Festival dell'architettura

Abstract

Is it possible to apply strategies of formal decomposition to the figurative patrimony left in heritage by the generation of Canella, Rossi, Aymonino, Semerani and companions? Or better, isn’t it the only way accessible, after acknowledging that the historical and dialectical conditions in which those architectures and their authors took place can’t be repeated? And even, are we sure that certain figures, taken away from their natural environment and reput in circulation, still don’t preserve something of their original meaning? And how much? Therefore, it’s only by the “historical” betrayal of their world that today it’s possible to release the formal and semantic values, that instead, for their nature, benefit of several lives. Maybe, for does who loved certain forms, it’s the only work to do.

One might well wonder, ten years later, what remains of all the gesticulating and muddle over generational handovers and lines of descent. Wasn’t it right here in Parma that someone had the the gall to draft a map of the self-styled genealogies? It must have been 2005, at any rate there are two issues of “d’Architettura” (28/2005 and 29/2006) to jog the memory. What lovely continuity! Maestros suggesting students and the youngest ones puff out their chests to show themselves equal to the commendation. These things come to mind because in the idea of those who dreamed up and edited this special edition of “FAMagazine”, dedicated to compositional research in schools of architecture, I was supposed to deal with Guido Canella’s teaching schemes. What can I say, it’s plain for all to see: nowadays Canella, Semerani, the Cooper Union, the Valparaiso and Porto schools and their teaching methods are acting on dead ground, ideologically wanting in agreement, but also where, to stay with our own case, the balance between teaching traditions and academic power has come unstuck. This, it seems to me, is the historical reality.

And so, with the convenience waning, the saturation around certain “focal points” watered down, there are two reasons why we might go back to examining those academic studies and teachings: historiographic or operational. Let’s leave aside the historiography and deal with the operational bit. First off, we need to distinguish between external and internal traditions. As regards imported traditions, it will surely be said that plucking out Hejduk in two thousand and sixteen is way past the sell-by date and that the contemporary situation is already elsewhere. I couldn’t agree more; nonetheless, it’s one thing to let historians and critics keep us up to date, quite another to look at how much certain practices can meet our own highly personal obsessions, some oversight or gap in the subject’s transmission mechanisms used until the other day. With more qualms over transferring a practice or a teaching approach from one side of the ocean to the other, which seems to me a rather artificial and provincial operation. Sure, a teaching approach will always be the expression of an idea of the world, of a specific ideology, but then so are forms. And yet these have always been free to move, to cross the seas or the Alps. They’ve always done so and even Saverio Muratori had to admit a certain hybridization when it came to the “special” factories due to cultural questions, given that consistency between environment and type only occurred at the fabric level. And so I wouldn’t get too choosy if some youngster showed interest in certain mechanisms from New York and wanted to use them, and I wouldn’t even measure such an option against today’s benchmark. If there’s one thing that these years of post-modernism have left us it’s the fact that history never follows a straight line and that the past is always there for the picking. In fact, to take Pasolini to heart, the past always possesses a contestational value compared to the current situation. And this too is a concept that we should bear in mind while we’re struggling to keep ourselves up to date.

Then, let’s admit it, it’s one thing to work with forms and figures loaded with signs and symbols and use these in a process of decanting, overwriting, excitation or parody (the ways are infinite), it’s quite another to work on procedures that are anything but neutral and bring about certain results rather than others, but in the end maintain their instrumental status. And so blessed be these decanted teachings if they help regenerate the departure factors. Because the fact that those never change, remained fixed and only adjust very slowly, and that Bramante in Milan will never be the Solari, just as Schifano, the Festa or Franco Angeli will remain that gangland and antiquated whiff rising from Piazza del Popolo to cheerfully corrupt the importation model. So, while understanding the natural inertia with which teaching traditions tend to be perpetrated, are we really sure that the link between procedures and forms can’t be unfastened? That certain practises can’t daringly renew consolidated traditions?

