Ar(ch) Povera: Rossi’s Rauchstrasse & the White Wall

Ar(ch)

Povera

R o s s i ’ s Rauchstrasse & the White Wall Studio 08 MAXXI The Home, The Monument & The Museum

JACOB KOMARZYNSKI

Contents

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Wayfinding Plans Prologue Q+A with the Architect

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Material

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Works

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Critic Review by Erin Campbell Index

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Step 1 Projects

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Step 2: Curatorial Strategies

Notes Knowledge Bank

Preface Wayfinding Plans

Prologue Comment from the Architect I suppose the premise is one of competition, and contention. The interpenetration of spaces, in physical/ concurrent and psychological/contingent terms means that any one overriding reading of architecture is never possible, nor warranted. Rather than establish a singular vision established from a personal standpoint, that is, grounded in the deep-time of my understanding of self and all else, the idea is to perhaps allow a non-hierarchical, “messy� conceptualisation to develop through interaction. The architecture is in the mind of the beholder.

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Q +A Conversation between Jacob Komarzynski and Chris Filippidis On Rossi Do you think that you have moved out of Rossi’s shadow? How have you embraced him but also managed to move away from him?

After the first half of the Studio, the first three projects and the exhibitions, I had perhaps reached a point where I felt that I had mined the residential project (Apartment Building in the Rauchstrasse) for all the formal characteristics, reducing them or abstracting them to a point where there was almost no where else to go. To move on from there I wanted to take an approach that was focused on how the design was found, where the eventual product was the aim, as opposed to the refabrication of these discrepant parts. In doing that, I have probably moved a fair way away from the starting point, which was very much a collage or assemblage of the different components put into different formal relationships.

In doing that I have made quite a concerted effort to, not ignore, but put aside these preconditions of what it would look like and went down a path that made it less predetermined and holistic than before, however successful that may be. It was quite hard, because every time you tried to make something like the residential project into something that represents itself you’re obviously going to make it look like itself in a certain respect. ii

Do you think Rossi is still relevant for contemporary discourse? If yes, why?

If no, why?

Yes, I guess it’s hard to, obviously I am still learning about Rossi, but I think there’s a lot of different readings you can take from his writings. Where I am standing now, I would say yes , he is still relevant, in a general sense. His ideas about how the city is construed from these tangential memories and moments that exist have had a bearing on contemporary discourse. You can see the philosophies that have come since then. In terms of how he did it, that isn’t as relevant anymore, in terms of the formal aesthetics, but in saying that, my reading of ‘Architecture of the City’ is that it is talking about looking at the city as an assemblage of architectural pieces that don’t necessarily have to stem from the same formal origins... it’s not the same cupola, not the same square windows, it’s the ideas and the ways of working that can be used again and again.

Conversation between Jacob Komarzynski and Chris Filippidis

On Exhibition What is the challenge of exhibiting architecture? What is exhibited and what does the exhibiting in your project? Is it that simple?

Exhibiting architecture is a challenge without reducing everything to models and drawings. It is tough to find a larger and true form, it takes a lot of nuance and careful coordination of the different parts.

What is exhibited in my project isn’t the residential project in its totality or distilled version of itself. It’s more of the metamoments that both inform it and place it within the continuum of architectural moments in a larger sense. In a similar way to how Rossi looked to reduce things to their essence, I think there are a prime few architectural moments from which everything stems off, in further abstracted versions. That is what I am trying to get to in exhibiting my project, not necessarily displacing elements of the building itself, but the experiences and the reminisces of the residential project through simplification and translation into a different material manifestation.

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How would you describe an architecture that exists solely inside the museum? How is that architecture different to architecture that exists outside the museum?

I guess that’s the premise of where my project stems from, that inside the museum architecture cannot exist because anything that is relocated from an external context into the confines of a museum, means it becomes an object or it becomes a signifier of an idea rather than the thing itself. That could be anything, a Greek vase or a Duchamp urinal. The Duchamp idea is a strong one because in effect he was saying, “anything in the right context can be viewed as art”. So the idea behind my project is that with the strength of the idea of the white cube that the MAXXI exemplifies, it has no space for architecture to exist, in anything other than an untrue form. By taking the architecture of the exhibition, or the way of building space and then using that to fragment and diffuse space and isolate the viewer from the white cube to make it able to view it as architecture opposed to the gallery space itself.

Conversation between Jacob Komarzynski and Chris Filippidis

On the Project of Architecture Can you identify a moment of crisis in the development of your project or your thinking about your project – for example a particular problem that couldn’t be resolved, or the idea that took-over your project...? Is it an architectural problem that will continue to haunt your project even after its completion?

The major crises are ongoing, in that in the end you have to choose the best option, and move on. If you keep on revising and fleshing out things, you are never going to get anywhere. The generation of plans and initial formal arrangement was the hardest bit for me, after establishing the conceptual framework for that to sit in. It is resolved as best as it can now, in this instance, but it could be resolved in so many other ways. It will continue to haunt the project even after its completion, because even though the project isnt focused on the arrangement in two planes, the way the architects go about the project of architecture means that the plan has precedence over everything else, in terms of how it is often the master of the rest of the project, often the first generating principle. After you intersect these plans with the MAXXI, you get these two different, interrupting frameworks, it’s diffused, and thats where the interest stems from. iv

Has your project for an architecture exhibition changed your position or attitude to architecture more generally?

If yes, how?

I haven’t had a project like this before, it’s exceptionally complex with what you are working with, the existing building and making a double, especially in terms of the amount of program you need in there. I don’t think it has changed my position, with any of these you find further things you are interested in. I think it was fun to have a more formal way of doing things, a lot of formal play because sometimes I can be too restrictive with the material and tectonic languages that I use.

Material Rossi Archive Drawings

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Apartment Building in the Rauchstrasse, Aldo Rossi, Berlin, 1983

Aldo Rossi, Ferlenga, A. Apartment building in the Rauchstrasse in Berlin, 1983

The building, which is a mirror image of the former Norwegian embassy on the corner of Drakestrasse and Rauch­ strasse, is typologically determined by a central corridor that begins at the tower containing the stairs.

The corridor divides the apartments and is lit by the large window at its end.

The apartments, conform to the Berlin building regulations. Each apartment has a loggia and can be entered from the central corridor or "Diele." The exterior of the building is made of red brick, with stripes of yellow brick marking the levels of the floors. The tower containing the stairs, which forms a central nucleus, is lit overhead from the lantern-shaped cupolo at the

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the top of the building: the entra;1ce and stairs thus constitute a unitary space above. from ated illumin The elevations are continuous and the apertures are regularly placed, marked by steel lintels painted green.

The relationship between steel and brick is present throughout the entire building, while the surface of the walls in the corner containing the entrance is continuous, broken by small windows.

This corner is conceived as a boundary wall or a section of the building.

The building, in accordance with the general plan, closes off the residential complex opening on to the Tiergarten.

Site plan, the stana];t1 of fagade overt the street. 0kior,ng

Elevations end ofthe:iďż˝ and overlooki ng the central o 'Ilgi the block, J Uttof the long roofs of terrace and, o buildingfromfthe courtyard. the

Aldo Rossi, Ferlenga, A.

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Aldo Rossi, Ferlenga, A.

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Works Overall Axonometric

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Works Plans

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Works Isometric Projections

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“Time, Interrupted” Isometric View p.04

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“Continual Return” Isometric View p.06

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“Framing the Void” Isometric View p.08

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“Stair Intersect” Isometric View p.10

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“A Semblance” Perspective View p.12

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“Interstices, Imposition” Perspective View p.14

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“Cut & FIll” Perspective View p.16

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“Lintel” Perspective View p.18

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“Claim” Perspective View p.20

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“Display & Displayed” Perspective View p.22

Critical Review Interpretation by Erin Campbell Exploring the implied role of the contemporary museum, Jacob Komarzynski’s intervention Ar(ch) Povera looks to break down the hegemony of the white wall and establish alternate readings of the museum.

As a series of interventions the spatial arrangement has been configured as bare stud framing. The linearity of the introduced elements, I would argue, emphasise the smoothness and the curvature of the MAXXI. Whilst the once fluid and open plan limits the understanding of the relationship between the interaction of the individual and the spatial form, this interruption of space and the new spaces in which are derived from this forces the individual to follow the lines of the MAXXI more closely, producing a heightened cognition in the experience of the museum.

Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum already begins to dissolve this idea of room as a box, the fluidity of the overlapping spaces is continuous and uninterrupted, the smoothness hides any tectonic elements as the traditional concept of the ‘white box’ mentality has shifted to the white hybridized container.

