La testa di giano

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:25:00 +0000

"Ciò che non assomiglia a niente non esiste"

Paul Valery, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1941.

Bogardus' Ark

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:41:00 +0000

Ianus #12 - Bogardus' Ark - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Cambridge Seven Associates - Special Exhibits Building, Franklin Park Zoo - Boston - 1963

" The Cambridge seven associates proposal for a vertical zoo has been made for a specific sire in Boston, but it's an idea that could be applied anywhere, especially in urban area where land is in short supply. The designers began by questioning the basics assumptions of zoo design and found that experience with a lot o aniumals including monkeys, bears and the big cats, shows that a satysfactory environmentgor them can be provided within a relatively small space: it is the way the space itself is designed that is important, not its size.

For example , although a lion may look comfortable set in a large, park-like enclosure, he's more likely to feel comfortable in a varied setting which encourages him to walk, climb, search for food and change his resting area according to the time of day, and which includes warm, dry lair in which to breed.

And there is no reason at all why such a setting should not be provided on a vertical axis rather than on a horizontal one; nor is the lion likely to care about whether he is on the first floor or the fifteenth, and the monkeys and tropical fish will be even less concerned!

For the Boston zoo, the Cambridge Seven propose a 12 storey building that would be reached by a bridge spanning a sunken paddock containing large mammals like elephants and rhino. The paddock would surround the building, with dens in the basement so to speak, so that people could see from the street what was going on and would be encouraged to go inside.

Lifts then take the visitors to the top of the building , where there is a restaurant and roof garden, and he slowly descends, starting with an aviary and passing through different habitats and climatic conditions on each floor until he reaches the ground again. The floors also contain an exhibition area , auditorium, classrooms, laboratories and a hospital, while staff facilities and mechanical services are located in a large, central core. The building has also been designed so that besides giving the visitor an unprecedented view of the animals - and at times he would get the impression that he was walking among them - it is equally suitable for teaching and research.

The Cambridge Seven believe that by consolidating a zoo in a high rise building they have reduced maintenance and running costs sufficiently to justify the capital expenditure needed to site it in a town, where it could attract large crowds even in winter. It would certainly make an interesting and unusual contribution to urban life. " *

" I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.

I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.

But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.

You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them. ” **

In the introduction to the first article appeared on Domus in 1969 the project has been curiously compared to Noah's Ark. Even if this seem to be simply suggestive and openly innocent it’s actually interesting to compare these two “projects”.

This is not an attempt to read the holy writings but I would summarize that God’s intention was a dogmatic imposition of destroying by first assuring the human genre to be kept alive, through the tool of the ark. The flood was meant to “put an end to all people” because of their “wickedness”.

The same details through which the ark is described appear to relate human beings with artificial goods, or better their relative relationship as a form of struggle toward the flood.

Furthermore rather than taking care of the only natural reproduction of the human genre, the Holy Scriptures relate explicitly to the building as a form of common knowledge unavoidable for their survival.

The possibility to keep the natural condition alive in an urban environment is an issue that interested many Nineteenth century intellectuals and today’s consumistic debate around the word “sustainability”.

Therefore today’s critical architectural debate often derail on these term or even enlarge the void around this topic evoking new obscure words (recently like that of Parametricism).

The ubiquity of the capital as the unique condition for determining urban value, brought inevitably to overlook some necessary aspect of the human condition : primarily the ones not directly computable in economic terms.

If everything owned must have a value because of its own physicality and position , how can be estimated the value of public goods, actually owned by everyone?

This is precise cultural issue is something that influenced urban planning theoretical debate and production since its birth, narrowing urban planning to its exclusive managerial aspect.

Even if this is not an attempt to reconstruct all the event nor even introducing theoretical debate around urban planning, I would suggest that this precise issue, around the inestimable nature of public goods, is something that brought to their disappearing (the public space in suburbia reduced to the roadway path,...).

The same logic concerned the issue of typologies: many public structures utilized in the past for collective purpose literally disappeared, not only because of economic inefficiency but because of speculative private or public investments.

What is at stake, with this building, is actually the ambitious possibility to recover a space for the public inside a dynamic urban realm dominated by the capitalist managerial ethos.

