Does Italy return from its long silence?

If it does, and there is information that makes us believe it, it will be most probably from the periphery of its traditional sources of emission, perhaps with the exception of Venice or, more specifically, a tendency of the IUAV- which seems unlikely to have the splendid headquarters that, together with Benedetta Tagliabue, our friend and colleague Enric Miralles designed – tendency that would be just now taking place.

The built form can now be seen light and variable, close to the programme and to what is contingent. Architecture of Low Resolution or Low Fidelity: the Lo-Fi formulated by Mario Lupano (at the same IUAV), by Marco Navarra in Sicily, by Amanda Montanari (IUAV), by Luca Emanueli (Ferrara).

Realism or, now, Neo-Realism is, perhaps, and under various formulations, the Common Ground in origin of the proposals by these authors. A new Realism that has to do, we like to think, with the Situationist project: it obtains the formal codes not necessarily from the background of Arte Povera, as was common in the 60's, but from a careful reading of the situation from the place and, also, from the programme, the most overlooked in other formal springs.

We consider the work of Marco Navarra to be seminal for all this movement, particularly in his Linear Park along the railway line of Syracuse, in Sicily, published again at the moment, and improved (In walk about city 2.0) with a prologue (maybe his last text?) by recently departed Manuel de Solà-Morales .

From a consciousness of proximity and also complicity we recently invited Amanda Montanari to the Barcelona University (ETSAB), like we had done before, repeatedly, with Luca Emanueli. For the rest we are usually awaiting Mario Lupano, firmly anchored to his IUAV of Venice. Cercle, like now with Montanari, will follow the trace of these tendencies.

It is from a reading of the programme, - if worthy of its name, as it is for its lifestyle and space occupancy-, that young Gian Luca Porcile accurately describes room typologies of Genoa, his city. Gian Luca goes beyond reductionisms and formal stereotypes, of supposedly universal standards, and it brings us near, him as well, to an architecture attached to what is most contingent.

It will be, perhaps, due to a conversation with Gian Luca that, when reading it, we believe to perceive Fabrizio di Andre singing in the background of a Genovese room?

It is the resumption of Realism, and the same Lo-Fi, a heritage exclusive to the Southern Europeans?. Is it not also a form of Hard Realism to solve the project, like OMA does, by making ad hoc containers for different parts of the programme, by piling them up afterwards without hesitation, like plates or books, and finally case them under a mesh, a tight like what the anti-system wear on their faces when they get into action?

Not far from the strategy we have just described, young Pau Bajet, in an exercise of Realism in the final project at ETSAB (Barcelona School), -a Library in the Plaça Catalunya, the central square of Barcelona-, sticks to the programme, shelves and shelves of books – in order to, serving it with precision- obtain a urban solution that transcends it.

Europe, especially the South, is going through difficult times.

The Italian resumption, with declared complicities with Catalonia, can return it to the forefront: the one that corresponds to our near future.

Eduard Bru, Barcelona

Torna Itàlia del seu llarg silenci?

Si ho fa, i n’hi ha dades que ens ho fan creure, serà amb tota probabilitat des de la perifèria dels seus tradicionals focus d’emissió, potser amb l’excepció de Venècia o,  més concretament, de una deriva de l’ IUAV -que sembla que mai tindrà la esplèndida seu que, amb Benedetta Tagliabue, va projectar el nostre amic i company Enric Miralles – deriva que s’estaria tot just ara formant.

La forma  construïda s’entreveu ara lleu i variable, pròxima al programa i allò contingent. Arquitectura de baixa definició o de baixa fidelitat : el Lo-Fi formulat per  Mario Lupano (al mateix IUAV), per Marco Navarra a Sicília, per Amanda Montanari (IUAV), per Luca Emanueli (Ferrara).

El Realisme o, ara,  neorealisme es, potser, i sota diverses formulacions, el common ground en origen de les propostes d’aquests autors. Un Realisme nou que te a veure, ens agrada pensar, amb el projecte situacionista: obté els codis formals no necessariament dels voltants de l’arte povera, com era freqüent als 60’s, sinó de una lectura atenta de la situació a partir del lloc i, també, del programa, aquell gran oblidat en altres primaveres formals.

Considerem seminal per tot aquest moviment el treball de Marco Navarra, singularment en el seu Parc Lineal al llarg de la línia fèrria de Siracusa, a Sicília, tot just publicat ara de nou, i millor (In walk about city 2.0) amb un pròleg de Manuel de Solà-Morales (q.e. p.d).

Des d’una consciencia de proximitat, i també de complicitat, doncs,  hem convidat recentment a la Escola de Barcelona (ETSAB) a  Amanda Montanari, com abans ho havíem fet, repetidament, a Luca Emanueli. Pel demés estam habitualment a la espera de Mario Lupano, ancorat fermement al seu IUAV de Venezia. Cercle, com ara amb Montanari, seguirà la traça d’aquestes derives.

Es des d’una lectura del programa, -en tant, si  mereix tal nom, ho és de formes de vida i d’ocupació de l’espai-, que el jove Gian Luca Porcile descriu amb precisió tipologies d’habitació de Gènova, la seva ciutat, que van mes enllà de reduccionismes i estereotips formals, d’estàndards suposadament universals, i ens aproxima, ell també, a un arquitectura arrapada a allò més contingent.

Serà, potser, per alguna conversa amb Gian Luca que, en llegir-lo, creiem percebre a Fabrizio di André cantant al fons d’alguna  estança genovesa?

