zibaldone

Reflection Architectural Storytelling

2011-04-15T12:17:00.000-04:00

Storytelling is not a simple form of entertainment: it is a mirror for processing and reconstituting experiences. Architects tell stories to give order to their experiences. Stories are about characters whose actions are sequentially organized and causally related. Characters have roles and the roles are motivated. What architectural artifacts are, what they do, why they do it, and what difference it makes--these questions should and could be answered and explained by stories. Stories are, thus, explanatory devices that help us make sense of the random and inexplicable happenings of everyday life. People aren’t characters until stories make them so. Events aren't grouped in logical chains until a storyteller groups and imposes logic on them. In Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carol explains to us with a surprising allegory how this kind of objective telling of circumstances and events is unconstructive and cannot become a storytelling:

“Don’t ask so many questions!” Sylvie interposed, anxious to save the poor old man from further bewilderment. “Suppose we get the Professor to tell us a story.”
Bruno adopted the idea with enthusiasm. Please do. He cried eagerly. “Sumfin about tigers—and bumble-bees —and robin-redbreasts, oo knows!”
“Why should you always have live things in stories?” Said the Professor. “Why don’t you have events, or circumstances?”
“Oh, please invent a story like that!” cried Bruno.
The Professor began fluently enough. “Once a coincidence was taking a walk with a little accident, and they met an explanation—a very old explanation—so old that it was quite doubled up, and looked more like a conundrum—” he broke off suddenly.
“Please go on!” both children exclaimed.
The Professor made a candid confession. “It’s a very difficult sort to invent, I find. Suppose Bruno tells one first.”
Bruno was only too happy to adopt the suggestion.
“Once there were a Pig, and a Accordion, and two jars of Orange-marmalade—”
“The dramatis personae,” murmured the Professor. “Well, what then?”[i]

In the dramatis personae of his storytelling, Luis I. Kahn, a Philadelphia architect and storyteller, included walls, columns, bricks and arches. He told us about them by using a dialogue between materials building element and the individual builder.

The wall did well for man. In its thickness and its strength, it protected man against destruction. But soon, the will to look out made man make a hole in the wall, and the wall was pained, and said, “What are you doing to me? I protected you; I made you feel secure - and now you put a hole through me!” And man said, “But I see wonderful things, and I want to look out.” And the wall felt very sad. Later man didn’t just hack a hole through the wall, but made a discerning opening, one trimmed with fine stone, and he put a lintel over the opening. And soon the wall felt pretty well. Consider also the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column … became the giver of light.[ii]

In another storytelling dialogue, Khan demonstrates how storytelling can be a powerful tool for delivering the value of craftsmanship engaged in tectonic reasoning. The Khan’s story reveals of to develop a happy cosmopoietic architectural facture by setting a proper questioning of the building materiality.

“What do you want Brick?”
And Brick says to you
“I like an Arch.”
And if you say to Brick
“Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”
Brick says:
“... I like an Arch”[iii]

No super-photo-rendering of brick walls, columns, openings and arches will ever have the guiding and convincing power with which Khan, as a modern Dinocrates or as epitome of the oral communication of architectural theory, is saturating his tectonically built narrative by setting stories that can lead to powerful architectural factures.

[i] Lewis Carroll, “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll, Wordsworth Editions, 1998, p.658

[ii] Lobell, John. Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1979, p.42

[iii] Louis Kahn, Louis Kahn: essential texts‬ ed. Robert C. Twombly W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, p. 270

Architectural storytelling

2011-04-14T05:22:00.000-04:00

The education of architects has always followed a curriculum based on storytelling. “What we do in schools of architecture is to teach people how to stand beside a bunch of representations of a project and tell a sincere story.” However this element of architectural training is changing: students holding a remote control present their designs in a temporal sequence of slides and movies (PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.), where every image annuls the previous. The same phenomenon is happening with professional presentation. This mono-sequential procedure prevents any possibility of a rich multidimensional understanding of the story told. The storyline is only one: the presenter, who has the command of the duration and sequence of the images displayed, controls the visual path of the story telling. This digitally engaged setting is prejudicial for a clear critical participation and discussion of design ideas developed in the story and the viewers of the presentation are not challenged to think within architecture, they are steered merely to think about architecture.

Carlo Emilio Gadda on Architecture

2010-06-20T05:34:00.003-04:00

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s best discussion of the difficulty of pastrufazian architects in intermingling the art of living well together with the art of building well is a sadly satiric piece entitled “La nostra casa si transforma: e l’inquilino la deve subire” (Our house is changing and the tenant must endure it), describing his life in a condominium when he was working in Rome for the RAI (the Italian Broadcasting Company). The piece is a demonstration that it is not possible to preserve decent conditions for living and to defend the unfortunate condominium dwellers from the (corrosive?) wear and tear that is the product of stressful cohabitation. For Gadda, contemporary architecture actually increases the mental strain of those who live in a condominium.

The dwelling of the human being is changing. Our home of today is not what it was thirty years ago. The reasons? Technical reasons, economical reasons; I would exclude moral reasons altogether. The nineteenth century introduced the use of joists (poutrelles), rarely used in Italy until the beginning of the twentieth century. Walls and roofs were still put together in the old-fashioned way: foundations, supporting structures, roof; pillars and vaults; quick-lime mortar; brick or stone walls; flat-roof tiles and barrel tiles. Recent decades have “revolutionized” building techniques, and consequently the structure of the house. This revolution, which I will call inevitable, imposed by pressing technical and economic motivations, has been accompanied by another revolution, which I will call useless or even foolish, bestowed upon us in many cases by the truculent, bullish attitude of the all-out innovators (innovators no-matter-what), by the irresponsible I-can-do-whatever-I-want behavior of fourteen-year-old draftsmen who never grew up—who still have the mental age of fourteen. All of the building experience, all of the “art” (in the Tuscan sense of mastery or expertise), all of the ability to understand and execute, in the past came from shrewdness and mental acuity, all of that has been thrown overboard as if it were unnecessary ballast. We have believed at times that it was possible to deny the order of the world and of the centuries and just start all over again, with renewed reasons. But these reasons turned out to be, in the end, the reasons of those teen-age-minded draftsmen. Meanwhile 77% of the reasons and physical challenges of the world have remained the same as ever: gravity, climate, sun, snow, rain, wind, disposal of sewage, drinkable water, mosquitoes, typhus, bronchitis, phlegm, pregnancy, silence.

The revolution that I have called inevitable has brought both advantages and disadvantages to the dwellers of the new house.

The new technique of reinforced concrete, of hollow brick walls with ferrocemento structures, the elimination of the heavy and expensive slate or terracotta tile roof, the use of supporting piles to set foundations on soft ground--all of these new techniques have allowed the building of economical structures with antiseismic qualities and general soundness at the same or even lower cost. The syntactic-unitary character of the structure decreases the total cost of the building while retaining equal structural strength, provided that the weight is properly distributed on the piles and the work is executed honestly and with technical diligence. (But diligence is not always present and active, as demonstrated by the chronicle of eroding concrete works year after year.) At any rate, these are the advantages. On the other hand, there are many disadvantages and inconveniences.

The wall of hollow bricks (also called “clay hollow tiles”) is lacking in mass and therefore in inertia (stability?) as well. The slightest commotion--a knock, a bang--reverberates through the floors, the ceilings, and the beams and pillars. The pulling up or down of roll-up shutters on the third floor makes the walls vibrate all the way up to the seventh floor. But, above all there is the thermal disadvantage: The rooms cool off and warm up according to the variations in external temperature at various times of the day. The tenants with an eastern exposure feel the warmth of the rising sun through the hollow tiles; on the other hand, the tenants with a western exposure, sweating as in a Turkish bat, must bear the ferocious heat of the late-afternoon sun, which the same inefficient hollow bricks are powerless to keep out.

Third and foremost is the acoustical disadvantage. The house is also supposed to offer usreviving rest--the kind of rest that supposedly energetic people pretend to despise as a god-forsaken practice, except they actually indulge in it whenever they can. They are just like the emir Mustafà, who used to instruct his servants to leave the lights on in his Baghdad palace until dawn to give night wanderers the impression that he was a sleepless soul, ever vigilant over the country’s fortunes. The house protects us, defends us as it must, in the gathering of our thoughts “against the wear and tear of modern life.”

Rest and sleep are as necessary as food and air for people who work and produce, for those who in their struggle for a living or in the struggle to save their souls from Hell are totally committing their neurological system--spinal cord and brain—minute by minute. Today’s house, the reformed house, the transformed house is powerless to preserve and defend the nerves of its inhabitants from the aforementioned outrageous wear and tear . The iron-ore cement structure, in hollow bricks, especially in the tension surfaces (supporting ceilings), resounds like a drum even to a rolling button. A big box of concrete and iron and hollow bricks means: “I will have to listen unwillingly to all of the noises of the building, I will have to hear every note, every syllable of the tenement”.

My Florentine friends laugh and tease me: “But why do you listen?” But other friends agree that my peace is valuable. Is it in danger? I was living on the third floor of an eight-story apartment building that consisted of 128 “family units”, in Viale Madagascar 2024, apartment D. People advised the use of wax earplugs. They nestle so comfortably in the ear! So easy to get them out! They can be neatly reutilized! They last two months. Noises? Don’t pay attention to them; ignore them! If you have wax in your ear, you don’t listen. What can you hear? Nevertheless, if you do listen … . “I hear everything about everybody.” They laugh, “What do you hear?” “I hear the life of the family, that is to say of the Italian family, multiplied by 128. Dynamic life, I hear: sitting life, life standing up, life with slippers, life with high heels, life with the tapping of high heels, life with clogs, opera-singing and accordion-pumping life, wishful life, life with family arguments, physiological life, pathological life, the non-discipline of the unforeseeable, the practice of the unavoidable.” On New Year’s Eve I hear shots from outside, from the inside the piercing sounds of a wailing baby. On other nights, or days, I hear a German Shepard, alone in the apartment, running, bouncing, suddenly and viciously growling, jumping and falling. The dog bowls by himself, with a pebble, just passing time, waiting to go to the final shelter--the lunatic asylum of S. Maria della Pieta. These incessant rumbles demonstrate to me that, at my address, Viale Madagascar, the dog is man’s best friend--especially when the friend is an idiot (and I mean the man).

I could ear the eighty-year-old retired captain who used to be in charge of bread warehouse, decorated many times for his valor: I could hear him cough from midnight to four in the morning, expelling all the phlegm that had patiently accumulated in his bronchial passages during the warm hours of the day. The physicians diagnosed it as chronic phlegm, so they don’t treat it because there is nothing they can do.

I could hear an undaunted woodworm in a dresser (I still today presume that it must have been made of walnut, so hard and brief was the sound in the night, like the turn of a corkscrew). Or sometimes I would wake with a start. The bang… it had been the door of the diva. She usually returned home drunk. She would take it out on the door. She would yell at a portrait of Garibaldi, the Hero of Two Worlds. She argued with the parrot, named Zack, which was in turn possessed by a special form of delirium, a schizophrenia-like syndrome--and he was only 93 years old! She wants to pour White Label down the parrot’s throat--an operation she can perform perfectly even when drunk--but he refuses; he wants a peanut instead. She gets mad and suddenly yells “cretin!” in one of his eyes. The bird gurgles enraged and answers: “whore!”

However, the commendatore on the third floor was very kind to me…he wore felt slippers, of the type from the province of Belluno. Unfortunately, he had the fault of dropping a button every night, precisely at midnight. A tiny sphere of dry-wood, or maybe bone. I have just fallen asleep. The spherical button wakes me up suddenly. It keeps on rolling and rolling. It seems impossible that a ball-shaped button could roll around for an hour, in a room of three by four meters, in Viale Madagascar 2024. The modern house, the transformed house, assures me: “It is possible.” Moreover, the classified ad in the newspaper, every morning, sings the renewed praises of the house: “AAAAA Penthouse scenic view, wide balconies.” As if the wide balconies were a bonus genially added by the architect and ipso facto bestowed upon the building that status of a palace. The balconies are only as wide as necessary to cover the apartments below. They are wide; of course, they have to be wide. During January, one certainly cannot dine on the balcony; I can guarantee that during July you will get the heat stroke that your heirs are eagerly waiting, mouths wide open. As for the scenic view, one can agree: the view of the Soratte mountain could be worth ten thousand per month: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte.” From the windows of the Madagascar I could see mount Amiata in the fading distance, the camel-colored hump of the cinnabar yielding Mount Amiata. Ten thousand liras per month: a fair price. Ah, the idea of mountain air, when in the transformed house it is the air of the Madagascar building that can’t always keep up to the level of Today, of the great Today. The plumbing system is the culprit of the unhealthy air. Vents for the drainpipes have not been installed. The designer considered them non-essential. Stinky kitchens, with inter-tenants stench intimately shared by many dwellers.

