CONTENTS

1 The Wrong Pyramid 88 The Four Books of Mistakes

Pier Paolo Tamburelli Matteo Ghidoni

11 Editorial 99 Deliberate Mistakes:

Stories of the Winchester House
14 Perfectly Fine for Mies Cédric Boulet
Kersten Geers
106 Phantoms of Monuments
19 Data Centre on Lexington Avenue Mathieu Mercuriali
Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen
111 Freud and Méliès
21 Beauty and Mistakes Alexander Hilton Wood
in the Early Work of Peter Märkli
Andrea Zanderigo 116 An “Aesthetics of Mistakes” in the
Discourse of the “Collective Actions” Group
25 Modernistic Neanderthalism Sergei Sitar interviews Andrei Monastyrski
Matteo Poli
120 The Nightmare of Participation,
30 Scamozzi versus Sansovino or Considering the Value of Failure
Paolo Carpi as a Proactive Catalyst for Change
Markus Miessen
40 The Displacement of the Grande Arche:
The Story of a Surreal Monument 129 Architecture, Dynamite
Wulf Böer and the Political Establishment
Giovanni La Varra
46 Santa Maria Annunziata in Roccaverano:
The Misinterpretation of a Project by Bramante 137 Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.
Manuela M. Morresi On the Potential of What Goes Wrong
in Relation to Modernism and Art
55 La Bombonera Filipa Ramos
Giacomo Summa
144 Mitologia Ferrari
61 Hagia Sophia versus Hagia Sophia Stefano Graziani
Ioanna Volaki
148 Instant Paradise: A Story of Failure
66 Solomon, I Have Outdone Thee! and Accidental Beauty
Asli Cicek Steven Bosmans and Michael Langeder

74 Systematic Mistakes: 152 A Lake and a Swimming Pool:

Notes on Leon Battista Alberti’s Design Two Water Stories from the USSR
Strategies Saverio Pesapane
Angelo Del Vecchio
160 A Mistake of Principles: The Principles
77 Review of the Exhibition Emergency of Architecture Are Eleven and Immutable
in Favour of Twice at the Institute of 2A+P/A
Contemporary Art
Aaron Moulton 164 A drawing by Alexander Brodsky

83 The Wrong Program 169 Fuck Concepts! Context!

BARarchitekten Call for Papers
THE WRONG PYRAMID: AN EGYPTIAN STORY, A TRUE STORY
Egypt, 2800 BC. As you can see, the ziggurat is an obsolete model. Egypt must innovate / It’s more cost
effective to build pyramids than ziggurats / The pyramid represents extraordinary progress for the
development of architecture; it opens up a new era of sustainable monuments / Fuck! What’s this guy
bullshitting about . . . / WTF. We’ve been building ziggurats for centuries / There should be a reason / Why
wasn’t my brother asked to be Pharaoh?
Ministers, what’s your opinion? / I don’t think this will please the Assyrian ratings agency. They won’t
allow us to do this, Pharaoh; we will need to . . . / Issue more debt / It’s better to invade Nubia! / Or, kick
the hell outta Crete . . . / I repeat . . . The budget doesn’t allow for it! / My idiotic son will end up doing it
and taking credit for it. I can just hear it now: “Cheops’s Pyramid”. Fuck you, Cheops, you suck! / Enough!
Quit acting like losers.
Tremontokan, you suck. We build the pyramid then / Don’t make an ass outta us. And let’s try not to get
fined like we did for that fucking Red Sea bridge / Get the fuck outta here! And, architect, take your god-
damned model too! / Now . . . bring me those Babylonian whores.
What kinda shit job is this?!?! Fuck internships / In the darkness of the night, doubts surface . . .
Isn’t it too steep? / 48 degrees? / mmm / mmm . . . / mmm . . . / ROAR!
FUCK! The pyramid creaks! / This motherfucker’s collapsing! / Attention employees! Tomorrow you’ll have
a day off in Sharm el-Sheikh / . . . And the foremen will be the entertainers! / And now what the fuck do I
tell him?! (A lonely man) / The Hittites came and destroyed the pyramid / Fuck . . . I finished but they threw
the apex into the Nile! / Now we can’t repair it.
Yes, they threw all the stones into the Nile / Hittites. Those pieces of shit! / mmm / What a fucker. Why
couldn’t I just build a ziggurat like all the others? / My wife even told me, “Build a ziggurat. Take some
bribes from the guys in the stone quarries” / “Dear Pharaoh, We have a problem . . . ” / “Dear Pharaoh, It’s
not so easy to build a pyramid . . . ” / “Dear Pharaoh, Is it true that every . . . ” / “Dear Pharaoh, FUCK YOU!”
And we can cover it with solar panels? / Or with windmills? / You know what? I can . . . / I can finish you off,
you motherfucking pyramid. / I’ll call . . . / I’ll call 10 Albanians and in 2 weeks / I’ll pull it outta my ass and
it’ll be done / I’ll pull it outta my ass and then I’ll kill myself.
SAN ROCCO Registered Office San Rocco is published three
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Previous pages:
Pier Paolo Tamburelli, The Wrong Pyramid.
Translation by Salomon Frausto
 EDITORIAL

There is plenty of bad architecture all over the place. Stupid, wrong
architecture. Architecture that failed, and failed miserably. Architecture
that is full of mistakes.
San Rocco 3 does not talk about that. San Rocco 3 is interested in
another kind of mistake: mistakes that are the product of a dispropor-
tion, of a displacement; mistakes that are somehow generous, open,
brave; mistakes that involve some sort of heroic failure; mistakes that
shed a new light on the limits of the very same rule that labels them
as mistakes.
Mistakes are evident, public. Like rules, they involve some sort of
agreement. Mistakes are the opposite of opinions. Actually, mistakes
despise opinions even more than rules do. Mistakes can happen only
if there is a shared knowledge. Mistakes do not imply a complete
refusal of the rule; rather, a rule is opposed by a new and different
rule, not by a mistake. Mistakes do not want to do away with the rule;
instead, mistakes try to establish a relationship with the rule (even
if this is not a very relaxed one). Mistakes are episodes in which the
rule manifests itself in all its weakness and clumsiness. Mistakes are
a comedy about rules, or the stumbling and stuttering little brothers
of rules. There is something intimately didactic about mistakes. As
soon as there is a mistake, there is some sort of correction, some sort
of teaching, some sort of school.
Mistakes are necessarily plural: if there is a rule, there will be plenty
of mistakes. Mistakes suggest the possibility (and the necessity) of a
new kind of rule, one that could even cope with this specific kind of
mistake. Mistakes somehow point toward some forgotten potential.
Mistakes are progressive.

11
 Mistakes sometimes contain a certain hubris. Behind every mis-
take there is somebody that believes he can afford to make that very
mistake (as in the case of Bramante and the different dimensions of
the orders in his Belvedere, or in that of Bernini and the Doric colon-
nade with the Ionic frieze for St Peter’s Square).
Mistakes are sometimes the product of humbleness: provincial
mistakes, made out of distrust, lack of self-confidence or instinctive
conservatism (like the exquisite provincialism of the pillars of Figini’s
house at the Villaggio dei Giornalisti, or the touching clumsiness of
the church in Roccaverano).
Mistakes can be intelligent, but they are definitely not smart (smart-
ness, in fact, is about avoiding mistakes). Smart mistakes are what
Castiglione and Raphael – who were too smart to really like mistakes –
called sprezzatura, a subtle negligence that undermines the rule without
openly discussing it. San Rocco is not interested in that, however:
San Rocco is interested in something less polite and riskier (or more
honest) – something that involves running the risk of producing a
total failure.
Sometimes mistakes happen precisely where different sets of rules
conflict, or where different scales intersect. Here the rigorous observa-
tion of an overall logic demands that mistakes be made on a smaller
scale: “Good reasons must, of force, give place to better” ( Julius Caesar,
Act IV, Scene III). Bramante’s Belvedere is full of such mistakes.
Mistakes are sometimes elegant. They can have a particular beauty.
They can be as sweet as Buster Keaton or Krazy Kat. They can turn the
rule into something milder or gentler. There is a particular talent for
making mistakes (think, for instance, of Lewerentz – early Lewerentz,
of course – or of Alvaro Siza).
In one of his letters, Schönberg (it was Schönberg, wasn’t it?) talks
about the honesty of Mahler (was it Mahler?) in having written nec-
essarily bad music at moments when bad music was what was called
for. Mistakes can be of this kind: disgraceful episodes that make a
sacrifice for the sake of the global meaning of a work, voluntary ugly
ducklings, self-sacrificing heroes like Judas according to Borges; or
deliberate mistakes, such as the incorrect perspective of the coffin
in Zurbarán’s depiction of St Bonaventura’s funeral, the wrong per-
spective of the Kaaba in popular Muslim prints, the repulsive façade
presented to the visitor by the monastery of La Tourette, the portico
in front of nothing of the Collegio Elvetico, and the fake windows at
Schloss Tegel . . .

12
 Mistakes can also appear when somebody tries to prove that all of
the rest of the world is wrong, and problems occur in the situations in
which this pure truth collides with the stubborn world that refuses to
comply with it. Thus, Palladio’s Basilica crashes its proud stairs against
a little medieval house, and almost all of Giorgio Grassi’s schemes are
mutilated at the borders of plots that are invariably too small to host
the project that they should have hosted.
Mistakes can also involve pure enigma, like the bent pyramid at
Dashur. Mistakes imply the existence of a story that we would like to hear.

13
 PERFECTLY FINE FOR MIES

Kersten Geers

14
a theory that works
a mania that sticks
a lie that has become a truth
a dream from which there is no waking up . . .
Rem Koolhaas, City of the Captive Globe

I.
In his ironic, if not slightly silly, book Modern Movements in Architecture,
Charles Jencks defines and simultaneously deconstructs Mies’s
Platonic modernism. All he needs to do so is the Seagram Building,
the totem of high modernism on Park Avenue in New York.
Mr Jencks discovers that the building, which is most frequently
shown from its “front side”, has a back, and the back is not convincing.
He states: “Consider, even in Mies’ own terms of visual refinement,
how far he has failed to reach a ‘perfect’ visual solution to resolving
the geometries of the internal corner of the Seagram building.” The
internal corner under scrutiny is the one created by the meeting of
the complex volume of the back with the main volume of the tower;
the corner is strange. Yet the corner is not only a weird detail; it is also
the place where two apparently different systems, or even ideas, of
the building collide. In 1973, this collision seems to be an attack on
Mr Jencks’s world view. It confuses him; it is a mistake. It makes him
simultaneously lyrical and disappointed: “In formal terms the exterior
corners of the building are masterful and convincing, the internal ones
are indecisive and botched: they look as if a meat cleaver has sliced
the two regular curtain walls off at mid point and just joined what is
left over. It appears that Mies is trying to get away with a fudge on just
the very problem which would have exercised the greatest skill and
passion of past, classical architects.”
Jencks is not convinced by what he sees and concludes that it is “a
near disaster in an architecture claiming consideration in the classi-
cal tradition of perfection”.
Mr Jencks, however, falls into the trap he has himself created. In
his technocratic overview of architecture – what he calls “late modern
architecture” and all its incarnations – each actor is supposed to play
a certain role, like two-dimensional characters in a cartoon. If one of
these characters does not behave exactly as Mr Jencks expects them
to, then it is a mistake. According to Mr Jencks, we should be warned
beforehand if things are supposed to be unresolved in the end.

15
 II.
The back of the Seagram Building is not a compromise. It is a con-
sciously designed rear façade that is perfectly in line with the fact that
the other side is the front. The rear façade is carefully considered, and
it reveals the Seagram Building’s true intentions: to create a context
where the very idea of one does not seem to make any sense at all.

III.
If Manhattan’s grid tries to annihilate the notion of context, then
the Seagram Building tries to falsify it. It works like a model of the
European idea of architecture, abstracted and created on a small
scale. According to this logic, each of the sides of the building must
be different, but none less important than the others, and it is pre-
cisely this equal weight of each of its aspects that the design takes into
consideration so elegantly.
The Seagram complex is comprised of a tall tower and a small block
of equal length and different width that are connected by a marble
“hinge”. Both tower and block are positioned in the middle of the plot
defined by Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. On either extreme of
the lot, no building has been designed. On Park Avenue this results
in the now-famous square in front of the tower. It creates a break in
the rhythm of the street and (supposedly) presents itself as a gesture
flouting the logic of land values. At the rear, however, there is an equally
large open space without a construction project, because that part of
the plot was not acquired by the Seagram Company.
From the surviving documentation, we know that the Seagram
Company tried to acquire the whole lot at first but didn’t succeed. I
don’t know if they ever shared this fact with Mies. To my knowledge,
however, there are no surviving drawings of a project that took this
into account. More interesting is that we can be sure that the thought –
whether real or virtual – was present when the project was developed,
thus making the resulting project one designed for a “handicapped”
site. The Seagram complex that was ultimately built treated this as an
asset and tried to impose an idea of context on a site that has virtually
nothing to do with this idea.

IV.
The alibi was simple. In front of the site along Park Avenue, one finds
the Racquet and Tennis club designed by McKim, Mead & White. It is
an imposing building in their signature palazzo style that was built in

16
1919, when two of the three principal partners had already died. Still,
the building is a masterpiece and a perfect example of their imposition
of European contextualism. The formula is rather simple (but effec-
tive): take an Italian palazzo, multiply its size by three times, stretch
it to fit at least two dimensions of the given plot, and you anchor a
romantic European fantasy in the implacable logic of the American
grid plan. McKim, Mead & White made many heroic attempts to inject
a self-constructed sense of European culture into the bulk of the built
mass of New York.
By 1954 the remaining buildings of McKim, Mead & White no
longer represent the bulk of the city, and the racquet club and the few
others that have remained have been left behind as incarnations of
an ideology, or a theory of a city, that could exist parallel to or overlaid
on top of the New York grid.
In the design of the Seagram Building, Mies takes the proposi-
tion of McKim, Mead & White seriously. In the front, towards the club
building, he makes a square, thus incorporating the palazzo into the
site. Together, palazzo, square and tower create a classic composition
of ersatz Europeanism. In the back, Mies designs a volume that takes
the width of the palazzo (which is the width of the site) and builds a
curious volumetric composition. It is a mise-en-scène of the “urban
block” that not only acknowledges its secondary nature with respect to
the tower, but also leaves space for the existing buildings in the back
along Lexington Avenue to dominate. In this sense, both volumes –
the large and the small – argue over the void, the empty space they
do not cover, in an attempt to impose their contextualism. The hinge
between them, created entirely out of the same bronze-coloured steel
profiles but with marble-plate infill, decisively unites both systems.
The manner of its physical materialization emphasizes the ambiguity
of its contextualism. As a dead body, it bridges the two – it steps back
and embraces two different results deriving from the same system of
measurement. The hinge and its awkward inner corner is not merely
a mistake, but also a precise and decisive incarnation of the ambigu-
ity of both plot and architect. Both are simultaneously American and
European, object and infill, imposing and imposed. This microscopic
representation of conflict is fundamental in Mies’s work, and is – upon
closer inspection – everywhere in it. In the Seagram Building one can
find it in the bizarre travertine extensions on the cores outside the
building, in the garage entrances in the base, in the parapets rep-
resenting the centre of the design and, of course, in the hinge itself.

17
 Each of these elements – combinations of a large volume and a
small one, or of a large cutout and a small one – mimics the other in
section or plan. And yet curiously, the most reproduced of all details,
the detail of the façade structure that shows steel profiles caught in
concrete reproduced by a smaller bronze profile on the outside, has
the same formal language. It acts as a microscopic reproduction of
the building’s formal riddle, part esoteric (un)consciousness, part
contextual pragmatism – a formal collision of seemingly uncombin-
able elements that is perfectly fine for Mies.

V.
In his City of the Captive Globe project, Rem Koolhaas recreated the
idea of the Manhattan grid as a set of speculative spaces on identical
granite bases. It presents a set of plots “where each philosophy has
the right to expand indefinitely to heaven”. It is a place where due
to the grid, lobotomy and schism are able to flourish indefinitely in
order to create the possibility of “cities within the city” as the ultimate
celebration of the endless possibilities that the concept of the grid
allows. Mies’s contextualism is but one of these possible philoso-
phies. However, as a Trojan horse, it annihilates the very frame that
it employs to flourish, or that permits it to exist.
As a self-imposed context within the Manhattan grid, the Seagram
Building is the lie that became truth, creating a dream from which there
is no waking up – Manhattanism aborted from within.

18
 DATA CENTRE ON LEXINGTON AVENUE

Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen

Data centre with perforated
base and tall chimney to max-
imize cooling through chim-
ney effect. Structure of steel
with natural stone infill. The
building fills the empty lot
made available after a building
originally present during the
construction of the Seagram
Building was demolished. The
height of the main volume has
been mediated by that of the
neighbouring buildings, which
makes the new building “fit”
the site; the base is ventilation
grills; the programme hints
at the notion of a context
that is everywhere and no-
where, which is the state of
Manhattan’s grid today.

19
20
 BEAUTY AND MISTAKES
IN THE EARLY WORK OF PETER MÄRKLI

Andrea Zanderigo

Beauty can be radical, and for this reason it is more than a consumer object.
Peter Märkli in conversation with Marcel Meili*

Peter Märkli has always been busy with the conscious production of *Mohsen Mostafavi (ed.),
beauty. Even his early, controversial projects might be interpreted as Approximations: The
Architecture of Peter Märkli
an ongoing investigation that attempts to demonstrate the possibility (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
for beauty to make an appearance once more in contemporary society Press, 2002)
(and be understood by it). And this is true despite the obvious fact that
his first buildings clearly belong to the antigrazioso tradition. Indeed,
we do not trust his words when he states in the same conversation cited
above that he was completely culturally ignorant at the beginning of
his career. We know that he had been travelling extensively throughout
Italy at the time, and we can imagine him carefully observing not only
the Romanesque Santa Giusta in Bazzano-L’Aquila, which he acknowl-
edges as a source (as does Meili), but Giovanni Muzio’s experiments
in Milan as well. The close resemblance between the bizarre syntax
and architectural elements of Ca’ Brüta and the double building in
Trübbach-Azmoos are too apparent to be ignored. We also shouldn’t
forget that during those years there was Carlo Carrà’s antigrazioso
poetics with its reinterpretation of the “primitives” that was close to
Muzio’s own. But maybe Märkli really didn’t know about Muzio then;
perhaps he was just sharing the same pre-modern sources, like the
works of the early Renaissance and Romanesque periods.
In any case, in the first works by Märkli, there is a particular kind
of beauty that is truly radical. How might we describe the main façades
of the double building in Trübbach-Azmoos from 1982 if not as radi-
cal? It is a weird pre-modern composition of two red-painted béton

21
 brut surfaces that are pierced with oddly spaced vertical windows on
the upper floor and an inversely tapering column-screened loggia on
the main one, with the whole standing atop a classical podium with
a double staircase and surmounted by a cryptic sculpture by one of
Märkli’s mentors, Hans Josephsohn. Nothing is aligned here; voids
and solids confront one another along the main axis, and the whole
composition is a beautiful ensemble of detectable mistakes. The
House in Trübbach- language may have changed, but the Minimalist entry façade of the
Azmoos, 1982 1988 apartment building in Trübbach is indeed no different. There
Above right: are intentionally no correspondences between the formwork and the
Apartment building in openings; in addition, there is a bizarre, rather Venturian proportional
Trübbach, 1988
relationship between the tapering windows and the narrow door that
creates an almost symmetrical overall composition (note the formwork
in the upper right portion of the façade).

Steps towards a Theory of Beauty

Searching for external objective affirmation, Märkli justifies his bizarre
compositional choices with a complicated and obscure proportional
system, a weird and highly personal combination of the Golden Section,
the Triangulum, the Modulor and who knows what else. Wisely, he adds

22
that his system alone does not constitute a recipe for beauty. After all,
beauty is the ultimate goal for architecture, and that is important to
us. But what is beauty in his eyes? How could we define it? And how
can we judge it?
What at first glance might appear to be an esoteric discourse on
beauty becomes a more consistent and understandable argument
when one follows Märkli’s train of thought in the above-mentioned
conversation. Responding to Meili’s perception of architecture as a
collective language in which the rules are determined by conventions
(the “discursive” model, as he calls it), Märkli introduces the aware-
ness of there being certain laws that are above individual or collective
will. Certainly, they are open to interpretation, but they do not vary
in their essentials. Perhaps without knowing it, Märkli introduces
Chomsky’s argument for the existence of invariable mind structures
in our brains that predetermine our language, which is in opposition
to the Structuralist discourse à la De Saussure. Märkli empirically sup-
ports this assumption by referring to typological similarities between
products of different cultures and times.
Consistently enough, when asked by Meili why hundreds of people
objected to one of his early apartment buildings and why he was so
certain that he was the only one to have recognized the truth of the
situation, Märkli answered that it was probably because he was the
only one who had ever seriously addressed these issues. Besides, the
mythical circle in which the signifier and the signified were immedi-
ately understandable by all – if it indeed ever existed – has been broken.

Beauty through Mistakes

In our eyes, Peter Märkli has been developing a true, albeit cryptic, inves- Apartment building in
tigation of beauty as achieved through mistakes – a compositional system Sargans, 1986

in which odd misalignments, subtle asymmetries, apparent inconsisten-

cies and grotesque proportions play an essential role in the definition of
built matter. Every level of the design process is enriched by seemingly
unconventional choices. And so in the top flat of the apartment build-
ing in Brig from 1995, for example, the kitchen and the living room are
intentionally placed at the two opposite ends of the narrow unit in order
to increase its apparent size and greatly enrich the living experience of
the residents (indeed, Luigi Caccia Dominioni had already criticized
Klein’s functional approach to small-unit design in a very similar way).
With the same purpose, a different trick is used in the apartment
building in Sargans from 1986, where the bedrooms and the kitchen

23
 are all reduced to the allowed minimum and the gain in surface area is
concentrated in a large living room connected to an unusually generous
entryway, thereby evading the need for a modernist distribution space.
A deep loggia standing on a mute concrete podium and screened by a
redundant series of oddly spaced pillars characterizes the main façade
of the building while providing privacy to the rooms facing the street.
Again in 1995, Märkli built a two-level single-family house on a plot
at the edge of the village of Grabs in which, significantly, the plan is
almost a square. In this square-based, polished concrete parallelepi-
ped, only the entrance corner has an angle measuring exactly ninety
degrees; all the others depart from perfect orthogonality in a barely
perceptible way. The point is precisely that by being almost a square,
it becomes a perfect square in reality.
This list could easily go on. It is clear that many of Peter Märkli’s
early projects present a pre-modern (and thus postmodern) mastery –
in a sense, beauty as achieved through mistakes.

House in Grabs, 1995

24
MODERNISTIC NEANDERTHALISM

Matteo Poli
photographs by Paolo Rosselli

25
 Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans
introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day. Ann Gibbons*

* Ann Gibbons, “A New The house Luigi Figini designed for himself in Milan is profoundly
View of the Birth of Homo Neanderthal, while Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye is most definitely Homo
Sapiens”, Science,
28 January 2011. sapiens sapiens. I am not sure a mistake is conspicuously visible in
Villa Figini (discard the Savoye and pick up the Weissenhof, and voilà,
le pilotis rond ist quadratisch) but I have to admit that its volume is
quite low-vaulted and has the large brow-ridge typical of Neanderthals.
Both houses share supports, open plans, horizontal windows, roof
gardens and a free design of the façade; they basically have the same
DNA. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier cleverly designed his villa as an over-
refined manifesto, demonstrating how sleekness always triumphs over
roughness. Figini limited himself to living in his own house with his
wife Gege Bottinelli, who was actually the curator of the Milanese gal-
lery Il Milione, where the first exhibition of Rationalism was mounted.
By chance, the champion of Neo-Rationalism, Aldo Rossi, abused
square pilotis and Neanderthal roughness, demonstrating how long-
dormant ideas can resurface again in architecture too.
While the house at the Villaggio dei Giornalisti essentially has no
acknowledged heirs but quite a large group of ancestors, Le Corbusier’s
seminal villa reinterpretations later evolved into the architectural
embodiment of Philip Dick–style science fiction with Rem Koolhaas’s
Villa dall’Ava. Instances of extinction and speciation . . .
The palafitte is now working undercover. Vegetation took over the
plot, hiding the last remains of a less sleek alternative to modernism. Still
inhabited and thus extremely hard to visit, it resists transformation: in
contrast to the open field in which it was originally built, it is now part of
a dense urban structure, camouflaged within the garden and extending
Le Corbusier’s five points to almost a century after their conception, and
still maintains its primary function – residential housing. Meanwhile the
Homo sapiens sapiens version risked demolition after becoming a youth
centre in Poissy for some years; stubbornly, Villa Figini kept its quiet exist-
ence resting on its large, flat, suspended belly.
There is general agreement that Neanderthal interbreeding was a
huge boon for our species; sticking with the metaphor, I am afraid that
the regular cross-breeding of similarly sleek buildings is leading archi-
tecture to a sterile place, whereas I think that the brutal genetic aber-
ration that generated Figini’s house might have had interesting conse-
quences and could liberate architecture from continuous self-repetition.