As I wrote at the beginning, this project seems dominated by a radical innocence, the vertical zoo, hence an attractive possibility for economic investor, rather than a political struggle for the public space as a form of common. Therefore what becomes obvious is that at the end the overall target of the building seems to be the only economical feasibility, efficiency of the entire structure and its maintenance. Because of its exclusive programmatic nature, the project for the Special Exhibits Building doesn’t handle any purpose of form, or better it doesn’t express any will to persist on any former architectural invention.

This aspect in a way its curious beacuse, working on the pure reference of the vertical building, it's the attempt to survive a collective memory(in this case that of the zoological garden)in an urban dense environment struggling with the same weapons: value and efficiency.

* Richard Carr, Domus 479, 1969

** Genesis VI, Noah and the Flood, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=NIV

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 11:56:00 +0000

« Non si puo trovare una lingua che parli ogni cosa per sé senza aver accattato da altri »
Niccolò Machiavelli

Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, 1514

Nothing to say

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 18:04:00 +0000

Ianus #11 - Nothing to say - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Jean Nouvel - Law Courts - Nantes - 2000

"Power is represented by official architecture. A Judicial city is a representation of the power of justice. What is at stake here is the image of justice in terms of its symbols and character. (The image of the public buildings is a heritage of signs that cannot be changed without some risks. The proposed architecture for this building is the modernisation of this heritage.)
We have only attempted to produce a just definition of justice: from the most distant interpretation, from the the city on the opposite bank of the river down to the detail of the interior spaces, via the inevitable facade, this is an exercise in architectural composition, in objectivisation.
It is about translating words like justice, fairness, equality, balance, dignity, and character - and their crossed definitions with other words, other concepts - into constructed signs."*

"Justice is the act of being just and/or fair"**

Far from being conceptual, the ugly architectural gestures we assist today are based on "concepts". Nevertheless anybody seems really interested in motivating this recourse to "concepts", in so far that anything seems justified to be appealed as such.
This freely used habit about motivating architectural decisions with something that never interested architecture before, in many cases do not produce architecture.
"The finished building as product is less important in conceptual architecture, than the ideas guiding them, ideas represented primarily by texts, diagrams, or art installations."***
It seems that architecture as a building is less important than "everything else", and instead concepts can actually suggest this "everything else" quality.

On the contrary this blog is about the possibility to conceive architecture as a practice of knowledge, intended in a dialectical conflict between its ideal (from the greek word "eidos" : configuration) and built nature.
It should be clear that even if ideal is a concept,at least in the case of architectural discipline, everything cannot be ideal.
Actually the janus paradigm for this critical reflections stands on the strain between IDEAL and UTOPIAN (I would suggest this distinction to be at the origin of every architectural discourse).
Today the abuse of concepts unbalances the architectural decision on the side of utopia explicitly because of the boundless dimension of "everything"(something that cannot be entirely reached or enclosed). For counter, ideal is something that we already know ,recognize(litterally configurate) and accumulate as a common knowledge.

"Hence, all that can be done is "void" architecture."****
The project of the Palace of Justice in Nantes is definitely the proof of the utopian recourse on concept. The suggestive severity of this all-black architecture instils are disappointed gazes, feared elderly. Even its public quality isn't manifested because of its lack from the common culture of building for the collective.
Fear, Queerness, Justice, and so on...Infinite quantity of concepts would be plausible of assignment, and might conduce to the same building.

The only quality of this building probably consists of is a subliminal precedent, its ideal. Thirty years before, Mies completed in Berlin the Neue Nationalgalerie.
Mies measured the quality of his architecture on the classical "Entsagung", the possibility of obliterating what is not architecture.

This solemn refusal still echoes somewhere, where there's "nothing to say".

* El Croquis 112-113, p. 42
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_architecture
**** M. Tafuri, Non c'é critica, solo storia, interview by R. Ingersoll, p.98

Jailed

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:32:00 +0000

Ianus#10 - Jailed - drawing by A.A.Dutto

OMA - Rem Koolhaas - The Hague City Hall - The Hague - 1986

"With its 150.000 m² this building would have been one of the largest projects in recent European memory, by definition a radical break with the scale of the old city.
The site has the form of a triangle, north and west façade align with the urban traffic system, to the south a pedestrian area. The building itself, in the form of a rectangle, is concentrated on the north edge, thus leaving a - sunken – triangular plaza that forms a cultural complex with the concert hall and the Netherlands Dance Theatre, and relates to the elevated plaza in front of the hotel."*