On the third floor, entrance D, I could tell from the smell coming through the maze of interconnected drainpipes just what kind of seafood the professor’s wife fried, every Tuesday and every Friday.

PNEUMATIC THOUGHTS

2010-02-16T13:12:00.000-05:00

Fante di Squadri

2010-02-15T09:37:00.000-05:00

Rational, Scientific and Really Non-Rational

2010-02-06T06:02:00.000-05:00

It is a widespread knowledge that Monsieur Descartes did not accept as factual what his senses communicated to his mind because he had a quasi-total mistrust in sensorial information. Nevertheless, when sitting at his breakfast table, being a good Frenchman, he had to make up his mind about his cook’s gastronomic efforts. During his repast, Monsieur Descartes had to put aside his philosophical thinking to consider the omelet and the bread he was eating through a sensorial assessment resulting from the savoring of the meal carefully laid out for him. Monsieur Descartes knew that a good chef prepares food anticipating the multiple effects caused by the meal and catering to a combination of different sensory phenomena and evaluations. Listening to the sizzling and cracklings of fats, paying attention to the fizzing, murmuring, and gurgling of cold and hot liquids and monitoring the change in color shades during browning, glazing and clarifying, cooks make decisions conjecturing the final taste and effect of their work. In other words, they work within a set of non-verbal but all-sensual configurations of procedures that will lead to what the final dish shall “feel,” “look” and “taste.”

On a daily basis, sitting at the dining table, Monsieur Descartes was facing a dilemma. The products of the process of cooking, a process that could be easily recognized as a rational activity as described in recipes and cookbooks, were always subjected to the irrational judgments of a mingling of sensory activities taking place before, during, and after each meal. His solution to this contradiction was the formation of a cloven world: on the one hand, there is the trustable mental reality of res cogitans and on the other hand the dreamlike physical reality of res extensa. Res cogitans cannot be eaten, but res extensa can be discerningly prepared, appreciated, and assimilated. Consequently, Monsieur Descartes, who indeed was a clever individual, hired and fired his chefs of cuisine on the finding generated by an appreciation and estimation of res extensa as embodied in the dish presented on the table rather than on the arid logic of the res cogitans as computed and explicated in cooking instructions and formulas submitted to his attention by the cook. He knew the two domains intertwined on a laid table and that his cautious philosophy could not be practiced at repast time.

Across the English Channel, in the Oxonian countryside, a few years later, a tolerant Esquire named John Locke was facing the same daily breakfast problem. Looking at the reality of his toast and fried egg with pork and beans on the side, this alert reader of Monsieur Descartes had to unravel the same conundrum regarding the qualities of his breakfast to decide the parameters that he was going to use to hire or to sack his cook. In order to solve the problem, Locke had to rely on empirical thinking. Planning not to have any preconceived idea about his breakfast, Locke worked out his decision on the one hand by analyzing the ideas that come from experiencing the toast, the egg, and the pork and beans and on the other hand by looking at the presentation, representation, image, and perception of the concept or notion of an English breakfast. No innate ideas, as the one asserting “mother’s fried-eggs were the best,” feint his judgment, but he knew that through his innate faculty he could perceive, remember, and combine an idea of breakfast that came from without and through desires, ponderings, and wills. Locke worked out a twofold theory of experience: observation may be employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds. The external experience is the source of most of the ideas that individuals have, and, as it depends entirely upon our senses, is called sensation. The internal experience is a source of ideas that wholly reside within the individual and reflective self and it is based on internal sense.

For Locke, the semiosis of a simple idea is the test and standard of reality, whether the mind contributes to our ideas or removes them further from the reality of things. In becoming generic and general, knowledge loses the capability of being in touch with things. However, not all the simple ideas carry with them the same significance for reality; colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and the like are simple ideas that produce those sensations in us. Simple ideas of sensations are embodied in Locke’s breakfast eggs by the qualities of being yellow, white, hot, cold, soft, runny, and so forth; they are the secondary qualities of bodies. Solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number fall also in the Lockian category of simple ideas. These ideas are resemblances of what really exists in the bodies themselves and in the case of eggs using a contemporary terminology these qualities are the lipids, the carbohydrates, the proteins, and the immunoglobulins and they stand for the primary qualities of bodies which indeed are the essential qualities useful for writing the labels of egg-based products and comprehending the pharmaceutical and nutritional values of eggs. Nevertheless, the knowledge of their presence and the comprehension of their functions are completely unnecessary to achieve the gourmet assessment of a perfect fried egg.

Foodstuff is not an abstract category, but for Cartesian dieticians and Lockian food designers, foodstuff is only a set of controlled properties to be listed in specifications and worked out in a speculatively value-efficient production. Nerveless, foodstuff always works within a collective memory, charged with meaning and the resulting dishes are always loaded with cultural weight and social solidity. The Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, an unusual philosopher of the eighteenth century, was interested in the power of imagination and discovered the beginning of humanity in the ontological dimension of stench—a secondary Lockian quality. Being an underpaid university professor of rhetoric, Vico did not have to face the problem of discovering the parameters for firing or hiring a cook since he could not afford one. Nevertheless, very likely he faced a similar dilemma when deciding to buy a pizza from a street vendor. Vico, who had addressed in one of his rhetorical exercises the dining habits of the Romans, knew that the pizza was a product of the Ancient Italic wisdom as demonstrated by philological investigations. “Pizza” derives from Latin pinsa a past participle of the verb pinsére that means to crush, to pound, to flatten. The flattened bread he knew to be excellent given a long tradition of baking that had brought it to perfection, except that it was covered with a tomato sauce (in Neapolitan: pummarolla), a concoction that according to Cartesian Botanists was dangerous because the tomato plant is a berry member of the lethal nightshades, in other words an herbaceous plant of the poisonous Solanaceae family. The suitability of tomatoes as foodstuff was debated for a long time by botanists and by cooks after they had been imported from the New World. Such a plant also struck popular imagination and its genus name Lycopersicon (wolf-peach) was enthused by the folk credence that upon eating a tomato a person will become a werewolf. However, having observed that no one was dying nor changing in wolf after eating tomatoes, the Neapolitans, realistic people used to make their judgments through their senses, in this case, their testing taste had made tomato a staple of their meals. By the end of the 16th century, the Queen of Naples, Maria Carolina, convinced her husband, King Ferdinand IV to allow the pizza, the humble fare of the urban poor, to be prepared in the royal kitchens.

An English cultivator wrote in 1596 about tomatoes, "these love apples are eaten abroad," and described them as “of rank and stinking savor.” Initially brought to Spain from South America, tomato was labeled toma(lt) de los Mores (Moors’ tomato). Altered by a French corruption, due perhaps to suspected aphrodisiac properties, the name becomes pomme d'amour (love apple) and consequently liebesapfel in the German speaking countries. In Italian, the linguistic corruption generated the term pomo d’oro (golden apple), a materic recognition of valuable produce product. In an act expressing his full dissatisfaction with the absolute certainties of the Cartesian method, Vico enjoyed the tomato sauce on his pizza, knowing that he could trust the ancient sapience of the Neapolitan eaters.

Vico's disapproval of the traditional Cartesian system pivots around the point that Cartesians focus on the studies of mathematics and physical sciences while undermining the significance of other facets of human knowledge, namely art, law, history, rhetoric, and language. Vico sees “knowledge making” as mostly consisting of uncertainties as it can be found in the opposition: You say tuh-MAY-toe, I say tuh-MAH-toe. For Vico, "keen perception and vivid language [were] sources of all freshness in a culture as well as the guarantee of its future.” The above mentioned considerations on the history of the changes in its naming makes “tomato” a “pomodoro,” a perfect candidate for the realm of Vico’s imaginative universals. Vico draws the imaginative universals from a common mental language that manifests itself as “vulgar” wisdom (maxims, proverbs, etcetera) that, through different manifestations across the world, expresses the same underlying concepts and views. To Vico, these took the form of primal and primary metaphors, universally recognized and preceding language, that on the one hand caused a configuration of categorizations and on the other led the mind's ability to objectify and operate critically.

To reach a decision over the possible toxicity of tomatoes Vico had to consider that mythos and logos combine in a sensually sentient solution. As he explains in his New Science, the power of imaginative metaphysics is a solution to human knowledge.

Rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (Giambattista Vico, New Science #405)

Vico’s discovery is that the world of senses begins in the periphery of our bodies and moves to inner and higher levels of perception. From there, in analogical manner, the senses rule the way we willfully and wittily act in our world is at the basis for a sated human sapience.

SPLENDOR AND MISERIES OF ARCHITECTURAL CONSTRUCTION DRAWINGS

2010-02-03T14:16:00.000-05:00

INDEXICAL MANO OCULATA

2010-01-28T12:43:00.000-05:00

MAKING SENSE / FARE SENSO

2010-01-25T09:20:00.000-05:00

Architectural appreciation is a multi sensorial experience, and reducing those multiple feeling and effects through trivial drawings, photographs, to vision only it removes the major parts of the components of its appreciation. If reduced to vision, architecture is "seen remotely" is not a living environment; it is only an image, a ‘beautiful’ illustration for glossy papers.

This reduction needs to be thought and the other senses needs to be woken up, as Marshall McLuhan as pointed out, mono sensorial experience embraces an artificially dormant and passive condition.

“For the dominance of one sense is formula per hypnosis. And a culture can be locked in the sleep of any one sense. The sleeper awakes in any other sense". [i]

This tricky situation of the visual dominance causes to deform the way the judgment of architecture, if this distortion is not very evident under the indigenous conditions of a specific western market, trivial visual judgement becomes flawed when dealing with other conditions or referring to other countries or other cultures past or present.

Architects must go back to direct description of human experience such as it is and return to the architectural artefact in itself. In this manner common sensorial data rather than single visual give us an "representation" of architecture, powerful, emotional descriptions when added together multiply their effects on man; but also, in order to find the sensorial intentions of other architects that had been neglected, the apprehension of builders from other centuries, or living under different places, that architects, historians, archaeologists have ignored because they were not visual.

Imagination is configured as a double-sided coin: we know that there are images on both sides, but we can see only one at the time. On the one side, imagination is the human faculty that keeps together what has been collected by different and discrete perceptions. This faculty has the gist of the Aristotelian koine aesthesis, also known as sensus communis, an internal sense by which the complex configurations of objects such as architectural and culinary products make sense. The sensus communis, is not our “commonsense,” but an amalgamation a combinatorial perception, an internal sense coordinating the data perceived by the external senses. It is the clinical eye of pre-statistical medicine able to recognize the always-changing configurations of syndromes. Sometimes this sensus communis can fail because of improperly and badly fed senses. Few years ago, guiding a group of students through a visit of Sant Andrea in Mantua we were climbing through the recently restored Gothic campanile that is located on the left side of the façade and I realized that many of the students had assume that the campanile was of recent construction because of pungent smell of the quick lime mortar used for re-pointing the bricks. For them, something smelling so strongly new could not be old although the guise was gothic and the regularity of the brick-courses was deformed by the centuries of aging.

Our sensorial system has changed minimally in the last few millennia; the sensations provoked by architecture remain the same and a constant throughout time.

[i] MCLUHAN, Marshall. Gutenberg's Galaxy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962 p.7

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AUGURI 2009-2010

2009-12-20T16:16:00.002-05:00

Architect as a Neuro-Demiurg

2009-08-31T03:48:00.000-04:00

A piece done long time ago for J.R bitrhday celebration

2009-08-07T14:40:00.000-04:00

ZIBALDINO

2009-08-04T12:48:00.001-04:00

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/zibaldino/7391305

Zibaldino is an infraordinary collection of critical and theoretical images and drawings dealing with the nature and the role of architectural imagination.

