Festival dell'architettura

Ladder. Solar Pavilion. Alison and Peter Smithson. Photography of Peter Smithson

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Abstract
The article proposes to free architecture from Techné and Hermeneia, and allow the latter to be merely a source of stimuli for perception. It is, ultimately, the assertion of architecture as an event and of the body as the territory in which architecture happens.

Call me Ishmael, exhorts the narrator in Moby Dick. And in so doing, annuls the distance between narrator and reader to trap the latter in an irresistible complicity. In the same way, the theme of Impossible Research in Architecture invites an annulment of distance and theory this inquisitorial gaze of the Greek theorein, equally expects to adopt the purest contingency. As in an upside down carnival, we feel we are invited to remove the academic mask, to forget critiques and history and just perceive, perceive architecture with the intensity of a child or a lover, without mediation, without transcendence.

Let us leave Hermes aside as a trafficker of meanings, we will no longer ask him for messages from the gods. At least for today, let us give architecture the opportunity to show itself without strange garbs, without history, innocent. Let us draw near to it with primordial, almost childish curiosity. Let us look for it with the body.

Architecture happens in the body, it dissolves in it. As Juan Navarro Baldeweg has said, it can be understood as a form of body-art. In my body have taken place the Pantheon of Rome and the churches of Lewerentz, St. Patrick’s Well and the towers of San Gimignano, the Villa Mairea and the Katsura Detached Palace. Architecture is "inscribed" in the body, tattooed onto it.

A tale is a ciphered code, written permanently in the object-book that contains it, but only during reading does it activate in the reader's mind. Only by opening the book of Moby Dick and starting to read it do the voice of Ishmael appear to us, along with the boundless seas, the ferocity of the whale, the hatred of Captain Ahab. In the same way, architecture is latent in the material built, and appears only when it is observed and listened to, when asked after, when interrogated. Architecture is reawakened in the moment when someone demands light, distances, or colours from it, or becomes interested in the roughness of its surface, its structure.

In addition, it is not necessary to go out to look for it. Architecture happens; it assails or accompanies you. Perhaps it is not separate from you. I am talking about those special moments when it is not possible to distinguish the one perceiving from what is perceived. This is the experience sought by the haiku, the unity between the subject, the object and the act, which Zen Buddhism calls satori.

What you see is what you see. We accept as pure amazement or pure wellbeing the sensations that architecture offers us, nothing more, without the need for symbolic relations to interpret.

We call "architecture" that intermittent phenomenon which occurs at particular moments, the rest of the time there is only the inert built material. Understood thus, architecture is an "instantaneous" phenomenon, something that "happens".

Only in the moment does it become eternal. The time adverbs: then, yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, carry the germ of ruin. With duration and its narcotic deceits expelled, we welcome "instant architecture", which appears as a feast, which dissolves in the moment of perception, like the flashings of fireworks.

The great architect Josep Llinás says that architecture is what follows the construction. For him, architecture is rest while construction is work. Architecture is the feast, the celebration, what emerges when the work ends. It brings us elementary pleasures, what can be achieved without effort, without even asking for it, the generous and impassioned pleasures of the feast.

In the same way architecture "is impregnated" with stories of life; its walls are never blank. In fact, architecture without an inhabitant is nothing. Adorno said that art is in relation with the other. Architecture, like art, is only realized in the other. And the other, in this case, is the inhabitant. In the same way, for those who inhabit it, architecture becomes their alter ego. The house is a sort of split "I". Architecture, impregnated with habit, retreats, becomes the volume of a shadow. It is located behind us, silent, alert, eager. Architecture, the house, is faithful only to its inhabitants, and yet it is invisible to them.

We make the house, and in turn, the house makes us. The house follows its own statute in the assembly of beings that share the same place. Inhabitants establish a covenant with their house in terms of privacy and immunity. The house awaits them, approaches when they meditate and expands when it receives. In the unconscious the house recedes, to the gaze it becomes elated. When a house is left, it always retains something of its inhabitants.

In My Blueberry Nights, the film by Wong Kar-Wai, Lizzy (Norah Jones) approaches her old home every night to gaze, with anxiety and suffering, at the only light in the building where she was once happy and where perhaps he – here the spasm of pain – continues to stay with another women. In Wakefield, the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a husband, under the pretext of a business trip, leaves his home in London and disappears for twenty years. However, he has not escaped to some far-off place but has hidden in the same neighbourhood and every day comes closer and closer to his house. Li, slinking in the shade, observes the inside of what was once his home and his wife inside it.

Abandoned houses produce melancholy. Giorgio Agamben, with regard to the melancholy of loving, says that this "would not be so much the result of a regressive action due to the loss of the object of love, but the illusory capacity to make what has been lost appear as an object we cannot appropriate.” Melancholy, masterfully portrayed by Dürer in the engraving that bears the name Melencolia I, is the feeling produced by an empty house, one that has lost its inhabitant. In this situation, the house or its observer thus generate a substitute of its inhabitant, which is the ghost.

The house is a unitary construction in which are condensed the features and traces of living. The house is a container of "conditioned air", i.e., a place to share the air we breathe and the habits of living together. The house, all of architecture, is an exception for its atmosphere, a sign for others and a shelter for ourselves. In a story by Scott Fitzgerald it is established that the most suitable size for a house is one in which the voice of the mother reaches every last corner.

Dante in the Purgatory of The Divine Comedy tells of the bitter taste of the bread of others and of how steep the stair is in an unknown house. The main character of In Search of Lost Time feels an inexplicable terror when he remains only in the luxurious room of the Grand Hotel de Balbec. Nevertheless, Hölderlin finds relief in the dwelling that the carpenter Zimmermann offers him in the tower along the Neckar.

Looking at the horizon from a house is like looking on an equal footing, because we feel that we have architecture behind us. Architecture is a latent fact that strengthens the evolutive frontality of the human being, because it protects our back, which has no vision ("covers our shoulders"). Architecture, then, does not require attention; it is pure latency, the volume of a shadow. With architecture and the house, the human being has brought into play a world that is complex and changeable which opposes Nature. The artifice is constituted as a counter-power of Physis. The vertical, the hero of Barnett Newman, rises against the horizon.

Today we can afford to forget Culture, to roam with mind empty. Only today will we remain innocent, even if we know well that architecture, understood as the inside opposing the great outside of Nature, is a solid symbolic structure that protects us from old threats, no less disturbing than cold or noise.

Architecture accompanies you, stays with you, discreetly, in the shadow. "Feel it" today without delay, tomorrow maybe you can ask about its name and its history, its creator and the symbols with which it has been invested. As an old song by Stephen Stills says: "Love the one you're with." Love and feel the architecture that accompanies you, be it a humble fisherman's cottage or the Empire State Building.

Full Professor in Architectural Design at the Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad Europea de Madrid, which he directed from 2003 to 2006. He is member of the Research Group [Inter]sección Filosofía- Arquitectura and editor of the Research Magazine REIA (Revista Europea de Investigación en Arquitectura).
He is the author of El claro en el bosque. Reflexiones sobre el vacío en arquitectura (ARQUIA, 1999) and Madre Materia (LAMPREAVE, 2009), which combines topics of architecture, art and philosophy. Both volumes were published in Italy by Marinotti.