Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less is Enough

Reading List
I cannot resist reproducing in full Luis Fernández-Galiano's review of three books by the young Italian theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli, published in Arquitectura Viva 158.  

31/01/2014
Pier Vittorio Aureli ‘Less is Enough’

Luis Fernández-Galiano
The architect and professor Pier Vittorio Aureli has just published an electronic book, Less is Enough, with Strelka Press, the editorial branch of the research institute promoted by Rem Koolhaas in Moscow, and the launching of this lucid and timely tract on austerity and asceticism gives a good excuse to look at his two previous works, The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011). Co-founder of the collective DOGMA, Aureli has taught extensively outside Italy – at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Architectural Association in London, and Yale University –, which explains why texts strongly rooted in the political and architectural debates of his country appear first in English. The two being reviewed here are meticulously edited by Joan Ockman (The Project...) and Cynthia Davidson (The Possibility...), who have managed to present the author’s ideas in limpid, pedagogical English prose.

The Project of Autonomy is a convincing description of the ideological debates in Italian architecture of the 1960s, a stimulating intellectual panorama that Aureli analyzes under the prism of the Rome-born philosopher Mario Tronti, whose political thinking he relates both to the architectural proposals of the Tendenza gathered around the Milanese Aldo Rossi, and to the utopian designs of Archizoom and Superstudio in Florence. The current senator Tronti was half a century ago the driving force and theorist of ‘operaism’, a radical Communist movement that would also involve the young Toni Negri, and which in time would bring about Autonomia Operaia. Aureli links the autonomy of the political, as defended by Tronti – who strove to reconcile the ideas of Karl Marx with those of the jurist of Nazism Carl Schmitt – with the autonomy of the architectural, as advocated by Rossi through the categories of type and place; and also connects the view of the philosopher of ‘society as factory’ with the No-Stop City of Andrea Branzi and his Archizoom companions, who proposed a zero degree of architecture that owed much to the urban ideas of Ludwig Hilberseimer, rediscovered at the time by a colleague of Rossi, Giorgio Grassi. This political and poetic landscape of Messianic effervescence – set against liberal democracy and the old guard represented by Bruno Zevi, Giulio Carlo Argan, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers – culminated and ironically also came to an end with two exhibitions, the one curated by Emilio Ambasz at the MoMA in 1972, and the Triennale di Milano directed by Rossi in 1973, a melancholy epilogue that Aureli duly records, while showing his dismay at the de-politicization of postmodern society.

Similar sentiments and anxieties inspired The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, an effort to define the political and the formal in architecture through the opposition between the city with limits and urbanization without them, polemicizing with the urban theories of Cerdá, Hilberseimer, Archizoom, and Koolhaas, and finding in the late work of Mies the best expression of an ‘absolute architecture’: an archipelago of well-defined forms rising on clear-cut plinths in the amorphous, unlimited sea of urbanization. Aureli finds the origins of this strategy in the work of four architects – Palladio, Piranesi, Boullée, and Ungers – who confronted the city project from the angle of architectural form, and combs through their work from a viewpoint closer to theory than to history. Defending the Greek polis against the Roman urbs, and thus nomos against lex, Aureli, like Tronti, resorts to Carl Schmitt to explain limits from the optic of political differentiation between friend and enemy, and to support well-delimited places and forms in the city over the systems and indefinite flows of urbanization, which has imposed its economic logic everywhere.

In his latest work, Aureli questions the current clamor for austerity, pointing out the ambiguity of its ascetic component, which can be both a tool of oppression and a form of resistance. Going through the history of monastery life, from the hermits and the abbeys governed by the Rule of Saint Benedict to the altissima paupertas of the Franciscan reform, and stretching the story to include the bohemian poverty of Baudelaire, the precarious life of Walter Benjamin, or the simple room proposed by Hannes Meyer as an alternative to the Existenzminimum, Aureli censures the monastic minimalism of Pawson, the pastoral humility of Zumthor, and even the asceticism of Steve Jobs for its pseudo-religious spiritual aura, and encourages us to replace the Miesian ‘less is more’ with ‘less is enough’, making the shedding of material things the basis of a life freed of the anxiety of production and possession. With his determination to bring into the current debate the political dimension of more ideologized times, Pier Vittorio Aureli has acquired a voice of his own, a voice that deserves to be heard.