Dreaming Architecture

2008-08-11T12:27:00.001-04:00

an Italian version of the story

dream of poliphilo

2008-07-07T21:21:00.000-04:00

Take as much you please of some unknown material …

2008-07-06T10:32:00.003-04:00

The arts architecture of alchemy and cuisine are based on thinking with things rather than thinking about things. The common denominator among these three arts is that all three can be ‘thought within’ or ‘thought about.’ For instance, the distinction between thinking about architecture and thinking within architecture is the same that exist between thinking about materials and thinking with materials. Alchemy as expression of the human talent for transforming terrestrial materials in substances and conceiving of liturgy is thinking with materials whereas chemistry is thinking about materials. Another field where thinking is done with materials is the culinary art, a cook thinks using the food stuff whereas in nutritional science dieticians think about abstract denomination as nutritional value.
Cusine, as the art of the sacrifice of terrestrial substances rules the liturgy for transfiguring "inanimate" foodstuff in substances to be assimilate by our bodies. Our alimentary imagination has an estimative character, a hedonic response that occurs immediately on stimulus contact, before our reflecting on the warrant for any gustatory evaluation. Rather than valuing what we ingest after the fact, we taste and in so doing we hedonically respond as the evaluative component of our tasting experience.
The activity of architectural imagination is part of the pursuit of the same hedonic and sensuous instinct. Architectural imagination is one of those critical faculties of the human mind that defies adequate explanation. To describe it as "creative, conscious, thought," is inadequate, because it remains unclear what is unique in architectural factures. An explanation becomes indispensable, however, when we want to study how this remarkable human ability evolves and works. Architecture can be explained using a procedure that can be called an alchemic cooking of drawings.

An Architect must have method, elegance and culture.

2008-06-28T12:56:00.002-04:00

Method Elegance Culture

Vitruvian Man

2008-06-17T14:28:00.001-04:00

MERLIN COCAI AND HIS MUSES

2008-06-17T08:37:00.002-04:00

2008-06-13T13:39:00.005-04:00

ARCHITECTS’ VIRTUES OR A MUCH NEEDED DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF SHALLOW DESIGN PROCEDURES

By Marco Frascari
Casting the Future of the Profession by Looking at
Architecture’s Two Cardinal Qualities

1. Casting the Future of the Profession by Looking at Architecture’s Two Cardinal Qualities

2. The Well-Tempered Drawings of a Reflective Architect

3. Conclusions

In the project of architecture, integrating the art of building well with the art of constructing well, drawings and buildings exemplify and suggest rather than determine or impose. The union of dream and solid stuff in tectonic events becomes an expres¬sion of pleasure, a subjective presence, rather than an objective proce¬dure to which both the user and the architect must be subjected and the details and the fabricated devices are playful demonstration of cosmologically constructed events in an edifice. A building can be designed only trough a continuous creative, intellectual dialectic between imagination and imagining. Using this bipolar condition, architects do not make a sensory phenomenon out of an idea, but on the contrary, they shape the sensory phenomenon into an idea using freehand drawings. Architects with their graphic dreams do not open the doors for the spirit to enter everyday life; rather, they raise the everyday to the imaginal world, releasing the imaginal content of physical reality. The sapience of beginnings that is the core of architects’ moral imagination is expressed in conjuring drawings, which elaborate the relationship between the mundane and the sacred in a transhistorical condition. Rejecting the pseudo-completeness of the present CAD drawing techniques, which cannot perform the fundamental act of establishing the indispensable cosmological relationship material order of cultural order, freehand drawings are the necessary masterpieces of these inaugurations.

Freehand design procedures cannot be abstractly constructed or described; they can be exclusively exemplified through moral tropes, geometric ordering, and constructive analogies embodied in buildings. We can master these elegant design procedures only through what Pascal has called “esprit de finesse et esprit de geometrie.” Fostered by fluid mental attitudes, these procedures dwell between the classical dichotomies proposed by philosophy and the mystifying but powerful structure of thinking by images. Freehand drawings are the only remaining locus where this condition between rationality and non-rationality results in a cosmography that sustains the architectural making of places. Freehand drawings are instruments capable of integrating both the solid stuff of the space that is encircling us with the dream stuff, which takes shape in our mind. The most difficult assignment for architects is to design by virtuous reflections a construction, which is to extract from the empty surface of paper the inauguration of a building. This demanding task is based on the assembling in a visible design of invisible configurations, and through this process to concretize in a set of lines, marks and strokes, the potentiality of a construction that cannot not be fully expressed but it is present in our thinking. In architectural design, there are no perceivable differences between sacred and mundane actions, as we sensible moderns believe to be. Every action, no matter how mundane (plowing, sowing, reaping, brewing, building ships, waging wars, playing games, system of weights and measures, building a brick wall, laying a floor, dancing on it, opening a door) must be viewed as an “earthly” symbol for a specific “divine” activity. No aspect of this knowledge can divorced from any other aspect, which makes architectural design a difficult task. This procedure of architectural conjuring is not just manual skill, but is a manifestation of a faculty of design acquired through appropriate techniques of prudent visualization and temperate exercises of architectural storytelling. Only through this thought-provoking procedure do the drawings become callimetric technographies that are “just the weaving of thoughts into images” (Bloom1996, 113), wonderful projections of buildings, tempered and prudent analogical places that make possible the construction of a vita beata in edifying edifices.

Macaronic Fragment #1

2008-06-06T09:23:00.005-04:00

Digging a little further within the history of macaronic production, I have come to realize that macaronic is multifaceted form of art and above all a powerful way of thinking. "Macaronic" ¬ is not a hodgepodge generated by polyglots or multiform stylists but, rather, it is an intellectual approach combining and superseding conventional systems of meaning. The application once again of macaronic thinking and its procedures to the conceiving of buildings is a crucial and very positive approach that will take architecture out of the hands of improper gluttons and put it back in the hands of proper professionals educated about tectonic and dwelling gourmandize. The implications of macaronic art will be fully explained in the first chapter. However, to respond to Viollet Le Duc‘s ousting of macaronic expressions from the architectural realm, it is imperative to make known, at this point, that macaronic thinking is a dexterous and constructive intelligence that can be used to demonstrate how architecture is still and will always be in a position that parallels the supple and prolific nature of cuisine conceiving and its strange natural companion, alchemy.
To end this lengthy fragment and to get on with a “subtraction of weight” from the present grave nature of architectural theory I should summon for help Mafelina, the euphonious muse that inspired the contriver of the macaronic art, Merlin Cocai—Teofilo Folengo’s pen name,—to give me the rhetorical flair necessary to carry on my allegro ma non troppo exercise of architectural theorizing. I need Mafelina’s gift to unfold these musing and happy analogical thoughts on beatifically weightless nature architecture as Giordano Bruno had her gift to fight the grave nature of “scholastic theories”: in his La Cena delle Ceneri (Ash Wednesday Supper).

By now, I really need you here, sweet Mafelina, you who are the muse of Merlin Cocai.

HABITUS

2008-06-01T07:28:00.004-04:00

Carlo Scarpa’s favorite maxim …

nullo dies sine linea
(do not let a day pas by without line),

Is the statement of an habitus
==================

The sharpening of the pencil is a liturgy

Is the statement of an habitus

habitus in terms of
“embodied habituallity”
is what lay behind real architecture

The Begining of Architecture

2008-05-17T18:18:00.001-04:00

architectural conceiving

2008-05-06T15:51:00.005-04:00

Architects conceive buildings;

they do not design them  

The way buildings are conceived, interpreted and valued increasingly depends on various aspects and procedures of representation.  
James Joyce in his “Finnegans Wake” gives a lesson on geometry. He is talking about the ‘eternal’ geometry, which he calls geomater.

See figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater
James Joyce

The word geomater is composed by two other words, geometry and the Latin word mater [mother].
 The words mother, material and measure share the same root.

slide show of the trattato

2008-04-27T18:49:00.001-04:00

A VISUAL LECTURE ON MACARONIC ARCHITECTURE

2008-04-26T13:29:00.003-04:00

I should also summon for help the same
powerful muse evoked by Giordano Bruno
in his La Cena delle Ceneri (Ash
Wednesday Supper) to fight the grave
nature of “scholastic theories”:
“By now, I really need you here, sweet Mafelina, you who are the muse of Merlin Cocai”
The idea of applying the “macaronic art” to
architecture occurred to me meanwhile I was
reading the Entretiens sur l’architecture by
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet Le Duc. Buried in the
Viollet Le Duc’s grandiloquent text there is a
reference to a “macaronic style” that made me
realize that macaronic was not only an obscure
term of literary expertise, but fully belonged to
realm of physical making.[1]
• [1] Viollet Le Duc, Eugène Emmanuel "Lectures on architecture", Vol
1 p.455, Dover Publications, NY, 1987

A VISUAL LECTURE ON MACARONIC ARCHITECTURE

Neo-Medieval Architecture.

2008-04-23T07:30:00.004-04:00

A gentle manifesto for Neo-Medieval Architecture.
By Marco Frascari

The lecture is an exercise in theoretical reconstruction. As a point of departure, the apparent contradictions are solved in a dream, i.e. the dreaming of the Middle Ages.

In short essay entitled "Dreaming the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco pronounces

"..we are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination.."

In his bestseller, Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor declares:

"The Middle Ages are much like our culture of today,but exhibit just enough variations to disturb us and force us to question some of our values and behavior patterns and to propose some alternatives or at least modifications.”

In an Editorial, (Studies in Medievalism III/1, 1987), Leslie J. Workman states:

"[Medievalism is] the study of the Middle Ages, the application of medieval models to contemporary needs, and the inspiration of the Middle Ages in all forms of art and thought."

A Neo-Medieval approach to Architecture is that built artifacts are not the result of vague or empirical poetics, but of a philosophical investigation carried on in a parallel way with the processes of architectural facture.
The approach is by no means normative and prescribes no method of procedure.
The ultimate truth of any real piece of architecture is not contained in embryo in an original inspiration; but after the first facture in any other instance of it it is continuously defined and redefined by a constantly evolving meaning that constructs itself in accordance to itself and in reaction to itself.

Every building element in neo-medieval architecture follows this process of configuration. There is no ultimate truth in buildings but a reoccurrences of pieces elaborated in the same manner.

Following Marvin Trachtenberg, I would like to propose that we should give to late medieval architecture a name more descriptively accurate than Gothic. The name would be medieval modernism; consequently, by revealing the hidden meaning of the terminology, my locution for talking about our dreaming of the middle ages will be neo-medieval modernism.
The fundamental facture in neo-medieval architecture is based on the concept of habitus. Habitus is a useful and flexible way to conceptualize agency and the ability to transform and reinforce the real nature of architecture.

In the neo-medieval modernism, habitus generates Tectonic Liturgies.
It is a promise to well thought and well built architecture.

Mostri architettonici

2008-04-21T06:24:00.005-04:00

Monsters of Architecture

The Architect's Dream : Houses for the Next Millennium

2008-04-19T20:52:00.008-04:00

A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE DESIGN OF THE DREAM HOUSE

The site selected for the design of the tower is not far away from the small town of Intercourse located in Pennsylvania within the heart of the Amish and Mennonite lands. I have always found that this area is a dream like landscape where happiness dwells in small everyday events. On one hand, I have selected this place for the pleasant landscapes created by the farms, and on the other hand for the landscapes generated by the stupendous geometric compositions used by the Amish in the composition of their quilts.

The geometry of the Amish quilts and the geometry of the tower fit into the same syntactical fields. The Amish quilts cast meanings that situate the problem of representation within a new optic. A quilt is concurrently an event of compositional quality and an occurrence of sophisticated tectonics: an assembly of pieces of cloth of the most diverse origins that becomes a unit by piecing or appliquéing. A quilt is an object of a specific materials quality that conceptually has the same causal origin of spoil-architecture or leftover dishes. A quilt is built with unspoiled spoils of other textile artifacts that have finished their practical or symbolic utility and must be translated in a new unity to carry the possibility of further meanings. A quilt is an object of social process, not only in the collection of pieces of fabric, but also in the production, since many hands collaborate in quilting and sewing. In a quilt an individual construction is always a social construing. A quilt could embody memory of joy (marriage quilts), glory (political quilts) suffering (mourning quilts). The construing the barn-rising event for a young couple in the Amish community can help the deciphering of the genetic nature of quilt construction. The barn raising requires a day of construction and a bountiful meal ritually that has been put together by an active participation of the local Amish community. This event increases the quotient of meaning of the manufactured article by empathizing a specific and a general story at the same time.
A quilt is a representation that is not necessarily verisimilar. One of the classical patterns is called log-cabin and represents the tectonic process rather than the final appearance of the construction. Another pattern is called court-house steps, and the image built from the pieces of fabric does not show monumental stairs, but the urban tectonics of a small county seat town.

By paraphrasing one of Blaise Pascal’s Pensee, I might state that if a craftsperson dreams of being an architect for twelve hours everyday, he or she will be happy as an architect dreaming of being a craftsperson twelve hours everyday. This chiastic interpretation of technology is also at the bases of the selection of the materials and the technology of construction of the tower.
The dominant theme is of something that by a game of words might be called “architectural pneumatology,” both, the processes of construction and the materials are selected in relationship to their capability of breathing.

