CONTENTS

3 Editorial 90 Inhabited Natures

Ioanna Angelidou
6 Les Nuits sans Kim Wilde
Simon de Dreuille / Drawings by Sam Jacob 104 Domestic Fields: Geoffrey Bawa’s House
in Colombo, Sri Lanka
12 Fog Virginia Chiappa Nunez and Pietro Pezzani
Giovanni Piovene
110 Entanglement
16 Switzerland: An Urban Field of Fantasies Joseph Grima
Freek Persyn
115 Around the World in 80 Days
24 A Metropolitan Village: YellowOffice
The 900-Kilometre Nile City
Oliver Thill / Photographs by Bas Princen 120 Hyperborea, 2011
Anton Ginzburg
33 The Nile Valley: The Urbanization
of Limited Resources 124 Everything and Nothing
Mathias Gunz Kersten Geers

42 Learning from Mobility: The Field as a 130 “Soylent Green”: The Use of the Countryside
Condition of Empowered Nomadism Éric Troussicot
Giorgio Talocci
136 81 Imaginary Public Spaces, 1:500
47 Zoom In Matilde Cassani
Ignacio Uriarte
141 The Barest Form in which Architecture
54 Arranging Six Different Postage Can Exist
Stamps in a Row Pier Vittorio Aureli
Giovan Battista Salerno
147 The Neutral Field
56 Courteousness and Contradiction 2A+P/A interviews Andrea Branzi
in the Work of Gabetti and Isola
Michele Bonino and Subhash Mukerjee 154 Entropy, Nature and the Discontinuous Field
Nicholas de Monchaux
63 The Even Covering of the Field
Jonathan Sergison 162 Baldessari als Erzieher
Francesca Pellicciari and Pier Paolo Tamburelli
67 Early Muslim Architecture, K. A .C. Creswell
and Some Random Notes on the Science of 169 Fake Baldessari
the Field Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani, Pier Paolo
Andrea Zanderigo Tamburelli and Milica Topalovic

76 I Love the Sight of Landscape in Use 172 Lewis Baltz’s Park City
Erica Overmeer Stefano Graziani

79 99 Fields: Notes for a Bibliography 178 Vittorio Gregotti in Conversation with Rolf
Luca Trevisani Jenni, Christian Müller Inderbitzin and Milica
Topalovic
82 A Collage City
Florian Beigel and Philip Christou 193 San Rocco 3: Mistakes, Call for papers
SAN ROCCO San Rocco
THE EVEN COVERING Dorsoduro 1685/A
OF THE FIELD I-30123 Venezia
#2 Summer 2011 +39 041 0994628
www.sanrocco.info
mail@sanrocco.info
Editor
Matteo Ghidoni
Editorial Board
Matteo Costanzo, Kersten Geers,
Francesca Pellicciari, Giovanni
Piovene, Giovanna Silva,
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
Graphic Design
pupilla grafik, Salottobuono,
Paolo Carpi
Copy Editor
Krystina Stermole
Website
Michele Marchetti
Administration
Ludovico Centis
San Rocco is an idea by:
2A+P/A, baukuh, Stefano
Graziani, Office KGDVS, pupilla
grafik, Salottobuono, Giovanna
Silva
For information about
San Rocco or to offer your
support please visit:
www.sanrocco.info or contact
us at support@sanrocco.info.
Cover image: Mshatta, frieze with triangles and rosettes
(Berlin, Pergamon Museum)
On the previous page: Bas Princen, Concave (Aswan), 2011
On pp. 184-185: Giovanna Silva, Mekong river, 2011
San Rocco is published three
times a year.
San Rocco uses Arnhem and
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Printed in May 2011 by
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11/10/2010.
ISSN 2038-4912
 EDITORIAL

The field is where we live. Buildings in cultivable soil – that is the field.
Agriculture and city and the expansion of the city and sprawl and in-
frastructure and trash and buildings and favelas and old villages and
gated communities and agriculture and some more other buildings.
A collection of “organs without a body” (Angélil and Siress, 2008) laid
down horizontally as far as geography permits it. In fact, apart from
mountains, deserts, jungles and large areas of mechanized agricul-
ture/mining with little human personnel (as in Kansas, Siberia or Rio
Grande do Sul), everything is field: East Java, northern Italy, the val-
ley of Mexico, the Taiheiyo belt, Flanders, greater São Paulo, Guang-
dong, New Jersey, the Nile valley or Bangladesh.
The field is the place where William Morris’s scary definition of archi-
tecture as “anything but desert” becomes true. It is associated with a
Malthusian tone, with the concept of no escape: more people, more
capital, more cars, more buildings, more energy, more noise, less
soil, less water, less food.
Even if it is not all the same, the field is one. A condition with no al-
ternatives. Still, patterns in the field are different, and figures in the
patterns are different once again.
The field lies outside of the binary opposition of city and nature. From
the point of view of nature, it is dirty, polluted, compromised, settled
and consumed. From the city’s point of view, it is rusty, uninterest-
ing, sleepy, backward and provincial.
The field is not an evolution of the city, but its natural domain: it is
both its pre-condition and its unavoidable conclusion, the (urban)
consequence of the Neolithic Revolution. Today the field is almost
filled and it looks like a monstrous version of the city, but it is not. The
field logically precedes the city. The city evolves within the field like a

3
 historical process within a geological one. The city is just a possibility
within the field, but not the only one, and not the primary one.
According to contemporary statistics, two thirds of the world’s popu-
lation will be living in cities by 2050. But these agglomerations are cit-
ies only according to statistics. Nothing about them is metropolitan
except their density. To understand these systems as cities is a mis-
take. They are merely denser rural areas crowded with restless mass-
es of (underemployed) farmers. Finally, after the modern infatuation
with cities, we are going to have to consider villages once again.
The field is slow, resistant, heavy, opaque: anything but a tabula rasa.
What is there remains there. It is not possible to add to it, and it is not
possible to get rid of things (in the field, you need to bring trash to a
filling dump, or – at the very least – throw it into a canal). There are
even identities embroidered into the field. Habits and traditions re-
sist within the field automatically, because of the inertia of the sheer
mass of what has accumulated there.
The field is landscape not because it is natural or green, but because
it has no centre and is horizontal. In fact, the field stretches over a
large surface, a kind of thin, dirty incrustation of the planet.
In the field, there are places, not just positions. Objects are not pure-
ly defined by their relationship with the other objects around them;
there is a geographic background. Still, the background does not ap-
pear anymore. Geography survives as an explanation of bizarre infra-
structural solutions, a sort of psychoanalysis of the field.
The field defines a new condition for architecture, reducing its ambi-
tions and mocking its principles (at least the Western ones). In fact,
the very existence of the field makes the figure–ground relationship
look obsolete. The figure is lost among figures. The possibility of the
figure disappears not because of abolition, but because of prolifera-
tion, or visual pollution. The landscape becomes a “figure–figure”
universe, to the point that figures become irrelevant. Form disap-
pears because of the oversupply of figures, desires and creativity. Ar-
chitecture disappears because of the oversupply of architects.
Within the field, creative interventions can only modify and trans-
form. Modifications are of the kind of contemporary electronic mu-
sic: sampling, remixing, dubbing. The themes are already there; they
cannot be invented, just found. The garbage already in the field is the

4
raw material from which to shape whatever contemporary architec-
ture, urbanism or landscape architecture. Recycling is the compul-
sory exercise.
“The even covering of the field” is an expression coined by K. A. C.
Creswell. According to Creswell, a bored British Army Captain posted
in Egypt during World War I who became a scholar of early Muslim
architecture, “the even covering of the field” is a basic principle of
Muslim art (Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture,
1958). Although Creswell does not elaborate much on his statement –
the “even covering” is proclaimed more than explained – the expres-
sion nonetheless suggests the existence of an entirely developed aes-
thetic, precisely what we are now lacking with respect to the contem-
porary field.
San Rocco 2 investigates the aesthetic consequences of the field,
from both urban and architectural perspectives. What does “field”
mean, exactly? How do we experience it? What kind of knowledge do
we need to understand it? What is the difference between field and
city, and between field and territory? What kind of images do these
jammed scenarios leave in our memories? What (and how) can one
design in a world without a background? And without a background,
what happens to the figure? Should the figure disappear as well? Are
there exceptions within the field? Should the “covering of the field”
be “even”? Does the field have borders? What kind of operations are
possible within it? Field operations?
Finally, San Rocco 2 raises a political question: should the field ever
be planned?
 LES NUITS SANS KIM WILDE

Simon de Dreuille
drawings by Sam Jacob

Beyond the statement of a stylized, manufactured popular urban vision

that one would expect – and appreciate – in the works of the architect
Sam Jacob, what struck me more about his drawings is their manifest
sense of ease. The city isn’t hard to draw, as they show, which makes
its manifestations less certain, less determined. It’s easy to pick a
situation and decide that you like it, and it is then easy to decide that
that situation is about your own background or history. Whereas the
whole composition principle of the drawings reveals its implications
progressively, the city quickly comes alive in the drawings’ separate
parts. It is just suddenly there, just as quick to emerge as it was in the
lyrics of dance music’s first predecessors in the 1980s: Full moon in the
city and the night was young / I was hungry for love / I was hungry for fun,
sang Samantha Fox in her hit single “Touch Me”. What is the city here?
And why is it even in the song? Dance music was the first commercial
Following pages: music intended to be mixed. Three decades later, images of the city
Sam Jacob, Planomania
from the eighties still remain. Sentimental, old-fashioned and some
even fascinating, most of the songs probably can’t describe the city
anymore, if, in fact, they ever could; they all end up mixed together in
the so-called field by DJs. I trust that Sam Jacob went to popular clubs
in the late eighties, and I would like to think that he’s been under the
influence of the tragicomic set created by the tautologic urban refer-
ences of the repetitive music of that time, for he himself took part in
the period’s collective obsession with mirages of the city.

6
The city was heartless in Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy”:
The love that you need / Will never be found at home / Run away, turn
away, run away, turn away, run away . . .

. . . hot in Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”:

Darken the city, night is a wire / Steam in the subway, earth is afire / Doo
doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo . . .

. . . slightly revolutionary in Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America”:

Outside a new day is dawning / Outside suburbia calling, everywhere / I
don’t want to go baby / New York to East California / There’s a new way
come in on ya / We’re the kids in America / We’re the kids in America . . .

. . . scary in Anne Clark’s “Our Darkness”:

Through these city nightmares you’d walk with me / And we’d talk of it
with idealistic assurance / That it wouldn’t tear us apart . . .

. . . paradoxical in Eurythmics’ “This City Never Sleeps”:

You know there’s so many people / Living in this house / And I don’t even
know their names / I guess it’s just a feeling (in the city) . . .

. . . just plain graphic in Laura Branigan’s “Self Control”:

(Oh oh oh) / (Oh oh oh) / (Oh oh oh) / (Oh oh oh) / Oh, the night is my world
/ City light painted girl / In the day nothing matters / It’s the night-time
that flatters . . .

. . . suburban in the Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia”:

Break the window by the town hall / Listen, the siren screams / There in
the distance, like a roll call / Of all the suburban dreams / Run with the
dogs tonight / In Suburbia / You can’t hide / In Suburbia / In Suburbia / In
Suburbia / In Suburbia / In Suburbia . . .

. . . and exhausting in Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”:

The city is crowded / My friends are away / And I’m on my own / It’s too
hot to handle / So I got to get up and go / It’s a cruel (it’s a cruel), cruel
summer . . .

You can add to the list, sketch it, see what happens. That’s what it’s
all about: instant urbanism that is concerned more with its oneiric
power than with its relevance.

7
 FOG

Giovanni Piovene

“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses

brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and
shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are
the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of
these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this rea-
son that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody
is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.”
Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 1923

Architecture – according to its most classical interpretation – needs

light in order to be revealed. Light discloses to the observer all the
three-dimensional features of a sculptural solid and defines it as an
object. In separating the figure from the background, light reveals the
singularity of a building.
In the field, this basic principle generates a schizophrenic con-
Facing page: dition. All buildings are essentially isolated and autonomous, but,
Brest, 1972 paradoxically, the field is the place where solitude is no longer pos-
© Heirs of Luigi Ghirri
sible. Since singular identities melt into the continuous built crust,
everything is visible at once. Unlike in the city, objects do not merge
into a single whole. In the conditions of the field, architecture doesn’t
benefit from the light described and praised by architects like Le
Corbusier. Rather, light makes it look like a mess.
The presence of fog is closely related to the hybrid coexistence
of built and unbuilt terrain. Fog – literally the suspension of water
droplets near the earth’s surface, generated by the contact between
hot air and a colder surface, like the ground – needs a critical mass of
raw matter, or ground, in order to take shape. Fog is a telltale sign of
the sprawling conditions of the field.

12
13
 Having observed the phenomenon from a personal perspective,
I can say that the field needs fog to reach its natural state. Fog is the
additional layer required to make the field’s visual and mental con-
ditions match. With fog, the architecture in the field finds the pure
landscape to which it psychologically relates.

Like fog, the field is constructed out of moments in time: it doesn’t

claim any permanence. Surprisingly, Aldo Rossi – the architect who put
the notion of the permanence of the city back onto our mental map –
has written about fog. In his A Scientific Autobiography, he refers to
fog on three different occasions.
The first of these is when he writes about the San Cataldo cemetery
in Modena and the way this project of his belongs to the thick fog and
the deserted houses of the Po Valley. There’s a certain innocence in
this idea of a territorial appropriation of architecture, but there is also
a significant latent potential.
Rossi pushes the argument further on the pages that follow, asking
himself how the seasons could be a part of architecture. What sparks
this isolated thought is once again fog, this time that which streams
through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan on a winter’s day.
Thanks to its monumental scale, the Milanese passageway allows the
outer atmosphere to be a part of it. Fog enhances architecture’s ability
to incorporate landscape in order to create new worlds.
Rossi’s third reference to fog is related to Leon Battista Alberti:
“If one enters Sant’Andrea at Mantua on those days when the fog has
penetrated the interior, one sees that no space so resembles the coun-
tryside, the Po lowland, as the measured and controlled space of this
Facing page: building”. Here Rossi gets closer to the problem and engages in an
Formigine, 1985 non-explicit dialogue with measurements. Fog architecture requires
© Heirs of Luigi Ghirri
certain proportions, and those who are familiar with Sant’Andrea
could easily make a connection in this regard with the church façade’s
deep, oversized arch, which mediates the outside–inside transition.
Fog can enter the temple thanks to the vast excavation of the façade,
a cave that belongs more to the square than to the building.
In line with the discontinuous narration that characterizes the
whole book, Rossi gives no clues about his intuitions, and possible
solutions lay suspended in the air. Fog becomes a means of saying
something else, something bigger that cannot be precisely formulated.
His delicate investigation raises the very relevant question of what an
architecture suited to the field can be.

14
15
 SWITZERLAND:
AN URBAN FIELD OF FANTASIES

Freek Persyn

Entering Switzerland via the Zurich airport offers a confirmation of

what we expect to find there. The hallways are lined with advertise-
ments not for perfumes or fashion brands, but for intricate handmade
watches and personal bankers (who promise to take the utmost care of
your fortune). A sensation of dedication and permanence permeates
the whole environment. Here, the seamless floor of nondescript granite
tiles found in airports around the world reads as an affirmative choice
rather than simply as the result of a set of functional parameters. The
floor’s shine offers a promise: your visit will be an easy one.
This type of flooring doesn’t end when one exits the security area,
however. Even on the way to the train, the confident smoothness
(maybe it’s even the same floor?) continues. Arriving at the platform,
the platforms are wide, not aiming for monumentality, but being just
wide enough to allow some distance between yourself and the other
An RE460 locomotive people around you. The wait for the train is calm and comfortable. It
crossing the Dala Gorge is absolutely clear when the train will arrive, so you can fill the remain-
on the bridge of the SBB
Simplon Line at a speed of ing time checking some emails or calling someone to report your safe
160 km/h. Passengers on arrival. On the dot, the train enters the station, silently, as if floating.
the train see daylight for
a mere two seconds when
As it stops, it doesn’t make the slightest noise, and the doors seem to
the train passes from one open with a sigh of expectation (gone is the sound of decompression
tunnel to the other so familiar from trains all over the globe). Everyone boards the train
(Photo by George Trüb)
one by one, softly talking. In only a few minutes, you will be able to
change trains in order to reach your final destination.

Smooth
Because of its infrastructure, Switzerland has become completely flat
despite its naturally rugged postcard appearance. Over the last decade,

16
the Swiss Federal Railway’s Bahn 2000 project has invested heavily in 1
new infrastructure and new trains.1 The Swiss, who make an average The investment is said to be
30.5 billion Swiss francs or
of 40 train trips per person per year compared with just 21 in Germany, 19.8 billion euro. Information
14 in France and 8 in Italy, voted for this major program of improve- on the Bahn 2000 program
can be found on the
ments in a referendum in 1987, and in another referendum promoting following websites: http://
new Transalpine rail routes in 1992. Bahn 2000 aims to offer at least www.railway-technology.
half-hourly frequency on major routes, a 15% cut in travel time between com/projects/switzerland/;
http://www.sbb.ch; http://
major cities, new trains and improved station facilities. Thanks to bet- www.swissworld.org/en/
ter signalling, train headway on very busy lines can be reduced from switzerland/swiss_specials/
swiss_trains/rail_2000/;
3 to 2 minutes, boosting line capacity by 30%. Tilting train technol- http://www.alptransit.ch.
ogy and double-decker trains offer higher speeds and about one third
more seating capacity than conventional carriages, thereby making 2
Born in Switzerland in
platform extensions and station remodeling unnecessary. 1928, André Corboz studied
The plans for better international connections via new shortened law at the university in
Geneva, and over time he
and higher-capacity transalpine rail routes using tunnels at Gotthard
became interested in the
(57 km) and Lötschberg (35 km) are well under way. On 23 March city’s history. From 1980 to
2011, the miners excavated the last metres of rock in the west tunnel 1993, he held the chair of
history of urbanism at the
between Faido and Sedrun, meaning that both single-track tunnels ETH in Zurich. The key text
of the Gotthard Base Tunnel are therefore completely drilled over a in which Corboz coins the
term “hypercity” was his
continuous length of 57 kilometres. The world’s longest tunnel, it
article “La Suisse comme
should become operational at the end of 2016. hyperville”, Le Visiteur, no.
AlpTransit Gotthard is creating a flat rail link for future travel 6 (2000).
through the Alps. The travel time between Basel and Milan will be 3
hours and 45 minutes, 90 minutes less than it takes today. The topog-
raphy of Switzerland has been contracted and deformed by time.
Despite the way it looks, this country has acquired all the character-
istics of “the field”, not in a formal sense, but in a temporal one.
The metropolis that is resulting from this process has been
described by André Corboz as “hyperville”: a city that is like a hyper-
text, offering links that cross from one location to another in one
straight move.2 The once distinct realms of the urban and the rural
have mutated into a territory in which the rural is contained within
the urban, and vice versa. This territory – built according to a variety
of logics, and therefore difficult to define and comprehend – is largely
dependent on transport.
If urbanization is considered to be the adoption of a certain
way of life and a collection of social habits, then it is inevitable that
the experiences connected with this type of urban environment
have changed, too. Once the spatial environment of the city has
been replaced by the temporal environment of transport, this will