Arquitectura Viva 158


From the introduction to Less Is Enough
"Asceticism ... allows subjects to focus on their life as the core of their own practice, by structuring it according to a self-chosen form made of specific habits and rules. This process often involves architecture and design as a device for self-enactment. Because asceticism allows subjects to focus on the self as the core of their activity, the architecture that has developed within this practice is an architecture focused not on representation but on life itself – on bios, as the most generic substratum of human existence." 

 Pier Vittorio Aureli

Go to Strelka Press, publishers of Less is Enough

Photo:
Becoming Political
Markus Miessen in conversation with Pier Vittorio Aureli
Build, 06/2008

Quote from the interview above:

"How can knowledge be transferred and produced in a meaningful way today?"
"By learning to not be hyperactive. This is a criticism that I address first to myself, every day. To not produce too much, to not design too much, to not travel too much, to not promote too much, to not network too much, to not be everywhere all the time. In short: to learn again to be sedentary and laconic. To learn that refusal, omission and inaction are also positive ways to do something." 

Manhattan As Muse: Europeans In New York

Arquitectura Viva 76, January - February 2001

Pages 17 - 23 (Spanish), 110 - 111 (English), cover.

© Arquitectura Viva, David Cohn. All rights reserved.

The current wave of European incursions into New York, with major new building projects announced by Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron and others, is the culmination of a courtship that first began in 1978 with a book, Koolhaas' Delirious New York. Delirious offered a mytho-critical analysis of the city as a pleasure-ground of capitalist excess, of surreal juxtapositions and promiscuous concentrations. Its style recalls something of the anarchic spirit of the Situationalists, absorbed in Koolhaas' years of study at London's AA. The book relished in sites such as the New York Athletic Club, a 1930s skyscraper with a different ludic activity programmed for every floor; in the lurid popular amusements of Coney Island; and in the exaggerated luxuries of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, such as berths for private railroad cars in its basements. Koolhaas' inspired portrayal of the city in the voluptuous terms of consumer desire, seduction and satisfaction anticipated the architecture of spectacle that currently dominates commercial building in New York and elsewhere. Contemporary European icons such as MVRDV's Dutch Pavilion at the Hannover Expo, with its sandwich-like stack of natural habitats, would be unthinkable without it.

Delirious set the tone for the encounter between Koolhaas' European generation and New York. It remains the best expression of the fascination that the city has exerted on overseas admirers, as seen in works ranging from the Manhattan Transcripts of Bernard Tschumi in the late 1970s to the deliriously unrealistic proposals for the Museum of Modern Art submitted by Herzog and de Meuron and Koolhaas himself in 1997. As might be expected, however, the book offers a take on the city that North Americans themselves have been slow to embrace, as the results of the MoMA competition suggested (more on this later). But with so many projects by members of the Koolhaas generation currently underway in Manhattan, it now appears that this reticence has been overcome, for reasons we shall examine here.

Built by waves of immigrants, New York has always looked to Europe for its architectural models. Its first buildings were Dutch and English rowhouses, the building type on which the 1811 plan of the city was based. But in addition to this typological dependence, which was eventually superseded by technical innovations, New York has also maintained a strong stylistic dependence on Europe. In this respect, 19th century New York differed from Chicago, where less need was felt to stretch conventional forms of stylistic dress over the oversized buildings produced by naked commercial interest.

Leading New York architects of the 19th century such as Richard Morris Hunt and Ernest Flagg routinely studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. The English models of the early 19th century, the Georgian townhouses and Puginesque Gothic churches, were successively succeeded by buildings in an eclectic variety of European styles, from the Greek Revival and Italianate to the French Second Empire style, the Romanesque of H. H. Richardson and contemporary German immigrants, and the neoclassical Beaux-Arts style introduced at the 1892 Chicago Fair.

Modern architecture was introduced to New York in much the same spirit, as an imported stylistic dress. Hitchcock and Johnson's 1932 book The International Style established the precedent, substituting the revolutionary tone of European avant-garde manifestos for cool formal appraisals. The Mies-inspired office towers of the 1950s by firms such as Harrison and Abramovitz or Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) essentially replaced the stone, brick and terra cotta facades of the 1920s and 30s for the glass curtain wall, and the stepped profiles created by the 1916 zoning law for stingy versions of the Seagram Building's plaza and tower.