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Through this conceptual investigation of Aldo Rossi, where Rossi’s formality is not immediately identifiable or apparent, his attitude towards the city is explored and extracted. These conflicting fragments of multiple dimensions and axes create an assemblage of architecture, much like the Roman context in which the MAXXI sits within. Layers of architecture built upon the existing, intertwined, embedded and at some points interrupting. A coexistence between the old and the new, questioning the role of the ‘white box’ contemporary museum as the partitions of the fragmented interventions sit stripped of all ‘white’ – void of any ‘finished’ materiality, almost incomplete in its most raw state.

The historical role of the museum as a space for objective display, or as background noise is challenged within this project. The experience of walking through the museum as objective viewer has become heightened, ease of movement has been interrupted and at some passageways completely blocked off. The narrowing of space alters the relationship between viewer and building, or in this case the building as the object of display itself, as this narrowing of space alters spatial proximity, alignment and even orientation in the once open plan.

Like Rossi and his formalism utilising simple shapes and artifacts, you may read these exposed walls as simply unfinished objects, embedded within the MAXXI and feel you grasp an understanding – however its in that closer reading looking past form and this surface-level first impression. The architecture produced forces you to analyse the interventions not in isolation but within their context given the implied meaning of the once blank canvas and what this means to exhibit architecture within architecture.

Much like Imperial Rome, the merging of architectures does not always align perfectly, both the city as context and the immediate context of the MAXXI are integral to the understanding of this project. The spatial arrangement of this collision of elements cannot be read as isolated fragments, there is a certain reliance on the context to unpack the multiplicity of layers and selection of materiality, or lack thereof. Perhaps this rejection of materiality is a selection of materiality afterall, offering a critique of the clean, uninterrupted lines of the original MAXXI and of the contemporary museum in a broader sense.

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Index Step 1.1: Architecture as City

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Index Step 1.2: Architecture as Monument

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Index Step 1.3: Architecture as Object

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Index Step 2.1: First Room: Structures Gonflables, 1968, Paris Re-Orientation The dislocation of objects in space, and the viewer in their navigation around these objects, enables alternate approaches, angles and viewpoints. The visual density and hierarchy shifts according to the location of the viewer, creating constantly changing spatial assemblages of objects, partial or whole. Freed of their use or context, the exhibits are now judged or viewed based on their relation to each other and the space; similarities, differences, juxtapositions, that advance and recede.

The imposition of the exhibiting structure is as much part of the curatorial strategy as the objects themselves, a scaffold for this collection of disparate parts, a network that both frames - orienting views - and constructs positioning these objects in enforced relations. The interactions between object and support draws attention to architectonic and spatial qualities, and the exhibition as a constructed context.

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Index Step 2.2: Second Rooms: Archaeology of the City, 1977, Paris

Accretion I Through the “sinking� or embedding of the viewer into a limited field of perception, the exhibition is restricted to partial or segmental views of objects. Rather than gripping the object in its entirety, either from a distance, or from clear orthogonal views, the viewer is made to collate these images, or views in their mind and to formulate this into a cohesive whole.

This results in subjective interpretations of the exhibition, stemming from preconditions in each viewer about how objects, or parts of objects, may relate to one another.

Moving through the exhibition space, these discrete spatial experiences are constructed and collated by the participant. Eventually, it becomes apparent that the exhibition is itself an object being exhibited. The disjunction, or gap between the subjective, or individual/collated, and the objective, or whole/cohesive, reveal the import of context and framing on reading.

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Index Step 2.3: Third Rooms: Alles ist Architektur, 1970, Monchengladbach (GER) Veil An uncovering, or unveiling of the exhibit brings the participant through a series of permeable chambers, divided by a semiopaque network of curtains.

These divisions are both wall and entrance, setting a space for an object and its exhibition, but not a method, or direction, or frame in which it is to be viewed. In an exhibit, one can also perceive, faintly, the shapes or masses of other objects apparent in the spaces adjacent, those that are further away are more imperceptible, more blurry; their forms imbued with perceived, fuzzy meaning prior to their unveiling.

In this blurred field of visual perception, other senses are allowed to be apparent as a way of bringing these separate but indistinct spaces together. The scent of coffee. The cool radiance of steel or concrete.

The scrape of gravel. These things become as much a part of the exhibition as the objects and the diaphanous walls that separate and connect simultaneously. In the one-dimensional reduction of the architecture of the exhibition, these sensory stimuli give a voice back to the hushed confines of the exhibit.

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Notes Reference & Process Cantafora, A., ‘A few profound things’ in Rossi, A. and Ferlenga, A., 2001. The Life And Works Of An Architect. [Cologne]: Könemann.

“Those passages that refer to the traces of life that are preserved in the walls of houses” Awareness of transience: “the contemporary, the immediate, objects used in daily life, architecture itself, even before it is built” “The city as the ideal place for the unfolding of tragic drama”, “the locus of the greatest artifice”, “the tragic knowledge of absence”;

Gandelsonas, M., Neo-Functionalism in Rossi, A. and Ferlenga, A., 2001. The Life And Works Of An Architect. [Cologne]: Könemann.

Functionalism asserts that “function and technology constitut[e] the basis for the generation of form in architecture, thereby eliminat[ing] contemporary academic conceptions of meaning and symbolism” “Since function is itself one of the meanings that could be articulated by form… functionalism was essentially based on an… idea of meaning” Neo-functionalism as a “comprehensive ideology which fundamentally emphasizes the development of the symbolic dimension - the introduction of the problem of meaning within the process of design in a systematic and conscious way” Neither eliminate nor solve dialectical contradictions (within neo- rationalism/ realism), but assume [these contradictions] as one of the main forces which keep alive the development of ideas in architecture”

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Eisenman, P., Post-Functionalism in Rossi, A. and Ferlenga, A., 2001. The Life And Works Of An Architect. [Cologne]: Könemann.

Humanism “characterized by a dialectical opposition: an oscillation between a concern for internal accommodation [program and its materialisation] and a concern for articulation of ideal themes in the form - for example as manifested in the configurational significance of the plan” Modernism revealed that “dialectic form and function is culturally based” “Displacement of man from away from the centre of his world...no longer viewed as an originating agent. Objects are seen as ideas independent of man. In this context, man is a discursive function among complex and already-formed systems of language, which he witnesses but does not constitute” Levi-Strauss: “Language, an unreflecting totalisation, is human reason which has its reason and of which man knows nothing” “The abstract as a mediation between pre-existent sign systems” Architectural form in an “atemporal, decompositional mode, something simplified from some pre-existent set of non-specific spatial entities”; ”Form understood as a series of fragments - signs without meaning dependent upon, and without reference to, a more basic condition”, which assumes “a p.38

basic condition of fragmentation and multiplicity from which the resultant form is a state of simplification” “Existing fragments of thought which when examined, might serve as a framework for the development of a larger theoretical structure” Vidler, A., 2013. The Third Typology And Other Essays. Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing.

“The city provides the material for classification, and the forms of its artefacts provide the basis for re-composition” Primitivism a la Laugier “founded on a belief in the rational order of nature; the origin of each element was natura… and the primary geometries favored for the combination of type-elements was seen as expressive of the underlying form of nature beneath its surface appearance” “Columns, houses, and urban spaces, while linked in an unbreakable chain of continuity, refer only to their own nature as architectural elements, and their geometries are neither scientific nor technical but essentially architectural” “The nature referred to in these recent designs is no more nor less than the nature of the city itself, emptied of specific social content from any particular time and allowed to speak simply of its own formal condition” “The city is considered as a whole, its past and present revealed in its physical structure… it stands complete and ready

Notes Reference & Process The nature referred to in these recent designs is no more nor less than the nature of the city itself, emptied of specific social content from any particular time and allowed to speak simply of its own formal condition” “The city is considered as a whole, its past and present revealed in its physical structure… it stands complete and ready to be de-composed into fragments” “These fragments do not re-invent institutional type-forms no repeat past typological forms: they are selected and reassembled according to criteria derived from three levels of meaning - the first, inherited from meanings ascribed by the past existence of the forms; the second, derived from voice of the specific fragment and its boundaries, which often cross between previous types; the third, proposed by a re-composition of these fragments in a new context” “Communication… has released architecture from the role of “social book” into its specialised domain” “The principle conditions for the invention of object and environments do not necessarily have to include a unitary statement of fit between form and use”, but “at the same time, ensures a relation at another level to a continuing tradition of city life” “The original sense of the form, the layers of accrued implication deposited by time and human experience cannot be lightly brushed away”, the transformation of these forms “ into entirely new entities p.39

that draw their communicative power and potential critical force from the understanding of this transformation” The third typology “refuses any “nostalgia” in its evocations of history, except to give its restorations sharper focus; it refuses all unitary descriptions of the social meaning of form, recognising the specious quality of any single ascription of social order to an architectural order; it finally refuses all eclecticism, resolutely filtering its “quotations” through the lens of a modernist aesthetic”

Aureli, P. (2007). The Difficult Whole.

