Festival dell'architettura

The essay is about the difficult theme of building an identity of Italian Architecture, starting from what elaborated and produced in the second half of the Nineteenth century and founded on two basic terms: Theory, on one hand, and City, on the other hand. The issues of the architecture of the city by Rossi, constant in the reasoning of Masters as Rogers, Samonà and Quaroni, find in the Analogy, firstly as theory of design, a possible way to manage today the complexity of the contemporary world.

The issue of identity is a slippery theme that risks being dividing more than joining, in architecture as in other fields of knowledge, if it is true that, in philosophy, for instance, the principle of identity is defined related to the principle of contradiction as logical principle that states the identity of a thing with itself – A is A – and excludes the identity with the other – A isn’t non A –. It is a relevant theme in our age that Marc Augè defined surmodernité «[…] combined result of an acceleration of history, a constriction of space and an individualization of destinies [1]». All the three conditions, observed by the anthropologist Augè related to the human behaviours, concerned very closely also architecture that, under a time faster proceeding, a world becoming smaller for the development of transportation systems and the individualization of the human life, lost its connotation of civil art, representative of a community. This concept was well expressed by Vittorio Gregotti in his definition of architecture as artistic practice [2] not flattened or on mere technique or on mere art: equidistant from the first – that aims to time acceleration and makes what you did before obsolete – but also from the second that can be subjective and is not responsible of spaces construction where a community should recognize itself, the fixed scene of human life by Rossi. Many scholars, especially the sociologist Roberto de Vita [3], underlined the many contradictions that globalization generated in the contemporary world where in fact an increase in inequality was produced and the research of identity often resulted in the rejection of the other: the challenge is today in the construction of ‘identity regulations’ in a context that has to be relational and dialogic but, in order to be effective, has to start from the recognition of himself to recognize the other and has to realize a identity construction process not fixed and immobile but under continuous construction.

Talking about architecture and Italy, there are two words, strictly related, that could be the keys of a possible reasoning about identity of Italian architecture; the two words are Theory and City. The word Theory, in Greek, has the same etymological root of theatre and of the verb theorein (θεωρεῖν) from thea (θέα) “a view” e horan (ὁρᾶν) “to see, to observe”. Thus, in some way, the theory, for the Greeks, is the act of observing, with eyes and mind, and in this sense is not related to an abstract dimension but to reality. The philosopher of realism György Lukács come back to mind, with the words: «Architecture is a construction of a real space, adequate, able to visually evoke adequacy [4]». The possibility of Architecture to represent – visually evoke – its same essence and the coherence to it of the form is thus related to the existing of Theory. On the other hand, the City, as the historian and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant recalls, is indissolubly linked to the birth of classical age characterized by «[…] a double and solidary innovation: the establishment of city and the birth of a rational thought [5]». Thereafter – and for over two thousand years – in the Western world Architecture has always been representation of civil values, shared by a community.

