is used as a frame for the exterior. Walls are constructed to frame the landscape, the perception of the space happens through the movement throughout the flat. This is contrary to Loos’s interiors, which are possible to be seen through single set views. If Loos interior seems to suggest that someone is already sitting somewhere in the space, in Corbusier’s photographs, there is the feeling someone just left. In several pictures of the Villa Savoye, it is possible to catch a door left open, a hat lying on the entrance, a fish ready to be cooked in the kitchen. There are in fact, several traces left behind: from a package of cigarettes, to a pair of sunglasses, from a whiskey flask, to an umbrella. All these objects are definitely portraying a male protagonist. The way we perceive the space is with the same voyeuristic view of Loos architecture. However, here we are more detectives than simple spectators. This can be even clearer in the film of Pierre Chenal: “L’architecture d’aujourd’hui”, directed with Corbusier as well. The camera starts entering Villa Savoye, in a car. We can see a man smoking, wearing a raincoat and a hat, the same one left in one of his photographs. The camera run upstairs, opening a series of doors, reaching the terrace, where a woman appears. 10She is behind some bars; although she is in an 223

open space, she is locked upstairs, and we cannot come closer to her. The scene is highly sexual: she is wearing heels, her skirt moves and her hair is blown in the wind. We are not just seeing the scene, we are trying to discover something. The space around us is a barrier to her, in fact we will never catch her eyes, she vanishes unexpectedly. It is not the first time Corbusier is portraying a story in his architecture. In the “Immeuble Clarté”, a woman and a child are shot from behind in the living room. The next shot is the same child with a man in the terrace, while the shoulder of a woman can be seen on the side. Here as well, as in Loos, the woman remains inside, with her face hidden; while the man can be seen in the outside world. The woman’s face is always hidden both in space and on furniture, as in the chaise longue, folding her face towards the wall. Corbusier place the female gender in a position of not being able to see. Women can be seen by others, but they are not looking at us, they are portrayed as enigmas to solve. Using Corbusier’s words: “ I exist in life only on condition that I see, I am an impertinent visual”. Corbusier constructs the house as a mechanism of views, as a system for taking pictures. He constructs lenses within the house, which is the camera itself. The moments of sexuality happens through the traces, which we see moving throughout the house. The tension is obtained through the chase. However, most of the time, it is an inhabited space and you can almost smell the perfume of the last visitor.

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(Endnotes) 1 Samuel Ray Jacobson-Notes on Sexuality & Space B.A. Architecture Rice University, 2010 2 Anthony Lane - “Exposures: Helmut Newton looks back.”. The New Yorker 22 September 2003 3 Sigmund Freud- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905 4 Amelia Jones-“The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader” 2003 5 http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ content/23/3-4/74.extract 6 Michael Renov,- From Identification to Ideology: the Male System of Hitchcock «Notorious», «Wide Angle», n:4.1, 1980, citato da Veronica Pravadelli in: Alfred Hitchcock. Notorious, Lindau, Torino 2003, p. 12. 7 Grimal, Pierre - “Pandora”. In Kershaw, Stephen. A concise dictionary of Classical Mythology. 1990 8 Mari Womack-Symbols and meaning : a concise introduction. Walnut Creek ... [et al.]: Altamira Press. p. 81, 2005 9 Max Risselada-Raumplan versus Plan Libre Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, 1919 -1930, 1988 10 Pierre Chenal- Souvenirs du cineaste, filmographie, temoignages, documents , 1987

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Traces and fragments â&#x20AC;&#x153;Design with beauty build in truthâ&#x20AC;? -AA motto

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