26
27
28
29

1 The history of the renovatio (renewal) of St Mark’s Square in Venice
See Manfredo Tafuri, Jacopo
Sansovino e l’architettura
del ’500 a Venezia (Padua:
Marsilio, 1969); Manuela M.
Morresi, Jacopo Sansovino
(Milan: Electa, 2000);
Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548–
1616, ed. Franco Barbieri and
Guido Beltramini, exh. cat.
Palazzo Barbaran da Porto,
Vicenza, 7 September 2003–
11 January 2004 (Venice:
Marsilio, 2003).
30
SCAMOZZI VERSUS SANSOVINO
Paolo Carpi
is a long and complicated one.1 In the sixty years from 1536 (when
the Venetian government’s Council of Ten chose Jacopo Sansovino
to rebuild the Mint that had burnt down in 1532) and 1597 (when
Vincenzo Scamozzi was fired as the architect of the New Procuracies
after the completion of the first ten bays), St Mark’s Square was the
site of a multi-layered battle that pitted the young conservative nobles
against the old nobles supporting the renovatio, the state procurators’
architects against the masons and stone-cutters, and, ultimately,
Vincenzo Scamozzi against Jacopo Sansovino.
In this struggle, Sansovino plays the role of the state architect
entrusted with the task of giving a physical form to the political values
of the renovatio of the Venetian Republic’s platea magna; in contrast
to Sansovino, Scamozzi does not join in on the collective produc-
tion of the modern myth of Venice. So while Sansovino takes sides,
Scamozzi does not align himself with any of the political parties of
the Republic, and whereas Sansovino tries – with some success – to
employ the classical language of architecture to express the values
of the Venetian renovatio, Scamozzi’s attempts – which are pretty
unsuccessful – are all directed at defending the autonomy of that very
same language. However, this autonomy ends up producing a divide
between architecture as an object (a building) and architecture as a
universal language: as an object, architecture is totally dependent on
power, while architecture as an expression of a universal language
simply stops being considered. From this point of view, Scamozzi’s
experience in St Mark’s Square is a failure, because the intentionally
sought, or at least unavoided, clash between architecture and its own
programme ends up being won by the latter. Still, it is important to
highlight the dignity with which Scamozzi accepts a defeat that borders
on martyrdom. This dignity is perfectly represented in Veronese’s por-
trait of the architect, in which Scamozzi is portrayed measuring – and
actually carrying – a Corinthian capital; it is a portrait of an architect
bearing his own cross.
If the enthusiasm for the renovatio is able to establish a link
between architecture and specific meanings until the middle of the
16th century, shortly thereafter architecture and its meanings begin to
diverge, if not clearly oppose one another. Scamozzi’s disappointment Paolo Caliari (il Veronese),
derives from the approximation that was instrumental for Sansovino Portrait of an Architect
(Vincenzo Scamozzi), ca.
to establish a connection between classical architectural language 1585, Denver Art Museum
and contemporary political values, a fact that allows him a certain
degree of license in adapting the ancient repertoire to the ideologi-
cal context of his day. What Sansovino considers licenses, necessary
licenses, Scamozzi perceives simply as mistakes, unforgivable mistakes.
When Scamozzi enters the battlefield of St Mark’s Square (1581), his
opponent Sansovino is already dead (1570) and the two components

7 8
6
Layout of St Mark’s Square
in 1580
1. Ducal Palace
2. Church of St Mark
1 3. Clock Tower
9
4. Old Procuracies
5. Church of San Geminiano
6. Orseolo Hospice
7. Bell Tower
11 10 8. Loggetta
9. Library
10. Public Slaughterhouse
11. Mint

31
 of the square – the larger piazza and the smaller piazzetta – are in the
state shown on the preceding page: the Library, a two-story building
with sixteen bays, is entirely finished apart from its southern façade
towards the water’s edge, the Mint is completed, the Beccheria (pub-
lic slaughterhouse) still occupies the corner between the Library and
the Mint, the Orseolo hospice still defines the southern border of the
square and the Loggetta is at the foot of the bell tower.
In this context, which is quite different from what we encounter
today, Sansovino strongly defines his idea for the organization of the
square with his three interventions, the Loggetta, the Library and
the Mint. The Library defines the alignment of the future relation-
ship between the square’s two parts, for its northern side defines the
new southern edge of the square, leaving the bell tower as an objet
trouvé at the junction of the piazza and the piazzetta. The Loggetta
enriches the bell tower, which has become freestanding. The Mint
is open to the east, toward the Ducal Palace and thus directly onto
the piazzetta, immediately south of the last (sixteenth) arcade of the
Library. Sansovino’s three buildings, together with the pre-existing

7 8
Layout of St Mark’s Square
in 1597
6
1. Ducal Palace
2. Church of St Mark
3. Clock Tower 1
4. Old Procuracies 9
5. Church of San Geminiano
6. New Procuracies (these
actually will not be finished
until 1640 by Baldassarre 10
Longhena)
7. Bell Tower
8. Loggetta
9. Library
10. Mint

32
ones (St Mark’s church, the Ducal Palace, the bell tower, the clock tower,
the Old Procuracies and the church of San Geminiano), operate like
the interconnected gears of a great new spatial machine. Sansovino’s
project is an open one; only a few fixed elements are required to define
the organization of the piazza and piazzetta. When Sansovino dies,
there are only two things left to do: conclude the southern edge of the
Library and substitute the Orseolo hospice with the New Procuracies.
Scamozzi’s first task is to complete the Library. In September 1580,
the Venetian Senate decides to move the public slaughterhouse and
to extend the Library to twenty-one bays, thereby aligning it with the
façade of the Mint facing the water’s edge. Scamozzi’s opinion on the
incomplete building by Sansovino is clear: “[M]any, without reason,
celebrated and described the very large – and almost disproportionally
tall – ornaments upon the columns, attributing to them one fourth of 2
the height of the columns, not to mention those who proposed orna- Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea
della architettura universale
ments of one third, if not half, so that they look like Albanian hats”.2 (1615), pt. II, bk. VI, chap.
Scamozzi’s intolerant orthodoxy does not attack Sansovino’s overall VII, 20.
urban scheme, but rather concentrates on some of the Library’s details: 3
the solution for the building’s corner, the Doric entablature and, most Drawing A 193, Uffizi,
importantly, the Ionic entablature of the second order. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe,
Florence.
According to Scamozzi, Sansovino’s Ionic entablature is entirely
incorrect: the height is wrong because of the unorthodox ornaments
introduced between the first and second bands of the architrave, and
the height of the frieze is wrong as well, for it has been made overly large
in order to make room for the windows of the mezzanine. Scamozzi
immediately tries to profit from the opportunity of the new commission
to correct the shame of Sansovino’s entirely incorrect entablature. He
proposes adding another floor to the Library, arguing that a twenty-
one-bay building with only two floors would appear disproportionate.
Of course, the construction of a third level would require the destruc-
tion of the second entablature. In order to persuade the Procurators,
Scamozzi designs a project that includes extremely luxurious offices
on the third level of the Library.3 Scamozzi’s proposal is rejected, how-
ever, after a consultation with the proto Simone Sorella, who observes
that a three-story Library would suffocate St Mark’s church, thereby
flouting a decree of 1556 stating the supremacy of the basilica over all
the other buildings in the square. Scamozzi’s strategy is a mistake: it
is simply suicidal to declare a grander goal (correcting the dispropor-
tion of the building) merely to achieve a smaller one (demolishing
the entirely incorrect entablature), knowing that there is no political

33

The point of contact
between the Mint (left)
and the Library (right) as
seen from St Mark’s basin
(photograph by Giovanna
Silva)
4 were to have remained separate.5
Scamozzi, L’idea della
architettura universale, pt. II,
bk. VI, chap. XXXV, 171.
5
See the reconstruction of
the original project in Tafuri,
Jacopo Sansovino, 82–89.
34
consensus regarding the former. Scamozzi acts like a fool. He will have
to extend the Library without increasing its height. In this context, it is
difficult to know how disappointed he is by the clash of the orders of
the Library and of the Mint, which Sansovino designed as independ-
ent objects but which are now forced to meet one another along the
sides facing the basin: “[A]nd sometimes orders of a certain kind crash
into others, as occurred here in Venice – without my consent – when
the façade of the Library and the façade of the Mint were made . . . :
excellent architects do not approve of such things”.4 The remark “with-
out my consent” sounds more like an attempt to lay the blame for this
clash on the shoulders of the Procurators rather than a direct criticism
of Sansovino, who had simply never thought about how to avoid this
clumsy encounter because, according to his design, the two buildings
So this first, and most evident, clash between the orders of the
Library and those of the Mint is executed by Scamozzi but is not
the product of an intentional attempt to critique Sansovino. Here
Scamozzi simply accepts (albeit with no enthusiasm) a solution arrived
at by someone else. However, he probably would have preferred not
to realize such a blatant conflict of ornament, because even if it had
been decided upon by somebody else, it was undoubtedly going to be
attributed to him.
In contrast, the second, and less evident, clash between the orders
of the two buildings in the piazza, that involving the Library and the
New Procuracies, happens entirely on purpose. Scamozzi is entrust-
ed with the task of realizing the New Procuracies in the place of the
Orseolo hotel. The new building would be in continuity with the three
bays of the northern façade of the Library. Here Scamozzi does not
have the opportunity to act directly on Sansovino’s entirely incorrect
entablature, but he has to build something that will abut it, and thus
he has the chance to remark upon it architecturally. The two prepara-
tory studies and the final realized version of this point of contact show
an involution from the point of view of formal eloquence that corre-
sponds to an evolution from the point of view of one’s awareness of
one’s means of expression.
The first solution (1582–88) appears in drawing UA194. Here
Scamozzi shows his complete refusal of Sansovino’s solution for the
Ionic entablature. The two façades correspond up until the balustrade
of the second floor – up to this level, the two buildings perfectly match.
It is in the Ionic arch of the second order of the bay between the two
buildings that Scamozzi introduces the first difference: a tympanum
that corresponds to the tympani appearing on the third floor of the
New Procuracies. The gap between Sansovino’s entirely incorrect
entablature and Scamozzi’s correct one is filled by three bands show-
ing the correct measurements of the elements of the entablature to
the right as compared to that on the left: the three correct bands col-
lide against undefined points of the entirely incorrect entablature. At
the top of this bay, the roofline of the Library with its balustrade and
statues is moved down in order to align it with the balustrade of the
third order of the New Procuracies, thereby producing a bizarre hybrid
containing elements of both buildings. In this drawing, Scamozzi
attempts an unlikely “fusion” notwithstanding his disapproval of
Sansovino’s design.
The second attempt (1596) to arrive at a solution is even more
paradoxical. Here the discontinuity starts with the first order, where
a blind wall has been introduced between the two buildings instead
of an arch (this is quite puzzling, particularly when seen in plan).
This wall is ornamented at its two ends with a mirrored repetition
of the corner solution of the Library, thereby connecting and divid-
ing the two buildings. The motif of the two mirrored (fake) corners
framing the blank wall extends upward, being just framed by the
entablatures of the smaller orders that cross the wall for no apparent
reason, and thereby links the two (seemingly) independent buildings.
At the level of the Ionic entablatures, the wall is nothing more than
an abstract field where the two entablatures confront each other in
no uncertain terms. Closer to the top, this solution becomes even
more whimsical and finally shows its limits: given the greater height
of the entirely incorrect entablature, the column and pilaster on the
left start higher than the column and pilaster on the right, and so the
column and pilaster on the left look strangely dwarfish. At the level
of the concluding Corinthian entablature, the fictional notion of the
independence of the two buildings comes to an end. While Scamozzi
stops the decorations of the frieze in correspondence with the column
and pilaster on the right, the roof, of course, reaches the column and
pilaster on the left.
The awkwardness of this solution is patent if, for a moment, one
considers the two buildings as truly separate and observes the Library
as an independent building: the attic loses its symmetry and looks as
if it is being harpooned by the Procuracies. Perhaps even Scamozzi
himself thought this was too much.

35
The first solution for the
point of contact between
the Library (left) and the
New Procuracies (right).
Drawn by SOOFFICE after
drawing no. A 194, Uffizi,
Gabinetto Disegni e
Stampe, Florence

36
 Second solution for the
point of contact between
the Library (left) and the
New Procuracies (right).
Drawn by SOOFFICE after
drawing no. 5448, Louvre,
Cabinet des Dessins, Paris

1 2 5m

37
 The ultimately realized solution represents a masterpiece of defeat.
After attempting first an articulated and unlikely reconciliation and
then a clumsy assault, Scamozzi abandons any formal gimmick and
leaves us with his bitter, merciless judgement, deciding that the point
of contact between the Procuracies and the Library can be solved only
by the brutal clash of the two conflicting orders. Scamozzi opts to
show up the irreconcilability of the two intellectual positions, even if
only with respect to a small detail. And he decides to work exclusively
on this detail despite the fact that it is inconsequential in the larger
picture of the square’s renovation, for he is stubborn enough to be
unable to renounce the opportunity to manifest his disagreement:
he takes full responsibility for a jarring note in order to adhere to the
correct architectural rhythm – the rhythm of Universal Architecture –
for the hundred or so metres of the Procuracies that remain. In the
end, Scamozzi accepts Sansovino’s mistake as it is, without hypocrisy
and without an ostentatious expression of disagreement. Much more
than in the correct solution of the Ionic entablature, it is here that the
lesson of Scamozzi lies.
One question remains: was this violent, Lilliputian confrontation
(a true tempest in a teapot) even noticed by Scamozzi’s clients? Perhaps
their reaction was not much different from that of the contemporary
tourist: a total indifference regarding the clear sign of an architectural
quarrel that, in the end, holds no interest for anyone.

Facing page:
The point of contact
between the Library (left)
and the New Procuracies
(right). How sweet is the
little carved angel who
now bears the weight
of the cornice Scamozzi
mercilessly placed upon
his shoulders after having
literally taken the ground
out from under his feet!

38
39
 THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE
GRANDE ARCHE: THE STORY OF
A SURREAL MONUMENT

Wulf Böer

40
In 1982 a competition was launched to design the Tête Défense, a rep-
resentative office building for the monofunctional high-rise colony
of La Défense, which is located in the western-most part of Greater
Paris. The axe historique, a line of historical monuments starting from
the Louvre and running straight through the French capital, pointed
directly toward the designated site.
The historical axis – the voie triomphale – serves as a guarantor of
urban stability in Paris by means of symmetry and continuity. Starting
with the creation of the Champs-Élysées in 1616, it was continually
extended over the course of time under the main premise of defin-
ing a straight corridor toward the western-most edge of the city. The
only architecture allowed along the boulevard was that dedicated to
the achievements of past generations. In the 18th century, that meant
monuments of military success, symbols of victory; not surprisingly,
most of those memorial buildings were created upon the directive of
Napoleon Bonaparte. With the continuous growth of Paris after the
Second World War, the axe historique extended even further westward.
By the 1970s, the avenue already crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly
and unsatisfactorily ended in the wildly growing business district of La
Défense, although no office building yet dared to directly interrupt the
voie triomphale. A new project to be placed along the axis was needed.
The inherent challenge of the competition for the Grande Arche
was twofold: how could one connect the emerging business district
with the historical urban fabric of Paris while simultaneously creat-
ing a functional office building within the purely economic context of
La Défense? In response, the winning entry by Danish architect Johan
Otto von Spreckelsen proposed a rectangular gateway inscribed within
a massive cube and placed precisely at the end point of the axe historique
so that it stands in line with the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile and the Arc
de Triomphe du Carrousel. The walls of the sculptural skyscraper are
wide enough to contain office space on thirty-five floors. Like a Donald
Judd sculpture scaled to an enormous dimension and provided with
an architectural programme, the project was able to solve the double
challenge of the competition by means of a Minimalist gesture on a
grand scale. Together with the spherical Géode in front of the Cité des
Sciences et de l’Industrie (by Adrien Fainsilber) and the glass Pyramide
du Louvre (by I. M. Pei), the project claims a rightful place among the
geometrically idealized buildings that had appeared in Paris by the
late eighties. The strictness that has been used to imply geometrical
discipline reveals an obsessive relationship with symmetry: the Grande

41
 Arche is a cube with a centrally inscribed cubic void, and its façade is
covered with square-format tiles of marble and perforated by square-
format windows. As a vast accumulation of geometrical tautologies, the
Arche comes close to losing its feature of being a building and becoming
purely an artefact that belongs to the sphere of flawless monuments.
Geometrical perfection: a postmodern approach to monumentality.
It was dedicated to the ideals of humanity.
Construction started in 1985, and French architect Paul Andreu
took over the duties of von Spreckelsen. The completed building is not
quite a cube, but since the difference in length of each side is only a few
metres (with each side measuring around 110 metres), this distortion
cannot be detected by the human eye. Even knowing about it, it is impos-
sible for the beholder to perceive this “flaw”. More significant than this
deviation from geometrical perfection is the location of the Grande
Arche: in order to prevent the structure’s foundations from colliding
with previously built infrastructure underground, the whole building
had to be rotated clockwise by an angle of 6.33°, thereby breaking the
building’s symmetrical relationship with the axe historique. (Later,
it was stated that the slightly distorted position of the Grande Arche
referred to the also slightly distorted position of the Louvre at the other
end of the axis.) The rotation does not cause a change of direction of
the axe historique; rather, it generates a feeling of discomfort and even
suspicion, for the perfect cube seems to be tilting horizontally. Due to
its extreme symmetry and the in-line arrangement of buildings along
the axe historique, one expects the newer Arche to be placed in align-
ment with the axis. Like an unkept promise, the dislocation produces
an almost embarrassing tension between the object and its environ-
ment. Seen in this context, the displacement of the Grande Arche
finds an analogy in the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico.
The enchanting yet perplexing atmosphere in his Metaphysical Town
Square paintings is, to a certain extent, also created by the distortion
of familiar situations. His famous painting Torre Rossa (1913) shows an
almost absolutely symmetrically arranged view along a Renaissance
street: identical buildings on both sides occupy exactly the same amount
of the canvas, and the vanishing point on the horizon lies precisely in
the centre of the scene. The beholder stands right in the middle, look-
ing at a cylindrical red tower that must be very far away (the ground
on which it stands actually shows the curvature of the earth). But
something does not seem to be right here. The apparent familiarity of
the view is disturbed by irregularities: The arcades framing the scene

42
provoke an abnormal feeling of claustrophobia, for they actually have
different vanishing points on the horizon. The tower is slightly shifted
away from the centre of the image, and its size seems indetermin-
able (can it really be eight times as high as the adjacent buildings?). In
the spirit of the Surrealist movement, the apparent rationality of the
image is undermined by distortions that might well be explained by
technical reasons (i.e., colour, proportions, vanishing points), but they
are nonetheless experienced first and foremost as a subconscious feel-
ing of irrationality. Besides the manipulation of the perspective view,
de Chirico uses carefully placed items of technology to alienate the
scenery. Two objects dominate his work, both symbols of rationaliza-
tion and production: a clock that seems stolen from a town hall and
a steam locomotive in the background. They do not only foresee the
overwhelming importance of technology for the 20th century; they also
dramatically contrast the venerable stasis of the scene and ridicule the
monumentality of its architectural elements. Against a background of
technology, the fountains, arcades and sculptures appear superficial
and somehow timeless; they lose their monumental character. De
Chirico’s Town Square paintings are more than still lifes in an urban
dimension: they are also surreal collages of uncertainty – anachronistic
elements arranged in a landscape of fake visual perception.
The displacement of the Grande Arche along the axe historique
leads to a comparable sort of mental disruption, but paradoxically
so, because the structure tries so hard to be a built manifesto of order
and regularity. Although the site had seemed empty from a bird’s-eye
view before the Arche’s construction began, urban development had
already infiltrated the ground below. The outcome was an involuntary
contextualization of the building that is experienced as a distortion of
the regularity one expects. The fact that the effect created by the build-
ing’s rotation was not intentional brings to mind what the Surrealist
movement defined as automatism: by deliberately applying chance and
accident to the process of its creation, art could be freed from rational
control. The absurdity of the genesis of the Grande Arche is the opposite,
for here an excess of rationality leads to a collective mistake, thereby
turning into an act of Surrealism: architecture automatique. As in the
Town Square paintings, the effect can be explained with technical
reasons, but its visual detachment from the urban context remains an
irrational act. As if there were a curse on the resurrection of histori-
cal architecture, other projects with a similar fervour for symbolism
met a comparably surrealistic fate. The Washington Monument, a

43
 super-sized reinterpretation of an Egyptian obelisk, was intended to
be placed at the intersection of two lines, one running south from the
centre of the White House and the other running west from the centre
of the Capitol. It was literally to become a landmark in the true meaning
of the word, highlighting the geographical coherence of two political
buildings and at the same time being the tallest structure to date: an
ancient column designed using the high-tech means of a skyscraper.
Even without tunnels below it, however, the ground was not able to
support the nearly-170-metre-high building. As a result, it was simply
constructed in another location in the park, 250 metres south of its
intended location. Since the context of the Washington Monument
derives from two geometrical lines – theoretical vectors without a built
substance – its actual displacement violates a rather academic rule. In
other words, it becomes a virtual mistake, invisible to those unaware
of the geographical references.
The axe historique, in contrast, is a built corridor, making the rota-
tion of the Grande Arche a very physical displacement that undermines
the premise of the voie triomphale – the laws of structural engineering
overrule those of urban planning. The engineers of the Arche desper-
ately tried to avoid an inclination, but, as if trapped within the inevit-
able tragedy of a Greek drama, they therefore had to accept a horizontal
displacement of the structure towards the avenue. Just as a Surrealist
artwork reveals the subconscious mind, the displacement of the Grande
Arche reveals the subterranean one of the urban organism. Maybe it is
in this mysterious notion that a reconciliation between the metropolis
and this strange object can be found. The Arche is a monument that,
accidentally, demonstrates the collective and fragile process of archi-
tecture within an environment of urban stability through a distorted
monumentality. Its somehow clumsy displacement makes the Grande
Arche more human and less monumental, and even more accurate and
less archaic. It is faulty, and therefore human – a horizontally inclined
tower of Pisa. Maybe it thus becomes, through its apparent failure, an
adequate symbol for a century dominated by the illogical curiosities
of the technological omnipotence it created.
West of La Défense, the latest part of the axe historique is about to
be built. The voie triomphale is being extended even further into the
outskirts of the metropolis, this time to the city of Nanterre, where
it will cross the Seine for a second time. On this last stretch, past the
Grande Arche, the projected boulevard is not on a straight axis: it will
actually bend in a slight curve.

44
Photograph by Leuntje
van Kampenhout

45
 SANTA MARIA ANNUNZIATA
IN ROCCAVERANO:
THE MISINTERPRETATION OF
A PROJECT BY BRAMANTE

Manuela M. Morresi

46
“In the significant years of our history, the only road that connected 1
Rocca with the civilized world . . . a victim of the destructive war . . . was Archivio Parrocchiale di
Roccaverano, Pompeo
essentially incapable of accommodating modern modes of transpor- Ravera, 1945 – Roccaverano
tation; the idea of using a car was just a dream . . . When the architect – 1966 Quaderno di memorie
lavori chiesa parrocchiale,
[Ercole] Checchi braved the Mombaldone–Roccaverano road alone unpublished transcription
and on foot on 26 April 1946 for the first time, he did so in a torrential by Tullio Galliano (whom
rainstorm, for the owner of the horse-drawn carriage he had hired to I would like to thank for
allowing me to use the
take him refused to attempt the trip in such weather.”1 This is what quote), 22r.
Father Pompeo Ravera, Roccaverano’s priest, wrote in the records of
2
the restoration (1946–66) that would return the church of Santa Maria Ercole Checchi, “La
Annunziata to its original state, liberating it from the 18th-century chiesa bramantesca di
stuccoes and 19th-century paintings that had long distorted its appear- Roccaverano”, Bollettino
d’arte 34 (1949), 205–17.
ance. Today, while the road is in better condition, it is still a moving
experience to go up to Roccaverano and discover this extraordinary 3
structure “hidden” within the built fabric of the village – a veritable Ravera, 1945 – Roccaverano –
1966, 13r, 13v.
foreign object in comparison to the other buildings in the local archi-
tectural tradition due to its evident “Roman-ness”. 4
Christoph L. Frommel,
At the time, the architect Ercole Checchi was a municipal officer Die Farnesina und Peruzzis
in the Superintendent’s office of the city of Turin: he was overseeing architektonisches Frühwerk
the church’s restoration and was the first to study the building and (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1961),
145ff.
suggest its attribution to Bramante in 1949,2 thereby increasing the
church’s value and encouraging the authorities to continue financing 5
Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante
the restoration through to its completion.3 architetto (Bari: Laterza,
Checchi’s attribution was subsequently accepted by Christoph 1969), 237–41, 1047. For a
Frommel without further research,4 and then in 1969 Arnaldo Bruschi different opinion, see James
S. Ackerman, “Review of C. L.
included Roccaverano’s church in the catalogue of Bramante’s uncon- Frommel, Die Farnesina und
firmed works in his monumental and as-yet-unequalled monograph Peruzzis architektonisches
Frühewerk”, Art Bulletin 44
on the architect.5
(1962), 243–46, where the
The attribution proposed by Checchi and then accepted by Frommel church of Roccaverano
and Bruschi is based on a consideration of stylistic qualities, and until is considered the
consequence of the
today it has not been backed up with decisive documents. More than intervention by Peruzzi at
twenty years ago when I was investigating the church, I only added the Sagra di Carpi (begun
in 1515) without Bramante’s
further details to the framework constructed by those who had come
involvement.
before me by identifying and describing the patron, Enrico Bruno, and
discussing the stylistic connections that link this church to Bramante’s 6
Manuela M. Morresi,
production.6 “Bramante, Enrico Bruno
Over the last twenty years, many documents, resources and pieces e la Parrocchiale di
of information have surfaced, but not “the” document, the one that Roccaverano”, in La piazza, la
chiesa, il parco, ed. Manfredo
could definitively connect the architect of Pope Julius II, Enrico Bruno Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1991),
and the church of Roccaverano. That said, however, it is precisely this 96–165.

47
7 link that I want to discuss here, a link that is supported by the fact that
For clarification regarding
the ecclesiastical career of
Enrico Bruno, see Ludovico
Bertoni, “Bruni, Enrico”,
Dizionario biografico degli
italiani, 14 (1972), 609–61;
and Morresi, “Bramante,
Enrico Bruno e la chiesa
parrocchiale”, 102–105.
8 nomination first as Under Treasurer, and then as General Treasurer
Ibid.
9 in the construction of the new church of St Peter’s, thereby coming
Rodolfo Lanciani, Storia
degli scavi di Roma e notizie
intorno alle collezioni
romane di antichità [1902–12]
(Rome: Quasar, 1989), vol. I,
120; Morresi, “Bramante,
Enrico Bruno e la chiesa
parrocchiale”, 105–106.
10
In the survey carried out in
1989 (published in Morresi,
“Bramante, Enrico Bruno
e la chiesa parrocchiale”,
99), the Greek cross was
found to be inscribed in a
rectangle measuring 18.1
(width) by 17.1 (length)
metres. The absence of
apses on the entrance wall
caused the builders to
minimize the wall’s thickness
in comparison to that of
the lateral walls, thereby
producing a sagging of the
façade.
48
the attribution to Bramante has yet to be disproved.
Enrico Bruno, who was born on an unknown date in Roccaverano,
lived in Rome from 1476 on. His ecclesiastical career survived the
pontificates of a series of popes of varying political orientations,
from Sixtus IV (1471–84), to Innocent III (1484–92) and Alexander
VI (1492–1503), to Julius II (1503–13). And it was precisely during the
reign of Julius II that Enrico’s cursus honorum culminated with his
of the Church in 1505.7 While holding this office, Enrico participated
into contact with Bramante and other artists active at the papal court.8
Enrico’s career leads us to think that he received a humanistic educa-
tion and therefore was probably a man of letters, as is also suggested
by his nomination as Prefect of the Vatican Library in 1501 and by
the presence in his Roman home of a collection of antiques known
by Fra Giocondo and reported by Rodolfo Lanciani9 at the beginning
of the 20th century.
The building programme conceptualized for Roccaverano was
supposed to have been very ambitious, but I believe that the death of
Enrico in 1509 – the same year that construction began – provoked a
significant simplification of the project. As early as 1949 Checchi noted
the problem of the solution devised for the façade’s corners, where
two pilasters are partially superimposed in an incongruous manner.
According to Checchi, this anomaly must have been the result of an
imprecise tracing of the foundations, where imperfect right angles
would have caused an excess of space on the façade that consequently
had to be filled with the two superimposed pilasters, and as a result of
this interpretation, Checchi reconstructed the façade with only one
pilaster at each of the corners.
There is no doubt that the church’s plan presented relevant irregu-
larities in its foundations: the Greek cross, with its central cupola
resting on four piers bevelled on the diagonal and reinforced by four
barrel vaults along the arms of the cross and by four domed vaults
over the chapels in the corners, is in reality not inscribed within a
perfect square.10 It is clear that the solution employed for the façade’s
corners is incongruous, but in it we may perceive the first clue that the
original project – which was presumably communicated via drawings
and perhaps even a wooden model sent by Bramante from Rome to
Roccaverano, as frequently occurred – was radically altered.
 1 2 5m

Elevation and plan of Santa

Maria Annunziata (survey
by T. Carunchio and D.
Dalpozzo, 1989)

49
11
A quincunx is a Greek cross
plan inscribed within a
square composed of nine
sections, five covered
with cupolas or with
domed vaults, and four
barrel vaulted ones that
correspond to the arms of
the cross.
Axonometric
reconstruction (Morresi)
of the original project of
Santa Maria Annunziata
(drafted by D. Dalpozzo)
50
In the church that was built, the apses placed along three sides
of the perimeter, excluding the inner surface of the primary façade,
are segments of a circle. If these apses had been given a semicircular
form instead, as was more customary, then the thickness of the walls
would have increased overall and would have led to an increase in the
width of the façade, which would, in turn, have allowed the insertion
of proper pairs of pilasters at its corners corresponding to the paired
pilasters of the interior’s minor order. If the entrance wall too had been
equipped with semicircular apses, then the plan would have become
perfectly organic, exemplifying the typology of the quincunx11 that was
en vogue in Rome in the first decade of the 16th century.
If these few alterations had been made, the dimensions of the
church would have been exactly convertible into Roman palms: 30
palms for the diameter of the central cupola, and 15 for the hemi-
spherical vaults, following a 1:2 ratio. What is more, the Greek cross
would have taken on a regular form based on a perfect square with
sides measuring 18.10 metres, the equivalent of 81 Roman palms
(1 palm = 0.2234 m).
The presence of the semicircular apses along the perimeter, includ-
ing the entrance wall, however, would result in an incompatibility
with the lateral portals on the sides. Consequently, this is a second
clue that is useful in reconstructing the original project sent from
Rome to Roccaverano.
The site chosen for the construction of the church, which was on
top of the hill around which the village is clustered, would have bene-
fitted greatly from a more ambitious building that was demanding
and expensive, one with three analogous façades, each with a sin-
gle centrally located portal. With such an appearance, Santa Maria
Annunziata would have been perfectly in tune with Bramante’s first
project for St Peter’s (U 1 A), a quincunx plan with four identical façades
(in Roccaverano, the difficulties of the site would have made it impos-
sible to build a fourth façade corresponding to the choir for orographic
reasons). With three analogous façades, the church would acquire
complete congruity, presenting a symmetrical and coherent volume
that was isolated and readily visible from a distance. In other words,
the great utopian design that was the first project for St Peter’s – an
idealized plan that was perfect yet unfeasible – would have been “made
visible” in Roccaverano: it would seem that the intention of the patron,
who was personally involved in St Peter’s construction, was that Santa
Maria Annunziata seem like a real replica, though on a smaller scale,
 1 2 5m

Reconstruction (Morresi)
of the original elevation
and plan of Santa Maria
Annunziata (drafted by
D. Dalpozzo)

51
12
On the dating of the
two projects and their
interdependence, see my
article “Bramante, Enrico
Bruno e la chiesa”, 117–26,
where all of the drawings
referring to Bramante’s
ideas for the church of Santi
Celso e Giuliano in Banchi
are studied in detail.
13
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London, Codex Coner, f.
12; Florence, Gabinetto
Nazionale dei Disegni e
delle Stampe, U 1954 A
(Anonymous), U 1953 A
(Anonymous), U 875 A
(Antonio da Sangallo il
Giovane); Pierpont Morgan
Library, New York, Codex
Mellon, ff. 56v, 57.
Bramante’s workshop, plan
of Santi Celso e Giuliano
in Rome, 1509 (London,
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
Codex Coner, f. 12)
52
of the gigantic macchina that Bramante had conceived as an exemplum
for the churches of Christendom, a replica that was also designed to
exalt the Bruno family, as demonstrated by the inscriptions and the
family emblems found inside and outside the church.
According to the hypothesis outlined above, the actual organiza-
tion of the church displays considerable reductions of and alterations
to the original building programme, most likely because of financial
problems that followed after Enrico Bruno’s death in 1509. The early
consecration of the church in 1516 leads us to believe that Enrico’s
heirs, Giovanni Francesco and Paolo Emilio, intended to finish the
building in a short time, which may have sparked the decision to
simplify the project by eliminating the lateral façades and transfer-
ring their respective portals to the single realized façade, a choice
that brought about the removal of the apses on the entrance façade.
The consequences of the first project of St Peter’s and its reprisal
in the design of Roccaverano’s church are immediately visible in
Bramante’s works from the same period. A series of Bramante’s ideas
for the Roman church of Santi Celso e Giuliano in Banchi, which was
never realized, date to around the second half of 1509 (and thus to
after the Roccaverano project, which was probably drafted in the last
months of 1508 and the first months of 150912) and can be seen in a
number of drawings that propose a perfect quincunx with extra dorsal
apses corresponding to the arms of the cross and with corner chapels
covered by square-based cupolas.13 Based on planimetric models of
St Peter’s and Santa Maria Annunziata in Roccaverano, this building
would not have had a monumental façade but rather a sequence of
shops whose fronts gave onto the well-trafficked Via dei Banchi.
The perfect integration of Santa Maria Annunziata within the
“typological family” of quincunx churches as conceived in Rome by
Bramante and his followers leads us to reassert Bramante’s authorship
of Roccaverano’s church, something that was already suggested by the
close links between Julius II’s architect and the pontifical treasurer
Enrico Bruno.
Like its plan, Santa Maria Annunziata’s façade also finds its place
in a precise “typological family” based on a frame of intersecting
architectonic orders differentiated by their dimensions: the greater
order, which is the Corinthian on pedestals, frames the median blind
arch and supports a triangular pediment, while the minor order, the
Doric, begins at ground level without pedestals, framing the blind
arches along the aisles and supporting two triangular semi-pediments.
We can virtually correct these semi-pediments, which are character- 14
ized by an overly high rise, by lowering their height below the annulet Francesco di Giorgio Martini,
Trattati di architettura,
of the pilasters’ capitals. This alteration was probably due to the fact ingegneria e arte militare,
that the builders intended to increase the slope of the roof to ease the ed. Corrado Maltese (Milan:
Il Polifilo, 1967), 90–91, 260,
weight of the snow brought by the winter months. fig. 38.
Tracing the genealogy of this type of façade brings us to its two
“fathers”, Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. 15
Architettura delle facciate: Le
Alberti was the first to experiment with intersecting orders on the chiese di Palladio a Venezia.
façade of Sant’Andrea in Mantua (begun 1470), which was certainly Nuovi rilievi, storia, materiali,
ed. Malvina Borgherini,
noticed by Bramante. Furthermore, Francesco di Giorgio, whose Andrea Guerra and Paola
body of theoretical and realized works Bramante knew, had imagined Modesti (Venice: Marsilio,
a figure of a man inscribed in the façade of a temple in his anthro- 2010).

pomorphic architectural experiments, which was the origin of the

three-part system involving a pediment and semi-pediments whereby
the dimensions of the greater pediment correspond to the figure’s
head and the lateral slopes are determined by the angle of its arms.14
In Roccaverano, as in Mantua, the organization of the façade reveals
the building’s interior spatial organization in a transparent manner,
despite the alterations to the design that we are presuming were made.
Furthermore, if we cannot deduce the exact correspondence between
the dimensions of the exterior and interior orders from the survey, the
lateral chapels display a pair of lower-order Doric pilasters that are
brought back out onto the exterior as the minor order used to signal
the aisles. The greater order of pilasters on the piers that support the
cupola are then visible in the greater order of Corinthian pilasters on
pedestals that are elevated to support the large median pediment; the
barrel vault that covers the arms of the cross is visible, though, in the
blind arch at the centre of the elevation. Copy of Francesco di
The experiment undertaken with this type of façade in Roccaverano Giorgio Martini, Man
Inscribed in the Façade of a
has had significant consequences over the centuries that followed, as Temple (Vicenza, Bertoliana
can be seen, for example, in the Palladian churches of Venice.15 Library, Dis. 1, f. 105r)
Despite a series of architectural misinterpretations and various
“departures” from the original project, a long-term architectural
phenomenon that is both complex and discontinuous began in the
isolated and “peripheral” Langhe region after the chance but fortunate
encounter between Bramante and Enrico Bruno at the court of Julius
II. It is the potential of a clear, simple, reproducible and potentially
infinitely variable model that radiated from the Rome of the beginning
of 16th century, maintaining its vitality intact over the course of time.