Es la represa del  realisme, i el mateix lo-fi , un patrimoni exclusiu dels sud europeus?. No es també una forma de realisme dur resoldre el projecte, com fa OMA, tot fent contenidors ad-hoc pels diversos punts del programa, per amuntegar-los  desprès sense contemplacions, com plats o llibres, i finalment enfundar-los sota una malla, una mitja com la que es col·loquen al rostre els antisistema per passar a l’acció?

No lluny de la estratègia que acabem de descriure, el jove Pau Bajet, en un exercici de realisme en el projecte  final de la seva carrera, una Biblioteca a la Plaça central de Barcelona,  s’arrapa al programa, lleixes i lleixes de llibres – per,  servint-lo amb precisió-, obtenir una solució urbana que el transcendeix.

Europa, especialment la del sud, està en hores difícils.

La represa  italiana, amb complicitats declarades a Catalunya, pot tornar-la al primer pla: aquell  que correspon al nostre futur  més proper.

Eduard Bru, Barcelona

Cercle ARTICLE 

 

NOTES ON LO-FI

Amanda Montanari

Susan Sontag's writing inspired me to choose this form of thesis. In 1964, describing the sensibility "that goes by the cult name of Camp", she chose to use the notes: "to snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble". This form suites to this essay, too. Some aspects of this special taste named of lo-fi is listed below:

1 - Lo-fi means low fidelity. Low definition. Low res is low resolution. To all effects, lo-fi is the non-finished, the non-resolved. In a wider sense and specularly, also the ruined or soiled.

2 - Music is lo-fi when the recording is poor. Video and photography when everything is pixeled or out of focus, in live shooting or random snaps.

3 - Lo-fi is the impulsive instrument of the creative flicker. The restoring of the immediate. This is one reason why it is often the resolution with which the real is documented: the real is great and is recorded with approximation.

4 - Lo-fi is referable to form. One expects that a work executed in low definition will be of high conceptual quality.

5 - Lo-fi is the form of a soul's need, the representation closest to creative energy.

6 - There is no counterfeiting in lo-fi. For example, in a photographic document of this type there are clear signs of a precise lifestyle: the kind of habits, rhythms, associations and values are not displayed but experienced and captured in low resolution. Von Trier's The Idiots is lo-fi.

7 - When it happens that lifestyle in photos is rendered in low definition it also happens that it turns out to be more intriguing and honest. The concept of nudity is also linked to this concept. Nakedness of the body in this case is not wilfully artistic, cut out in masterful black and whites, but random, as in Juergen Teller's work. In Richardson's it is stupid, provocative or real core pornography, cut out of an experience that seems real and, to all effects, if it is not yet real it becomes so.

8 - The glossy, the artificial, the constructed is not lo-fi. Duly built sets, for example, they are not the scenario of a lo-fi photograph.

9 - The use of recycled materials in planning a work is conceptually a lo-fi activity. The musician Papa M has composed a piece out of messages left on his answering machine: this is awareness of how to use the materials around you (in this case sounds) without inhibition. It is also the use of sounds that are without pretensions. In this case lo-fi is also somewhat intimist.

Tom Friedman makes the same natural use of materials in his art works.

10 - Lo-fi may be synonymous with ugly, because not defined, or bothersome because dirty.

Brunier's landscapes and maquettes probably smell of vinyl glue.

11 - For the artist or designer with a lo-fi approach to the work, anything in the world can become production material. The architect chooses his materials without limiting his imagination, Martin Margiela dyes garments by leaving them to soak in mould. It's all done not through purely aesthetic choice but from necessity: because taking freely from the word and using limitlessly responds to the need to channel creative energy in the most immediate and natural way. The most simple way.

12 - This is why the work most highly representative of an artist's creative energy is the sketch. When Giacometti did the sketch for a future work he seized the urgency of his genius in just a few lines. Chaplin too in the sound performance in Modern Times gets by with "Sing! Never mind the words". Punctuation is invented in Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina. Lo-fi as also the use of stratagem.

13 - The theory of a high quality project is generally repaid with a low definition model when available time or money has run out. If OMA had more money it wouldn't be spent on perfecting models but on further enriching its research. First and foremost the exhibition Content showed the theory of the project: the direct attitude of the lo-fi designer conveys power in the elaboration of the design. This is why the non-finished of the immanent idea is exhibited.

Or you can go for ready-mades. Duchamp was decidedly lo-fi. Detournement is a lo-fi practice.

14 - Finishing a project and correcting it to maximum definition is an action that suddenly interrupts the propensities of the open work.

15 - There are evidently different degrees of codification of the idea. An idea that becomes design demands greater codification, and the approximation typical of lo-fi remains only at a conceptual level. Droog Design projects use certain aspects of lo-fi as a concept: the dual purpose curtains, the armchair to modify with a hammer, the Short leg chair and many others.

16 - An Idea expressed in low fidelity is more charged with meaning than an idea expressed through the filter of high quality. The patina separates execution from idea, fixes the idea on very rigid terrain and as a result it becomes older and slower.

17 - Low definition contrarily ensures rapidity of execution, immediacy of recording and ease of transport. These features give it a young, reckless nature.

18 - Lo-fi is low cost. Giving back an idea in low definition is more economical than doing so in high. So it is more ethical and democratic.