Theory and City are in the middle of thought and work of three Masters of Italian Architecture of the twentieth century that, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales observed, represented three vertices of an intellectual circle that elaborated the principles of a new and original rationalism that later found a first stable point in the work by Aldo Rossi for the XV Triennale of Milan in 1973. The three Masters, to which Solà-Morales matches three Schools not always correspondent to universities, are Ernesto Nathan Rogers in Milan, Giuseppe Samonà in Venice and Ludovico Quaroni in Roma. The essay by Solà-Morales underlines the theoretical specific principles of this movement, between others, in the reductionism, the imitation, the return to the things themselves, starting from a critical revision of the Modern funded on an original taste for history and the material analysis of architecture that finds in the city the place where observe «[…] the montage and the articulation of few permanent and immutable elements [that] combines themselves in a not mechanic but compositive way […] define the whole field of the possible operations [6]». The space of this essay not allow to treat deeply the theoretical thought of the three mentioned Masters but their works – borrowing the metaphor about the necessary relationship between the rib and the arc [7] as theory and work in architecture, where the arc remains, with its form, evoking also the existence of the structure that made possible its construction – introduced the issue of analogy as theory of design that found its specification in Italy in relationship with history and, thus, with the city. Velasca Tower by BBPR was born, in the same years of the algid and atopic Pirelli skyscraper, in an indissoluble relationship with the forms of the historical architecture in Milan; the San Marco Village by Giuseppe Samonà proposed again the venetian campiello as usual and consonant form of inhabiting, even if in a new condition immersed in the nature, of open-city; Ludovico Quaroni, in the project for the enlargement of Opera of Rome, works again on architectural order as instrument for the definition of building character. Elements taken from History, known in the City, for the construction of a design Theory: «This built city is founded on artefacts but artefacts are by now theories [8]» is the sentence by Aldo Rossi that explains the indissoluble link between City, History and Theory, a link that becomes architectural reality, definitely for Rossi, through the analogical thought. In 1976, Rossi published on «Lotus» magazine, commenting the famous collage, a text titled La città analoga: tavola: it is a ‘political’ text about the beauty of the city, a beauty that Rossi defined helpful but that is likely «[…] to bother the aggressive, business and bureaucratic interventions»: from here the necessity of «[…] imagining the future starting form the reality otherwise there is not solution for the city as social artefact par excellence [9]». A warning related to relationship between architecture, as capability of imagining the future, and reality that is, forty years later, still quite actual, even if in a world characterized by an always increasing level of complexity. Thus, complexity as connotation of our contemporary age as was well described by Edgar Morin. «There is complexity only when the different components that make a whole are inseparable […] and when there is a interdependent, interactive and inter-retroactive link between the parts and the whole and between the whole and the parts [10[]» to which it is necessary to apply a complex thought. «One of the axiom of complexity is the impossibility, also theoretical, of omniscience» – Morin again stated – «Recognition of a principle of incompleteness and uncertainly. The complex thought is animated by a permanent tension between aspiration to a not fragmented, sectorial and reductive thought and the recognition of incompleteness of any knowledge [...] [11]». Faced with this condition «Analogy [can be] the dispositive that, in any antinomy and aporia, shows their logical unavoidability and, at the same time, makes possible not so much their composition but their moving and transformation [12]» making true, in some ways, a progressive character of our acting that, in architecture, is linked to the idea of continuity by Rogers. A way of thinking that is not opposite to the logical thought but integrate it in the field of a rationalism intended, with Antonio Monestiroli, as «[…] concatenation of steps, where there are also ‘unsafe steps’ as analogy that is an unsafe step even if also rational. In the sense that the reference to analogy has always a recognisable reason [13]».

In the Italian Dictionary, voice analogy, we read «relationship of similarity between some constitutive elements of two facts or objects, as to mentally deduct a certain degree of similarity between the facts and the objects themselves [14]»; continuing, the detailed meanings that the word assumes in the different disciplines are listed and, between them, the definition in biology is particularly effective, it states: «[…] identity or similarity of the functions of structurally different organs […]». There isn’t architecture but, in the previous definition, we can replace function with purpose – in the sense Kant gave it – and organs with architectures to obtain a possible definition of architectural analogy made of «different things that illuminate themselves, or acquire different light if juxtaposed [in time or space]» so that «analogy, at every comparison, increases our capability of knowledge [15]».

Federica Visconti (Naples, 1971) graduated in Architecture in 1995, first class honours. PhD in 2002 in Urban Design at the University of Naples Federico II, in 2003 obtained a biannual specialization degree in Architectural and Urban Design. Associate Professor of Architectural Design at the DiARC_Department of Architecture at the University of Naples “Federico II” since 2011. Member of the Scientific Committee of the magazine EDA_esempi di architettura and of many Editorial Board of Series about Theory of architecture and Urban Project. One of the principal research subjects is the relationship between rational architecture and new realism starting form the assumptions developed in the Italian debate of the Sixties and Seventies of the Twentieth century.

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