Log, (9), 39-61. Retrieved November 8, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41765133 Typology as ”a generalizing view of the city and its process of becoming” The “city in all its dimensions”, a “general event” Singularity of the urban event as “a concrete category of the architecture of the city” “Architectural intervention as a partial, concrete and identifiable contribution to the development of the city”, a “universal yet individual element” “Impossible relationship between analysis and project, or between personal invention (the architectural event) and the identification of a collective horizon” Rossi attempted to “be in radical continuity with the theoretical tensions expressed by the Modern Movement, while simultaneously recognizing the irreducitbilityirreducibility of urban complexity and subjective experience to easy common denominators” Tradition as “reason applied to reality in order to extrapolate lines of structural continuity that could contribute to a more conscious perception of the present” Type is “architecture as a structural and formal fact… as a complex experience”; Realism as “the attempt to document man’s life in every dimensions of space, time and place”; p.40

Rationalism as ‘the attempt to establish a highly specific knowledge of a disciplinary landscape that cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas” Theory as “an attempt to construct a body of knowledge that serves not only as a recipe for research but also a teachable methodology” Realist cinema and literature influence Rossi by both “inspiring the overall act of commitment to the city as a place of everyday life” as well as the recognition of everyday urban life through typical figures that coincide with urban images or architectural situations that can be easily identified and coded” Architecture as a “daily theatr indifferent to, yet participating in, the ‘business of living’” Passage from “empirical and documentary reality as found to a familiar, repeatable and typical reality made up of constituent facts” Allows the concentration of “social, cultural and ideological expectations in a single artefact” Popular tradition “as a “current of reality” opposed to the formalist and metaphysical abstraction of the Modern Movement” Rossi saw the realist attitude not “as a formal mimesis, but as the deep adherence pf architectural language to man’s historical reality” “Type as a point of encounter between mans needs, architectural invention, and the form of the city’

Notes Reference & Process The concept of tradition as “the free choice of what history offered, the acceptance of an order within which it was possible to derive a wider, newer order through rational criticism of what had previously been done” “Type as a critical and operational device for establishing an underlying thematic reading of architecture and its confrontation with the problematic of the city” The “ability to think of the city as a whole through the specific practice of a simplified vocabulary of architectural forms”, in the search of a “deeper attachment to the anonymous and abstract character of the modern city” “Type rendered not through universal rules but by the immediacy and singularity of an architectural event” Unite d’Habitation, the Smithsons Golden Lane, where “an architectural form takes a typical element of the city (the street) and develops i as an exceptional one” For Rossi, “The analysis and project of the city had to go beyond the totalizing, demiurgic and diagrammatic attitude of planning, which he believed was too general and simplistic for confronting the reality of an urban territory irreducible to an abstract common denominator” “Only a defined and finite form, by virtue of its clear limits, allows for its continuity and for the production of further actions and the adaptation to unpredictable events” Topological study was “a search for its p.41

vital characteristics, which persist despite the qualitative and quantitative variations in urban form with the passage of time” “The acceptance of the existing urban landscape as a theoretical plane; a plane i which the project does not impose a new concept of habitable space, but rather acknowledges, explains, and thus retroactively justifies what already exists” Pippo Ciorra (1992) Aldo Rossi’s Palazzo dello Sport, Journal of Architectural Education, 45:3, 147-149.

Wittgenstein: “I am nothing if not glimpses of a single object observed from different angles” Each of Rossi’s projects “constitutes a new chapter of a story that involves others and, at the same time, a further fragment in the reconstruction of a latent urban image” “’Fragment’ means a small piece broken off of something. It therefore expresses a hope, yet another hope, rather than a leftover, which instead expresses a surfeit of broken and abandoned things.” The fragments of Rossi’s cities, then, represent not only a memory of architectural and monumental values in the city, but they also recover them as the site of their sur- vival, the starting points for sketching out a new, rebuilt urban geography.”

Alan Colquhoun, “[Rossi] attempts all but the most general types and to avoid the circumstantial. Particular figures are used not because of the associations they arouse within a particular context or in relation to particular functions, but because of their power to suggest archetypes, archetypes which longing to the autonomous tradition of architecture itself. The use of simple, immediately recognizable forms that are not simply quotations, remains the essential foundation of Rossi’s “composition by elements,” where “the use of complete parts as elements, as true architectures, is a precise architectural choice” Mary Louise Lobsinger (2006) The New Urban Scale in Italy, Journal of Architectural Education, 59:3, 28-38.

“Economic forces are indeed a major impetus within the urban dynamic and … they can be analysed in terms of urban structure” “Myriad forces - economic, social, political, and historical - acting upon city form” “Rossi asserted the necessity of understanding the nature of the city and how forces acting upon the city produce changes in form” The urban artefact as a descriptive classification that identifies a key element - individual or composite - in the complex dynamic of the city” p.42

“Urban artefacts accrue value, that is, how they change and produce changes within the physical structure and sociohistorical imagination of a city over time. Not limited to the object-centric focus of architecture in its most reduced definition, the urban artefact is complex and dynamic in formation and structure” “The substance of the urban artefact, both tangible and intangible qualities, was historically constituted through its active participation in the structuring of the city over time” “The recognition that the city is constructed in its totality”, “a complex dynamic of competing forces and processes of change” “Architecture as a key aspect of the city as an urban artefact and as the primary physical evidence of the complex forces acting on the city” which evidences “the forces acting within and upon the city”

Notes Reference & Process Kurt W. Forster, “Monument/Memory and the Mortality of Architecture”, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), pp 2-19.

“Unintentional monuments”, with “modern status as a “monument”/”landmark” entails a loss of practical usefulness and a halt to further transformations” Riegl’s reasoning “sprang directly from his recognition of the continual destruction of everything generated by humans”, “from man we expect accomplished artefacts as symbols of a necessary human production, their disintegration as the symbol of an equally necessary passing” “If time fashioned ruins, modern archaeology will take even the ruins apart, first by means of scientific analysis and later by excavation and excision from the context of the ages” On collective memory and artistic evolution: “attitudes towards buildings of the past relate to the current views of architecture and its public values” “The deliberate memorial, the “intentional monument”, is exposed to a kind of historic double jeopardy, memory is all that sustains its meaning but its physical form will have to survive the vagaries of changing perceptions and values” “Recovery and repression occur in the communicating vessels of contemporary interests” - loss as well as discovery - with “anonymous elements, ornament, and p.43

schematic representation particularly telling” Riegl proposed a “concept of continuous historical evolution which generates its own changing values” On late Roman art: “transition from a haptic mode of perception, fastened on discrete sculptural elements at close range, to an optical one which takes things in at a distance and in terms of rhythmically and spatially differentiated relationships” “the powerful rise of images in late antiquity, which gave full reign to a host of new planar and intervallic relationships among figures with all their consequences for narrative imagery,” Human artefacts as “documents of an irretrievable stage in the evolution of history” “The index of time was precisely what marked an old artifact or building as a historic monument.”

“Restore the object thoroughly and you cancelled both its documentary value making it an unreliable witness to the time of its origin - and its capacity to convey a sense of historical distance, of the time elapsed since its creation:” “the use of clearly historical forms in a new work plays upon the contradiction between a recognizable past and the present in such a way as to blur their distinction“; “A false congruence of past and present inevitably corrupts the identity of both, leaving its objects “stranded” in history”

“A capricious selection of historic motifs or details for the design of a new building finds its counterpart in the arbitrary preservation of this or that old building from among the many slated for demolition” The fragment as a new aesthetic category: “the undisturbed process of dilapidation and decoy, but the idea of the fragment arises not from the gesture of salvaging a piece of the whole but from disregard or even denial of the value represented by integral works” Adorno defined it succinctly: “the fragmentary ... is not a category of contingent parts: the fragment is that part of the totality of a work which defies totality “When only methods of totalitarian control were able to guarantee the coherence of a work, then a disjunctum membrum, a mere fragment of the whole, was better and truer than an integral and resolved work.”