Following an architectural contest won by Richard Meier (dating 1986), The Hague City Hall opened on september 1995. This enormous structure was the explicitly fulfillment of his architect who declared: "The architecture is white: it is people that add the colour". The clear break with history embodied by this building was absolutely totalitarian: white and transparency.
Returning to the 10 years early competition issues what is interesting to note was the target about joining the historical and the new urban tissue. Therefore, even if the winner doesn't witness it, the project of about 150000m² should have imbalanced on form, or better a form of instability.
Altough the Meier City hall shiny hyperstructure gives the institution a new progressive mask, another project made by OMA seemed to emphasize that concept of "instability".
Even if its appearance claims back to contructivists theories and his post-mahnattan manifesto, the typical european historical stratification was evident, and the caos was covered up by geometrical semplification.
The "transition" was evident as nobody of that element actually embodied its typical aspect (even functionally): the plaza was not a typical plaza nor the facade was a typical facade..
One aspect that underline this sort of tension between the OMA project is its reference to Michelangelo's prisons(mid XVI), especially in the way it gives depth to the block, manomitting building frontal shapes at each layer superimposed. Tough the conceptual basis of this project is "a radical break with the scale of the old city" it seemingly gleans attractiveness from its context so it becomes somehow contextual. Everyone of the four facades is different from each other, belonging to different urban proximities.

Architecture in this project is reputedly contextual, not in the way it summarizes its context but in the way it is somehow affected by its proximities.
The sort of instability in boardering issues (historical-modernist edge tissue) often stands under the influence of the most evident elements in its nearest sourroundigs.

* quoted from http://oma.nl/ - projects - the Hague City Hall, The Hague, 1986

Basic Instinct

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:08:00 +0000


Ianus#09 -Basic Instinct - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Piero Bottoni -Latin Villa - project for the IV International Exposition of decorative and industrial arts in Monza - 1929-30 *

"This villa wants to recover, from the latin building soul, her equilibrium of masses, from the mediterranean tradition of the outdoor living, her loggia, atrium and terraces, from the Tirreno coast houses, her color, from the modern technique, her structure.
In plan disposition the coastal living habits has been considered, as such its predominant exposition to sun and open air.
Underneath the big open atrium ,from the typical latin house, will develop the daily life.
Will rise a garden, at the edge of a pine forest, overlooking the sea. It will not anyway screen the landscape but it will be crossed through: the sea or the mount will be framed by the atrium, like a painting."

This project is extremely instinctive: every element comes actually from a memory.
The plan, rather than a typical house, is clearly arranged like a boat : stern and fore, cabins and spiral stairs.

* "Architettura, spazio primario" , C. De Carli, Hoepli, 1982, p.342

The good and the bad

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:38:00 +0000

Ianus#08 - The good and the bad - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Gabetti e Isola - Courthouse in Alba - Alba, Italy 1981

"[..]I built with Isola many houses and the most informal character of the latter was given by the porch, where children plays [....]. Therefore we considered this element for our (courthouse) project. We actually wanted to destroy any aulic tone given by the courthouse."*

Alba is a town, of about 32000 inhabitants, situated in Piedmontese Langhe, well-known for its medieval towers. At the edge of the historic city, periphery moved forward until eighties, leaving a free area used as a dumping ground, located in an abandoned creek bed of the river Tanaro.
During the seventies this wasteland was awarded to appellation of square celebrating the twinning with the city of Metz., but the uselessness as public space wasn’t late to affect real estate speculators.
In 1981 the municipal administration invited architects Gabetti and Isola to draw up a redevelopment plan. The site in its residual emptiness appeared emblematic of the incontrolled growth of the modern city. Such as a modern Place Maubert** , administrators were interested in upgrading this space in terms of collective use, providing it with a new public building.
Though the pressure of real estates, the organization that obtained the area, was the Court of Alba. The latter decided to build the new Courthouse.
As many other projects in Italy, despite the usual long time of realization, this public work born under the sign of “urgency”: “money must be spent as soon as possible to keep the fundings on!”.
After a series of first attemps, the designers in 1985 temporarily abandoned the project, trapped by the inability to conceive a convincing urban design.
In the first two projects, Gabetti and Isola manifestly showed their priority to give an urban value to the building, not so much in his figure, but rather in its permeability to the public space*** .
Although the project for the square roughly decayed, the courthouse went ahead. This building was conceived as a box underground, covered by vegetation on sloping terraces. The central cut consisted of a porch longitudinally dividing the building and distributing the Court, the courtrooms and the Public Prosecutor’s office.
The proposed architecture was deliberately humble and seemed to refer to the informal model of residential villa.
The structure of the porch was the same recurring in suburban villas, where children play and meet friends, and was obviously used in order to destroy any aulic tone given to the Court institution itself.
Similarly, around 1860, Alessandro Antonelli conceived the Senate of Piedmont replacing the Corinthian order with the Composite in order to manifest a less repulsive use of justice during the Restoration period.
Therefore the porch becomes an emblematic figure, extending stubbornly throughout the length of the site, such as the arcade system typically retrievable in Piedmont. At the same time it is also ironically a mockery of judicial power, deprived of any serious reference to severity of justice.
Despite the seemingly quotation of Vuban’s fortress, it actually boasts its banality paradoxically like a “fortress of ordinariness” .
The typical representation in watercolors dissolves the building between the outlines of Piedmontese landscape .