Though New York depended stylistically on Europe, few European or foreign-born architects have built significant work in the city. In the 19th century, of course, the difficulties of trans-Atlantic travel generally made a crossing a one-way affair, as in the case of English architect Richard Upjohn, author of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street (1846). By the beginning of the 20th century, immigrating European craftsmen had made the most impressive impact on the city, from the Italian masons who laid mosaic tile floors in the lobbies of thousands of tenement housing blocks to the Catalan Gustavino brothers, who introduced a system of Catalan tile vaulting that was used in civic monuments such as Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library.

One of the most singular architects to emerge from this immigrant culture was the Austrian-born Joseph Urban, whose career is a good illustration of the light-hearted tone with which modern architecture was first received in New York. Born in 1872, Urban came to the United States in 1911 as art director of the Boston Opera. Later in New York, he designed the stage sets for several hundred theatrical productions, as well as some of the city's most fashionable Art Deco night spots of the 1920s, such as the Ziegfield Theater, home of the Ziegfield Follies, and the Central Park Casino. Working with the George B. Post firm In 1928, he designed an elaborately-decorated tower on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street for the Hearst magazine group, described by the AIA Guide to New York City as a "Secessionist skyscraper," of which only the base was built [Norman Foster's Hearst Tower completed the building a decade after I wrote this]. And in 1930 he built one of New York's first International Style buildings, the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street, which soon became home to the exiled German philosophers of the Frankfurt School. Urban's work is an architectural equivalent to the mixture of popular and European cultures that transformed Hollywood in the 1930s, and gave rise in New York to figures such as George Gershwin.

But the commercial nature of architectural practice in New York in fact offered few opportunities to the exiled European architects of the 1930s and 40s, who were drawn instead to the Bauhaus-modeled schools established at Harvard and Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology. Important international figures of the postwar period were granted only a token presence in Manhattan, from Mies' Seagram Building and Le Corbusier's and Niemeyer's minimal participation in the United Nations, to Gropius' disappointing collaboration on the Pan Am Building (with Emery Roth and Pietro Belluschi, 1963), Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum (1966), Pier Luigi Nervi's little-known George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal in upper Manhattan (1966), and José Luis Sert's state-financed housing of the 1970s on Roosevelt Island - a list to which we could justly add Wright's Guggenheim Museum, his only work in New York. This record is hardly worse than that of other world cities of the period, but it fades in significance when compared to the transforming impact that corporate-style local architects had on the city's profile in the same years, as seen in Robert Stern's fascinating book, New York 1960 (Monacelli Press, 1995).

This isolation began to erode in the 1970s chiefly due to the impact of Peter Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, founded in 1967, which for the first time offered foreign architects an academic haven in New York. Eisenman's center was the first to recognize the enormous potential of New York's position as an international city and port of entry. Its influence soon spread to neighboring schools, including Columbia, Hejduk's Cooper Union, and Princeton, where figures such as Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vidler, Raimund Abraham, Bernard Tschumi and others found permanent teaching positions, and stars such as Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi spent extended teaching terms.

The best years of the Institute coincided with the appearance of Koolhaas' Delirious, and the rise of New York as an alluring muse in its own right for foreign visitors. Europe did not arrive on American shores this time only as an imported style (though Philip Johnson was quick to adapt Post Modernism in these terms, and was soon followed by all the commercial firms). Rather, visiting Europeans entered into a direct, two-way dialogue with the city, plunging into the flourishing downtown arts scene of galleries and experimental performance venues, made possible by low-rent industrial spaces and abundant grant money, of which the grant-supported Institute itself was an example.

This vibrant cultural scene was part of downtown Manhattan's booming bohemian underworld of fashionable all-night discotheques, post-hippie organic restaurants, raw, illegal loft dwellings and the like, a world populated by a young urban generation composed not only of the usual self-exiled refugees from the North American heartland, but also by a new international crowd. In the old non-residential districts of lower Manhattan, de-industrialization had left behind a fantasmal landscape of decaying urban shipwrecks, which the new city dwellers transformed into a playland of anarchic action (as in the building cuts of artist Gordon Matta-Clark) and dreamlike urban fantasy (Steven Holl's Pamphlet Architecture series, Tschumi's comic-like Manhattan Transcripts of 1976-81, or John Hejduk's ominous urban ballets).