Aldo Rossi projects: “their desolate grandeur shaken by the surreal violence of graphic representation-many of the buildings constructed during those years are languishing in a state of utter degradation that amounts to punitive neglect” On representation: “their shadows seem more substantial than the buildings themselves whose purpose is negated by utter vacancy” On the forum: “the continuous occupation of the site with its gradual p.44

accumulations and substitutions suffused all parts and fragments with a shared presence” “At the heart of the matter beats the destructive force of time; and beneath it, like a murmur of the heart, the mortality of culture itself. Its continual demise, accentuated rhythmically by surges of the new and lapses into the old, leaves behind a trail of rubble rather than a museum of achievements.” “there is no objective past, constant over time, but only a continual refraction of the absent in the memory of the present.”

‘Memory & Monument’ in in Ghirado, D.Y.F., 2019. Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture. [London]: Yale UNiversity Press.

The Pertini monument as a “structure open to all, without a program or definite purpose, a site of collective memory”; Monuments as “propelling force(s) around which other activities and events could grow”; “Memories of events at particular sites to be conserved by the site itself, only awaiting the presence of a visitor to spring back to life” Referring to Libeskind’s Holocaust Museum (and Pirates of the Caribbean ride): “spatial sequences are carefully calibrated to achieve dismay, disorientation and disquiet”; whilst Rossi at Cuneo: “functioned as a vehicle,

Notes Reference & Process A “subtle prod to shed quotidian cares through the ascent of stairs, through darkness to a light-suffused space open to the sky’ “Directing each visitor’s passage up the tightly framed and steadily narrowing staircase to a singular, deeply personal moment on the viewing terrace which would be, nonetheless, the site of a powerful, collective memory” Repetition of a staircase framed by high walls and an open-air viewing platform”; For Rossi, “a monument expressed the collective memory of a community and as such formed an essential link between the present and the group’s past” Collective memory “spring(s) from the dynamics of group interpersonal relations… [to] assemble personal memories to form a body of collective memories” These “continually shape and reshape the group’s shared experiences” “Those collective memories did not end with the construction of the monument” Halbwach: “The group’s image of its external milieu and its stable relationships with this environment becomes paramount in the idea it forms of itself, permeating every element of its consciousness, moderating and governing its evolution”; “When groups enter a space they at once transform it and adapt to it. In turn, that exterior environment and the p.45

relationships it conserves come to form the image the group retains of itself” “Memory the most essential unifying element for a community… intimately, permanently, bound up with the city”; Segrate scheme as an: “assemblage of parts and fragments””; “Assembled of parts, pieces and fragments, the monument and piazza deliberately summoned references to other piazzas, other architectures”; “… an architecture of shadows” “shadows that marked the passage of time, of the seasons; dynamic and expressive, they embodied becoming, a future still unfolding, as yet undefined”; “Shadows alter the relation with reality… mark the passage of time/ duration and changes in atmosphere (duality of tempo)” With the absence of figures, “more imaginative reactivations of the events or people memorialised take place”; in the Monument to Partisans: “those blunted columns invite the viewer to restore the absent parts, and with them to imaginatively summon forth a full range of associations and memories” Simple geometries as “forms that permit imaginative reflection and allow meaning to accrue over time”; James Porter: “Nowhere are sites of memory more compelling than where they are least visibly supported, as in the example of empty sepulchres, which are literal monuments to memory.. Those unmistakable signs of absence...designate the very loss of loss. Remains like these,

, overwhelmingly oppressive in their heartfelt material presence, are the most resistant to the project of description and therefore the sublimest sites of all”; Rossi: “The most precise form is also the one most absent” “Milans thick tapestry of memories quite literally litters the city with a millennial accumulation of sacred sites, against which the Milanese brush in the course of their daily lives” “Burnishing the marble and bronze with an ever-thickening accumulation of collective memories” Memories as “enfolded within a spatial and temporal expansion...poised between time and eternity”, “the tumult and the infinite”; The monuments “rest poised on that sweet tension between the rough and tumble of daily life and a glimpse of the elusive horizon that we call infinity” Rafael Moneo, “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery”, Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976), pp 1-21.

“The concept of an autonomous architecture expressed in the development of a typology of relationships between architecture and the city”; “One understands what architecture is from an analysis of those things in the urban fabric which architecture is not” p.46

Modernist architecture attempted to “establish a continuity between architecture and the other fine arts, thus reducing the specific value in architecture itself” Tendenza, and Rossi therein, posited that there was a “specificity or particular aspect of architecture which could allow it to be considered as an autonomous discipline” Understanding the city and its forms requires an understanding of the elements that make up the city, those of architecture.

Once these elements are determined, one can “grasp the laws by which they are composed and through which they create a more complex reality” For Rossi, “the experience of the city is what permits the discovery of these elements, and the identification of them as urban facts, as a “unicum”, having value in the whole as well as individually as form, in a particular place.”

“These elements are intelligible through memory, not through remembering” Type as “the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model” The model can be repeated as it is, the type “is an object on the basis of which everyone can conceive of works that may not resemble each other at all” Type as something “constant...beyond the particular and the concrete, something that appears during the examination of architectural facts” Rossi: “no type can be identified with a

Notes Reference & Process that withstand the passage of time; these urban facts are the monuments that, in one way or another, constitute or make up and configurate the city” “Give meaning to the life of the city which, through these monument , both remembers the past and uses ‘its memory’” The monument is something permanent because it is already in a dialectic position within urban development, permitting an understanding of the city as something that is created through points (primary elements) and areas (neighbourhoods); and while it acquires value as such through the form, it disappears in the latter from which the value of use comes forth” “Each situation, each event whose recollection is retained in memory, has a corresponding architectonic answer, a sign which fixes it” “Place allows every architecture to achieve the dimension of the individual... necessary for the identification of an urban fact” - Place as the collective, something more than the environment “Architecture cannot be made ignoring these realities which give it a sense of place and of history” “Architecture becomes a determining factor in the constitution of urban facts when it is able to assume the entire civil and political dimension of an era; when it is highly rational, comprehensible and transmissible” p.47

“Building makes one consider all the prior morphological problems that demand both a knowledge of place and a certain interpretation of history before it can aspire to be an urban fact” “The first principle of all architecture for Rossi would be the possibility of achieving a form from a set of elements; the relationship between the elements and the whole is the context of the architects work” “Close to a primary constructed reality, completely upset when forced into a new architecture in which the dimension, scale, and the traditional formal relationships have been forgotten” “History, the collective memory of a certain past, is poured into the architectural object in order to make it intelligible, thus recovering its nature”

Antonello Marotta, “Aldo Rossi: the ‘autobiography’ and its fragments.”. City, Territory and Architecture, Volume 6, (2019) Architecture of the City: looking at the “historic, consolidated city, the monument and urban rules of archaeological fabric” “made up of urban memories, with the city at the centre of his critical, reconstructive gaze, but also fragments of desired places, small gestures, in an analogical course” “drawing, in Rossi, substituted architecture”, with the “change from an idealistic system founded on the rational principles of city construction, summarised in his book-manifesto, to a phase in which the only iconography remains alive.”

“The territory of drawing is not linear, on the contrary, the memory has ramifications, and often the compositions accumulate matter and memories.”

“The drawing [as a] a field parallel to work, certainly able to reveal it but, at the same time, to create an area of investigation, of inquiry, like a place that has its own life. Ideas, formulation and programmatic texts that did not have the materialisation of physical work reconstruct a field of the ‘possible’.”

“Its ultimate aim is not to “show” reality but reveal a new kind through a different pattern” Rossi realised “he was more capable of constructing what he felt, than of p.48

establishing that series of linking rings that led in a hierarchical way from the type to the monument.”

“The dual sense of time, atmospheric and chronological, dominates every construction”; “form both presided over the construction and endured, in a world where functions were changing continuously and inform material was changing.” “the theme of death returns persistently, of desire as a loss, of memory as disappearance.” Memory as ethereal vestige of the no-longer physical ““I loved the Pantheon’s subsidence described in the books on statics; the unexpected crack, a visible but contained collapse, gives enormous strength to architecture because its beauty could not be foreseen” “Memories, subsidence, deformations, lines that cross each other recalled” Lines of flight, of tangents and digressions Drosos, N., 2017. Place And Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture. [online] Colledge Art Association.