Architecture, proud and victim of its own rhetoric, identifies its figure with the field.

* quotation of Roberto Gabetti, translated by A.A. Dutto from Lezioni Piemontesi, Clut, 1997.
**Carlo Olmo, Mille e una Place Maubert, in Le città del mondo e il futuro delle metropoli, Electa, Milano, 1988.
***S Giriodi, Il nuovo tribunale di Alba, in “L’Industria delle Costruzioni”, 206, December, 1988.

It Began in Afrika

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:08:00 +0000

Ianus#07 - It Began in Afrika - drawing by A.A. Dutto

Taller de arquitectura - La Muraille Rouge - Le Viaduc, Calpe (Alicante), Spain 1969

Taller de Arquitectura was a spanish team, based in Barcelona, founded in 1964. It was attended by people coming from different disciplines: architects, mathematicians, engineers, writers, sociologists.

The founder was Ricardo Bofill reached then by ten more partners.

Following is what we could assume as their statement of principles:

Architecture no longer exists.

There exist only anonymous cities, without shape or style, that anyone has ever dreamed or desired.

Against these modern cities, obvoius and simplistic, we launch monuments to qualify, destroy or invent the space.

Organize the revolt.

Against these thousands of houses, all identical, aligned, repeated and silly.

Against the rational and schematic layout of territory.

Against the importation of prefabricated Nordic cities.

Against these French village gathering, common and petty bourgeois, at the edge of Sahara.

Against Architecture.

The architects have to return to Earth to change, to be able to contradict, and to find the reason for their existance.

The only way to create new cities is to conceive new monumentalities in which the man's dreams could be interpreted.

The urban lanscape is an anti-landscape. The new architecture should respect the hidden feelings and obsessions. Magritte is more important than Mies Van der Rohe.

Alone, a lonely castle should be on the top of the mountain. Architecture cannot invent anything new but just learn how to read and extend the landscape.
If the world was covered by a transparent roof, the whole urbanism and architecture we know today would disappear, replaced by other arts and ecological techniques.

Architecture, today is the impossibility to cover the word with a roof.

This permanent failure hides the utopia of scientific architecture. Between utopia and reality is the the labour.

Transforming dreams into monuments, destruction, imagination applied to the construction of the spaces to finally die.

Architecture can only exists in reality or the tangible range of dreams.

The nature - the greed

the music - the cosmo

the science - your lover

the films - the napalm

the poetry - the death

The monuments of the future will arise in our souls. Because humanity dreams and sees in these dreams more beautiful cities.

The activity of an architect is to transform the dream into reality.

Every place, from the desert to the hole, can adapt to our sensibilities to become habitable, provided that the artist has modified it.

As cities grow naturally and reach the nature, some changes occour : a civilization.

This seems incomprehensible to the rational conception of art and history, with its attemps to rationalize an apparent chaos, transforming the products into a real chaos.

Today the mistake of architecture is the belief that athe order is given by the surface, by the skin of buildings and cities.

The order is not visibile, it actually underlies and controls the diversity of elements and structures.

Alternating between the creator (the revolutionary) and the encoder (the conservative), the architect must always choose the first one to survive.

Urban design is the result of:

culture

sensibility

construction technique

street trace

ideology

sexuality

hatred of a man for another

science

sense of humour

Taller de Arquitectura tries the only possible type of urbanism: one in which order and disorder coexist, reciprocally created or both destroyed.