The current crop of downtown projects by Europeans of this generation is clearly a product of the maturation of the downtown scene. Twenty years after the publication of Delirious, high rents and tourist mobs have forced art galleries from Soho to the old dock warehouses of Chelsea, while artists have been displaced from downtown lofts to tough borough neighborhoods such as Greenpoint, Williamsburg or Long Island City. At the same time, many members of the generation that pioneered the colonization of Soho have grown into positions of economic and political power, enabling them to commission major building projects, while some of the architects who began their careers with sketchy urban fantasies are now at the top of their profession.

Thus we find that the fashion-conscious hotelier and former Studio 54 owner Ian Schraeger has moved down from midtown to Astor Place, where he plans to build a hotel jointly designed by Koolhaas and Herzog and de Meuron, on a long-empty site owned by The Cooper Union. We find Scholastic Books, one of the new corporate denizens of lower Broadway, completing a new building designed by the late Aldo Rossi, who was chosen to assure approval in the difficult Soho Historic District design review process. We find Comme des Garçons, one of the first fashion boutiques to eschew Madison Avenue for a gritty downtown location, hiring London's Future Systems for their latest garage-front store, while Prada prepares a new venue by Rem Koolhaas. And we find Jean Nouvel at the head of a private developer's scheme to set a major hotel atop one of the best views of lower Manhattan, across the East River in the tough Brooklyn Bridge industrial district.

But these downtown projects also mark the end of Soho's bohemian era, which has fallen victim to its own success. The obvious danger is that new downtown projects will be little more than commercial simulacrae of its old bohemian spirit. Rossi's building certainly falls into this category; its toy-like columned facade on Broadway is all too plainly a cheap commercial skin, an insipid Post Modern companion to nearby 19th century cast iron buildings. Its rear facade on Mercer Street, composed of angled steel profiles that recall modern industrial structures, is a better complement to the tough industrial texture of the neighborhood.

A similar process of maturation is behind other projects by Europeans elsewhere in the city. As Dean of the School of Architecture at Columbia University, Bernard Tschumi is following the example of Sert and Rafael Moneo, former Deans at Harvard, and César Pelli, former Dean at Yale, all of whom used their academic prestige to build successful professional careers in the United States. But in the case of Tschumi's Lerner Hall at Columbia, something has been lost on the journey to the Upper West Side. Lerner Hall includes Tschumi's trademark multi-level interchange of "space, movement and event," also indebted in part to the example of the Situationalists, and previously seen in his Le Fresnoy Arts School outside Lille. But here he has been forced to wrap this experimental fantasia in a retrograde masonry dress, supposedly in harmony with the surrounding campus buildings by McKim Mead and White. This is a typical example of a client's overly-rigid interpretation of the concepts of contextualism and historic preservation, which so often stifles architectural innovation in the United States.

The enlargement of the Museum of Modern Art, which is now underway following a design by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, is another case in which a large and slow-moving institution was not quite ready for the avant garde. Terence Riley, Director of the Architecture and Design Department at the MoMA, appears to have pushed both his patrons and his shortlisted architects a little too hard when the competition was organized in 1997. (The ten participants were Taniguchi, Tschumi, and Herzog & de Meuron, the three finalists, and Koolhaas, Dominique Perrault, Wiel Arets, Toyo Ito, Rafael Viñoly, Steven Holl and Williams & Tsien). Many participants strained too far for the unexpected or the extravagant in the competition's first stage, or failed to rise to the demands of the occasion, while the second stage finalists were simply too cautious. The Museum Board, on the other hand, found itself most comfortable in the hands of Taniguchi, a Harvard-trained modernist in the same mold of non-ideological formalism that Johnson and the Museum have always promoted.

Globalization has also made New York more accessible to the rest of the world -- though international groups seeking a Manhattan presence can usually afford only a sliver of it, as seen in the miniature midtown towers by Christian Portzamparc for the French LVMH fashion conglomerate on 57th Street, and by Raimund Abraham for the Austrian Cultural Institute, now nearing completion on East 52nd Street. The best time to see Portzamparc's building is at dusk, when interior lighting transforms its haute couture folded glass skin into light, billowing veils. Abraham, who has taught for many years at The Cooper Union, has created a menacing mask of tilted, suspended planes, which threaten to fall guillotine-like over the street. Both buildings give testimony to the hardy resistance of the over-built Manhattan urban plan, an anarchic collage that nevertheless brings order to the most disparate of architectural expressions.