53
Photograph by Giovanna
Silva

54
 LA BOMBONERA

Giacomo Summa

The first FIFA World Cup took place in Uruguay in 1930. For this event,
and particularly to host the final match (Uruguay–Argentina, 4–2),
a new stadium was built in Montevideo. Juan Antonio Scasso, the
Director de Paseos Públicos, designed the venue for 90,000 people,
and it would later be called the “Centenario” due to the correspond-
ence of its inauguration with the hundredth anniversary of Uruguayan
independence. The stadium was almost circular in shape in order to
provide all spectators with an equally good view of the field.
Thus began the development of a new model of a football stadium
in the Río de la Plata region: modern, functional and colossal. On the
other side of the Río de la Plata in Argentina, the various conservative
governments in power gave strong support to the Buenos Aires foot-
ball clubs and their projects after the economic crisis of 1929. The

55
 Facing page:
La Bombonera, sections
through the railway

Left:
La Bombonera, view of the
exterior

Below:
La Bombonera, aerial view

Argentinean state heavily supported these investments (thanks to Law

no. 12.345), particularly the activity of helping clubs that owned plots
of land to build sports facilities for the public’s use.
The Boca Juniors owned a plot (an irregular rectangle measuring
114 by 187 metres) in the Boca neighbourhood. Shortly after the pres-
entation of Law no. 12.345, the club presented a business plan for the
realization of a new stadium under the guidance of President Camilo
Cichero to the governmental authorities. The sale of tickets and season
tickets, subscriptions by new stakeholders, mortgages and state subsi-
dies were all part of the plan, so although the club was already heavily
in debt, the decision was made to build the new stadium nonetheless.
Apart from the football field and stands for 100,000 spectators, the
programme for the new stadium included the club’s headquarters, an
Olympic-size swimming pool, a gymnasium, an auditorium for 1,000
people, basketball courts, bowling lanes, a hotel, meeting rooms, a
library and a room for playing chess.
Upon receiving the necessary government funding in 1938, the club
organized an architecture competition. Many professional architec-
tural firms participated, but in the end nobody won. In fact, the com-
petition revealed a problem that could not be solved: the site was too
small for the stadium, for it would not be possible to build a complete
ring of seating around the field. It was simply impossible to provide
equally good vantage points to all spectators given the nature of the
plot of land. Indeed, the site measured only 114 by 187 metres when
the field had to measure at least 105 by 58 metres (which is still the
minimum area required by FIFA). Simple math demonstrates that only
23 metres on the short ends and 41 metres on the long ones remained
for the stands. A stadium for 100,000 people just could not fit there.

57
 In the same year, the Boca Juniors’ archrivals, the River Plate club,
completed its stadium in a peripheral area north of the city. The new
River Plate stadium (known as the “Monumental”) re-proposed the
model of the Montevideo “Centenario”, but introduced two orders of
stands, thereby allowing spectators to be closer to the field and incor-
porating new structural solutions. However, while the monumental
success of the new River Plate stadium made the mistake of the Boca
Juniors’ one all the more evident, the new technology developed by the
engineers of the “Monumental” (Aslan and Ezcurra) actually provided
a potential solution to their problem.
As a result, the engineers Delpini, Sulčič and Bés proposed a new
project for the Boca Juniors. They got rid of the continuous ring around
the field and proposed a strange horseshoe-shaped form instead, with
the stands distributed along the field’s two short ends and only one of
its long ones. The tribunes were organized in three orders with – for
the first time – an increasingly steep inclination in the higher sec-
tors, thereby allowing for a clear view of the field from all the three
orders. These structural solutions made the stadium project extend
five metres over the railway tracks facing the long end of the stadium.
Lengthy negotiations between the Boca Juniors, the railway company
(Ferrocarril Sud) and the municipal authorities were needed in order to
make this possible. The asymmetric layout of the stadium also required
an innovative organization of points of access and escape routes, with
large corridors being introduced below the tribunes that allowed the
stadium to be evacuated in only eight minutes. This complex system
of corridors and stairways resulted in the characteristically machine-
like appearance of the stadium’s exterior. The stadium immediately
achieved the status of a monument in the Boca neighbourhood, becom-
ing an explicit symbol of an increase in the supply of modern attrac-
tions (culture, leisure, sport) to the working-class area.
Along the long side of the new stadium where it had not been pos-
sible to build stands, only a tiny space remained, and this was used to
create a string of executive boxes. These boxes (palcos) are organized on
three levels with separate points of access, thereby creating an ensem-
ble that looks like a box of chocolates; it was this appearance that led
to the stadium’s famous nickname: La Bombonera, the Spanish term
for a box of chocolates. Thus, the unplanned result of a simple real
estate mistake – buying the wrong plot of land – ended up creating a
surprising architectural situation of having the crowds seated on the
stands immediately opposite the opera-style boxes across the field.

58
59
60
 HAGIA SOPHIA
VERSUS HAGIA SOPHIA

Ioanna Volaki

Chronology
532 AD: Shortly after the commencement of the construction of Hagia
Sophia, its architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, find
themselves in an ominous position. Their original plans for the build-
ing have been overly optimistic, for the structure is already beginning
to deform and their client is not happy. In his De Aedificiis, Procopius
describes the uncomfortable situation that arises between the archi-
tects and Emperor Justinian I when the former ask for the project to
be temporarily suspended but the latter obliges them to continue.
Thus begins the vortex of the monument’s structural reinforcement,
and it will continue for another 1,500 years.
532–537: Feverish changes are made in order to stabilize the structure.
Piers and buttresses grow, and galleries become more compact and
are attached to the main structure. The building is completed on time,
and a triumphant inauguration is followed by an ecstatic Emperor
Justinian making some inappropriate statements.
7 May 558: A moment of counter-success comes twenty-one years later:
after a series of earthquakes, the building’s famous dome caves in,
causing a massive contortion of piers, arches and buttresses. To cor-
rect the north and south arches that have been bent by the downward
and outward thrust of the dome, such an extreme widening towards
the interior is required that the proportions of the nave are altered.
Following this a new, structurally more adequate dome is built. In
total, the reinforcements required result in a cross-sectional area of
100 square metres for each pier. Isidore the Younger is put in charge
of the reconstruction, and the building is inaugurated once more in
563 (in a much humbler ceremony).

61

Facing page:
Plaster model of Hagia
Sophia’s interior (I. Volaki)
62
26 October 869: A fire and an earthquake damage the building’s west
arch and semidome. The subsequent restoration aims at strengthening
the lunettes by increasing their mass. Nevertheless, the intervention
does not prevent the collapse of the western part of the dome in 989, and
repairs are consequently undertaken by the Armenian architect Trdat.
1261–82 and 1344: The reinforcement of the north-west part of the
structure continues. A series of buttresses is added in the northern
and western parts of the building.
19 May 1346: In the grim aftermath of another seismic event, the
eastern part of the dome collapses, taking its supporting arch with
it. Despite the incredible accumulation of mass, the structural integ-
rity of the dome and semidomes remains weak. The story brings to
mind traditional Byzantine songs about structures that won’t remain
standing unless grotesque sacrifices are made (e.g., in the song of the
bridge of Arta, the sacrifice was the architect’s wife). The Greek archi-
tect Synadinos Astras and the Italian architect Giovanni Peralta are
put in charge of the repairs.
1570: Interventions are initiated by the Turkish architect Mimar Sinan.
For the first time the east–west axis is strengthened by the addition
of buttresses. The enclosure of Hagia Sophia by structural mass is
completed.
1847–49: The Swiss architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati under-
take the general restoration of the building. The task does not include
the addition of large reinforcements; rather the dome is consolidated
by iron rings.
1926: The Turkish government calls for a team of experts to investi-
gate the possibility of the monument collapsing. After six months, the
result of their research is surprising: by default the building has been
guaranteed a certain level of protection from the seismic activity of
the area because it is built atop natural rock . . . Nevertheless, another
iron ring is added to the dome.
Afterwards
Due to the original miscalculation of the building’s structural capac-
ity and Justinian’s inability to compromise, Hagia Sophia has been
marked by what seems to be a never-ending cycle of structural fail-
ures and attempts to correct them. All of these efforts, which span
a period of 1,500 years and have been the work of so many experts
from different cultural and educational backgrounds, have resulted
in an enormous superimposition of layers of structural mass on the
63
64
monument. In addition, there has been a parallel accumulation of
“cultural mass” around the building, for its conversion into an impe-
rial mosque paired with the simple, almost brutal façades of the early
Christian church has resulted in an exterior that resembles a geological
formation more than a monument. Even the surrounding vegetation
contributes to this image when seen from a certain distance. This
sensory perception of the building is amplified the closer you get to
it. The nondescript assemblage of volumes you encounter in the front
garden, which obstructs the majority of the building’s façade, and the
way one enters from a small lateral opening in the south-west side of
the narthex create the sensation of walking into a cave.
Compared to the exterior, the antithesis of the interior is strik-
ing. The main space is bright and articulated. Under the dome it is
perceived as both central and elongated, both a closed space and a
distinctly open one (and it is difficult to realize that this bright, float-
ing dome needs a mountain of mass to support it). This ambiguity
of the interior creates a sense of elasticity that completely contra-
dicts the structure’s absolute, massive exterior. Equivocal on many le-
vels, the “both-and” nature of the internal space has been described
numerous times. Perhaps the most adequate representation would be
something like Luigi Moretti’s plaster models of historical buildings’ Facing page:
negative spaces. As he wrote in his article “Structures and Sequences Plaster model of Hagia
Sophia’s exterior (I. Volaki)
of Spaces”, “There is one expressive aspect that resumes the architec-
tural fact with such notable latitude that it could be seen with greater
tranquillity than the others even in isolation: I mean the internal and
empty space of architecture.”
All early Christian churches were fundamentally perceived as
internal worlds, a fact that led to the treatment of the exterior as a
skin wrapped around a richly articulated interior. In the case of Hagia
Sophia, this opposition has reached the extreme: it is a bright cave
inside a mountain.

65
 SOLOMON, I HAVE OUTDONE THEE!

Asli Cicek

“Solomon, I have outdone Thee!” These are the words that the Byzantine
emperor Justinian I is said to have spoken upon entering Hagia Sophia
after its completion on 27 December 537. He had commissioned the
scientists Anthemius and Isidore to construct his dream: a gigantic
dome crowning the rectangular floor space of the largest church in
Christendom, which it would remain for the next nine hundred years.

The construction of this glamorous building took five years to complete

on the site of two former burned-down basilicas bearing the same
name. This third iteration was both the embodiment of the renovatio
imperii – Justinian’s ambition to restore the Roman empire by regaining
the lost western Roman territories – and the cause of the bankruptcy of
the royal treasury. Surely the investment was worth the effort, though,
because it became one of the most important examples of Byzantine
Facing page: architecture and a remarkable achievement in the history of Baukunst.
Hagia Sophia, 532–537 AD The glory of the Eastern Roman Empire was secured, though at the
time of its achievement even Justinian couldn’t have anticipated how
symbolic his building was going to become for European history: first
as an Orthodox basilica, then as the residence of eastern patriarchs,
then to be plundered by the Crusaders, then as a Catholic cathedral,
a mosque and finally, in 1935, a museum. Indeed, Justinian had sur-
passed even King Solomon’s first temple of Jerusalem on many levels.
However, the bunker-like building was in trouble from the
beginning. Constantinople was located on one of the most sensi-
tive fault lines in the region. Since the dome was made too heavy for
the load-bearing structure beneath it, an earthquake caused its first
major collapse only twenty years after the building was consecrated.

66
 5 10 20 m

0
 The dome would later collapse on various other occasions throughout
the following centuries, mainly due to earthquakes, and need to be
reconstructed. (Ironically, each time the reconstruction took as long
as the construction of the whole building had originally.) The rulers of
each period commissioned renowned architects to carry out the work,
and the discussion that follows here concentrates on one of them:
Mimar Sinan, the most eminent architect of the Ottoman Empire.

The conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 caused the

city to be renamed Istanbul and the great Christian church of Hagia
Sophia to become the “Aya Sofya Camii” imperial mosque. Mehmet II,
who earned the title Fatih (The Conqueror) after taking Constantinople,
didn’t demolish the building. It became a romantic legend that he was
so impressed by the temple that he chose to keep it. Today, with the
cynicism of centuries later, we can assume that it might have been
more of a pragmatic decision than a romantic one: the building repre-
sented the absolute sovereignty that the Ottomans wanted to display.
However, the architectural intervention to make the church “look” like
a mosque only came in 1481 with the placement of a minaret on top
of a semidomed stair tower at the south-west corner of the building.
This simple yet blunt intervention changed the silhouette of Hagia
Sophia for good. At the same time, however, the placement of a tower
there had possibly challenged the already vulnerable structural bal-
ance of the building. One thing is sure: it was the first addition that
wasn’t intended to strengthen the structure; rather, it was an ignorant,
nonchalant and carefree intervention. Another minaret was added
some years later.
Sinan’s first encounter with Hagia Sophia is hard to date precisely,
for there is only sparse information about his life apart from his auto-
biography, a story oscillating between modesty and megalomania.
He presumably saw Hagia Sophia for the first time in 1511 upon his
arrival in Istanbul as a twenty-year-old man who was to attend the
janissary school where he was trained as a carpenter and converted
from Christianity to Islam. At that time, becoming the chief architect
of the court had probably never crossed his mind, let alone the idea
that he would be commissioned sixty years later to “correct” this build-
ing. Before Suleiman the Magnificent named him his chief architect,
Sinan spent twenty-five years in the army as a civil engineer carrying
out infrastructural and maintenance work during the sieges. He was
pretty lucky: he survived three sultans through the peak period of

68
the empire. But this might also have caused his admiration for Hagia
Sophia to turn into the lifelong ambition of surpassing it inasmuch as
the sultans obliged him to build something bigger and better. He got
several chances to surpass Hagia Sophia, and many of his mosques
carry traces of his thorough study of this building. His two biggest
mosques, the Süleymaniye and Selimiye, challenged Hagia Sophia’s
grandeur, but Sinan’s attempts cannot be considered to be limited to
these. He must have seen more errors in Hagia Sophia than merely
the structural one concerning the dome – which, given its elliptical
base, caused difficulties in the even transfer of its weight to the rec-
tangular base of the building – and he clearly tried to avoid these in
his own buildings. Lighting conditions, spatial order and a harmoni-
ous façade incorporating the structure seem to be the issues he found
unresolved in Hagia Sophia and tried to respond to on various scales. Sinan holding a
Yet it remains difficult to explain why Sinan dealt with Hagia Sophia wooden measuring
stick overseeing the
only in some of his projects. There is no linear evolution in his works construction of Suleiman’s
that represents a systematic response to Hagia Sophia’s marvels and mausoleum, watercolour
flaws. With the Şehzade Mosque of the 1540s, what Sinan called his
on paper by Nakkas Osman,
ca. 1579 (from Lokman,
“apprenticeship” project, the architect had demonstrated that a cen- Tarikh-i Sultan Suleyman)
tral dome with four semidomes on the sides would provide a coherent
interior. Thirty years later he built the Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Mosque
where the subsidiary spaces disappeared almost completely, with
freestanding columns supporting the central dome and permitting
the creation of one grand, uninterrupted space.
The contrast between Hagia Sophia’s richly decorated interior and
its plain, stucco-clad exterior must also have irritated Sinan. In his
eyes this building may have been a forced combination of too many
ideas that lacked coherence. While its façade is simple, the extrava-
gant interior boasts five different sorts of marble and plentiful golden
mosaics. In contrast, the interiors of Sinan’s mosques are stripped of
embellishments, revealing a unity in his architectural projects that
derives from their structural form. Any interior ornamentation is the
result of material compositions, not artistic ones. Obviously, Islam’s
prohibition of the depiction of the human figure provided Sinan with
the proper justification for decorating his buildings with abstract
adornment. If Sinan were to have built churches and depicted biblical
stories within them he might have found himself in a difficult position
from which to challenge Hagia Sophia’s heavily adorned interior with
his comparatively restrained architectural spaces. The most strik-
ing evidence for his disapproval of Hagia Sophia’s decorated interior

69
70
is possibly an early work from 1545, the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque Above:
located on the Asian side of Istanbul. The inner surfaces of the walls of Kiliç Ali Paşa Mosque
Mimar Sinan, 1580
this mosque are plainly plastered; in fact, the interior looks strangely
abandoned. Although Sinan’s later work displays some elaborately Previous page:
Şehzade Mosque,
decorative detailing, he treated interiors much more simply than many Mimar Sinan, 1543-1548
other mosques built before and after his.
Sinan was commissioned with strengthening the structure of Hagia
Sophia in 1573. He added eight buttresses along the east and west
façades that guaranteed the dome’s survival until the 19th century.
This is significant for an architect who spent most of his career trying
to give shape to his unspoken critique of Hagia Sophia. He also built
two larger minarets, thereby structurally balancing the existing two
and giving the building its silhouette of an imperial mosque (though it

71
 would only be in the 19th century that all four minarets were made of
equal height by the Fossati brothers). Sinan also introduced a twenty-
four-metre buffer zone around the building in which nothing else could
be constructed. It remains curious, however, why Sinan was so keen
to assure Hagia Sophia’s survival and to exhibit the building in all its
grandeur. Perhaps we can claim that by doing so he guaranteed an
indestructible rival: the stronger the enemy, the sweeter the triumph.
Towards the end of his long life Sinan built two curious mosques
that can be connected to his critique of Hagia Sophia. One is the Kılıç
Ali Paşa Mosque, with a floor plan that almost copies that of Hagia
Sophia but succeeds in avoiding the creation of dark secondary spaces
despite the presence of the central dome. The second one is the Şemsi
Ahmet Paşa, a miniscule mosque positioned with sensitivity on the
The restored mosque of Asian shore, 300 metres from the Mihrimah Sultan mentioned above.
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, The Şemsi Ahmet Paşa is the smallest külliye (mosque complex) imagi-
watercolour on paper by
Nakkas Osman, ca. 1581 nable. Through the mosque’s low windows the Bosphorus can be seen,
(from Lokman, Shahnama-i and the scale of the building is like an embrace rather than being
Salim Khan)
overwhelming. Its modesty contrasts with the Selimiye mosque that
Sinan had completed six years earlier and called his masterwork; it
had a dome with a span slightly broader than that of Hagia Sophia’s.
Yet here we might take the Şemsi Ahmet Paşa Mosque as Sinan’s last
attempt – free from any sultan’s demands – to surpass Hagia Sophia
by ignoring its most significant quality: its scale. Obviously it is ridicu-
lous to compare these two buildings, yet it is remarkable that Sinan
became so precise about the design of such a small structure, one which
is also regarded today as one of his most important works. Would he
have consciously chosen an unpretentious, calmer design instead of
Facing page: one that was imposing and exuded grandeur as a way of concluding a
Mimar Sinan, Şemsi Ahmed fifty-year career dedicated to surpassing the building he both admired
Paşa Mosque, 1580–81
and criticized more than any other? Or had Sinan accepted that Hagia
Sophia was worth every single mistake it displayed? In the end, he may
have decided that, as the Turkish proverb suggests, “he should kiss
the hand he could not bend”.

72
73
 SYSTEMATIC MISTAKES:
NOTES ON LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI’S
DESIGN STRATEGIES

Angelo Del Vecchio

You know in my case all painting – and the older I get the more it becomes
so – is accident. So I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly
ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. . . .
Perhaps one could say that it’s not an accident, because it becomes a
selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve. One
is attempting, of course, to keep the vitality of the accident and yet pre-
serve a continuity.
Francis Bacon (from David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon)

Nowadays it is difficult to imagine an architect who publishes liter-

ary works under a pseudonym or anonymously, fails to acknowledge
his authorship of successful writings attributed to him and does not
even mention any of his own buildings in his architectural treatise.
However, while it is rare to encounter these kinds of communications
strategies, for no marketing agency would ever advise their use, they
were nonetheless some of the practices carried out by Leon Battista
Alberti during his career, but they were implemented in a far less naive
manner than you might think. Naivety is in fact a behavioural trait
unknown to Alberti that was almost entirely absent from his day. In
the Renaissance, naivety was actually a clever trick, a clockwork orange
armed with acute awareness: sincerity was planned, and innocence
was programmed.
A sense of complete awareness is indeed the hallmark of Alberti’s
way of working, which was characterized by a skilful combination of
tactics and rhetorics, and produced a complex world of assemblages,
variations, contaminations, écarts, inversions and mixtures of liter-
ary and architectural models. His oeuvre is a mosaic of forms and

74
references that precisely mirror the mental processes that were behind
it – the ways in which creative thoughts are generated.
Alberti’s habit of entrusting the task of executing his own projects
to others and never surveying the material realization of his designs
was too systematic to have been just the result of historical circum-
stances or the product of an intellectual attitude that implied a disin-
terest in the actual outcome of the principles he communicated in his
writings. Rather, his habit hid a method: it concealed a logic aimed
at obtaining architectural solutions that are deliberately pursued but
not entirely predictable.
In design, homogeneity is considered an imperative condition,
just as the unity of action, place and time is in classical drama. For
Alberti, however, the consistency of an architectural work lies in the
relationship between heterogeneous elements that have been drawn
from the reservoir of history and reassembled concinnatamente (har-
moniously) into a new whole. Alberti’s range of archictectural ref-
erences is extremely broad, and includes classical, mediaeval and
fifteenth-century architectural works. His vast body of source material
even permitted the incorporation of potential future architectural
contributions, thereby allowing for and taking into consideration
the misunderstandings and mistakes that might be made by build-
ers to come. In this way, the seemingly mechanical approach of his
combinatory system was actually a less rigid and more natural one.
As a result, Alberti’s architecture can be considered to be all
of the buildings in which his system is applied, not only the ones
that display an immaculately classical pedigree. Alberti’s architec-
ture incorporates the pre-existing (such as Santa Maria Novella in
Florence or San Francesco in Rimini), the contemporary (such as San
Sebastiano in Mantua, which seems to be an enigmatic combination
of a classical work flanked by a mediaeval structure though both
parts were actually built at the same time) and even the architecture
of the future, despite its sometimes abominable appearance (as can
be seen, for instance, in the stairs of San Sebastiano). For Alberti, the
classical ideal is to be found not in abstract, ideal circumstances,
but in everyday situations where it is cross-bred and contaminated,
embedded in the real and, to a certain extent, made indistinguish-
able from the context in which one experiences it. The classical is
thus torn to pieces, transformed and smothered by superfluous addi-
tions, and yet its presence is still apparent to the eye that has been
taught to recognize it.

75
 Alberti’s architecture – which is the result of a diachronic approach
to design – presents itself as an integration of wide-ranging architectur-
al references within a core design concept that is so powerful (although
it is less obvious to us today because we read his architecture in the
light of the work that followed after it, his work was sensationally new
in his day) and simple that deviations, mistakes or misunderstandings
in relation to the original idea do not alter the fundamental meaning
of his work. On the contrary, later alterations to his buildings only
increase the purity of the classical ideal contained within them;
they cannot completely conceal it.
The interest of Alberti’s logic of architectural design lies not only
in his anticipation of the effects of potential changes to his projects
over time, but also in his inclusion of them within his repertoire of
creative techniques and compositional algorithms ab origine.
Thus, the potential architectural “mistake” – which Alberti includes
from the very beginning in the range of possibilities generated by
his projects – is deactivated, neutralized, annihilated. If irregularity
is itself a part of the rule, then how can one distinguish it from the
rule itself?