17
3 undoubtedly affect the experiences – and state of mind – of residents
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles:
The Architecture of Four
Ecologies (New York: Harper
and Row, 1971).
18
over the course of time.
Of course, the experience of transport is an aspect of the classic
metropolis as well. The psychological pressure of taking the metro in
Paris or the subway in New York is an intrinsic part of the urban expe-
rience. Once described by Reyner Banham as the “appalling contrast
between physical contact and psychological separation in the crowds
herded shoulder to shoulder in a public transportation system”,3 the
classic metropolitan transportation experience is one that heightens
the pressure of the metropolis to the point of unbearability.
In Switzerland, however, this is different. Another look at the Bahn
2000 programme shows a major focus on new rolling stock. The new
locomotives that support the programme are especially developed
by Pininfarina, the famous designer of super sports cars. Like most
Ferraris, the new Re 460 locomotives are built to be state-of-the-art
technology (and red, too!). Later, double-decker passenger cars were
made to match these engines, which were dubbed IC 2000. Together,
they provide inter-city travellers with a regular top speed of 200 kilo-
metres per hour.
With the use of these machines, transportation and speed are
under control in Switzerland, and travel has no physical impact and
creates no psychological or social tension. It’s smooth to the point
of rendering travellers numb. Travelling is no longer an experience;
instead, it is a convenience, a routine, a gap in time.
Rough
In this context of infrastructural perfection, the presence of build-
ings that offer intense tactile experiences seems inevitable. In the
intimacy of the home, there is a need to replenish this lack of physi-
cality: the imaginary needs the tactile – the real – upon which to feed
and ground itself.
Switzerland and its architects have excelled in producing envi-
ronments that take the physical and material reality of spaces to the
extreme. The art of architecture has turned into the mastering of a
double agenda: supreme skill in the material construction of the build-
ing (backed by a high-preformance crafts-based building industry) and
the exercise of perfect control over the sensorial experience generated
by the architectural interiors.
The man who best embodies the prototypical Swiss architect is
Peter Zumthor. His image is globally exported and present, not in the
form of actual buildings, of which he has built only a few, but in terms 4
of his attitude. An architect from Basel,4 Zumthor gradually refined Peter Zumthor was
born in 1943 in Basel,
his skill by focusing on a limited number of buildings over a very long where he studied at the
period of time, arriving at marvellous and idiosyncratic results in each Kunstgewerbeschule. He
currently works out of his
case. Over the course of his career, it can hardly be a coincidence that small studio with around
this architect moved his base of operations from the more urban city thirty employees in the town
of Basel to the archetypically rural area of Graubunden, reinventing of Haldenstein, Switzerland.
He is the winner of the 2009
himself as the uber-craftsman along the way. Pritzker Prize.
His most famous project, the thermal baths in Vals, is a building
5
where time seems to stand still – a space dedicated to calm, reflection This project description of
and perspective, and a veritable haven from the pressures of mod- the secular retreat in South
ern life.5 The space itself is designed to create a direct confrontation Devon in the UK is similar to
the project in Vals.
between the body of the visitor and the physicality of the stone, an expe-
rience that is best lived when the place is sparsely populated. Crowds 6
Quintus Miller was born in
don’t help the atmosphere of contemplation that the architecture so
1961 in Aarau and studied
masterfully creates. In this project, the collective experience of visi- architecture at the ETH in
tors is far removed from that of the public thermal baths in Istanbul Zurich. Since 1994 he and
Paola Maranta have headed
or ancient Rome. In Vals, the collective experience operates more on up the architectural firm
the level of fantasy: a shared desire for retreat and permanence. In Miller & Maranta in Basel.
this sense, the thermal baths in Vals exude the same sense of longev-
7
ity promised by the Swiss watches advertised along the travelators at Interview with Quintus
the Zurich airport. Miller by Job Floris and Anne
Holtrop, 31 March 2008,
Basel, published in Oase 76
Memory as “Tradition Is to Feed the
Swiss architect Quintus Miller has described the way in which an envi- Fire, Not to Preserve the
Ashes.”
ronment can be made to trigger a shared experience in the mind of its
users as Stimmung.6 Technically, this concept can be understood as
the artful craft of tuning a space through the exploitation of materi-
als, proportion and light. As Miller himself has said, “[T]o work in a
context is to look around, to know the context and then to look for the
essences you can find in this context. We work like perfumers. We are
using these essences, mixing them together into a new perfume.”7
Although this quote might sound a bit superficial when taken out
of its original context, it is important to realize the goal of the process
Miller describes. The aim is not to “play with atmospheres”. In this
sense, the concept should not be misunderstood as being along the
lines of “place making”, which is more of a branding strategy aimed at
deliberately staging atmospheres. In Miller’s words, “Stimmung is not
the same thing as atmosphere. It is a typically German word. It means
‘to tune’. [Just] as you tune a violin to the right key, we tune a space to

19
 the right atmosphere. That’s a small, but I think important, difference:
to find the right key for the perception and the use of the space. We
are designing space through proportions, material use and light. But
that’s not enough. You need more. Every space creates associations in
your memory. And we try to awaken this memory in you.”
This attitude creates very sophisticated environments in which
fantasies blend with reality. Although the environments created are
not collective in the strict sense of the word, they do share a clear set
of values that are culturally ingrained in Switzerland. As architects,
Miller & Maranta consider memory and human perception to be part
of the material things they manipulate. In their work, Stimmung is part
of a strategy to make buildings that are at once ambiguous yet familiar
to the existing context. The goal of this process can be understood as
something that is simultaneously traditional and contemporary; it is
not to be historical, but to bring history a step further – to continue
it. As Miller himself has said, “tradition is to feed the fire, not to pre-
serve the ashes”.
Seen in this way, Swiss architecture and the Swiss railway are the
two sides of the same coin. Although the landscape is urbanizing at
a rapid speed, this is being achieved without creating the traditional
image of the city. On the contrary, the future of the new Swiss city
looks like the old countryside: it is an accumulation of projects loosely
bound together by seamless infrastructure that is gradually moulded
and shaped by architects and railway engineers (who are one another’s
mirror image) into a collective domain with a strong public image.
The dedication and skill with which this is being done is breath-
taking. This is no kind of Las Vegas decor that makes one constantly
aware of the scaffolding buttressing the mirage. Rather, these Swiss
worlds are carefully constructed and embedded within their context
and topography: they represent a complex and multi-layered ecology.
What is outside or behind is out of sight, discretely and effectively dealt
with in other places (the most evident of these elements being the highly
protected federal border). Slowly but with the utmost determination,
Switzerland is turning into a Gesamtkunstwerk – a rough diamond
being gradually polished to bring out a gentle shine.

Fantasy
But is it credible to claim that the radical urbanization of the Swiss
landscape is in fact an evolving tradition whereby the existing is slowly
being transformed into the future? According to André Corboz, the

20
Swiss hypercity represents the first instance in human history in 8
which there is such a dramatic gap between the territorial reality and Some architects agree
with this point of view and
its mental representation. From an urbanistic point of view, he claims radically turn their heads in
that the eventual awakening from the Swiss dream will be tragic. another direction. One such
case is the architectural
Seen through his eyes, the promise of “analogue architecture” seems firm of EM2N in Zurich. They
flattened: it hasn’t reactivated a relationship with reality, but rather don’t get overly concerned
seems to dwell upon the creation of a nostalgic future – a fantasy that about the exact finish of
their buildings. It is not
cannot sustain itself,8 instead simply indulging in the tactility of the that they don’t put in the
carefully constructed image. effort, but rather that
they do so only insofar
An example of this is the recent publication Dado,9 which is about as it emphasizes their
the house that architect Valerio Olgiati10 lives in, one he inherited own fetishistic interests,
from his famous architect father. Everything in the publication radi- namely the complexity
and contradictions of the
ates the characteristics of Swiss architecture. The old house, a rural metropolitan environments
building exuding authenticity, is sparsely furnished with a few well- they design. And these
environments can be many
chosen pieces of contemporary furniture. All of the pictures in the
things: with Swiss rigor and
book seem carefully constructed, zooming in on scenes rather than American pragmatism, EM2N
spaces and allowing the viewer to indulge in the intimate atmosphere has designed projects as
diverse as subway stations,
of the beautiful house. One of the images takes this exposed intimacy schools, infrastructure and
to the extreme: in the centre of the picture, there is a photograph of cultural conglomerates,
among others. According
Olgiati’s parents with a snapshot of a beautiful smiling woman next
to EM2N, the future of
to it. It is clear that the architect and his wife are happy. Switzerland should be
Next to Olgiati’s house stands a newly constructed office space more explicitly urban and
thus denser, which would
resembling a rural shed clad in dark timber cladding. In one of the also serve to preserve
book’s other pictures, the rural fantasy is carefully depicted. It shows a some of Switzerland as it
street running down towards the office shed in the background. Inside is today: undeveloped and
unspoilt. EM2N is an office
the building, the profile of the architect is clearly visible. To the side, of architects who believe in
something that looks like a dung heap prominently fills the image. contrasts. Keeping a part
of Switzerland unspoilt
The manure looks fresh, releasing a steam which imbues the scene means accepting that
with a sense of mystery and nostalgia. This is Switzerland dreaming another part will have to
of what it used to be. be positively dirty. Rather
than craftsmen they are
Looks can be deceiving, however. Another picture spread in the cultivated businessmen
book tells a completely different story. On the left, there is a picture along the lines of Gordon
Bunshaft, the genius
taken from the ground floor of the shed – or better, from the floor under
architect-entrepreneur
the platform on top of which the shed is standing. The space consists of who headed up SOM in the
four concrete columns holding up an exposed concrete slab, which is glorious 1960s.

surrounded by an offset concrete retaining wall. The floor of the space 9

is simply made of tarmac. On the tarmac, there is a car slightly hidden Selina Walder, ed., Dado:
Built and Inhabited by Rudolf
behind the central core that leads towards the office above. Olgiati and Valerio Olgiati
In the picture on the right side of the double-page spread, two (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag,
2010).
deck chairs stand in the sun that illuminates the gap between the

21
10
Valerio Olgiati was born in
1958 in Chur and studied
architecture at the ETH
Zurich. In 1996 he opened
his own practice in Zurich,
and in 2008 his wife, Tamara
Olgiati, joined his firm in
Flims.
22
retaining walls and the platform. All of the elements in the picture
are relatively autonomous: they are standing together, but they don’t
seem to belong to each other. The scene is unfamiliar and even a bit
aggressive, and yet there is still something relaxed about the setting.
Although the link might seem farfetched, the picture’s atmosphere
is similar to that of the work of David Hockney. Like in his L.A. paint-
ings, the emptiness of things on this tarmac plateau has an artificial
tension. In these pictures, the metropolis is just outside the frame,
and this changes everything; it gives the entire publication another
perspective. Obviously, this is not a space designed to be Switzerland.
This is the Swiss sensibility dreaming about Los Angeles.
Hyperlink
In a recent interview with André Corboz in the Swiss newspaper Le
Temps, the journalist wondered what Switzerland has become today.
Is it an informal city, a big periphery, an expanse of countryside lack-
ing a soul? When Corboz was asked – so many years after he coined
the word “hyperville” – what would be an appropriate term for this
nameless kind of diffused urbanity, he paused and blurted out “Los
Angeles”.
The tarmac photo of the Swiss architect and the Swiss newspaper
quote refer to the same metropolis. Could this be a coincidence? Well,
there is no answer, just a curiosity about what will happen now that
architects have started fantasizing about the reality that urbanists
are already seeing.
Double-page photo spread
from Dado: Built and
Inhabited by Rudolf Olgiati
and Valerio Olgiati (Basel:
Birkhäuser Verlag, 2010)

23
 A METROPOLITAN VILLAGE:
THE 900-KILOMETRES
NILE CITY
Oliver Thill
photographs by Bas Princen
A New Type of City
The reason for the existence of cities has always
changed throughout history. The urban development
of the last two centuries in Europe, America and
Asia has been based on a fast-expanding capitalist
economy. The rapid growth of industrial production
stimulated an enormous immigration of poor
farmers into the emerging industrial centres,
generating a new working class with a secularized
culture of the masses. This new metropolitan culture
has always been seen as the polar opposite of the
more tradition-based lifestyle of the countryside.
These two cultures have long been an inseparable
couple, with the countryside inspiring city dwellers
and the rural population entranced by urban life.
The whole tradition of European urban planning of
the 19th and 20th centuries was based on the fertile
contradiction between metropolis and countryside,
a contradiction that generated fascinating new urban
ideals like the garden city, the linear town and CIAM
planning.
At the beginning of the 21st century, new gigantic
urban systems began to appear in developing
countries that cannot be explained either by a
capitalist economy paired with rural exodus, or
by the traditional conflict between metropolis
and countryside. To be able to read these systems,
24
classical Western urbanistic thinking seems too
limited. A new vocabulary is therefore necessary in
order to be able to understand and describe these
new megacities.
A City of Population Density
One of these new gigantic urban systems is located
in Egypt. Lacking a formal name, this city appears
on no map. Even in Cairo – which is a megacity itself –
the new metropolis is unknown, because Cairo’s
Western-trained urban planners are simply unable
to see it. But with more than 26 million inhabitants,
the “Nile City” is bigger than the Egyptian capital and
is – in terms of sheer numbers – one of the biggest
cities in the world. The Nile City is situated in the
river’s upper valley, forming a narrow linear strip
of urbanization along the Nile in the middle of the
desert. The city is no more than a few kilometres
wide, but it is nearly 900 kilometres long.
As an urban system, the Nile City is based neither
on any particular industry nor on rural exodus. It
is a new city type that was formed simply by rapid
population growth produced by the introduction
of Western medical standards, the security of food
availability thanks to foreign importation and the
absence of family planning in a tradition-based
Islamic society. The Nile City is in its essence a city
of population density. As an agricultural region, the
Nile City has slowly turned into a single homogenous
urban corridor over the last hundred years exclusively
due to an annual population growth of around 2%.
A Natural Linear City
The Nile City has an astonishingly simple layout
that is clearly defined by its geographical limits.
In the middle, there is the Nile, an approximately
half-kilometre-wide body of water that is strongly
controlled by the Aswan Dams, several Nile barriers
and man-made riverbanks. On both sides of the Nile
there is a small strip of land irrigated with Nile water
via an ingenious network of water channels, which
create an artificial and very fertile oasis. On average,
the valley is no wider than 12 kilometres, and it ends
abruptly when it reaches the two mountain chains
that soar as high as 300 metres and form the edges of
the Sahara.
The infrastructure of the Nile City is closely linked
to these morphological conditions. A single railway
line, which was already built by the British in the 19th
century, runs over 900 kilometres along the middle
of the valley up to Aswan, forming a kind of “subway”
for the Nile City with stops every 50 kilometres or
so. Along both desert edges run two very functional
highways connecting the Nile City to Cairo and the
Red Sea. Every 200 kilometres there is a little district
capital with its own bridge over the river and a small
airport, each of them serving as an urban satellite in
the desert.
In light of these conditions, the Nile City can be
read on a larger scale as a very logical and beautiful
diagram of infrastructure and landscape, and it can
be understood as a natural linear city, one that is
placed not in a lush Arcadian landscape but in the
harsh and beautiful emptiness of the Sahara. The
Nile City is a linear city in the middle of nowhere –
the only place where man can survive in an otherwise
endless ocean of sand and stones.
A Metropolis without Physical Density
The Nile City is very densely populated. With 2,841
people per square kilometre, it has a density similar
to those of Los Angeles, Tokyo–Yokohama and
Milan. Such a comparison sounds promising, but
in terms of its urban image, the Nile City absolutely
The classic image of an urban metropolis comprised
of housing blocks with big boulevards for traffic is
almost nowhere to be found. There are no signs of
intense, hectic urban life. Seen through European
eyes, the Nile City still looks like an agricultural
landscape, or like the countryside, despite having a
population density ten times that of Germany.
cannot compete with Western or Asian megacities.
Entering the Nile City is at first a disillusioning
experience, yet is also astonishing at the same time,
for there is no city. On an emotional level this is not
easy to understand, but the reason for it is simple.
Because of the limited conditions of a developing
country, the Nile City is very rich in population but
poor in physical infrastructure. The average housing
surface is not much more than 5 square metres per
person (the Western/European standard is around
45), there are hardly any built public facilities like
office buildings or factories, and the street network
is very modest, because with 30 cars for every 1,000
inhabitants (the Western/European standard is
around 500), mobility is still very limited. The Nile
City is obviously very dense in terms of its population,
but its building density is very limited. A population
density that in Europe or America would generate
a very densely built and farmland-consuming
metropolitan area produces nothing more than a
small-town atmosphere in the Egyptian context.
The Nile City is a metropolis without physical density.
The City as Countryside
The Nile Valley forms a very strong barrier and offers
no horizon other than its own. There is hardly any
difference between the countryside and urban
settlements, and hardly any difference between the
periphery and urban centres. The Nile City looks the
same everywhere. The Nile City is the only reality the
people who live there know and – as if trapped in a
test tube – they cannot escape from it.
In the Nile City settlements and agricultural
land form one inseparable unity because urban
development and farming depend in a very direct
way on one another. The Nile City can be read as a
900-kilometre-long continuous body of farmland or
as an equally long continuous strip of urban fabric or
as a combination of both. The Nile City can be read
25
Former Sugarcane Fields, 2009