The tower is built with massive masonry-works of different kinds, stone for the corners bricks for the walls, the front columns are made of alternate layers of polish shallow drums of pink stone (Rosatello di Verona) and gray concrete drums cast within metal forms to make the exposed curved surface truly shining. The walls inside are finished with stucco lustro of different colors derived from the palette of the paintings of Gentile da Fabriano. In the areas of major usages, it is a simpler plaster made with quicklime and marble dust applied by pushing strongly with trowel on the brown coat. Stretched linen fabric that had been previously dipped in lime mortar makes the hanged ceilings. Outside sometime the walls are plastered with a mix of old tiles dust and quicklime and some time the brickwork is left exposed. The underground and the ground floors are in polished granite and the other floors are in teak. The floor of the loggia on top is made with 22x22cm terra-cotta tiles with inserted in eccentric positions a few polished brass tiles 11x11cm with the function of altering the grid pattern. The window frames are made with an assembly of steel profiles, wood, felt and the hardware is in brass. Of course the fundamental specification is that a blacksmith with red hair must do all the metal works.

The ground floor of the tower is the access room for the entire building. The doors on this floor have a dual thickness: when the panels of the doors are open they are closed closets and when the panels are closed the doors are open closets. These doors fall within tradition set by temple of the double-faced Janus with its doors open during the time of a war and closed during the periods of peace. It is also giving to Cardea, wife of Janus and goddess of the hinges her cardinal role in the generating architecture. This is the cardinal floor of the design: it was the first to be delineate, in weaving the pattern of this floor the key building element of the tower took their meaning. A ponderous column and three massive walls and a swift stair are the structural element of the tower. Below the entry floor there are two cellars that have been dedicated to the preservation and aging of food and wine. The lowest level is the wine cellar and within it originates the “pneuma” of the house. In this deep cellar dwells the spiritus phantasticus, presiding over the numinous nature of this building. This cellar contains also the memory of the first building I did as independent professional, a house for a owner of wine-yard on the hilly moraines beyond Lazise, a small and medieval-walled town on the Lake of Garda near Verona. When I received the commission I was proud of having to take on a latere tradition of the modern, not the tradition of the sanitary architecture of sanatoria, but to the Dionysian tradition of Gardella’s and Sartoris’s designs for houses of owners of vineyards. Consequently, I thought this was my chance for designing something within the practice of the architettura metafisica catechized by Sartoris. Nevertheless, during the construction of this cellar in Lazise, I discovered that my dream for a metaphysical cellar was a selfish dream not a dream cellar. During the construction of the cellar, the client was present every day on site. However, during the construction of the upper floors he was coming to visit the works only once in a while. During the erection of the walls of the cellar, the client was constantly overseeing the masons on the selection of materials, measures, proportions and construction procedures. He was aiming for a perfect cellar for his wines.

In the tower, the underground floors are vaulted; the lower one as I have already pointed out is a wine cellar and the other is dedicated to the storage of food. Above the ground floor are two floors dedicated to bedrooms and above them there is a floor with a library and a workspace. The last floor is the kitchen and the dining room and above it is an open loggia covered with a pitch roof.

The main facade is an assembly of windows since windows are for looking within and without out, before and after. The design of windows is very important since they are not only for allowing ventilation and light or framing vision of landscapes. They are very powerful tools for forecasting past constructions and back-casting future buildings. The construction of western perspective is based on the understanding of the role of windows in a unifying perception field. In the tower these windows regain their power of analogical tool and they becomes machines for the objectification of reality. Through the machines of these windows I can see in and out and mirror ourselves in the reality.

Three other analogical machines are embodied in the house. The first is on the loggia incorporated in the structure of the roof. It is a crane and a built-in sextant The second analogical machine is a water wheel on the west side of the house at the level of the ground floor and it produce energy and movement for all the contrivance of the house. The third and most important analogical device is an angelic compass on the roof where it works as a weathervane. The heating is done by stoves. Open fireplaces are in the kitchen and on the top loggia. The roof of the loggia is built on a metal frame and the surface is copper with gold leaf. The weather vane is made in bronze and copper.

The eye of the architect is on the other side

2008-04-14T11:58:00.002-04:00

The mystery of architecture is all in the divinatory nature of the mirroring metaphors ruling the looming.

DISEGNO INTERNO & DISEGNO ESTERNO

2008-04-12T19:04:00.012-04:00

The concept of Disegno:

developed by Federico Zuccari (1542-1609) is based on the following aphorism and incastro:

designo vero segno di Dio in noi
(Disegno is the true sign of God within us)
(Go-sign-d; Di-segn-o)

This concept extends from an internalized image to the externalized drawing on paper. It is the powerful hinge connecting the theorical parts and practical parts of architecture, since the internal image emerges through the performing of a external drawing on the paper both as Disegno interno, i.e. facture of it and Disegno externo i.e. the appearance of it

Architectural Dementia

2008-04-10T07:08:00.002-04:00

The first sign of dementia is usually memory loss and indeed the architectural discipline is suffering of amnesia.

Architectural dementia can loosely be thought of as a progressive form of didactic dementia, where educational losses result in cognitive impairment. Pathologically it has various characteristics, not all of which are necessarily present in every case.

As the disease begins to make an impact in the representational region of the discipline, more partial serious symptoms manifest. This is evident by the impairment of graphic and interpretation abilities, co-ordination skills (aphasia and agnosia respectively), and also by the development of apraxia which affects tasks such as drawings. A general loss of initiative and the ability to demonstrate clear or abstract thinking can lead to objective and subjective observations of symptoms at this stage.

As in the human dementia, the ultimate cause of Architectural dementia is unknown.

Elegant Building

2008-04-08T05:41:00.004-04:00

The unfortunate essence of the present condition of architectural tectonics and the graphic construction of it is not elegant in its constitution, anymore. It originates in a confuse and mystifying quest for conspicuously momentous plausible details, forgetting that a proper tectonic is a search for an illumination of consciousness of building that can transform perception to such an extent that the most mundane artifacts or processes of construction can yield to estranging and beautiful characteristics

The first realization is that the word elegant can be both subject and object in drawing and building. Elegant building can be an elegant edifice or an edifice elegantly erected and elegantly draw by an elegant architect. This ambiguity is essential for the role play by elegance in originating architectural conjuring. Elegant is a special "tuning" of the mind and the body in relationship to the materials and techniques of construction and their translation within the magic of graphic and tectonics realms of human dwellings.

The key role of architects is to perform acts of prediction by using elegant graphic utterances to evoke elegantly designed future buildings. Elegant lines and colors are the powerful expression of the graphic prognostication of architecture that are then translated in elegant tectonics events which allow an elegant life.

a windy situation

2008-04-07T10:21:00.003-04:00

Real architects are compelled, by their own choice; to keep a balance on a tightrope, while changing winds coalesce to make them fall.

The walking on the rope is the costant examination of the germinal stages of architectural conjuring up, when a lump of magma insights, references, memories, memories, emotions, obsessions, passions, ideals, desires, finally flows and "the conceiving takes place. This is the right conceiving, that is the summary of moment of truth, that every time in the architect renews that sense of creative power. The idea is that the creative act is not entirely ineffable, but uses a "instrumentation" transmissible and documentable. The techniques are proposed invention according to a dual value: as conceptual tools, in the sense that promote the initiation of the design process, facilitate and guide, and as a means of interpretation through which analyze and understand architecture.

vita beata

2008-04-07T08:39:00.005-04:00

From the top of my head

The degradation of our environment is global and we have already caused irreversible damages—finding a remedy to this way of life is of utmost importance. Unfortunately, it is the architectural pursuit of modernity that has been, in part, a direct and indirect cause of many misuses of our planet’s resources. By only paying attention to spaces and forms, many architects share the responsibility for physical and psychological damages caused to our social and physical environment.
In this epoch cursed and blessed with never-ending architectural motions and emotions, I do not want to sound negative and paint a bleak picture. However, surrounded by architects continually making architecture by formalistic displacing, I have to acknowledge that these habits are endangering architectural virtues. Under the bizarre sign of cupidity merged with the fashionable, the practices and theories that dominate both the profession and architectural education, demonstrate more concern for signature-architects than for architecture itself. The consequence of this self-absorbed approach is that our constructed environment is not only becoming out of control, but also becoming out of place. The only solution possible for such distressing displacements is to acknowledge that we do not live in architects’ spaces but in architectural places.

Crucial modern rethinking of the program of architecture has resulted in our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While the present trend towards sustainable architecture has put green water back in the washbasin, a positive and fortunate event, the baby is still missing. The missing baby is the principle of a beatific life, a vita beata, a principle based on the merging of three essential arts: the art of living well, the art of building well and the art of thinking well. This principle of the vita beata is the fundamental and necessary ground to rebuild genial and substantial architecture that is predicated on moral and cultural imagination rather than economic, social and behavioral predictions.

In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon: “You will understand then that the most important part of any work is its beginning.” Architecture is about the beginning—the introduction to merging the art of living well with the art of building well and thinking well. Accordingly, teaching is about the importance of architectural virtues to avoid producing on the one hand designs conceived for pure financial profit, or on the other hand absurd buildings. Our students strive for the wonderment that can be made real through elegant design principles embodied in the drawings and models created by architects who know how to respect the real measures of architecture. Real architectural teaching does not mythologizing design, but rather it opens a window onto the intense reality of an architectural cultures--complex systems of people, relationships, rules, and habits in which the conceiving and making of buildings are anchored.

An architects’ essential work is not always obvious—even to sensitive observers. To only see architects as designers of buildings does make sense, but it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story of what an architect does. Their ability to deal with a sensuously built world becomes evident when we consider the less visible aspects of the practice—do not just consider the obvious visible aspects of designing for a specific client request, but also contemplate the subtle dimensions of architects’ tectonic expressions: architects construct and construe the invisible tone that enlivens the world of buildings. Architects’ unseen work takes place in the planning of appropriate reciprocity between dwellers and dwellings by preserving tectonic heritage and achieving both civil and civic sustainability in their conceiving of buildings. In their work architects unfold well thought representations derived from dialogue set between the technological tuning of sound constructions and the fostering of a worthwhile quality of life for the future inhabitants of their buildings.

Architectural Meditations

2008-04-05T13:25:00.004-04:00

The Happily Cunning Tactics of Architectural Meditations

In the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of his architectural primer, Vitruvius suggests that constructions were a meditated carry out of buildings. Then he advances the idea that theory is a graphic illustration devised to explain cunningly constructed objects. Sollertia, an act of cunning judgment, is an essential intellectual procedure to build any construction. Sollertia, a clever sense, is the cardinal virtue in both practicing and theorizing of architecture. Sollertia is the fundamental virtue for a prudent, resourceful, well-educated and ingenious architect. Good architecture is possible only when an architect is expert (peritus) and gifted with a quick and dexterous intelligence (ingegno mobili sollertiaque) (Vitruvius V, 6,vii). Happily (feliciter) concluding his treatise, in the last book, the Roman writer generates a remarkable propaganda line for the profession. In the last paragraph of the book, Vitruvius declares that, during wars, cities can free themselves from enemies by relying on the cunning intelligence of their architects (architectorum sollarties sunt|libertae) rather than strategies (Vitruvius X, 16,xii).

Sollertia is the Roman translation what the Greeks called metis. Metis, a quick-wit procedure is a crucial mental operation for any compassed architect who hurries up slowly, that is meditating on the drawing board. To meditate architecturally is to construct a plot and to weave a plan. A physical expression of sollertia is the use of a "line" which allows the cutting of beams and planks straight. The lines and the plumb lines used by master masons in laying the bricks during the building walls are all expressions of metis. Used to comment the proper accomplishment of something, an Italian saying "executing something following the line and the mark (per filo e per segno)” is a snappy language codification of sollertia. It derives from the use of a line or strong string deepened in colored dust by mason and painters to mark by snapping walls and floors.
Sollertia/metis has its origin in the art or technology of weaving. All the "lines" used in other crafts requiring metis derive from the "lines" used in a loom. The tracing on the ground of the future building shows clearly the textile origin of construction. On a construction site, pull between battered boards; the tracing lines mark the plan of a future building. The construction site marking and tracings give the impression of being a huge horizontal loom, showing that a plan of an edifice is woven, just as fishing or hunting net. The plumb line also derives from the weights used to keep in tension the woof in the loom. Probably, this phenomenological derivation explains why the majority of architects prefer to use parallel bars instead of strategic versatile drafting machines, during their designing. A parallel-bar is just a portable loom for weaving the lines of a plan or of an elevation, by running a square back and forth as a shuttle, and meditating on design occasions. Sollertia is forewarned prudence, a meditated procedure of construction enlightened by tactical flashes of intuition necessary to fight a making of architecture that the result of devices or strategies of power rather then tactics of resistance determining the union of the art of living well and the art of building in a “vita felice.” The understanding this happily cunning resistance is essential to avoid that a culture which was for long time cunningly oral and then essentially craftily chirographic can become slave to controlling strategies of the new typographic reality.