76
REVIEW OF THE EXHIBITION
EMERGENCY IN FAVOUR
OF TWICE AT THE INSTITUTE
OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Aaron Moulton
Every picture has to exist in the mind before it is put on
canvas, and it always loses something when it is turned
into paint. I prefer to see my pictures without that
muddying.
Marcel Duchamp
A lovely form has been revealed, freed from its
functional purpose, therefore a man clearly has made
an aesthetic contribution.
Walter Arnsberg
The latest exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary
Art is an intricately woven tale of the found object
told through a lost or possibly-never-realized
readymade by the 20th century’s revered art
prankster Marcel Duchamp. The readymade in
question is referred to as “Emergency in Favour of
Twice”, an English translation of “Crise en faveur de
2 Fois”. The only mention of this work is in a letter
from early 1916 that Duchamp wrote to his sister
Suzanne while he was living in New York. It is in this
same letter that Duchamp first declares the bottle
rack as being an artwork and famously coins the
term “readymade”.
Nearly all of the early readymades disappeared
or were thrown away or lost. Apart from some
exhibition copies that were plucked from roughly
similar designs, the readymades as we know them
originated in the early 1960s and were replicas
produced by gallerist Arturo Schwarz, author of
Duchamp’s catalogue raisonné. The letter to his
sister almost predicted the eventual fates of these
early versions, for its intent was to warn her not
to discard them accidentally. Duchamp was too
late, however, and the early bottle rack, along with
“Emergency in Favour of Twice,” went out with the
spring cleaning.
The bottle rack was never given a title, a very sacred
aspect of any Duchamp work. In his letter to his
sister he tells her that he will write her back with
what to inscribe as a title but asks her to sign it in
his name “(from) Marcel Duchamp”. But he never
describes “Emergency”. How could his sister
have ever known what she was throwing away?
When asked about the title for the bottle rack or a
description of “Emergency”, he could never recall.
It could almost be said that the lost readymade never
existed except in written form.
The curator of the exhibition at the Institute of
Contemporary Art attempted to deconstruct all the
aspects of wordplay for which Duchamp was famous
and with which he had potentially loaded this
obscure piece, waiting for its eventual excavation.
The entire museum is broken up into a series of
chapters revealing a matryoshka-like universe-
within-a-universe that at times borders on pseudo-
academics. Each segment of the show delves deeper
to address elements inherent to the lost masterpiece.
This investigation is compositely sketched through
the works of artists from the recent and not-so-recent
past ranging from Christian Jankowski to Chris
Burden and even Duchamp himself. The viewer is
asked to ponder the history, truth and nature of the
readymade. Replete with all the necessary clues, the
ideas at work are what keep you on the edge of your
seat from the first moment you enter the Institute of
Contemporary Art.
77
Crisis of Faith
The most troubling analysis of meaning in the
title – and in the introduction to the exhibition –
is a direct play on faith itself, or a “crise de foie”.
Duchamp’s golden calf becomes tangible, and belief
is suspended when contextualized within the archive
of the Arts Science Research Laboratory. Portrayed
like an anthropology exhibit, the lab was founded
by Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould.
The couple spent most of the 1990s establishing
claims that Duchamp had more of a hand in his
readymades coming into being than merely pointing
and choosing.
What is presented is an arsenal of objects: snow
shovel, bottle rack, urinal. Each is a potential
source “version” of the readymades but of slightly
differing designs. Works like Fountain, we discover,
have no traceable origin or blueprint. Plumbing
manufacturer J. L. Mott, who supposedly produced
the urinal “chosen” by Duchamp, could never
historically prove that Fountain, with its subtle
intricacies, ever really existed due to the make’s
absence from their archive and even from the
sales catalogues they had produced at the time.
The conspiracy develops into an assumption that
Duchamp might have produced a few of these deftly
simulated objects and even put them into circulation.
Then, as legend has it, he theatrically chose the urinal
that became Fountain from a group of other equally
handmade and identical sculptures.
Duchamp biographer Calvin Tompkins eloquently
described the artist’s obsession with meticulously
remaking his own works. From copies of Nude
Descending a Staircase to the iconic “replicas” of
the readymades, a surgically precise hand was
at work, one which, in the biographer’s words,
“turned mechanical reproduction into a personal
expression”. Early on Duchamp demostrated a clear
understanding of the power of the popular image
over the object itself and of how something could
78
evolve quickly, based on consumption, into an icon.
Also on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art is
the famous Alfred Stieglitz photograph of Fountain,
the only proper document of the original. This photo
was in itself a carefully staged “event” that, after its
reproduction in The Blind Man, was sure to place this
formerly quotidian object in a pantheon all its own.
To further the Doubting Thomas, most everyone
from you and me to MoMA and MoCA accepts the
idea that Fountain and its original siblings have been
lost. Yet there is a lack of solid evidence to support the
common belief regarding the “selection” process or
the provenance of the object itself. The myth is a good
one though, bordering on folklore.
Alas the research of Shearer and Gould was
broadly and publicly dismissed by past and current
Duchampians not only because it was sacrilege, but
because the theory was full of holes. It is nonetheless
an idea that subverts the entirety of 20th- and
21st-century art history, making most of the cultural
production of contemporary artists working with
found objects, appropriation, etc., rooted in what
could be now described as an elaborate hoax.
Outside the Arts Science Research Laboratory one
finds a vitrine of early sculptural artefacts from
performances by Chris Burden – works ironically
loaned by the notorious Duchamp referencer Jasper
Johns. The lock from his 5-Day Locker Piece (1971)
or the sand and shells from his disappearance to a
random island are each tangibly present to tell their
tale of origin, complete with Burden’s sober and dry
account. Altogether these works neatly illustrate the
sacred, reliquary-like status that objects obtain and
yet, in the case of Burden, the works provide evidence
of performances that can, short of a witness, almost
never be proven.
A small gallery with a guard and a sign reading “NO
MINORS ALLOWED” presented works by artists
Carmelo Gavotta, Bola Ecua and Hamid Piccardo.
The rather tasteless range of subjects made even this
writer experience difficulty accepting them as serious
art due to their clearly gratuitous and overtly perverse
qualities. It felt like someone was trying too hard and
their work bore no relation to anything so far seen
in the exhibition. The room, which displayed a large
banner reading “The First Tirana Biennale” (2001),
was presented as a mini group show containing the
biennale’s promotional posters of bukkake girls or an
AK47-bearing Osama bin Laden and curated by Oliviero
Toscani, the famously kitsch Benetton photographer.
Some twenty minutes’ distance from this room a
placard revealed the project as being a work by Tito
Mussoni. Ten years ago this little-known artist from
Italy concocted a subversive intervention when
he managed to curate a section in the First Tirana
Biennale by stealing the identity of Oliviero Toscani.
He invented the careers and commissions of new
work from five artists. He was never caught. Upon
learning what I had actually seen, the former feeling
of cheap shock warmed to a baffled anger about
feeling duped. Nonetheless, the troubling display
made for one of the more intriguing and yet, to this
writer’s knowledge, totally unknown mythologies of
the entire exhibition.
I waited in line for fifteen minutes to see films by
Leopold Kessler. Expecting to enter sooner than later,
I discovered that everyone in front of me was an actor
paid to wait – a clever but annoying performance
piece by Slovak artist Roman Ondák. The work took
comical advantage of my desire to see everything and
my unquestioning obedience to social structures.
The films by Kessler were disturbingly banal. The
artist has a habit of dressing like a city employee,
the kind you imagine going about fixing streetlights
or performing other acts of cosmetic maintenance.
Kessler, however, changes things slightly and even
introduces elements that you might not otherwise
recognize that enhance the function of the given
structure while playing into our habits of use, such
as, for example, installing perfectly designed locks in
the interiors of London phone booths. By means of a
simple sleight of hand, he has created a new form of
private space in public through a device that no one
even notices.
An exploration into the thingness of things was at
work here. Christian Jankowski’s Strip the Auctioneer

Emergency Look Twice

The multiple meanings of the exhibition’s title divide
the Institute of Contemporary Art with a distinct
tempo, imagining various takes on the legacy of the
readymade. The second part of the show underlined
the dilemma that the readymade poses by creating
an uncanny rupture with real life, making us do a
double-take and deeply consider the alien potential
inherent to an everyday object that we might be using
on a daily basis – a forced jamais vu. The aim is to
identify that sudden epiphanic aura of seeing the
selected and now-magic version emerging from the
camouflage of the many. It became a nice segue to the
earlier feeling of being duped, but was I now being
duped by something rather than someone?

79
from 2009 is a very funny look at a Christie’s auction
where, after having sold all the lots, the auctioneer
eventually puts the shirt off his back, as well as his
socks and shoes, etc., up for bidding. Jankowski’s
auction lots oscillate between the priceless and
the worthless, and they are transcended by a
Duchampian alchemy whereby a sock still warm from
its wearer becomes a four-figure item of artistic value.
The gavel becomes a magic wand that itself takes on
value and aura through proximity. Jankowski’s work
thus frames the visible birth of the contemporary art
object.
newsstands and Sturtevant’s Warhol flowers all
pushed and pulled in different ways. They could have
all been IKEA products at that point.
Duchamp himself finally made an appearance with
his Rotoreliefs, a prescient harbinger he originally
created as post-art products, aesthetic shortcuts or
hypnotic optical porn. He first exhibited them at an
inventors’ fair, selling not a single one to any member
of the public. In the exhibition at the Institute of
Contemporary Art, the row of discs spun from a
wall mount and literally sucked in the room like a
spiraling vortex.

Liver Sickness
The next linguistic trick in Duchamp’s title “Crise
en faveur de 2 Fois” is “crise de foie”, the French
expression for “liver disease”, an affliction resulting
from having too much sugar, or, if you like, too much
of a good thing. This again reflects the prolific use of
the readymade and the way in which its abundance
has damaged our visual palette, faulting an inability
to recognize a good thing or “the real thing” when we
see it.
In the exhibition, a large, chaotic room was strewn
with garbage and objects. It was a white-cube
apocalypse, a total saturation and collapse of a world
now made of Cartesian paper. The garbage, it turned
out, was all meticulously handmade by Australian
artist Carly Fisher. To a tee, I was looking at things
I know so well that I don’t look at them twice: junk
food wrappers, discarded Coke cans, crumpled
cigarette packages. I was now being forced to look
at them out of suspicion, a sense of fear or a strange Crisis in Favour of Emergence
creeping paranoia that the world around me was one The final room in the exhibition did everything to
big choreographed coincidence of circumstance and overcome the now daunting legacy that this mode of
props. production has taken on; it was a palette-cleansing
Damien Hirst vitrines of medical instruments reconciliation, especially after the previous room and
glimmered in a corner. Sherrie Levine’s gold-plated its implosive ubiquity. For this space, a number of
urinals, Robert Lazzarini’s psychedelically skewed artists were given the playful task of producing their
phone booth, Bertrand Planes’s schizophrenic own interpretations of “Emergency in Favour

80

of Twice”. It was a brilliant carte blanche, and one
that was, in some cases, well played.
Somebody had to do it, so artist Jeffrey Vallance
hired a psychic medium to contact Duchamp and
finally describe what our lost readymade looked
like. On-screen was a comically stuttering, dusty
old man reaching deep and conjuring quotes like
“any form is the perspective of another form . . . a
chariot made of rods of emancipated metal . . . in the
form of a toboggan but more of a corkscrew”. Loris
Gréaud made a rather hilarious work called Air of
Judgment? (2011), a direct riff on Duchamp’s Air de
Paris, even using a similar glass vial to hold what
was purportedly the breath of a local court judge.
Gréaud’s wordplay with “err of judgment” brought
things appropriately full circle to oblige the visitor to
think about the origin of this phenomenon and how
it had been historicized.
The young Spanish artist Rubén Grilo contributed
something that in all its simplicity burned its way
into my memory. It was a form that until now only
existed in the artist’s mind. A quivering squiggle
on the wall was constantly and palimpsestuously
rewriting itself in a green laser projection like an
afterimage of some insecure primordial shape.
In a similar vein, artist Ignacio Uriarte presented
a series of photographs showing configurations
of clear plastic rulers. The series presented every
imaginable combination, and the results were a dry
but curious new language of totemic forms. The
glossolalic score from Steve McQueen’s video Once
Upon a Time (2004) echoed from a side room. Myriad
images flashed from the Voyager II golden record
that would represent a sort of a time capsule for any
alien or would-be seafarer who might come upon this
indexical account of the human species.
In the corner of the room, the Behring Institute for
Medical Research had a salon hang. The Institute is a
Dutch organization that began a widespread survey
in search of art that could function as a placebo and
of placebos that could in fact be art. The project begs
many questions regarding how a person experiences
an artwork, exactly what it is that they experience
which differentiates between art, “art”, something
otherwise common and non-art, and whether such
a differentiation is, in fact, possible. In addition,
there were several dozen objects in the room taken
from other cultures for which one did not have
an immediate point of reference. From Vladimir
Archipov’s Folk Art Archive of improvised bricolage
devices to a private collection of fetish objects, cult
icons, out-of-place artefacts and ritual devices, each
beautiful and awkwardly alienating, these works
somehow brought everything to a conclusion by
posing this question: How can we move beyond the
readymade, and what does art without reference look
like?
The Abstract Expressionists faced a similar dilemma,
but with what seem today like easily surmountable
odds by comparison. Today’s artist operates almost
entirely in the realm of reference and employs a
81
language of art that references art. The path for Emergency in Favour of Twice
development leads to a gaping maw of white noise Institute of Contemporary Art
containing everything and nothing, often with 1 April–2 August 2011
dead ends of conceptual arithmetic. Yet an eventual Participants: Marina Abramovič, Vladimir Archipov,
endgame is in sight, and maybe this is, in fact, the Arts Science Research Laboratory, Behring Institute
real crisis. In this way, works like the Grilo laser piece, of Medical Research, Alighero Boetti, Chris Burden,
while not what I imagined the lost readymade to Roisin Byrne, Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Cuoghi,
look like, achieved something rare through the art Marcel Duchamp, Bola Ecua, Carly Fisher, Carmelo
of disengaging and letting the act of creation drift Gavotta, Loris Gréaud, Rubén Grilo, Damien Hirst,
into a realm in which the Surrealists and Abstract Christian Jankowski, Leopold Kessler, Oliver Laric,
Expressionists first broke ground but to which we Robert Lazzarini, David Levine, Sherrie Levine, Steve
have not found a sincere way to return without the McQueen, Tito Mussoni, Roman Ondák, Hamid
security of mannerism and loaded parentheses. Piccardo, Bertrand Planes, Gedi Sibony, Situationists
One could surmise that Duchamp, aware of how his International, Alfred Stieglitz, Sturtevant and Jeffrey
actions might be interpreted by future fans, set this Vallance
all up as one of his many games full of clues, dead
ends and intrigue – maybe his last great game. The
Green Box, his immense treasure map to The Large
Glass, certainly makes you wonder whether such a
forensic strategy of planting the devil in the details
was happening everywhere all along, forcing us
to do a double-take at his every word. The “copy”
had a different, almost performative meaning for
Duchamp, one that related more to the nature of the
word and referred not only to serializing, but even to
mimicry and sublimation. As a whole, the exhibition
at the Institute of Contemporary Art functions
simultaneously as a conspiracy theory, a litmus
test and a crystal ball, revealing the threadbare
psychological paradoxes of the readymade.
With a precise handicraft and an alchemist’s
desire, Duchamp’s readymade penetrated the thin
membrane of the retinal function of art, thereby
releasing a flood of potential for future generations.
And yet with this lost readymade he even broke the
bond binding the idea to the form and, one could say,
to the reference. Now one must discern whether his
legacy is based on what is written, on an elaborately
mistaken identity or on a possible hoax.

82
 THE WRONG PROGRAM

BARarchitekten

In 1995, we started drawing with pixels on the computer using the

program SuperPaint.
This was a mistake: it was the wrong program for architects to use.
So why didn’t we start using one of the vector-based CAD programs that
were already standard issue for architects? It was partly due to a lack of
resources (acquiring the software and hardware was expensive), and
partly due to a lack of knowledge (none of us had worked in established
offices that used CAD, and we had finished our education just before
the widespread adoption of the technology). As important, perhaps,
was our unwillingness to simply follow the same path that most other
architects were taking. One of the luxuries of living in low-rent Berlin
shortly after the fall of the Wall was being able to look askance at con-
ventional practice: the world of CAD seemed irredeemably associated
with the bad buildings being built in the centre of Berlin. There was
also the beguiling simplicity of using SuperPaint. Unlike the daunt-
ing and unintuitive complexity of a CAD program, which appeared to
require an entirely new way of thinking, SuperPaint was just a new way
of putting lines on a white surface, eliminating the inconvenience of
drafting with rapidograph pens. We had always admired Ludwig Leo’s
extensive use of the one-millimetre pen in his drawings of the 1960s
and 1970s, and now we could produce thick lines and black fills with
no risk of smudged ink.
While our contemporaries worked at the sombre screens of
AutoCAD, we cheerfully nudged pixels around the small black-and-
white screens of our Mac Classics, as if we were playing a primitive
computer game. At a high zoom, working with SuperPaint became
more like arranging a mosaic of black and white tiles than drafting.

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 The main project that we drafted with SuperPaint was called
Stadtbaustein, a prototypical mixed-use building for Berlin in which
a rationalized structure and the careful positioning of service shafts
allowed for economical construction and flexible use. SuperPaint’s
restricted palette contributed to the formal reductiveness of the design.
For one thing, only orthogonal lines looked good. At a 1:50 scale, one
pixel corresponded to roughly two centimetres, which became our basic
unit. And the novelty of “cutting and pasting” allowed us to quickly
produce large numbers of plan variants with a set of standardized parts
that showed different scenarios for the use and spatial arrangement
of the floor plan. The one-pixel unit also produced a basic but highly
legible, almost Op Art–like graphical language in which one-pixel-wide
lines were separated by one-pixel-wide gaps. Through these gaps, each
building element (window, partition wall, plumbing fixture or piece of
furniture) retained an independent identity and a feeling of potential
mobility. After a few months, we realized we had reached the limits of
the software; we needed to produce usable architectural drawings. So
we moved on to use a conventional vector-based CAD program with a
more powerful computer. At first we missed the feeling of arranging
elements on the screen and the comforting simplicity of the pixel unit.
But that was soon forgotten as we got used to the many advantages of
this new way of working.
For fifteen years, our SuperPaint period seemed to be nothing but
an amusing misstep in our digital evolution – that is, until we recently
started to work on a large housing project in Berlin that began to look
remarkably like Stadtbaustein. This encouraged us to look again at the
previous project. Although we had some old printouts of it, we found
Facing page: that SuperPaint would not run on a modern operating system and that
Stadtbaustein, 1995, the files could not be opened by any modern program: it was a classic
city block version
example of digital obsolescence. By using an emulator called Basilisk,
however, it was possible to run Mac OS7 and SuperPaint on a modern
computer, and thereby to convert the files into a readable format.
In looking at the drawings again, it became clear that using
SuperPaint as our medium had had a lasting influence on our work.
We had always looked back on our SuperPaint period as a preliminary
to our subsequent adoption of CAD; it is more telling, however, to see
it as a coda to manual drafting. Robin Evans wrote extensively on the
historical influence of techniques of architectural representation –
types of orthogonal and perspective projections – on architectural
imagination. He didn’t write so much about the influence of different

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85
 media and instruments – for example, the use of transparent paper –
but, clearly, the (hand)work of making a drawing used to provide a
continuous feedback to the imagination of the architect, and this feed-
back depended on the particularities of the medium. The SuperPaint
drawings, though done on a screen, were still linked in our minds to
the practice of making plans by arranging lines on a sheet of paper,
a way of thinking that all but disappeared with the adoption of CAD.
We still have the choice of using non-digital media (physical models,
sketches), but the focus of our work, which now happens on the com-
puter, no longer has this tangibility.
In their essay “The Shift”, Alison and Peter Smithson described
the unintended influence that collages and home-made prints that
they made as their Christmas cards and other ephemera had had on
their work. For us, SuperPaint was a medium that, through its limited
capabilities, had brought certain ideas – such as rationalization and
kit-of-parts construction – into focus, even if we didn’t know it at the
time. Contrary to normal expectations of technical progress, our new
medium involved a limitation of choice, a return to basics. Unlike
the Smithsons, who produced their Christmas cards year after year,
we only used SuperPaint for the very short time it took us to realize
that it was useless for the practical work of producing architectural
drawings. So what if we had carried on with our pixel experiments?
While it would be possible to set up a modern pixel-based program
like Photoshop to allow us to draft in the same way, it is most unlikely
that anyone would accept such self-imposed limitations. It would no
longer be a mistake; it would be an affectation.

Stadtbaustein, 1995,
infrastructure and patterns
of use (right) and scenarios
in detail (facing page)

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87
 THE FOUR BOOKS OF MISTAKES

Matteo Ghidoni

Like almost every discourse on architecture in the Renaissance,

The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio (1570) is in debt to
Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the only ancient treatise about architec-
ture to have survived. Palladio puts Vitruvius above all his predeces-
sors, and claims to have chosen him as his “master and guide”. But
Vitruvius is also an enigma: his text’s technical language is obscure
and incomplete, its illustrations got lost and it is difficult to compare
its observations with existing ruins, which mainly date to the late
Roman Empire.
According to Wittkower, Palladio’s incorrect reconstruction of
the façade of the ancient house included in the edition of Vitruvius
by Daniele Barbaro (1556) is based on two fundamental mistakes.
An incorrect theory of the development of society makes him think
about the private house and the public building as two different evo-
lutionary steps in the formation of the city, and about the temple as
nothing more than a house of particular magnificence. Additionally,
his theory about the genesis of architecture affects his own idea of
architectural composition: he identifies elementary units that can be
transposed from one class of buildings to another and scaled accord-
ing to an architect’s specific needs. Any Palladian villa façade would
have been impossible without this “original sin”: the displacement of
the classical temple front gave the motif a whole new – and not at all
classical – life and led to its extraordinary diffusion.
The balance between decoro (decorum, convention) and licenza
(discretion, abuse) permeates the entire architectural debate of the
Renaissance. Evading the rules and exercising the autonomy of judge-
ment are two necessary consequences of the needs of the genius,

88
creativity, grace and other qualities aspired to by architectural theo-
reticians. Palladio himself introduces a section titled De gli abusi (On
Abuses) in his first book. We can read this more as an invitation to
transgress the rules than as a warning against their infringement.
Moreover, one of Palladio’s followers, the amateur architect Teofilo
Gallaccini, felt the need to write an entire Trattato sopra gli errori degli
architetti (1621). But besides this conscious and limited use of license,
which could spark debates about the use of a “broken tympanum” or
the “banded column” at the most, the transmission of architectural
knowledge is punctuated by genuine and fruitful errors whose main
vehicle of diffusion is the printed page.
The Four Books of Mistakes is a series of drawing exercises that
methodically violate the four books of architecture by Palladio. A
number of increasingly serious “printing errors” – erasures, overlap-
pings, cuts or the combination of all these actions – is introduced
into the pages of the treatise. The exercise’s only (self-imposed) limit
is maintaining a respect for the page’s own architecture, such as the
boundaries of the frame and the positioning of text and drawings.
The result is a set of new pages that question the risk of transmitting
a mistake together with the rule, or the possibility of opening things
up to new mistakes and new rules. The latent image of an open and
generous text emerges from a rather dogmatic one. We can plumb
its depths, trying to share a manipulable knowledge of architecture.

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98
 DELIBERATE MISTAKES:
STORIES OF THE WINCHESTER HOUSE

Cédric Boulet

In San Jose, California, sits a rather unusual and monstrous house.

The extravagant mansion was home to a single woman for nearly forty
years beginning in 1884. At over 24,000 square feet, it is comprised of
150 rooms, a dozen or so bathrooms, numerous towers and cupolas,
and all sorts of diverse detailing. Most interesting of all, however, is the
mansion’s chaotic and unruly character: there seems to be an almost
complete disregard for proper design. Basic architectural strategies
of circulation, programme and planning were not properly employed.
Walking through the house, one experiences architectural redun-
dancy, dysfunction, inaccuracy, oversights and all sorts of design faux
pas. In a way, the house is littered with architectural mistakes. The
house’s incorrectness is so considerable, in fact, that one gets the
impression that the mistakes were made knowingly, or perhaps even
deliberately. Of course, the notion of making mistakes on purpose –
be it in architecture or elsewhere – presents a paradox. In the same
way that one could intentionally make a spelling mistake, one could
deliberately make an architectural mistake, but the question quickly
becomes why? To better understand the house’s mistakes and why
they were made, it is necessary to delve into the story of its owner,
Sarah L. Winchester.
Sarah was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, heir to the wildly
successful Winchester Repeating Arms Company. William’s father,
Oliver Winchester, had invented the 1873 Winchester Repeating Rifle –
“the gun that won the West” – at a time when guns were a requisite in
American culture, whether they were being used with the purpose
of hunting, trade or self-defence. It was unequivocally the best of its
kind, the icon of cowboys, Indians, sheriffs and the everyday man. The

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 Winchester rifle was promoted by both Buffalo Bill Cody and Theodore
Roosevelt, and the Winchester family was in competition with other
famous gun-manufacturing families, namely those behind the Smith
& Wesson and the Colts. Sales of their rifle spread beyond the U.S.,
and contracts with other countries swelled the Winchester fortune.
Although Sarah remained mostly a bystander to it all, the Winchester
legacy would eventually have an effect on her life nonetheless . . .

The Story of the Winchester Mystery House

The story goes as follows. At a certain point, Sarah tragically loses her
infant daughter and then, some years later, her husband, William. As
a result, she receives an enormous inheritance and significant stocks
in the Winchester company, but she is overwhelmed with grief, so
much so that her health begins to deteriorate and she is instructed by
a doctor to move out of her New Haven home and seek remedy in the
Western sun. After the move, however, her sorrow only deepens, lead-
ing to a psychological collapse and triggering a sense of guilt over her
gun-money inheritance, which in turn develops into a belief that the
spirits of the Winchester rifle’s victims are haunting her. Even more
bizarrely, Sarah becomes convinced that she can avoid retribution by
sheltering the spirits and believes that she must distract them from
haunting her by continuously constructing confusing spaces for them
to roam about in.
Given Sarah’s goal, architecture became an instrument of trickery.
Without an architect or any kind of master plan, Sarah Winchester
built against the standards and conventions of architecture, delib-
erately making planning and spatial mistakes that were designed to
act as diversions. The building’s construction continued ceaselessly
for dozens of years, ending with her death in 1922. Less than one year
later her home was converted into a museum.
Today the house remains a tourist attraction, the Winchester
Mystery House, a kind of museum of architectural mistakes. The house’s
oddities are explained by telling the story of Sarah’s superstitious and
eccentric behaviour, suggesting that still today the house is haunted
by spirits. But what sets the Winchester House apart from the typical
gimmick- and prop-filled haunted house is that the most disturbing
element is the architecture itself; its improperness conjures a sense of
unfamiliarity and eeriness. The house’s architectural errors so blatantly
violate the customary logic of architecture that visitors are obliged to
reinterpret their relationship with each of the building’s spaces.

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 For instance, one might encounter a set of stairs that is entirely
conventional in and of itself but runs dead into the ceiling rather than
granting access to the floor above. The tension between the properly
designed and built stairs on the one hand and the glaring problem of
having them cut off by the ceiling on the other generates a sense of
utter dysfunction. Elsewhere in the house another staircase appears
normal but leads nowhere, while a door on the second floor opens
directly to the outdoors with a sixteen-foot drop to the ground. Three
other doors also open to large drops within the house itself, and an-
other opens onto nothing but a wall. There is also a window that looks
into the elevator shaft rather than outside. In another room, windows
are used as flooring, while in a different space, doors are used in the
same way. One of the rooms is fully decorated but has no floor at all
and also lacks a ceiling; another simply has no door by which to enter
it. Finally, an otherwise functional chimney stops a few feet short of
reaching the outside.
The list of oddities at the Winchester Mystery House extends to
the way some rooms connect to one another, instances of redundant
circulation, the occasional creation of uncomfortably tight spaces and
the introduction of strange secret passageways. These oddities and
their conspicuous dysfunctionality are so unfamiliar to our everyday
interaction with architecture that we seem to enjoy the experience,
for tourists have sustained the Winchester Mystery House’s status as
a popular attraction for decades.

The Story of Llanada Villa

The story of the Winchester Mystery House might be just that: a story.
In truth, the house went by the name of Llanada Villa during Sarah
Winchester’s time, and Llanada Villa has its own story to tell. In the
book Captive of the Labyrinth (2010), author Mary Jo Ignoffo takes a
closer look at Sarah Winchester’s life and posits that the elderly woman
was actually quite level-headed and that the house’s architectural mis-
takes can be explained as being something other than an obsessive
expression of superstition.
Ignoffo’s account reveals that newspapers began speculating about
the reasons behind Sarah Winchester’s unusual building activity as
early as 1892, and the resulting rumours spread as town gossip for years
before her legacy was left in the hands of the tourist-hungry owners
of the house, from which point stories involving ghosts would pre-
dominate. Ignoffo provides first-hand accounts of Sarah Winchester’s

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 friends and servants that plainly attest to her sanity (though never
failing to recount her inordinate eccentricities as well), but the ghost
stories still prevailed in the public’s imagination, and since Sarah
never attempted to dispel the gossip by disproving the newspapers,
her reputation as a madwoman grew.
As mentioned earlier, Sarah was ill. She had crippled hands due
to rheumatoid arthritis and she was missing teeth, thus leading her
to always wear a veil and gloves. Self-conscious of her appearance, she
avoided contact with neighbours and family, and built a large hedge
around her lot to conceal her unconventional building activity. Between
her disinterest in the community and what they could make of the
rambling house, the newspapers concluded that Sarah had to be mad
and tied the famous Winchester rifle money into their speculation.
Though the Llanada Villa was particularly bizarre, many of the fea-
tures we find odd today would actually have been rather mainstream
in the late 19th century. Upper-class women often took an interest in
architectural design and experimented with it, leading to some rather
strange combinations of architectural elements. In fact, there were sev-
eral other irregular Victorian houses on the west coast, including one
primarily designed by Elizabeth Colt of the Colt revolver family. Sarah
Winchester must have found solace in the constant act of designing
and building, for it distracted her from a life of loneliness and sorrow.
As Ignoffo puts it, “she wanted to work in peace, plodding along in a
labyrinth of her own making, perhaps reflective of an equally complex
interior life” (Captive, 122). She built spontaneously and ceaselessly,
and without any real goal or underlying logic. At times she tore whole
portions of the house down, had them rebuilt or constantly adjusted
them, and then abandoned them only to later resume their construc-
tion, relocate them or tear them down once more; it is said that the
main cupola was demolished and rebuilt a ludicrous sixteen times.
But a large number of the architectural mistakes that remain today
were a consequence of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Like
most houses in the San Jose area, Llanada Villa was severely damaged
by the 7.8-magnitude seismic event. Whole and partial rooms crum-
bled, gaping holes were created, and the seven-story tower collapsed
directly onto the house. While other homes were either levelled and
rebuilt or heavily reconstructed, Sarah cleared the debris and dealt
with the wreckage, making only minimal adjustments and correc-
tions to the house. This approach accentuated the house’s shortcom-
ings, making the lack of a proper sense of design even more evident.