Taller de Arquitectura is prepared to invent possible cities, full of dreams, achievable and imperfect.

Above all imperfect.

"Within the context of the La Manzanera complex and the combination of cubes in space, the building known as La Muralla Roja asks to be considered as a case apart. On the one hand, it embodies a clear reference to the popular architectures of the Arab Mediterranean, in particular to the adobe towers of North Africa, and to a reinterpretation of the Mediterranean tradition of the casbah. At the same time, the labyrinth of this recreated casbah corresponds to a precise geometric plan based on the typology of the Greek cross with arms 5 m (16’) long, these being grouped in different ways, with the service towers (kitchens and bathrooms) at their point of intersection. The geometric basis of the layout represents an approximation to the theories of constructivism, and makes La Muralla Roja a very clear evocation of these. The use of various different tones of paint provides a wealth of different views of the building."**

At the center of Taller ideolgy are two assumptions: the monumental shape (figure) and the social needs.
This project is somehow ideal: it assumes the reference of the arabic casbah. It seems that nothing was invented or freely traced by the artist, rather every element was carefully derived from geography and history.
Therefore any utopic interpretation is excludable:the ideal sought by this project is given by the absolutely realistic models to which it relates.

** qouted text here : http://www.ricardobofill.com/en/6902/Architecture/La-Muralla-Roja.htm

My Iron Lung

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:29:00 +0000

Ianus#06 - My Iron Lung - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers - B&B Italia Offices - Novedrate, Como 1971

"The offices of B & B are at Novedrate, in Brianza, a place with a hot and rather stifling climate in the summer. It thereby provided an opportunity to extend the idea of the double roof (or the loft, if you prefer) to a much larger structure than the housing units at Cusago. In this case the structure between the two layers of the roof also houses the service and ventilation ducts. [...]

B & B is smaller than Centre Pompidou, of course, yet it is still fairly large. I remember that we said, as a sort of challenge: "There shouldn't be any element with a diameter larger than eight centimetres". The idea was to reduce everything to a very slender structure, to a sort of filigree: at bottom, a formal and rather sophisticated exercise, an effort of stylistic and plastic research carried out with the components of metal supporting structures. This challenge provides the key to the building: a span of forty meters made with extremely light self-supporting structures.

It was a work that required a great deal of patience, and some demanding acrobatics. (..) Furthermore, it has a modular structure that can be extended ad infinitum, just by continuing to add elements."*

The program for this new building reacts to three needs:

the expansion of an existing building without creating a nuisance to the latter.
an internal flexibility that could fit in with all the technical and technological needs of a modern working environment.
the possibility for new alteration in the structure following a modular rule.

Following these rules the building appers clear and incontestable: the form is totally dominated by its program.
Everyone of the three consequant space (office, storage,technical equipment) expresses the condition of total isolation.

This building seems to be condamned to a paradox: its sandwich-like frontal view assigns the same height both to the human activity and the mechanical devices (under the roof). In a cynical sense it may appears somehow slave of his technology, especially by the way it gives a picture far more interesting of the mechanical entanglement(especially considering the setup on the top of the second slab) than any of the other plan-libre activity space.
Furthermore, flying over the area, immediately appears a kind of green-grid next to building, at a first glance related to the structural module. Should it be deviously considered a slave of the same overall module?

* this interview to Renzo Piano found here thanks to Giuseppe Alla.

Making the Nature Scene

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Ianus#05 - Making the nature scene - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Jean-Louis-Charles Garnier -Palas Garnier (Operà de Paris) - Paris - 1875

"What will be the size of this foyer? To answer to this question we first need to determine how the walk is practiced.
All that is present in the world is concerned with theater and performance. The palace, the court, the church, the ceremonies, everything that speaks and moves can be definied as theater, at least in a general sense.
The complete theater-craft does not exist, but what exists is its starting point.
The whole world is made up of endless and subsequent scenes, dramatic or comic, and any speech or action sees the presence of actors and spectators." *