ARCHITECTURAL sustainability

2008-04-04T21:52:00.004-04:00

The question of sustainability is related to value.

Unfortunately there are too many types of value on the market, historic values, cost values –traditionally considered unnecessary in schools since there is the bizarre conviction that designing within a budget hampers architectural creativity–intrinsic values, instrumental values and the most important of the values: ethical values.

Traditional utilitarianism is the negation of sustainability, but most of the present thinking on sustainability is developed within the tenet of utilitarianism where morality is about producing good consequences but not having good intentions and architectural sustainability becomes a way of producing the greatest overall amount of good in the world. The emphasis is clearly on consequences, not intentions. Utilitarianism often demands that we put aside our own moral convictions.

A good model to tackle the question of sustainability is the one worked out by Igiasi De Sola-Morales—the idea of Weak Architecture--and schools should work out the opposition: Strong Sustainability versus Weak Sustainability.

Our Western culture aspires to power and domination and this pursuit describes architecture as well architectural sustainability and consequently the preponderance of architects seek to produce buildings with a powerful image and impact (i.e. Starchitects for sustainability!). Referring to a way of philosophizing that does not aspire to totalize the multitude of human discourses into a single system, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo introduced the notions of Weak Ontology. In accordance with Vattimo’s notions, Solas-Morales speaks of a weak architecture, and we should speak of a weak sustainability.

The concept of weak sustainability in architecture should be related to the concept of weak force, a force that govern decay as well as the weak processes of nature whereas the strong sustainability use excessive physical aggression in its technological processes.
The concept of weak sustainability in architecture should deal with the nature of hybrid technologies since strong sustainability in architecture deals only with purebred technologies. Hybrid technologies are various, polymorphous (solar, wind, water), compounded (adaptive reuse) and multifaceted (architecture of spoils) in which it is acceptable to cut sectional courses that run not only from top to substructure, from start to end, but also, crosswise, obliquely and transversely.

The appropriate way to tackle this concept of week sustainable architecture is to teach a course of architectural ethics based on real on oblique crossing of poetics and pathos in a cosmospoiesis, i.e. the ethics of world-making that give rise to the synestetic townscapes of intimacy and participation as in the weak urbanism proposed by Simon Hubacker in 1999.

ROMA QUANTA FUIT IPSA VICTUALIA DOCET

2008-04-04T13:34:00.006-04:00

ROMA QUANTA FUIT IPSA VICTUALIA DOCET
BY BASTIAN CERLIO

GEE WIZ

HESITATION

2008-04-04T06:14:00.004-04:00

DRAWING WITH HESITATION

Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is the very hesitation.

Bergson, The creative mind: an introduction to metaphysics.

A hesitated representation is a poetic form from drawing eternally on intellectual borders, where drafting tools are buzzing an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into genetic anagogy.
Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, architects should write a new grimoirre of drawing construction grounded in hesitation.
Hesitate comes from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty in doing something. Hesitation must be brought back and surrounded everyone in our confident age of aggressive digital expansion and brutal construction.
We must discover the angles/angels of hesitation

The Real Icon of Architecture

2008-03-26T12:47:00.003-04:00

The Real Icon of Architecture
or
Veronica of the Semperian Knot

Real Macaronic Thinking

2008-03-26T08:58:00.009-04:00

Humorous Architecture

“A half-theory turns away from practice -
a total theory leads back to it,”
Novalis, L’Encyclopédie, 81 (IV-738).

As I recently come to realize, I am macaronic thinker. In trying to grasp what is research in architecture I have discovered that an understanding of a humorous view of architecture is essential to figure out the means by which architectural intelligence and imagination operate.
Under this sign of a theory full of humors, architecture might regain the lost power of constructing jovial, mercurial, lunatic and saturnal built-environments. Phlegmatic, bloody, melancholic and bilious rooms composed in a humorous balance will recover the wasted wonder of our constructed world. A comic architecture is the solution to the present condition of architecture conceived under the blessing of flippant figment or under a sign of tedious novelty, both signs to repudiate.

A real humorous theory of architecture aims to happiness and its buildings are products of a gourmet genre of thinking that is the macaronic art. In his Macaronic Book (Liber Macaronices), Teofilo Folengo (Merlinus Cocaius=Merlin Cocai) explains that the macaronic art is so called from macaroni, which are an ancient savory foodstuff “bound together with flour, cheese and butter, which is fat, coarse, and rustic (quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum rude, et rusticanum)”(2nd ed.1521). Folengo’s metaphorically gastronomic characterization singles out the essential tectonic nature of the macaronic art, a mixture of different frame of minds belonging to different and sometimes opposites realms. Architecture and macaronic art share the comparable mix of tectonic technology. Buildings are erected using a mix of low technologies as mortar bricks and snap-lines and high technologies as steel beams and laser beams levels.

This is a humorous conclusion to a quest held under the sign of wonder. In the present condition of wonder, an excessive wonder, it is unavoidable to think of a new interconnection of the signs of architecture and wonder. This relationship requires an inversion of the conception of wonder. This inversion is an act of translation: a passage that takes places within the elusive and subtle realm of humors. The divine and sublime wonder of a heavy 'eternal-architecture' must be translated in a light and humorous architecture.

----------------
A non-reformed friar, Teofilo Folengo--born in 1491 in Cipata (Virgil’s Andes) near Mantua (Italy) and died in Campanese ner Bassano del Grappa in 1544--used the pen name Merlin Cocai and later on a second pen name: Limerno (anagram of Merlino) Pitocco, that is Merlin Destitute. Among the macaronics, other than Folengo and Odasi, can be enumerated the Italian : Fossa da Cremona, Bassano da Mantova, Giovan Giorgio Alione, Partenio Zanclaio, Bartolomeo Bolla, Cesare Orsini, and Bernardino Stefonio; the French: Remy Belleau, Étienne Tabourot and Antonius de Arena; the English: William Drummond, George Ruggle and Alexander Geddes. There were also macaronic schools in Holland, Germany, Portugal and Spain. See Lessico universale italiano 1973, XII, 463. Macaronic has also a association with the eighteenth-century London dandies who were called macaronis because they liked Italian food, for the reason that they experienced it during the Grand Tour. An American traditional song also contains the word: "Yankee Doodle went to town, / Riding on a pony, / Stuck a feather in his hat, / And called it macaroni", and it is linked to the dandy sense. A macaroon is also a chewy cookie made with a mix of sugar, egg whites, and almond paste, comes from French macaron and derives from Italian maccarone, "a trodden mixture."
===================

TEATRI DI TECHNE E LOGOS

2008-03-25T14:03:00.006-04:00

Dreaming Architecture

2008-03-24T10:12:00.006-04:00

By dream, daydreaming, revere, slumber, sogno, somnium, sopor and any other dream-related word used in this short philosophical storytelling about the conceiving of architecture, I intend specific moments of dreaming:

first, the hypnogogic dream, that is the dreaming that ushers us in sleeps;

second, the hypnopompic dream, that is the dreaming that takes places as we are awakening;

third, the dreaming that occurs during the day, viz., daydreaming and awake dreaming.

