SMALL, MEDIUM AND LARGE

Andrea Branzi

Even today different parameters of judgment are hardly ever applied in comparing urban phenomena of such differing scales as the metropolis, the town and the village.

The instruments of study applied to such urban agglomerates are differentiated only as far as the volumes of traffic or the markets of the area are concerned, but substantially the specialists in this field are still convinced that between such phenomena ( metropolis, town and village) there is no more than a difference in scale.

Indeed, qualitative judgement tends to be inversely proportional to their size, so that the village represents the best model of urbanization owing the balance which has been struck between the individual, urban spaces, and the «overall form» of the village; and the metropolis is judged by the same yardstick - that is, according to wether or not certain values typical of the village have been preserved.

This «continuity» within differences of size is supposed to guarantee the permanence of human scale (to judge from what one commonly hears) even in big agglomerates, and juvenile delinquency becomes the symptom of the disappearence of such qualities.

There has been no progress at all in the elaboration of differentiated models of behaviour: the sun, green areas, the square, the fountain, the municipal park with its benches - have all remained the immovable symbols of a dream, and are still the only typically urbanistic-architectonic tools for mediating between the individual and the megalopolis. The visual relationship which bound the villager to his village is still the same which accompanies the town-dweller to the metropolis: urban phenomena are seen as being no more than visual structures. To this day the town planner is still unable to comprehend an urban structure which does not correspond to a certain system of representation. Mediating architectonically between the individual and nature, has become the outer limit beyond which town planning will not venture.

Differentiated figurative episodes within the city limits should constitute a kind of qualitative and narrative succession of use in orientation (and for the markets of the area) and more generally, taken as a whole, they do make up the so-called «FORM OF THE CITY».

The «form of the city» is a hierarchical structure capable of qualifying every single square meter or town, and of organizing single buildings and single sequences in relation to one another and in relation to the whole. In cities and villages such an overall figurative structure is made up of the traffic lanes (which originated in the history of the birth and formation af the said city) and the location of significant episodes of a monumental or natural character.

In the metropolis such systems of reference and figuration no longer exist, and even if they exist they no longer play the structural role described above. The manhattanite walking along the regularly patterned streets of his town will always be in the same significative point in the sense that he never encounter scenically differentiated episodes but always the same elementary prespective structure created by the perpendicular crossing of two streets.

His urban experience goes no further than the reading of street signs: above this level ( of 5 to 6 meters ) the city is no longer a phenomenon that he perceives. The skycraper is no longer the super monument that it was in the thirties: it is the undiferenciated accumulation of cubic meters which may rise to dizzy heights but can hardly be felt as a figurative presence. Such an accumulation rises from an elementary and extremly low distributive base ( which is what the town-dweller figuratively utilizes ) and developps in proportion to the cost of the area. In its time the Empire State Building was proposed as a kind of mega-cathedral for an improbable mega village: today nothing differentiates it from the cluster of other Manhattan skyscrapers, unless perhaps the error in foresight it reveals.

Andrea Branzi, Radical Notes, 1972

Architecture and Modesty
Andrea Branzi

With the development of the electronic media and mass-culture, architecture has become something of a minor art. Even if by this reductive term one means all those cultural activities applied to minor structures and systems of communication, this distinction, however academic, may be of some schematic use in revealing the modifications in specific weight to which the various cultural techniques have been subjected in our society.