However, the real problem is not the teachings, but the forms, because these really do embrace an idea of the world, and even when teachings have long ceased being productive and no one can piece together which exercises or steps Luciano Semerani trained his students with any more, the forms will remain and carry on working.

Here we are then. The real point is that of the forms and even more so in Italy, where, when all is said and done, we haven’t had a formal teaching tradition, on the contrary, forms and figures, as rich as they may be in compositional terms, have always had to find their raison d’être elsewhere: whether ideological, political, typological, disciplinary or historical. Never formal processes, never revelations of compositional mechanisms, but references to the city, to society and, for the tougher-skinned, to their own autobiography – but how can we not forget that to achieve an autobiography meant passing through a theory of the city and architecture? And yet, for many years, on the PhD courses in Venice and Milan it was maintained that the peculiarity of research must be none other than composition! That only composition could be taught with a certain objectivity, without tumbling into the intricate labyrinth of personal languages. Even if it’s one thing to dismantle the compositional mechanisms of a creator, but it’s quite another to sketch out procedures to arrive at the form, and it seems to me that this has never happened in Italy, at least among the champions of the Thirties Generation. How come? Quite simply because the forms and figures had no formal origin and as a result formal processes in that direction could not be hypothesized, but drew on historical transfigurations, highly personal interpretations, whose expressive strength was enough to impose a school. And these schools – I suppose many will disagree, but it’s true – become established and are founded more on the strength of representation than on consistency between theory and practice. It’s the persuasive power of images which end up being shared that consolidate a school, not the efficacy of the analytical tools adopted. This might already have been clear twenty years ago, but it was necessary to be able to look at that era from a more external point of view, since, internally, the links between theoretical assumptions, ideological standpoints, forms, and the personalities of the teachers were anything but loose. And the teacher’s etymons came to be adopted not out of laziness or adulation, as the misguided might insinuate, but to participate in a precise idea of the world.

And so, should some young PhD student be interested in these facts, I would urge him or her to try, starting from the original syntax and vocabulary of these so-called maestros, to reconstruct how at school they slacken and manipulate certain components, stiffen in others and then assess the contributions of various students, which distortions and hybridizations they have brought. But beware – it’s not the quality of the etymon that’s at stake, but its transmissibility, its capacity for adaptation. Nor is there a question mark whether Canella or Rossi fuelled this linguistic extension, if this came about naturally or they left the task to their underlings (other specious doubts), but this is exactly what happened, it’s a fact that can be rediscovered with negligible effort by leafing through magazines and teaching publications of the time. Nonetheless, only the devious can ignore the gratification given by speaking a common language, by possessing the linguistic codes we wish to recognize one another through.

Take this drawing by Umberto Bloise, who graduated under Guido Canella in 1990. Does it not tell of the desire to share a language and at the same time the manipulation forced upon the student? I’ve copiously rifled those drawings for my degree thesis, in a certain sense more bewitched by the vulgar transcription and bastardized stylistic traits than the original. Perhaps because they seemed to me more susceptible to being modified, to allowing further alterations. I’m well aware that conscientious teachers advise their students to draw on the original source, but at that time, in some way, the problem was not to learn directly from the maestro, but to belong to his school, therefore to speak the language derived from him, tapping into the jargon, as something more intimate and intense. In fact, I’ve always looked on with astonishment and envy at the mannered outburst that issued forth from the graduates and students of Antonio Acuto, who, for those in the dark, was one of Canella’s very first students.

It seems to me a rather interesting piece of research to reconstruct these linguistic oscillations between the school walls, while it would also help to shift the spotlight onto a more textual dynamic. And this is not so much because of a pre-eminence of structural analysis tout court, but because I have the impression that work of this type tends to further loosen the consolidated historical connections, allowing a highly original figurative legacy to become working material once again.