19 - On the computer the files that shift faster are small size. So you can communicate more rapidly and consequently spread more information. This is precisely how digital potential is conceived in low definition: that is, it's powerful, fast and never definitive. But for the rest lo-fi prefers tape listeners, designers who don't feel blocked with regard to technical quality, craftsmanship, the one-off piece, DIY intended as a blend of heterogeneous elements with the purpose of obtaining the right sensation.

20 - Lo-fi contents itself with rendering suggestions. It does this with gestures, because gestures are honestly bound to the heart, and low definition is an instrument used in order not to lie.

21 - Lo-fi is a continuous tension towards transforming itself into hi-fi. It thus allows perfection to "hook up", it envisages the continual participation of the public who become, in part, designers.

In this sense, Open Source software (a clear example of open discourse) by its very nature comes under the category of lo-fi, inviting users to increasingly ensuing thoughts.

In the cinema the example of Star Wars is emblematic: a saga that begins in 1977 with the 4th episode envisages incompleteness right from its genesis.

And it is the intention and character of Lucas himself – renowned maniacal perfectionist and top innovator in cinema digital technology – that encourage fan-film festivals as free integration of the Star Wars world.

22 - Lo-fi is a praxis, and in the West its mechanisms have grown on soil prepared by early 20th century science with Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem (which points out the incompleteness of the formal system and takes cognisance of indeterminateness, an awareness that has existed for centuries in the East) and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: the unknowable nature of the universe makes it hard to work with perfection; openness is innate in everything.

Lo-fi makes peace with incompleteness.

23 - Seeing an exhibition at a museum is lo-fi, having the exhibition catalogue at home is hi-fi.

The self-taught man is lo-fi, the academically trained is hi-fi.

It's lo-fi to want to go on playing even when the game gets tough.

These reflections were drawn up by Amanda Montanari in December 2004 for her thesis in Master in Production and Culture of Fashion, University of Bologna.

Lo-fi as praxis

A formal low-profile helps emerging the value of the content. Weakness of action is strength of activity. This approach, more easily accepted by the western culture after the introduction of relativity and revolution of quantum theory, has been representing the fundaments of eastern philosophy for millennia, concerning whether Hinduism, Taoism or Buddhism.

With regards to this particular application of lo-fi in architecture, it is sufficient think about the Japanese wabi-sabi and make analogies.

My investigation of low definition as a design practice has evolved over the years: starting from an interest in its aesthetic results I have then reached the research of the ultimate meaning of movement and cyclical change.

A formal low-profile is able to express the essence of a present state furthermore, it is a light link in the chain of change, and its spirit remains faithful to the natural rhythms of happening.

Adopting the low-definition as a design practice we realize that, thanks to these characteristics (and to others previously mentioned as: stratagem, bricolage, ready-made, detournement, simple game; realism, ethics, democracy and the inclination to perfection with a peaceful attitude towards incompleteness) it holds in itself the usage of emerging possibilities.

If the sense of reality exists, and no one can doubt its existence, then there must also be something we will call sense of possibility. Those who own it will not say, for example: this has happened here, that will happen or must happen, they will imagine instead: this or that could or should happen; and if they are told that one particular thing is just as it is, they will think: it could also be different. So that the sense of possibility could also be defined as the ability of imagining everything that could actually be, without giving a greater importance to what it is, than to what is not.

A position that is basically smooth, despite its deep roots, responds to the need to give space to this sense of possibility. Openness is inborn within everything and the difficulties of this drift are mostly related to freedom. Fractal in its management, freedom asks those who exercise it to be continually open to future developments.

Everything leads us to believe that the future will accelerate the irreversible change in the behaviour and scenario of modern society. One day we will build cities for drifting. With slight changes we can use areas that already exist. We can use a few people who already exist.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the process of political unification of Italy highlights the problem of a corresponding process of cultural unification. Within the young nation coexisted huge differences, impossible to summarize in the gap between the North and the South of the country, but such as to define a real mosaic.

Equally considerable is the distance between coastal regions and inland: the unifying value of trade and maritime tradition has always constituted a common basis for the part of country nearest to the Mediterranean. Many cultural peculiarities can be found along the extensive outline of Italian coasts, these peculiarities reflect the geography defined by the maritime routes rather than simply represent the linear distance.

The place and the characters.

In an attempt to unify the Italian culture, each cities or each regions begin to be described in a rigid system of stereotypes. To each site were attributed characteristics that facilitate the identification; the active port, the industrial center, the city of art, the beautiful agricultural landscape are associated with certain geographical areas rather than to others. Similarly are defined the masks that will eventually characterize the stereotype of the inhabitants of the various regions in certain popular culture.

One of the most significant aspects to define the relationship between places and people, especially in some forms of artistic expression, is the relationship with modernity. In general terms, the popular masks were used to represent the exaltation of tradition in contrast with the negative and dehumanizing aspects of modernity.

In this context, the Genoese case is an anomaly. Especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, the port city was loaded from the stereotype of Italian capital for a particular form of modernization[1].

The habitual presence of the great ocean liners, which were also built near the town, the existence of large industries and the presence of infrastructures related to the transports and the commerce as well as the construction of the early Italian skyscrapers, had paved the way to the growth of the civic pride in the exaltation of the relationship between the rapid urban transformation and the diffusion of new technologies.

In 1949 a film entitled "Che tempi!"[2] allows us to describe this phenomenon. It is not a coincidence that the title of the film alludes to the unique character of the modern times: these words express the astonishment caused by the misunderstandings and sudden changes of society that may occur in a system of global trade.