Available at: <http://www.caareviews. org/reviews/2662#.X6eSm2gzaiM> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Shift of exhibitions to focus “less on individual buildings, and more on issues such as the institutional structures that underpin architectural practice, theoretical discourse and its dissemination, as well as architecture’s relationship to its publics

Notes Reference & Process Arata Isozaki’s Electric Labyrinth: “work of architecture that exhibited itself as architecture (its stakes remaining firmly within the discipline) and in which the gallery and its conditions of viewing were incorporated within its medium” Through the 1960’s “a shift in architectural exhibitions, away from conveying information through documents and toward creating immediate sensory experiences for the viewers.” “a (historical) model of exhibition in which the two opposing strategies of representing architecture and directly experiencing it within the gallery collapse into one” “Self effacement as the central aesthetic goal of historic preservation.“ Matthew Hayes (2019) On the origins of Alois Riegl’s conservation theory, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 58:3, 132-143, “Riegl considered current psychology and notions of mass culture, which celebrated subjective experience” “the subjective nature of aesthetics in the form of artistic value”; “If artistic values were difficult to define, if “they change ceaselessly from subject to subject and from moment to moment,” then there could be no objective, eternal aesthetics”; “artistic value as a presentday, psychologically relative value” p.49

“Age also provided an objective, material criterion for identifying objects to be preserved”; “appearance of ruins represented a natural dissolution of the complete” Viewer wanting a physical/mental experience of a work of art through the “subjective appearance, that is, in the effects it exerts on the (sensuously perceptive or mentally awakening) subject”; “Monuments were no longer bearers of knowledge – they were substrates for individual sensation” “All life is a constant engagement of the individual self with the surrounding world, the subject with the object” “the monument has joined a cycle of evanescence, shifted from the anthropocentric to the organic realm” Dankmalkultus emerged in the same milieu as Menger’s Principles, where “value was not an inherent quality of an object (such as the cost of production) but derived from the importance accorded to it by individual users, and was hence changeable.” the prospect of ongoing negotiations or contestation with those [conditions] and hence the potential of architecture opening onto a different type of political space”

Felicity D. Scott “Out of Place: Arata Isozaki’s Electric Labyrinth, 1968”, in Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture,, ed. Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller and Jérémie McGowan (Zürich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2014): 21-39.

Arata Isozaki’s Electric Labyrinth: “work of architecture that exhibited itself as architecture (its stakes remaining firmly within the discipline) and in which the gallery and its conditions of viewing were incorporated within its medium” “Having adopted a double character of conservation and memory, on the one hand, and of edification or pedagogy, on the other, architecture suspended within a museum risked becoming frozen in time, conceived of as models to be imitated or as cultural patrimony to be perpetuated”

dimension, one that is more strictly historical” “Permanence was itself not fixed but could be interrupted” “Architectural objects, once abstracted from normative contexts and delivered from functions through their recasting as exhibits, could also operate to other ends; the possibility that distinct and critical relations could be woven among them, including of a kind that take as their project not that of institutionalising norms but rather of instituting alternative relations between architecture and contemporary historical conditions”

“A paradoxical uncoupling of architecture not only from function or purpose but from contemporary historical contingencies and, in turn, its programming or rescripting to other (historicist) ends”

Isozaki’s Electric Labyrinth “occup[ied] and engage[d] the institutional logics of the gallery as a site for exhibiting architecture without submitting to what Damisch identified as an abdication prompted by that suspension” and rather “used the very instabilities and openings born of that suspension from normative function to speak with some precision to contemporary forces impacting architecture”

Damisch: “by abstracting the objects it receives from their contexts and delivering them from their functions, [the museum] weaves between them new relations, ones that have the advantage of displacing the questions of construction and realization, so as to inscribe them within another

“The gallery and its conditions of viewing were incorporated within its medium”, Electric Labyrinth “occupied the space of exhibition as architecture... remaining “suspended” from the conventional functionality (and social dimension) or architecture”

p.50

Notes Reference & Process “The relation between the virtual place and its actualisation in material form or as a singular iteration was not one of resemblance since the passage between the concept and each actualization was one of differentiation such that each was unique” “In other words, this open relationship or temporal passage between a virtual plane and its actualisation undermined the logic of putting forward a model or even representational paradigm for copying, replacing it with a conceptual model that would radically transform as it encountered conditions on the ground” “The exhibition, as a medium, was thus conceived as a space both of participation as well as conflict, a space in which (along with the physical equipment and institutional framework) the user was cast as central to the architectural “event”” “Electric Labyrinth ... resonated ambiguously with contemporary forces in both material and conceptual realms, calling upon its viewer (or activator) to position themselves, quite literally, within an architecture speaking to the discipline’s institutional, political and technological conditions”, and through this “offers the prospect of ongoing negotiations or contestation with those [conditions] and hence the potential of architecture opening onto a different type of political space” p.51

Buckner, Clark. “The Experimental Conditions of Exhibition Practice.” in Art Journal, Volume 68, No. 3. Fall.

Storr: “Space is the medium in which ideas are visually phrased. Installation is both presentation and commentary, documentation and interpretation” IN the 1960’s “Diverse site-specific and process-oriented art practices collapsed the distinctions between an artworks creation and exhibition”, with “the exhibition space and its conventions ...bought to the fore as the very material of the work and were subjected to artists’ transformative interventions” “Drawing on such shifts to a newly activated, horizontal, and phenomenological orientation, artists... engaged the gallery as a social space to be physically inhabited and explored” Julie Ault: “Exhibitions are crucial junctions within which art and artifacts are made accessible to audiences, and particular narratives, histories and ideas are actuated. Furthermore, every mode of display establishes relationships among artist, art, institution, and audience and generates routines and rituals for looking” On Attitudes Becomes Form: “the form of Szeeman’s exhibition mirrored the work it featured, emphasizing process and approach over object or result”. p.52

“Szeeman extended the work of exhibition-making not only beyond the conventional mediating functions of the curator, but also beyond the progarmmatic functions of the institution” Iwona Blazwick, “Temple/White Cube/Laboratory”, in Marincola, P. (2006) What Makes a Great Exhibition, University of the Arts,Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative,US “The exhibition space, be it museum or laboratory, can no longer be undertook as neutral, natural, or universal but rather as thoroughly prescribed by the psychodynamics of politics, economics, geography, and subjectivity” On Whitechapel’s 1958 Pollock show: “The paintings themselves, no longer stacked or suspended from the top of the wall, were installed to emphasize a one-to-one, anthropomorphic relation with the body of the spectator. Viewers were plunged into the physicality of the painting itself, not a projection through perspective and illusion, but an environment in its own right, an expanded field of vision”

Notes Reference & Process Modernist installation methods “disavowed the architecture of the site and instead emphasized the displays as creating an environment that promoted interaction between the objects and the viewers” Brian O’Doherty: “The outside world must not come in… walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. ...untouched by time and its vicissitudes… art exists in a kind of eternity of display” “[Donald] Judd understood the floor as a horizontal grid, which offered an organizing structure and principle of potentially infinite growth and democratic intention. The spectator could now occupy the very same space as the work of art, his or her relation shifting from a vertical, retinal experience to a phenomenological one” “The floor is the stage, the blank canvas activated both by the work and by the spectator.”

Jean-Christophe Royoux on 1960s artistic strategies: “art was conceived as a critical model able to explore various forms of the individual social, psychic or linguistic integration to a reality informed and defomed by the all=pervasive power of mass culture” “The aim of art [was]... to expose p.53

the spectator, within the frame of a precisely defined spatial environment, to a theatricalized experience offering the means of access to alternative modes of self-fashioning” Helio Oiticica “allowed a subtle exploration of the relationship between the subjective and the social, the poetic and the material”, where “structures became general, given, open to collectivecasual-momentary behaviour” Joseph Beuys: “To impose forms on the world around us is the beginning of a process that continues into the political field” “Institutions will tend towards systems of display that reflect the complex socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts within which they operate. They cannot help but be vulnerable to numerous vested interests around which they must negotiate.”

“Much of the twentieth-century avant-garde project may be understood as an assault on the procedures and establishments of art institutions, suggesting an Oedipal relation of dependency on these very institutions” nature of the city itself, emptied of specific social content from any particular time and allowed to speak simply of its own formal condition”

“The city is considered as a whole, its past and present revealed in its physical structure… it stands complete and ready to be de-composed into fragments” “These fragments do not re-invent institutional type-forms no repeat past typological forms: they are selected and reassembled according to criteria derived from three levels of meaning - the first, inherited from meanings ascribed by the past existence of the forms; the second, derived from voice of the specific fragment and its boundaries, which often cross between previous types; the third, proposed by a re-composition of these fragments in a new context” “Communication… has released architecture from the role of “social book” into its specialised domain” “The principle conditions for the invention of object and environments do not necessarily have to include a unitary statement of fit between form and use”, but “at the same time, ensures a relation at another level to a continuing tradition of city life” “The original sense of the form, the layers of accrued implication deposited by time and human experience cannot be lightly brushed away”, the transformation of these forms “ into entirely new entities that draw their communicative power and potential critical force from the understanding of this transformation” The third typology “refuses any “nostalgia” in its evocations of history, except to give its restorations p.54

sharper focus; it refuses all unitary descriptions of the social meaning of form, recognising the specious quality of any single ascription of social order to an architectural order; it finally refuses all eclecticism, resolutely filtering its “quotations” through the lens of a modernist aesthetic”

Notes Reference & Process Forster, Kurt. (2010). Show Me: Arguments For an Architecture Of Display. Log. 55-64.