All the other times and kinds of dreams are specific fields for Freudian and Jungian analysis and they do not pertain to the scope of this book. Although, I will mention Freud’s and Jung’s intuitions, they are merely construing comments related to the discussion of how architects conceive their buildings. My story is only concerned with the driving force of the architect in relationship to the Other and not with the infinite problems of analysis of a personality. The consequence is that I will use the word ‘dream’ and its derivative in a loose way from a psychological point of view. This is done intentionally to avoid a mental cloaking.
The aim of this vagueness of language is to avoid the shrouding of the precise notion that dreams imply disciplined work by hiding beyond a psychological screen an irreducible principle of any good work of architecture:
The education and the work of imagination are a discipline just as important as the discipline necessary for the education and the working of a rational mind.
A disciplined imagination is essential in any constructed work, because a pragmatist as Charles Sander Pierce has pointed out
the whole business of ratiocination and all that make us intellectual being is performed in imagination. Many persons, perhaps have the idea that every observation about the human mind is a psychological observation. They might as well regard the sight or sound of an apple dropping from a tree as an astronomical observation. (MS 614:5).
Imagination is not a dead image; the discussion of imagination is not a peripheral issue, but a central one for making a powerful architecture. Articulating the architectural realm of this discipline by identifying it with dreaming is the best way of unraveling the role of this undisciplined discipline for the figuring out of the constructed world .
Freud, Jung and followers have interpreted dreams, but the dream in itself has been largely neglected because dreaming is a foil for an epistemological inquiry into the nature of perception. In the dream we can seek clarification of the ontological since the dream is not modality of the imagination, but its first possibility. In the dream we see the light. This light is the phos that is at the root of Phantasy and the Romans called Imaginatio.
This micro-story is about the light of dreaming as Synesius of Cyrene , Pavel Florensky and Charles Sander Pierce have musingly theorized. Their theories are here presented as the delightfully indispensable, but philistinely superfluous ingredients for tossing this salad of architectural musement.
The combination of this trinity of authors, in a work devoted to the discipline of architecture, might seem very peculiar. The thought of an American pragmatist philosopher, a chameleonic Hellenistic Christian Pagan thinker and a mystic heretic Russian Revolutionary mathematician tossed together may generate—at first view—a very unusual salad. Nevertheless, all the three authors have dealt with the power and nature of the imaginal through the path of dreams. The tossing together of their ideas can make the salad quite balanced although intensely tangy. Being a way to an imaginal sapience, this salad can be an appetizer leading to a particular understanding of cognitive imagination useful to architectural designers.
Throughout his book on dreams, De imsommnis, Synesius argues that everyone regardless of status and education can interpret his or her dreams. This is significant modification of imaginative interpretation, since, in antiquity, imagination belonged only to people with certain status. Only kings, high priests or mystics could have the gift of meaningful dreams or the talent of interpreting them. Who was born outside of these preferred groups was not allowed to have and use imagination. Nowadays, in architectural schools and in the profession the status is not especially of class, but still there is the research of the gifted. An evidence of this not-so-hidden belief is the students’ portfolios reviews taking place at the moment of admissions. The reason is the assumption that architectural imagination is not a discipline and cannot be taught. Since, a proper imagination is an imprint not something which can be built. As a consequence of this apodictic assumtion no course deal directly with discipline of imagination as intermediate for proper conceiving of architecture.
Imagining is a central crucial activity in architecture. It takes imagination to inhabit a building as well as to design it. Nevertheless, in commonsensical propensity the bias of discrediting the discipline of imagination has made us dismissive of it as fancy, an immoral and tramp-like capacity which must be repressed or if it happens it is merely a trick, a cunning solution inutile to be decorously taught. Consequently imagination does not have a theoretical or a practical standing in architectural pedagogy. Architectural dreams fall within the same extravagantly cauldron of vaguely and vagrantly imaginative habits. Following the tradition set by Arthemidorus, Synesius classifies dreams under two headings. They are sorted in theorenatic dreams and in allegorical dreams. Cardano in his commentary on Synesius uses two convincing images to explain the difference between these two dreams. The thereomatic dream is like the imprint left by a seal, whereas the allegorical is constructed piece by piece, as mosaic workers compose their images, tessera by tessera. The thereomatic is a stroke marking a presence without mediation, whereas the allegorical dream is always a mediating constructive activity. In the allegoric dream, the image must be built before it could be construe.
Synesius sees dreams, as the highest expression of imagination and his text is an excursus on the superiority of the imaginative life. The analogical domain selected by Synesius to explain the faculty of imagination is the realm of light. This is the light emanating phantastikon pneuma (translated in Latin as spiritus phantasticus). This powerful and luminous spirit irradiates beams of lights that allow the dreams to be seen within the nocturnal theater of sleep. The phantastikon pneuma dwells between the rational and the non-rational worlds. This pneuma is the powerful agent that captures the ediola that wanders within the universe and their construction in the mosaic of a dream metamorphoses our understanding of reality.
Oneiric images show the possibility of transformation. This is a translation that makes visible the invisible. A dream is the first step toward an understanding of the invisible. Father Pavel Florensky sees dreams as something on the threshold joining and separating the visible sphere of the real with the invisible sphere of the imaginal. The dreams are our sensing and making sense of the imaginal since they enact the connection between the visible and the invisible. They are the inverse perspective for the translation of the imaginal into the real.
Florensky sees the dreams of the night as psychological, but the hypnopompic dream, that is the awakening dream, is the one accomplishing the translation from the sphere of the imaginal to the real and vice versa. A dream, in itself, can last a short instant in our time, but the corresponding dreamtime can last from seconds to millennia. During dreaming, the speed of the vector of time can be infinite and its direction can be inverted by moving from the future to the past. This inversion of time is essential for Florensky’s understanding of the role of dreams as icons hanging on the wall enclosing the imaginal. This inversion corresponds to the inverse perspective of the looming icons attached at the iconostasis of the Orthodox churches. Dreams and holy icons partake of the same ontology since they have the same causally inversed time. For Florensky, dreams are comparable holy cons and the holy icons are solidified dreams. Dreams are gates open with the barrier separating the imaginal from the real.
Florensky gives an instance of the causally inversed time of the dream as an opening in wall enclosing the imaginal by telling the story of a person who dreamed of being active during the French Revolution. Then, after intensely long and complicated adventures, this early morning dreamer finds himself in front of a Revolutionary Court. At the end of the proceedings, being sentenced to death by guillotine and wakes up with the cold of an iron bar of the bed-head pressing the neck (Florensky 1977:28-30). This inverse vector taking place in dreams is a demonstration of how tempus fugit backward in imaginal sphere.
In the dream, time runs, and runs fast, toward the present, inverse from the awake consciousness .
We are brought on the plane of an imaginary space, by which the same event seen from the plane of the real space is seen imaginally as it was taking place in a teleological time. (Florensky 1977:30).
Two are the imagining cogent elements that make icons reversed vectoriality within the imaginal. Within the Icons, the powerful tools performing the inversion are the inverse perspective and the gold of both background and lumeggiature. The gold correspond to the innate light of the dream and the inverse time to the inverse perspective.
Florensky has dedicated several considerations to the ambiguous geometrical topic of the inverse perspective (Obratnaia Perspektiva). In a remarkable essay, dedicated specifically to the topic and in his lectures at the Vuthcemas, Florensky points out that through the inverse perspective we are looking within the imaginal sphere of human understanding. In this essay Florensky is attempting a demonstration of the existence of the inverse perspective through the so-call perspective mistakes that can be seen in all the representations before the affirmation of the costruzione legittina and in few others after the legitimization of this monocular view took place during the Italian Renaissance.
The geometry of the inverse perspective is utterly visual and tasks directly with light: not the external light, but the internal light. Arthur Zajonic, a physicist interested in quantum optics, points out that two are the light of vision: one exterior and one interior. To explain this duality, he refers to clinical cases of born blind people that after having regained perfect physical sight cannot see anyway what is in front of them. This, as Zajonic proves, is because they do not have the interior light. They see the objects but the do not know how to envision them; there are not images in their mind. He describes that they know an object only when they touch them. They have tactile images, but the simple vision of an object is not enough to build an image of it. To have vision entails much more that having a functioning organ of vision: it is essential to know how to construct the image.
Florensky to demonstrate how the perspective of the costruzione legittima fails to recognize vision as a necessary component of representation analyzes four famous Durer’s incisions demonstrating the mechanisms of the costruzione legittima, in Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirkel vn Richtscheyt ... . One of these illustrations has been abused lately by the many interested in the gaze and other byproducts of the ‘scopic regime’ that is dominating the theater of a visual culture that does not know how to visualize.
The first illustration of the sequence produced by Dürer shows a bedroom where an artist is making a perspectival portrait—probably a legitimated likeness—using a portable perspective machine. A table on which is vertically set a frame containing a glass or a sheet of oily paper constitutes this portable machine. In front of it, an adjustable contrivance holds the draftsman by the nose in position. This machine is a crude empirical rendition of the mathesis of the costruzione legittima that has held by the nose architects for too long.
The second illustration is the one that has been recently misread and misapply by the pseudo-philosophical-gazers. It shows a working table on which a dead-looking lady reveals her nature through a Lucinda to a draftsman who is going to transcribe his view on a piece of paper that has traced on it the same grid of the Lucinda. In this case, the Lucinda is a square frame holding a grid of strings that divides the view in 36 squares. The eye of the draftsman is kept in the required position by a phallic miniature obelisk. In this machine there is already a reference to a coordinate system that will eliminate sight from the site of the perspective drawing.
The third illustration shows a bedroom—a dim room—where an artist is reproducing an urn on a luminous oily sheet using a singular apparatus, an optical pipe connected to a string that is fastened to a ring on the wall. The artist eye is still part of the process. It moves deliberately following the tracing of lines by looking inside the narrow pipe, but is not part of the construction anymore. The real point of construction of the objective vision of the urn is beyond the head of the artist. It is located in ring secured on the wall.
The fourth illustration, the most explicit of the series, shows a very narrow room with a pair of artists and a pair of windows. One window is open and the other is closed. One artist is standing and the other is sitting. At the center is a huge working table holding a lute and a special kind of apparatus where a movable Lucinda has been coupled with a frame holding a drafting sheet. The perspectival string is connected with a ring in the wall and it is kept in tension by a counterweight and on the other side is maneuvered by a wand held by the standing artist. The sitting artist uses an orthogonal coordinated device to record the points of the construction of the image. The point is then marked on the movable panel holding the paper for the drawing. No human, nor divine vision is needed in this perspectival construction. The two folks presented by Dürer are two visually impaired artists making a Braille rendition of a lute. With their machine they can do any other three-dimensional object in a jiffy and probably with fewer distractions of two visually paired artists executing the same task.
A powerful commentary on Dürer’s drawing machines is a canvas done by a Sicilian architect practicing the surrealistic vice. Entitled Colloquio (Conversazione), this oil painting by Maurizio Clerici shows all the drawing machines presented by Dürer sublimated in super-drawing machine located within a perspective box. The characters presented together with the super-drawing machine within the box are a mask and an eye. The eye is the eye of the draftsman and the mask is the object to be represented. The background of the mask is mirror. The presence of the mirror reveals the other side of the mask. The converse side of the mask is visible to us as well as to the sublimate eye of the draftsmen. The incidental presence of the mirror delegitimizes this view of perspective and it projects the potentiality of this super-drawing machine as key to the real of dream.
Although skeptical about creating a “key to dreams” (CP 6.423), Pierce was confident in the power of dreams as sources of meaning for human reasoning.
A meaning is the association of a word with images, its dream exiting power (CP 4.56)
For Pierce, dreams are images devoid of any reference to actuality (3.459), but tools able to call up images from the realm of the imaginal.
The importance of dreams in the philosophy and semiotic of Pierce has been pointed out by Vincent Colapietro.
While take individually these reference to dreams [by Pierce] may seem of slight insignificance, taken together they add up to something of deep, if not obvious, importance. Moreover, when these references are connected with texts stressing the importance [of] imagination for inquiry, they cease to appear incidental. Finally, the fact that these references are found in some of Pierce’s most important early writings as well as in his most brilliant later pieces contributes to our sense that dreams are not peripheral to Pierce’s account of meanings (especially of how meanings emerges and evolves in the context of inquiry).
For Pierce, icons are the most powerful expressions of dreams.
Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them ...
So in contemplating a painting there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that is not a thing, the distinction of the real and copy disappears and it is for a moment a pure dream—not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon (Pierce 3.362).
An icon, a “vagueness” is a dream. An icon does not draw any distinction between the self and the other (Pierce 5.75). “It is all one with object” (Pierce 4.572). An icon as a “magic” representation constitutes and substitutes any object and it is the perfect tool for our mental motions. Our mental images are icons and working with icons is the most powerful tool for communicating in a constructive way (Pierce 2.270). Imagining and imaging are, iconically speaking, the same activity, since both them make visible the invisible processes of the human mind within its cosmic framework. The phenomenology of images is that of mediation and this is accomplished with what Pierce has labeled Existential Graphs. These are graphic tools, effective icons transcribing facts and “experiencing them is as experiencing the things (Pierce 4.86). As conjectural tools Graphs are scribed on the sheet of existence. Dreams and graphs perform the same function since both are lighted by the lume naturale (Pierce 1.80; 5.604). Pierce’s Icons as Florensky’s icons are divinatory process originated in the realm of the imaginal.

The book of geomater

2008-03-23T12:31:00.002-04:00

Hybrid Architectural Drawings

2008-03-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

Hybrid Architectural Drawings

Far from yielding less than hard line drawings or photographic renderings, hybrid architectural drawings (HAD) can be viewed in terms of iconic augmentation, since HAD challenge perceptual configuration by relating them to non-perceptual structures. They are real architectural drawings because they mirror architecture in its most powerful condition. Architecture is constantly in itself a result of hybrid factures, i.e., the building of architecture results from amalgams of high technology, low technology, sophisticated and naïve structures, complicated and simple systems, and refined and elemental construction events.
The apparatus ruling these authentic drawings of architecture is based on the possibility of constructing past or future buildings utilizing an interactive optic and haptic thesaurus. HAD result from tactics dealing with contraction and miniaturization, conversion and suppression, yielding more by handling less. In these graphic procedures, the main scope of drawings is to resist the entropy of a normal sum of perception by increasing connotations within an architectural cosmos and by capturing architectural meanings within a network of abbreviated signs, marks and traces.
The main scope of HAD is the graphic capture of a cosmos and the conquest is carried out by a denial of the immediate by favoring the mediate, since it is the glorification of the un-figurative essence of things. The positive power of the material mediation by hybrid signs ascribable to the designative character of architectural is instituted by merging analytical and symbolic properties, amalgamating discreteness, finite numbers, combinatory power, pictograms hieroglyphs and ideograms, all of which epitomizes direct, prudent and temperate inscription of human thoughts.
The use of HAD gives back to architectural drawings their ontological aspect od storytelling, which has been lost because of the present anthological understanding of communication as briefing. HAD represent the eidos and morphe of the building. Unfortunately, in the relationship between drawings and buildings, the predominant tendency is firmly established on the erroneous concept of linguistic representation sanctioning plausibility. The base of this concept is the conviction that constructed buildings should visually appear as in the design drawings prepared by the architects. This conviction results from a paradigm of representation acquiescing within a rationalization of architecture. This process of rationalization, generated under the spell of verisimilitude, formally binds constructive likeness to the external qualities rather than to the internal qualities carried by architects’ graphic products. Developed during the Enlightenment and fostered with heavy propaganda during the Modern Movement, the nefarious paradigm of verisimilar representations has limited the richness of the character and the intensity of the universe of architectural invention. Constructions no longer construe architects’ poetic and amazing understanding of human dwelling. Buildings become expressions of pseudo-artistic obsessions derived from a search for celebrity and individual fame. The debates on the visual congruity between constructions and representations are unfolded under the influence of this preposterous paradigm, refusing to consider that the sign of verisimilitude appertains to a philosophical polarity. The opposite pole of verisimilitude, a plausible construct, is something implausible: wonder. This philosophical polarity recalls and intersects few others philosophical polarities, namely real and fictitious, credible and incredible, authentic and false, rational and irrational. A rediscovery of the role of marveling as embodied in freehand drawings can turn the professionals and the professors of architecture onto a path leading toward a beatific architecture, true to the qualities rather than the quantities embodies in the drawings.

two enjoyable papers

2008-03-20T17:56:00.001-04:00

"Architectural Synestesia: a hypothesis on the makeup of Scarpa's modernist architectural drawings"

A macaronic meditation on the anti-Cartesian nature of architectural imagination

Happines and Architecture

2008-03-18T17:40:00.010-04:00

Corte Cornaro in Padua
&
Alvise Cornaro

Honestamente Bella,

Alvise Cornaro’s temperate view of Lady Architecture and her Maids Phronesis and Sophrosine.

An
allegra ma non troppo
view of architecture.

Well-known for his treatise on the sober life, Alvise Cornaro (1484-1566) is frequently a footnote in many articles devoted to the architecture and the architects of Renaissance Veneto. Being an extremely influential figure, his presence on the architectural stage of the 500 Veneto is not only important for working the connections among key characters of the play, but above all for reviling the hidden but essential ethic relationships set between theory and practice in the govern of architectural cosmospoiesis. This Paduan theatrical patron, working together with the members of his troupe, Ruzante (a play writer and actor) and Falconetto (a painter and architect) professed in his unpublished architectural treatise and his multifaceted benefactions that prudent and temperate architectural factures can lead to a sustainable architecture capable of inducing real human happiness.