26
as a dense network of street villages or as a system
of agricultural megablocks with an average size of
a square kilometre. It can be read as a Leonidovian
landscape-based linear city or as an Branziesque
“agropolis”. In the Nile City, landscape is neither
suppressed nor replaced by the city; rather, urban
development encircles the landscape and frames
the agricultural fields. Here “the field” is obviously
not merely the foundation for the city; rather, in the
urban figure–ground relationship, it has shifted from
being the latter to being the former. In the Nile City,
the landscape is still the essence and the structural
backbone of the urban fabric, and it is the only thing
people in the city have. The Nile City is a metropolis
in which the city’s essence is still the countryside –
it is a metropolis that is at the same time Arcadia.
The Pre-urban Condition
The Nile City is an accident. There had never been a
will or a wish to create it; it just happened. The Nile
City even denies being a city. People in the Nile City
have no idea that the Nile City exists, or at least they
ignore it. They try to behave like normal farmers,
and even today their horizon ends at the edge of
their fields. There is no consciousness of the Nile
City as a perceivable object because it is a biotope
for 26 million – a zone these people never leave
and therefore cannot see. The Nile City is the first
metropolis completely populated by farmers –
a sort of rural metropolis or endless chain of villages
turned into one metropolitan village.
In the Nile City, there is no working class and hardly
any middle class. Here there is no reason for people
to move because farmers don’t move. People just
stay and live their lives in their fields – the city is
simply an endless sequence of local situations that
do not relate to one another in any kind of spatial
hierarchy. Urban consciousness does not exist.
In the Nile City there is no reason for celebrating
civitas, nor is there a reason to develop a public
domain (like inventing an agora, founding an
acropolis or creating a piazza) . . . In the Nile City
people still engage in a Neolithic life, so there is no
need for theatres or museums, or even a cinema
or a discotheque, because there is no audience, no
public dimension. Even the mosques – which are
produced as endless repetitions of the same building
types – are smallish and modest, because they serve
very circumscribed local communities. There is
no need for architectural heroes like Sinan, nor for
architectural representation or landmarks. The Nile
City is just the endless expansion of the same local
conditions – the house with the field next to the house
with the field, one village next to another village. The
accumulation of enormous quantities in the Nile City
has not yet resulted in a jump in quality.
The Nile City is a city in a pre-urban condition,
a megalopolis without an urban consciousness.
Architecture = Urbanism
Architectural production in the Nile City is a very
disciplined act based on limited local technologies.
Building is expensive, and therefore it must be
effective and efficient. Building materials are in large
part taken directly from the fields. Illegal temporary
brickyards turn out simple bricks made of the Nile’s
fertile mud. A Maison Domino–like concrete skeleton
functions as the basis for a house and gets filled with
brickwork. Because of the hot climate there is hardly
any need for windows, and this ends up generating a
hermetic architecture of rough brick surfaces.
The brown architectural volumes appear in different
sizes. Houses are designed in such a way as to be
extendable. A small farmer’s family usually starts out
with an (illegally built) one-storey structure and then
gradually adds additional surfaces according to the
family’s needs. Because of the fact that agricultural
land is very valuable and is directly related to a
family’s income, the houses are extended vertically.
This results in housing that is up to five or six storeys
27
high, even in small villages. The same technology
is used for the design of commercial small-scale
apartment buildings in the local centres, thereby
producing mini-towers of up to fifteen storeys.
Because architecture is the result of this rational
and objective process, nearly all houses in the
Nile City look the same. As a consequence, an
astonishingly hermetic homogeneity is produced.
Continuous brown building masses form modest
walls between the intensely coloured green fields.
This (nearly structuralistic) image of the Nile City
generates two interesting phenomena. On one hand,
architecture and urbanism can hardly be separated
from one another in the Nile City – the quality of
the individual building is also that of the whole
megalopolis, and so there is no difference between
architecture and urbanism. On the other hand,
the figure–ground relationship in the Nile City is
influenced in a lasting way by the more structural
qualities of the buildings. The building masses form
humble, non-communicative objects but can at the
same time be read as neutral, monolithic structures
that emphasize the green landscape; in other words,
in the Nile City the buildings are so neutral that the
landscape becomes the dominant element, thereby
causing an inversion of the classic figure–ground
relationship.
import 30% of their food. This is a very dangerous
state of affairs for a developing country. The farmer
tilling the soil between the housing high-rises
demonstrates the limits of the system. One thing
seems to be sure, however. If the Nile City goes on
like this for the next fifty years – if the population
explosion is not stopped or if the prosperity level
rises too quickly – then it will consume all of its own
ecological resources and become a city with serious
water- and food-supply problems. Further growth
will prove deadly for the Nile City. From this point
of view, the Nile City can be seen as a model for the
whole world with its rapidly growing population.
Is it possible to imagine the world as an Arcadian
metropolis? Is it possible to invent other models of
prosperity, like welfare without growth? Is a happy
Existenzminimum even thinkable?

Unstable Equilibrium
The Nile City is an interesting phenomenon, and
its existence raises more questions than it provides
answers. Will it ever become a real city? Will the
continual addition of quantity eventually create a
jump in urban quality? Will there one day be some
sort of development of the public domain?
The future of the Nile City is very unclear. It exists in
a very fragile state of balance, but might already be
out of equilibrium. The rapid growth of the Nile City’s
built structures has already reduced the agricultural
surface to a level that obliges its inhabitants to

28
Informal Settlement, 2009

29
30
31
The map on pages 30–31 and the drawing on this page are
part of the “900-Kilometre Nile City” research project carried
out at the Berlage Institute in 2009/10, led by Pier Paolo
Tamburelli and Oliver Thill. It is the result of the collective
effort of the following participants: Ulrich Gradenegger,
Minqi Gu, Magnus Jørgensen, Vesna Jovanovic, Zhiwei Lu,
Ivan K. Nasution, Roberto Soundy, Ji Hyun Woo and Lingxiao
Zhang.

32
 THE NILE VALLEY:
THE URBANIZATION
OF LIMITED RESOURCES

Mathias Gunz

A Green Carpet in the Desert

The strict and immediate division between desert and arable land
is a traditional feature of the Nile Valley. This is also reflected in the
administration of the territory, where only arable land is consid-
ered as “land” with a private owner, while the desert is considered
“no-man’s-land” and belongs to the state. The desert becomes land
if and only if it is made arable. Historically, this process has been
limited by the scarcity of resources (mainly water), but also by the
topography of the land.
Although the balance between available resources and human
extension has been constantly renegotiated with the introduction
of new technologies, most radically in the twentieth century, the
antagonism of habitat versus desert has remained a constant. Today,
with its rapid population growth, this static conception is no longer
an option for Egypt.
The complete conquest of the desert as a habitat has become
the primary political obsession – and according to many, Egypt’s
only hope. While the state is the biggest protagonist and patron
of this project, the same pattern is repeated on a smaller scale
by private actors who – often informally – reclaim small farming
plots along the desert’s edge. This edge has thus been transformed
from a sharp line into a zone in which countless actors engage in
a variety of uncoordinated activities. The actual increase of arable
land may be minimal, but the motile desert edge signals the Nile
Valley’s transformation from a simpler and more static territorial
system to a more complex, multi-layered and dynamic one.

33
 A Pressure Cooker: The Linear Oasis
It appears that the Nile Valley has been put in motion not so much
due to new external forces arriving from the international or global
context, but to an internal densification and urbanization driven by
enormous growth within an environment of limited resources. The
linear oasis has become a pressure cooker where more and more peo-
ple and activities compete for the same space. The compression of the
villages and their incremental expansion onto the arable land has
permanently shifted the land–population equilibrium and changed
the Nile Valley from an agricultural producer to mainly an exporter
of cheap labour in just fifty years.
In the context of this enormous upheaval, it is not the physical
signs of transformation that astonish the most, but rather the relative
stability of the Nile Valley’s physical landscape. While Cairo shows all
of the symptoms of an over-spilling metropolis, the Nile Valley has so
far been hiding its urbanization behind a scenic rural coulisse. In the
villages the physical manifestation of growth is almost inconspicuous
and organic. This has been reflected in a change of tide in the pressure
equalization between the metropolis and its hinterland. Traditionally,
rural Upper Egypt has predominantly been a support structure for
Cairo, supplying it with produce. Today it is the Nile Valley that relies
on Cairo for supply, for balancing its unsustainable growth and arti-
ficially stabilizing its crumbling foundations.

A Stability Grid
At the base of the Nile Valley territory one finds the traditional form of
land cultivation, a genetic code that has been determining life in the Nile
Valley for thousands of years. Agricultural technology and techniques are
refined at best, but certainly not subjected to radical rationalization. The
ensuing inefficiency is taken for granted: the government’s main goal
for the Nile Valley agricultural landscape is not to maximize production
but to achieve maximal employment. This “stability grid” of rural life
binds the masses to a territory and lifestyle that can no longer sustain
their existence, yet it upholds a traditional and stable hegemony. This
state-guaranteed agrarian fundament levels the landscape of oppor-
tunity within Egypt. It has been favoured over a radical modernization
that would dissolve the village network very suddenly with unpredict-
able consequences for both the rural areas and the cities.
Production throughout the valley relies on a highly refined system
of water management. The mechanisms of distribution in the tense

34
geopolitical context of the Nile Basin Initiative demand constant recal-
culation of a highly sensitive, age-old empirical balance. Internationally
negotiated water quotas are translated into a numeric “water budget”
for every governorate, district and commune, tuned and enforced by
a central bureaucracy in Cairo. The constant expansion of farmland
exerts enormous pressure on this system. Various buffers, such as
fossil ground water, have been exploited, but solutions for long-term
consolidation are no more than visions.
Meanwhile, the farmers view the highly technical, multi-layered
water network with the fatalism of encountering a natural phenom-
enon, well aware that their lifestyle relies on the Nile’s waters, yet
unaware that this supply is severely threatened.

Movement
A look beyond the pharaonic territorial structures of the Nile Valley
shows a life that is much more urban and modern than might be
expected. One indicator for this is the high level of individual mobil-
ity: almost all citizen have access – economically and physically – to
a transportation system characterized by a high density and a wide
permeability. In a fragile balance of formal and informal forces, and of
governmental regimentation and private initiative, a demand-driven
transport system that meets the needs of local, regional and national
connections could develop.
Mobility has become vital in a rural landscape that has ceased to
be self-sufficient. As in many other places, peasants in the Nile Valley
are forced to seek work in the cities; what is particular here is that
they stay rooted in the valley, send all of their earnings back home and
then eventually, in most cases, return to their hometowns. The Nile
Valley has never seen real rural flight. Instead, it has a long tradition
of seasonal migration and commuting.
The transportation network allows a form of human settlement in
the villages that is not exclusively based on agricultural production.
This overlaps the stability grid with another, highly elastic network that
allows the village to remain the basic unit of urbanization, although
under completely different preconditions. The result is a specific liv-
ing environment that is pre-modern and globalized at the same time:
commuting peasants, satellite-equipped huts, farming policemen and
villages extended with remittances from Riyadh and Doha – an entire
population oscillation between pharaonic farmer and post-industrial
service provider.

35
 Potential in the Desert
While the transport system allows a de-escalation of rural growth
on a regional basis, remittance transfers and financial flows release
pressure on a national or international level. Yet when looking for a
definitive solution to Egypt’s population–land disequilibrium, eyes
still turn to the desert. Its seemingly infinite unlocked spatial poten-
tial is the projection surface for dreams, visions and scientific number
games of all stripes. The most enigmatic of these is the desert city.
First initiated during the 1970s under Anwar el-Sadat, this countrywide
state-initiated urbanization project had the goal of decentralizing and
redistributing massive population growth from out of the Nile Valley
into the desert in order to relieve the pressure created by the country’s
scarcity of arable land. But the prolonged lack of public and social
amenities and workplaces has assigned the Nile Valley’s new towns
such as New Asyut the role of a highly dependent extension of their
“older sister” in the valley, the town of Asyut. For the time being, the
desert city leaves one with an uncanny perception of a ghost town in
the desert – a town that seems suspended between a slow, never-ending
process of construction and a simultaneous one of decay.
On a smaller scale, the potential of the desert is also the inspira-
tion for private initiative. Desert land is “no-land”, thus it can have no
private owner. Only when it is rendered arable does it become property.
Urbanizing desert, therefore, is made to seem like producing some-
thing out of nothing, and together with the engineer’s claim that all
desert “is potentially urbanizable” the myth of salvation in the desert is
thus solidified. This obsession with the desert obscures what has been
the real stability factor and the housing solution for the Nile Valley’s
growing population over the years: informal construction on arable
land. Stability thus comes at a high cost.

The Production of Stability

It is an open threat that if any southern neighbour were to challenge
Egypt’s rights on the Nile’s waters, the reaction would be martial. The
Nile is considered a matter of national security. Any interference with
the Nile would not only aggravate already existing food-supply issues,
but also threaten the stability of the whole country. This stability, with
its regional significance, has long been Hosni Mubarak’s main com-
modity in dealing with the West. The rural stability grid, the valley’s
high mobility and the myth of eventual desert expansion are not just
specific cultural expressions of a society that finds itself caught between

36
tradition and globalization; they are also controlled instruments in
the Mubarak system’s bio-political strategy to produce stability.
Today it seems that Mubarak’s heavy-handed strategy to connect
the Nile Valley population to the world both economically and via com-
munications media while keeping them locked in a quasi-mediaeval
living model that has poverty, powerlessness and a lack of develop-
mental perspective as integral components has come to an end. Too
great were the costs of this enforced inertia. Yet the way towards a
modern society – namely overcoming a monstrous apparatus that
infiltrates all layers of Egypt’s society, from the economic elite to the
middle-class bureaucracy to the rurally recruited security forces – is
long and uncertain.
In the Nile Valley, modernity comes as both a threat and a potential.
Many in and outside Egypt fear the unforeseeable consequences of dis-
solving the unsustainable but ingrained socio-economic structures.
The hasty unanchoring of a traditional rural mode of life that has held
the Nile Valley’s particle-cloud of urbanization in place since the time
of the pharaohs might trigger massive migration, especially towards
Cairo. Yet there are also signs in the Nile Valley that hint to a possible
third way, a territorial transformation whose vector points not so much
to Cairo as to a new, more complex, more connected, more diverse – in
short, a more urban – incarnation of Nile Valley living.

This text is part of a larger research project on “Specificity and

Urbanization” conducted by ETH Studio Basel since 2005.

37
38
Stability: Field structure
around Assiut

39
40
Motion: Transportation
network and desert
occupation around Assiut

41

1 The field is a scenario of informal and organic growth that has by now
Guy Debord, “Théorie de
la dérive”, Internationale
Situationniste, no. 2 (1958).
2
The word sahel in Arabic
means precisely shore or
border, whereas sahra (the
origin of the name Sahara)
refers to an empty space, or
a place without pasture.
3
Eugenio Turri, Gli uomini
delle tende: Dalla Mongolia
alla Mauritania (Milan: Bruno
Mondadori, 1983).
4
United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), The
Global Drylands Imperative:
Pastoralism and Mobility
in the Drylands (Nairobi:
Drylands Development
Centre, 2003), 1.
42
LEARNING FROM MOBILITY:
THE FIELD AS A CONDITION OF
EMPOWERED NOMADISM
Giorgio Talocci
become the norm in most cities of the developing world: it is a condi-
tion of urban fringe, the marginal space (either outer or interstitial)
where nature and urbanization mingle in a precarious uncertainness,
where all the signs visible on the landscape belong to both city and
countryside and yet, at the same time, to neither of them.
This article aims to exalt the field and its “even covering” as a
potentially positive synthesis of these two sides, of the (nomadic) space
of the eternal dérive1 and the (sedentary) space of fractal enclosures:
by comparing the field to the edge of the desert, and its inhabitants
to the nomadic tribes of the sahel,2 I will assert that is possible to
learn from the mobility of nomads, perceiving the nomadic condi-
tion as an asset. To elaborate upon this idea, I will interpret the Baan
Mankong housing programme implemented by the Thai government
as a phenomenon that has already taken advantage of just such a
condition.
The Sahel
The edge of the desert is the line of separation between the world of
nomadic pastoralism and that of sedentary agriculture, “the muta-
ble border that forms the place of trade and continuous rebalancing
between the two civilisations”.3 It is a complex ecosystem that is in
continuous mutation, where “a single good rainstorm transforms the
landscape, creating rich meadows . . . where the previous year there
had been only sand and gravel”.4 Mobile pastoralism is the exact tech-
nique employed by the herders to make good use of the tremendous
unpredictability of resources and represents the only way they can
provide their communities with a reasonable level of resilience in the
face of unexpected ecological events.
Several scholars have highlighted the importance for institutions
to be able to manage this kind of mobile living.5 A study by the United
Nations Development Programme portrays a future mobile pasto-
ral society in which “[n]omadic herders are the principal users and
managers of large areas of grassland, steppe and desert edge” and
in which “[p]astures are corporately owned and managed by small
associations . . . within a loose framework maintained by the state”.6
This perspective thus advocates for a participatory governance of
the land that, moreover, must be seen as a commons. However, these
recommendations have been disregarded by governing institutions,
whose approach has more often been oriented toward the sedentariza-
tion of nomadic tribes in a denial of their immanent nature, thereby 5
compromising the tribes’ resilience rather than fostering it. Maryam Niamir-Fuller,
ed., Managing Mobility
in African Rangelands:
The Field The Legitimization of
Transhumance (London:
Nowadays, the urban fringes are not that different from the sahel: the Intermediate Technology
peri-urban space, along with all its ramifications (the interstices inside Publications, 1999);
the city), is indeed in constant transformation, an object of real-estate Zeremarian Fre and
Alessandro Dinucci,
interests that force its inhabitants to cope daily with the possibility Understanding the Indigenous
of being displaced. Indeed, in conditions of fast economic growth, Knowledge and Information
Systems of Pastoralists in
which exist in many developing countries, “the field” is the receptacle Eritrea (Rome: Food and
of the identities denied by the cultural and economic mainstream, Agriculture Organization of
and of the people who lack access to resources, decision-making and the United Nations, 2003).

common narratives7 but nevertheless depend upon the proximity of 6 UNDP, Global Drylands
the city to develop their livelihoods. At the same time, the opening Imperative, 8.
up to neo-liberalist doctrines and the consequent commodification
7
of land and access to global economic dynamics have turned the field Ali Madanipour, “Social
into one of battle between political and economic pressure and the Exclusion and Space”, in Ali
Madanipour, Goran Cars
multitude of the urban poor. and Judith Allen, eds., Social
Rather than being simply a catalyst of neglected differences,8 Exclusion in European Cities:
Processes, Experiences
however, the field could become a space of resistance and emancipa-
and Responses (London:
tion from the mainstream. As for the nomads of the sahel, the com- Routledge, 1998).
munities of the field have developed a certain resilience against the
8
unpredictability of their environment, the lack of any security in terms Gary Bridge and Sophie
of ownership of land and resources and the persistent ignorance and Watson, “City Differences”,
aversion of institutional and public opinion about them. This resil- in idem, eds., A Companion
to the City (Oxford:
ience finds expression in the richness and creativity of the use of space Blackwell, 2000).
and its assets, and in attempts to establish networks linking different

43
9 communities. However, these expressions are timid, being spatially
UNDP, Global Drylands
Imperative, 6–7; Fre and
Dinucci, Understanding the
Indigenous Knowledge, 7.
10
The term Baan Mankong in
Thai literally means “secure
housing”.
11
Community Organizations
Development Institute
(CODI), “50 Community
Upgrading Projects”,
CODIupdate, no. 5 (2000), 2.
12
CODI is a public organization
associated with the Ministry
of Social Development and
Human Security.
13
CODI, “50 Community
Upgrading Projects”, 8.
44
and temporally inhibited by the issues listed above as well as by the
enormous gap between the urban poor and the ruling institutions.
Resilience, then, needs to be fostered more, and this can only occur
through a renunciation of both the unrestrained commodification of
land and the employment of a top-down approach to its governance,
which could be precisely the case in the desert drylands.
Thai Fields: The Baan Mankong Program
If only a few minor attempts at corporately owned (and managed) land
have been carried out in the sahel,9 it would seem that this lesson has
already been learnt in the peri-urban space of Thailand. In January 2003
the Thai government launched the Baan Mankong Program10 “as part
of its efforts to address the housing problems of the country’s poorest
urban citizens”.11 The housing experiment, which was implemented
by the Community Organisations Development Institute,12 has been
trying to facilitate the aspirations of the communities of slum dwellers
(who squat on land owned either by private individuals or by public
or religious authorities) by creating an important framework for the
development of their informal settlements and the improvement of
their living conditions.
Channelling government funds directly to poor communities in
the form of infrastructure subsidies and housing and land loans, the
programme wants to put these communities at the centre of urban
development as well as at the heart of a decision-making process car-
ried out with the participation of local governments, professionals,
universities and NGOs. Managing their budget themselves, the com-
munities are the ones to plan and carry out improvements to their
environment, thereby allowing them to state their primary role in the
transformation process currently happening in the field.
What makes the scaling-up of this participatory approach to gov-
ernance possible is the fact the communities involved work in net-
works. Established in the 1990s through activities of community
saving around the country, the network of poor communities has
since developed greatly and is now the main conveyor of knowledge,
information and services throughout the field: the Chang Chumchon,
for example, is a network of skilled community builders that was
founded in 2005 as a spontaneous outcome of the whole process, and
its members now provide labour and technical expertise in resolving
construction-related issues.13
 The network marvellously interconnects all of the actors on its 14
various levels, ensuring the establishment of all of the vertical and Derek Armitage,
“Governance and the
horizontal linkages necessary for reaching the institutional condi- Commons in a Multi-Level
tions required to foster collective action and self-organizing systems World”, International Journey
of the Commons 2, no. 1
within common pooled resources.14 In other words, the Baan Mankong (2009), 14.
network acts as a rhizome,15 and is thus able to survive and reorgan-
ize itself after a crisis; it may undergo mutations in the process, but it 15
Gilles Deleuze and Felix
always finds a way to persist. Guattari, A Thousand
Advocating for common pooled resources would mean also consid- Plateaus (London:
Continuum, 2004), 3–28.
ering the land as a commons. Only in this way can the field once again
become a space of flow, where people and knowledge can circulate 16 CODI, “50 Community
freely. Land in the Baan Mankong Program is accessed and admin- Upgrading Projects”, 6.