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New mistakes became apparent as rooms were left improperly propor-
tioned, misaligned, unfinished and, occasionally, even inaccessible.
Sarah actually gave up on Llanada Villa not long after the earth-
quake, and only returned in 1909. By the time of her return to San Jose,
she had been “deemed a madwoman because of her pessimistic and
recalcitrant reaction to the earthquake” (Captive, 157). Speculation
about her would only worsen after she insisted on living in the earth-
quake-damaged house, spending her days amongst a myriad of archi-
tectural mistakes. Sarah Winchester never escaped the tragic rumours.
Since the idea of designing, building and living with architectural
mistakes was unfathomable to the public, the only way to explain
the dysfunction of the house was to attribute an equal measure of
dysfunction to its owner.
In the end, whether one chooses to believe the Winchester Mystery
House story or that of Llanada Villa doesn’t much matter; more
interesting than the question of Ms. Winchester’s spirituality or
sanity are the mistakes that were committed in her architecture.
She welcomed – or at the very least permitted – the house’s shortcom-
ings, testing and experimenting with the conventions of architecture
and using the house itself as a kind of laboratory, unashamed of its
failures. She not only continued to build erroneously without correc-
tion, but also elected to leave the mistakes intact and live with them
for a good portion of her life.
Perhaps most fascinating is the interest generated by Sarah
Winchester’s home. The house was so disturbing that it fuelled years
of newspaper speculation followed by nearly a hundred years of tour-
ism. It would seem as if our appetite for architectural unconventionality
is somehow satisfied by experiencing Ms. Winchester’s house, or by
experiencing mistakes that were to some extent deliberate – mistakes
that were designed.

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 PHANTOMS OF MONUMENTS

Mathieu Mercuriali

Investigating Mistakes
Sometimes the phantoms of monuments appear in the proportions
of their façades. When Baron Haussmann’s plans for the renovation
of the part of Paris surrounding the city opera house included build-
ings that were taller than authorized, Charles Garnier had to redesign
the opera house’s façade quickly in order to maintain its monumental
status. As a result, the main façade of the Palais Garnier was raised by
adding an attic to the top of the building. This addition illustrates the
relationship between the façade of a monument and its image. Does
this “mistake” give a distorted perception of the building’s propor-
tions? The mistake can be considered as a change of direction, one that
creates a dichotomy of ideas. In architecture, this dialogue of errors
can create new typologies. Sometimes the programmatic complexity of
opera houses and philharmonic halls, which belong to the typological
family of theatres, leads to complex solutions, for instance grouping
Opera Garnier, Paris activities together within a single form or breaking up the larger whole
into a play of multiple volumes. It is the relationship between context,
content and container that may cause architects to make mistakes
in their decisions and interpretation. Today, with the multiplicity of
formal and urban responses, these notions are blurred, leading to a
deconstruction of the audience’s path: the hall, the staircase, the foyer
and the auditorium. What contemporary theatre no longer follows the
rule that dictates having a façade that is like an imprint of the shape
of the interior hall?
In classical architecture, the main façade provides access to the
building. However, several design mistakes have modified the function
of this façade. For example, the great ceremonial staircase leading to

106
the lobby of the Opera Bastille is no longer used, as people now enter
the building from the side. This inversion of functions highlights the
complexity of such programmes. The auditoriums of the Guangzhou
Opera House designed by Zaha Hadid and the Sydney Opera House
designed by Jorn Utzon have unified and unique interiors without a
primary façade. But whereas the Chinese opera house is contained
within a form that has no relation to the auditorium, in Sydney, it is Opera Bastille, Paris
the balance between the needs of the auditorium and the outward
expression of the building that creates the structure’s morphology.
The decision regarding the positioning of the interiors is extremely
important in this case as it has a bearing on the façade in the con-
text of the surrounding buildings. Opera houses that are hidden in
a homogeneous envelope, as perfect as a crystal, seem inaccessible.
Closed to the surrounding neighbourhood, they are conceived to be
strong, iconic buildings of international import. These agglomera-
tions of huge halls are disproportionate in the urban fabric and have
to compete with apartment buildings and offices.
Guangzhou Opera House,
The Shapeless versus Additions Guangzhou

Design mistakes can be accompanied by difficulties in construction.

These two ambivalent aspects of architectural projects come together
to create a constructed reality. Modern opera houses can become a
parody of the iconic image of a city. Through the differentiation of
the types of façades, the question of the unshaped in architecture is
raised. Indeed, the morphological integrity of a monument demon-
strates how its architect conceived a building that can be seen from
all angles thanks to its different façades. In a functionalistic tradition,
the expressive façade of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles
turns its back on the service-entrance façade, thereby showing archi-
tectural inventiveness. Sydney Opera House,
The secondary façade can sometimes be the result of a design mis- Sydney

take that contributes to the creation of the identity of a building. These

hidden faces of buildings point to the dialectic between “garden” and
“court”, as well as to the opposition between constructive and creative
processes of architecture. Mistakes in conception and construction
are made visible by rules that can be bypassed. The Elbphilharmonie
in Hamburg has two main façades that operate dialectically between
the point of access oriented toward the city and the landmark facing
the harbour. Was the building designed as a synthetic whole or as the Walt Disney Concert Hall,
sum of distinct elements? Los Angeles

107
 Paul Andreu’s Beijing Opera and Jean Nouvel’s KKL in Lucerne
feature a collection of rooms and functions brought together respec-
tively under a bubble and a giant roof, as in a shopping centre. The
rooms are designed as a set of boxes that are built to fit in a specific
area of town. This public space is a neighbourhood people can stroll
Elbphilarmonie, Hamburg through or walk past, and the rooms are objects. Current architectural
projects designed as a mix of different forms that want to be as visible
as possible as recognizable icons can be considered design mistakes
since the signals they give us no longer represent their function, for
example, that of a music hall; rather, their function is swallowed up
within a stereotypical camouflage. Some projects lack innovation
because they consist of a classic auditorium paired with an organic
envelope that is too restrictive. In his 1921 draft of the design for the
Salzburger Festspielhaus, Hans Poelzig solved this problem by creat-
ing a pyramidal building, a symbol that was visible from a distance
Beijing Opera, Beijing and thus corresponded perfectly with the gigantic hall inside it that
was designed to accommodate 3,000 people.

A Box in the City

The position of the opera house in the city is crucial to its potential
for interaction with what is found outside it. Is the building made as
an object of representation or as a tool of production? The dialectic
of the programme sets the area designated for the public against the
KKL, Lucerne area designed for artists and administrative staff. This dichotomy is
expressed by an opposition of treatments in the so-called noble and
technical façades. This is the play between “looking” and “doing”. The
heart of the project is disconnected from its envelope: the auditorium
is a “box within the box” of the building, just as the opaque envelope
can be seen as a “box within the city”. Do these successive boxes,
which seem impenetrable, prevent acoustic dialogue between the
felted interior and the noisy city? Rem Koolhaas has created a visual
dialogue between the heart of the auditorium and the city’s skyline in
Salzburger Festspielhaus, the Casa Musica in Porto. Here the overlapping of the different pub-
Salzburg lic spaces shows the desire to integrate the opera house into the city.
Therefore, it is the relationship between the users and the residents
of the local neighbourhood that is at stake. This relationship is made
real through a network of rooms where events take place in spite of
the different typologies of interiors employed. This reversal is at its
best with the innovation of Koolhaas’s Taipei Performing Arts Center.
Casa da Musica, Porto The rooms are like volumes hung around a central cubic space, which

108
is the urban foyer that extends into the covered market atop of which
the performance hall is built. In this way, the audience can mingle
with the artists; the stage is open to this new type of public space.
Designing monuments such as places of culture, sports and leisure
questions the use of the building block where the main façade is no
longer of primary importance. Hans Scharoun did not prioritize the
façades of the Berlin Philharmonic in order to reflect the compositional Taipei Performing Arts
concept of the inner concert room. Here it is the foyer that regulates Center, Taipei

the pressure between the inward and outward forces. Scharoun was
seeking to forge a relationship between the music, the viewer and the
space in his design. He says that he designed this interior as a landscape
in which the auditorium is conceived as a valley protected by a roof
that is stretched over the hall like a tent. He describes his project as
an archaic shelter that stands apart from traditional types of concert
halls and returns to the essence of what a room where people listen to
music should be. With its asymmetry, the project extends its immedi-
ate surroundings – a park – through the addition of winding walkways
that lead to the concert hall. The project is designed to function as an Berlin Philarmonic, Berlin
inside that extends to the outside without a rational composition of the
façade. Thus the project is suited to its unique site. Its specific design
avoids the pitfall of modular spaces, which would not be able to be
used in various configurations for optimum performance. This audi-
torium can be seen as the ideal model for contemporary philharmonic
halls. The style of the architect can express itself in the minimalism
of secondary façades, thereby revealing his or her ability to work with
the technical and artistic media of the day. The architect can design
buildings with an economy of means that is enhanced by his or her
inventiveness. Are these façades a mistake or do they highlight the
monumental character of the buildings on which they appear?

Prototypes
The establishment of a typology can help to redefine contemporary
architectural concepts. By noticing interesting design mistakes, one
can identify innovative morphological typologies. The repetition of
common characteristics – in this case, a space in which to listen to live
music – cannot be used as the only generic element for defining the
architectural family of concert halls. Formal or geometric structures
have been created in response to previously erected buildings in order
to correct mistakes related to acoustics or spectator viewing angles.
This is how the identification of mistakes allows projects to evolve and

109
 change. Improvements are therefore changing the types of architec-
tural objects and rendering old classifications obsolete. New forms
appear, like the congestion of functions in the Elbphilharmonie that
results in setting density against shape, the façades that result from
the project in Berlin and the reversed context in Taipei. This is a new
way of looking at how a range of solutions can be found to optimize
both function and context. Design mistakes as well as problems in
construction can be discerned in every building, and each innovative
concert hall can be seen as a kind of “full-size” prototype for future
projects. These successive mistakes tend to turn complex buildings
into modern monuments that become contemporary urban icons.

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 FREUD AND MÉLIÈS

Alexander Hilton Wood

If the cruelty of science had to sacrifice for the sake of knowledge the
kind of mystery invoked by magic, it wasn’t only because science had
rendered such mystery useless, but also because it had taken over its
function in a society for whom it only provoked ridicule and laughter,
even if secretly frightened by the absence of myth. Nevertheless, in the
late nineteenth century, just as the progress of science and technology
seemed to irreversibly cast off any understanding of reality through
mystery and magic, the suspicion arose that such traditions wouldn’t
be banished so easily. Ironically, this suspicion also took hold in sci-
ence itself, and in particular in late-nineteenth-century psychology.
In the work of such mid- to late-nineteenth-century natural scientists
as Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Brücke, Emil du Bois-Reymond
and Carl Ludwig – all of whom swore an oath in 1847 to reduce physi-
ology to the mathematical, physical and chemical laws of the clock-
work causality of nineteenth-century mechanistic philosophy – one
is struck by how they explain the processes of the body and the mind
by all sorts of mechanisms, as if man were a huge, haunted machine
that functioned flawlessly at all times. Yet if the mind is a machine, it
isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that this machinery will ultimately
malfunction, or that it is malfunctioning already, silently, secretly, and
if it breaks down, what kind of mechanic knows how it works and how
to fix it? It is here that Freud entered the scene, as if from the wings of
the theatre of history. If, like Helmholtz, he began analyzing complex
psychological effects in order to establish their physiological causes, he
later found that quite a few effects had no cause in reality, so to speak,
but rather in the marvellous and absolutely mysterious theatre of the
unconscious. He inferred that the majority of our psychological life

111
 is kept hidden from both ourselves and from others, a psychological
life that only becomes visible when dysfunctional, as in madness or
even the triviality of a mistake, and it was this sort of triviality that
Freud seized upon as a kind of key for his work. Freud may be said to
be the scientist of the mistake, insofar as he chronicled various kinds
of psychological malfunctions in everyday life, largely of a linguistic
kind, in order to reveal the logic of such errors, so that he was left
with a mind that looked less like the mechanical, constant, law-like
causality of a factory and more like a theatre of sexuality, violence and
fantasy in which all the roles are played by a single actor in a farce
beyond their control.
It is of interest, then, that 1896, which was the year Freud first used
the term “psychoanalysis” to refer to his method, was also the year in
which Georges Méliès made a breakthrough of similar import for the
history of film. In the annals of the history of film this is a cliché, but
perhaps this cliché deceives us. Legend has it that Méliès’s camera
jammed for a few seconds while filming the Place de L’Opéra in Paris,
but this mistake was only discovered later, after the film was labori-
ously developed in his studio film lab. For Méliès, this mistake, little
more than the result of a trivial mechanical malfunction, proved to be
nothing less than magical. To his surprise, it produced the illusion of
the supernatural manipulation of the mechanics of space and time.
Before Méliès became one of the first and most prolific auteurs of film,
he was a professional magician. His films are indebted to his work in
magic and thus must be seen as the films of a magician. His interest
in film was initially due to what he saw as its value for his profession,
and he took on the expense of the technology without any aim other
than to add a new trick to his nightly repertoire. In fact, Méliès later
recalled the first public demonstration of the Lumière Cinématographe
on 22 March 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris, to which he was witness,
as an extraordinary trick. Méliès was first of all a spectator himself,
and as a spectator he identified with the popular imagination of film
as an utterly psychopathological spectacle that hypnotized certain
social classes who frequented the fairs where such exhibitions were
held. Méliès transformed the late-nineteenth-century theatre of magic
into a theatre of technology. The film studio he designed for himself in
Montreuil-sous-Bois in 1897 was built to the exact dimensions of the
backstage of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris (which was named
after the famous modern magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin), a the-
atre Méliès had bought in 1888 for his elaborate magic performances

112
and where he later made some of his first films in 1896. From the
arbitrary mistake of the machine Méliès fashioned an entire ontologi-
cal theatre in which the mechanics of time and space, subject in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to further and further
mechanization, were no longer bound to such mechanical causality,
as if enrapt by a spell, having become a marvellous power over reality
itself. This is to say that there is a kind of metaphysics of the mistake
that is nothing other than magical.
For, as Freud argues in Totem and Taboo (1913), the principle of
magic is the act of mistaking the causality of ideas for the causal-
ity of nature and imagining that the control of ideas will lead to a
control of nature itself.1 In other words, for Freud such beliefs are
a mistaken hypothesis, such that the laws of nature have been mis-
taken for those of psychology, the laws of the mind. It is precisely 1
this mistake that the films of Méliès play upon, the havoc that ensues Sigmund Freud, Totem
and Taboo, trans. James
once the boundary of the psychic and the physical has been broken. Strachley (London:
In over 600 films, Méliès constantly investigated the meaning of this Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1950).
mistake, the metaphysics of metamorphosis that it made possible.
If for Freud this mistake may be inferred from an obscure psycho-
logical mechanism that seeks to deny the power of the body over the
mind insofar as we persist in the illusion that our mind has a power
over the body, for Méliès we may say that technology also stood in
for a similar sort of occult mechanism that enabled him to hold his
audience in a psychological captivity. In Méliès the body is multi-
plied and mutilated, and it metamorphoses into an infinite number
of forms. It assumes monstrous proportions; it vanishes and then
materializes again from thin air spontaneously, without revealing
the hand that controls this brutal technological transformation of
bodies, space and time. His films are populated by horrifying colli-
sions, wrecks and marvellous explosions of all kinds, as if he were
making a slapstick comedy out of the carnage of the destruction of
civilization by its machines. The logic of all these mutations is based
on the mysterious kind of materiality that film itself makes available
for the first time, which simultaneously reveals and hides the logic
of perception that it also makes visible. Méliès’s professional suc-
cess in magic was due to the engineering of illusions at the Théâtre
Robert-Houdin. Film allows the documentation of the performances
of the late-nineteenth-century magic theatre, but it also disguises the
complex mechanics of a theatre of illusions within the complexities
of montage born of Méliès’s mistake.

113
 Le Manoir du diable (1896) is one of the earliest surviving films of
Méliès, and after Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin
(1896), it is one of his first films that depart from the realism of the
Lumière, Edison and Paul films that he had screened in his theatre.
In contrast to the bright and open world of the city and its reality,
as found in the films of the Lumière brothers, Méliès’s world was
one of secrecy and illusion, shrouded in the aura of evil. The film
premiered on 24 December 1896 at Méliès’s Théâtre Robert-Houdin.
The infamous “special effect” of this film is the canonical substitu-
tion shot. This shot introduces an imperceptible schism into the
continuum of the set and the frame. Le Manoir du diable is about
three minutes long and is set within one of his vaudeville mise-en-
scènes. Méliès establishes a set. The camera remains motionless,
integrated into the set, and through the stabilization of the frame
of the mise-en-scène, a cinematographic continuum is constructed.
In terms of this particular special effect, Alfred Clark’s short film
The Execution of Mary Stuart, produced by Thomas Edison in 1895,
preceded Méliès’s film, in which the gruesome illusion of an execu-
tion is achieved through the invention of the substitution shot. This
shot necessitates the revision of the scene through the cutting and
splicing of two discontinuous shots. Because of the mechanics of the
early film cameras, excess footage had to be cut from the film since
the cameras were unable to perform an instantaneous in-camera
cut. In Méliès’s Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin,
this shot is utilized to create the illusion of the disappearance of
a woman on stage during a theatrical performance conducted by
Méliès himself. In Le Manoir du diable, this shot facilitates a magical
transformation: a bat becomes the devil, then the devil conjures a
hoard of alchemical phantasmagorias from the void, and then a cru-
sader appears who causes the devil to disappear by brandishing his
almighty crucifix. In other words, this shot establishes a logic of pure
dissimulation, the discontinuities of a spectacle of time and space.
Méliès is the great showman. In many of his films he assumed all of
the roles of film production, from those of the cameraman, cinema-
tographer, editor, director, set designer, actor and marketer to that
of the producer. Therefore, we must think of Méliès in a sense that
does not distinguish these roles from one another. Due to this explicit
concern with the process of the production of film at the level of the
manipulation of the film base itself, we can reframe the historical
significance of this film not only as the work of the amateur auteur,

114
opposed to the industrial professional, but also as an intervention 2
in the very process of production, from the chemical transformation Sergei Ėjzenštejn, “Georges
Méliès’s Mistake”, in Selected
of cellulose into celluloid in the first industrial chemical laborato- Works, vol. 1 of Writings,
ries to the manufacture, manipulation and multiplication of films, 1922–1934, ed. and trans.
Richard Taylor (London: BFI,
a spectacle that mirrors those of industrialization. 1988), 258–60.
In 1933, Sergei Ėjzenštejn wrote an essay about Méliès entitled
“Georges Méliès’s Mistake” that highlighted the relevance of his work 3
Ibid., 258.
for psychology.2 For Ėjzenštejn, Méliès’s mistake introduced a new
kind of perception that contributed to the evolution of film: “To err 4
Ibid.
is human and Méliès probably made other mistakes in his work. But
for some reason this mistake was consolidated and became part of
the treasure of cinema’s means of expression.”3 Ėjzenštejn grounded
the revolutionary potential of such a mistake in its power to highlight
the “structure of our processes of perception in general”.4 However,
his remarks also show how long after Méliès film would try to repress
the memory of its earliest era when it was still little more than a tech-
nological novelty of modernity and not yet an industry. It didn’t take
long for this novelty of technology to be integrated into everyday life,
or for the effect of Méliès’s sorcery to wear off. He stands as one of
the last of the illusionists, but also as one of the first of a new era of
the avant-garde. Freud and Méliès insist upon the primacy of fantasy
as the failure of the machinery of reality.

Georges Méliès, The

Palace of the Arabian
Nights – The Descent into
the Crystal Grotto, 1905,
LC-USZ62-60081, Library
of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division,
Washington, D.C.

115
 AN “AESTHETICS OF MISTAKES”
IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE
“COLLECTIVE ACTIONS” GROUP:
SERGEI SITAR INTERVIEWS
ANDREI MONASTYRSKI

The following are two entries from the Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow
Conceptual School (Словарь терминов московской концептуальной
школы [Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999]) that are the most relevant to
the topic of the “aesthetics of mistakes” of the Russian “Collective
Actions” group (C. A.):

C. A.’S AESTHETICS OF MISTAKES

– see “The Three Mistakes of C. A.” and “Musical Dropper etc.” The
aesthetics of mistakes was realized in C. A.’s performance The Score
(1985). Reference: Text of C. A.’s performance The Score (1985).

THE THREE MISTAKES OF C. A.

– three demonstrational/aesthetic mistakes in three of C. A.’s perfor-
mances: 1. Third variant (1978) – the “second” figure had appeared
from the pit three minutes after the disappearance of the “first” figure,
instead of the planned fifteen minutes (resp. N. P.1); 2. Russian Mir2
(1985) – the spectators had approached the curtain with the “Nine
Hares of Russian Mir”3 visible (at this stage of the performance the
hares were supposed to be concealed beneath a white curtain) (resp.
M. K.); The Work of Visual Art – A Painting (1987) – the audio player was
set too loud (the phonograph could be heard by the nearby specta-
tors and participants) (resp. A. M. / J. B.). These mistakes gave rise to
C. A.’s “aesthetics of mistakes”. Reference: Letters and conversations
during the 1980s.

116
The following is the transcript of an interview con- and conversations” as a “proper term”? That is, this
ducted online. Sergei Sitar sent Andrei Monastyrski word/expression had to refer to some kind of reality
his written questions in Russian and then Andrei which, while being apparently collective in nature,
answered by sending audio files, attaching photos is situated “above” or parallel to both the realm of
and, on two occasions, writing. language and the level of “artistic practice” as such,
correct?
Sergei Sitar: How come a separate entry for “C.
A.’s Aesthetics of Mistakes” was included in the AM: [audio recording]
Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow Conceptual School Kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam5
published in 1999? kama-kam
kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
Andrei Monastyrski: [audio recording] kama-kam
Mir-reke-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ya-reku-v-reku-v-reku-v-rekuuuuuuuu kama-kam
mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
mir-reke-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kam
ya-reku-mir-reku-mir-rekuuuuuuuu kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ya–reku–mir–rekeeeeeeee kama-kam
ya-mir-reke-reku-rekuuuuuuuuu kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
rekuuuuuuuuu kama-kam
mir-reke-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ya-reku-mir-reku-mir-reku-mir-rekeeeeeeee kama-kam
ya-reku-mir-reku-mir-reku-mir-rekeeeeeeee kЭ6-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ–
mir-reku-re-mir-rekuuuuuuuu rЭ-kЭ
mir-reku-ya-rek-umir-ya–ku-mir-miruuuuuuuu4 kЭ-pЭ-kЭ-kЭ
kЭ-pЭ-kЭ-kЭ
[added in writing]: kЭ-pЭ-kЭ-kЭ
Perhaps this could be regarded as an answer to your kama-kama-kama-kam-kama-kam
first question? kam-kam
kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
SS: I suppose it could, yes, when one is aware of the kama-kam
context, though it probably has to be transliterated kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam . . .
into the Latin alphabet for potential Western read- kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
ers [which has been done here for San Rocco]. How kam-kam-kam
shall we proceed, then? Can we continue, or shall kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
we wait until you feel a bit better? If we do continue kam-kam-kam-kam-kam
right now, I would dare to ask the following: Am kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf–kЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf
I right to think that, in the course of editing the kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kam
Dictionary, you were using certain strict principles kam-kam
for identifying some word or expression from “letters kama-kama-kama-kam-kam-kaaam