In one of the most memorable scenes of the film the protagonists discuss about the choice of the restaurant for the lunch. The stereotype, that describes the Ligurian people as an irreducible greedy, would drive the characters to a popular and economic food: the farinata. However, the desire for modernity leads them to lunch in one of the most elegant places of the town, significantly placed on the roof of a skyscraper. It is important to note that the skyscraper in Piazza Dante, in those years, was the tallest building in Italy and one of the highest in Europe. If the expensive character of the place is a starting point for a comic scene, it is interesting the absence of a typical characteristic of Italian comedy: the staging of the superiority of popular traditions, with particular reference to the traditional foods, compared to the innovation. The presence in the film of the restaurant on the top of the skyscraper is destined to become the expression of a form of civic pride.

The same building appears in another scene of the same movie, where his shape is used to define the skyline of the city from a ship. In this movie, as in another film of the same year entitled "Le mura di Malapaga"[3], the city is presented to the spectator by the point of view of the characters that arrive by sea; a long tradition, which precedes the contemporary age, say that the first view of Genoa is from the sea[4]. Is also interesting to observe the ease with which is staging the presence of the ships; the great ocean liners, such as the large merchant vessels, were in Genoa an usual presence; from the decks of these ships travelers were watching the city but the Genoese people devoted only little attention to something as common.

Exactly the opposite is described in a movie filmed in 1973[5] but that is, however, set in the thirties. In "Amarcord" by Federico Fellini, the passage of the Rex in front of Rimini provides the director the inspiration for one of the most famous and meaningful scenes of Italian cinema. The great ocean liner slips, majestic and fantastic, in front of the inhabitants of the town, tightly packed in small boats to observe the passing of this "wonderful ship." The evocation of the stylized shape of the liner becomes an opportunity to feed the dreams of those who have merely the opportunity to witness the passage of the ship and could only imagine the splendor and richness of life that takes place in its halls.

The relationship between the space of the staging and the characters is well represented by other scenes of the motion picture by Fellini. If you want to generalize you can say that the Ligurian Sea and the Tyrrhenian Sea show a scenario often harsh and full of recognizable places that characterize the landscape, both natural and built. In contrast, in much of the Adriatic coast, the landscape, poor of relief or emerging elements, has led the artists to focus their attention on the characters. In another famous scene, always in "Amarcord", Fellini stage the fog that, completely denying the understanding of the location, displaces the characters and, with them, the spectator. But the most significant part of the movie to examine this relationship is the final scene. In a barren and bare landscape the director calls together all of his characters; the caricatured nature of their appearance is necessary to fill the scene in the absence of a real scenography. The distance from the movies set in Genoa is emblematic, in Fellini is not the place to define the action of the characters but are the characters themselves to define the aspects of the scene.

[1] M. Spesso, A proposito di Genova, Genova 2012, pp. 84-86.

[2] Che tempi! (1948) directed by Giorgio Bianchi with Gilberto Govi, Walter Chiari, Alberto Sordi.

[3] Le mura di Malapaga (1949) directed by René Clément with Jean Gabin, Isa Miranda.

[4] D. Astengo, L’altro sguardo. Artisti e viaggiatori in Liguria dal ‘700 al ‘900, Ventimiglia 2007.

[5] Amarcord (1973) directed by Fedrico Fellini.

[Fig. 1,2,3,] Che Tempi! (1948) Giorgio Bianchi



[Fig. 4,5,6] Amarcord (1973) Federico Fellini



Genoese interior

The theater allows us to investigate another specificity of the representation of places and space with regard to the city of Genoa. Genoa is commonly defined as a city of interiors[6]; this element is common also in other port cities. But the fact that many activities, essential to understand the city life, take place indoors is sometimes seen as a metaphor of the reserved nature of the Genoese people. Besides, the particularities of the interior spaces of the city are known not only for students of urban studies and architecture, but also to those involved in real estate and fiscal matters.

Another feature was the presence, and the prominence, of a bourgeois theater that was able to represent with ironic but generally good-natured tones a petty bourgeoisie that often, in Italy, has found poor visibility, especially in reason of the strength and importance of popular theater. Just in Genoa that, compared to other Italian cities, had not seen the presence of a strong local tradition in the commedia dell'arte, the representation of this part of society could emerge more easily. With respect to the popular theater, which in many cases took place (and was set) in the streets, this bourgeois theater finds its natural setting in interior spaces.

One of the most interesting signs to understand the character of these kind of interior spaces is the description of the ingresso alla Genovese (Genoese entrance). In the city, the apartments of the bourgeoisie reached a larger size than in other Italian cities and their internal distribution was not provided by a corridor but by a large entrance hall. This ingresso, on which the rooms open as in a small hotel or in a bed & breakfast, was not dissimilar from the parlor of French and English tradition and constitute a hybrid local: at the same time private and public, where the private sphere of the family mingled with the public dimension of social life. Gilberto Govi, the most prominent figure of the Genoese Dialectal Theatre, understood and staged the extraordinary narrative opportunities offered by this space that, albeit transposed without great care in theater sets, became a background realistic but, at the same time, full of possibilities for the action of the characters.

Another kind of interior is the scagno, a small office managed by a petty bourgeoisie often linked to the maritime economy. Also in this case the public and private come together in a sort of neutral ground, an intermediate space that seems to deny the clear separation between the urban space and intimate places of work and family life that in other European cities are clearly distinct.