Together with the attractions of Manhattan as muse, and the effects of globalization, the third factor bringing European architects to New York is the urge for renewal, the same urge that has governed the city's relation to Europe since its beginnings. Commercial architecture in the United States consumes fresh ideas with the same vehement wantonness that the country has burned through countless other irreplaceable resources. New ideas come in through the architecture schools and get hustled out onto the street in an insatiable assembly line of stylistic packaging. As each stylistic gambit is mined to exhaustion, from postwar Modernism to Post Modernism to Deconstruction (which never quite got off the ground), thoughtful observers such as Riley at the MoMA or Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic at The New York Times, call out for a more considered investment in the resource of architectural invention, with Europe as their model.

The latest chapter in this struggle is taking place at The New York Times itself, which, working with a private developer, has chosen Renzo Piano to design its new offices, a 200 meter shaft which will rise on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets. The project introduces to the city the multi-layered curtain walls of environmentally-conscious offices in northern Europe, which allow users to open windows to fresh air, a feature that American developers have previously resisted for its high cost. In this case, Piano sheathes the double-glazed skin in a translucent jacket of ceramic elements, similar to the system he used for his Potsdammer Platz complex in Berlin. But the floor plans respond to the usual American commercial demand for large floor areas, rather than the more humanistic, narrow light-oriented layouts required of German buildings. (The economic imperatives of New York building also ruled out Norman Foster's competition design for the project, which proposed sky gardens on every eighth floor. The other competitors were César Pelli and the team of Frank Gehry and David Childs of SOM, who ultimately withdrew). It is hard to know at this point how much Piano will be able to move within the tight corset of commercial interest that constrains him, or what the city's commercial firms will be able to learn from his understatedly sophisticated way of building. But the very fact that he has been invited to work here is an important sign of hope and progress for the city.

After Functionalism

Written December 1993
© David Cohn. All Rights Reserved.


Note:
This was my stab at a theory of contemporary architecture, written in 1993, which helped clarify many of my thoughts and intuitions. I proposed it as the introduction to a collection of my articles, for which it could still serve, with some revisions, today.


The revolution in architecture announced by books such as Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (both 1966) changed the course of postwar Modernism. But after twenty years of post-modern movements and styles, from North American Historicism and European Neo-Rationalism through Contextualism, Critical Regionalism, Eclecticism and lately, DeConstructivism, the strongest trend to have emerged in contemporary architecture is the irrepressible return of the Modern. What then in architecture has actually changed?

In retrospect, it is clear that the Modern Movement Rossi and Venturi attacked was a shadow of its prewar self. Compared to the avant-garde manifestos of the beginning of the century, the corporate headquarters, airports and shopping centers of mainstream postwar Modernism represent a notable failure of nerve. The vital energy of early Modernism was fueled by a progressive collective project or vision, be it Marxist or Fascist or ambiguous or self-invented, that after the war --after a war inflamed by such ideas-- was untenable. Postwar architecture joined the other arts in a strategic retreat from collective ideologies -- to an existential uncertainty on the one hand, or to science as the model for a collective, more than individual coherence on the other.

Just as postwar art generally spoke only of agonizing subjective experience (Mark Rothko) or through the alienated, objectified voice of scientific observation and demonstration (John Cage), postwar modern architecture withdrew into the theoretically "scientific" concept of functionalism, the idea that an objective, rational language of architecture could be developed from the clear, logical expression of the functional and structural requirements of a building.

Functionalism was not new to modern architecture, but after the war it was applied with a new single-mindedness. The most sophisticated architects interpreted functionalism in organic sociological terms (Jacob Bakema, Georges Candillis) or used functional elements in dramatic sculptural compositions (James Stirling and other Brutalists, in what we could call a functionalist mannerism, precursor to High Tech), while more conservative American practitioners tended towards a more abstract and geometric formalism. But the general tendency of functionalism, and what made it such an easy target for the first post-modern critics, was to reduce architecture to a purely instrumental status. Between the work of Mies van der Rohe and his postwar Chicago followers such as C. F. Murphy or Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an essential dimension of architecture had been lost.


Ironically, this situation is comparable in many ways to the historic conditions that gave rise to modern architecture in the first place. The industrialization of England at the end of the 18th century and the philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment gave rise to a rationalization of human work and thought as seen, for example, in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, a concept which produced the complementary principle, as stated by John Ruskin, of the "inutility" of art.