Architecture, once considered the most complete and noble of the arts, has lost its pre-eminence not only because of the external difficulties of a political and economic nature that it has always encountered, but also because of a deep internal crisis now afflicting it as a result of modifications in the mechanisms of cultural production and of the urban function itself.
Today the city is becoming more and more a structure offering services, a place merely to live in ; it is no longer one of society's cultural structures. The communication carried out by architecture, based on the allegory of balances between man and his natural environment, is motionless in space and lacking in the depth of psychic penetration that the electronic media have achieved. Today the city is no longer a cultural " place" but a "condition". Urban culture,
in other words, is independent of the city as a place and it coincides with the culture of consumption.
To be an urbanite today does not mean to live in a city but to adopt a specific model of behaviour made up of a certain way of speaking, of printed and televised information, of a particular kind of clothing, of the music one listens to: wherever these media arrive, the city arrives. There is no longer any culture external to the urban phenomenon in as much as there is no longer any countryside representing a real and logical alternative; there is no place which does not to some extent communicate with the city and Its models. The "urban condition" coincides with the social circulation of goods, which can be exported from any metropolitan area. Every day millions of cubic metres of this new type of city are produced, and every day millions of cubic metres of city become rubbish, in keeping with the laws of a metabolism unknown to the immoveable equilibria of the city.
The concept of culture itself is changing. Until quite recently produced by a small group of intellectual professionals and consumed by a numberless mass of readers, visitors, subscribers, enthusiasts and voyeurs who had only to buy the book, disc or ticket, and were institutionally excluded from any right to produce or consume a private culture as anatural right (since culture is a higher and "universal" good, to produce which one must undergo a stressful series of exercises, tests, studies, examinations, consultation, and dedicate his life to it), culture, as I was saying, is now experienced as an immediate, spontaneous good, the direct product of a certain social behaviour and a model of consumption, an economic stimulus. What we are witnessing here is the reversal of the traditional hierarchies; more importance is attributed to the window dresser, decorator, fashion designer, expert in colours, upholsterer, opinion leader, taster, make-up expert, etc. than to the "artist" intent on sending out allegorical messages to the world.
Architectonic quality is much less important than the quality of the microclimate one experiences inside, and good acoustics are preferred to observance of the laws of composition ...
Architecture now becomes a "minor art" applied to the harmonious resolution of functional and structural problems and kept outside the real circuits determining the" quality of life" and culture.
The masterwork of architecture ended not only when culture became an article of consumption but when the profession definitely took the place of the art; as long as the schools of architecture were clubs for a few enthusiasts, methodological planning opened large areas of "creative" variations; but now that architectonic planning has to be taught to thousands of people, it is idle to think of introducing unknown quantities of any kind. The number of unknown factors that architectonic planning is called on to resolve today has been reduced almost to zero. Variation in design consists of a simple compositional scheme often chosen at random without regard for different cultural areas, but only for the availability of elements differentiated on the industrial plane alone. Pasolinl claims that there are no longer any somatic differences between youths of the left and the right. It is also true that there are no ideologies capable of producing different results in the architectonic idiom. The long Italian battle fought against construction surveyors, responsible for the low cultural level of much urban architecture, is the result of a mistake rooted in the certainty long cultivated by the Modern Movement that there Is an indivisible identity between urban quality and civilization. The quality that we ask of the city today has nothing to do with form or composition, but only with the quality of social services and the market. For architects the time hascome for a bit of modesty ...

Radical Notes, 1975

Louis Kahn Superstar
Andrea Branzi

He was one of those personages who besides existing in real times are also a revival of themselves, a sign recalling some period of our lives, a significant detail in a much larger picture; in the background of an uncut version of «American Graffiti» teeming with teenagers and their yogourts, one should see a game of tennis going on between Louis Kahn and Marcuse.. He made us run terrible risks, but today we can smile at the tought of him and remember «the way we were» without any danger of our turning to stone. When his star rose in the early sixties we were all firmly settled in our admiration of the socialdemocratic perfection of the Scandinavian quarters, and our hitchhiking holidays were spent discussing our hopes to meet swedish girls...

Surrounded by mediocre teachers who talked of prefabricated schools, Louis Kahn then represented the almost biblical symbol of the campuses of American Universities, a myth still possible of the great master, the last specimen of the gerontocracy that dominated the world of architecture in those years (a tenuous link with the Founding Fathers, against whom rebelion was unthinkable ). His allusions to the classical origins of architecture - Roman - to be exact - was the academic answer to the stalemate to which Modern architecture which continued to point to itself as a rational order, with the Villa Savoye as its Parthenon and Siemenstadt as its Polis. As a counterbalance to this motionless Greek and Euclidean self-admiration, Louis Kahn proposed the Latin example, an experimentation brought on by destiny, an allusion to Roman way of looking architecture, in which volume and structure, fonction and monumental purpose coincided. It was then that the first reproductions of Piranesi began to be passed around, and the first visits to Villa Adriana took place. There are still some who haven’t recovered from it all..