[6] R. Giardina, L’Europa e le vie del Mediterraneo. Da Venezia a Istanbul, da Ulisse all’Orient Express, Milano 2006, p. 225.



[Fig. 7,8,9] Scenes from comedies of Gilberto Govi, recorded from 1957 to 1960.


The house by the medlar tree.

The Sicilian literature occupies a position of particular prominence for the development of novel in Italy. To understand the relationship between places and artistic expression, one of the masterpieces of Italian verismo (realist literature) is one of the most interesting sources of ideas and information. "I Malavoglia"[7], by Giovanni Verga, in the first English edition was significantly entitled "The House by the Medlar Tree" from the name of the house where the family of the protagonists lives and around which is focused a large part of the story. In the novel are shown the complex relationship between the house and the urban space, the town of Acitrezza in this case. For the family, which gives its name to the novel, the loss of the house corresponds to the loss of the possibility of social progress and ability to improve their condition compared to that of humble fishermen. Owning a home means occupying a position in the town, in a perfect correspondence between the logic of spatial relationships and the social dimension, the loss of the first corresponds to the loss of the second.

Several decades after the writing of Verga's masterpiece, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in "Il Gattopardo" (The Leopard) tells a story set in a completely different social milieu; however, the author, describing the spaces in which is set the story of the noble Prince of Salina, shows the same attention that Verga had dedicated to the house of the Malavoglia. In both the novels is described the strict adherence that binds men to the places in which they live. Both the nobles and the fishermen appear bound to their homes by a link impossible to cut. This relationship becomes the symbol of the relationship between mankind and the society in which they live, a connection that provides them with a form of security, but that imprisons them in a condition that is impossible to change.

The attention for the description of the link between the environment and characters is also present in a contemporary author, Andrea Camilleri; in his historical novels that make up the most interesting part of his literary production, the Sicilian author has often staged the imaginary town of Vigata, transposition of his native Porto Empedocle. The approach of this author to the historical novel is often based on a form of choral narration in which the society expresses itself through documents reconstructed, imaginary newspaper articles or false administrative documents, all reconstructed with meticulous precision. However, one of the most interesting cases for understanding the way in which the author describes the urban space is the case of the novel entitled "Il birraio di Preston"[8].

The story is set in the days before and after the opening of an opera house; an highly significant moment in the life of an Italian town of the nineteenth century. The conflicts born around the construction of the theater, but also about the choice of the opera that will inaugurate it ("Il birraio di Preston" by Luigi Ricci that gives the title to the novel) allows the author to describe, at the same time, the city and its inhabitants. The burning of the theater during the day of the inauguration becomes the material expression of the tensions, potentially explosive, present in the Sicilian and Italian society in the decades following the unification of the country.

One of the most interesting examples to understand the relationship between the characters of Camilleri and the environment in which they move is another historical novel entitled "La mossa del cavallo"[9]. The protagonist, native of Sicily but lived for a long time in Liguria, thinks, and consequently acts, in Ligurian language. This makes him somewhat immune to the interests and relationship of the region where he has returned; but at the same time leaves the man exposed to hazards that is not able to counteract. To save himself the protagonist will have to start thinking in its original language, the Sicilian, reconstructing the inevitable link between the man and the place; a link from which does not seem possible any form of detachment.

It is interesting to note how different it is from this approach of another masterpiece of Italian literature: “La coscienza di Zeno”[10] by Italo Svevo. The novel, written and set in Trieste in the early decades of the twentieth century, shows how the town was culturally, as well as geographically, near to Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis. The focus of the story is always the relationship between a person and the society in which he lives. The central element, which the protagonist defines as “his illness”, ends up being described as a disease of the society itself. It is this consciousness, that the protagonist reaches only in the last pages of the novel, to allow him to considered himself cured. In contrast to the people around him, Zeno became aware of the problems of the society in which he lives, allowing him to understand the reasons for immobility in which the other characters are forced. In a novel set in Trieste, in the most northern point of the Adriatic Sea and under the influence of the Mittel-European culture, the link between the scene and the character is loosened and the psychology of the protagonist ends up prevailing on the constraints that society imposes.

Casa Ugalde, J.A. Coderch, 1953. Francesc Català Roca Archive.

I

For decades, I have been defending the Realist architecture for its, in my opinion, principal values:

- It is the Architecture that recognises change, indeterminacy and contingency of everyday life.

- It is the Architecture that gives prominence to links, to the non predetermined, volatile, identity; the architecture of the associations.

-The one that accepts time not as a natural enemy but as a partner:
The passing by of time adapts, completes, and updates architecture.

- Architecture of the pre-eminence and quality of the intermediate spaces. The Architecture of the active void.

- Architecture that adds, through time, layers of use and meaning (Ferran Grau).

The Catalan Architecture of the immediate post Civil War could not be anything other than Realist.

Isolated from power for belonging to the Republican side, the loser against Franco's fascists. Without fundamental raw materials such as, among many others, laminated iron profiles. Without money, as an obvious consequence of the Civil War. Without clients.

Thus Coderch, architect of the State – the only entity with economical capacity of that time-, employee in an agency of the country’s physical reconstruction, he opts for the vernacular / fisherman village styles, either by stylistic choice and/or material need: the constructive, material, economical, and technical resources available of the moment, were not very different from those popular architectures that Coderch refines.