In the applied arts, the division between utility and art was expressed in the eruption of ornament in the first machine-produced goods, such as those displayed at London's Great Exhibition of 1851. From this point, modern architecture emerged as the effort to reintegrate the concepts of utility and art, from Louis Sullivan's search for the organic nature of the tall building to Adolph Loos' famous essay Ornament is Crime.

What had occurred at the end of the 18th century in England, and re-occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, was the exile of what we here call "art" from the world of work and reason, or, to put it simply, from the world of fact. The emergence of English Romantic poetry in the same period is perhaps the clearest example of this division. If the project of the Enlightenment in England (with its positivist and empiricist colorings) is taken to mean the secularization and rationalization of thought, the banishment of untested belief and superstition, the reduction of what can be considered "real" to what can be empirically confirmed by the scientific method and deduction, to the laws of nature and logic (a reduction of language, we might say, in favor of fact), then the imaginative realm of Romantic poetry in the 19th century, from William Blake onwards, surges from this radical reduction of the world of meaning like a phantom amputated limb. In Romantic literature, sentiment and desire are displaced to the past, the mythical, the distant and exotic. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary describes the alienation of romantic displacement, and the corresponding poverty of a "realist" present, the catastrophic consequences of the rupture of language.



In the United States, the first critical reactions to functionalism sought to humanize the overly instrumental and reductive aspects of postwar practice. Charles Moore and his colleagues, in books such as The Place of Houses and Body Memory Architecture (with reading lists, following Nobert-Schultz's Intentions in Architecutre, including Piaget, Bachelard, and Heidegger), sought to construct a humanistic bridge to an apparently abstract formal language, emphasizing the structural polarization of space by the human body, in phenomenological, perceptual, and psychological terms. This work, like the contemporary theories of Aldo van Eyck, Herman Hertzberger or Christopher Alexander, still maintained a "scientific" approach to architecture, seen in terms of sociological insights or in the isolated experimental units of the "human body" and "perception". Architecture was conceived as an instrument of social form, adapting functionalism to a broader, more sensitive view of human necessity.

But the short life of the post-modern movement in the United States, from the actual buildings of Venturi and Moore to Michael Graves and the corporate skyscraper architects of the 1980s, could be attributed to the fact that the Americans sought to realize this humanistic program through the same ornamental strategy used in the 19th century.  The much-celebrated irony of Venturi and Scott Brown's use of pop-scaled "sign" ornament was charged with the same alienation and distrust of non-objective language as the paintings of Jasper Johns or the stacked bricks of Carl André. The scenographic, ephemeral (and poorly constructed) quality of Moore's output failed to engage the real issues of the production of buildings, while at the other extreme, the later work of Graves and the commercial post-modernists abandoned all interest in a critical project. Only Alexander remained faithful to the logical consequences of his theory, as developed in A Pattern Language, a revolutionary design method as appropriate to luxury residential compounds as it is to the Third World.



Aldo Rossi, in the concept of type proposed in The Architecture of the City, challenged functionalism in different terms. Just as in the early formalism of Peter Eisenman or the twelve tone system in music, Rossi's early work could be described as a quasi-scientific investigation into the "constituent elements" of architectonic language. But in his case, the basic elements were determined not so much by the natural laws of physics and geometry as by the laws of memory and the imagination. In the concept of type, Rossi began to address an idea about what we might call the "mental reproduction of images," how images might multiply and transform themselves in the memory and the imagination in a semiotics of nostalgia and desire.

Manfredo Tafuri's harsh criticism of Rossi in the History of Italian Architecture, 1944 - 1985 underlines the radical nature of Rossi's approach and its challenge to the (Enlightenment, Marxist) project of reason:

"The imagined project concerned a new collective need in a universe that was robbing individual action of its element of fantasy. But whoever immerses himself in imaginary realms today --as Blanchot has warned us-- is forced to annul space and time, to send them deep into the nothingness of "literary space". This annulment is indecent and provocative. It has nothing to do with the classical Entsagung; it is based on the amoral principle of abstention." (1)

While Rossi's own architecture seems, as Tafuri observes, to end in a paralyzing reductivism, the radical potential of his idea can be interpreted in terms diametrically opposed to Tafuri's analysis: to open the "imaginary realms" of "literary space" to a world otherwise determined by instrumental reason or functionality, to release the powers of the imagination from an "indecent, provocative" postwar exile.