“Museums play myriad roles and constantly look for new ways to reclaim interest in what they have subtracted from the market” “The museal struggle over competing ambitions reaches beyond the realms of patron and public to animate a contention between the domains of architecture and display themselves” On Neues Museum: “Ita overarching character sprang form a calibrtaed assembly of different tectonic models and ornamental vocabularies that proved capable of generating nuanced spaces and a cadence of rooms between rectangular and octagonal halls” Its interiors “unfold in a panoply of spaces spanning archaic starkness to filigree-like detailing”; “Ornamentation amounts to more than a calligraphic flourish, feeding the eye a series of reversible or mirrored versions of the structure, conceived as an interaction between its visible members and its invisible vectors of force” “A progressive exposition of an idea, the idea of increasing lightness and structural independence from posts and passive support” “A shift to visual, as opposed to tectonic- qualities whose nature consisted principally in the display of themselves” p.55

Neues Museum “must be considered a site of exhibition, to wit, a site of the exhibition of architecture per se” “Conceived as displays of architecture and therefore derived their impact from their own qualities instead of reflecting the value of their collections” With “obviously fake architecture, the works of art on display assume an even more dubious appearance” On Eisenman’s “Cities of Artificial Excavation”: “The contradictory purpose of the exercise: how to introduce architecture into an existing building and how to create a setting fir to display its ideas” “Putting an end to the unending interrelatedness of every one of its parts, crisscrossed by views along zigzagging passageways, Eisenman erected a barrier between the potential and the momentary realisation of this architecture” “Once the dust had settled [after demolition], there was nothing more to be seen but its absence” “Spaces as they exist in actual buildings by Eisenman survive n the memory of those who saw them” “The impossibility of showing what architecture is really like rather than merely elaborating the means of its representation” On Eisenman’s Castelvecchio intervention: “By interlacing existing and new patterns, he shifts or overrides them in a baffling masquerade of past and present,

other and self. Breaking a pattern may be among the oldest ways of asserting identity not by itself by against an existing identity” “Bring architecture into its own on the terrain of the museum”, part of the “eduring effort to secure a presence for architecture itself rather than its representation in drawings and images”

Capdevila, P.M. (2017). “An Italian querelle: radical vs. tendenza.” in Log, 67-81, 2017 “For the Tendenza, architecture is a cognitive process that in and of itself, in the acknowledgment of its own autonomy, is today necessitating a refounding of the discipline; that refuses interdisciplinary solutions to its own crisis; that does not pursue and immerse itself in political, economic, social, and technological events only to mask its own creative and formal sterility” On Aymonino & Rossi’s Gallaterese: “The coexistence of objects, heaped together in constructivist fashion and obstinately forced to communicate impossible meanings, and a mute object, closed within its equally obstinate timidity, recapitulates in an exemplary fashion the entire ‘drama’ of modern architecture” “Tafuri detects in Rossi’s work the inability to reestablish an architectural language and attributes the silence of its signs to the fact that the connection to their origin has been lost, not because that source cannot be traced but rather because “that ‘center’ has been historically destroyed, because that ‘source’ has been dispersed into multiple streams”

p.56

Notes Reference & Process On Schwitters, Moholy Nagy, LeWitt: “The desecrating immersion into chaos permits these artists to reemerge with instruments that, by having absorbed the logic of that chaos, are prepared to dominate it from within”; “Thus we have the form of formlessness as both the conquest and project. On the one side, the manipulation of pure signs as the foundations of an architectural constructivism; on the other, the acceptance of the indefinite, of dissolution”; “Tafuri’s description of the “form of formlessness” suggests that, paradoxically, it is easier to achieve some order by accepting chaos than by denying it and that the indeterminate, the casual, the transient, can give rise to “the Whole””; The Radical architects, “through their celebration of contingency and their acceptance of the dissolution of architecture, paradoxically came much closer to some new order, and order derived from mass consumptions “totality of disorder””; “A search of the past for the foundation of the future is not as evident in the painting (Cantafora’s ‘La citta analoga’) as the impossibility of formulating the future as something different from the past or at least from a certain idealised, selected past” p.57

In Archizoom’s No-Stop City: “an ahistorical present prevails, marked by the constant expiration and renewal induced by consumption - where everything, in the words of Vattimo, “tends to flatten out at the level of contemporaneity and simultaneity, thus producing a dehistoricization of experience” “One of the most remarkable features of this project is its radicalisation of the figure-ground dialectic.

The objects shape a habitat that is fragmented, heterogeneous, disordered, hyperexpressive, and dynamic, while the background is unitary, homogenous, ordered, inexpressive and stable” “The city no longer ‘represents’ the city but becomes the system itself, programmed and isotropic.”

“Thus the project (No-Stop City) seems an accurate manifestation of the merging post-Fordist regime: while the background can be seen as a conceptual representation of global capitalism devoid of objects, restraints, and alternatives, the figures are a concrete representation of the plurality, temporarily, and contingency through which that very capitalism tangibly manifests itself”

Sheikh, S., 2009. Positively White Cube Revisited. [online] e-flux.com.

Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/03/68545/positively-white-cuberevisited/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

“The gallery space is not a neutral container, but a historical construct.

Furthermore, it is an aesthetic object in and of itself. The ideal form of the white cube ... is inseparable from the artworks exhibited inside it. Indeed, the white cube not only conditions, but also overpowers the artworks themselves in its shift from placing content within a context to making the context itself the content.

However, this emergence of context is enabled primarily through its attempted disappearance. The white cube is conceived as a place free of context, where time and social space are thought to be excluded from the experience of artworks.

It is only through the apparent neutrality of appearing outside of daily life and politics that the works within the white cube can appear to be self-contained— only by being freed from historical time can they attain their aura of timelessness.

“Transparency - Instrument of Design” in Transparency, Rowe, C., Slutzky, R (1997). Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser.

“Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations.

Space not only recedes but fluctuates in p.58

a continuous activity. The position of the transparent figures has equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer now as the further one” Moholy-Nagy: “Some superimpositions of form overcome space and time fixations. They transpose insignificant singularities into meaningful complexities ... transparent quality of the superimpositions often suggest transparency of context as well, revealing unnoticed structural qualities in the object”.

Moholy finds that “the manifold word agglutinations” of James Joyce are “the approach to the practical task of building up a completeness from interlocked units by an ingenious transparency or relationships… by a process or distortion, composition, and double-entendre, a linguistic transparency (Kepes’ “interpenetration without optical destruction”) -- might be effected, and that whoever experiences one of these Joycean “agglutinations” will enjoy the sensation of looking through a first plane of significance to others lying behind it.”

“The attempt to describe buildings or urban patterns independently from their historical context, to see them side by side across periods of stylistic differences and to insist on a common quality in works from widely differing epochs, produced by distinct social, technical and political

Notes Reference & Process “Transparency as organization of form produces clarity as well as allows for ambiguity and ambivalence. It assigns each part not only one definite position and distinct role in a whole but endows it with a potential for several assignments, each of which though distinct can be determined from time to time by deciding in which connection one chooses to see it.

Transparency then is the imposed order and freedom of choice at the same time.”

and not be “attached” to certain forms or motifs to which meaning is thought to be attributable by association or is believed to derive from precedent. Meaning can thus consist in the adhoc or repeated identification of the beholder with the object. Meaning then blossoms from personal involvement, it is created in the act of focusing on one of the possible readings of form relations that are latent, inherent or implied in the formorganization.”

“Transparency as form - organization is inclusive: it can absorb contradiction and local singularities, such as local symmetry for instance, without endangering the cohesion and readability of the whole”

“collage as an attitude conducive to artifacts resulting from a technique that would render feasible “a way of giving integrity to a jumble of pluralistic references”

“Since a transparent organization invites and encourages the fluctuation of multiple readings, and suggests individual interpretation, it activates and involves. The spectator remains not an observer “on the outside”, he becomes part of the composition through his participation. He enters a dialogue. He has to decide and in “reading” a facade, choosing one of several possible readings or the composition he is, at the same time, in his imagination, engaged in its creation.