At bottom Louis Kahn’s original compositional contributions were very few, and were useful in revealing that after all classical architecture was still latent under the skin of modern architecture. It was the first sign of a credibility crisis in the Modern Movement, and this crisis he lived from positions on the right. It was also the last weary debate on architecture and its laws of compostition; the came the deluge. It was the deluge because suddenly everyone realized that Carnaby street, the Animals, the Birds, the Beatles and the Mamas ans Papas were much more important, significant and complete than any prophecy meant for the masons. It was then that we broke off, because of those personages and along those lines; from that moment on our education went on elsewhere, and no longer in schools of architecture. Louis Kahn’s defeat was not due so much to the confutation of his theories as to the general leap forward taken by the youth culture, to the appearance of new and powerful media, and to the entrance of public creativity on the publis scene. It was the instruments, especially, that brought about his defeat, the sound of an LP record, clothing, and drugs were educational instruments more powerful than any form of architecture. The great consisted in the capacity of this «depth media» to appeal to the masses everywhere in the world. A cultural revolution had begun which went far beyond the conflict over its content and swept over unbelievable numbers of consumers.

Architecture, as cultural communication, has no way of achieving the same «quantitative» following as modern electronic media or models of behaviour. In a world in which a message spreads simultaneously everywhere , architecture remains an immovable object which on must travel to reach, as on a pilgrimage, an object which is half a usable instruments and half allegory, closed within its disciplinary limits and successfully imposed in a narrow field of urban influence only because of a ridiculous aspiration to the monumental. The city itself no longer coincides with an architectural area, but only with a consumer model. The quality of that model is as important as that of any municipal structure: any place, reached by the television, telephone, fashions, is an integral part of the urban system. Indeed, the metropolis is no longer a place, but a condition. Let the dead look after their dead, then. With Louis Kahn, architecture died and not simply a particular concept of it; he, like everyone else before him, saw it as a problem of quality.


Radical Notes, 1975.

