Lachlan Welsh Studio 8, MSD S2, 2020
Analagous (from within)
STUDIO 8: MAXXI The Home, the Monument, the Museum In association with MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI, Rome), and anticipating the major retrospective Aldo Rossi: The Architect And The Cities, at the Zaha Hadid designed, National Museum of 21st Century Art (MAXXI) opening in December 2020. The architecture exhibition lies at the confounded intersection of the representation and generation of architecture and its discourses. The institutional setting of the museum functions as the place for the display of architecture, but paradoxically, suspends any evidence of architecture actually ‘being’ there. This architecture in absentia resists the museum’s institutional codes, practices and perceptual histories – something that art cannot do, but something that architecture seems to do naturally. Architecture’s unease in the museum buttresses Aldo Rossi’s claim of the disciplinary autonomy of architecture. Students will engage with digitised drawings and other documents of MultiResidential Housing Projects held by the MAXXI Architecture Archive. These projects have been influenced by Aldo Rossi’s popular ideas of the 60s, 70s, and 80s that supported the rejection of Modernism and the reconsideration of historical time within the architecture of the city. Projects from the Archive become canvases for students to investigate the idea of the Monument within architecture culture and the idea of Display within the museum.
Led by Scott Woods and Kim Vo Semester 2, 2020 Melbourne School of Design Christopher Filippidis Erin Campbell Hongchang Duan Jacob Komarzynski Jessica Liu Lachlan Welsh Manning McBride Nan Hang Zhang Oskar Rosa Sharleen Wonorahardjo Yi Wang Yichen Cao
CONTENTS Prologue 3 Interview 4 Wayfinding Plans 6 Material 9 Works 18 Critic’s Review 42 Index 44 Notes 62 Knowledge Bank 94
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PROLOGUE
In Analogous (from within), one experiences Aldo Rossi’s residential project for Giudecca passively through numerous installations of typological form, borne from within the MAXXI. Beginning in the theatres, a negotiation occurs between the city and the archive. The clash between the contextual and the contextless produces uncanny architectural fragments, caught between specificity and generality in their appearance. These pieces are configured throughout the museum reconstructing familiar urban
spaces in their composition. The resulting tension that exists between the two envelopes stands as a critique of the institutional nature of the gallery. Conflict arises where the two entities meet as the exhibited Rossi content seeks to break through the white walls and reconnect with the wider city. Lachlan Welsh, 2020
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INTERVIEW 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? Rossi is quite a difficult person to move out of the shadow of, but I like to think that across my steps one, two and three I’ve at least tried to move some way away from his trademark solidity and permanence. This is tough though, because when you’re dealing with the Rossi forms—they’re so specific, the windows, the columns, these kind of forms—it’s hard not to just carry those forms across into your own project. So, you are kind of anchored to him in a way. However, if you try and abstract him any further, the connection is lost. So, his architecture operates in this very narrow range between specificity and generality, and so for us there is not a whole lot of room to move without either becoming too obvious or too abstract. Whilst this has been a challenge, I like to think I’ve struck a balance between staying in that narrow zone and also managing to do something different in that moment by undermining the solidity and permanence. Do you think Rossi is still relevant for contemporary discourse? I think this comes to the idea of how he mines historical form, abstracting it for use in his own architecture. I question whether that aspect of his work is so relevant for contemporary discourse; these caricatures of historical architecture: towers, turrets and other such elements. Honestly, I wonder whether that was ever even an appropriate style for anywhere outside of Italy. Given its rich architectural history, the context lends itself to the abstraction classical forms that inform his architecture. So, I’m not sure I find his formalism relevant. As for his attitude towards the city on the other hand, I find this very relevant. Certain strands of urbanism that we may find today tend to think of the city as a system. Rossi believed quite the opposite. For him, the city is a collection of specific architectural moments that come together to form an assemblage. The city only exists in as
much as it is the sum of individual moments of architecture. I find this very interesting as it carves out a place for architecture in contemporary discourse by treating it as the fundamental building block of the city. So, I would say that his theory is still relevant for sure. What is the challenge of exhibiting architecture? What is exhibited and what does the exhibiting in your project? One thing that I struggled with in this design brief: at one end of the spectrum for exhibiting architecture you have a very traditional approach with a white gallery wall, architectural drawings, models on pedestals, it’s an exhibition of traditional architectural representations. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the remodelling of architecture at 1:1 scale. I suppose I went down the route of exhibiting 1:1 to make it a more architectural project rather than just putting drawings up on the wall. But still there became the difficulty of moving away from just putting the building in the museum. How do you do something at 1:1 that is experienced as architecture without recreating the building itself? That’s really the fundamental question of my project. It uses these kinds of typological forms to construct a new architecture that has the same qualities as the residence it is supposed to be representing, but the residence is not there in full. It’s deconstructed into urban typologies and reconstructed through similar fragments of form. The challenge is how do you exhibit the architecture in a way that is not just building the building or putting the drawings on the wall, but how do you abstract the building and reconfigure that in a way in which somebody could walk through the exhibition and feel like they’ve understood the residence, even though they’ve never been there. This requires a close reading of the compositional ideas behind the residence.