A masterpiece of composition, that architects of the Fine-Arts regarded as classic, is the Operà of Paris designed and built by Charles Garnier between 1860 and 1875. Through his writings Garnier exposes some principles about the architecture of an ideal theater that should have based on the perception of the path.
As well as Garnier identifies the chapters of his book, it becomes possible to understand the sequences of spaces considered in their individual integrity: vestibule,stairs, lobby and gallery, stage, ..
The way he deals with the design of each of these spaces seems to transpose the issue in a Ritual dimension.
Thus whatever problem seems to repeat the same ontological root: the rapresentation of a drama.
Assuming that the ladies usually arrive on a coach, while man on foot, he separetes the entries. The ladies reach the heart of the building, arriving in a room all covered with mirrors to check the details of their clothing before reaching the men through the grand staircase of the lobby. The ritual continues on the big staircase with the procession of each couple reaching his own seat.
Garnier divides into four sequences the fact of going to the Opera, metaphorically identified with sections of the drama:
_the arrival in front of the building.
_the meeting.
_the procession on the staircase.
_the contemplation of the scenery.

Similarly to the hotel of Marienbad described by Alain Resnais the sensations induced to the observer are totalizing and alienating: the ambient is brought to the threshold of abstraction. The control becomes the only rule like in a Gestalt cogitation.
The building in itself appears uninterested to a formal integrity,whereas it seems more withdrawn in working out the ideal set for each part of the ritual. From the outside, exactly from the Place du Théâtre Français, three parts of the building are clearly distinguishable:

the gable.
the dome of the auditorium.
the low building of the lobby.

The exterior plainly reveals the artificiality of the machine, honoured to show off its internal devices.

Although the entire composition is overlooked by the Fine Art modus operandi (thus the simmetry,the niches, etcc.. ) only the plan expresses the will to control the fruition: each spactator becames an actor in the eye of the machine. The human gait becomes slave of the machine. Thirty years later someone said: "Le plan est le generateur. Sans plan, il y a desordre, arbitraire.Le plan porte en lui l'essence de la sensation.(...)"**
The outside is clearly dominated by the stratification and the superposition of forms raped by functions. The notion of typology is denyed.

*translated by A.A.Dutto from "The Theatre" written by Charles Garnier, 1871.
** copied out from "Toward an architecture", Le Corbusier, 1925.

Hour of power

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:48:00 +0000

Ianus#04 - Hour of power - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Philip Johnson (with John Burgee) - The Crystal Cathedral - Garden Grove, Los Angeles 1980

"At the age of seventy-two I no longer feel obligated to please anybody. I no longer feel obligated to further modern architecture. I no longer need the moral backing of "progress". I do not have to better anything. And I have always loved moldings and history. While this might lead to the accusation that architecture is little more than taste, there are some of us, of course, who feel that architecture has always been taste. I now think in terms of pleasing myself and not reforming society or developing any kind of moralist vision about the impact of my work on society." *

In 1980 Philip Johnson designed with John Burgee a protestant christian church in the city of Garden Grove, Orange County, on behalf of Reverend Robert Schuller, who had requested a space where the meeting with God could occur "in the presence of the sky and the surrounding world".
In accordance with this program the design was conceived as a large structure consisting of a large tubolar lattice structure covered with reflective glass.
The building looks like a huge cathedral leaning on the the typical low-rise-suburban residential landscape of L.A., really like a white elephant.
The shape of the outer and the inner space, seen in plan, is given as the combination of two lozenges having different width (400*200feet in plan measure) and same center, and expresses its volume as a brilliant shining crystal.
First of all what is interesting about this structure is the lack of an immediate reference to the architecture of glass (think the Mies' glass diasmond skyscraper of 1919) as it is pursued in this building that is not the classical modern quality of Transparency but rather a complex game of Opacity between inside and outside. The aspect that leads to the dramatization of the complex is undoubtedly the implementation of the programmatic pastoral significance (in particular of Schuller's church) from which the symbolic marriage of believers with the Divine literally turns into a popular television scenography.

Bas Princen - Hour of Power - 2005

The quality that secondly demonstrates the critical flow of this project is certainly the dynamics of reflections on its outer surface, shaped in a figure of such inclinations to avoid the nearby Neutra's church and emphasize rather the anonymous suburbs nearby. It therefore becomes the monument of a banality weakly assumed as a condition of its passive insignificance. The shape inside is characterized by numerous convergent triangles but here comes a dilemma: are the triangles symbolizing the sacred triad, or perhaps the optical telescope of a camera?

The postmodern condition of this building is clearly exhibited in two ambiguously modernist aspects: opacity inside and transparency outside:

Opacity becomes the control guarantee of what happens inside, as in this case perhaps incredibly otherwordly events (or perhaps television business!).
Transparency is denied or rather symbolized by a mirror: the banality naked in front of a mirror.