GRILLE ET NEUTRALITE
Jacques Lucan




L’architecture et sa disparition

Le recours à la grille contourne les problèmes d’équilibre ; il implique la répétition ; il fait s’éloigner les règles ou les procédures de composition auxquelles il n’est plus besoin ni nécessaire de se rapporter. En considérant certains aspects d'œuvres de Mies Van der Rohe, il n’est pas étonnant que les Smithson parlent d’une architecture «autre» et d’une esthétique sans rhétorique. Ils aiment aussi ranger dans la même catégorie de projets, le Hoschshule fur Gestaltung à Ulm de Bill, et la maison Pacific Palissades à Los Angeles de Charles Eames, par exemple. Plus généralement, plutôt que de l’architecture à l’européenne, l’absence de rhétorique serait le fait de l’architecture Nord-Américaine, notamment celle des bâtiments de grande hauteur, le Lever House sur Park Avenue de S.O.M en étant l’exemple le plus accompli. Le signe certainement le plus fort de l'émergence d’une architecture autre, disent-ils, se trouve dans les bâtiments élevés. Les nombreuses répétitions font que production de masse, processus, contrôle, etc - ce que les américains connaissent bien - deviennent le contrôle. Ce qui évite le recours aux notions de composition ou d’art.
Lorsque Koolhaas reviendra sur la question de l’architecture du gratte-ciel et des bâtiments de grande hauteur, il soulignera lui aussi qu’elle se base sur la répétition, notamment la répétition du «plan typique» des étages «le plan typique implique la répétition et l'indétermination : pour être typique, il doit être suffisamment indéfini». Selon lui, le plan typique est une invention américaine; il est «sans qualités, neutres « il est le degré zéro de l’architecture. Il correspond à un programme de bâtiment de bureaux qui est « le premier programme totalement abstrait», c’est à dire un programme dont la seule fonction est de «laisser ses occupants exister». En conséquence, le plan typique s’approche de la grille, que Koolhaas assimile à du papier millimétré : «le plan typique est pour la population des bureaux ce que le papier millimétré est aux courbes mathématiques». La ville du plan typique, downtown, n’a pas de configuration formelle spécifique; elle est une accumulation de skyscrapers. Elle est, dit encore Koolhaas, «une condition» plutôt qu’un «lieu». Il reprend ainsi des mots que nous verrons bientôt avoir été employés par Archizoom, groupe auquel il est fait explicitement référence et qui aurait interprété le plan typique comme «condition finale de la civilisation occidentale». Il retrouve aussi l’exigence «d’une architecture fonctionnaliste qui imagine et établit sur le sol (la surface de la terre) des patterns d’activité humaine en des juxtapositions sans précèdent et des combinaisons catalytiques.»
Le neutre définit donc un fond par rapport auquel les activités peuvent se développer. Plusieurs modèles de neutralité sont encore possibles, de l’usine au supermarché, des aires de manutentions des marchandises aux aires de stationnement automobiles. Banham voit ainsi dans les étendues dégagées et plates des terminaux de transport par containers, sur lesquelles les engins de manutentions peuvent se déplacer à leur aise, l’expression radicale d’un nouvel idéal, la métaphore d’une ville autre. Évoquant les possibilités qui vont à l’encontre de tout monumentalisme et de toute architecture figée dans ses usages et fidèle à des valeurs essentielles. Dans la même veine «anti-architecturale» poussant ses raisonnements à la limite, Banham défend l’idée qu’une architecture «autre» pourrait se contenter d’offrir seulement un contrôle de l’environnement, les problèmes formels relatifs à la définition de l’espace et à la construction glissant au second plan ou disparaissant tout à fait. Il en vient à considérer que deux modèles antithétiques doivent être distingués, l’un porteur des valeurs traditionnelles de l’architecture l’autre avancent celle d’une hypothèse d’une dématérialisation de celle-ci.