117

SS: The word “aesthetics” can be understood and
employed with at least two distinct meanings. One
of these is the traditional Kantian one, which is to say
basically everything perceived by the senses (empiri-
cally) as opposed to the domain of logic – the sphere
of “pure reason” (including a priori spatial concepts)
and the entire field of organization of experience
according to certain principles. The other possible
meaning implies a certain broad field of activity that
intimately depends upon one’s ability to contem-
plate things without a practical interest – in other
words, a field of action that is opposed to “business”
or any other “goal-oriented” practices. This latter
reading, it would seem, is more characteristic of the
discourse of Collective Actions, particularly with
regard to the usage of the term “aesthetics” in your
text Aesthetics and Magic (1986). Which of these two
meanings – or maybe some other one? – is implied
by the word “aesthetics” in the case of your “aesthet-
ics of mistakes”?
AM: [audio recording]
Kak mozhet byt poznana immanentsiya?
Kak mozhet byt poznana immanen-tsi-ya?
Kak mozhet byt poznana emman-tsi-ya?
Ponyatnoooo!
...
Kak mozhet byt ponyata immonentsiya – ponyatno!
Kak mozhet byt poznana immonentsiya – ponyatno!
118
Kak mozhet byt poznana immonentsiya – ponyatno!
Kak mozhet byt poznana immonentsiya
– poo-nyaaaat-noooo!
...
Kak mozhet byt poznana transtsendentsiya?
Kak mozhet byt poznana transtsenden-tsi-yaa?
Sovershenno neponyatno!
Kak mozhet byt poznana transtsenden-tsi-yaa – sov-
ershennoo – neponyaaat – nOOOO7
SS: You begin your seminal text Earthworks (1987)
by drawing an analogy between language and the
foundations of a building. In the following para-
graphs this analogy is developed to the point at
which it turns into a virtual identification of large-
scale infrastructural projects (such as underground
sewer systems, road networks, heating mains, etc.)
with the “zone of pre-receptivity” explored by Kant in
the introductory part of his Critique of Pure Reason.
Yet further on in this text you present a number of
examples showing that these “earthworks” are in
most cases futile or self-contradictory in terms of
their effects, and that they can be best understood as
manifestations of the most archaic and rudimentary
levels of collective unconsciousness – in particular
of various sun-related, animalistic or phallic cults.
Does it mean that one has to regard all man-made
alterations of the Earth’s surface – throughout the
entire recorded history of humankind – as being
based on a series of mistakes and, therefore, as one
big mistake? Or are there some exceptions to this
rule?
AM: [audio recording]
Kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá
kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá
kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá
kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá
kvá-kala
kvakalá-kvakalá-kvakalá8
Notes
1 In these dictionary entries,
the abbreviation “Resp.”
(short for “responsible”,
the translation of “отв.”)
followed by a set of a
person’s initials identifies
the person / persons
responsible for the
occurrence of the mistake.
2 Mir is an untranslatable
Russian word meaning
“world”, “peace” and
the traditional peasant
community of pre-
revolutionary Russia.
3 The “Nine Hares of Russian
Mir” is a term the C. A.
coined to designate a group
of 10 objects that were
specially designed for this
performance.
4 This tape-recorded
“mantric” chant is based on
the closeness of the Russian
words reka (river), reku
(I say), rech (speech) and
rechka (creek). The archaic
word rek is also semantically
close to pro-rek (predicted)
and na-rek (has named
something), which, though
rare and poetic, are still
in use in modern Russian.
Thus, the entire phrase can
be read as “I herald world/
peace to the river”, although
closer to the end the phrase
SS: Dear Andrei, thank you very much. Here is my
last question: It turns out that Oxana can’t come to
the Kiosks performance on Sunday because of her
orphanage lessons. Since I’m coming alone, would
it be possible to find space for me in one of the cars?
Or should I still catch a local train?
AM: Sergei! Lets meet at one o’clock near the
entrance to the Alexeevskaya metro station. We’ll
see; there will probably be room for you. The 2nd of
October – Sunday!
things get spontaneously 7 This chant (sung by
distorted, forming the Monastyrski with a
logically impossible gradually rising tone) is
statement “umir ya”, or “I composed of repetitions
have died”. of four basic sentences
that can be translated
5 Kama is the name of a as follows: “How can one
prominent Russian river. grasp immanence? It is
comprehensible. How can
6 The character “Э” used one grasp transcendence?
here designates a sound It is absolutely
that is very similar to incomprehensible!”
pronunciation of the
letter A in English words 8 This mantric song is
like “hat”. “KЭ-pЭ-rЭ-Эf” apparently based on the
is presumably related to verb kvakala, meaning “to
the abbreviation for the croak” in the past indefinite
name of the post-Soviet tense with a shifting accent.
Communist Party of the The longer lines were sung
Russian Federation. with a gradually falling tone.
119
 THE NIGHTMARE OF
PARTICIPATION, OR
CONSIDERING THE VALUE
OF FAILURE AS A PROACTIVE
CATALYST FOR CHANGE
Markus Miessen
In order for any kind of participation to obtain
a political dimension, the engagement of the
people involved needs to be based on a critical
external voice. Through this kind of “conflictual
participation”, the exchange of knowledge in a
post-disciplinary field of forces starts to produce
new forms of knowledge. As a starting point for
a model of “conflictual participation”, one could
make use of the concept of collaboration versus
cooperation that Florian Schneider outlines in “The
Dark Side of the Multitude”1: “As a pejorative term,
collaboration stands for willingly assisting an enemy
of one’s country, especially an occupying force or a
malevolent power. It means to work together with
an agency or instrumentality with which one is not
immediately connected . . . ”2 Since this notion of
collaboration is also based on an idea of the inside
and the outside (i.e., if you are inside something,
then you are part of an existing discourse that is to be
agreed with and fostered), it will increasingly be “the
outsider” who will manage to add critically to pre-
established power relations of expertise. Although
the outsider will be understood as someone who
does not threaten the internal system due to a lack
of knowledge about its structure, it is precisely this
condition that allows one to fully immerse oneself
in its depths in a dilettantish manner. What we
120
need today are more dilettantes who neither worry
about making the wrong move nor prevent friction
between different agents within the existing field of
forces when necessary – a means by which, as Claire
Doherty calls it, to “circumnavigate predictability”.3
It is precisely this dilettantism that might enable
us to enter more productive modes of collaborative
engagement. In this sense, critical production
beyond disciplinary divides could be interpreted
as the temporary abandonment of one’s own
specialized knowledge in exchange for the benefits
of entering an existing discourse through curiosity as
a point of access. Through non-specialist knowledge
but highly specific targeting in terms of a will to
participate in a given environment, such curiosity
engenders exploration, investigation and learning
and allows for a forceful injection of external
knowledge that is alien to the given system with
which one is engaging.
Schneider describes the notion of teamwork as
something that frequently fails because of (often
banal) internalized modes of cooperation that are
characterized by the opposite of sharing knowledge:
“[I]n order to stay ahead of competitors, one has to
hide relevant information from others. On the other
hand, it also refers to the fact that joining forces in
a group or team increases the likelihood of failure
much more than the likelihood of success. Awkward
group dynamics, harmful externalities and bad
management practices are responsible for the
rest.”4 Interestingly, he stresses the fact that there
is increasing evidence that working together may
also happen in unexpected ways. In such a regime
of practice, the individual members of, for example,
a work group – in which individuals are usually
conditioned to pursue solidarity and generosity –
are exposed to a brusquer method of working
together, a mode whereby “the more individuals
follow their own agendas, the more mutually,
sometimes inextricably, dependent they become.”5
Cooperation should be understood as the process
of working side by side in agreement rather than in
competition. Collaboration is a process whereby
individuals or organizations work together at
the intersection of common goals. This can be
adversarial, so that by joining forces a surplus is
generated, although the stakeholders’ goals might
oppose this. In order to clearly distinguish between
modes of cooperation and modes of collaboration,
Schneider introduces cooperation as a method
applied among identifiable individuals within and
between organizations, whereas collaboration
corresponds to a more disparate relationship that
is generated by and based on heterogeneous parts
that are defined as unpredictable singularities.
In contrast to an organic model of cooperation,
collaboration is put forward as a rigorously
immanent and illegitimate praxis.
This notion, of course, is linked to the concept of the
outsider as well as to the need for a more conflictual
mode of participation from the point of view of self-
initiated practice versus the more established model
of the service provider: “[C]ooperation necessarily
takes place in a client–server architecture. . . .
Collaboration, on the contrary, presumes rhizomatic
structures where knowledge grows exuberantly . . .
and proliferates in an unforeseeable manner.”6 It is
this collaborative structure, according to Schneider,
that presents the most fertile site of revolutionary
potential. It is where change can occur, frameworks
of difference can flourish and the creativity of the
multiplicity generates productive practices.
Collaboration often produces actors who work
on projects for something other than a purely
monetary reward or the accumulation of cultural
capital. It can also be described as a productive
learning process. In their book In Search of New
Public Domain, Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp
characterize what they call a true public domain
as an experience in which there is an interplay
of friction and freedom, for in this domain we
frequently temporarily come into contact with and
enter the parochial domain of others.7 They point to
the fact that if you set up a situation in which people
can produce what they believe in, this condition can
generate a set of relationships and productivities
that take the situation further than the conventional
understanding of disciplinary or interdisciplinary
practice can. The logic of change is always based on
the notion of exception, while unpredictable action
is the catalyst that sparks something new. One could
argue that the autonomy of the art world produces
an infrastructure for this. In a context like this one,
opposition can be read as affirmation, and whether
the boundaries of conflict retract or expand, they set
up the limits of potentialities.
The concept of using conflict as a generator of critical
and productive collaboration was first introduced
by conflict theory. As far as the idea of introducing
conflict is concerned, there are very formalized state/
political, transnational and non-governmental
structures and procedures in place that utilize
conflict as a strategic tool, essentially employing
it in order to both reveal realities and generate a
crisis, which allows for change to occur more rapidly.
The United Nations employs a number of conflict
strategies in which micro-conflicts are superimposed
on existing situations of conflict in order to address
a given issue. This concept of introducing other
conflicts falls within what is officially called “conflict
transformation theory”, which is strongly influenced
by Johan Galtung.8
To return to the notion of collaboration, it would
thus not be farfetched to argue that conflict could be
understood as a productive variable in collaboration.
It points to the larger question of how we think about
challenges and change. Conflict is not necessarily a
given, though. It needs to emerge and be fostered as
a generative friction, a force of critical production.
However, as mentioned earlier, such conflict should
121
be understood not as one that is physical or violent,
but rather as a friction that emerges on the levels
of content and production – a conflict played out
within the remit of the democratic arena. “Doing”
and acting within this arena produces reality. In
this context, those who do not act, standing on the
sidelines as spectators, do not participate and thus
simply confirm pre-existing paradigms of practice.
The culture of antagonistic collaboration could also
be described as an urban rather than a rural practice,
for density allows for antagonisms to emerge more
naturally. The space of performativity is a space of
reaction and encounter in which there is an intrinsic
relationship that Chantal Mouffe has termed the
adversarial one of “friendly enemies”. What they have
in common is that they share a symbolic space. They
agree on the ethico-political principles that inform
the political association, but they disagree about
the interpretation of those principles. In a similar
manner Jacques Derrida applies the use of difference
to the concept of friendship in his book The Politics
of Friendship,9 exploring the dynamic between friend
and enemy. Haunted by the provocative address
attributed to Aristotle – “O my friends, there is no
friend” – Derrida illustrates that there is a play of
difference associated with the concept of friendship.
He does not have to problematize the concept of
friendship, as it is already problematized by its very
own history: in its essence, friendship is marked
by difference. Between friend and enemy as well
as friend and friend, there is the potential for a
conflictual consensus, one that produces the fertile
ground for conflictual participation to occur.
This allows for the politics of participation to be
re-defined by a productive difference inserted as
friction. Critical practice is supposed to challenge
the expectation of what and how things should be
done. Knowledge is necessarily shareable and occurs
after a common ground has been established, even
if that shared ground is conflictual. If art is political
122
through its definition of ways of being together and
its reshaping of how we hold things in common,
then, as Tom Keenan remarks, “art clearly can be
and in fact is a mode of research in the political”,10
and it engages in politics not through modes of
representation, but through practice. The moment
of the political is the moment in which agency is
enacted or in which one becomes visible. Almost
by default, this raises a problem: someone on the
outside needs to recognize art as being political.
Therefore, the relationship between practice and
distribution, or the question of how to address and
present the political object, becomes imperative.
It is important to understand that architecture
can never deliver solutions; what it might be able
to do is to visualize and spatialize the conflicts
that are at the core of the very nature of its context,
even if – and especially because – those conflicts
are disappearing more and more from our visual
registers. Consequently, architecture becomes a sort
of eyewitness testimony.
Hence, one should argue that instead of
breeding the next generation of facilitators and
mediators, we should aim for the encouragement
of the “uninterested outsider” or the “uninvited
participator” who is unaware of prerequisites and
protocol, thereby entering the arena with nothing
but a creative intellect and the will to provoke
change. Running down the corridor without fear
of causing friction or destabilizing existing power
structures, he opens up a space for change, one that
enables “political politics”. Given the increasing
fragmentation of identities and the complexities
of the contemporary city, we are now facing a
situation in which it is crucial to think about a form
of commonality that allows for conflict to be a form
of productive engagement – a model of bohemian
participation in the sense that it involves outsiders
who participate in existing debates and discourses
untroubled by the disapproval of others.
As Simon Critchley argues, philosophy always begins
with disappointment.11 Nihilism is the breakdown
of the order of meaning in which everything that we
have previously imagined as a sound basis for moral
judgement becomes meaningless. According to
Critchley, philosophical activity, by which he means
the free movement of thought and the possibility
for critical reflection, “is defined by the militant
resistance to nihilism”.12 In order to remain at least a
little optimistic in the current socio-political climate
of practice, one needs to generate a space in which it
seems possible to overcome the constant lamenting,
pessimism, and negative writing about the
contemporary condition. Peter Sloterdijk contends
that the individual designer needs to attempt
to construct a certain universe of competency,
a territory in which one can exist as a sovereign
individual, not in the sense of relative specialization,
but rather the reverse: the contemporary “expert”
needs to become an incompetent master navigating
the ocean of practices, not a more specialized master
of a single terrain. For Sloterdijk, design is the skilful
mastering of incompetence.13 Skilful incompetence
allows for a sort of neutral gear, a parallel reality in
which practice, even in the presence of those who
attempt to think in an unconscious manner, can be
sustained in an optimistic mode of production.
The free circulation of thought necessarily implies
not always clinging to what is known and perceived
as functional and “right”, or what has been practiced
or experienced previously. Working from the outside,
like a non-institutional free agent (who is, to a certain
extent, comparable to an external consultant14) also
means actively performing a certain marginality.
The isolation of such marginality can only be
overcome by a relentless will for collaboration and
a commitment and will to change things from a
distance that produces a mode of criticality – a
distance that an insider cannot offer and does not
possess. In this model of practice, which strives for
change through commitment, complicity connotes
the death of a project. Such a model needs to be
driven by a result-oriented praxis whose potential for
modalities can only ever be tested in reality. These
results can then be critiqued, altered, tweaked,
edited or even dismissed, rather than simply having
their theoretical potential regurgitated over and over
again. The key phrase here is “constructive critical
productivity”. One should attempt to produce ten
critical realities per year and repeatedly learn from
the potential mistakes these would permit, and
then develop a single practice after a considerable
amount of time has been spent learning that it had
failed. Testing allows for agility, and it needs to be
carried out in the proper context, in collaboration
with others and across cultural milieux, in order to
avoid the vanity and comfortable, passive hiding
behind walls of egocentric practice, all of which is
highly uncritical and terribly unproductive. Martin
Wuttke’s analogy about the theatre is relevant here:
There is the danger that theatre is turning into a mere
simulation of itself. It is like a cleaning lady mopping
the floor of the stage who, while observing her own
reflection in the window, realizes that she likes the
movement of her ass as she cleans the floor. It no longer
seems to matter whether the floor is actually being
cleaned, because the movement of her ass is the only
result of its being mopped. This is how I perceive theatre
right now: a cleaning lady who has nothing else on her
mind but the salacious movement of her own ass.15
Using Wuttke’s analogy, it seems crucial to find a way
to position oneself, in an agile manner, within the
context of current practices and the contemporary
condition without falling into the trap of deadlock.
Today’s critical practitioner should opt to become a
receptor of political processes rather than a remote
player who navigates through the cultural-political
terrain in a deaf/dumb/blind manner – something
123
that Diedrich Diederichsen calls “surrogate-
democratic participation”16 – and represents nothing
more than a depoliticization of the individual beyond
serious modes of engagement. In the current climate,
it is necessary to separate oneself from magic
buzzwords – sustainability, participation, democracy
or “the multitude” – that were propagated at the tail
end of the 1990s. Instead of using them as simple
billpostings for political one-liners, one must address
their underlying motives through contextualized
practice. These buzzwords were only a few of the
terms that were used in order to shift attention from
the micro to the macro scale. This was happening
across the board, beyond political alliances, whether
on the left or the right.17 At some point, it became
sexy to subscribe to one of these terms; whether one
was convinced by its content or future potential was
a secondary question. It was a mainstream trend
that bridged disciplines and political mindsets. The
whole point of cultural praxis is that it presupposes
and assumes possible futures – that it speculates on
what might be possible through a series of critical
theories and practices which, for society at large, are
still too abstract.18
One could claim, however, that the real value of this
praxis is hidden in an approach in which there is no
evidence of either fully rational decision-making
or consensus in the result. One could argue that
the cross-benching politician in the British House
of Lords is an interesting reference to consider,
not as a gesamt-political structure of the House
and its conservative alignment, but as a structural
component that is designed to leave space for those
who want to remain unaligned in order to provoke,
motivate and eventually stimulate change. The cross-
bencher is essentially an independent practitioner
who neither belongs to a specific party nor regularly
fosters alliances with the same political camps.
Although this also makes him or her a less reliable
or dependable player who potentially even lacks
124
a clear stance, he or she still offers an alternative,
disinterested and less biased perspective on the
internal, consensus-driven mechanisms of the other
political parties present in the House. Although
these politicians have an undoubtedly political
opinion, they do not subscribe to the nailed-down
membership books or party platforms of more
consolidated politicians. This is also reflected in
the cross-bencher’s physical positioning within
the House, with Labour sitting on one side, the
conservatives sitting on the other and the cross-
benchers in the middle, slightly displaced toward
the back of the room.
Today participation is part of the neoliberal
project, and it ultimately serves the preservation
of the system. Real questions of power are no
longer being negotiated. Within the remit of such
“directed participation” and highly controlled
political engagement, one should promote the
involvement of the autonomous practitioner as a
means of harnessing conflict as an enabling rather
than disabling force. This shift calls for a new
interpretation of both the late-1990s romantic use
of “participation” as a mode or operation as well as
the function and responsibility of the cross-bencher:
a mode of conflictual participation that no longer
perpetuates or relies on a process by which others
are invited in, but instead acts without consensual
mandate as a disinterested, productive irritant.
In participation there are often too many potential
decision-makers, but there are rarely enough people
who take on the responsibility and risk of turning
decisions into reality, of moving things forward.
Any political practice must, of course, always opt to
remain within the territory and be founded on the
basic rules of the democratic arena. Nevertheless,
there is a potential danger in always using the
majority as a way of generating democratic decision-
making. The dilemma with democracy is that the
moment you have a room full of idiots, they will vote
for an idiotic government, or, in the case of the recent
Swiss referendum regarding the subsistence of the
country’s mosques, if one has sufficient financial
resources to mobilize the idiots, it is possible to make
the entire country look like a fool. The main difficulty
with the romanticized notion of the participatory
project is that it assumes that everyone should sit
around the table in order to make decisions, for
this might not necessarily be in everyone’s best
interest. Should one seriously read the British Sun,
the New York Post or the German Bild Zeitung simply
because they are the newspapers with the largest
readership and print runs? The question at hand
and the development of the last decade’s notion
of the participatory project actually point to a far
greater danger: the problem and helplessness of
the political left. If all one can do in order to make
decisions is outsource the decision-making and
pass responsibility to the floor, then something has
gone severely wrong with representative electoral
democracy. This is also why, in the shadow of the
last decade, we have witnessed the re-emergence of
the right, which now, oddly, appears to get things
done. It developed irony to perfection, a leap that
has rendered the right almost invulnerable: “The
left may have won the curricular battle, but the right
won the public-relations war. The right did this in
the old-fashioned way, by mastering the ancient art
of rhetoric and spinning a vocabulary that, once
established in the public mind, performed the work
of argument all by itself.”19
So what can the architect’s role be in all of this
today? A contemporary architect must confront
the dilemma of a profession that no longer really
exists. There is no such thing as a core competence,
although, as we learned from Sloterdijk earlier,
this may actually be an advantage rather than a
disadvantage. Having a core competence – such
as Sony = miniaturization, Honda = combustion
engine, 3M = everything that sticks to things – also
means that you may be very good at doing one thing,
but the demand simply vanishes. Everyone who
joins companies like Sony, Honda or 3M needs to
understand that such competencies are only valuable
when they can be applied in different fields; they
should have an understanding of how to facilitate
this transfer and why it is desirable. Until recently,
most architects did not know how to do this. Over
time they unlearned this skill, which was actually a
part of architectural training for a long time. In the
Renaissance, the polymath and generalist was the
role model for such a practitioner: he was a reflexive,
educated individual capable of lateral thinking.
Different times have identified different primary
competencies, but it becomes interesting when one
allows these dimensions to become transparent and
understood as interdependent.
Rather than mourning the good old days, this
model can also be understood as a challenge full of
potential. Architects have at times been very prolific
in exploiting the potential of being in a parasitic
relationship with the discipline that actually
produces architecture, which is the discipline of
construction. The natural disillusionment with the
way in which decisions that have already been made
are often not carried through by those who should
realize them has equipped architects with a healthy
amount of scepticism. Over the last decades, what
used to be known as the profession of architecture
has disintegrated into a plethora of practices. This
shift from a profession or clearly outlined discipline
to a series of practices was fuelled and mobilized by a
certain politicization of architecture that emerged in
the mid 1990s. However, while these varied practices
are trying to achieve many disparate aims, they
might nonetheless be united by a unique quality,
namely the potential and skill of the imagination,
formulation and design of strategic frameworks that
enable things to happen. The problem, however, is
that this abstract quality is continuously applied
125
on the same old turf, one that failed architects in
the first place. This raises the question of how to
position oneself within the broader realm of critical
practices. It is easy to agree that there is a certain
impotence that seems to govern the profession.
However, within the cultural sphere, there are many
niches to be investigated and occupied. Through
the exploration of the potential space between
stability and instability, critical spatial practice
can be understood as a stage set of sorts, a strategic
manual for choreographing futures. Cynics might
argue that the architectural project per se is simply a
more baggage-burdened type of storytelling practice,
and there may even be a certain truth to this.
Nevertheless, one needs to be pretty good at telling
the story.
Such polyphonic practice opens up a new role not
only for the architect, but for critical practices
in general: to go beyond conventional physical
construction and venture into the construction of
realities, not in order to follow existing protocols, but
in order to generate them proactively. It represents
a plea to the non-academic intellectual, with a
wide diffusion beyond academia, although most
of it may have been nurtured there. Even more so,
cross-benching practitioners should not remain at
the water’s edge. Instead, they should turn to the
political world precisely because it is animated by
considerations of power and interest. Unlike the
academy, its impact might affect an entire practice
or social body rather than only a student body.
The intention behind saying this is not to sound
megalomaniacal, but rather to say that in times of
crisis one is responsible for an intellectual premise
on a larger scale. In this sense, moving from relatively
discrete questions of interpretation and reading
to much more significant and proactive ones of
social change and transformation may introduce
and articulate an outsider’s perspective on a larger
scale. As Edward Said has said, “The intellectual
126
who claims to write only for him or herself, or for
the sake of pure learning, or abstract science is
not to be, and must not be, believed.”20 Here Said
proactively summarizes the key problematic in the
present discussion: “The hardest aspect of being an
intellectual is to represent what you profess through
your work and interventions, without hardening
into an institution or a kind of automaton acting
at the behest of a system or method.”21 In Said’s
opinion, the important thing is to never forget that
you have the choice. And choice is what permeates
strength and power, even from the point of view of
the individual.
Political space entails the practice of decision-
making and judging; to judge means to introduce
a system of hierarchies. A curatorial practice that
generates a political space has at its core the acts
of strategizing and destruction – making choices
about what to eliminate. In the given context of
critical spatial practice, the architect as curator
could be understood as an instigator who, through
the introduction of zones of conflict, transforms the
cultural landscape, which is the result of an unstable
society that consists of many distinct and often
conflicting individuals, institutions and spaces.
One could therefore argue that instead of breeding
the next generation of facilitators and mediators,
we should aim to encourage the involvement of the
disinterested outsider who exists at the margins, just
waiting for the right moment to produce ruptures
in the prevailing discourses and practices. This
outsider is someone who is inherently unaware of
prerequisites and protocols, one who enters the
arena with nothing but his or her creative intellect.
Running down the corridor without fear of causing
friction or destabilizing existing power relations,
this outsider opens up a space for change, one that
enables “political politics”.
The question remains whether trying to simply
describe one’s own role within a plethora of
differentiated practices is to be understood as
an opportunistic endeavour or whether it has
some qualities or use-value that extend beyond
the individual. The cross-benching praxis could
be described precisely as acting without a clearly
defined mandate while proactively seeking
engagement: freelancing with a conscience. It
calls for a hermeneutics and recalibration of the
notion of participation. Such an understanding
of practice seems vital in order to face the future
optimistically. It assumes that one defines oneself
through the notion of practice rather than through
that of a discipline or profession. Here skills and a
core competence replace the traditional notion of
disciplines and professionalism. Here participation
produces an alternative and parallel reality
that is activated and driven by self-motivation,
political agendas, collaborative willingness and
the fearlessness to exclude rather than thrive in
unquestioned inclusion. This agenda of critical
manipulation must not take anything for granted
and must never ultimately take sides, meaning that
one should not cop out of responsibility, but stay
flexible, agile and critical without being dogmatic.
One should, on the other hand, be aware that cross-
benching tactics also have a weakness, for they
tend to be temporary and often local, and hence
potentially in danger of ignoring the bigger picture or
having trouble looking at things diachronically.
Apart from a relatively small circle of practitioners,
the art and architecture worlds, as practice rather
than pure critique, have lost touch in this regard.
Many practices in the art world rarely produce
more than one-liners and nestle within the
relative freedom and luxury of a superimposed
happy-go-lucky bubble in which participation has
become nothing but an esoteric self-awareness
programme. This has resulted in an almost entire
de-politicization of the art world. What is needed now
is a re-introduction of the critical interrogation of
the value, positions and temporal nature of political
engagement. Along these lines, an alternative
rendering of participation and the relational should
be arrived at, one that morphs from performer into
proactive enabler and moves beyond the event-driven
realities of certain artistic production in response
to social situations toward a direct and personal
engagement and stimulation of specific future
realities. This can only be achieved by avoiding the
trap of getting stuck in one milieu, like the art world
or a single political project; we humans have feet in
order to be able to move and not get stuck. Otherwise,
we would be trees. This movement needs to result
in a content- and agenda-driven nomadic practice
fuelled by critical inquiry carried out from an extra-
discursive position that allows one to exit a given
milieu in order to be able to re-enter it differently.
This practitioner will be a co-author rather than a
participant, for participants are usually confronted
with superimposed structures. Although the “free
radical” does not exist and nothing is ever clean-cut
– rather, everything is ambivalent – such a practice
needs to work toward an ambition that is immune
to complicity. This complicity can be overcome
by assuming three positions with which modes of
proactive participation can become meaningful:
attitude, relevance and responsibility. Unfortunately,
these are lacking.
Space is the result of Handlung.22 It is impossible
to generate change via a passive mode of response.
Practice always needs to go beyond absorption and
become projective, injecting itself into contextual
realities and making itself visible in order to
instrumentalize these. In a time when participation
has become nothing more than a rendering of
tokenistic political correctness, such a propositional
rather than purely reflective notion of practice offers
a hideout for agonistic commitment.
Most sub-cultural developments of the last
fifty years obliged themselves to gravitate more
127
toward the military logic of the avant-gardes than
toward the ideas of democratic participation:
first on site, scouting out unknown terrain, but
otherwise living the wild and dangerous life of
small underground cells.23 As Marcel Reich-Ranicki
wrote about Gotthold-Ephraim Lessing, “The
loneliness appeared to him as the qualification for
the autonomy of the critic, and the autonomy as the
prerequisite for his function.”24

Notes

1 Florian Schneider, is becoming increasingly 11 Simon Critchley, 18 Ibid., 184.

“Collaboration: The Dark
Side of the Multitude”.
2 Ibid.
3 Claire Doherty, “The New
Situationists”, in idem,
Contemporary Art – From
Studio to Situation (London:
Black Dog, 2004), 11.
4 Schneider, “The Dark Side
of the Multitude”.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Maarten Hajer and Arnold
Reijndorp, In Search of
the New Public Domain
(Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
2002).
8 Galtung is the founder
of the International Peace
Research Institute (PRIO)
in Oslo and is currently
the director of Transcend,
an international peace
and development network
considered to be the
pioneer of peace and conflict
research. Galtung also
originated the concept of
“peace journalism”, which
influential in communications
and media studies. Over the
past forty years, Galtung has
published ninety-five books
and more than a thousand
articles on the functioning
of conflict. Interestingly,
Transcend also promotes
codes like this one: “Even
if electoral democracy and
individual human rights are
good for you, they might
not be so for others”. This
is interesting precisely
because Galtung has
developed the concept that
is widely known as “structural
violence” whereby conflict is
understood not as a means of
provocation, but as a means
of prompting change through
the operational collision of
interests that produce new
meaning and practice – a
means of productive and
operative change.
9 Jacques Derrida, Politics of
Friendship (London: Verso,
1997).
10 Tom Keenan, roundtable
discussion at the Centre
for Research Architecture,
Goldsmiths College,
University of London.
Indefinitely Demanding:
Ethics of Commitment,
Politics of Resistance
(London: Verso, 2007), 1.
12 Ibid., 2.
13 Peter Sloterdijk and
Sven Voelker, Der Welt
über die Strasse Helfen –
Designstudien im Anschluss
an eine philosophische
Überlegung (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink Verlag, 2010), 11–12.
14 See also chapter 9,
“Learning from the Market”.
15 Martin Wuttke, quoted
in Stephan Suschke (ed.),
Nahaufnahme: Martin Wuttke
– Theaterarbeit mit Schleef,
Müller, Castorf, Pollesch
(Berlin: Alexander Verlag,
2010) (translation by the
author).
16 Diedrich Diederichsen,
Eigenblutdoping –
Selbstverwertung,
Künsterlromantik,
Partizipation (Cologne:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
2008), 279.
17 Ibid., 49.
19 Stanley Fish, “Intellectual
Diversity: The Trojan Horse
of a Dark Design”, The
Chronicle of Higher Education
/ The Chronicle Review, 13
February 2004.
20 Edward Said,
Representations of the
Intellectual: The 1993 Reith
Lectures (New York: Random
House, 1996), 110.
21 Ibid., 121.
22 See also Martina Löw,
Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 2001).
23 Tobias Rapp, Lost and
Sound (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2009), 49 (translation by the
author).
24 Marcel Reich-Ranicki,
quoted in Uwe Wittstock,
Marcel Reich-Ranicki:
Geschichte eines Lebens
(Munich: Karl Blessing
Verlag, 2005), 192
(translation by the author).

128
ARCHITECTURE, DYNAMITE AND
THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT

Giovanni La Varra

129
 I.
“We used what was the requisite quantity of dynamite, about 150 kilo-
grams. We’ve being operating in this line of business for twenty-five
years and never before had anything of the like happened. We blew
one of the two base supports of the building to make sure it would
fold over in the right direction. What happened instead was that the
concrete slab remained mysteriously in place.” These are the remarks
of Beppe Zandonella, the owner of Tecnomine, a firm from Piacenza,
Italy, engaged to demolish one of the “Vele” buildings in Scampia,
Naples (“vele” is the Italian word for “sails”, a nickname derived from
the triangular shape of the huge Neapolitan buildings).
It was 12 December 1997, and at a window in the building facing
the Vele in the Scampia quarter of a suburb of Naples, Neapolitan
mayor Antonio Bassolino was waiting to see one of the Vele collapse.
The intention was to demolish two of the seven Vele structures, and
news of this had been announced to the press, which had thus turned
out to witness the event. It was the first time in Italy that a residential
building built with planning authorization was to be demolished
using dynamite.
The local Neapolitan government had a plan to tackle the diffi-
cult quarter of Scampia, an area of the city beset by acute problems
of urban decay (drug dealing, squatting, etc.), problems that had thus
plagued the seven Vele (designated as A, B, C, D, F, G and H) from the
time of their construction. The plan involved demolishing Vele F and
G, adapting Vela H to house the Civil Defence and Emergency Service
on the basis of a design by the firm of Gregotti Associati and restoring
the others to provide new premises for the university.
The Vele are one of the major public projects of Italian architecture
from the 1970s, much like the Corviale in Rome, the Zen in Palermo,
the large Rozzol Melara court complex in Trieste, Calabria University
in Cosenza and Cagliari’s Sant’Elia quarter. Public residential building,
in what were its final years, had gone in for huge structures housing
thousands of apartment dwellings and, in almost all cases, the signs
of urban decay were evident from the start: squatters moved into the
flats before they were completed, rents went unpaid and the agency
charged with the structures’ maintenance failed to get access to flats
with the result that tenants could end up living for years without a lift
in a fourteen-floor building.
Following the initial blast with dynamite, Vela F remained stand-
ing for several days. The mayor, the town councillors, the engineers,

130
the journalists and the tenants of the other Vele stared in disbelief
at the building, which was tilted at an angle and suspended, precari-
ously poised but tenaciously resistant. After four days the decision was
made to use a crane and a large metal wrecking ball to complete the
demolition of the building, now a spent shell.
So the anticipated event of the building’s collapse had not occurred
as planned. The mistake the demolition firm made was to underesti-
mate the quantity of iron in the reinforced concrete. There was more
than had been expected, and, naturally, the original drawings of the
structures had disappeared before the demolition plans were made.
Some months later, the second Vela was demolished with a more
robust charge of dynamite. The urban restoration plans that should
have followed in the wake of its demolition, however, remained a dead
letter. To date, the four surviving Vele (Vela H was demolished in 2003)
continue to be run-down, and the living conditions there are as dif-
ficult as ever, although some local associations have begun to take
action at a community level and push for the improvement of the area.
Vela F, left hanging and suspended for a few days to the surprise
and dismay of the authorities and local people, eloquently betokens
the considerable uncertainty on a national level about how to view a
period of building that had yielded works which were extraordinary
and courageous in their intentions but a total write-off in terms of
their outcome.
The very idea of a partial demolition appears to reveal this uncer-
tainty. The plan was to demolish two Vele out of seven: a prudent
demonstration of force, but a limited one designed to create an event
that was geared to the types of interests the media has in town plan-
ning issues.
The question as to what should be done with these works is still
unresolved today – to demolish them, to upgrade them, to change
their use under planning law or to intervene with a “bottom-up” or
“top-down” approach.

II.
The short-lived season of large-scale Italian buildings was ushered in
by a sense of expectancy in which three elements overlapped. The first
was faith in new technologies and in forms of building industrializa-
tion, a theme that characterized Italian architecture of the 1960s and
was derived from news about experiences in Japan and the English-
speaking world.