In 1947, he also builds his house in the Calvó Square of Barcelona.
But his encounter (1950) with the artistic avant-garde (mostly Catalan) is decisive, this took place in Spain’s Pavilion at the Triennale of Milan of which design he was responsible. Miró, Pons, Tharrats, gave him a look from the avant-garde of those popular materials that he had read till then from a continuing tradition.

Coderch will then give a giant leap, that will change all his work and he will produce, two years later, his greatest work: the Ugalde house, incomprehensible by its genesis and outcome unless one understands that it comes from the intersection between tradition and avant-garde that he experienced.

From this necessary "Realism" derive the great episodes of the time, such as the residential building in the Pallars Street in Barcelona (Bohigas- Martorell) and, later on, the Georgina House or the House on the island of Pantelleria,
-that is to say the best of Clotet & Tusquets-, up to the works that Clotet did by himself or with Ignacio Paricio- constructive realism and environmental-, and other components of what was called School of Barcelona. Also Alejandro de la Sota, alone, in Madrid.

Enric Miralles claimed for himself the adjective of realist, rightfully if we consider the benefit he obtained precisely from the programme, -as his friends and mentors, the Smithsons- since the school La Llauna, which meant his breakthrough into the local Catalan scenario, until the Archery facilities for the '92 Olympics and further on.

Realism inspired expressly in the most trivial and situationist gesture. Take a look at the catalogue of the meaningful exhibition organised at the MACBA by the same Miralles, and another baroque realist, Elias Torres, along with Xavier Costa, dedicated precisely to Situationism.

The Olympics gave the opportunity to some, as whom this signs, to implement this realism, contextual and pragmatic on an urban scale: Vall d'Hebrón. It is also, in its own way, the Olympic Village, although entangled with another possible commitment option with reality, stylistic eclecticism which is often sustained by MBM.
An architect of similar age and in a comparable situation also did it: Josef Kleihus in the IBA of Berlin.

II

In a period of general optimism, Peter Rowe published his “Civic Realism”.

Barcelona was the main part of the book. The Barcelona that was transformed with the impulse and money related to the ‘92 Olympics, served Rowe to identify Realism (attentive, by definition, to the programme) with the attention to the public programme and, therefore, to the urban space, constituted this way in civic space.
That civic realism is the cross produced in Catalan lands between the programmatic and constructive realism and the urban ambition imposed by the teaching of Manuel de Solá- Morales.

III

"Dirty realism" is the option posed for the large-scale architecture paid with private money to obtain profit (tax havens to the margin). They propose it, each one in their own way:

1.
LO-FI Group: Marco Navarra, Luca Emanueli, Mario Lupano, or (in architecture and fashion) Amanda Montanari.
It consists on setting the corresponding elements of the basic programme traces and allows time, taste or the user's need to finish and modify, with the help of time, the project.

2.
R. Koolhaas-OMA, wounded, made relative, dismissed that Realist-Civic idyll in word and deed probably by considering it artificial and subsidized (by the state) and, therefore, outside the mainstream of history, which would be articulated around the Market, that is precisely where he himself always wanted to be located in order to obtain a large-scale architecture capable of being paid with ordinary Money, not necessarily from the state.

His Dirty realism, in the architecture section, demands greater empathy with the "really real" distributive, formal, object-based, and vital standards of the moment. An architecture in the market, with the dirty hands, if it is necessary.

See its formal translation: boxes that correspond to diverse programme containers, approximately superimposed, fitted in a tight with a mesh structure, like the faces of the assailants of any corporate building.
I am aware of the different moral position of the two examples with which I have illustrated Dirty realism, but I believe to find in them coincidences of project strategy and formalization.

Years ago I published a small book on Koolhaasian positions.

BORDEAUX, VENEZIA, BARCELONA, LAGOS. De la biennale a Mutations, 2001.
Click per a llegir. (ESP-ENG-FR)

IV

At this stage, a phase of progressive income transference towards the upper classes and/or directly to crooks who used to be called of white collar, disappearance phase, therefore, of that public (state) money which precisely paid that civic realism, or that kept the dirty version within the inherent limits of the so-called welfare society, there is no longer other realism than hard realism: hardcore architecture.

Hard realism is the one forced to work with what is given, or with what is diminishing, without more options.

If the first realism could operate with realities, materials, and new objects, and also recycle objects in the réaction poétique – interiors of the Smithsons, for example - hard realism can no longer operate with anything else than with the layout.
Its field of action is to give the void a semantic, vectorize the vacuum: making visible what can be determined in it as relational and pervadable.

To tell the truth, it does not seem to me a necessarily objectionable situation: the void has always been what is essential in architecture, since we need the solid precisely to create the void that we inhabit. If we cannot qualify the vacuum from the quality of the solids that make it, we will have to do it from its layout and, also, or ultimately, from the basic solid: our bodies.

It is this importance of the void what brings it near to the hard realism, on one flank, by the deprived classicism of the Tendenza, and this is also what can make this text understandable in the framework in which it is disseminated. Also to the stoic, even voluptuous, acceptance of time passing by, - proper of what is classical and of the body as an archetype -, opposite the neurosis of the derivatives of the modern movement, always concerned about being removed from the neurotic continuum of what is up to date.