La surface neutre

A la fin des années 1960 et au début des années 1970, les mouvements italiens de néo-avant garde de l’architecture «radicale» et contestataire, Superstudio et Archizoom, avanceront des idées dont certaines ne sont pas sans rappeler Banham. Cependant ce sera quelque fois après avoir exploré des méthodes de composition alternatives, comme l’avait fait Adolfo Natalini, fondateur de Superstudio. Il avait identifié diverses «méthode de composition» qui empruntaient beaucoup au «processus pop» d’élargissement du répertoire formel vers les images de la société de consommation : transposition d’échelle, assemblage, montage, contamination, répétition, itération, etc. sachant que «l’espace actif, le théâtre, le champ vital sont les objectifs de la recherche. Le happening continu, le niveau existentiel, la réalité fluide sont les paramètres de la vérification.»
La proposition la plus célèbre de Superstudio est Il monumento continuo (le monument continu - 1969-1970). Démonstration par l’absurde dira plus tard Natalini, modèle d’urbanisation totale, ses diverses images s’inscrivent dans différents environnements géographiques sans recevoir de ceux-ci des qualités qui les particularisent : «murs» continus qui découpent ou traversent villes ou territoires, architecture «sans architectes» qui évoque le Land art, monumentale mais neutre, silencieuse quant aux fonctions qu’elle pourrait être susceptible d’accueillir. Superstudio précise qu’il s’agit d’une architecture «qui émerge dans un environnement continu : la terre devenue homogène du point de vue de la technique, de la culture et tous les autres impérialisme». Après Il monumento continuo, Superstudio produit une série d’autres images, Gli atti fondamentali (les actes fondamentaux 1971-1972) : sur une surface, lisse et réfléchissante comme un miroir, dessinée par une grille carrée qui s’étend à l’infini, se déroulent des scènes de la vie quotidienne, scènes domestiques ordinaires et banales, mais qui n’auraient plus besoin de l’architecture puisqu’elles sont dépouillés des vêtements de la maison. Entreprise donc de disparition de l’architecture au profit de productions de situations et d’événements.
En 1970, Archizoom propose No-Stop city, projet qui étend une grille isotrope à l’infini, dénuée de toute centralité, développant l’hypothèse d’une «langage architectural non figuratif», et proposant l’image d’une ville «non-discontinue et homogène». Comme le note Gargiani, les projets de Mies van der Rohe correspondent pour Archizoom à des principes qui rejettent la composition, au contraire des projets de Le Corbusier. Archizoom fait ainsi sienne de la réévaluation critique de l’œuvre américaine de Mies van der Rohe, à laquelle procède quasiment au même moment Mafredo Tafuri (1935-1994). Parlant du «silence» de cette œuvre, l’historien souligne que «dans leur absence totale de valeur sémantiqe (asemanticità), le Seagram Building et le Federal Center de Chicago sont des objets capables d’être pour leur propre mort (essere per la propria morte), seul moyen pour eux d’échapper à un naufrage certain».
Dans une perspective marxiste radicale, Archizoom dresse le constat d’une ville moderne dont la réalité ne correspond pas au développement capitaliste, une ville arriérée et confuse qu’il n’est plus utile de chercher à ordonner. No Stop City est une vision extrême de la condition industrielle ; elle pousse à la limite la logique de la production industrielle comme loi universelle, comme «chaîne de montage du social», sachant que «le Capital propose dans la consommation son propre Modèle social, qui dépasse la réalité de la Classe, en tant qu’il suppose, pour son développement, une réalité sociale homogène». Par voie de conséquence, No-Stop city «cesse d’être un «lieu» pour devenir une «condition»».
Dans cette optique, la grille est l’héritière du plan libre et de l’open-space ; elle a à voir avec l’espace universel dont parlait Van Doesburg ; elle s’oppose explicitement à «l’architecture de la ville». Là encore, au même titre que l’usine, le supermarché devient un modèle :»L’Usine et le Supermarché deviennent les véritables modèles témoins de la ville future : des structures urbaines optimales, potentiellement infinies, où les fonctions se disposent spontanément sur un plan libre, rendu homogène par un système de micro-climatisation et d’information optimale. Les équilibres «naturels et spontanés» de la lumière et de l’air sont en réalité dépassés : la maison devient une autre de parking équipée. A l’intérieur, il n’y a plus de hiérarchies ni de figurations spatiales conditionnantes». Cette métropole sans limites, dans laquelle la maison disparaît, image du possible «village planétaire» décrit par Marshall Mcluhan (1911 - 1980), est libérée de l’architecture et de ses contraintes formelles. L’architecture, conclut Archizoom, «doit devenir une structure ouverte, s’offrant à la production intellectuelle de masse comme seule force figurant le paysage collectif».

En 1972, un projet d’exposition itinérantes d’environnements «L’invenzione della superficie neutra» conçue avec un fabricant de matériaux stratifiés décoratifs, rassemble le groupe Archizoom et Superstudio, avec notamment Ettore Sottssas. L’exposition est présentée comme une «opération table rase par la création des environnements, les auteurs se proposent de développer et de représenter le thème d’un espace défini par des surfaces neutres, mieux même, neutralisées à tel point qu’elles ont coupé définitivement tout lien linguistique préexistant et conditionnant». A cette occasion, le groupe Archizoom réitère sa définition d’une maison comme laboratoire dans leqeul il serait possible de développer ses facultés créatrices, dans lequel il serait donc nécesaire de se défaire d’un ameublement considéré comme lié à des usages imposées et non-choisis : «La maison peut devenir une sorte de «parking équipé», dans le sens que disparaissent toutes les préfigurations typologiques et toutes les permanences spatiales de la maison actuelles, pour laisser la place à la figuration spontanée et incontrolée du milieu» . La même année, au Museum of Modern Art de New York, l’exposition dont le commissaire est Emilio Ambasz «Italy : the new domestic Landscape « présente onze «environnements» dont les auteurs sont entre autres Sottssas, Archizoom, Superstudio, Joe Colombo et Gaetano Pesce, des installations qui veulent montrer de nouveaux paysages pour la maison, manifestant la transformation des modes de vie à travers notamment le design de nouveaux équipements. Quelques temps plus tard, Andrea Branzi, membre du groupe Archizoom, dénonce le mythe qui entroure Kahn, celui d’un maitre dont les contributions nouvelles sont peu nombreuses, participent d’un débat épuisé «sur l’architecture et ses lois de composition» et ont seulement montré en quoi les préoccupations classiques sont encore latentes «sous la peau de l’architecture moderne» Pour Branzi, Kahn reste fidèle à l’idée de «lieu architectural» alors que la métropole n’est plus un lieu mais une condition, alors que «la qualité que nous demandons aux villes n’est pas formelle ni compositionnelle» Branzi ajoute enfin que le temps de la modestie est venu pour les architectes.