istrated collectively by the communities involved, and the process of 17

searching for that land is a collective one, too, one in which people need Ibid.
to be very creative: “once they come together as a community and as 18
networks of communities . . . the possibilities for finding alternative Henri Lefebvre, La
land multiply fast and the resourcefulness and energy start pouring production de l’espace (Paris:
Anthropos, 1974).
out”.16 This process has been compared to a very large army of ants let
loose across the country that are “scanning their territory and com- 19
David Harvey, “The right to
ing up with some very interesting pieces of vacant private and public the city”, New Left Review,
land that have been hiding in the cracks of some 250 towns and cities no.53 (2008).
– land that no government agency or NGOs or researcher might ever
20
have found or thought of as possible”.17 Francesco Careri, New
Babylon: Una città nomade
(Turin: Testo&immagine,
Empowered Nomadism
2001).
The communities living in the field therefore legitimate their presence
on it, re-appropriating it and re-signifying it. In so doing, they not only 21
Robert Smithson, “A Tour of
reclaim the right to the full citizenship that they deserve, but they also the Monuments of Passaic”,
spark a positive process for the entire city by being champions of a trans- in Jack Flam, ed., Robert
Smithson: The Collected
formation that would finally be socially just, sustainable and inclusive of
Writings (Berkeley, Calif.:
all the realities that populate the urban whole. Involving all of the reali- University of California
ties of the city in its rhizomatic network, the field will be the (represen- Press, 1997), 68–74.
tational18) space that is now lacking inside the official city – an endless
terrain for collective experimentation with the movement of people and
knowledge in which one can claim one’s right to the city itself.19 The field
will embody a condition of empowered nomadism that recalls Constant
Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon project,20 where mobility and collective
action were seen as the key to the emancipation of the self.
By learning something from mobility, the field could avoid becom-
ing suburbia21 as a result of endless urban development: it would be

45
22 neither a desert nor an exclusive civilization, a space that is neither
Deleuze and Guattari, A smooth nor striated,22 one that is surely marked by the traces left
Thousand Plateaus, 523–51.
behind by its empowered nomads, but with no enclosures – a space
whose intrinsic resilience will guarantee that there won’t be the need
to fear its continuous transformation.

46
 ZOOM IN

Ignacio Uriarte

The six digital drawings on the pages that follow were

made using MS-Excel. They deal with the notions of
work and space, as well as of workspace.
Each magazine page is systematically filled out with a
single scribble-like black line functioning as a closed
circuit. If you tried to follow it, you would travel across
the whole page until you reached your starting point
again.
A proportional increase in length and decrease in
width maintains the same average density on each
page. There is, of course, no zoom in.

47
 ARRANGING
SIX DIFFERENT POSTAGE STAMPS
IN A ROW

Giovan Battista Salerno

There are 720 possible ways of arranging six different postage stamps in
a row. Anyone who has put six stamps on a letter has inevitably adopted
one of the arrangements envisaged in the 720 envelopes of Alighiero
Boetti’s artwork of 1974–75 entitled 720 lettere dall’Afghanistan (720
Letters from Afghanistan). Postage stamps – like numbers, letters of
the alphabet, words in the dictionary or playing cards, all of which are
materials used by Boetti – participate in a world outside the painting,
bear the mark and the information of interchangeable worlds and
function only by being combined.
Stamps have both monetary and philatelic values, each of which
is objective. They automatically date the work in which they are used.
They bear images of all of the officially acknowledged social catego-
ries, from politics to economics, and from ancient or recent history
to art. They are used just once and travel only in one direction in the
language of the country from which their journey begins.
The permutation of the combination of Boetti’s stamps expresses an
entire manner of communication – it outlines a territory that includes
all possibilities, and offers an extensive knowledge of all of its aspects.
This territory is a whole, one that is made visible through the com-
ponents that comprise it and the development of the law that orders
them. It is divided into six sectors – or six dimensions or regions – each
governed by the sign of one of the elements that make up the storyline:
each panel presents the 120 ways of putting the stamps on a letter start-
ing from one of the six stamps, which means 4,320 stamps in all.
The first and last examples of the possible permutations are mir-
ror images of each other, and the gradual process of shuffling the six
stamps unfolds between these initial and final stages.

54
 Within the extreme uniformity of this space flows the arbitrary Alighiero Boetti, 720 lettere
path marked out by the stamps. The stamps function according to dall’Afghanistan (detail),
1973-1974, mixed technique
the rhythm of Dastaghir, the boy in Kabul who uses stamped letters on paper, 720 stamped
to send the pages of his Persian diary to Italy. The range of permuta- envelopes with postage,
6 elements (165 x 120 cm
tions frames Dastaghir’s essence in his handwriting, his time and his each) and a book (29.5 x 23
intelligence. And it captures him, carrying him off to another world, x 4 cm)
to offer, for comment, a completely different image of Afghanistan © Alighiero Boetti by SIAE
2011. Courtesy Fondazione
from the one presented by the stamps. Alighiero Boetti, Rome
On each page of the diary is a Boetti square, that is, a large square
made up of smaller squares set in a 32-by-32 grid, the nearest perfect
square just exceeding one thousand components. On each sheet the
24 small squares in excess of a thousand are “erased” in a different
manner. The thousand manners of this cancellation can be compared
to Afghan writing, like the pages of another diary or the patterns of a
Bukhara carpet. The viewer is struck by the different “calligraphies”
of the two scripts – Boetti’s squares and Dastaghir’s diary. With its
respective degrees of meaning and intensity, each stands out against
the absolute background of the permutation.

55
 COURTEOUSNESS AND
CONTRADICTION IN THE WORKS
BY GABETTI AND ISOLA

Michele Bonino and Subhash Mukerjee

There is a saying in Italy about people from the Piemonte region: it is

said that the Piedmontese are both false and courteous. Gabetti and
Isola’s projects surely appear to be courteous. They are often built
using traditional local materials and technologies, they are some-
times topped with bushes or little trees, they are always represented
with delicate watercolours that fade at the edges: they show a friendli-
ness towards and a respect for their context. But what this harmless
and sometimes disturbingly picturesque language expresses is never
really that comfortable: the affected manners that characterize most
of their work seem to be there expressly to hide the radicality of other
aspects.
Gabetti and Isola have enjoyed fame ever since their debut because
of their early “withdrawal from the modern movement”, as Reyner
Banham expressed it in an article featured in The Architectural Review
during the debate sparked by Gabetti and Isola’s Bottega d’Erasmo
(Turin, 1953–56), which they completed before turning thirty years of
age. Like Banham, we are convinced that Gabetti and Isola never felt
enthusiastic about modernity. But for us this is not only a matter of
their architectural language. In fact, we believe that they tried not to
feel – or, perhaps, not to show – enthusiasm for anything: every aspect
of their work is treated with the icy ease of those who are used to deal-
ing with everything through processes of critique and elaboration.
Unlike the vague and uncertain borders of their drawings, there are no
uncertainties in their buildings, only carefully planned contradictions
used to reinforce their message in an almost Venturian way.
At the end of the 1960s, Gabetti and Isola began populating the
Piedmont with a series of buildings – many of them private, but all

56
of them nonetheless paying attention to public functions – that were
almost always located on the borders between towns and the coun-
tryside. All of them display the core of the design in their sections.
The Centro Residenziale Ovest that Gabetti and Isola designed for
Olivetti (Ivrea, 1968–71, with Luciano Re) could have fully addressed
the research into land architecture that was becoming internationally
fashionable at that time, but the approach the duo chose subtly stated
their distance from it. Built as a residence for interns and young employ-
ees, the complex connects two different levels: the roof is co-planar
with the lawn bordering the road, while the famous glazed stripe of
its curved façade embraces a small wooded hill, thereby resolving the
change in level. The roof could have easily been a green one, helping
the building to blend in with the landscape. Instead, Gabetti and Isola
decided to cover only half of the building – the parking garage – with
grass. The rest of the complex is covered with a conventional flat roof
paved with white cement tiles that ends in a strange moulding made
of traditional bricks that is subliminally hidden in the curtain-wall.
Design decisions like these have been interpreted by the architects’
disciples and critics as subjective and authorial ones, thereby leading
to a focus on their language, which, according to these interpretations,
was to be situated in relationship to a comfortable regionalism. For us,
however, the decisions we have highlighted are contradictions carefully
placed to strengthen the message that if “architecture is landscape”,
then there is no need for the former to blend literally into the latter.
This building, perhaps also due to its location in the “technological”
context of Ivrea (which was dominated in those years by the presence
of Olivetti, a world leader in information technology), expresses a clear
approach toward construction, once again with Venturian analogies.
According to Venturi, modern designers seldom took advantage of
the conventional element. Gabetti and Isola never hesitate to use the
most ordinary of technologies, but they do so in a creative way, offer-
ing a lesson in pragmatism and clarity, and freeing ideas and con-
cepts from the tyranny of sophisticated building solutions. At Ivrea
this approach is also visible in the funny rounded Plexiglas skylights
that pop out of the grass – they actually represent the whole skyline
of the building from the road – or in the quite harsh structure of the
garage, which literally recalls elements borrowed from the design of
infrastructure.
It is meaningful to us that two crucial themes of Gabetti and Isola’s
poetics, the sophisticated relationship between architecture and

57
58
landscape and the creative use of ordinary technologies, emerge from
buildings that are mostly well-known for linguistic reasons. In the case
of the Residenziale Ovest, for instance, the image that most people
remember is that of a hypogeal building – a memory so strong that
among the inhabitants of Ivrea the complex is called Talponia, which
loosely translates to “Mole-town” – despite the fact that the building
is not hypogeal at all.
We believe that in order to talk about Gabetti and Isola’s fifty-year
career today, we need to strip their works of their associated language,
a language that the architects used too skillfully to dissimulate the
force of their statements. Looking at the Ivrea building is a starting
point for understanding if, aside from their inescapable and not always
positive influence on local architects or the appreciation they gained
on the national scene (for example, they are among the few architects
“spared” by Manfredo Tafuri in his Storia dell’architettura italiana
1944–1981), Gabetti and Isola are capable of challenging a confronta-
tion with the main themes of the international architectural debate,
especially those which, at the beginning of the 1970s – which is when
they reached their full maturity as designers – were changing the way
people thought about architecture.
One year after the opening of the Residenziale Ovest, the architec-
tural duo submitted their proposal for the competition for the new
FIAT headquarters (Candiolo, 1972–73, with Guido Drocco and Luciano
Re). Welton Becket, Carlo Mollino, Skidmore Owings and Merril,
and Marco Zanuso were among the architects invited to participate,
and Kevin Roche was the winner. The complex was never built. The
project dealt with a 160-hectare area south of Turin, not far from the
Palazzina di caccia di Stupinigi by Filippo Juvarra. Gabetti and Isola’s Previous page:
proposal continued, on a bigger scale, the research they had begun Gabetti and Isola,
courteous preliminary
at Ivrea, here taking the form of a huge circle with a diameter of one sketch for FIAT’s
kilometre. As they themselves explained, “the shape of a building headquarters in Candiolo,
1972
to be realized today only partly, and to be defined as a volume later,
needed to be the least temporary, the least stylistic possible: the most
abstract”. But the abstraction of this territorial sign did not prevent
the emphasis of the fabric of the countryside, every trace of which was
preserved. The project’s strength is in being read not as an imposition
of an arbitrary form on the landscape, but as the ability to modify
centuries-old geometries without inventing new criteria: it was a fur-
ther way to express the analogy between architecture and landscape
rather than the notion of the one’s mimesis of the other.

59
 The FIAT centre in Candiolo needed to be self-sufficient, incorpo-
rating general facilities, restaurants, theatres and shops. As here, there
is also a mixed programme in Gabetti and Isola’s residential building
at Sestriere (1976–78, with Guido Drocco). Aside from the strategical
or commercial intentions of the clients, these complex programmes
also reveal the will to create new urban projects within the territory: it
would seem that the designers wanted to take the challenge of condens-
ing the complexity of the city, looking for alternative ways of rooting
their bigger buildings in the landscape. In the Sestriere project, a long
wooden building on a steep slope, this occurs through the replication
of the idea used earlier at Ivrea of an actual road running inside the
building and serving the parking garage. Rather funnily, the entrance
to the garages is literally shaped as a mountain tunnel, even if it leads
inside a building rather than inside a mountain. For us, shifts like this
generate an ambiguity that is the strongest relationship the building
establishes with the landscape. This almost-hidden detail helps to
contrast and strengthen the most popular feature of the building, the
gentle stepped profile that perfectly adapts to the contours of the slope.
The building’s adaptation to the topography is so successful that its
architects were not afraid to top the structure with little pagoda-like
Plexiglas roofs. In this case as well, the project plays a sophisticated
game with landscape, infrastructure and technology through pains-
taking work on the section. There is only one proper façade; the second
façade is directly against the ground.
The site of the Palazzo di Giustizia in Alba (1981–87, with Giuseppe
Varaldo), which is located on the edge of the little Piedmontese town,
is a flat one. However, although there was no natural topography, the
Facing page: architects pragmatically created one. From the exterior the building
Ivrea, Sestriere, Alba, appears like a series of stone walls, one on top of the other – a sort of
diagramatic sections.
Elaboration by MARC with low ziggurat topped with grass and little trees. With its horizontal
Andrea Tomasi extension and limited height, it seems like it is trying to disappear into
nature. However, there is no nature around it, only a large parking lot
and a congested road that leads toward the city centre. The problem of
internal circulation is resolved by a little portico that, seen from above,
is of an almost mediaeval aspect, covered by a slanted roof clad in tra-
ditional Piedmontese clay tiles. But below, the portico is treated with
an uncommon hardness: the ceiling is of brutally exposed concrete
sustained by circular iron columns that are directly pierced into it with
no mediation, no detail. If architecture is landscape, then there is no
reason for it to hide; there is no reason to invent new forms if one can

60
61
 employ an endless territorial – or even infrastructural – repertoire;
there is no reason to concentrate on its face or craftsmanship when the
research being carried out focuses on its relationship to the ground.
There is a saying in Piemonte that is often used to define the typi-
cal attitude of local people toward life: pisa pi curt (quite literally,
“you must pee shorter”). It tells us to never be too self-confident; it is
an invitation to restraint. More than in their architectural language,
Gabetti and Isola were Piedmontese in their approach to their work.
They were able to forge a working style that is probably their most
interesting contribution for the work of today’s designers – one based
on a restrained radicality that allowed them to design projects that
seem traditional at first glance but then reveal themselves to be fresh
and surprising upon closer analysis. Strength and restraint. It is in
the subtle equilibrium that Gabetti and Isola were able to maintain
between these two aspects that we find their most enduring lesson,
a lesson that is ultimately one about style.

62
 THE EVEN COVERING OF THE FIELD

Jonathan Sergison

The urban concept that structured the development of eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century London was both loose and rational. Employing
the capacity for the repetition of the English terraced house within a
matrix of streets and squares, neighbourhoods were constructed in
a manner that conformed to a picturesque attitude and sensibility.
The majority of the built fabric comprised housing of four classes or
types. These varied in scale or grandeur according to the social status
of their intended inhabitants. Houses were built speculatively and
could be seen as sober contributors to an overall urban plan. The dif-
ferences that occur from one to the next are subtle, built in accordance
with the limited choice that the “pattern book” of standard details
afforded. The builders of Georgian houses made small-scale varia-
tions that would not detract from an overall sense of urban uniform-
ity. The parts of London that were developed in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries still read as a homogeneous urban fabric
in which greater emphasis is given to the benefits of repetition than
to individual expression.
While a considerable amount of rebuilding has taken place since
the Georgian neighbourhoods were first built, there is enough intact
Georgian architecture to form an impression of the original quality of
what was constructed. The neighbourhoods we now call Bloomsbury,
Fitzrovia and Marylebone were developed at the beginning of the
eighteenth century in predominantly agricultural areas lying to the
north of the two significant urban centres, the cities of London and
Westminster. The ownership of these estates was in the hands of
aristocratic families that had profited from the seizure of church
land by Henry VIII. These were not necessarily large landholdings,

63
 but their relationship to an expanding city made them a potentially
valuable asset. The manner in which these estates were developed
was a remarkably shrewd and economically calculating invention.
While the landowners knew that a building had a greater capacity to
generate revenue than agricultural production, they did not have the
means to construct a new residential neighbourhood. Instead they
commissioned a surveyor to prepare an urban plan and then allowed
speculative builders to erect one or more houses according to urban
guidelines and in accordance with the “pattern book”, which pre-
cisely determined all aspects of the manner in which a house should
be constructed.
A notable characteristic of this form of urban development is that
it relied on a system of land ownership that is specific to England.