“Collage as a state of mind encouraging the “politics of bricolage”, activity that “implies a willingness to deal with the odds and ends left over from human endeavour”. Phenomenal transparency is a means of formorganization that permits [one] to incorporate the heterogeneous elements in a complex architectural or urban tissue, to treat them as essential part of collective memory and not as embarrassment”

“If thus supremacy of the visual and its individual interpretation over the subject matter is assured, then meaning could be a quality that comes into being through accruing, through sedimentation, p.59

Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, O’Doherty, B. (1986), Santa Monica: The Lapis Press.

“Art exists in a kind of eternity of display...This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status: one has to have died already to be there” “Since this [the ritual space, and by extension, the gallery] is a space where access to higher metaphysical realms is made to seem available, it must be sheltered from the appearance of space and time. This specially segregated space is a kind of non-space, ultra-space, or ideal space where the surrounding matrix of space-time is symbolically annulled” “The construction of a supposedly unchanging space, then, or a space where the effects of change are deliberately disguised and hidden, is sympathetic magic to promote unchangingness in the real or non-ritual world; it is an attempt to cast an appearance of eternality over the status quo in terms of social values and also, in our modern instance, artistic values” “The eternity suggested in our exhibition spaces is ostensibly that of artistic posterity, of undying beauty, of the masterpiece. But in fact it is a specific sensibility , with specific limitations and conditionings, that is so glorified” “The white cube was a transitional device that attempted to bleach out the past and at the same time control the future by appealing to supposedly p.60

transcendental modes of presence and power” O’Doherty seeks to argue for the “defenses of time and change against the myth of the eternality and transcendence of pure form” Notes on the Gallery Space “History [as opposed to the linearity of life] is different. As the scale changes, layers of time are superimposed and through them we project perspectives with which to recover and correct the past” “We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. It clarifies itself through through a process of historical inevitability usually attached to the art it contains” “The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art”. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation from itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values” “Conversely, things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them. Indeed, the object frequently becomes the medium through which these ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion - a popular form of late modernist academicism (“ideas are more interesting than art”)”

Notes Reference & Process In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery “frames” the gallery and its laws” “In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the firehose in a modern museum looks not like a firehose but an esthetic conundrum.

Modernism’s transposition of perception from life to normal values is complete” “Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial... untouched by the vicissitudes of time.

Art exists in a kind of eternity of display.

This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there” “Indeed, the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion. The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not - or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study” In the easel painting: “The perspective positions everything within the picture along a cone of space, against which the frame acts as a grid, echoing those cuts of foreground, middle ground, and distance within”; “The eye is abstracted from an anchored body and projected as a miniature proxy into the picture to inhabit and test the articulations of its space” “For this process, the stability of the frame is necessary...its limiting security completely defines the experience within.

There is not suggestion that the space within the picture is continuous with the space on either side of it” p.61

“In a photograph, the location of the edge is a primary decision, since it composes - or decomposes - what it surrounds. Eventually framing, editing, cropping - establishing limits - become major acts of composition” Abstract Expressionism “began to conceive the edge as a structural unit through which the painting entered into a dialogue with the wall beyond it” “Once the wall became an esthetic force, it modified anything shown on it. The wall, the context of the art, had become rich in a context it subtly donated to the art” “The breaking of the rectangle formally confirmed the wall’s autonomy, altering for good the concept of the gallery space” William Anastasi at Dwan, New York, 1965: photographed the empty gallery, noticed the parameters of the wall, top and bottom, right and left, the placement of each electrical outlet, the ocean of space in the middle. He then silkscreened all this data on a canvas slightly smaller than the wall handout it on the wall; “For me, the show had a peculiar after-effect: when the paintings came down, the wall became a kind of ready-made mural and so changed every show in that space thereafter”

“The transformation of objects is contextual, a matter of relocation.

Proximity to the picture plane assists this transformation. When isolated, the context of objects is the gallery. Eventually, the gallery itself becomes, like the picture plane, a transforming force. At this point, as Minimalism demonstrated, art can be literalised and transformed: the gallery will make it art anyway” “With the tableau, the gallery “impersonates” other spaces. The gallery space “quotes” the tableaux and makes them art, much as their representation became art within the illusory space of a traditional picture” “The effect on the spectator… is one of trespass. Because trespass makes one partly visible to oneself, it plays down body language, encourages a convention of silence” Context as Content “With eclectic light, the ceiling became an intensely cultivated garden of fixtures, and modernism simply ignored it. The ceiling lost its role in the ensemble of the total room. The Georgian ceiling, for instance, dropped a palisade to the picture molding, extending the roof’s domain as a graceful, graduated enclosure. Modern architecture simply ran the blank wall into the blank ceiling and lowered the lid.

And what a lid! Its pods, floods, spots, canisters, ducts make it a technicians playground.”

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assumptions, overlooked content, flaws in historical logic. Projects - short term art made for specific sites and occasions - raise the issue of how the impermanent survives, if it does” “The historical process is both hampered and facilitated by removing the original, which becomes increasingly fictitious as afterlives become more concrete. What is preserved, and what s allowed to lapse edit the idea of history the form of communal memory favoured at any particular time” “If the white wall cannot be summarily dismissed, it can be understood. This knowledge changes the whitre wall, since its content is composed of metal projections based on unexposed assumptions. The wall is our assumptions”

Notes Reference & Process Gow, M. and Pita, F., 2017. The Guise Of Architecture. [online] offramp.sciarc. edu. Available at: <https://offramp.sciarc. edu/articles/the-guise-of-architecture> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Peter Eisenman, in his text “Architecture and the Problem of the Rhetorical Figure,” poses the difference between the functional job of architecture and the other roles of architecture, pertaining to the creation of worldviews and multiple, possible realities. He contends that, What defines architecture is the continuous dislocation of dwelling, to dislocate, in other words, what it in fact locates. In order to reinvent the site whether it be a city or a house, the idea of site must be freed from its traditional places, histories, and systems of meanings Peter Eisenman makes regarding the “rhetorical figure” where he talks about the “fictional quality of reality” and the “real quality of fiction,” This repressed text is a fiction which recognizes its own fictive condition. In its way, it begins to acknowledge the fictional quality of reality and the real quality of fiction. Culture, history, and ultimately architecture are not fixed or merely additive, but are a continual process of reiteration and simultaneous dislocation which at every moment modifies the p.63

previous instant of meaning and structure Low, J., 2016. The Material Undoings Of Kelly Lycan - Momus. [online] Momus. Available at: <https://momus.ca/ the-material-undoings-of-kelly-lycan/> [Accessed 8 November 2020]. “the work first struck me as a room in mourning: an emptiness indifferent to being filled. White walls of roughlysliced drywall extend from the building’s interior skeleton, forming vacant platforms. Open shelves refract sightlines, splintering sightlines and casting shadows. “ it presents as art the often-invisible framing and support systems within museum contexts, nudging an awareness towards how languages of display – in photography, architecture, and the materials themselves – shape ideas of value” how any specific site “is covered over by realities, representations, decors, and settings … a serried network of semblances” extending far beyond a particular locale”

Miller, M., 2016. The Anti-Museum Director: Alanna Heiss On The 40Th Anniversary Of PS1 Contemporary Art Center – Artnews.Com. [online] Artnews. com. Available at: <https://www.artnews. com/art-news/artists/the-anti-museumdirector-alanna-heiss-on-the-40thanniversary-of-ps1-contemporary-artcenter-6675/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Robert Ryman’s white panels installed on white walls were so subtle that the focus becomes the walls themselves, their small imperfections and shadows.

I paused for a time at an untitled installation by Doug Wheeler. It is a room in a corner of the building with nothing in it. There are six arched windows. One of the glass panes has been removed and the rest are tinted, going progressively darker from left to right. That was it. The empty room was curiously moving. I felt at once far away from where I was and intensely present. I stood there for a long while with the sounds from the city outside seeming distant, watching the light slowly move across the floor.”

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Preece, R., 2013. Power Alignments: A Conversation With Peter Downsbrough Sculpture. [online] Sculpture Magazine.

Available at: <https://sculpturemagazine. art/power-alignments-a-conversationwith-peter-downsbrough/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

About Two Pipes: “At the time when I made it, I was very interested in “place,” in placing something, putting something in an environment—whether interior or exterior—to “mark” that space and as an extension into time” About making a room piece: “It’s a question of the letters, the words, the content, and context; everything interacts as far as I’m concerned. People walk through, in, and around the work as they walk in and around the space. They have to be constantly aware that the nuances of things change, and that affects the meaning” “It’s not by chance that things are aligned the way they are. They’re ordered in a certain way that suits certain powers that are. You have to be aware of that. You can’t necessarily change the way things are and you might not even want to, but you have to be aware of it.”