*copied out from the article "Reflections : on style and the International Style; on Postmodernism; on Architecture" by Philip Johnson, in Oppositions, n.10, 1977.

Wall of voodoo

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:08:00 +0000


Ianus#03 - Wall of voodoo - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Federico Zuccari - Palazzetto Zuccari - Roma - 1590

"(..)Perciò la sua casa era un perfettissimo teatro; ed egli era un abilissimo apparecchiatore. Ma nell'artificio quasi sempre egli metteva tutto sé; vi spendeva la ricchezza del suo spirito largamente; vi si obliava così che non di rado rimaneva ingannato dal suo stesso inganno, insidiato dala sua stessa insidia ferito dalle sue stesse armi, a simiglianza d'un incantatore il qual fosse preso nel cerchio stesso del suo incantesimo.
Tutto, intorno, aveva assunto per lui quella inesprimibile apparenza di vita che acquistano, ad esempio, gli arnesi sacri, le insegne d'una religione, gli strumenti d'un culto, ogni figura su cui si accumuli la meditazione umana o da cui l'immagione umana poggi a una qualche ideale altezza.(..)" *

In 1590 the artist Federico Zuccari decided to build his own house in a plot of land located near SS Trinita dei Monti. The trapezoidal-shaped lot has been occupied by a building consisting of three distinct parts: a tower, a palace and a walled enclosure. Articulated as the complexity of a living organism, the head-tower contained the artist's studio, in two overlapping blocks overlooking the square , a vertical expression of Mannerism; adjacent to the opposite side of the square follows a two-storeys high residential block articulated in five axis; the rearmost section, the most famous and interesting part, originally had one storey containing a garden.
The interesting thing about this terminal part are three anthropomorphic gost masks which adorn the garden gate, and two windows. The wonder in front of this architectural work may recall certain element of the beautiful garden of Bomarzo, 50km north of Rome, commmissioned to an unwnown architect by Vicino Orsini during the 16th century. The difference between these two buildings is evident in their localization. The palace of Zuccari, in fact, built a few years later, resumes some sculptural references, however, openly confronting with an urban setting.

What first translates this building into a pure abstraction is the symbolic place where it is located: precisely in that part of the Campus Martius where in 60 b.C. were located the gardens of Lucullus, considered the first model of pleasure hedonistic garden.
The second reason to consider this building as pure abstraction is its origin from the space of representation, considering the relationship with the artist's drawings for the Divine Commedy.

This building has managed to transform the abstractinos in the mind of its creator in an artifact symbolically expressive of the same aspirations.
As the garden path of Bomarzo guides the viewer between different artifacts in the park, without that demonstrates any particular signifiance, so this portal delivers directly into the mind of the urban observer a symbolic access to the wild sublime nature.

* copyed out from "Il Piacere", G. D'Annunzio, 1982, Mondadori.
The novel is set in the Palazzo Zuccari where the protagonist lives.

Lewdly Vitruvian

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 11:50:00 +0000


Ianus#02 - Lewdly vitruvian - drawing by A.A.Dutto

James Stirling - Southgate housing - Runcorn New Town 1967

Following the announcement of the demolition of the complex in 1989 (the entire estate was demolished 1990-92), appeared an article written by Stirling declaring his disapproval:
"Many of the large public housing estates of the 50s, 60s and 70s originated with a planning and design brief of very specific and comprehensive requirements, drawn up by local government officials and their planning advisers. These were given to architects as conclusive and essential criteria for their design proposals.
They determined almost every aspect of the housing and were by far the largest contribution to the eventual appearance and environment of the estates....It seems a little unfair that the architects' input should today be considered as being primarily responsible for the lack of quality.
Southgate was a recipient of this social vision and we were asked to comply with the following: that the housing should be :
_built in a "heavy precast concrete system" and should include "over deck dwellings";
_that it would be low-rise, high-density with specific numbers of two, three, four, five and six "person units"; _that there should be "a net residential density of 100 persons per acre"
_building costs be within government ceilings;
_that the layout should include one shop and one pub
_that the number of dwelling units be 1,800 — "a target population of about 6,500";
_that there should be "1.5 car spaces per dwelling unit with 50 per cent in lock-up garages";
_that we should use a specified district heating system and a specified refuse and storage system;
_Floor to-ceiling heights were given;
_room sizes were to accord with current housing guides;
...difficulties (at Southgate) were contributed to by the management, particularlythe policy of creating residential ghettos of people with social problems, plus difficulties related to district heating and poor maintenance and supervision."*