64
Historically, the Crown owned the land, and all land titles were held
by the King’s subjects as a result of a royal grant. Land “tenure” does
in fact refer to the relationship between the tenant and the lord, rather
than the relationship between the tenant and the land. A tenant could,
in turn, grant rights over portions of the land they held to their subor-
dinates. Thus, the concept of ownership is not helpful in explaining the
complex distribution of land rights, as use of land, including the right
to build on it, was generally granted for only a limited period. Typically,
this was 99 years, at the end of which time land rights reverted to the
holder of the royal grant. Furthermore, the family that held control of
the land did so in perpetuity, which meant that no single individual
could sell this interest because it was not legally his, but was rather
vested in his family and his descendants.
The conditions of the lease or the legal deed that defined the
detail of this arrangement stipulated that rent should be paid to the
landlord, that the property should be well maintained and that at the
end of the period of the lease it should be returned to the owner of
the land. This system might seem so onerous for the house builder
that one wonders why anyone would have ever accepted such terms.
However, evidence suggests the opposite, as large areas of London
were developed in this manner in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
The landowning families that supported this urban development
concept did in time become some of the wealthiest in Britain, at least on
paper. While it is possible to be a little cynical about a very Anglo-Saxon
attitude to development characterized by speculation and economic
ambition, the urban result of the process described here is remarkable
when compared to the large-scale building and rebuilding that has
occurred in London over the last twenty years. This recent period of
great opportunity has privileged spectacle over conformity to a more
consistent urban strategy. History will judge this production in time,
but in too many instances it feels as though a great opportunity has
been squandered. Too much of the recent house building programme
has prioritized financial return rather than the quality of the built envi-
ronment. Architects have been willing contributors to the reshaping
of London and have supported the belief held by many that building
landmarks is more important than making decent urban background
architecture. A city in which every project vies for attention with its
neighbours is nauseating and unsettling. Pre-twentieth-century exam-
ples of an urban attitude of conformity to a quiet, uniform, normative

65
 understanding of the city are far removed from the character of many
recently built, large-scale redevelopment projects.
It is not possible to compare the needs and demands of contempo-
rary London to those it had in the eighteenth century. Society, culture
and the economy are more complex and contested, and modern hous-
ing needs are fundamentally different. The households that occupied
the terraced houses referred to earlier had a large number of household
staff. Many of these houses have quite comfortably been converted from
extensive domestic use to be partially or wholly dedicated to business.
Their original civic ambition and sense of urban decorum renders
them valued building arrangements, despite the inconvenience that
comes from their vertical arrangement. The first-floor front room of a
Georgian terraced house is an undeniably pleasant space from which
to look back at the city.
Georgian London could be understood as a homogeneous, rational
urban condition built to a relatively low density. The emergence of this
urban solution can be explained in very pragmatic economic terms,
but it must also be seen as an expression of a landscaping tradition
and of ideas about the house as a type that is undeniably a product of
social and cultural values that developed in an empirical manner. It
valued the logic of repetition and has been capable of absorbing chang-
ing social needs with the passage of time. Where the city’s Georgian
urban fabric sits alongside neighbours from more recent times that are
often built to a higher density, it can be seen as a dignified display of
urban decorum and poise. The field that was once covered evenly has
become a more complex urban matrix with time, but one that retains
the structuring character of the initial act of building.
Increasingly, central London can be read as a collection of disparate
objects often at odds with the grain of the existing urban fabric. While
we should not be striving to recreate an urban condition that would
not meet contemporary needs, it would make sense to reappraise the
value of urban decorum and reinstate a more dignified approach to
building in the city.

66
 EARLY MUSLIM ARCHITECTURE,
K. A .C. CRESWELL AND SOME
RANDOM NOTES ON THE SCIENCE
OF THE FIELD

Andrea Zanderigo

Prologue
In perusing A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture by Colonel
Creswell again, a potential list of rules for the science of the field
came to mind in the form of prescriptions for building a pre-Ottoman
mosque.

1.
To draw the (often fortified) perimeter, the equivalent of the temenos.
To fill the inner space with endless, regular rows of pillars/columns
supporting a (frequently flat) roof. To excise one (or more) courtyard(s)
out of the covered space. To insert a bunch of exceptional elements,
like a mihrab (niche) or a minbar (pulpit), (almost) randomly. To add a
proto-minaret, in certain cases, outside the field.

2.
The grid and the perimeter are engaged in a non-linear relationship.
Sometimes they match perfectly, and the outer wall is geometrically
coherent with the rule imposed by the series of bays. But sometimes,
as in Tlemcen or Marrakesh, they abruptly clash, and the enclosure
appears as a later cut of a virtually endless and homogeneous set of
pillars.

3.
Weak hierarchies may appear within the apparent homogeneity of
the grid. In certain cases the width of the central bay may be slightly
larger, a characteristic which may occasionally be combined with an
increased height and clerestory windows. Sometimes, without altering

67
 the level of the ceiling and the span, there may be a row of larger or
differently shaped pillars that stress subtle fluctuations in the relative
importance of the spaces.

4.
The size of the bay does not consistently change according to the size
of the building. The basic tectonic element is always the same: four
pillars with a roof on top of them. Only their number varies, accord-
ing to the size and shape of the outer perimeter. The case of Susa is a
revealing one: regardless of their respective size, the Bu Fatata Mosque
and the Great Mosque share the very same basic structural element,
a vaulted roof supported by four fat pillars (with semi-pilasters glued
on each side), 3.5 by 3.5 metres in plan. The former mosque sports
only nine units and a separate court, while the latter, as the name
suggests, is comprised of 116 units, including the porches surround-
ing the courtyard.

68
 Great Mosque of al-Mansour
Baghdad, ca. 149 AH (AD 766)

Field 1 • Approx. 100 x 200 m, [(16 x 14) – (12 x 9)] + [(16 x 16) – (12 x 9)]
columns + 16 piers, 2 minbar, 28 bastions, 5 doors.
Al-Khatib provides Creswell with the only description of the gigantic
al-Mansour double mosque for the new city of Baghdad. The complex
is divided into two nearly identical halves: the smaller one, which is
included in the outer perimeter of the Khalif’s palace, is for the court
and the dignitaries, while the larger one is for the plebs. The double
field is bordered by a single fortified wall pierced by five openings.
Seventeen doors puncture the qibla (sacred wall) of the public section.
Two identical sahns (courtyards) and two slightly off-centre fenced
minbars are the only notable exceptions in the otherwise completely
homogeneous field. The astonishing abstraction of the plan is certainly
reinforced by the fact that the building survives only in literature.

69
Aqsa Mosque of al-Mahdi
Jerusalem, ca. 163 AH (AD 780)

Field 2 • 102.8 x 69.2 m, [(14 x 10) – 4] columns (or round piers), 1 dome,
1 mihrab, 26 doors.
Dealing with a multi-layered building in this case, Creswell again
compensates for the lack of clear archaeological evidence by draw-
ing upon a literary description of the structure by Muqaddasi, which
allows him to recreate the plan. There is no sahn in the Aqsa mosque;
the field doesn’t need to provide an open-air space because it’s part
of the bigger ensemble called Haram el-Sherif (the Esplanade of the
Mosques), which even includes the famous Dome of the Rock. The field
displays two distortions: compared to the others, the central aisle is
almost double in width as well as being higher, with clerestory lights
culminating in a wooden dome and the mihrab. The Great Brass Door
provides central access to this and overshadows the lesser openings
of the side aisles. The other distortion, which is much more subtle, is
due to a change in depth in the consistency of the structure: toward
the qibla, fat, squared piers are substituted by airy marble columns. In
any case, even the presence of a clear climax is not capable of destroy-
ing the homogeneity of the field-like space.

70
 Mosque of Abd ar-Rahman
Cordova, ca. 175 AH (AD 792)

Field 3 • 73.5 x 96.87 m, 10 x 11 columns + court, 1 mihrab, 14 buttresses

+ 5 bastions, 4 doors.
As in Muhammad’s own house in Medina – the ur-type for all of the
buildings being discussed here – the covered space stands only on one
side of the sahn, which is not surrounded by porches. The outer perim-
eter of the field is shown here in all its autonomy. Once more, though
less obviously, the main axis is stressed by a slightly enlarged central
aisle and a deeply dug mihrab. Ten buttresses in the outer wall and a
thick diaphragm between the mosque and the sahn help to contain
the lateral forces created by the sequence of recurring arches, which
run orthogonally toward the qibla. In a typically Syrian manner, par-
allel gabled roofs span the width between these arches: this is field
architecture by Umayyad refugees produced for the newly conquered
region of Andalusia.

71
72
 Facing page:
Great Mosque of
al-Mutawakkil
Samarra, ca. 232 AH (AD 847)
Field 4 • Approx. 156 x 240 m, [(24 x 36) – (16 x 22)] piers, 1 mihrab,
1 minaret, 44 bastions, 21 doors.
The Great Mosque forms an immense rectangle with bastioned walls
of burnt brick. Its proportion are approximately 3:2, as usual. Its area is
nearly 38,000 square metres, thereby making it the largest mosque in
the world. The beautiful enclosing walls, which have been preserved,
are 2.65 metres thick. Very little remains of the interior because it was
despoiled to enable the reuse of its building materials, but Creswell
assures us that the 464 octagonal brick piers were standing on square
bases (2.07 metres per side), with three rows of superimposed marble
columns at the four corners. Again, the central aisle is slightly larger
and culminates in a rectangular mihrab. The mosque protrudes out
of the city of Samarra, and the qibla wall becomes an organic part of
the enclosure of the city. An astonishing ziggurat-like spiral minaret,
50 metres in height, stands freely in front of the mosque, lined up with
the central axis. Here, the field (the mosque) overlooks its undeveloped
twin (the countryside).

73
Great Mosque
Susa, ca. 235 AH (AD 850)

Field 5 • Approx. 90 x 60 m, ([(12 x 13) – (10 x 5)]+[(3 x 13) – (2 x 11)] + 2 +

(3 x 5)) piers, 1 mihrab, 2 domes, 2 towers, 9 doors.
In order to carve out an almost regular sanctuary into the established
body of an existing city, the great mosque of Susa adds two ziyadas
(side courts with adjoining porches) to the main building. The field is
thus multiplied and heavily distorts its substance in order to adapt to
a given environment. Focusing on the sanctuary, two distinct phases
of construction are clearly visible: starting from the sahn, the first
three bays are covered by tunnel vaults and culminate in a central
dome on a slightly larger aisle. A second dome in front of the mihrab
crowns another three bays, covered by cross vaults and supported by
completely different piers. The inner logic of the field always allows a
process of adding on spaces.

74
 Great Mosque
Qairawan, 155–249 AH
(AD 772–863)
Field 6 • 70.28 x 120.8 m, [(28 x 16) – (17 x 12) – (2 x 2) + 24] columns or
piers, 2 domes, 1 mihrab, 1 minaret, 14 bastions + 37 buttresses, 6 doors.
The current face of the Great Mosque in Qairawan is the chaotic result
of the overlapping of many different hands over the centuries, even
though the main building phase took place over ninety years, begin-
ning in 772. The interior is a veritable hall of columns divided into
seventeen aisles by sixteen arcades running perpendicular to the
back wall. Here, not only is the central aisle larger and punctured by
two domes at the beginning and at the end, but the predominance of
the qibla is also stressed even more by a wider and higher transverse
arcade, thereby producing a visual climax or focus in the otherwise
forest-like space. As often occurs, the sahn is punctuated by a whole
set of small objects (a well, a pavilion, the building for the treasure
of the community, etc.) disposed in a relaxed arrangement. Within
the grid of the field, there is space for loose objects. The exterior is
extremely chaotic, being broken up by irregularly spaced buttresses
of varying size and form. In a way, the outer face of the field becomes
unimportant here.

75
 I LOVE THE SIGHT
OF LANDSCAPE IN USE

Erica Overmeer

At the edge of an area where the landscape dissolves into parking lots
and anonymous playgrounds and then finally gives way to low-rise
buildings stands an aggrieved-looking Orthodox Jewish boy. Dressed
in all the trappings of his religion, poking at a low fire that is smoulder-
ing amongst some big, scattered boulders at the edge of a vast parking
lot, he is burning unknown things, before disappearing in an inde-
terminate direction, weaving between the parked cars. Meanwhile, a
gang of black teenaged moped riders are revving their bikes and rac-
ing down the path that crosses my view, from left to right and back
again, between the indistinct school grounds nestled somewhere in
the landscape and the far end of the parking lot, where a group of
young men are gathered around a parked car with all its doors open,
gesturing wildly and screaming at each other in high-pitched voices
over the soundtrack of Arabic rap blaring from their car radio.
A few hundred metres of trails through the undergrowth lead to
the next parking lot, a sandy plot bordered by concrete park benches
beneath low trees and overshadowed by looming high-voltage elec-
tricity pylons, where wide-legged Turkish men sit with chessboards
between their knees, spending their afternoons playing chess and
boules, and where, at the close of the day, Mathilda from Haiti sets up
her deep fat fryer on an improvised terrace and serves her spicy fried
chicken wings to her mostly Creole drive-by clientele.
A black off-duty police officer walking his dog warns me of “dan-
gerous” men who might hassle me and perhaps even steal my camera.
A scary-looking youngster with a shaven head wearing a grey combat
outfit is walking an even meaner-looking dog. He follows my gaze into
the landscape and makes a friendly inquiry as to exactly what I’m doing

76
there “filming the landscape” with my old-fashioned camera; then he
wishes me luck with my endeavour.
Two young friends of African origin who are spending their after-
school hours in their elder brother’s bar follow me around and, excited
about my presence in their neighbourhood, offer to help me at any time
with anything I might need, whatever it might be. Last but not least,
a lonely black boy walks in splendid isolation, apparently unaware of
his surroundings, lost in soliloquy, jabbing his right arm out in front
of him all the while, his clenched fist and two extended fingers simu-
lating a pistol, threatening some invisible adversary.
Over and over people pop up, passing in and out of sight, engaged
in a great variety of tasks and with intentions entirely their own, each
with his or her own individual sense of purpose unknown to me; they
are all somehow using and occupying this apparently “neutral” space
in their own ways, inadvertently shaping my perception of their sur-
roundings by their very presence in and use of the space.
An elderly Maghreb man and his grandson are walking back and
forth, carrying large plastic bottles filled with water from an unknown
source to irrigate their tiny patch of squatted ground somewhere in the
middle of this landscape, concealed behind the next bush. In front of
me, a couple with a jerry can begin tapping water – illegally – from an
improvised tap connected to a well hidden by a heavy lid and a large
stone so nobody can see it.
Suddenly a man in a small white truck parks next to me, gets out
and starts shovelling sand into the back of his car until a police car
shows up a few minutes later to check the man’s ID and ask me what I’m
doing there too. They think it is okay, as long I don’t take any pictures
of small children. A woman comes wandering by and asks me if I’ve
seen her son; she wants to bring him lunch. He drives a white car. And
yes, I’d noticed the white car a moment before – he must be somewhere
around, I just saw him heading in the direction of the dump. After a
while the woman comes back and thanks me for finding her son.
And then there is William, a huge man with a broad, light-brown
face from Guadeloupe, another former French colony. He observes
me from a distance before his curiosity finally compels him to come
over to talk to me. Having lived in Sarcelles for twenty-five years, he
was practically born there, and as a former rugby player, he is now the
boss of the Sarcelles “Maison du Rugby”, a modest concrete pavilion
in the middle of the green fields, which are, in fact, rugby grounds; I’d
thought I’d been observing football fields.

77
 It’s around noon, and while I’m talking to William, behind our
backs, all kinds of large and small, bright red firefighters’ vehicles
start arriving and park neatly in a row along the edge of the next broad,
green field, overshadowed by another cluster of towering high-voltage
electricity pylons. Young athletic men dressed in dark blue trainers
climb out of the vehicles, joking and happily chatting, and divide
themselves up in two teams to start a football match.
Large boulders, concrete blocks and building-site debris seem
to have been scattered about at random but are in fact strategically
placed in squares, at junctions and at points where dirt roads and
parking lots melt into patches of green, in order to prevent travel-
lers’ cars from entering and occupying the area and setting up their
improvised camps, which is what they seem to be doing everywhere
where boulders or other barricades haven’t been put in place in time
to prevent it. During his lunch break, a short black man of unknown
origins working on a nearby construction site and dressed in bright
red overalls stretches out to sleep in the sun on the warm boulders,
which are broad enough to hold his tiny body.

Sarcelles / New Territory

Sarcelles is France’s first ville nouvelle, or new town.
It was built in the early 1960s in the greater Paris area in
the northern suburbs known as the so-called banlieue. It is
a small place, and yet it addresses all the major questions
and dilemmas of modern society and, with its inspirational,
visionary design, the challenges and conflicts of modern
urbanism in a suburban context.
Sarcelles was built as an independent town set in a
rural environment to be an autonomous centre that was
nonetheless closely linked to Paris. It was designed to
respond to the urgent housing shortage that had resulted
from the significant urban changes and remodelling that
were happening in the Paris of the sixties. The surrounding
landscape was intended to form an integral part of
Sarcelles’s layout and is a fundamental element of its urban
conception. Large housing blocks, wide green spaces,
small parks, sports facilities, broad vistas, recreational
areas, school playgrounds and a (securely fenced) Jewish
kindergarten alternate with one another. The local hospital
situated next to a waste combustion plant and huge parking
lots giving way to open spaces with no apparent use,
scattered with debris and dotted with squatters’ improvised
allotments, are all overshadowed by looming high-voltage
electricity pylons.
Everything is interconnected by dirt roads and crisscrossed
by trails that are formed by force of habit rather than design
and strewn with large boulders, concrete blocks and building
rubble, all of which appears to have been dumped at random.
The area is bordered by the suburban railway that connects
Charles de Gaulle Airport in Roissy with Paris’s Gare du
Nord; low-flying planes circle overhead. The vast skies,
illuminated at any time of the day by a kind of hazy light that
is always good for taking pictures, are cut in all directions by
a complex patterns of high-voltage power lines.

78
 99 FIELDS:
NOTES FOR A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Luca Trevisani

It happened during a mediaeval art history class. The image being

discussed was that of St Jerome in the desert. As for myself, I had
always seen St Jerome in his study, surrounded by books in the care-
fully described space defined by Antonello da Messina – more a man
of the Renaissance than a saint.
Here instead, the saint showed himself just as I had imagined a
saint would: alone, penitent, ascetic, far from the joys and tempta-
tions of society. What I found really striking, though, was the desert.
The idea of the desert.
The desert was defined by a comparison with the town painted in
the background:
this is the desert because it is not the city, which is a clear urban
ensemble. If you are not within the walls, then you are in the desert,
which does not mean sand, heat, Paris–Dakar, or a void, but rather the
negation of the town. And I also remember perceiving St Jerome in the
desert, painted just outside the city, as someone who had lost the keys
to his house and was waiting outside, just beyond the town walls.
Not much has changed, in the end, considering how we Italians
escape from the city in the springtime and celebrate the season’s
arrival with a day trip outside the walls in true Italian style. Nothing
has changed since Shakespeare had Romeo say “There is no world
without Verona walls”.
Well, I was born in Verona and, in time, I left it, and I can tell you
that there is most definitely something beyond those walls.
What follows is a selection of ninety-nine episodes that happened
there, in the fields outside Verona – episodes that showed (and keep
showing) us those fields . . . the ones beyond the city walls.