2008-03-18T08:40:00.002-04:00

THE GEOMATRICIAN

Every properly trained architect is a geomatriciam

The constructing and construing of the essence for an architectural cosmology, the quest for an architectural being-in-place, are predicated on a set of phenomenal and passionately radical issues that inscribes the status of the phenomenology of architectural sapience. Dealing on the one hand with routinely mundane sociological and behavioral studies and on the other hand with the vulgarization of theory by intentional borrowing from literary criticism or social sciences, the majority of the professors and professionals have excluded from their practicing and teaching the quintessential structure of moral designing by a palimpsestic erasure. Deliberately overlapping architecture to architect, they translate the “archeo” in archi-tect as an affirmation of their dominance. The do not seem to be aware that archeo in architect has different meaning from the identical prefix in architecture. In architecture the prefix is an affirmation of the power of the art, an assertion of architecture as a Queen mother of moral virtues, noble and born to command, because it measures the dimensions of our living with regard to an ultimate end. It appears that they have long forgotten that as architects, they rule inauguration as a breakthrough to otherness or alterity within the maternal nature of architecture. Understanding archeo as an assertion of their ruling power rather than an affirmation of them as inaugurators or beginners of edifying constructions, architects do not appreciate anymore what, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon, “you will understand then that the most important part of any work is its beginning” (377b).
Most of the times, non-provident and non-prudent architects have the tendency tend to neglect this quintessential question regarding architectural cosmology and beginnings they act arrogantly as preposterous Gnostic demiurges. Too many architects assume they know by heart the values of dwelling and building and consequently they ludicrously believe that they understand what is good for us, pathetically powerless dwellers. This bad gnostic architects do not recognize that the wonder of designing a building dwells in the art of architectural edification which is above all a moral activity not based ethical values but on virtues. Their aim is not the beginning of a masterpiece of the art of living well, but a telic construction of a personal power built on the glossy pages of architectural magazines. The most horrible result of the lack of beginnings is the endorsing of gratuitousness that merely evolves in a cacophonous constructed environment produced by cacotechnical architecture producing a cosmophobia with consequent fear and mistrust of decoration and ornament as edifying representations.

the grimoire of architecture

2008-03-17T19:41:00.005-04:00

The Grimoire of Architecture

Long time ago, architectural drawings were produced in a lesser quantity. It used to be that few lines were necessary to architects to describe future, present or past buildings. Nowadays, we need thousand and thousands of lines to describe a building. This is an incredible and a quite recent condition by which the favorite spell used by Carlo Scarpa in his teaching … nullo dies sine linea (do not let a day elapse without line), should be amplified to … nullo dies sine mille lineae (do not let a day elaps without thousand lines), this latter event that can be done only digitally.
Another fruitful ambiguity ruling an Architectural Grimoire is also clearly embodied in the already mentioned key reference of the “Latin spell”: nullo dies sine linea, since linea can be understood as a line of writing or a line in drawing and to its etymological and ontological origin: linea was the string made of flax (Linum usitatissimum) used by Roman builders to trace buildings .

A Grimoire is a manual of magic and “a book of spells.” The etymology can be traced from the Middle English "gramaire," to the Old French "gramaire,” and ultimately to the Latin: grammatica that comes from Greek. grammatike tekhne “art of letters,” carring the sense of philology, literature and graphic decoration in the broadest sense. The Greeks borrow from the Phoenician alphabetic script and created their own script from them. These Greek characters gave rise to both the Latin and Runic lettering. The Greek called these letters "gramma," from stem ofgraphein "to draw or write” but gramma also meant pictures. An individual with an understanding of these characters and pictures, and an grasp on how to use them was called "grammatikos." From this notion, it can easily be assumed that Owen Jones was indeed a grammatikos when he put together his great masterpiece, a chromolithographic book entitled “Grammar of Ornament.”
This elucidation of title Grimoire of Architecture is meant to be slightly “glamorous” since “glamour” that literally means the "gift of glamoury" keeps this manual talent craftily in the eyes of architects: eyes that must be brought together with Leon Battista Alberti’s winged eye and the accompanying motto “what next” (quid tum)? Eye
A Scottish derivative of the Old French "gramaire," glamoury” means spell-craft, and its products are tied into the arts of the eyes, and what can be done to and with them. It was particularly tied into the arts of ambiguity and until a not very distant date, Grammar was divided by English writers following the precedent of Latin grammarians into Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and strangely enough the ambiguity is reveal again in the “idea” of Orthography, a proper linguist “standing up” also use by Vitruvius to indicate the “standing up” drawing of a building.

the angel of architecture in a dream

2008-03-16T22:33:00.002-04:00

Eleven

2008-03-15T20:28:00.013-04:00

Eleven are the cards of the Grimoire of Architecture

This movie is an exercise in theoretical reconstruction. As a point of departure, the apparent contradictions are solved in a dream, i.e. the dreaming of the Architecture.

Eleven is an essential architectural number and numeral

Theory & Practice of Architectural Drawing

2008-03-15T13:34:00.003-04:00

A dreamed course on architectural drawings.

UNHURRIED ARCHITECTURE

2008-03-15T09:32:00.002-04:00

Unhurried architecture refers to the process of developing and erecting edifices slowly but surely.
The resulting constructions are not just expected to develop economic values but the main target is to develop cultural and historical effectiveness as well. They are the result of prudent and temperate architectural factures.
Prudent and temperate architectural factures produce blessed sustainable architecture capable of giving mental and physical sustenance to real human happiness. The sustenance of happiness through an architectural cosmospoiesis is based on his understanding that happiness quickly fades away without the presence of the assimilated consciousness that has produced it and that architecture can help to maintain it by fostering a vita beata, a good life.

The alchemy of architecture

2008-03-14T16:06:00.005-04:00

The intriguing nature of architecture is analogous to the alchemic bodies of the three-legged Siamese twins presented in an illustration of “Aurora Consurgens.” They share the same digestive systems and internal reproductive apparatus even though they have separate external conceiving organs and different mouths.

Corporeal thinking within architecture is a chiasmus: assimilation and gestation are identical within the realms of theory and practice although the expression, the feeding and the conceiving of practical and theoretical forethoughts and back-thoughts are different in their forms and nature.

The hermaphroditic image can be read as a representation of the union between theoretical abstractions and empirical constructions that presides over architectural cosmospoiesis.

Brunelleschi's Fat Carpenter

2008-03-14T15:07:00.007-04:00

Recto and Verso

A mirror is the incidental element that permits to challenge the domination of the so called costruzione legittima. The historical tradition calls for mirroring events to explain the origin of a legitimate perspective--all the others were bastards. On one hand, there is Filippo Brunelleschi experiments in perspective[shortly before 1413], and, on the other hand, Alberti’s book on painting [1435]. Alberti’s theorization is considered the first written record of the costruzione legittima, although the Florentine architect never uses the term. Nevertheless, he gives the merit of beginning all this sanctioning of perspectival construction to Brunelleschi. In The Life of Brunelleschi, Antonio Manetti, an architect himself, tells the story of the experiments in perspective done by Brunelleschi. The experiments were based on two tablets representing: one the Baptistery of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini and the other a view of Piazza della Signoria. Both the tablets are lost. The experiment most well known is one performed with the tablet of the Baptistery. The procedure of this experiment has been analyzed by many art historians seeking to reconstruct the mental and the corporal procedure of the experiment to determine the intellectual vehicle influencing Brunelleschi’s tablet strategy.
The scholarly discussions on the experiment conducted by Brunelleschi at three arms' length inside the Florence Cathedral looking to a mirror reflecting a painting of the baptistery does not reveal the arcane and occult nature of this experiment. completed with a laminated silver sky reflecting clouds, the perspectival rendition of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the umphallus of the city of Florence, is a curious painting. The mirror image of the representation of the baptistery was to be seen through a hole in the tablet itself—hole that had been fastidiously described by Manetti.
Nothing is arcane in the monocularity of the costruzione legittima. Everything is arcane in the paired images in Brunelleschi’s experiment. The tablet of the baptistery is closer to the metaphysical geometry of a medieval Byzantine icon than to the geometrical comprehensibility employed in the costruzione legittima. he use of the mirror has of the overtone of an experiment in katoptromancy (divination with the use of a mirror), an Etruscan discipline. Brunelleschi’s reflective experiment points out that architectural imagination is a divination by mirror.
A mirror, a gate to the mundus imaginalis, is the imaginable place of construction of the perspective as well as the imaginal place of fabrication of a building image. The analogical relationship between construction of perspective and the construction of building is also stressed by Filarete in his Treatise on Architecture. After having acknowledged that who initiated the whole affair of perspective through a mirror is undoubtedly “Ser Brunellesco,” Filarete compares the construction of perspective to the construction of a building. Between the two occurrences, the common magic wand is a proportional divider. In both procedures, the mirror is the powerful tool that has in itself the capacity of making a designer to see better and clearer through a reflection than staring directly at something.
Brunelleschi, the mirror gazer, is a cunning architect. He is an architect gifted with what in metis or sollertia. Brunelleschi does not only conceive cunningly devices for casting images or erecting domes, but he also conceives practical jokes and pranks. The stories of these jokes are essential for understanding his way of working. He was a very strong and singular character who liked to make his ideas clear by artfully constructed metaphorical and allegorical means. Notable is the story of the Brunelleschi’s hard-egg. Invited by the committee in charge of appointing the architect for the erection of the dome of the Florentine cathedral to present the model of his proposal, Brunelleschi refused of fulfill the request. Furthermore, he gave them a hard-egg asking to the members of the committee to make it stand up without visible support. After their vain attempts, Brunelleschi cracked slightly the bottom of the egg shell and made it to stand up vertically. At the objection of the committee, that anybody could do it in that way, Brunelleschi subtly answered that if anybody would have seen his model would have made the same comment and someone else could be appointed for the job. As result of this cleverly staged action he was appointed for the job. However, the committee did not utterly trust Brunelleschi and they appointed together with him: Lorenzo Ghiberti, a less crafty artist, but with an ineffective knowledge of construction. Brunelleschi got ride of him, by feigning a sickness—after the woks where started—leaving the poor Ghiberti alone in charge of directing the works. This brought to light Ghiberti’s incompetence and Brunelleschi was left alone in charge of the erection of the dome.
These episodes demonstrate the particular character of Brunelleschi mind. To discern better the implications for architectural design of the experiment of the Baptistery tablet is essential to recognize another episode of Brunelleschi’s life. Beside the anecdote of the two tablets, Manetti tells another story. It is a short tale—a novella—of a practical joke organized by Brunelleschi in 1409. The title of Manetti’s tale is The Fat Woodworker (La novella del grasso legnaiuolo).
The novella tells that, during the month of January, Brunelleschi and a few of his friends decided to chastise with a practical joke Manetto, the Fat Woodworker, who did not show up for a dinner held by his group of friends. The aim of the joke was of convincing Manetto that he was someone else, to be more precise Matteo, a friend that was out of town during that period. The commanding conclusion of the joke was, that when Manetto was utterly convinced of being Matteo, to persuade him that all he had experienced was a set of mirror dreams between him and Matteo. In the story, there are many plays of mirror events that can be easily connected with the mirroring images of the of the experiment of the baptistery. However, the key passage for understanding the relationship between dream, mirror and imagination is when Brunelleschi has Manetto—who is finally convinced that he is Matteo—brought back to his house.

They entered the Fat One’s bedroom, where he was lying in a deep sleep, and they put him on a stretcher with all of his clothes. They carried him to his house where, by chance, his mother had not yet returned from the villa, which they knew since they kept a close watch over everything - and they put him in his bed and put his clothes where he usually put them. But since he usually slept with his head at the head of the bed, they left him with his head at the foot of the bed. Once they did this, they took the key to his shop and went inside. They took all of his hardware and moved it from one place to another. They did the same with his tools, leaving the wood planes with the edges up, and the saws with the teeth down. They did this with all the items in the shop that they could, so that the shop was so mislaid and much turmoil that it seemed demons had been there.

All this inversion of positions is completely superfluous for carrying on the joke, but it is the substantive touch cunningly elaborated by Brunelleschi for making posterity to discern that his experiment with the mirror is the inverse experience of the costruzione legittima. It is an experiment of perceptual epistemology in the realm of the imaginal.

Dreaming Architecture

2008-03-08T18:25:00.003-05:00

ZIBALDONE : A realm of architectural delight:

2008-03-07T05:05:00.011-05:00

A realm of architectural delight:
the gastronomical analogy as a novel tactic to achieve sustainability

My aim is to claim that eating and drinking, as sources of creative imagination and aesthetic pleasure, are connected to the creative process in architecture, and hold a double denomination integrating the good with the beautiful.

Gastronomic and architectural creations are mutually enhancing and mutually inspiring in their common pursuit of beauty. Exemplifying the values of sustainability and sustenance in the culture of architecture and cuisine, eating, drinking and building considered on the same plate contributes to finer, richer understanding by shedding a cross-cultural light on the study of traditional architecture and contemporary searches for sustainable architecture.