Notwithstanding the provisions of policies have been very harsh, the architect managed to build an ideal architecture:
_the height of the terraced houses is the same that is typical in eighteenth-century Georgian square of Bath and Edinburgh(300ft*300ft).
_the organisatinon is an L shaped arrangement with two fronts and two backs facing over the garden square; the L shaped arrangement allows orientation of living spaces to the south or west; there are no north facing living rooms.
_all buildings are linked by elevated walkways. The city center is 5 minutes walk far.
_ to prevent traffic moving fast within the housing area, the design of roads widths and corners is to a minimum and the cul-de-sac system is a frustration to fast drinving.
_the color of the walls on the pedestrian path, is used as a distinguishing factor between the different squares.
_circular windows of the bedrooms are so perfect that they were probably taken from the famous Vitruvian Man drawn by Leonardo da Vinci (as evidenced by a famous event of lewdly nudity exposed!...).

The reference to the realistic nature of this project lies in its stated intention to rethink the spaces of human life in its private and public presence, without failing to deal with the requirements of building regulations.
Some forms that identify the elements of the building (the Georgian square, circular windows) become rational elements of reading. The reference to the proportions of the square of Bath is used as a symbol of quality of community life alike the Vitruvian Man is a symbol of privacy.
As this case demonstrates, the ideal cannot be confused with utopian.

*taken from an article entitled "Corporation decision"ruthless and dictatorial", says Stirling" appeared on the Building Design journal in 1889.

Are You Red.....Y

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Alberto Dutto) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 10:47:00 +0000


Ianus#1 - Red as a tool - drawing by A.A.Dutto

Hannes Meyer - Freidorf Siedlung - Muttenz 1921

" -Color-

The color uniformity of all the houses in Freidorf finds its justification in the intimate essence of our cooperative idea. The diversity of colors could have generated a typical individualistic image (kind of petty-bourgeois) and the impression that the houses were built in different periods.

Thus, the color is only a manner to express our unity and our harmony.
Architectural uniformity is also obtained through a uniform color.
Everything could be reduced to the formula: one owner, one will build, and a single period of time for construction.

The tone of color is a dull red that takes on a different intensity depending on whether you look at it from below, standing in the garden, or from the end of the fence or the surrounding mountains. Furthermore the intensity of color may depend on the weather (sun, fog, snow and rain).

It is a symphony of red: faded red walls, red ledges , silver gray windows and roofs of dark red with black -white chimneys on top. There is no color highlighting of individual elements, and there is no conflict between the roofs and walls: there is only the eternal contrast between the red of the houses and the green of nature, between the exciting color of the human work and the calmness of the divine.

In Freidorf appear memories of the old part of Basel, with its famous buildings, including the Cathedral, the Orphanage, the Barracks, and its so different shades of red: red wine, red, rust, brick red or brownish red!

Near Freidorf, down the plain of the battlefield of St. Jakob, the buildings of our ancestors witness the clear superiority of the colors in the middle of the surrounding landscape: in the midst of the cold blue-violet stands the white silhouette of St . Jakob.You can see the white-ocher farmhouse, built in 1507; in the weak red-brown, the old colony sull'Ulmenweg and, as the predominant element, the shiny gold-ocher color of the Bavarian Spinnerei Gellert.

In the limit of this area now lies flat Freidorf, as a symbol of the postwar period, in his whimsical red, exciting and biting; calm and glittering in the mist, shining and glittering in the sun. For each visitor Freidorf remains imprinted in my memory, now friendly, now filthy and brutal.

Depending on the impression that it causes, the visitor is generous with praise or blame, approval or disapproval, and we receive, as appropriate, expressions esteem or contempt."*

This text is not about the color within the limits of its expressive horizon but tends to its identification as an ideological tool.
It's like being in front of the mirror, seeing the reflections of its intents on the glass, and wondering what image is the most truthful.

* translated by Andrea Alberto Dutto from "Die Siedlung Freidorf" in AA.VV. , Siedlung-sgenossenschaft Freidorf, Buchandlung VSK, Basel, 1921.