79
Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland.
London: Seely & Co., 1884.
J. J. Abrams, Lost, 2004–10.
Bas Jan Ader, In Search of the
Miraculous, 1975.
Pawel Althamer, Untitled,
2003. Neugerriemschneider,
Berlin.
Pawel Althamer, Path, 2007.
Skulptur Projekte Münster,
Münster.
Michelangelo Antonioni,
Deserto Rosso, 1964.
John Baldessari, The Backs
of All the Trucks Passed while
Driving from Los Angeles to
Santa Barbara, California,
Sunday, 20 January 1963,
1963.
Giovanni Bellini, St Jerome
Reading in the Desert, 1505.
Mario Bellini, Kar-a-Sutra, 1971.
The Berlin Wall, 13 April
1961–9 November 1989.
BBPR, Il labirinto dei ragazzi,
1954. X Triennale, Milan.
Alighiero e Boetti,
Classificando i mille fiumi più
lunghi del mondo, 1977.
Carol Bove with Janine
Lariviere, Plants & Mammals,
80
2009. Horticultural Society
of New York.
Joseph Brodsky, Fondamenta
degli Incurabili. Milan:
Adelphi, 1991.
Dino Buzzati, Il deserto dei
Tartari. Milan: Mondadori,
1940.
Frank Boezem, Weather
Drawings, 1969.
Gianni Celati, Verso la foce
Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz,
Celebration? Real Life, 1972.
Gallery House, London.
Vija Celmins, Untitled
(Ocean), 1968.
Bruce Chatwin, The
Songlines. Franklin, Penn.:
Franklin Press, 1986.
John Cheever, The Swimmer,
1964.
Cima da Conegliano,
St Jerome in the Desert,
1500/1505.
Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse
and Iannis Xénakis, Poème
électronique, 1958. Brussels.
Cosmic Wonder, Eclipse, 2005.
Joe Dante, Innerspace, 1987.
Frank Darabont, The Mist,
2007.
Walter De Maria, The New
York Earth Room, 1977. 141
Wooster Street, New York.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Blur
Building, 2002. Yverdon-les-
Bains, Switzerland.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land,
1922.
Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music
for Airports, 1978.
Luigi Ghirri and Vittorio Savi,
Luigi Ghirri: Atlante. Milan:
Charta, 2000.
J. Wolfgang Goethe, La
forma delle nuvole e altri
saggi di meteorologia. Milan:
Archinto, 2000.
Hans Haacke, Condensation
Cube, 1963–65.
Florian Hecker, Dark Energy
(22’18”), 2007. Galerie Neu,
Berlin.
Werner Herzog, Fata
Morgana, 1970.
Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1970.
Hans Hollein, Architecture
Pill, non-physical
environment, 1967.
The Holy Bible, Exodus
14:15–31.
Roni Horn, Bluff Life (To
Place, Bk. I). New York: Peter
Blum, 1990.
Roni Horn, Folds (To Place,
Bk. II). New York: Mary Boone
Gallery, 1991.
Roni Horn, Lava (To Place,
Bk. III). New York: Roni Horn,
1992.
Roni Horn, Pooling Waters
(To Place, Bk. IV). Cologne:
Walther König, 1993.
Roni Horn, Inner Geography
(To Place, supplement).
Baltimore, MD: Baltimore
Museum of Art, 1994.
Roni Horn, Verne’s Journey
(To Place, Bk. V). Cologne:
Walther König, 1995.
Roni Horn, Haraldsdóttir (To
Place, Bk. VI). Denver: Ginny
Williams, 1996.
Roni Horn, Arctic Circles (To
Place, Bk. VII). Denver: Ginny
Williams, 1998.
Roni Horn, Becoming a
Landscape (To Place, Bk.
VIII). Denver: Ginny Williams,
2001.
Roni Horn, Doubt Box (To
Place, Bk. IX). Göttingen:
Steidl, 2006.
Duglas Huebler, Location
Piece #13, 1969.
Alexander von Humboldt,
14 September 1769–6 May
1859.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of
Perception. London: Chatto
& Windus, 1954.
Peter Hyams, Capricorn One,
1978.
Derek Jarman, Derek
Jarman’s Garden. London:
Thames & Hudson, 1995.
Joe Johnston, Honey, I
Shrunk the Kids, 1989.
Friedrich Kiesler, Raumstadt,
1925. Paris.
Arata Isozaki, Electric
Labyrinth, 1968. Milan.
Sol LeWitt, Autobiography.
New York and Boston:
Multiple and Lois and
Michael K. Torf, 1980.
Lars Laumann, The Berlin
Wall, 2008.
David Lynch, Dune, 1984.
Giorgio Manganelli,
Dall’inferno. Milan: Adelphi,
1998.
Giorgio Manganelli, L’isola
pianeta. Milan: Adelphi, 1996.
Maurizio Mercuri, Theme,
1997–2000.
Robert Morris, Steam Cloud,
1966.
Piero Manzoni, Socle du
monde, 1961.
Mark Manders, Two
Connected Houses.
Amsterdam: Roma
Publications, 2010.
Enzo Mari, Modulo 856, 1967.
VI Biennale d’arte di San
Marino.
Eva Marisaldi, Plasmoniana,
1993. Galleria Neon, Bologna.
Steve McQueen, Barrage.
Cologne: Walther König
Verlag, 2000.
Marco Navarra, Parco lineare
tra Caltagirone e Piazza
Armerina, Caltagirone–S.
Michele di Ganzaria (CT),
1998–2000.
Isamu Noguchi, Moerenuma
Park, 1988–2005.
Giancarlo Norese,
Barbonato, 1996.
“Pink Floyd: Live In Venice”,
14 July 1989.
Frank Perry, The Swimmer,
1968.
Jean Prouvé, La maison
tropicale, 1951.
Ed Ruscha, Hollywood Is a
Verb, 1983.
Principality of Sealand,
1967–.
Carlo Scarpa, Tomba Brion,
1969–78. San Vito d’Altivole.
Markus Schinwald, Skies,
2009.
W. Somerset Maugham, On
a Chinese Screen. New York:
George H. Doran, 1922.
Lo spazio dell’immagine,
Palazzo Trinici, Foligno, 2
July–1 October 1967.
Charles Sprawson, Haunts
of the Black Masseur: The
Swimmer as Hero. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1992.
Gus Van Sant, Gerry, 2002.
Ettore Sottsass, “Il pianeta
come festival”, Casabella,
no. 365 (1972), 41–47.
Südgelände Nature Park,
Berlin, 2000.
Superstudio,
Supersuperficie, 1971.
Danis Tanovic, No Man’s
Land, 2001.
Andrej Tarkovskij, Stalker,
1979.
Bernard Tschumi, Fireworks,
1974. London.
Ron Underwood, Tremors,
1990.
Franco Vaccari, 700 km di
esposizione Modena Graz,
1972.
Vangelis, Antarctica, 1983.
Polydor Records.
Jules Verne, Voyage au centre
de la terre. Paris: Pierre-
Jules Hetzel, 1864.
Jules Verne, Le tour du
monde en quatre-vingts jours.
Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel,
1873.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle.
New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1963.
Wim Wenders, Notebook on
Cities and Clothes, 1989.
Wim Wenders, Tokyo Ga,
1985.
Frank Lloyd Wright,
The Japanese Print: An
Interpretation. Chicago:
Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Co.,
1912.
Piero Zanini, Significati
del confine. Milan: Bruno
Mondadori, 2000.
81
 A COLLAGE CITY

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

1 “But, if Versailles is the complete unity model and the Villa Adriana the
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, apparently uncoordinated amalgam of discrete enthusiasms and, if the
Collage City (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 91. shattering ideality of Versailles is to be compared with the relativisti-
cally produced ‘bits’ of Tivoli, then what opportune interpretations can
2
See Florian Beigel and Philip
be placed upon this comparison?”
Christou, Architecture Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City1
as City: Saemangeum
Island City (Vienna:
SpringerWienNewYork, Land Scale: Landscape as Infrastructure
2010). Saemangeum is a Some urban theorists and designers in Europe, particularly in Spain,
400-square-kilometre land
reclamation project in
have been trying in the last decade or two to find new design expres-
South Korea intended to sions for the characterless soup of urban sprawl that one finds with-
become a new city with a in and between many cities today. They have been thinking about
population of approximately
700,000 people. The aru landscapes as infrastructures for development. They are designing
design proposal entitled the site first. It is like designing the blanket first and then laying out
“Saemangeum Island City”
the picnic. It could also be described as designing the glue between
was selected in August
2008 in an international developments – a notion of a new shared space. The methodology
urban design competition/ often involves unravelling the geological and cultural history of the
workshop as one of three
winning projects, the site. A set of specific characteristics and times of the site/landscape
other two being presented are identified, respected and heightened in the new development. In
by teams from Columbia
this way the contemporary city can be made to be more site-specific,
University and MIT.
more grounded in a place, more cultured and more civic.

Islands and Bodies of Water

On the large map of the Saemangeum Island City project,2 the com-
position of bodies of water and islands of various shapes and sizes
has been formed in response to some of the specific qualities of the
site: the lake bed topography; the flow of the two large river estuaries;

82
proximity to rocks, existing islands and places of natural beauty; the
experience of being on an island, always within walking distance to
the water’s edge; and the experience one would have of the bodies of
water lying between the islands. In Saemangeum, the civility of the
city is dependent not only on the quality of the public spaces within
the city’s fabric, but also on the quality of the water spaces.
A landscape infrastructure of artificial islands and estuary land
reclamation was designed first. This landscape infrastructure is the
shared realm of the citizens, or the glue between diverse components –
the city’s blanket.

The Poetry of the Natural and the Artificial

The play between the natural beauty of the mountains, the former sea-
shore of the river estuary and the islands of the Gogunsan Archipelago,
along with the artificiality of the proposed new islands, will generate
the poetic landscape of a unique water city. To distinguish between
the two, we are proposing that the reclaimed land and the land-filled
islands have simple geometric edges. This would create a dialectical
relationship between the wild estuary and the man-made landscape.
The Water Theatre of artificial islands focuses on the wild geological
formations of the natural archipelago in the open waters of the Yellow
Sea and is the most dramatic example of this phenomenon.

City Scale: City Magnets Are Cities within the City

City magnets are densifications in the city with landscape voids
between them in the form of bodies of water, agricultural space or
areas of wilderness. The intention is to concentrate the urban fabric
in localities of density rather than allowing a dispersed, undifferen-
tiated sprawl. Magnets are in locations with good views of places of
natural beauty, such as the archipelago of islands beyond the sea wall,
or former rocks and islands on the banks of the rivers.
The Jin-Bong Lagoon City is on a peninsula between the Man-
Gyeong and Dong-Jin rivers. Two rectangular islands attach them-
selves to the peninsula: the densely inhabited River Confluence City
on the south shore of Man-Gyeong River, and the long, narrow Bridge
Island linking the Harbour City and the Sea Wall to the mainland.
Between them is a small body of water and a large wetland lagoon on
an area of lowland at the end of the peninsula. Along the southern
edge of the Man-Gyeong River are a series of steeply sloped wooded
hills that in former times were islands in the estuary. The Mang Hae

83
 Buddhist Temple is situated on the western slopes of these hills, with
a view towards the horizon and the setting sun over the water. The
River Confluence City is strategically situated to offer views to the
east over these wooded hills and the Man-Gyeong River, and to the
south over the lagoon landscape. A body of water has been retained
between the new man-made shores of the Lagoon City and the natu-
ral ones of the wooded hills to heighten the experience and special
identities of each. With the exception of the densely inhabited River
Confluence City, most of the new land in this part of Saemangeum
will be inhabited with lowland farms or lines of industrial work-
shops. Small farm villages and riverside fishing harbours (Farm
City) occupy a 400-metre-wide strip of high-lying land along the
north edge of the Dong-Jin River. The Farm City is connected to the
mainland with roads on land-filled strips that serve food-related or
biofuel industries and farmsteads.

Coexistence and Vitality

It is becoming increasingly understood that cities where different
activities occur in close proximity tend to be more vital places to
live. Such coexistences in the city could include the pairing of resi-
dential buildings with clean industry, or the presence of agritour-
ism, wetlands or port facilities within the urban fabric. At Schiphol
Airport near Amsterdam, for example, the runway is nestled among
high-tech industrial sheds and densely packed greenhouse clusters
growing tulips. Meanwhile the urban grain of the Poblenou District
in Barcelona, part of the L’Eixample urban grid, is used increasingly
by creative knowledge–based and service industries located along-
side residential uses. This coexistence of programmes offers a good
example of a sustainable city.

Local Scale: A Collage of City Structures

A collage approach has been used in the design of the city. Magnets
are composed of a number of reinterpreted and readapted versions of
found city-block types or examples of urban voids from various places
around the world. We call these “City Structures” or “City Figures”.
City Structures are characterized by their strong public realm and are
designed to be capable of accommodating multiple-use scenarios that
are adaptable to future needs. They are usually comprised of a number
of buildings of a similar type that form identifiable squares, gardens,
streetscapes and skylines. City Structures have been arranged next to

84
each other, in a manner somewhat similar to the way in which Colin
Rowe describes ancient Rome:

[W]ith its more abrupt collisions, more acute disjunctions, its more expan-
sive set pieces, its more radically discriminated matrix and general lack
of “sensitive” inhibition, imperial Rome, far more than the city of the
High Baroque, illustrates something of the “bricolage” mentality at its
most lavish.3

Rowe and Koetter’s essay, written in 1973 and published five years
later, still seems astonishingly pertinent today. They contemplate the
potential of using a bricolage mentality in urban design rather than
a purely “scientific” approach of systems, codes, measures, paramet-
rics and so on. It is useful to note that a collage technique can be used
in architecture on the scale of an individual building as well as on a 3
broader urban scale: Rowe and Koetter, Collage
City, 106.

In discussing the relativity of parts to the whole the compositional tech- 4

nique of collage is useful as it places emphasis on relationships of separate Florian Beigel and Philip
dissimilar events rather than on the ending. It has the characteristics of Christou, “Teasing
Modernity”, 2G, no. 22
spontaneity, free association, and multiple meaning – it can capture the (2002), 6.
infinite. Each part, besides contributing to the whole, possesses its own
episodic value. There are no late-comers to a collage architecture. You can
come in at any part. Walter Benjamin considered collage to be the major
constructive principle of the artistic imagination in the age of technology.
This is still so in today’s information avalanche.4

Harbour City
At the centre of Saemangeum is a cluster of marine and lake ports col-
lectively called the Harbour City. This district straddles both sides of the
sea wall. It is inhabited by city structures of differing characters and a
diverse range of programmes. It is an integral part of Saemangeum.
The Seaport City has a large industrial marina strategically placed
outside of the sea wall along an existing deep water channel to serve
container ships. Immediately adjacent is the recreational harbour
surrounded by Fisker perimeter blocks and Oido city blocks separated
by parkland strips. The high-density, high-rise Threshold City on the
lakeside links the ensemble of lake harbours to the sea wall and to
the Seaport City.
Inside the sea wall there are many lake marinas, harbours and
water-taxi ports. The Seafood Port is the focus of the Saemangeum
marine food cluster. Nestled in the heart of the city, this vibrant

85
 industry creates jobs and brings vitality to the public realm. Its quay-
side is lined with Barceloneta-type city blocks. The Barcelona Cerda
grid city block occupies a large part of the southern island of the
Harbour City, which is filled with large public squares, shops, offices,
apartments, studio spaces and clean industries. An adapted version of
the London Weymouth Mews city structure separates the quarters of
Barceloneta and Cerda city blocks. Here large public voids are carved
out of the city fabric as parks, sports fields or potentially productive
agricultural fields. Slender, frame-like multi-storey buildings along
the water’s edge act like urban windows on the horizon.

An adaptation of the
Barceloneta city-block
structure within the Jin-
Bong Lagoon city magnet.
Thomas Gantner, May 2008

86
88
An adaption of the
Barceloneta Cerda grid
within the Harbour City.
Thomas Gantner, May 2008