Sed prius altorium vestrum chiamare bisognat, o macaronaeam Musae quae funditis artem.
Teofilo Folengo, Baldus 1:5-6

"You are what you eat."American proverb

When we no longer have good cooking in the world,we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. --Maire-Antoine Careme

Life is a combination of magic and pasta. --Federico Fellini

Viva i maccheroni

Zibaldone: dream stuff and solid stuff

2008-03-06T18:23:00.004-05:00

Architects works with the malleable stuff of perception combining dream stuff and solid stuff

Zibaldone: Recto and Verso 2nd

2008-03-06T17:57:00.005-05:00

Facture
Recto & Verso
Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Carlo Scarpa as recto and verso

ZIBALDONE: VERSO AND RECTO

2008-03-06T14:27:00.010-05:00

A Recto and Verso Drawing

A sheet of paper is a three-dimensional object, a fact that is too easy to forget by looking to a set of architectural drawings on the screen of a Mac or PC. Every sheet has two sides, and something interesting often lies on the other side. In the argot of the art historian, the front of a work on paper is the recto, while the back is the verso. The terms recto and verso are an Italian habit.

Since Renaissance Italian used these two locutions to designate the front and the back of a fo(g)lio of paper. Interestingly, the terms recto and verso do not even began in the world of drawings, but from the language used to describe manuscripts and books. An examination of their Latin origin is illuminating: as you look at a book open before you, the page on the right is the folio recto, or the "right leaf." The page on the left is the folio verso, or the "turned leaf," reached by turning over the previous folio recto. Cultural associations that privilege right over left load the application of these terms to drawings. Like the English word right, the Latin word rectus (root of such words as rectitude rectify and rectum), can translate as either "right" or "straight." Verso, regardless of being merely a direction-assessment, stands as the opposite or a negative opposition.
The development of the recto-verso relationship is closely related to the history of the use of paper. Introduced in Europe only in the late thirteenth century, paper was not in widespread use in the West until the fifteenth century. Obviously, its primacy as a support for drawings was not established instantaneously, and the medieval practice of drawing on wax or plaster coated wood tablets continued well into the sixteenth century. While the tablets were convenient for working, the drawings made in this way were by nature ephemeral, as the tablets were always eventually smoothed or re-plastered for reuse. Other pre-paper drawing supports likewise tended to encourage the obliteration of drawings once they had outlived their use. Parchment, made from animal skins, was likewise strong enough to withstand scraping, and so tended to be reused until repeated scraping wore the support away. Since paper will not stand scraping, drawings executed on it are much more likely to be preserved: the artistic value of a drawing on paper, even when negligible, is bound to outweigh its value as a recyclable material resource, which is next to nil.

In architectural drawing the verso/recto approach usher us into different realms from which we are to take back mysteries to our particular realm.
The magic of a recto verso conceiving is to alter someone consciousness.
The alterity of the recto verso architectural conjuring up is essential for the making of a proper architecture responding to the unknown other.

Two types of drawings has been made, one type manifests the invisible in the visible whereas the other transubstantiate in recto and verso representations, producing a chiasm of theory and practice. In architectural designing the recto verso approach usher us into different realms from which we are to take back mysteries to our particular realm.

The alterity of the recto-verso design approach is essential for the making of a proper architecture responding to the unknown other.
In these types of drawings, architecture is represented in a subjunctive mode since Architecture constitutes an activity that cannot be subordinated to another enterprise.

For many architects the product of their activity is not a design, but an imposition. For them, buildings and urban manipulations of space determine or impose rather than exemplify or suggests. They carry out a duty, whereas they should enjoy the delight of a demonstrative realization.

The alchemy of drawing
===========================

ZIBALDONE: A church designed for an architectural competition

2008-03-04T08:52:00.003-05:00

ZIBALDONE: Dogana Vecchia Lazise Second Phase in Collaboration with Claudio Sgarbi

2008-03-03T20:09:00.004-05:00

ZIBALDONE: Textual Corporality

2008-03-03T06:05:00.004-05:00

ZIBALDONE: Zabajone Mayonnaise and Scrambled Eggs.

2008-03-02T20:16:00.006-05:00

The art architecture as the arts of alchemy and cuisine are essentially based on processes of thinking with things rather than thinking about things.

The common denominator among these three arts is that all three can be ‘thought in’ or ‘thought about.’ For instance, the difference between thinking about architecture and thinking in architecture, it is the same distinction between thinking about materials and thinking with materials. Alchemy is thinking with materials whereas chemistry is thinking about materials. Alchemy, in its most traditional interpretation, is none other than the human talent for the transformation of terrestrial materials in substances and ability of conceiving a liturgy for transfiguring those crafts that deal with "inanimate" matter. Another field where thinking is done with materials is the culinary art whereas nutritional science thinks about materials. Cuisine is none other than the art of the sacrifice of terrestrial substances and the science beyond the liturgy for transfiguring "inanimate" foodstuff in assimilative substances.

Let us whisks beat and fluff up our analogical eggs, and to be more precise let us compare mayonnaise, zabajone and scrambled eggs.

According to traditional sources, mayonnaise was the discovery of the private chef of the Duke de Richelieu in 1756. While the Duke was defeating the British at Port Mahon, his chef was creating a victory feast that included a sauce made of cream and eggs. When the chef realized that there was no cream in the Duke’s kitchen, he improvised and substituted olive oil instead. A new and marvelous culinary masterpiece was born! The chef named it "mayonnaise" in honor of the de Richelieu 's victory.

Among the old dishes of Piedmont’s cuisine, the king of deserts is the zabaglione (piemontese dialect: 'L Sanbajon). Fra' Pasquale de Baylon (1540-1592), of the Third Order of Franciscans, used to suggest to his penitents (especially to those complaining of the spouse frigidity) a therapeutic recipe which, summarized in 1+2+2+1, would have given vigor and strength to exhausted spouse. Made Saint in 1680 by Pope Alessandro VIII Santo Baylon became a legend. In Piedmont’s dialect the saint name is pronounced San Bajon (o=u). Sanbajon become in italian Zabaione o Zabaglione. To make it beat 1 yolk and two teaspoons full of sugar until the mixture is palest yellow tending towards white, then beat in two eggshells of Marsala wine and cook in a double boiler (bagnemarie). Continue whisking using a hand mixer; do not let it reach a boil, but remove it from the fire as soon as it thickens. When it has cooled to merely warm, you fold in one egg white beaten until very firm.

Every one knows how to make scramble eggs, and everybody has his or her secret but for completing this triadic association, I will give the version of Scramble eggs served to James Bond and friends in The Edwardian Room at The Plaza. The recipe is following the instruction of the American Felix Leiter. For four persons: 12 fresh eggs; Salt and pepper; 6 oz. of fresh butter. Break the eggs into a bowl. Beat thoroughly with a fork and season well. Melt 4 oz. of the butter in a small heavy bottomed copper saucepan. When melted, pour in the eggs and cook over a very low heat, beating constantly with a small eggbeater. While the eggs are a little moister than you would wish for eating, remove the pan from heat, fold in the rest of butter and continue beating for half a minute, adding finely chopped chives or fines herbs. Dish up on top of hot buttered toast in copper dishes and serve with pink champagne (Taittinger) with a low music in the background.
Three different ways of beating eggs with completely different results and effects, the vis imaginativa, the force of imagination is a vision: it sees space as a symbol and time as a liturgy.

Carlo Scarpa and the RISOTTO COL TASTASAL

2008-03-02T05:06:00.004-05:00

Colors, sounds and flavors are the essence of a knowledge that cannot distinguish between intelligible and imaginable.
When in Venice, a traveling architect should not fail to visit Scarpa’s Olivetti Store, in Saint Mark’s Square, and he or she should not miss the occasion of tasting two Venetian dishes: one is the risi col nero de sepa (a rice dish where the sauce is prepared with squid ink) and the other, a Dogal dish served during Venetian spring holidays, is risi e bisi, a kind of risotto all’onda—undulating risotto, that is a soupy risotto fluid enough to form a wave on the dish when served—tossed with fresh baby pees. The critical synesthetic imagination, the magic poiesis beyond the adding of squid ink or tiny peas to the rice is the same by which Scarpa choose to substitute the pebbles with small monochromatic murrine to the traditional mix of mortar and of the terrazzo paste of the Olivetti shop.
The comparison between risotto and terrazzo floor is not only a accidental formal analogy, but also a technological correspondence: Amy Tan, in The Kitchen God’s Wife, (Ivy Book, New York 1992) tells how in local pisé construction, a soup of egg-whites and mud is spilled on the floor for three consecutive days to make a rammed-earth floor dust free and shiny-hard as porcelain and how crumbling pisé walls can be made clean and insect free by spreading a sticky porridge of rice and mud on the interior of the walls (pp.245–246).
To persevere in my humorously telling of edifying stories regarding the tellurian and cosmic triplets that are architecture, alchemy and cuisine, I must return to the table at the Trattoria del Gaffaro. The event is again one of Scarpa’s communal lunches and this time the special dish ordered by him for his cohort and prepared by the patient chef of the Gaffaro is the “risotto col tastasal.” Prepared traditionally in the Venetian mainland this unusual seasonal fare is usually cooked to make sure that homemade salami-blend of pork ground meat, salt and spices is properly done and balanced in the taste before to stuff it into the casing. As an alchemic procedure of analogies, the cooking with rice achieves the same result of the evaporation that takes place in the dry cellar where the salami are going to be stored and although the final flavor is totally different the balance of spices and salt in the stuffing can be easily detected.
Making a few considerations on the strange nature and role of the food to be eaten—a fictitious victual (res ficta), to unveil something hidden, the salt, in something (res facta) that in the end will be completely different from the preparation tasted--Scarpa digressed by drawing a parallel between the function of the risotto col tastasal. A set of architectural drawings is completely different from a building but its purpose is to taste in advance the architecture of a future building. This speculation lead to a further comparison by considering how one risotto is sufficient to taste several potential salamis and many future outputs can be judged how through one single sampling. Further elaborating the point of relationship of one to many for an understanding of architecture Scarpa uttered a warning that might sound as paradox in our age of smörgåsbord teaching of architecture. Scarpa’s macaronic paradox was that to teach architecture it was crucial to tutor architectural students about the work of a single architect or better to educate the students about the architecture of one single specific building. Undoubtedly, he was already thinking of the building by Giovanni Maria Falconetto that was going to be the topic of the afternoon lecture he was going to deliver. As typical of that period of Scarpa’s teaching, the lecture was going to be presented using no slides, but just drawing plans, sections and elevations on the blackboard. He also exploited during his lecturing any kind of analogical references that he could found looking around in the classroom as he did in the Falconetto lecture by directing everybody attention to the rather beautiful knees of a female student sitting with crossed legs in the front row strongly illuminated by an above spotlite. He pointed to them to visibly demonstrate how the play of light worked on the surfaces of the moldings of the only building of Falconetto he analyzed during his lecture. Built in 1530, the selected building was Porta Savonarola one of Padua city gates was in itself equivalent to a “risotto col tastasal” since it was employed to “taste” the architecture of a future building, the Odeo Cornaro, a gateway to melodic contemplation, on which Falconetto was working together with his powerful patron Alvise Cornaro. The Odeo, an octagonal central plan building modeled after the “studio” of Marcus Terentius Varro. Both the buildings are vaulted structures, with an octagonal room at their center to deal with pneuma, the airy salt of life. In the case of the Odeo, the pneuma not only gives the proper ventilation and temperature during the changes of seasons but also allows the physical and the spiritual to merge in a decompression chamber through the arias of chamber music performances played in it—Odeo, in Greek, meant a small construction for musical performances. Porta Savonarola is in the same condition of synesthetic merging, the octagonal room a negative tower of winds is the space necessary for urban decompression filtrating and merging the “odors” of the countryside and the city.

ZIBALDONE

2008-03-01T16:34:00.001-05:00

Zibaldone*
By
Marco Frascari
An infraordinary collation of critical readings and note
Excursions in the culinary, historical one and architectural realms for the Vitruvian Exercises.
A short anti-Cartesian meditation on the nature of architectural imagination

*zibaldone Italian, s. m.
1 Victuals prepared with many ingredients | (by extension) bundle of various things; confused mixture of people
2 Personal book, notebook in which notes are annotated without order, news, thoughts
3 Uncertain etymology; according to a hypothesis, it been born as voice of Emilian, an Italian dialect. It origined as a crossing between the Emilia word zibanda 'It. vivanda=cook food' and zabaione ‘a turinese desert made with eggs sugar and Marsala Wine.