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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? There’s something about an object being in a museum that naturally imbues it with a certain value, or if not value, it at least encourages a closer reading of it, viewing it in a different light. Architecture exhibited this way ceases to be background noise, something that you move through subconsciously, it becomes a something more cognitive. In my project I imagine that the experience of it is less phenomenological and instead more like you are walking around an architectural model and understanding it as you move through it. So exhibiting architecture in a museum perhaps allows for this more so than out in the real world because it puts it in this privileged position, it switches on cognition, and so you consider the thing as an object as you move through it. Can you identify a moment of crisis in the development of your project or your thinking about your project? Is it an architectural problem that will continue to haunt your project even after its completion? The main crisis for me was trying to represent Rossi without blatant copying. That was one thing that was really bugging me. Do you go full copy, copying the cornice and the roof forms etc, by which it really starts to look like a Rossi diorama? Or do you abstract it, and run the risk of ceasing association with Rossi? So you’re stuck in this weird zone in which you almost have to copy him in some way to certify the project as a Rossi project. I found this to be so superficial, that was what was bugging me. In this way anyone could just do a Rossi building, you just take these historically inspired forms and reconfigure them in some generic way and then you’re done. This led me to think about the MAXXI in my project as a factory for mass-producing these superficial Rossi forms which become created in the workshop and rolled out to be
configured throughout the galleries. I tried to turn this negative into a positive, but I think it will still haunt my project because I fear that even with my narrative attached, the project will remain looking like Rossi’s architecture, which is potentially problematic. This is also why I have gone for a highly tectonic approach, which is to not just render in solid white but break it down into a technical construction. Which may go back to how I’ve managed to move away from him as well. Has your project for an architecture exhibition changed your position or attitude to architecture more generally? I would say so. If I previously described the experience of being a viewer in this exhibition as cognitive, making one think about it more closely, being a designer of such an exhibition amplifies that same feeling. You might look at Rossi’s buildings and think that they’re quite simple or something that’s been overdone, you get everything there is to get in the first viewing. But by being forced to persist with these residences that we may never have looked at otherwise—they may not even be particularly interesting buildings, I know mine isn’t very interesting compared to some other peoples’—but being forced to have this as your only reference and you have to struggle through extracting ideas out of that, it makes you look closer at architecture, it makes you try harder to understand what’s going on. After having gone through that process you become more adept at incorporating that level of specificity and close reading into your own architecture. Perhaps then you apply that same method of close reading to forms of architecture other than Rossi.v
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WAYFINDING PLANS
Ground Floor
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First Floor
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Second Floor
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MATERIAL
001
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003
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004
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005
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006
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009
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010
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Isometric P. 18
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WORKS
Site Plan
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Ground Floor: Existing
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Ground Floor: Proposed
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First Floor: Existing
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First Floor: Proposed
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Second Floor: Existing
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Second Floor: Proposed
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Plaza and Colonnade
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Street
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Laneway
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Terrace
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Domestic Interior
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Modes of Interaction P. 36
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Enclosure P. 37
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Intersection
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Protrusion
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Convergence
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Projection
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CRITIC’S REVIEW Written by Jessica Liu