89
 INHABITED NATURES
Ioanna Angelidou
Tokyo is a paradigm of accelerating modernization
and rapid urbanization in the post–World War II
era. It has developed from a system of overlapping
historic urban layers that could hardly accommodate
this out-of-scale and beyond-expectation expansion
to become the giant maze of a megacity that it is
today. Interestingly enough, it is a sort of overall
indetermination that has enabled the aggressive
growth of the Japanese capital. This is partly due to
the fact that in Japan, contrary to how things work in
the West and particularly in Europe, architecture is
rarely considered a theoretical discipline; instead, it
is usually perceived as the confluence of artistic laxity
and functional efficiency. This approach is relevant
to the country’s long tradition of craftsmanship but
curiously enough also embodies core principles of
modernity.
Modern architecture seems to have practically
invaded Japan during the period of frenzied
reconstruction that followed the devastating
aftermath of the war. However, already from the mid-
1920s Japanese architects such as Kunio Maekawa
and Junzo Sakakura had travelled to Europe to
apprentice with Le Corbusier. Furthermore, the
new construction methods that went hand in
hand with modernism and introduced the use of
concrete and metal were immediately approached
90
with enthusiasm in Japan, since the local architects
wished to master them in order to utilize their
potential structurally and artistically. Indeed, the
formal and material abstraction of modernism fell
in line with vernacular building values and thus
not only was a representation of progress but also
embodied a sense of beauty, which in the West was
often associated with the negatively perceived notion
of austerity. But this appreciative embrace was short-
lived, and soon issues of adaptation as opposed to
the unquestioning assimilation of foreign elements
emerged. The utopian visions of the Metabolists were
replaced with skepticism over the megastructure and
its disregard of nature and the human scale. Though
Kenzo Tange remained a seminal figure throughout
this period and the years that followed, new
approaches emerged in Japanese architecture that
were quick to re-appropriate existent semantics with
a new focus. Arata Isozaki declared the autonomy
of architecture and celebrated its fluid associations
with the arts, Hiroshi Hara turned his interest to
vernacular settlements and the incorporation of
physical elements in design and Kazuo Shinohara
saw the potential of hybridizing continuity in the
chaotic urban condition of the Japanese city.
The greatest shift in contemporary Japanese
architecture, however, was induced by an external
factor, the country’s economy, as a series of
unfortunate events in that field towards the late
1980s instigated a prolonged period of financial
struggle. During the twenty-five years after the
speculative bubble burst, the construction industry
was greatly shaken and, consequently, Japanese
architecture came up against a combination of
financial and conceptual crises. The period of
introspection that followed nurtured new ideas and
approaches, engagement in the observation of the
urban quotidian and the re-appropriation of the
domestic ordinary. This proved a blessing in disguise
that reinforced alternative perceptions of the
differentiation between private and public as well as
between urban and domestic, which in turn nurtured
a lively vernacular of emerging contemporaneity
within the local architecture scene. In Tokyo, where
reconstruction has continuously alternated with
catastrophe, phenomena of duality and shifting
identity constitute more a recurrence than singular
events.
The Bow Wow generation, a term coined by critic
Akira Suzuki to describe young architects during
the peak of the Japanese financial crisis of the mid-
1990s, engaged in a counter-intuitive exploration of
the existing landscape. This was far from a choice of
plain artistic experimentation; rather, some degree
of adaptive re-use became inevitable when Japan
was faced with the harsh reality of recession and
significantly diminished construction activity. The
horror vacui from which every megalopolis suffers
has proven to be a source of renewal for the building
stock and spatial by-products of Tokyo. Tiny lots
and constant replacement reduce architecture’s
responsibilities and allow for the most indulgent
and often perverse designs, which present ideal case
studies of fragmentation and impermanence. A
younger architectural generation that emerged only a
decade later materializes spaces by employing design
tactics that seek to integrate the existing paradoxical
taxonomy of Tokyo’s urbanscape as a found element
rather than to erase or redefine it – in other words,
to enable a rapport of the metamodern inhabitant
with the city’s white noise through structural and
conceptual permeability that simultaneously
engages and re-appropriates it. If the contemporary
city is indeed constructed through a series of
accidents, then Tokyo is the epitome of such a playful
sequence.
How, then, is one to approach this reality through
a dissection of the part-to-part and part-to-whole
relationships that enable the continuous evolution
of a novel vernacular architecture that rapidly takes
shape during a prolonged period of crisis? Here this
question is posed in a fragmentary way by means
of an extended conversation with an insider, one
of the most active members of the post–Bow Wow
generation: the young female architect Kumiko
Inui. Tracing the non-hierarchical adaptation
of events occurring in a field of play such as the
city, the discussion that follows considers formal,
perceptional and genealogical thresholds that induce
a condition of distinct singularity. Sparked by an
image of Tokyo’s chaotic urbanscape – a photograph
of Gaien-Nishi Dori (fig. 1), which acts as the border
between the districts of Aoyama (Minato Ward) and
Harajuku (Shibuya Ward) – the conversation unfolds
1. Gaien-Nishi Dori towards
Yoyogi with the Watarium
(Mario Botta) on the
left, and Tower House
(Takamitsu Azuma) on the
right
© Ioanna Angelidou
a number of stories that enrich the Japanese capital
by creatively informing its building stock, micro-
topographies and architectural generations. At the
same time, the discussion dissects a number of small
projects that serve very aptly as case studies of the
design tactics that these nurtured.
91
White Noise
Kumiko Inui: This [Gaien-Nishi Dori] is a very famous
street among architects because of Tower House.
It is a very small house made of rough concrete and
basically only a staircase inside; all furniture is built
in the structure because there is not even enough
space for a bed, it is that small . . . It was designed in
the mid-1960s by Takamitsu Azuma, and is the most
famous house of that age; actually, it made the street
famous as well. Before this house was built there were
practically no buildings on Gaien-Nishi Dori.
It is a relatively new street. Of course, it existed before
World War II but not in the same form. After the war
many areas in Tokyo had been leveled by the bombing
raids and therefore changed character. Around this
house there were very few buildings, and for the
extended area it was one of the tallest constructions.
Ioanna Angelidou: And this is also why it is called
Tower House, even though nowadays it seems like
just a small building.
KI: Yes! It was the only concrete building as well;
around it there were only low wooden houses. But this
is not surprising because this area was basically still a
vast rice field back then.
IA: In the city!? But it is in the Shibuya Ward, which
was always part of Tokyo’s inner metropolitan area . . .
KI: One way or the other, yes. But the truth is that
immediately after World War II the metropolitan area
was limited to the current centre of Tokyo, around the
Imperial Park (Chiyoda, Chuo, Minato Wards). The
city has been expanding rapidly ever since, sprawling.
So in the 1960s the area around Tower House was only
suburban and the same held true for neighbouring
areas, such as Yoyogi Uehara. In any case, the house
was and remains a symbol of rapid progress.
92
IA: Japan and Tokyo – as the core of the country’s
economic expansion to a world superpower – have
undergone rapid urbanization and modernization
accompanied by mass migration to the cities,
which had as an effect on the introduction of
rationalization and standardization. These, being
basic principles of modernism, were prevalent in the
West but largely foreign to the local culture. However,
modernism was initially elevated to iconic status
only to be denied soon for the exact same reasons
it was so widely accepted in the first place. If this is
indeed a launching pad for architectural freedom
and formal experimentation in contemporary
Japanese architecture, how do you view the extreme
sophistication of individual works in a widely
incoherent context?
KI: As you know, the notion of context in Japan is
pretty vague. There is no clear context around the
buildings. But let us think of Europe, where the old
cities have a very concrete image that goes hand in
hand with historic continuity. It seems like such
cities have been designed as a whole and every new
building is embedded to an existing system. So if you
design in Paris, for example, you obviously can have
a clear image, a concept, about whether you actually
intend to integrate your building into the urban
landscape or not. Consequently, you can also draw
comparisons between the city and your building. But
if you were to design something in Tokyo, or in Japan
in general, this clarity of reference would not be that
easy to establish.
IA: Or, to quote Hiroshi Hara, “the part is greater
than the whole”. Is that because the reference itself
is not important or is it due to the lack of context you
mentioned before?
KI: It is not exactly that the context does not exist.
Rather, since the context is either complicated or
uncertain, it is not easy to define what it is in the first
place. It is hard to point at something and say: “This
is the context”. As an architect you have to approach it
very vaguely.
IA: So, then, essentially in European cities, where the
context is so solid, a new building would always be
an invader. And conversely, in Tokyo no matter how
bizarre an architectural object, it might fit the loose
context. You can plant a building anywhere and it
would not really matter that much what it looks like,
for even if it were inconsistent with the surroundings
it would still somehow appear as part of a fluid
whole and thus nurture an organic relationship that
elsewhere is hard to develop.
KI: Yes, every new building in the European city
somehow seems like a parasite. Take, for instance,
the Prada Omotesando building by Herzog &
de Meuron. In any other city it would stand out
immediately but in Tokyo it is not a Herzog & de
Meuron design: it is just a part of the city. In Europe
and America one might make such discernible
differentiations, but in Tokyo everything goes. That is
the Tokyo urban condition: we can design everything
and there will be nobody to say “No, this cannot be
done because it does not match its surroundings”.
IA: Is this absolute freedom liberating, to the
architect at least?
KI: Well, we could say that, but in reality it is two-fold.
This absolute freedom “tortures” creativity. If you can
potentially do anything, then there is no criticism
involved in design, nor is there criticism about the
building itself. But since these are the conditions one
has to work with in Tokyo, you somehow have to find
a “deeper” concept of the city, a more sophisticated
one. Essentially you have to invent the constraints
and impose them on yourself.
IA: I was recently reading a conversation on a similar
topic between Ryue Nishizawa and Junya Ishigami
(“Approach to Architecture”, JA: Japan Architect,
no. 72), where Nishizawa was saying the exact same
thing. An architectural project occasionally loses
the strength it might seem to have in the studio. In
context, all of a sudden this power might be no more,
as if it were instantly lost with materialization. Its
individual importance wanes because anything
would fit equally well. Even if it were designed with
the intention of attaining some sort of iconic quality,
it vanishes, and that is a major constraint as it
changes the whole perspective of the architectural
concept the moment it is inhabited.
KI: I absolutely agree. But we architects cannot help
ourselves; we always want to make our design slightly
different so that it stands out somehow, even if it
is just a little bit. You want to build something that
makes a smooth transition and matches the city
but at the same time can stand apart as unique. It
is a balance between those two things. In Tokyo we
understand that this desire is indeed a contradiction,
yet at the same time we want to embrace it, to present
a contradictory solution for this complex condition.
It is pretty much like a love-hate relationship with the
city, I think.
Three and a Half Houses: Nesting in the City
and Beyond
IA: In Japanese architecture, largely due to
size limitations, rooms must function both
individually and collectively. Thus, space seems to
be compartmentalized rather than divided in order
to enhance the idea of living together yet separately.
In this sense it is adjusted to the scale of the body
and attributes importance to physical and visual
transition. For example, you have designed
93
 separated from its neighbours. There is no easier way
to distance oneself from such a functional design
approach than to eliminate the corridor, dissolve
the transition space. Even if I have a grid in the plan,
it is materialized as walls that do not really act as
partitions. On the contrary, they actually do away
with the functional separation of spaces because
the identity of each room is blurred: you have to
pass through one room to go to the other and the
corridor element dissolves. As a matter of fact, all the
rooms function as transition spaces; they are all the
corridor.

IA: How do you see this concept being translated

in the broader context of the city of Tokyo with the
23 wards as “urban villages”, event hubs connected
by the zones of transition that constitute the
sakariba (commercial streets)? This is essentially a
relationship of points and lines, with the street as a
corridor and the buildings as individual rooms. It
seems too functional a taxonomy for a chaotic city
like Tokyo.

2. House K in Koto Ward

(2010)
© Office of Kumiko Inui

House K (fig. 2), where space is partitioned by a

number of parallel walls and gives the impression
that the interior is elongated and projected endlessly.
Even though the design does not embrace the
modernist open plan, it produces a continuous space
precisely through the partition it deploys.
3. View of Kagurazaka area,
KI: This is one of the trials of contemporary Shinjuku Ward
© Ioanna Angelidou
architecture in Japan: to grow out of the modernist
notion of functionalism. In a strictly functionalist KI: Kagurazaka is interesting. I would say it is very
building plan you would have a corridor and rooms representative of Tokyo (fig. 3). You have all those low
arranged along it and every element would be clearly wooden houses with angled roofs and then in the

94
background the towers of Nishi-Shinjuku with their
own flat roofs enveloping them. This urban condition
is very typical of Tokyo, it appears throughout the city
and everywhere. Of course, the street is indeed an
urban corridor, but at the same time it has another
aspect: we can sometimes eat in the street or we can
talk or even just relax there. So the street is space
for movement but at the same time it is also an
event space – everything can happen in the street.
In Kagurazaka there are some very narrow streets,
maybe one metre wide or even less, sometimes
just enough space for one person to pass through.
Yet, people even place some very nice plants out to
decorate their neighbourhood. All sorts of small
social actions take place there. Another area that
functions this way is Yanaka, next to Nippori Station
north of Ueno Park. Again, it is an area with low
wooden houses and old temples, a historic area with
very narrow, lively alleys. Of course, this is relevant to
the population as well: older people tend to socialize
like this but we, as architects, are interested in this
sort of urban corridor and its inhabitation. It is some
sort of traditional habit, a way of living that inspires
admiration because it has developed through
time and experience. So why not try to employ this
experience and materialize it in contemporary
architecture, take this habit and use it to establish
new relationships between inside and outside on
more than one level and within a different context?
IA: Speaking of smallness, the hyper-fragmentation
and miniscule sites in Tokyo are paired with a
complex set of building regulations. They respond
to a number of issues such as volumetric control, site
coverage and total floor area. Even the amount and
way a building generates shade on neighbouring lots
is strictly defined.
KI: We currently have a project in the office that we
call House O and is still in progress, but the main
idea is for it to appear as a solid monolith that gets
natural light from a small internal courtyard and a
big skylight above it. It is for a family, and the wife’s
mother stays with them so the husband wants
to make a nice space for her and also keep a nice
space for himself to relax, keeping the generations
separated under the same roof. The courtyard will be
the space the family shares and the big skylight will
make it very sunny and bright – no shadows in there.
But the building itself, the monolith, is an adaptation
of the shape the shadow of the single volume of the
courtyard would create. So, as a matter of fact, we are
currently designing a sort of shadow-shaped building
(fig. 4).
4. House O in Ohta Ward,
Tokyo (ongoing since 2009)
Model
© Office of Kumiko Inui
IA: Have you also found smallness to be a beneficial
constraint? A prime example would be Tokyo
Apartment I in Hiroo, a project of yours where each
unit is 25 square metres including the circulation
core, or barely 17 square metres of inhabitable space.
That is extremely small even by Tokyo standards (fig. 5).
95

5. Apartment I in Hiroo,
Shibuya Ward (2005)
© Daici Ano
KI: I like the smallness that has developed from
hyper-fragmentation, yet at the same time I also
feel too limited and sometimes get tired of it. The
site width for Apartment I was 6 metres in total. Of
course, we enjoyed the smallness; we managed to get
something good out of it. But we spent such a long
time finding solutions that efficiently respond to the
programme requirements. Because an apartment
has given functions that impose a number of
limitations, and beyond that you need fire escapes
and all those other things that add difficulties. No
matter how small a site, the limitations are the same,
so the complexity increases exponentially, and this
also means that if you only work with tiny sites the
repetition becomes boring. On the other hand,
there are few opportunities to design – especially
for the younger generation of architects – so such
96
small commissions are much needed, and equally
time-consuming as a bigger one nonetheless! But
beyond practical constraints, the real issue is that
all small sites, regardless of their location and
specific dimensions, are essentially similar. So when
you open a magazine of contemporary Japanese
architecture and you see all these small houses, of
course, every time it is a different architect and a
different design but it seems as if all are basically
trying to solve the same problem and inevitably
end up with a more or less similar solution. It is
very difficult to find a new design problem beyond
how to get more natural light or make a beautiful
building. So as a project it does pose challenges,
but the architectural question itself it is not entirely
challenging. The small site and its constraints
are already typical for us since we design in Tokyo
anyway, but the real constraint is one we set ourselves
and that is to find something else in the project. Or
at least this is how I feel; I have to impose this kind
of additional limitation upon the project and create
some more trouble for myself.
IA: Would a house in a suburban area pose fewer
such problems and thus be more challenging
architecturally? I suppose that in that case one would
immediately be faced with the lack of Tokyo’s density
but an indeterminate context nonetheless.
KI: We have a guest-house project, Small House H. It
was an addition to the main house and faces the back
yard, where there are only a number of trees – a rural
and generic landscape. I was thinking, “Were I to live
in this guest pavilion, would I like it?” So I felt I had to
enhance the context through the architecture of the
little house itself. We rotated the guest-house volume
and used diagonal walls so the rooms are triangular,
but the view from each is different and private (fig.
6). One overlooks a bamboo forest, another the
garden lantern, and the third the other side of the
 A D

3 2

1 2

1 dining room A view of the deserted 6. Plan of Small House

2 room garden H in Takasaki, Gunma
3 bathroom B view of the existing main Prefecture
A. view of the deserted garden
4 existing Japanese-style building ©B.Office
view of
of Kumiko Inui main build
the existing
dining room C view of the sculpture C. view to the sculpture garden a
5 existing hall garden and existing green existing green painted fence
painted fence D. view to the bamboo forest
D view of the bamboo forest
1. dining room
2. room
3. bathroom
garden. Only the entrance space with the dining Invisible Fields 4. existing japanese style dining
room overlooks the main house, so each room has 5. existing hall
its unique view and does away with the strangeness IA: You mentioned the integration of tradition
of the environment, the mixture of mismatched and habits of generations past in contemporary
elements built throughout the years. We attempted to architecture. Although you were mainly referring to
redefine the relationship with the context since there quotidian domestic life, it got me thinking about the
was no way to change it. genealogy of architectural ideas in general, which