Body and void are, therefore, the defining elements of hard realism, to which in addition to all the attributes that it has pointed out for the generically realist architecture, must now add the following:

-The crisis of the perpetuous new or the beauty of the specific.
The actual world wants confidence, for economical reasons, no more experiments are needed, but of course to maintain ourselves alive we do need perpetuous changes.
But there is a possible common path for the known and the new: I defend architectures that repeat solutions, with strategic changes. Then, beauty appears bonding the general, checked, procedures, with each specific situation.

-The dissolution of the puritan joint: it is to say that is no longer convincing, we should underline in a hysterical manner the passing by of time between two architectural moments. The bondage between adequate architectures is used to express the difference made out of novelty and generally, progress, both qualities in abeyance nowadays.

- The body’s come back: If beauty that appears with the specific is needed, the main specific, and usually forgotten, item is our body.
Our body has been assimilated like a machine, all its senses, all its spaces, of the MM formula.
Nowadays the most fashionable designers are very often characterized by the increasing stupid solutions to inexistent problems, being modern by forgetting -today always less than tomorrow- the common sense.


The physical and emotional possibilities, our body expects, creates and suggests, are usually put aside of the architectural narrative, that focus itself on ridiculous geometric variations of elemental miss functional standard solutions.

Just check the evolution of bathroom fittings.

-Architecture (and urbanism of course) as a process of progressive corrections

-Beauty made out by differences, oppositions and contradictions. Yes, let’s be Venturians but with more gravitas and sensuality, at least we are old Europeans like Richardson (almost), Nash, Perret, Puillon, Rossi, Asnago and Vender…

V
Let’s multiply beauties

The idea of beauty should change, must change, is already changing
The “new” beauty will be related with strong changes of the Modern M. items, like: impure for pure, instable for permanent, sensual by puritan, intense by beautiful, alive by frozen.

Let`s multiply beauties, let’s be hard

Eduard Bru.
Barcelona January 2013

In the interview conducted by Crane.tv to Shohei Shigematsu one can appreciate well the spirit that presides over the OMA Office in New York ¹. Shohei Shigematsu's words, though mild in tone, are eloquent. In his explanation, it is clear that OMA does not have a set for preset forms of architecture, but does have, however, a way of thinking. In view of the results the second statement is very credible while the first one is a lot less. My starting point here is that OMA’s architecture has a specific foundational image: a painting. And more specifically, the female figure that appears in the painting.

It is the "Angelus", by Jean-François Millet, one of the founders of the École de Barbizon together with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau. Painted in 1857, it is today preserved at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. On the canvas one can appreciate a couple of peasants praying the evening prayer of the Angelus in a field near Barbizon. The man has taken off his hat which he holds in his hands while the woman withdraws her gesture with clasped hands.

The painting gave origin to a book written by Salvador Dalí in the decade of the 30s of the past century, the manuscript of which was lost in 1941 in Arcachon, and which was subsequently published by the editor Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1963 in Paris. The original title was Le mythe tragique de “L’Angélus” de Millet² . In this book Dalí unravels one of his fixed images - the painting by Millet -, as could also be the rhinoceros’ horn or the grasshoppers. A great reader of Freud, whom he was able to meet in 1948 in London, Dalí invents the Paranoiac-Critical Method in 1929.

Such a method apprehended things in their underlying purpose. Armed with psychoanalysis, Dalí chose paranoia as the place where daily life is stirred with violence and it becomes uncanny. Once caught -subject with needles- the unconscious is dissected, analyzed and ultimately explained: rationalizing the delirium and transforming it into a story. The whole of Dalí’s work is teleological, that is to say that it revolves around this research about himself, where Oedipus will emerge as the main character.

The Angelus by J.F. Millet also raised a series of oil paintings and drawings by Dalí that illustrated what was assayed in the book. Succinctly, the book develops a tale for the painting in a subliminal order and which finds its form in the classical myth of Oedipus. Dalí attributed the immense popularity of the painting to its underlying or hidden meaning. The meaning that appears in a sinister way in the thought of Dalí since his childhood and which he is now able to discern its fundamental elements. Such images will be related to eroticism and death. And in its Oedipal translation: infanticide, parricide and incest.

Dalí visited the city of New York in 1935. Four decades later on, in 1978, Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York³ , which main thesis will be the urban congestion in the city of New York. And as the same title suggests, it will be the delirium what will explain it. Such an attempt of rationalization will come from the hand of Dalí and his paranoiac-critical method.

RK explains in the book how Le Corbusier sees his visions for New York frustrated because he is not capable of comprehending it. In return, the city of New York does not even pay attention to LC. Nevertheless, Dalí’s visit is different. Dalí interprets the urban phenomenon of congestion in New York -Manhattanism, in the words of RK- from its underlying logic: the paranoiac state.

RK remembers Dalí’s words about New York:

The paranoiac-critical conquest of Manhattan on behalf of Dalí is an economic model, especially when, with a final gesture, it transforms the entire city into a show, represented only for its pleasure.
"Every evening, the skyscrapers of New York adopt the multiple and giant anthropomorphic figures of the Angelus by Millet […] immobile, and ready to perform the sexual act and devour each other [...]. It is this bloodthirsty desire what illuminates them and makes all the central heating and the whole central poetry circulates within its ferruginous bone structure".
For a moment, his interpretation leaves all the other functions of the city in suspense. It is there for him only.
"New York, why, why did you erect my statue time ago, before I was born, higher than any other, more desperate than any other?”.⁴

According to RK, Dalí interprets the city of New York as an economic model for the spectacular representation of himself. Thus, the city of New York becomes the giant materialization of his self-representation: the myth of Oedipus and his image, which is none other than the couple of peasants of the Angelus. The anthropomorphic skyscrapers are now ready for the cannibal act that will join death and eroticism. The Dalinian story sublimated in urban congestion, capitalist economy and entertainment society, working as a team for the greater glory of Dalí, the great egocentric.