The new museum project, Analogous (from within), by Lachlan Welsh, draws on Aldo Rossi’s proposal for the Campo di Marte redevelopment and presents to us the transformation of the existing MAXXI museum into a factory for the interpretation, production and exhibition. Furthermore, the project interrogates the function of the museum and its role in archiving, translation and presentation. It can therefore be considered in two parts that synergistically work together to form the Rossi factory. The first component of the proposal focuses on the relationship between the theatres, the archive and the Rossi workshop. The new theatres located on the ground and first floor serve different agendas within the scheme. The former is the Theatre of the Archive, inward facing, it takes on an interior sensibility, aligning itself to a condition that is archive specific. Whilst the latter, Theatre of the City, positions itself to face towards the exterior of the MAXXI and beyond; towards Rome. These spaces combined become a zone for the mass production of Rossi; churning out 1:1 typological architectural pieces which are then stored in the archive or assembled within the workshop to populate the museum. The second part of the new museum are the five galleries of the MAXXI which are representational of the six abstracted urban conditions of Rossi’s Campo di Marte redevelopment. The urban conditions, the Monument, the Plaza & Colonnade, the Street, the Terrace, the Laneway and the Residence become both the framework for exhibition and actual exhibition itself;
recreating and presenting the archetypal spaces that are evident within the residential proposal. Starting from the Entrance Hall, as one moves through the new museum, from ground floor to the second floor, there is a mediation of the monument to the residential; a movement through typological language and experiences. Employing the curatorial strategy of partitioning, the design utilises the massproduced generic fragments from the Rossi factory and specific configuration to create a new architecture within the MAXXI. The five representational galleries of the museum perform as a container for Rossi, creating a relationship that is established via the gap; the space between MAXXI container and Rossi architecture. These new exhibition spaces are constructed through screens and platforms that are offset and lifted from the walls and floors of the galleries and meet existing walls through various modes of interpretation such as intersection, rupture and convergence. The mass production of form is further emphasised through the thinness of materiality of the screens, platforms and columns. The construction of the new exhibition suites allows for the simultaneous experience of the MAXXI and Rossi without ever needing to touch the existing museum through the platform infrastructure of footings. Analogous (from within) is a building within a building.
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INDEX
Step 1.1A
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Step 1.1B
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Step 1.2A
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Step 1.2B
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Step 1.3A
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Step 1.3B
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Exhibition 2.1
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Step 2.1A
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Exhibition 2.2
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Step 2.2A
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Step 2.2B
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Step 2.2C
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Exhibition 2.3
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Step 2.3A
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Step 2.3B
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Step 2.3C
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Step 2.3D
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Step 2.3E
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NOTES Week 1
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Week 2
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Week 3
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Week 4
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Week 5
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Week 6
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Week 7
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Week 8
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Week 9
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Week 10 Re-examining the residence
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Week 10 Exploring the CCA Archive
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Week 11
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Week 12
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KNOWLEDGE BANK Lectures Albena Yaneva in conversation with Alan Pert, ACAHUCH + CCPD Patrik Schumacher, Recent Cultural Projects at Zaha Hadid Architects Pippo Ciorra, Aldo Rossi Exhibitions Rory Hyde, Design and Public Life Thomas Daniell, Notes from a Small Island Belinda Yang, Thesis Presentation Richen Jin, Thesis Presentation Kim Vo, Thesis Presentation
Reading Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect. Alois Riegl, The Modern Cult of Monuments. Andrew Peckham, The Dichotomies of Rationalism in 20th Century Italian Architecture. Anthony Vidler, The Third Typology. Colin Davis, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms Diane Ghirardo, Memory and Monument. Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen, Exhibit A: Exhibitions That Transformed Architecture 1948-2000. Greg Lynn, Folding in Architecture. K. Michael Hays, Architectural Theory since 1968 (multiple entries mentioning Rossi) Kurt Forster, Monument/Memory and the Mortality of Architecture. Mario Gandalsonas, Neo-Functionalism. Peter Eisenman. Post-Functionalism. Pier Vittorio Aureli, Rossi, The Concept of the Locus as a Political Category of the City in The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Difficult Whole. Pippo Ciorra, Aldo Rossi’s Palazzo dello Sport. Wilfried Kuehn, “1:1” in Displayed Spaces: New Means of Architecture Presentation through Exhibitions. William Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, chapters “Extension and Critique in the 1960s” and “Pluralism in the 1970s”.
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Lachlan Welsh 2020