131
 The second was the idea that economic planning could become
a territorial, community-level matter. New disciplines linked to the
social sciences, to the urban economy and to land planning issues
became the backdrop for the thinking of a substantial number of
Italian architects.
The third was the possibility that concurrent with a politically
progressive outlook there might be a new landscape of large-scale
buildings tasked with controlling the urban form of towns and their
broader surrounding area. In other words, in the mid 1960s a body
of Italian architects retreated from the battleground of the town and
turned their focus to the territory as the new war front.
However, one very real expectation met with disappointment: the
possibility of a dialogue between architects and the political establish-
ment. No sooner were the work sites in operation than the politicians
sensed that the management of these works required rigour, earnest-
ness, precision and transparency. It soon became clear that architec-
ture in which the formal aspects were emphasized would be matched
by the need for a greater commitment in the management of the final
structure. The response from political circles was an equally rigorous
and radical project: constant and methodical neglect.
All the major works of Italy’s large-scale building period encoun-
tered a lengthy succession of obstacles. The Zen and Corviale build-
ings, in Palermo and Rome respectively, were taken over by squatters
before completion. Following the 1980 earthquake in southern Italy,
the Vele came under siege from the evacuees, who were ready to take
up occupancy even in cellars without lighting. And for its part, Calabria
University was never completed. In all cases there were disputes with
Facing page: the construction companies, work stoppages at the sites and major
Photograph by Luciano design variations (to simplify them and to force down costs, which,
Ferrara
nonetheless, mysteriously grew). The squatting was universally tol-
erated. The political establishment saw these buildings as a sort of
release valve, or as a way of handling social hardship. Judged from
this standpoint, the efficacy of the Zen, Vele and Corviale complexes
was exceptional. From the outset, the nature of these big structures
seemed beyond the political establishment’s ability to run and manage
them. Unsuccessful in its attempt to run these buildings as they were
conceived to be run (as huge machines à habiter or as monuments for
controlling urban expansion), the politicians managed them in quite
a different sense: by facilitating their decay and tolerating unlawful
conduct on their premises.

132
133
 These large-scale structures brought about no change in the think-
ing and action of politicians. Rather, it was the political establishment
with its machinery for control and management that changed both the
nature and value of this type of architecture. The introduction of the
principle of laissez-fairism into Italy can be traced back to long before
the surge in interest in non-interference by the state during the 1980s.
Large-scale structures built in the 1970s like the Vele – including
other, less well-known ones – represent an unresolved trauma expe-
rienced by architectural thinking in Italy. Large buildings were put
up throughout the world during those years, but elsewhere the efforts
made by architects were backed up by the firmest rigour in the manage-
ment and maintenance of these large machines à habiter, and when the
management of such projects was complicated by social conditions,
a radical choice was made: to demolish and rebuild.
For Italy, there was no Pruitt-Igoe.
This trauma has weighed heavily on the development of archi-
tecture in Italy, and its effects have been felt in two ways. On the one
hand, architects have been overwhelmed by disenchantment. The
enormous opportunities of the 1970s led to the creation of negative
landmarks. As the possibility of controlling local land development
through large-scale structures unravelled, any and all enthusiasm for
local planning evaporated. The abandonment of the project was abrupt
and uniformly supported. At the start of the 1980s, the scale of build-
ing projects changed, as did the nature of society’s expectations with
regard to architecture. On the other hand, society had begun building
cities in which the “do it yourself” approach was fashionable. Nowhere
in Europe did as many people get in on the act of building the urban
landscape as in Italy. Sprawl in its Italian incarnation released Italian
society’s pent-up individualism. Local planning was delegated to count-
less people, and en masse Italians became the owners of single-family
homes and small craftwork and industrial structures.

III.
The formal nature of buildings like the Vele is rich and complex. The
issue now, after the intervening years, is to decide what the outlook
for them is, not just to conduct research into their past.
What, therefore, is to be done? What view can we take today of
these buildings? There are three mainstream approaches. The first,
which is the most disagreeable and extreme, is that they should be
demolished and that they need to be replaced with other forms of

134
residential accommodation. Managing and maintaining them is
costly and complicated. From this point of view, the only solution is
to do away with them, given that they are no longer conceivable within
the contemporary context of towns and neighbourhoods that would
willingly have done without these elephantine buildings in the first
place. The new run-of-the-mill building recently put up in the place
of the demolished Vele perfectly exemplifies this attitude.
The second approach implies a romantic vision. It argues that these
structures, to a degree, are evidence both of an era and of a philoso-
phy regarding towns and cities. It is thus essential that they survive
as proof that “cities of another kind are (were) possible”. Defeats, too,
after all, create monuments. However, as with all forms of romanti-
cism, the risk inherent in this vision is that it is private, abstract and
difficult to share with thousands of people living in strained social
conditions without any prospect of improvement. For them, the idea
of living in a monument is a non-starter.
A third approach is to take a closer look at these large architec-
tural creations, to see them for what they are rather than viewing
them according to the negative connotations with which they are
associated. This is the only approach that has attempted to discern
a new narrative for these buildings. It is an approach that gets down
to work, that intuits the possibility of mounting a project that can in
some way be assimilated into the architecture and that maps out the
threads of the social relationships in these places. The outcome of
this approach is a project that domesticates; it represents the discov-
ery that within these micro-cities there is life and there are human
relationships, and that a fragile sort of community has taken shape
there. It is an unbiased and realistic approach that uses the social
resources available to get more out of structures like the Vele and to
reassemble them in a new scenario.
In different ways, each of these three approaches impedes the pos-
sibility of restoring these buildings by starting from their form. The
first approach physically eliminates the structures, the second one
tries to freeze their appearance by maintaining the buildings’ current
state, and the third leaves the question of form in the background,
perceiving buildings like the Vele as a sort of theatre in which living
is an adaptive and flexible exercise.
However, the destiny of these structures lies in their form, which
is exemplified – and not by chance – by nicknames or analogies that
invariably derive from something unrelated: “the large serpent”,

135
 “the bridge”, “the dam”, “the sail”, “the kasbah”. These huge edifices
have brought the possibility of living differently to Italy. This feature
of theirs, their exceptional form, needs to be considered afresh and
worked on. Oddly, taking a new interest in these huge buildings would
involve thinking, once again, about cities and territory in terms of
architectural form.
A fourth approach must be brought to bear on the architecture
of these large artefacts as well. The materials with which such a pro-
ject would start are buildings that are characterized by both ample
dimensions and problems, and that are also saddled with a public
image that is difficult to change. The operation in question is one
of adaptation (through architectural redesign) and architectonic
reinvention (of type or layout), but also of the cultural reinvention of
a new relationship between architecture and politics. The current
economic conditions necessitate a careful appraisal of how to give
new value to public areas, and this new value could be endowed by
an architectural project than can impose a new way of doing things
on the political establishment.
If dynamite is not the solution, then we should make a new attempt
through architecture.

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 TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.
ON THE POTENTIAL OF WHAT
GOES WRONG IN RELATION
TO MODERNISM AND ART

Filipa Ramos

While preparing this text it did not take me long to understand that I
had no ambition to deliver a conclusive essay; instead I was interested
in identifying a set of categories that could be used to classify certain
remnants of the architectonic legacy of modernism that seem to be
particularly attractive to visual artists who, in the process of re-working
them, carried out an exploration of the realm of the gaze and the recep-
tion of modernism.
Evidently I am not the first to inquire into the current artistic use
of cultural memory, in particular that which relates to modernism.
During these last few years, we have all spent so much time rummaging
through countless lost-and-found departments and reading intensively
between the lines of our official art histories that it seems like we are
mostly creating through recollection. Despite living in the age of the
digital screen – or perhaps precisely because of this – we are creating in
Technicolor, documenting in black and white and constantly evoking
gestures, attitudes and aesthetics of the past.
This exploration of production and consumption seems to have
brought to light the fact that what attracts us most in the recent past
is not the perfect or the preserved, but rather what did not work – what
has been lost or was never fully acknowledged.
Not surprisingly, failure has a special place in our contemporary
lexicon. It constitutes a key motif in the transition from modernism to
postmodernism, and it has been continuously revisited, as in Samuel
Beckett’s exemplary plea from Worstward Ho (1983): “Ever tried. Ever
failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
More recently, its relation to contemporary aesthetics was celebrated
in Harald Szeemann’s 2004 exhibition The Beauty of Failure / The Failure

137
1 of Beauty (Juan Miró Foundation, Barcelona), which reflected upon the
Mark Lewis’s essay “Is
Modernity Our Antiquity?”,
published as a contribution
to Documenta 12 (Afterall
14 [Autumn/Winter 2006]),
provides an exceptional
discussion of this theme.
Stills from Tamar
Guimarães’s video Canoas,
2010. Courtesy the artist
138
richness of the debate between utopias and their often disastrous results,
and how they constituted the poles of a central axis of artistic inquiry.
There has not been a radical change of focus since then; instead
we have engaged in a sort of up-close examination that has brought
micro-histories to the fore, not so much to confirm that the promises
of a Golden Age that was due to arrive hand in hand with rationality and
technology were never fulfilled, but to trace direct ways of dialoguing
with the past, as incompleteness provided the perfect possibility for
inserting something new into a circle that was not closed.1 Something
that is not fully accomplished leaves space for others to squeeze in, not
only so that its value and use can be reconsidered, but also so that it can
be used as a host for subsequent interventions and rearrangements.
Building on this idea, I propose the identification of three figures
that appear to be crucial for the grounding of this consistent return to
the failed, especially in relation to spatial use and occupation. These
three figures are the museum, the ruin and the razed.
The museum corresponds to those places that, despite their pristine
state of conservation, have lost (or never fully acquired) their original
function. In this process they display their unfulfilled vocation, thus
becoming an archetype of the divorce between form and function.
The ruin is related to what was abandoned, to the cumbersome left-
overs that magnify the paradox of modernist utopias in their oscillation
between presence and oblivion and in the loss of a connection with use.
The razed refers to those obsolescent structures that were destroyed
in order to eliminate an undesired and invasive presence.
Each figure will be analyzed through the specific case of an art-
work that provides a terrain for an inquiry into what became of the
modernist legacy. These three cases also seem to suggest that the
attempt to overcome unresolved situations (such as the “museum-
ification” of a house, the abandonment and decay of a failed touristic
complex or the more brutal act of demolishing a utopian community
project that had become a ghetto) was equally unsuccessful. But, alas,
these failures are precisely what allow artists to enter an open terrain
and work with it. The artist thus behaves as a sort of mediator in the
attempt to overcome modernity.
The Museum
Canoas (13’, 2010) is a film by Tamar Guimarães that presents a dou-
ble portrait of Oscar Niemeyer’s project for his private residence in
the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The house is the axis and perimeter
of the camera: the film is shot either around or from the inside of
the domestic space, comprising the gardens; we see the house in the
daylight and in the evening, during both its apparently everyday use
and the exceptional moment of a party, when it is serenely occupied
and very crowded.
We watch how different individuals relate to it differently – how
the servants move around with ease, seeming to be the only ones who
really know all the corners of the house, even if, as caretakers, they
never really use it. Then there are other people for whom the house
represents a meeting point, a place where their common presence
confirms a certain social and cultural status.
Here everyone seems to be the Other, and it is this sense of oth-
erness that triggers a second portrait of the house, a more fleeting
one, that depicts it through a series of discourses it propitiates and
contains. The house becomes the host for the outcome of thoughts
about identity and about the relationship between popular tradition
and modernism in Brazil, as well as for short stories and events, as,
for example, when Suely Rolnik talks about the relationship of Lygia
Clark’s practice to drug culture and experimental literature. In this
sense, the house stops being a commodity and a symbol and becomes
the place for the in-between, for the exchange and flux of common
intellectual property: ideas, impressions, feelings and memories.
Despite this potential to become a space for exchange, Casa das
Canoas, with its organic, mild, sensual form, its gentle curves and its
languid insertion into the landscape, can never hide the gaps it per-
petuates between class and race, nature and culture, discourse and
abandonment. When talking about Clark, Rolnik’s words are uttered
inside the house, and what at first seemed like the perfect setting for it,
actually proves to be ill-suited, as it is full of people dancing, chatting
and moving about. The house becomes noise, which overshadows the
possibility for reflection about the legacy of modernism, both its offi-
cial, known versions, and the narrow alleyways of its micro-narratives.
In 2007 on the occasion of the celebration of the hundredth birth-
day of Oscar Niemeyer, Casa das Canoas became a listed building and
can now be visited as a cultural institution.
Is a museum made out of a house still a house? What function
does it have? Is it a tribute? A relic? A monument? Will it become, in
its permanent condition of inhabitability, the archetype of modernist
architecture? Through Tamar Guimarães’s film we get the impression

139
2 that the house is a container for impermanence: those people do not
“Je suis toujours aussi mal
installé. Je ne sais si c’est
la cause de, mais depuis
un mois que je travaille
sur une grande toile, j’en
ai fait au moins 20 les unes
sur les autres toutes plus
dégueulasses les unes que
les autres. Le résultat est
nul.” Buren quoted in the
leaflet of the exhibition Je
ne sais si c’en est la cause,
Museo Experimental El Eco,
Mexico City, June–August
2011.
140
belong there and those conversations are being had in a strange con-
text that is unable to contain them. Everything is slightly forged, just
like the house itself: a high-class simulacrum of a machine for living.
The Ruin
It is thus quite paradoxical that a certain desire for the preservation of a
hotel in a tropical location and of what it contained arises from seeing
Mario Garcia Torres’s Je ne sais si c’en est la cause (“I don’t know if that
was the reason”, 2009).
The work consists of the presentation of a research project focused on
two sets of murals that the artist Daniel Buren created in the 1960s for the
Grapetree Bay, a beach hotel in St. Croix in the American Virgin Islands.
The title of the work is taken from a letter that Buren sent to his family
while working on the murals in which he complained about not being
very well inserted and wondered if this could be the reason for what he
considered to be the “dégueulasse” quality of the work he was producing.2
Forty years have passed since then, and the murals are currently
in an advanced state of decay because the hotel experienced a series of
financial fiascos that culminated in its closure in 1989, when Hurricane
Hugo devastated large areas of the island.
Garcia Torres carried out an inquiry on Buren’s mural works, and
he displays his research through a combination of past and present
photographic records and other documentation, such as original
leaflets from the Hotel, that he presents in a double slide projection.
The images are accompanied by an audio track of a song whose lyrics
were inspired by Buren’s letter from 1965 interpreted by the musician
Mario López Landa. As in many of his previous works, Garcia Torres
proves to be an exceptional researcher of the recent past of art history,
bringing to light hidden episodes – often vicissitudes – that he presents
through his own review and reinterpretation.
Buren’s murals are out of reach, for they are found in a very isolated
location inaccessible to most people. Their insertion within history of
art – and in particular within the history of Daniel Buren’s art – can
be problematic, not only due to his remark about the dégueulasse
quality of the works, but also because soon after doing the murals,
the artist underwent a radical change from the rather expressionistic
and materialistic approach that is still visible in these panels, even if
some of them – the ones produced around 1965 – already make use of
the abstract motifs that became the artist’s trademark.
 The murals are condemned to their current condition of being
a ruin, and the artist seems to transmit mixed feelings as a result:
if there is a nostalgic attitude toward a “squandered” artwork that
almost no one sees or is interested in preserving, this condition also
holds a strong fascination.

After all the antiquities have been found, catalogued, preserved and Mario Garcia Torres, Je
inserted in history, the contemporary researcher feeds upon modern ne sais si c’en est la cause,
2009. Courtesy the artist
ruins, expressing an inevitable contempt for their state of decay, as it
was their very abandonment that had allowed them to be forgotten –
and then subsequently rediscovered.

The Razed
Leaving St. Croix behind for a different context, we could wonder if
urban landscapes tend to be less generous to the development of ruins
(which is, to a certain extent, an oxymoronic expression), especially
in relation to the very recent past. Also, there seems to be less benevo-
lence toward our recent ancestors, as if it is the passing of time that
attenuates taste and judgement.
The combination of these two factors – the rapid replacement
of the old in urban contexts and the impious attitude toward the
recently aged – triggers a schizophrenic condition, because in our age
of historiographical obsession we deliberately erase some of the most
resistant remains of modernism. Even stranger is the fact that it seems
that the more innocuous the memory of these places is, the easier it
is for them to be erased. It can be harder for the setting of a dramatic
occurrence to succumb to the vicissitudes of time (such as abandon-
ment, forgetfulness or disinterest) or to be actively erased, than for a
building that was not fully functional or suited to a certain moment
in time and is thus more vulnerable to the desire for its elimination.
Demolition could well represent the ultimate triumph and defeat
of the studied legacy of modernism: nothing remains, and yet all that

141

Still from Cyprien Gaillard’s
video Pruitt-Igoe Falls, 2009.
Courtesy the artist
3 disruption, marginality and crime, and it seemed like the only option
A new perspective on
the failure of the Pruitt-
Igoe complex was
recently presented in the
documentary The Pruitt-Igoe
Myth: An Urban History (2011)
directed by Chad Freidrichs.
142
exists lies in the shared memory of those who were there to see it and
in the fragmented, dull and vague documentation that outlives what
has been deliberately razed.
What we perceive in several artworks by Cyprien Gaillard, such as
the video Pruitt-Igoe Falls (6’55’’, 2009), is a consistent interest in docu-
menting these acts of destruction, which he subsequently combines
with other materials more or less linked to Western culture. There is
something very ambivalent about documenting demolitions: despite
their violence, they emanate such a strong energy, emotion and power
that they are one of the things that come closest to embodying the
contemporary perception of the sublime.
Pruitt-Igoe Falls takes its title from the large urban housing com-
plex of Pruitt-Igoe. Built in the 1950s on the outskirts of Saint Louis,
Missouri, the housing complex had a rather short life, as it suffered
from the effect of a global economic and demographic strategy that
caused the emptying of the city during the late 1950s.3 In the early 1970s
the complex was in such a state of decay that it was synonymous with
was to start from scratch; in fact, the process of razing the building
complex began in 1972.
Ironically, Pruitt-Igoe was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the same
architect responsible for the Twin Towers. It is impressive that his
two best-known building complexes both became famous due to their
destruction, which in both cases also signalled a moment of radical
change. Although the destruction of the World Trade Center lies beyond
the limits of this discussion, the demolition of the housing complex in St.
Louis marked a point of no return in the architecture of a given moment.
As Charles Jencks famously declared, 15 July 1972 – the day that
the last part of Pruitt-Igoe was razed to the ground – was the day that
“modern architecture died”.
 In spite of its title, Gaillard’s video does not document Pruitt-Igoe.
It consists of two static, silent shots that gradually cross-fade into one
another in a continuous loop. The first captures the demolition of a
part of the Sighthill Housing Estate in Glasgow, a city that underwent
a radical regeneration plan. The video shows a night view of a concrete
monolithic block, illuminated as if it were an important monument or
a film set. Then all of a sudden the building implodes and collapses,
producing a thick cloud that gradually grows bigger and engulfs the
camera, thereby plunging the image into almost total darkness. It
is in this moment that a faint light appears and gradually outshines
what remained of the first scene: the second shot also presents a night
view, this time of Niagara Falls illuminated by bright and colourful
spotlights. Here again, the image becomes gradually obscured, in
this case by the vapour of the falling water, and then it gives way to
the initial shot once more, creating a continuous loop between one
spectacle and the other.
One could easily reflect on how nature and urban decay can become
entertainment, as the cause of awe and emotion. But it could also be
that the main (and only) actor here is failure: the failure to preserve
and share something that is a common good (the waterfall), which
has been turned into a sort of Disneyland attraction, and the failure
of a modernist housing plan that is no longer in use but studied only
for its impressive demolition.
Failure is also very dear to Tamar Guimarães’s and Mario Garcia
Torres’s projects, and once more, the question remains: what failure
are we considering here? That of modernism’s proposals or that of our
attempts to overcome them?
As stated earlier, this discussion offers no final conclusions, given
its inconclusive nature. Rather it aims to open up the possibility of
using these three categories to inform certain recent artistic practices.
As a last remark I would like to deterritorialize this proposal in
order to conceive of the failure of modernism as a cliché and to con-
sider the subsequent attempts to overcome this as the true failures.
By way of farewell, I would propose three different figures that
became key architectural typologies in the early 20th century. They are
less related to a specific moment in time than those of the museum,
the ruin and the razed; instead, they refer to particular conditions of
inhabitation and use: the museum, the hotel and the house.
But perhaps this will be discussed on another occasion.

143
 MITOLOGIA FERRARI

Stefano Graziani

Rumour has it that the Ferrari factory stands on a 0.8-degree incline.

144
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146
147
 INSTANT PARADISE:
A STORY OF FAILURE
AND ACCIDENTAL BEAUTY

Steven Bosmans and Michael Langeder

You can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west . . . And with the right
kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where
the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time.

Thomas Pynchon, V.

In Roman Polanski’s movie Chinatown, Jack Nicholson plays the role

of a private investigator carrying out matrimonial surveillance of the
chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
The plot narrates the detective’s slow uncovering of clues and events
as he is faced with a situation he cannot fully comprehend. Chinatown
becomes a metaphor for that which is unfathomable – a place (or state
of mind) in which codes of conduct cannot truly apply and events may
occur for no apparent reason.
In 1905, with Los Angeles embroiled in its Water Wars, the southern
Californian area around Imperial Valley had to face quite a contrary
situation. The Salton Sea, California’s largest inland body of water,
was formed when a combination of heavy rainfall and engineering
mistakes led the Colorado River to flood just below the U.S.–Mexico
border. For over two years, the Colorado River gradually filled the natu-
ral depression previously known as the Salton Sink, suddenly creating
an oasis where previously there had been mere desert.
Initially the event was regarded as a colossal embarrassment.
However, when the breach was finally stopped, the seductive force of
this refreshing body of water in the California desert proved irresistible,

148
and real estate developers immediately grasped the economic opportu- Steven Bosmans & Michael
nities it represented. During the following decades numerous attempts Langeder, Salton Sea Map

at urban exploitation were undertaken; California had once again

struck gold. Holiday resorts and an extensive entertainment pro-
gramme along the shores of the Salton Sea attracted hordes of peo-
ple from the surrounding area. Tourism flourished; Frank Sinatra,
President Eisenhower, Jerry Lewis and the Beach Boys all frequented
the miraculous lake. In fact, in the 1960s the Salton Sea rivalled neigh-
bouring Palm Springs as the main desert resort for the Hollywood jet
set. The new town of Salton City was laid out from scratch as the main
resort, dividing the desert into small parcels ready for future develop-
ment, and a vast network of streets was created in happy anticipation
of the future arrival of holiday homeowners.

149
Photograph by Steven Predictably, and almost literally, the Salton Sea proved to be a Fata
Bosmans Morgana. By the 1980s, with the lake being fed only by agricultural run-
off, the unpleasant side effects of its environmentally overburdened
system resulted in the near abandonment of the area. The lack of fresh
water and the ever-rising saline levels in combination with high water
temperatures led to a cycle of massive fish die-offs, thus turning the
former paradise into a morbid wasteland. Today, the retreating shores
are covered in a thick layer of fish skeletons, and a penetrating stench
lingers in the air.
The settlements around the sea, which bear exotic names like
“Bombay Beach”, “Desert Shores” and even “Mecca”, underwent a
fate comparable to that of the towns that sprang up during the Gold
Rush: they were deserted almost as suddenly as they were created. Now
the neat infrastructural grid around the lake largely remains empty.
Today’s visitors encounter the aftermath of the American dream in
the run-down trailers and the empty lots along the shoreline, and
the geometrically arranged streets are home to eccentrics and desert
nomads. The lake itself, for its part, is as revolting as it is attractive. Due
to the constant heat, a haze hangs over its sky-blue waters, generating
sublime and otherworldly vistas, while cockroaches crunch their way
through the strata of fish carcasses that lie along the shore of the lake.
Today the lake serves three purposes:
1. as a convenient repository for agricultural wastewater;
2. as a resource for fisheries and outdoor recreation (although to
a far lesser extent than in its golden age);
3. as an ecological wildlife reserve, especially for birds.

150
 All three of these purposes are basically artificial, trapped in a curi- 1
ous stalemate. Left to its own devices, the lake’s salinity will continue The proposed interventions
include digging a canal to
to increase gradually, eventually impairing its other uses. The fish the Gulf of Mexico as well
will disappear, thereby affecting the local wildlife. In this scenario, as the more subtle and
potentially interesting
only the first of the lake’s three purposes will endure: that of serving idea of accumulating the
as a dump for agricultural waste. Cutting off the agricultural inflow, agricultural waste in smaller,
however, would make the lake disappear completely, and thus make dyked portions of the sea in
order to create an inverse
life in the area impossible. Returning the “sea” to the initial phase of archipelago of “themed”
its accidental birth by achieving a stable water/salinity balance would lakes: the nature reserve,
the recreational lake and the
be technologically complex and, in any case, cost billions of dollars. agricultural dump.
The lake’s situation continues to be complicated, and none of the
proposed restoration strategies is without its pitfalls.1
Whatever the future holds, the once-imagined urbanization of the
Salton Sea may have failed, but it did successfully generate another
kind of beauty. The Salton Sea is a window in time, an apocalyptic
glimpse of what the world might look like after its occupation by man-
kind. Driving along its shores one encounters infrastructure without
purpose and unfinished cities – the visible traces of something that
almost happened but in the end wasn’t meant to be.
The occupation of the Salton Sea proved to be a mistake, one that
can now be neither fixed nor ignored after the collective expectations
and ambitions that were invested in it. The story is a truly human one
and, though perhaps only to the eyes of an outsider, a Californian one.
The lake’s birth was merely an accident; the real mistake was in seeing
its potential, the first step in an unavoidable cascade of future errors.
Meanwhile, the Salton Sea remains, dancing inside its own ethereal
bubble. And although the natural depression in which the Salton Sea
was formed had probably already flooded and dried up a thousand
times before in the history of the planet, this time it will have to last.

151
 A LAKE AND A SWIMMING POOL:
TWO WATER STORIES FROM THE USSR

Saverio Pesapane

1 In December 1922, Sergei Mironovich Kirov spoke at the Soviet

Transcript of Sergei Convention that led to the official formation of the Soviet Union. Kirov
Mironovich Kirov’s speech
on 30 December 1922, was a prominent Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union, and from 1926
consulted online at until his murder on 1 December 1934, he was the head of the Party
www.muar.ru.
organization in Leningrad. During his speech at the convention, one
of the topics he addressed was the construction of a new Congress
building “on the sites of palaces once owned by bankers, landlords
and tsars”. He went on to say that this new palace would be “another
push encouraging the still-dormant European proletariat . . . to real-
ize that we are here to stay, and that the ideas . . . of communism are
as deeply rooted here as the wells drilled by Baku oilers”.1
In November 1933, taking up an idea expressed in 1830 by tsarist
surveyor Alexander Shrenk, a special conference of the USSR Academy
of Sciences approved a plan for the “reconstruction of the Volga River
and its basin”, which included the diversion of some of the waters of the
Pechora and the Northern Dvina – two rivers in the north of European
Russia that flow out to the Arctic – into the Volga.
We can consider these episodes the very beginning of the trans-
formation of two sites in the USSR that are different in size, location
and history, but were both doomed by an incredible series of mistakes:
the site in Moscow where the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was until
1931, and the Aral Sea, in Kazakhstan.
In 1931, a conference of the Party leaders decided that the future
Palace would be erected upon the former site of the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour.
When Napoleon Bonaparte retreated from Moscow in 1812,
Alexander I decided to build a cathedral in honor of Christ the Saviour

152
“to signify Our gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from
the doom that overshadowed Her” and as a memorial to the Russian
people’s sacrifices. In 1817 Alexander I endorsed the architectural pro-
ject, which was carried out by Aleksandr Lavrentyevich Vitberg, and
the church was consecrated on 26 May 1883, the same day Alexander
III was crowned. Such a reminder of the era of the Tsars was probably
too much for the Soviets to accept, so demolition began on August
18, with two last detonations finally destroying the structure on 5
December 1931.
During the same year an international architectural contest was
launched for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, an administra-
tive centre in the heart of Moscow near the Kremlin, on the site of the
demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The competition was won
by a project by Boris Iofan proposing a huge celebratory edifice. It was
supposed to become the world’s tallest structure, and the top of the
building was designed to host a statue of Lenin that was taller than
the Statue of Liberty.
In the 1940s, the Soviet government undertook a number of ambi-
tious construction projects aimed at transforming the Russian land-
scape with the goal of improving irrigation, waterway navigation and
hydroelectric power on the orders of Joseph Stalin. Among these, one
of the grandest was the “The Great Plan for the Transformation of
Nature” (Великое преобразование природы), a massive intervention
in land improvement and hydroengineering.
The construction of the Palace of the Soviets was begun in 1937,
but it was interrupted by the German invasion of 1941. In 1941–42, the
steel frame of the foundations was disassembled to be used to make
fortifications and weapons for the war. After World War II the country
no longer had the energy to continue this gigantic project, so the site
was abandoned for several years.
The location’s conversion into the world’s largest open-air swim-
ming pool following the design of Moscow architect Dmitry Chechulin
began in 1958. When the Moskva Pool opened in 1960, it was circular
in shape and had a diameter of 129.5 metres. For more than thirty
years afterward, the pool remained open to the public year round with
a modest entrance fee, and during the long, cold Russian winters, a
huge vapour cloud enshrouded it.
In 1954, when the head of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences was
Trofim Lysenko, an anti-Mendelian scientist who carried out agricul-
tural experimentation and research that today is largely dismissed as

153
Moskva pool, aerial view

fraudulent, a network of irrigation canals was built in the steppe belt

of the southern Soviet Union and in the deserts of Central Asia. The
Virgin Lands Campaign had begun.
A vast number of people had to be brought in from all over the Soviet
Union to populate the newly irrigated territory. More than 300,000
people, mostly Ukrainians and Russians, arrived in the Virgin Lands
to begin new lives as farmers. In addition, hundreds of thousands of
seasonal workers would join them, staying to assist with the year’s
harvest.
The plan was based around the idea of diverting two large rivers
that fed the Aral Sea in order to irrigate fields chosen to become areas
for cotton cultivation, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya.
The contruction of the first irrigation canals started in 1940, and
the first harvest in 1956 was a big success. But the situation changed
in a few years. Due to poor planning with regard to preparing for the
harvest and fertilizing the soil, and due to the failure of the agricul-
tural plan, the Aral Sea – which, despite its name, was actually a lake,
one of the four largest in the world with an area of 68,000 square
kilometres – started to shrink in 1960. In 1964, Aleksandr Asarin at
the Hydroproject Institute stated: “It was a part of the five-year plan
approved by the Council of Ministers and the Politburo. Nobody at a
lower level would have dared to say a word against those plans, even
though the fate of the Aral Sea was at stake.”2

154
 In 1968 a Soviet engineer said in a public talk: “It is obvious to eve-
ryone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable.”3 Sure enough,
during the 1990s more than fifty percent of the surface of the former
Aral Sea became a desert.