The parallels between Rossi's architecture of the 1970s and other contemporary movements in art are obvious, from the ritualized stage sets of Robert Wilson to the ideologically-charged paintings of Anselm Kiefer. It is no accident that the image of the theater is a favorite Rossian theme, for theater offers a model of realism diametrically opposed to the factual representations of, say, photography, a realism which can be composed of symbolic rather than literal elements (the type characters of Bertold Brecht, for example, adapted from popular folk literature and employed in a context of social realism). Here symbolism is used not to create imaginary worlds but as a tool in the analysis of the "real", or even, we could say, in the composition of the real.



Behind the figure of Rossi in Europe and Venturi in the United States, the influence of Louis Kahn is of course decisive. Kahn's dialectic of served and serving spaces, developed from the Brutalism of the 1950s, and his formal dialectic of repeated and deformed geometric volumes and patterns, helped to distance his method from functionalism, and provided the essential outlines for Rossian type and Venturian deformation.

More difficult to assimilate at the time, but perhaps equally decisive for the present, was Kahn's disturbing spiritualization of architecture. The elevation of traditional modern values such as light, space and the "honest" use of materials to a transcendent, spiritual plane went against the grain of postwar doubt. Worse, it seemed to echo the fatuous, vaguely Heideggerian exaltation of the everyday which Theodor Adorno denounced in The Jargon of Authenticity. For at the same time that Kahn was asking the brick "what it wanted to be," French post-structuralists were examining the semiotic unmasking of God as an effect of language, the absent referent of an empty sign. But the thought of Heidegger is reflected more concretely in the writings of Rossi, Venturi, and later, Christian Norberg-Schulz and others, where a Kahnian spirituality is rationalized in terms of psychology and semiotics (Rossi, for example, following Gaston Bachelard, calls his childhood reminiscences A Scientific Autobiography).

If we were to substitute the problematic word "spirituality", which comes to us from a broken world of absolute values and faith, for another word, "poetry," which is specifically an attribute of language, we might be able to identify the essential change which the work of Rossi and Venturi, and behind them Kahn, brought to architecture, a change which has not only affected the present, but which has also changed our historical understanding of the first modern architects. Poetry can refer, of course, to many different things. But if we imagine the poet as a sensitized observer of the world, reflecting, comparing, associating, imagining, remembering and feeling through the weave of language, and if we associate these qualities with the architect, who follows the same process through the weave of form and the building's functional circumstances, that is, its role in the entire social sphere, we find ourselves with an architecture which brings a new dimension of meaning to the languages of functionalism and abstract form: the dimension of language in its fullest, most human and relative sense, open to the powers of memory, dream and projection, the power to create a "fiction" of the present and future, of fact and imagination, to propose a (partial, poetic) project as a fundamental dimension of the real.

In this sense, poetry has replaced science at the end of the twentieth century as a model for a cohesive structure of thought, to such a degree that science itself, particularly in advanced areas of physics and mathematics, is often referred to today as a kind of poetics, a concentrated, contingent linguistic weave, without for that reason being any less rigorous or verifiable.

The direct stylistic impact of post-modernism may not be as evident today as it was in the 1970s and 80s. But the more general shift to a poetic concept of language has spread through all the branches of architecture in the past twenty years, from the more obviously poetic work of John Hejduk or Álvaro Siza and signature artists such as Frank Gehry or Richard Meier, to include the architectural invasion of fields previously surrendered to technology: in the city planning theory of Oriol Bohigas, the engineering works of Santiago Calatrava, or the High Tech buildings of Norman Foster. We can speak once again of an architecture that represents public aspirations (the Trés Grands Projets of François Mitterand, the public building programs of new democratic administrations all across Spain), of an architecture that, with the right patrons, can represent a collective project, even in the old Enlightenment terms. And in retrospect, how do we now understand the work of the Russian Constructivists, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bauhaus, Italian Rationalism or the Dutch Neo-Plasticists but in these same poetic terms?

Architecture meets the needs of the present but also creates the world of the future, consciously or no. To consciously seize the powers of imagining and creating the future world would seem to be the present goal of a renewed public and private architecture, and the most important legacy of the post-modern revolution.


Note 1:
Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944 - 85, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989, page 137.