Notes Reference & Process James Attlee, ‘Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier’, in Tate Papers, no.7, Spring 2007, https://www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/tate-papers/07/ towards-anarchitecture-gordon-mattaclark-and-le-corbusier, accessed 8 November 2020.

“The ‘re-staging’ of Anarchitecture as part of the exhibition Open Systems (2005) at Tate Modern triggered numerous questions relating to the work’s authorship and content. At the simplest level, the memories of surviving participants differed as to what had and had not been included. The original installation had not been documented, and in such a situation the first question that the exhibition needed to attempt to answer became whose memory is it that is being reconstructed?” “ It is interesting that Matta-Clark spoke to interviewers of being fascinated by the architectural spaces, or ‘recurrent dream spaces’ as he called them, each of us stores within the mind, and that one of his proposals to the Anarchitecture Group was concerned with ‘designing for memory’.”

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Baers, M., 2012. Michael Asher (1943–2012): Parting Words And Unfinished Work. [online] E-flux.com.

Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/39/60293/michael-asher-19432012-parting-words-and-unfinishedwork/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Michael Asher’s “ extrapolating from a site’s prior function (in that case, a newspaper archive) could offer insight into how any specific site “is covered over by realities, representations, decors, and settings … a serried network of semblances” extending far beyond a particular locale”

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Knowledge Bank Bibliographic Information for Selected Source Material Jan de Cock, Randschade fig. 7: Museum voor Schone Kunsten,

Source: https://www.invaluable.com/auctionlot/jan-de-co-212-c-66c1e32a9c

Jan de Cock, Title: 4, 2010

Source: http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/jande-cock-repromotion

Lawrence Weiner, A 36 x 36 removal to the lathing or support wall of a plaster or wallboard from a wall, 1968.

Installation view, Pocket Utopia, 2007.

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Peter Downsborough, Two Pipes, 2014.

Source: https://www.martineaboucaya.com/ peter-downsbrough/

Peter Downsborough, Untitled, Oostende, 2008

Source: https://www.martineaboucaya.com/ peter-downsbrough/

Peter Downsborough, Untitled, Bruxelles, 2004

Source: https://www.martineaboucaya.com/ peter-downsbrough/

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Alan Saret, Brick Wall and Sun, 1976, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Source: http://www.16miles. com/2009/01/sudden-omnipresence-ofalan-saret.html

Carl Andre, Trier, 1987 + 41st Dolomite Integer, 1985, installation view, Konrad Fischer Galerie 2009

Source: http://www.konradfischergalerie. de

Michael Asher, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland, October 17November 29, 1992.

Source: http://moussemagazine.it/ simon-starling-kunsthalle-bern-michaelasher-2017/

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Michael Asher, Haus Lange installation, 1982

Source: https://archinect.com/blog/ article/109518189/learning-from-michaelasher

Daniel Buren, Haus Esters Installation

Source: https://archinect.com/blog/ article/109518189/learning-from-michaelasher

Kelly Lycan, â&#x20AC;&#x153;More Than Nothing,â&#x20AC;? 2016. Installation view, Burrard Arts Foundation.

Source: https://momus.ca/the-materialundoings-of-kelly-lycan/

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Kilian Ruthemann (shown left: Room for Milk, 2013)

Source: https://www.coeval-magazine. com/coeval/2015/5/1/kilian-ruthemann

Gordon Matta-Clark, “Doors, Floors, Doors” in the exhibition, “Rooms

Source: https://www.moma.org/ calendar/exhibitions/3991/installation_ images/37806

Michael Asher, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California, U.S.A., January 26-April 12, 2008.

Source: http://moussemagazine.it/ mario-garcia-torres-michael-asher-2017/

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Peter Eisenmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Plan for the Cities of Artficial Excavation Exhibtition at CCA

Source: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/ search/details/collection/object/316815

Christo, Corridor Store Front, 1967 - 1968

Source: http://www.noshowmuseum. com/en/1st-a/christo#info

Charlotte Posenenske, Drehflugel Serie E (Revolving Vanes Series E), 1967.

Source: https://www.hatjecantz. de/minimal-art-5850-0.html?article_ id=5850&clang=0

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Knowledge Bank Bibliographic Information for Selected Source Material Cantafora, A., ‘A few profound things’ in Rossi, A. and Ferlenga, A., 2001. The Life And Works Of An Architect. [Cologne]: Könemann.

Gandelsonas, M., NeoFunctionalism in Rossi, A. and Ferlenga, A., 2001. The Life And Works Of An Architect.

[Cologne]: Könemann.

Eisenman, P., Post-Functionalism in Rossi, A. and Ferlenga, A., 2001. The Life And Works Of An Architect. [Cologne]: Könemann.

Vidler, A., 2013. The Third Typology And Other Essays.

Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing.

Aureli, P. (2007). The Difficult Whole. Log, (9), 39-61. Retrieved November 8, 2020, from http:// www.jstor.org/stable/41765133 Pippo Ciorra (1992) Aldo Rossi’s Palazzo dello Sport, Journal of Architectural Education, 45:3, 147-149 Mary Louise Lobsinger (2006) The New Urban Scale in Italy, Journal of Architectural Education, 59:3, 28-38.

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Kurt W. Forster, “Monument/ Memory and the Mortality of Architecture”, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), pp 2-19.

‘Memory & Monument’ in in Ghirado, D.Y.F., 2019. Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture.

[London]: Yale UNiversity Press.

Rafael Moneo, “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery”, Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976), pp 1-21.

Antonello Marotta, “Aldo Rossi: the ‘autobiography’ and its fragments.”. City, Territory and Architecture, Volume 6, (2019) Drosos, N., 2017. Place And Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture. [online] Colledge Art Association. Available at: <http://www.caareviews.org/ reviews/2662#.X6eSm2gzaiM> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Matthew Hayes (2019) On the origins of Alois Riegl’s conservation theory, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 58:3, 132-143, Buckner, Clark. “The Experimental Conditions of Exhibition Practice.” in Art

Felicity D. Scott “Out of Place: Arata Isozaki’s Electric Labyrinth, 1968”, in Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture,, ed. Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller and Jérémie McGowan (Zürich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2014): 21-39.

“Transparency - Instrument of Design” in Transparency, Rowe, C., Slutzky, R (1997).

Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser.

Iwona Blazwick, “Temple/White Cube/Laboratory”, in Marincola, P. (2006) What Makes a Great Exhibition, University of the Arts,Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative,US

Gow, M. and Pita, F., 2017.

The Guise Of Architecture. [online] offramp.sciarc.edu.

Available at: <https://offramp. sciarc.edu/articles/the-guiseof-architecture> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Forster, Kurt. (2010). Show Me: Arguments For an Architecture Of Display. Log. 55-64.

Capdevila, P.M. (2017). “An Italian querelle: radical vs. tendenza.” in Log, 67-81, 2017.

Sheikh, S., 2009. Positively White Cube Revisited. [online] e-flux.com. Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/03/68545/positivelywhite-cube-revisited/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

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Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, O’Doherty, B. (1986), Santa Monica: The Lapis Press.

Low, J., 2016. The Material Undoings Of Kelly Lycan - Momus. [online] Momus.

Available at: <https://momus.ca/ the-material-undoings-of-kellylycan/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

Miller, M., 2016. The AntiMuseum Director: Alanna Heiss On The 40Th Anniversary Of PS1 Contemporary Art Center – Artnews.Com. [online] Artnews. com. Available at: <https:// www.artnews.com/art-news/ artists/the-anti-museumdirector-alanna-heiss-onthe-40th-anniversary-of-ps1-

Preece, R., 2013. Power Alignments: A Conversation With Peter Downsbrough Sculpture. [online] Sculpture Magazine. Available at: <https:// sculpturemagazine.art/poweralignments-a-conversation-withpeter-downsbrough/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

James Attlee, ‘Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon MattaClark and Le Corbusier’, in Tate Papers, no.7, Spring 2007, https:// www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tate-papers/07/ towards-anarchitecture-gordonmatta-clark-and-le-corbusier, accessed 8 November 2020.

Baers, M., 2012. Michael Asher (1943–2012): Parting Words And Unfinished Work. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/39/60293/michael-asher1943-2012-parting-words-andunfinished-work/> [Accessed 8 November 2020].

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