Jacques Lucan in Composition, non-compoistion, Architecture et théories au XIX-XXè siecles

Vous pouvez aussi visionner sa conférence ce livre ici.

Architecture and Sex

Andrea Branzi

There has always been a relationship between architecture and the human body. It would be interesting to examine this relationship from inside history and to study its variations in relation to variations in current moral standards, or at least in relation to the importance given to sexuality in society and in daily life. W. Reich discovered that more than half of our time, at least until we reach middle-age (about fifty), is spent thinking about sex, about our own and other’s people sex lives, imagining combinations and couplings, for sexual activities are not only a free kind of social comunication but a form of physical energy that conditions all our experiences. Of these, I should say, sex most deeply influences our «experience of space» - that is, our capacity to conceive the empty space lying between us and others (which is normally taken to be architectonic space ) as a sexual medium, as a place for the free exchange or messages and for the possible or actual sexual experiences. This kind of theory, which is moreover elementary enough to be true, is officially absent in the history of architecture. There are some isolated cases of intuition in this regard, but they are almost always limited to cases of anthropomorphic or phallic architecture and never concern any officially adopted architectonic guidelines.

In a society like ours now experiencing the first symptoms of a sexual revolution, I think there is a futur for this idea of architecture as a predominantly sexual place. Just how, it is hard to say, but it’s quite certain that such a powerfull link in inter-family and urban relationships can hardly be silenced much longer, all the more so because its discovery is more a scientific than a moral matter.

Let us not forget that the discovery of the sociality and of the city has only recently been officialy acknowledged, after long being rejected as a vulgar interference in a discipline based on itslef. The same thing might happen with sex in architecture : the whole history of architecture could be reinterpreted in the light of this hypothesis, and trace the course of humanity’s long battle against sex. The relationship between architectonic concepts and the sensorial experience of space might constitute the first step in our inquiry. In the Middle Ages, when sex was officially condemned by moral opinion, all the physical data of architectonic space were heightened, just as the hermit would resist the call of the flesh by suffocating the stimulus under more powerful sensations such as physical pain. One need only think of Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, in which one’s perception of the monumental organism was closely related to such physical experiences as differences in temperature between the interior and the exterior, the odour of such unventilated places, a certain kind of acoustics, light filtering in through the windows, etc.. Sexual communication in such places of communal gathering (which were already completely full of both sensorial and religious stimuli ) became impossible. With the Renaissance came a restructuralization of architecture from within . In it the relationship with the physical experience of space is replaced by a kind of ideological-philosophical relationship with the classical order, while relationships with the human body shift direct experience to proportional relationships. Architecture became a completely conceptual kind of experience, soudless and odourless, immersed in an illuminated universe officially undisturbed by sexual vibrations.

This kind of approach has been handed down to us without any appreciable variants, apart from those Freudian inspiration resulting from the growing feeling among architects and many others that the organization of experience is much more revelant than it was once tought. But the role of architecture as the great instrument of sexual repression has been reconfirmed. The struggles for compositional freedom, for the discarding of functionalism as a repression of free behaviour have now reached the surveyors’ college; but the road from organic architecture to orgonic achitecture, it seems, will be long and hard.

Radical Notes, 1975

et un tout petit peu plus ici, là, là et là.