We might also say, turning to terminology taken from linguistics, wishing to work in that area of relationships between signified and signifier. Which is an area that is constantly shifting, and in fact, for the artist or architect should constitute the main field of work, while it naturally falls to the historian to nail the two terms on top of one another to correspond to a determined historical section. At this point, it should be said that the decanting of concepts from linguistics to architecture is a source of infinite speculation, and if anyone fancies experiencing first hand all the entanglements of the problem there is still Meaning in Architecture by Jencks and Baird as a highly methodical compendium. Nevertheless, it seems to me that perhaps the question can be traced to the realization that every architectural form harks back to a meaning or several simultaneous meanings, with a spectrum ranging from a technical, functional, distributional meaning to a symbolic one, which in the very perception of these relationships is destined to be modified over time, and what was simply the accomplishment of distribution issues can later take on an unexpected ideological value. I’ll try to give two examples: almost forty years after the building of Beaubourg, its technological guts and air conditioning tubes so very radically paraded on the façade, and whose technological paroxysm, at the time, could oscillate between faith in technical rationality or a parody of it – depending on whether it was read through the Archigram lens or not. Nowadays, in these years of smart technology, it almost inspires endearment, like the smokestacks of the locomotives at the Museum of Science and Technology; to the extent that I really can’t say whether those coloured tubes can still claim that technological law is worth almost as much as the genius loci or history. Then again, in the 2010s, how much functional reasoning still attaches to works of rationalism? Or better, we must note how these have accentuated their stylistic dimension, freezing into involuntary landmarks of every presumed minimalist trend.

Consequently, not glimpsing any ascending Zeitgeist on the horizon, why not work on the terrain, by now historically vast, that has opened up between signifieds and signifiers? Let there be no mistake, not in critical or hermeneutic terms but as architects, i.e. aware that the game can be continuously bolstered and that, as a result, every move can go towards accentuating or diminishing or overturning the remaining original meaning, proceeding by juxtaposition or overwriting or elision, until reduced to a pure morpheme, susceptible in turn to being put back into the dance of meanings, and equally conscious that every move works in a different way according to context.

All of this can reasonably be applied to the legacy of forms and figures bequeathed to us by the Thirties Generation. Suffice to wait and it will occur naturally. Already for today’s students, born in the nineties, to mention Aldo Rossi or Guido Canella or Luciano Semerani or Gianugo Polesello, rather than Le Corbusier, Aalto or Mies amounts to the same thing; just a few more years and it will also hold good for the Koolhaas and Libeskinds. And so the problem is only for those who were students of Rossi, Canella, Semerani, or Polesello. And it’s precisely in this connection that I believe that textual practices of a formal breaking down need to be encouraged. It will be almost impossible to restore the historical and dialectic conditions through which Canella’s school complexes tried to epically alter a hinterland of Milan raped by speculation, and yet something of the original meaning remains “stuck” to those forms and is not mechanically extinguished once the links with the original task have been torn apart, but remains operative. For how long I’ve no idea, it depends on many factors. However, it seems to me that only through the “historical” betrayal of that world will it be possible to immediately liberate the formal values, which instead enjoy many lives and are, by nature, polysemic (Galvano della Volpe said something of this sort) and can be reorganized: betraying therefore, or better, severing, grafting, altering, overturning, reiterating; testing proximity, intolerance, resistance, couplings, as obscene as they are judicious. Conceivably, for those who have loved certain forms, the only work to be done; which also means paying through the nose for what we are and for those who were the legends of our training. Then, in any case, “participation in modern events will happen inevitably”. These, however, are words of Arcangeli.

Elvio Manganaro (Pavia, 1976) has a PhD in Architectural composition and conducts educational activity at Polytechnic University of Milan and Turin. He published Funzione del concetto di tipologia edilizia in Italia (Bruno Mondadori, 2013); Scuole di architettura. Quattro saggi su Roma e Milano (Unicopli, 2015); Warum Florenz? O delle ragioni del’espressionismo di Michelucci, Ricci, Savioli e Dezzi Bardeschi (Libria, 2016).

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