The events recounted above constitute two parallel temporal sequences

of events, one beginning with a cathedral and ending with a swimming
pool, and the other starting with a lake and concluding with a desert.
They are also two voids that witness two instances of cultural
colonization: the Soviet regime in the heart of Orthodox Russia, and
the Slavs in the heart of central Asia.
It’s the magnitude of the events that leaves us speechless when we
look at the history of the Soviet Union.
2
In February 1990 the Russian Orthodox Church received permission Michael Wines, “Grand
Soviet Scheme for Sharing
from the Soviet government to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Water in Central Asia Is
Saviour and to dismantle the Moskva Pool. After ten years, a replica Foundering”, New York Times,
9 December 2002.
of the original cathedral was consecrated on 19 August 2000, the feast
day of the Transfiguration, and people from all over the world visit the 3
building every day. Tom Bissell, “Eternal Winter:
Lessons of the Aral Sea
By 2007 the surface area of the Aral Sea had shrunk to ten percent Disaster”, Harper’s Magazine,
of its original size, and its drastic shrinkage has led to the creation of April 2002.
the Aralkum, a desert on the site of the former lake. The communities
around the Aral Sea continue to live in their former lake cities, though,
dreaming about the return of the sea.

Following pages:
Saverio Pesapane, Aral Sea,
2008

155
156
157
158
159

Aldo Rossi, Untitled, 1973,
pen and marker on paper,
28 x 20.5 cm.
Courtesy Galleria Antonia
Jannone Disegni di
Architettura
160
A MISTAKE OF PRINCIPLES:
THE PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURE
ARE ELEVEN AND IMMUTABLE
2A+P/A
In the first edition of Aldo Rossi’s L’Architettura della città, published by
Marsilio in 1966, there is a misprint on page 132. This mistake opens
the door to a fascinating reinterpretation of Rossi’s ideas.
Undici sono i principî dell’architettura e immutabili; ma continua-
mente diverse sono le risposte che le situazioni concrete, le situazioni
umane, danno a questioni diverse.
[The principles of architecture are eleven and immutable; but the
responses to different questions as they occur in actual situations,
human situations, constantly vary.]
In fact, the first word of this passage was supposed to be unici, or
“unique”, rather than undici (eleven). This is a mistake that can hap-
pen only in Italian because the two words differ by just one letter,
but they have different meanings that cause profound changes in
the meaning of the sentence, hence: “The principles of architecture
are eleven and immutable” instead of “The principles of architecture
are unique and immutable”. As a result, a simple mistake offers the
opportunity to re-read the ultimate meaning of a sentence, an entire
book, a thought. The great significance of this error is the possibility
for reinterpretation that it provides.
So what might these “eleven and immutable” principles of archi-
tecture be?
The list of possible principles that follows is the result of the com-
parison and contrast of our experience with Rossi’s universe, set out
through a “questionable” free-handed manipulation of certain pas-
sages expressing his thoughts.
161
 I. The first principle of architecture is: you do not talk about principles
of architecture.

II. Architecture is a creation that is inseparable from the human life

and society that produced it; thus it is something collective1 and shared.

III. When creating an architectural work, we must express something

else, something about ourselves.2 Architecture, as an expression of
man, is linked to his personal history and the experiences of which
this is comprised.

IV. The choices that one makes in architectural design are driven by
our need to refer to something that already expresses, in a complete
form, a universe of yearnings to we aspire.3

V. Architectural works refer not only to a system of (more or less strin-

gent) conventions, but also to all of the experiences that have generated
these conventions.4 When we create architecture, we need to know
how to explain how we did it, not just why,5 because architecture is
incomplete when considered merely as a physical thing.

Notes

1 The original sentence is
as follows: “I use the term
architecture in a positive
and pragmatic sense, as a
creation inseparable from
civilized life and the society
in which it is manifested.”
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture
of the City, trans. Diane
Ghirardo and Joan Ockman
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1982), 21.
2 “[I]t is unthinkable that
in creating this or that
particular architecture
we do not want to express
something else, something
of our own” (our translation).
Aldo Rossi, “Architettura per
i musei”, in Guido Canella et
al., Teoria della progettazione
architettonica (Bari: Edizioni
Dedalo, 1968), 136.
3 “This particular emergence
that some architectural
works have in the history
of technology and art
is certainly due to the
so-called spirit of the times
and to the artist’s need,
often autobiographical in
nature, to refer to something
that already expresses, in a
complete form, a universe of
aspirations that he intends
to pursue” (our translation).
Rossi, “Architettura per i
musei”, 130.
4 “We can explain how we
did something, not why we
did it ­– but ‘how’ is broad
enough. / It does not refer
to a more or less rigid
system of conventions,
but to a collection of
experiences that create
these conventions” (our
translation). Aldo Rossi,
I quaderni azzurri, vol.
14 (5 November 1972–31
December 1972) (Milan and
Los Angeles: Electa and The
Getty Research Institute,
1999).
5 “Thus, all those who engage
seriously in architectural
design, and who
simultaneously design and
imagine buildings, should tell
us how they arrived at some
of their architectural works”
(our translation). Rossi,
“Architettura per i musei”,
124.
6 “I believe that we will not
transcend functionalist
theory until we recognize
the importance of both
form and rational processes
of architecture, seeing in
form itself the capacity to
embrace many different

162
 VI. It is impossible to determine why one form or another is suitable
or not as an architectural work: a moka pot could be architecture. This
is because any given form has the ability to assume different values,
meanings and uses.6

VII. Architecture generally survives even after its function changes.7

We need to figure out how to reuse and preserve it over time. On the
one hand, therefore, there is the rationality of architecture, and on
the other, the lives of the individual architectural works themselves.8

VIII. Every single architectural project is also part of a unique archi-

tecture that we are unable to compose, or even glimpse, in its entirety.9

IX. The city is the home of everyday life, and it is where architecture is
the fixed stage of human events10 – the scene of life’s spectacle.

X. The final result of an architectural project is pursued with obstinacy

just as much as it is unexpected.11

XI. It is conceivable that another set of assumptions can provide us

with what we are looking for, but what is not as certain is whether it
can lend itself to the experimental verification to which we subject it.12

values, meanings, and uses.”
Rossi, The Architecture of the
City, 118.
7 This principle refers to
the notion of “permanence”,
which we can summarize
using Rossi’s own words in
The Architecture of the City
as “a past that we still feel”,
where “by permanence I
[mean] not only that one can
still experience the form of
the past in this monument but
that the physical form of the
past has assumed different
functions and has continued
to function, conditioning the
urban area in which it stands
and continuing to constitute
an important urban focus.”
Ibid., 59.
8 Ibid., 116.
9 This sentence comes
from a letter that Rossi
wrote to Ezio Rossi Bonfanti
in response to his text
“Elementi e costruzione:
Note sull’architettura di
Aldo Rossi”, which appeared
in issue number 10 of the
magazine Controspazio
(October 1970). Aldo Rossi,
letter to Ezio Bonfanti, 3
January 1971, in Marco Biraghi
and Michelangelo Sabatino
(eds.), Architettura moderna e
storia dell’architettura (Milan:
Bruno Mondadori, 2001), 368.
10 “Architecture, attesting
to the tastes and attitudes
of generations, to public
events and private
tragedies, to new and old
facts, is the fixed stage for
human events.” Rossi, The
Architecture of the City, 22.
11 “What is decisive will
happen anyway. And the
end result is as obstinately
pursued as it is unexpected”
(our translation). Aldo
Rossi, preface to Rosaldo
Bonicalzi (ed.), Scritti
scelti sull’architettura e
la città 1956–1972 (Turin:
CittàStudiEdizioni, 1975), viii.
12 Our translation. Aldo
Rossi, “Considerazioni sulla
morfologia urbana e la
tipologia edilizia”, in Aspetti
e problemi della tipologia
edilizia, readings for the
course entitled “Caratteri
distributivi degli edifici”,
Instituto Universitario di
Architettura di Venezia,
1963/64 academic year
(Venice: Editrice Cluva,
1964), 31. Also in Rossi,
Scritti scelti, 225.

163
Alexander Brodsky,
Untitled, 2011

164
 Flaneur&Publisher is a container for beauty.
A black box, intimate and personal.
Everyday but extraordinary. Like poetry.
Flaneur&Publisher is what is left unsaid.

Each edition presents a fragment of reality

inquiring into contemporaneity
with dedicated essays and original photos,
perfectly printed on photographic paper.

A small, unobtrusive ways of escape.

To be carried as a part of ourselves for when
we need a fragment of something other than ourselves.

www.flaneurandpublisher.com
Frog www.frogmagazine.net
K ALEIDOSCOPE www.
A contemporary magazine kaleidoscope-press.com

main theme

Let’s just forget

about Peggy
and the Medicis
...In my dreams,
I am Loulou
de la Falaise
and Mrs Prada
is my Yves
Saint Laurent.
Extracted from INEVITABLE OSMOSIS,
Nicholas Cullinan and Francesco Vezzoli in conversation
(KALEIDOSCOPE issue 13)

Issue 13, Winter 2011/12 New formula

Art Directed by OK-RM, London
Out December
 CALL FOR PAPERS
San Rocco 4: Fuck concepts! Context!
San Rocco is interested in gathering together the widest possible
variety of contributions. San Rocco believes that architecture
is a collective knowledge, and that collective knowledge is the
product of a multitude. External contributions to San Rocco
might take different forms. Essays, illustrations, designs, comic
strips and even novels are all equally suitable for publication in
San Rocco. In principle, there are no limits – either minimum
or maximum – imposed on the length of contributions. Minor
contributions (a few lines of text, a small drawing, a photo, a
postcard) are by no means uninteresting to San Rocco. For
each issue, San Rocco will put out a “call for papers” comprised
of an editorial note and of a list of cases, each followed by a
short comment. As such, the “call for papers” is a preview of
the magazine. The “call for papers” defines the field of interest
of a given issue and produces a context in which to situate
contributions.
Submission Guidelines:
A External contributors can either accept the proposed
interpretative point of view or react with new interpretations
of the case studies.
B Additional cases might be suggested by external contributors,
following the approach defined in the “call for papers”. New
cases might be accepted, depending on their evaluation by the
editorial board.
C Proposed contributions will be evaluated on the basis of a
500-word abstract containing information about the proposed
submission’s content and length, and the type and number of
illustrations and drawings it includes.
D Contributions to San Rocco must be written in English. San
Rocco does not translate texts.
E All texts (including footnotes, image credits, etc.) should be
submitted digitally in .rtf format and edited according to the
Oxford Style Manual.
F All illustrations and drawings should be submitted digitally
(in .tif or .eps format). Please include a numbered list of all
illustrations and provide the following information for each:
illustration source, name of photographer or artist, name of
copyright holder, or “no copyright”, and caption, if needed.
G San Rocco does not buy intellectual property rights for
the material appearing in the magazine. San Rocco suggests
that external contributors publish their work under Creative
Commons licences.
H Contributors whose work is selected for publication in
San Rocco will be informed and will then start collaborating
with San Rocco’s editorial board in order to complete the
preparation of the issue.
Proposals for contributions to San Rocco 4 must be submitted
electronically to mail@sanrocco.info before 31 January 2012.
Contemporary architecture is generally present-
ed with the phrase “My concept is . . . ”, in which the
blank is filled in by some sort of notion: “My concept
is freedom”, “My concept is the iPad”, “My concept is
the Big Bang”, “My concept is democracy”, “My concept
is panda bears”, “My concept is M&M’s”. This statement
is then followed by a PowerPoint presentation that be-
gins with M&M’s and ends with round, pink bungalows
on paradisiacal Malaysian beaches.
According to concepts, to design is to find what build-
ings are: an ontology for dummies that turns banality
into spectacle. Thus, the library is the books, the sta-
dium is the muscles, the promenade is the beach, the
aquarium is the fish, the swimming pool is the water
and grandmother’s garage is grandmother.
Concepts are a tool used to justify design decisions in
the absence of architecture. Concepts originate from a
state of self-inflicted despair in which design needs to
be justified point by point, and architecture by defi-
nition has no cultural relevance. Concepts presup-
pose that nothing specifically architectural exists in
reality: there are no spatial relationships, no territo-
ries and no cities, and it is thus impossible to obtain
169
any knowledge about these phenomena. Concepts are
the tools used to make architecture in a world of post-
atomic barbarians. Conan and Mad Max would dream
up a concept for imagining how to erect their own
primitive huts.
Concepts claim to translate architecture into an every-
day language. As such, concepts claim to be democrat-
ic, and therefore claim that they allow people with no
architectural education to understand buildings. The
point here is that translating architecture into an eve-
ryday language is nonsensical (and, contrary to popu-
lar opinion, there is nothing democratic about non-
sense). Architecture is immersed in and appropriated
by language, but it is not itself a language: architec-
ture is about modifying landscapes and shaping spa-
tial conditions, not about communicating information
or celebrating values (values can occupy architecture,
but architecture cannot produce them: like a bowl, ar-
chitecture can be filled, but it cannot generate its own
content). So, no translation of architecture is possible,
just as it is impossible to “translate” dance or ice hock-
ey. Here the problem is not only the reduction of com-
plexity that is associated with any kind of populism,
but also the translation into a mediocre story of some-
thing that is simply not a story. In other words, the
problem is not that of mediocre translation; the prob-
lem is translation in general. In the end, there is noth-
ing to understand in buildings. And democracy is cer-
tainly not about understanding architecture: it is about
accessing architecture. You just need to enter, move,
look, wait, climb, stop . . . That’s it.
Concepts exist because of the unnecessary feeling that
architecture needs an explanation, that architecture
needs to apologize. Concepts describe what architec-
ture will do before architecture is made, thereby guar-
anteeing that it will not do anything else. Concepts turn
architecture into something safe, predictable, tamed.
With concepts, there are no nightmares in the city, no
nasty jokes, no surprises, no contradictions, no com-
plexity, no congestion, no memory, no subconscious.
Concepts prevent any free appropriation; they erase
any surprise. The only gestures admitted into build-
ings are the conceptual ones that were used to explain
them. Like ghosts, concepts do not want to vacate the
170
buildings they generated; concepts do not accept their
own disappearance in the final product.
Concepts introduce a kind of rationality that makes pro-
jects automatic-pilot-justified in every step of the con-
struction process. Concepts help decision-makers to
remember and re-tell the reasons for their decisions to
those who charged them with this task, whether these
people are parliamentary commissions, committees of
kindergarten mothers or voters. In this way, concepts
start an endless chain of justifications that are certainly
more bureaucratic than democratic (concepts and bu-
reaucracy have always been allies, at least since Colbert
and Perrault screwed poor old Bernini). The need to ex-
plain, justify and certify the project now – and to do all
of this easily – prevents any possible future complexity
in the building. Concepts operate as a form of violence
of the present against the future. The period of con-
struction becomes more important than the building’s
lifespan. The immediate dialogue with clients and con-
tractors becomes more important than the future rich-
ness of the building. The design is totally dependent on
the narration that is required to sell the building. (Note:
this, to a certain extent, is unavoidable; what is avoid-
able is building the cultural legitimacy of architecture
precisely upon its very dependence on these oversim-
plified narrations, or turning selling into an ideology.)
Concepts protect us from running the risk of engaging
with form. Why should we bother with form when we
have an idea? Why waste time seeking beauty when we
can claim that we are solving problems? Why think when
we can happily sit around a table and do some brain-
storming? Why take the pains to learn something when
we can shout “Eureka!” in your face?
Anyhow, it is possible to escape from this selbstver-
schuldete Minderheit. Complexity exists, in re, in context.
Cities and territories are here, and it is possible to un-
derstand them!
Nothing else is needed. Just pay attention; just trust si-
lence and immobility. In the end, to design is to define
contexts, to re-shape what is already there, to formal-
ize the given. Concepts are not needed, and neither are
messages or literature. The relationship between hu-
mans and buildings is spatial, being simply based on the
fact that both humans and buildings occupy portions
of space but with this difference: contrary to humans,
buildings survive for long periods of time and do not
move. There seems to be a possibility for interaction
between humans and architecture, one that is quite
interesting and unpredictable: the possibility for built
matter to operate on human behaviour by means of its
own immobility. And this clumsy brotherhood of archi-
tecture and human gestures, this mute complexity, sur-
vives only if the relationship is both immediate and in-
direct, evident and untold. Probably nobody has ever
exposed the nature of this relationship as precisely or
bravely as Rossi did: “Go to an old folks’ home: sorrow is
something tangible. Sorrow is in the walls, in the court-
yards, in the dormitory” (Rossi, The Architecture of the
City, 1966).
“Go to an old folks’ home” and “sorrow is something tan-
gible” ­­– there is no link between the two phrases, no ex-
planation: sorrow and the old folks’ home are just there
together. The relationship is spatial in character in the
sentence itself too: here is the building, there is sor-
row. “Sorrow is in the walls”. No jokes. No concepts. Sor-
row manifests itself in space – in the walls, in the court-
yards, in the dormitory. This crystallized sorrow that
materializes as walls cannot be described, just pointed
out. Sorrow is not the concept behind the building, nor
does the building represent sorrow; rather, sorrow is a
specific condition produced in space by the series of
acts accumulated through time in a specific place. Un-
happiness does not need concepts, and neither does
happiness.
So, fuck concepts! Context! And fuck content! Form!
San Rocco 4 attempts to understand the genealogy of
concepts and ultimately tries to imagine a new archi-
tecture without ideas.
• Genealogy •
There is a tradition of concepts in architecture, quite a
serious one, with all kinds of related topics (character,
architecture parlante, and so on): Serlio’s Book VI with
its houses that change appearance according to the dif-
ferent professions of their inhabitants, Palladio’s villas,
Colbert’s reasonable objections to Bernini’s Louvre,
Laugier’s hut, Ledoux’s architecture parlante . . .
• No-nonsense Classicism •
As our world became increasingly bureaucratized, it be-
came crucial for architects to find a way to deal with
concepts. Various strategies were developed in order
to react to this situation and to offer an architecture
befitting the logic of bureaucrats (e.g., Durand, Schin-
kel, Semper). A strange kind of no-nonsense classicism
appeared, one that was logically arranged, repetitive,
economical and realizable in stages.
• Content •
Modernism accepted the 17th- and 18th-century infatu-
ation with concepts, yet it recognized only one of these:
content, or, in other words, quantity. Modernism (a tru-
ly Protestant project) was an architecture of quantity,
measurable in terms of the amount of social housing
produced in a year, or a given project’s cost per square
metre. But content (which is to say quantity) was still not
a reality; rather, it was the concept of modernism. For its
only concept, modernism also invented an entire body
of propaganda, thereby creating a model of the happy
marriage of concepts and propaganda that would be so
successful later on. In the process, form was dismissed
because modernism was about doing the right thing, and
context was ignored because modernism was about do-
ing the right thing in large quantities. Architecture had
to sacrifice itself in the name of a good cause. But then
that good cause somehow got lost. Concepts survived,
though, as brutal as Bolshevik propaganda and as re-
gressive as Lady Thatcher’s social policies. How could
modernism come to such a sad a conclusion? What
went wrong along the way? Is there a parallel here with
the depressing history of the European political left af-
ter May 1968?
• Into the Ears of Millions •
Concepts correspond to the need to whisper into the
ears of millions (as Jeff Koons has said, “At one time,
artists had only to whisper into the ear of the king or
pope to have political effect. Now, they must whisper
into the ears of millions of people”). To do this, contem-
porary architecture enthusiastically embraced all sorts
171
of trashy allegories. But did this populistic attempt
really work out? For all its love of cheap slogans, con-
temporary architecture is still highly non-communica-
tive, misunderstood and neglected. Any other art form
works better, and any other expressive medium (con-
sidering architecture, just for the sake of argument, as
an expressive medium) has higher returns. Why should
we not learn from this failure? Why should we not ac-
cept this situation and make use of it? Consider how
successful contemporary art has been in being deliber-
ately obscure. Maybe what is wrong with contemporary
architecture is precisely its (modernist) humbleness,
its desperate eagerness to sacrifice itself in the name
of something else.
• A Defence of Concepts •
Over the last four centuries, concepts have been very
popular. As a result, a large majority of our readers
might be irritated by (or at least have doubts about)
our argument against concepts. So, please explain to us
why we are wrong. You know we are open-minded.
• Stirling’s Non-dogmatic
Accumulation of Formal Knowledge •
Stirling is often considered a stupid architect, probably
partly because (at least in the second part of his career)
he didn’t write, and what has appeared in print is in-
deed a mishmash of statements, vague interviews and
sloppy prize acceptance speeches. It is also probably
partly because he seemed so strangely inconsequen-
tial in his trading in of British industrialist brickwork
for pink, oversized railings. In his “inconsequential” ac-
tions, however, Stirling was a fundamental contextual-
ist, though his context was not the gloomy universe in
which he was supposed to place each of his buildings,
but the one that he constructed himself along the way.
For Stirling, the series of preceding formal solutions
created the context for the new ones he would develop.
In each of his commissions, reality turned out to be con-
frontational yet fertile. Over time, Stirling put together
a body of non-dogmatic formal knowledge comprised of
imprecise sources, inconsequential fascinations, bad
172
jokes and out-of-place erudition. But then again, im-
precision can generate a world if one is stubborn and
consistent and ignorant enough not to care too much
about it.
• Le Corbusier, a Contextual Architect •
Despite his initial claims for a new universal, machine-
inspired architecture, a number of essays from L’Esprit
nouveau (later to be included in Vers une architecture)
communicate Le Corbusier’s deep interest in specific
landscapes such as the Acropolis in Athens or the city
of Rome. Le Corbusier considers the Acropolis to be
an architectural device that provides the key to the in-
terpretation of the entire landscape lying between Pi-
raeus and Pentelikon. Convincingly enough, Colin Rowe
states that the La Tourette monastery acts in the very
same way with respect to its context. On another scale,
it is easy to consider the series of projects ranging from
Plan Obus to the sketches for South American cities as
obvious members of the same family. Among the ap-
parently most un-contextual operations, even the Plan
Voisin or the Beistegui attic clearly fit within the very
specific Parisian context of the Haussmannian eras-
ures and the cult of the urban axis, curiously coupled
with the surrealistic excision of the Cadavre Exquis.
• Why Architecture by O. M. U.
(Peace Be Upon Him)
Always Looks So Bad •
The architecture of Oswald Mathias Ungers is always un-
comfortable, uneasy and fundamentally unhappy. And
the worst thing about it is that you always suspect that
there is some sort of reason for this; you always have
the feeling that its failures exist on purpose, or that its
shortcomings are supposed to tell you something. Un-
gers’s architecture is an example of how concepts can
destroy all good presuppositions. In fact, Ungers was
right on almost every level. He was intelligent, educat-
ed and realistic, had a precise notion of monumentality
and an impressive understanding of the city, and he did
not lack good taste. He may also have had some sort of
(German) sense of humour. Still, he felt the need to turn
all his impressive architectural knowledge into argu-
ments, and so he never made a decent building.
• Vanna at the Door •
In a famous photo of her house, Vanna Venturi stands
next to the entrance. The photo is frontal: it shows the
house as in an elevation. In the image, Vanna hides in
the shadow, almost unnoticeable at first glance. The
owner and the house are clearly two separate things.
The house is clearly not a portrait. Robert Venturi is
extremely delicate with his mother: architecture must
keep its distance from the world of feelings. A house for
one’s mother, however, is a house just the same, and
Vanna Venturi’s house is a masterpiece of abstraction
and, as such, a masterpiece of respect. It clearly cor-
responds to the rigorous mannerism of Robert Ventu-
ri’s early production. The house is not an icon; it has
no message, and it develops no argument. Vanna was
lucky: Bob designed her house before learning all the
ideas that his wife would later discover in his architec-
ture – brilliant ideas, but ideas nonetheless.
• The Concept Is “Concept” •
Whether you consider Eisenman’s, OMA’s or Tschumi’s
entries for the competition for the Parc de la Villette,
the contest was clearly about concepts even if nobody
understood what those concepts were. Maybe the con-
cept was just “a concept” – the concept of a concept,
or a manifesto about the potential of an architecture
of pure concepts. In fact, the proposed pavilions had
no programme, no message and no reason. They were
expensive and they clearly did not do any good for the
surrounding urban fabric. They were also uncompro-
misingly ugly (as the ones that were built still testify).
The question is: Why red? Why did concepts in archi-
tecture appear in 1983 as something entirely unintelli-
gible, apart from the fact that they had to be red?
• Vito Acconci, Architect •
Could you please go back to masturbating under art
gallery floors?
• Examples •
San Rocco is also interested in contributions analyzing
concepts and contexts in the buildings included on our
lists of the Top 25 Contextual Masterpieces and the Top
25 Conceptual Disasters.
San Rocco’s Top 25 Contextual Masterpieces:
• Flatiron, New York, USA
• Forum Nervae, Rome, Italy
• Seagram Building, New York, USA
• Annunziata, Ariccia, Italy
• Portico dei Banchi, Bologna, Italy
• Bowery Savings Bank, New York, USA
• Currutchet House, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Haus am Michaelerplatz, Vienna, Austria
• Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brazil
• Twin Parks Northeast Houses, New York, USA
• Satellite Towers, Mexico City, Mexico
• Economist Building, London, UK
• York Terrace, Regent’s Park, London, UK
• Kiefhoek social housing, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
• San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, Italy
• John Deere headquarters, Moline, Illinois, USA
• Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey
• Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
• Public Library, Seattle, USA
• Stone House, Tavole, Italy
• Santa Maria della Pace, Rome, Italy
• Fire Station No. 4, Columbus, Indiana, USA
• Casa Milà, Barcelona, Spain
• Gehry House, Santa Monica, California, USA
• National Farmers’ Bank, Owatonna, Minnesota, USA
San Rocco’s Top 25 Conceptual Disasters:
• Tour Eiffel, Paris, France
• Tallest tower in the world, wherever it is right now
• Fred & Ginger, Prague, Czech Republic
• Bibliothèque François Mitterand, Paris, France
• Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy
• Villa Capra (a.k.a. “la Rotonda”), Vicenza, Italy
• The Calatrava project of your choice
• Fondation Cartier, Paris, France
173
• Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Louvre, Paris, France (except the pyramid, of course)
• Einsteinturm, Potsdam, Germany
• NEMO Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Cemetery of Modena, Modena, Italy
• Olympic Stadium (the so-called Bird’s Nest), Beijing,
People’s Republic of China
• Reichstag (the old and the new), Berlin, Germany
• Aqua tower, Chicago, USA
• San Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome, Italy
• Kubuswoningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
• Mountain dwellings, Copenhagen, Denmark
• J. P. Getty Center, Los Angeles, USA
• Capitol, Dhaka, Bangladesh
• Central library, Delft Institute of Technology, Delft,
The Netherlands
• McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Illinois Institute
of Technology, Chicago, USA
• Dutch Pavilion, Hannover, Germany
• Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, Germany

Following pages:
Flatiron Building,
photograph by Francesco
Giunta;
Tour Eiffel, photograph by
Giulio Boem

174
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 SAN ROCCO • MISTAKES 2A+P/A on a misprint in The
Architecture of the City BARarchitekten on using the
wrong program Wulf Böer on the Grande Arche Steven
Bosmans and Michael Langeder on an instant paradise
Cédric Boulet on Sarah Winchester’s house Paolo Carpi
on a silent quarrel between Scamozzi and Sansovino Asli
Cicek on Sinan and Hagia Sophia Angelo Del Vecchio on
Leon Battista Alberti Kersten Geers on the back of the
Seagram Building Matteo Ghidoni plays with Palladio
Stefano Graziani at the Ferrari factory Alexander Hilton
Wood on Freud and Méliès Giovanni La Varra on archi-
tecture, dynamite and the political establishment Mathieu
Mercuriali on façades Markus Miessen on participation
mistakes Manuela Morresi on Bramante at Roccaverano
Aaron Moulton reviews an exhibition Office Kersten Geers
David Van Severen proposes a completion of the Seagram
block Saverio Pesapane tells the story of a pool and a lake
that are part of the “Great Plan for the Transformation of
Nature” Matteo Poli on a house by Luigi Figini Filipa
Ramos on three mistakes Sergei Sitar interviews Andrei
Monastyrski Giacomo Summa on La Bombonera Pier
Paolo Tamburelli sheds light on the mystery of Snefru’s first
pyramid Ioanna Volaki on Hagia Sophia Andrea Zanderigo
on Peter Märkli with photos by Paolo Rosselli and Giovanna
Silva, and a drawing by Alexander Brodsky

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