Delirious New York contains, among other documentary images, the illustrations by Madelon Vriesendorp. The most famous between them is the one that is on the cover and on page 160 of the edition of Gustavo Gili⁵ . Entitled Flagrant offense. In a New York penthouse, a couple of buildings lie on a bed in a post-coital scene. They are the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Barely hidden under a sheet, they are discovered by the Rockefeller Center that observes them illuminating them with a spotlight from the threshold of the door. On the bedside table, the forearm of the Statue of Liberty illuminates the bedroom, while the Dutch grid of Manhattan and Central Park covers the carpet that is swallowed by the bed. On the outside, the skyscrapers of New York contemplate with a hypnotic gaze the now spectacular scene. As proof, at an edge of the bed hangs a Goodyear piece of tire. Its way of hanging is unmistakable. It reminds us of the soft pocket watches painted by Dalí in The Persistence of Memory, of 1931. In addition, the act committed by the two anthropomorphic skyscrapers is forbidden, as the acts that occur in the myth of Oedipus are.

The text of RK and illustrations of MV constitute a double allusion to the Dalinian paranoiac-critical method. The manhattanism, the delirium of New York, Can only be explained from the irrationality of the urban process, for its essentially paranoiac dynamics. Pathologically, New York is at the margin of modernity. The Hygienist and Cartesian criterion of Le Corbusier becomes useless in New York, which advances according to the swerves of an economical model that is found placed under the spotlights of show business. Does a city that has been filmed more than this one exist?

Thus, Manhattanism is the expression of a capitalist system in an exacerbated state, in its greater degree of concentration. According to David Harvey⁶, the Supreme precept of capitalism is the compound growth rate consisted of 3 per cent. Such a requirement causes the system to permanently subsist "on the knife’s cutting edge", so that the crises succeed one another, becoming "irrational rationalisers": the very description of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method.

Thus, it can be said that the paranoid nature of New York’s congestion is analogous to the paranoiac-critical method, representation of which is the Angelus of Millet, and more specifically, the figure of the woman who is ready for the sexual and cannibal act. For RK, and in a foundational way in his work, the woman of the Angelus will be the image of the economic and urban processes that define the city. Such processes will be paranoiac and will have a formal effect on architecture. The buildings of RK will offer a murderous sensuality. And to be more precise, they will offer the attitude of the peasant of the Angelus.

In another of the books of RK, Content⁷ , the subtitles attract attention: Perverted Architecture, Homicidal Engineering, Sweat shop Demographics, Slum Sociology, Big Brother Skyscrapers, Al Qaeda Fetish, Martha Stewart Urbanism and Paranoid Technology. To sum up, the subtitles constitute a set of notes on what is pathological and spectacular; of the paranoiac states and the cannibal sensuality. And that is where the architecture of RK shall arise and grow, under the auspices of a woman of great resemblance with the religious mantis: the peasant of the Angelus by Millet. The RK buildings will rise with difficulty. Their insect suffering, more than human, will be reflected almost always in a withdrawn gesture⁸.

Content has plenty of examples, like the illustrations of the OMA buildings that have come to life now converted into anthropomorphic villains, ready for the sexual act and crime, designed by Simon Brown and Jon Link, of &&&. One can also find in Content, the article of Fenna Haakma Wagenar, “Astrology. Protect us from what we want” ⁹, gives a good account of the paranoiac state of OMA’s activity. FHW exposes the many conflicts between the models of thought and method between OMA-Rotterdam and Herzog & de Meuron-Basel. For OMA, FHW describes a febrile condition of production on the edge of delirium that RK deals with rationalizing from time to time. Although never in excess: comfort does not exist in OMA.

Enric Llorach, Barcelona

[1] Crane.tv, Shohei Shigematsu OMA member. In New York, format: video, architecture journal Metalocus, online edition, 21.12.2012

[2] Salvador Dalí, Le mythe tragique de “L’Angélus” de Millet, Société Nouvelle des Éditions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1963. Spanish version: El mito trágico de “El Ángelus” de Millet, Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, 2004. 1ª edición en colección Marginales: March 1978. 1ª edición en colección Esenciales: January 2004.

[4] Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 1978. Spanish version: Delirio de Nueva York. Un manifiesto retroactivo para Manhattan, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2004, pages 263-264.

[5] Ibid, p. 160.

[7] AMOMA / Rem Koolhaas / &&& | Simon Brown | Jon Link, Content. Perverted Architecture. Homicidal Engineering. Sweat shop Demographics. Slum Sociology. Big Brother Skyscrapers. Al Qaeda Fetish. Martha Stewart Urbanism. Paranoid Technology, Taschen, Köln, 2004.

[8] The soft melting pocket watches that are found in the painting The persistence of memory (1931), by Salvador Dalí, exert at the same time a foundational image for the OMA-Rem Koolhaas architecture. In this occasion the resemblance must be found in the soft slabs that abound in his work and that Dalí would have called “eatable architecture”.

Note: All the images are downloaded from internet, in particular from: http://www.metalocus.es/, http://www.oma.nl/ and http://www.google.es/

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Enric Llorach

Roundtable, June 13th, 2012, AURS.


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