97
raises the issue of past masters. What do you think of
Tange’s Yoyogi Olympic Gymnasium complex (fig. 7)?
7. Yoyogi Olympic
Gymnasium (Kenzo Tange)
© Ioanna Angelidou
KI: That is, of course, a masterpiece! I love it because
it is a great engineering feat and at the same time a
very beautiful form; it is like an inhabitable sculpture
and as such represents a great combination.
IA: So in that sense could we say it somehow blends
modernist principles with local tradition? New
construction methods involving concrete and metal
were imported to Japan from the West and were the
main reason modernism was initially embraced
enthusiastically. At the same time, the functionalism
that accompanied modern architecture seemed
somewhat mismatched with the Japanese mentality,
which holds beauty and individuality in such high
regard. And Tange’s buildings for the 1964 Tokyo
Olympics seemingly combine the two approaches
perfectly.
KI: I think the Olympic Gymnasium bears a great
resemblance to the work of Saarinen, with the
suspended concrete structure like a tent. That kind
of design was popular in the late 1950s, so in that
sense it was part of a broader international scene in
98
modern architecture of which I think Yoyogi is one of
the best-realized examples.
IA: Discussion about modernism and its adaptation
to the local context has eventually led to at least two
distinct architectural groups that are continuously
renewed and evolving based on the Japanese
tradition of acquiring knowledge and experience
through the transition within a hierarchy. The
employment of this hierarchical working mode is
also a blend of the professional world and school: a
disciple is essentially a student. We have the family
tree growing from those that instigated the Tradition
Debate in the 1950s: Yoshiro Taniguchi – Kiyoshi
Seike – Kazuo Shinohara – Toyo Ito – Kazuyo Sejima.
Then there is the modernist line that goes back to
Le Corbusier: Kunio Maekawa – Kenzo Tange – the
Metabolists – Arata Isozaki. Jun Aoki was your sensei
(master) and he, in turn, was a disciple of Isozaki.
To what degree has this informal architectural
genealogy affected your personal design approach,
considering your experience studying abroad at Yale,
too?
KI: It is very interesting to see the differences
between working in Japan and working abroad. For
example, here when you work for somebody – in
my case for Jun Aoki – you spend four years or more
studying a certain approach and then you start your
own practice. But in Europe or America you might
get the chance to work for many different offices
within the same period; thus you experience lots of
different things and find what fits you best before you
set out on your own. In Japan one would rarely get
that chance. I am interested in hearing about your
experience in this regard as well.
IA: Well, I studied and practiced in Europe and
America before working in Japan, so my perception
of the situation is bound to be different. Even in
Japan I have worked in a big office with international
projects, which means that inevitably both the staff’s
composition and the hierarchical system that they
operate within are largely Westernized. But we still
work in small teams, essentially two or three people
where one is a kohai (junior or assistant) and the
other a sempai (intermediate or tutor). And the sensei
is always personally involved in all the projects, so
you interact with him directly.
KI: Because your sensei is open-minded and
interested in listening to what young people have to
say. So he operates his office like that even though 90
people are involved and there are many international
projects – a Westernized version of the Japanese
apprentice system. It is not a real system, but as a
result it appears to be one, doesn’t it? And even in
Japanese architecture schools it is similar: you enter
a lab and study under a certain individual.
IA: Then if we think of the contemporary Japanese
architecture scene, we have Toyo Ito, who studied
under Shinohara but worked for Kikutake. This is
paradoxical in a way, because the latter belongs to the
Metabolists; thus Ito combines both school lines, the
one that grows from Maekawa and is pro-modern,
and the other from Taniguchi, who was skeptical
of the assimilation of Western architectural
influences without a process of re-appropriation and
adaptation. But anyway, we associate Ito with a single
approach at a time as a disciple. Then Kazuyo Sejima
worked for Toyo Ito and went on to start her own
practice. From the younger generation, the so-called
post–Bow Wow, we could also mention Akihisa
Hirata, who also emerged from Ito’s office, Hiroshi
Nakamura from Kengo Kuma’s, Ishigami from
Sejima’s and of course yourself, from Aoki’s office.
KI: The apprentice system has two sides, a good
one and a bad one. The good side is that you learn
from your sensei’s approach, but on the other
hand this can easily be diminished to mannerism.
Nevertheless, it is a great opportunity for young
architects, because one gets the chance to grow
rapidly by concentrating on architecture per se; the
sensei will usually be dealing with outside issues
that would otherwise become a distraction from
design when you run your own practice. Speaking
from my experience in Aoki-san’s office, all of the
architects were very young, in their mid-20s to early
30s. Yet, each member of the staff is in charge of a
project all by themselves, and of course it is difficult,
but there is no other internal hierarchy, only Aoki
and the young architect without any intermediate
project management. This means that when you
are in charge of a project you have to take it to the
end; even if you wanted to leave the office you could
not really do that until the particular project is
completed, which means that in the process you
learn how to approach it architecturally as well as
how architecture works as a business.
IA: Exactly. Whereas in Europe or America, especially
in a corporate office, by the time you have actually
moved up and are entrusted with responsibility
for a project you might be around 40 – or it might
just as well never happen. In that sense Western
architecture is way more hierarchical, and not in a
very productive way either.
KI: Yes, and on the other hand in the Japanese
system the quality of the outcome largely depends
on interpersonal dynamics. If the sensei and
the apprentice get along too well, the project
will inevitably be representative of the master’s
approach. But if the apprentice has developed a
strong individual approach or is a more forward
character, new, interesting combinations occur. It is
a continuous struggle, and in a multi-person, clearly
organized professional hierarchy this mixture of
characters is harder to develop.
99
Spatial Illusions
IA: There exists in Japanese culture the idea of
engawa, essentially a space bringing together interior
and exterior – an intermediate space that acts as
connecting matter. In the commercial areas of Tokyo,
such as Ginza, this concept is either completely
shattered by the excessive use of billboards and neon
signs or it is translated into the sophistication of
the flagship-store skins, where design is essentially
limited to a surface that is barely 30 centimetres
deep, yet still manages to produce an effect of
threshold space.
KI: To tell you the truth, maybe because I have done
one project too many of the kind, I tend to find it
limiting as well. But in all cases I have always tried to
consider the relationship between city and building
and simultaneously also that between city and brand.
The brand will usually be a global one, in which
case if you make the building–brand relationship
too obvious, it will inevitably create an awkward
relationship with the city and the building will be
diminished to the status of a sign – just an object. So
the point is to create a site-specific envelope, a sort of
localized one. For the Dior flagship store in Ginza we
used the custom pattern that expresses their identity,
but at the same time we tried to make a vast white
and bright surface, because it is located in Ginza and
that area is full of huge, bright billboards. It is such
an electric part of the city, so I wanted to make the
building part of that context.
IA: But patterning is an important architectural
element in your work, and I mean as a scheme to
create space rather than as a feature of a material
envelope per se, such as a façade.
KI: One of my earliest projects was the renovation of
the offices of a kindergarten in Kataokadai. There
100
we tore down the external walls and replaced them
with vertical louvers, like stripes. Then we painted
the interior walls with colourful horizontal stripes,
so when you look at the building the façade stripes
together with the interior stripes create a gingham
check pattern. Depending on the angle from which
you look at it, it might seem like a three-dimensional
space or a two-dimensional pattern. You know, in
office spaces there are so many objects cluttered
together. Offices for kindergartens in particular are
always messy, with desks, chairs, books, toys and
even food lying around . . . But I did not want to make
a closed space; it should be nice and sunny inside.
At the same time I thought it might not be a good
idea to expose this messiness to the exterior, so I
tried to come up with a way to disguise it. The spatial
gingham check is not just a façade: it becomes the
building. I think it worked out quite well, because
this illusion has a cute effect, and it is a kindergarten,
after all.
IA: And then there is also that small tea-house you did
some years ago, the Shin-Yatsushiro Monument, where
envelope and structure become one, and their blend is
the pavilion space, an inhabitable object (fig. 8).
8. Shin-Yatsushiro
Monument in Yatsushiro,
Kumamoto Prefecture
(2004)
© Daici Ano
KI: We were invited to design this pavilion outside a
newly constructed train station for a new Shinkansen
(bullet train) line. The site is a non-place in the
middle of a rice field with nothing else around. But
they somehow decided to plant the station there
and asked us to design something to put outside the
entrance; it was a little bit strange. Obviously, it is
kind of hard to come up with an idea for this kind
of context – a rice field and an unassuming station,
that’s all. We did not want to make something that
would only be connected to the station; indeed,
we preferred to use the rice field as an inspiration
or reference because at least it was there before
the station. But since the invitation was to “do
something for the station” in the first place, we had
to find some sort of balance between our urge and
the client’s wish. So we imagined a house-shaped
solid and then started punching holes into that
shape – seven different dimensions of openings, the
biggest being 2.4 metres. When you look at it from
afar – for example, when you approach the station
with the rapid train – of course you only see the big
square holes, because human eyesight is limited;
from a greater distance the pavilion indeed looks
like a typical Japanese wooden house in the rice field.
Then as you move closer and the train slows down,
you gradually perceive that it is a lacy structure, so it
is more like a contemporary sculpture that better fits
the surroundings of a new station. And of course, you
can also sit inside and enjoy the sun – or the rain –
once you get off the train, because that is what you
usually do in a pavilion. Instead, this one is not really
static; it is an idea that reveals itself through the
viewer’s movement and approach.
Fragmentation and Osmosis
IA: What you describe is a very poetic approach for
a project set in a largely insignificant context that
grew out of a very practical need. This traces a rich
intermediate space beyond the differentiation
between intuition and rationalization in architecture,
which has been an issue in Japanese architecture for
several years, as you yourself have argued. I think, and
you might agree, that this partly led to a high degree
of abstraction in contemporary architecture in Japan
– an abstraction that is both formal and material,
and often extreme to the extent of coming across as
either humorous or intentionally naive. However,
this approach is also contradictory in the sense that
it is not quite clear whether it builds upon criticism of
modernist austerity or actually idolizes the latter.
KI: The 1980s were all about postmodernism and
semantics. Everyone was talking about meaning and
shape and how they come together – how a building
is like an object or how function is integrated into
a sculpture. The emergence of OMA is a boundary;
it is like a revolution in architecture. Before OMA,
architecture was a mixture of function and art, but
in OMA’s work the programme becomes important.
Not only that, but it becomes the main issue of
architecture, and it is so interesting because the
programme itself is interesting as a mixture. You can
have a space that combines a station and a museum
or a house and an elevator and so on and so forth –
spaces that are bizarre and interesting at the same
time. From that point on, I think architecture has
tried to make the buildings more obedient, almost
submissive to the programme. No additions or
ornamental design. We Japanese admire simplicity,
and one way to achieve that in architecture is by
moving towards abstraction. Yet we maintain the
quality of ornament in the sense that the sculptural
aspect of a form becomes an inhabitable space. Thus
intuition and function come together.
IA: Besides that, intuition could also be perceived as
the unconscious deployment of recurring ideas.
101
KI: This reminds me of the Asakusa competition
project (fig. 9), where we used the experience from
Apartment I to come up with a different concept. We
had to design a tower structure with an inevitable
vertical circulation core. The site was relatively small,
but the requirement was still a tower-like structure
eight or nine floors tall, and that is a lot of space. In
this case the issue of vertical connection becomes
an important matter because it is necessary, and
its resolution largely affects the rest of the design.
If one were to use a single core, it might work fine,
but then it is a typical tower and architecture is
diminished to just a façade design. So we broke down
the programme and also fragmented the vertical
circulation core into more than one shaft, spreading
them around. This idea of slightly shifting the plan’s
elements in order to break the verticality in section is
drawn from Apartment I but it is also relevant to the
context. Asakusa is a tourist area with a homonymous
and very famous temple, and all of these small shops
and commercial pavilion structures spread around
it. Usually temples have a wall or gate to protect them,
but in Asakusa there is no built element to divide the
temple space from the surrounding area; you would
basically move from the shops inside the Tourist
Centre directly into the temple. We tried to reflect
this idea of fragmentation and smaller spaces in
the interior of the Tourist Centre tower as well, not
like a metaphor but rather by deploying the same
system in a different way on each floor. We also used
colour directly drawn from the context – the red-and-
purple flags or lanterns – to create a similar effect by
cladding the programmatic boxes like a landscape of
small colourful pavilions spread around each floor.

IA: It is interesting because this project, in a way,

9. Asakusa Tourist Centre in
Taito Ward (2008)
Competition scheme (2nd
Prize)
© Office of Kumiko Inui
is the inversion of the fragmentation in the Hibiya
Kadan flower shop in Chiyoda, where you have a
forest of small towers planted among the trees of
Hibiya Park (fig. 10).
KI: We were asked to design a building with a height
of 7.5 metres. This was something we could not
avoid, as our flower shop would be replacing the

102
 you position yourself among the small towers, it is
the opposite: you are in the open air, but since the
composition is pretty dense you wonder whether you
might actually be enclosed within a room after all.
It creates a different sense of interior and exterior;
it is like a double blurring of the boundary between
inside and outside.

10. Hibiya Kadan flower

shop in Yurakucho, Chiyoda
Ward (2009)
View from Yurakucho
© Daici Ano
older structure that the same florist had occupied
on the site and had been demolished. The building
regulations for the Yurakucho area prescribed that
the same outline and height be maintained even
though it was a pavilion inside Hibiya Park and there
were no neighbouring structures. At the same time,
we could not have a two-storey building; that was
a strange limitation but proved to be quite a nice
constraint in the end. We took the prescribed outline,
which was approximately 100 square metres in plan,
and made a single volume with a height of 7.5 metres.
Then looking at it we thought, “OK, it’s nice; it is very
spacious but not very interesting, because what is
the special experience? This is a kind of space that
we all know.” So we started to chop the space up into
smaller volumes, keeping the height consistent. The
smaller the plan of the fragment, the more difficult
it becomes to get a direct view of the ceiling. So even
though you are in an enclosed space, your perception
of its vertical limit is blurred: it almost seems as if
there is no ceiling and it is open to the sky. Then if

103
 DOMESTIC FIELDS:
GEOFFREY BAWA’S HOUSE
IN COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

Virginia Chiappa Nunez and Pietro Pezzani

In 1959 Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa rented the third in a row
of four bungalows on 33rd Lane off of Bagatelle Road in Colombo,
which was the capital city of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) at the time.
A descendant of a wealthy, ethnically mixed family belonging to
Colombo’s middle-class Burghers, Bawa had returned to his native
island for two years after two long periods of training and travel. Ten
years earlier, he had bought and started to redesign a ten-hectare
property with an old bungalow on Dedduwa Lake that was to become
his famous Lunuganga estate. As a result, the bungalow in Colombo
served as a small pied-à-terre in the city while Bawa launched his
architectural practice.
The plot consisted of a row of bungalows typical of Colombo’s sub-
urbs: it was narrow, enclosed by walls, and incorporated a side lane
to provide access to the different bungalows. Bawa’s first home thus
consisted of nothing more than a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom
Geoffrey Bawa, Bawa House, and a room for his servant.
original plan Just as John Soane did for his house at Nos. 12, 13 and 14 Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, Bawa succeeded in buying the bungalow in which he was
living as well as the remaining three in the row in an apparently
unplanned process of horizontal expansion over a period of ten years.
Once the four bungalows and their incoherent geography of rooms
were finally annexed, this tropical John Soane started to transform
the whole complex. Bawa would bring to his 33rd Lane house many
of the experiences he had collected over the period in which the den-
sification of Colombo’s residential suburbs, together with the rise of
a new middle class of clients, was changing the former requirements
of single-family homes. As properties became smaller, the traditional

104
 typology consisting of a bungalow in the middle of a garden was no
longer suitable.
In his projects for the De Silva house and the Bartolomeusz house
(which would later become his own office), Bawa carried out a sub-
stantial subversion of the prior typology, bringing the garden inside
the house in the form of a central courtyard surrounded by verandas
and open loggias. The final result, at once introspective and highly
permeable, owed as much to Bawa’s training in modern architecture
as to traditional local techniques for creating natural ventilation.
A similar approach can be seen in the 33rd Lane project, but the
outcome here was much more radical. The plot’s initial condition of
saturation was not only taken as the fixed point of the project, but was
pushed to the point at which any sort of figure–ground relationship
almost disappeared: instead of generating tensions and relation-
ships between the former bungalows and the limits of the plot, Bawa
eliminated any distinction between object and container – the house
ends where the plot ends. The scrap of land is cut – or one could say
ploughed – by lines that, starting from the geometry of the bungalows’
former arrangement, reach the boundary of the lot and could ideally
continue onward, forming an irregular, infinite pattern. The perim-
eter wall acts as a frame: its form being generically rectangular, it is
indifferent to whatever happens inside.
The division and distribution of the four formerly distinct residen-
tial units (the house’s archaeology) is still somehow recognizable, but
their topology has been broken. Several rooms with different shapes
and dimensions, stacked up in a horizontal, Tetris-like patchwork, are
connected one to the other in surprising and daring sequences: liv-
ing room–patio–kitchen–patio–patio–bedroom–patio, etc. Any sense
of hierarchy is lost.
Seen in these terms, the two houses that Bawa built for himself
during his lifetime can be perceived as the result of extremely opposed
approaches concerning the visual and phenomenological relationship
between interior and exterior space.
On the one hand, there is Lunuganga, which borrows from both
the traditional English country houses and the Italian gardens
experienced by the architect during his travels and is situated at
the centre of a luxurious garden that can only be fully enjoyed and
understood from the privileged vantage point of the house. Even
the vegetation of the garden was shaped to provide the house with
radiating views.

106
 On the other hand, in the complex on 33rd Lane there is no cen-
tre from which one can appreciate the whole; rather, infinite points of
view generate a planar graticule of gazes that indifferently cross open
and enclosed spaces, one after another. Here objects and vegetation
establish the atmosphere and function of the different spaces, along
with some elementary binary attributes – enclosed/open, covered/
uncovered. There is no proper exterior space, no proper void; instead,
many small patios comprise a grid entirely characterized by ever-
changing conditions. As in a maze, space is multiplied by means of
folding the interior of an enclosed shape, for even in its higher parts
the building seems to fold vertically on itself like a mat. Quite signifi-
cantly, when the house rises up for two floors it loses its introspec-
tive quality and almost becomes an observatory, something made to
provide the pleasure of a different perspective, of a view over the flat
landscape of the city.
As in subsequent works – e.g. the Mora House by Abalos & Herreros
or the first version of the experimental house in Tianjin by Ryue
Nishizawa – there are almost no distribution spaces: one must step
from one room into the next, creating one’s own path through an iso-
tropic space. What unites these distinct and distant projects is “the pos-
sibility of organizing a contemporary domestic space without reference
to either the modern model of the open plan, or the traditional one of
rooms and corridor” (Abalos & Herreros). Nevertheless, what strikes one
most in Bawa’s project and, even in its apparent casualness, makes it
even more interesting and radical than its successors is its completely
introverted nature in relationship to its surroundings. This is a quality
that neither the Mora House nor Nishizawa’s house in Tianjin share
(or at least not to the same extent), both being placed in the middle of
an open-air landscape like traditional observatory-villas.
In conclusion, perhaps Bawa’s house on 33rd Lane owes part of
its iconic power precisely to its suburban quality, that is, its complete
indifference to any “exterior” urban expression, which is something
ultimately related to its capacity to engender an almost atomized
“outside condition” within its own interior.
Eventually, the exact correspondence between house and plot
makes the 33rd Lane home look like the basic unit of a potential urban
configuration: a horizontal urban fabric based on the completely pri-
vate colonization of space by enclosed domestic fields.

108
 ENTANGLEMENT

Joseph Grima

Once there was a city. The city was neither large nor beautiful. It had
no history. The only distinctive feature of the city was a gaping hole
in the earth that lay on the city’s perimeter, singularly close to the
city itself. It was more than a pit, in fact: it was a chasm, a gaping void
many times larger than the city itself. It could have easily swallowed
the city whole.
The city didn’t exist in spite of the hole; the city existed because of
the hole. Likewise, the hole didn’t exist in spite of the city, but because
of it, for the city’s network of roads, railways, conveyor belts, smelting
furnaces, markets, offices and theatres was what nourished the hole’s
growth. At the height of the hole’s productivity, both the hole and the
city doubled in size in the span of five years. The hole was the city’s
alter ego or its raison d’être, but also a trophy of sorts, a testament to
the city’s achievement.
Not all “holes” are as tangible as this one, but every city has its
own: an objective to be accomplished and a physical footprint on the
landscape, which only rarely can be represented in a single image, or
as a unitary spatial body. The landscape is the parchment on which the
history of the city’s accomplishments is inscribed, stratified layer by
layer on top of many other similar narratives. Fragmentary landscapes
are assembled out of a multitude of strips and shards of infrastructure,
tracts and offcut chunks of service space, constellations of logistics
centres, archipelagos of business parks, or entire swathes, sectors and
distant belts of productive agricultural or industrial land, all of which
is both a product of, and necessary to, the existence of some remote
and possibly unfamiliar urban entity.

110
 In a quasi-tautological plot twist, “holes” themselves can take
on urban form. Until the 2008 crisis forced Dubai to seek a humili-
ating bailout from Abu Dhabi, it operated simultaneously as a city
and a highly efficient machine for attracting capital from other cities
around the globe and transforming it into real estate. As Christopher
Hawthorne wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “In a fundamental sense,
many of Dubai’s skyscrapers were conceived and designed primarily
as vessels to store excess liquidity. If the endless rows of stalled tow-
ers now resemble mere shells, perhaps shells are all they were ever
meant to be.”1
In the days of the boom, The Economist noted, supply in Dubai
seemed to create its own demand. For the city to grow, the hole had
to get deeper, and for the hole to continue to get deeper, the city had
to grow. 1
However, given that Dubai’s explosive growth over the last dec- Los Angeles Times, 21 June
2009, available online at
ade owes less to the presence of a favourable environment for urban http://articles
growth than to an advantageous geopolitical context, it soon found .latimes.com/2009/jun/21
/entertainment/ca-dubai21.
itself lacking the significant infrastructural prerequisites neces-
sary to supporting the existence of a city of several million people.
Suddenly exposed to the danger of chronic food shortages caused by
the UAE’s predictable inability to feed its own cities, and spurred by
the volatility of food prices and a turbulent global economic climate,
the Emirates have taken to purchasing vast tracts of land on distant
continents: entire extra-urban regions of the developing world are
being transformed into topographical insurance policies against
future food scarcity. Over the past three or four years, China, South
Korea, several Gulf states and other nations that have undergone
explosive economic, demographic and consequently urban growth
have scrambled to purchase or lease vast quantities of land in foreign
countries. Korean agribusiness, Qatari corporations, Chinese food
traders, Saudi investment banks and European private equity funds –
all with government backing – have become the proprietors of entire
regions of arable terrain in Argentina, Uganda, Brazil, the Philippines
and Kenya. Megafarms of unprecedented fertility have sprung up in
impoverished Sudan, and Mali has seen a spike in foreign acquisitions
of agricultural land. The output of these territories bears no relation to
the economies of the nations that surround them – they are in effect
fragments of the distant urban entities to which they belong, and to
which their output is shipped the very moment it is harvested. These
agricultural landscapes could be described as the spatial prostheses

111
 of the metropolitan regions they belong to: as such, they enable the
urban body but are not considered a part of it.
In quantum physics there exists a state in which two quantum par-
ticles – photons of light or atoms, for example – are linked so intimately
that they remain connected even if separated across an entire galaxy,
a condition defined by the scientist Erwin Schrödinger as “entangle-
ment”. A similar form of entanglement is visible in the landscape: there
are towers, fields, cables, dams, substations, corridors, server farms,
fish farms, power plants, grain silos, motorways, railways and objects
ranging in scale from single buildings to an entire region whose pur-
pose of existence is intimately bound not to their visible surroundings
but to a distant but specific entity. Systems of an almost inconceivable
complexity overlap and intertwine, layering themselves one upon the
other to produce a new typology of entangled spatial relations. Now
and then, the news offers us the odd anecdotal reminder of the con-
temporary city’s tentacular – and at times brittle – web: a pensioner in
northern Georgia, scavenging for copper wire, unintentionally severs
an underground fibre optic cable, thereby instantaneously depriving
the entire region of Tbilisi of Internet access. And of the thousands of
secret U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, one that caused
particular consternation was a list of the hundred sites of “critical
infrastructure” scattered across five continents whose loss would,
almost instantaneously, “critically impact the public health, economic
security, and/or national and homeland security” of America. The list
is a mundane yet incisive snapshot of the physical fabric of this inter-
linked global web: a lab in Kvistgaard, Denmark; an undersea cable
connection in Brookvale, Australia; flood-control dams along the Rio
Grande between the U.S. and Mexico; a tin mine in Peru; hydroelectric
dam turbines in Chiba, Japan . . .

In 1865, at the age of thirty, the English economist William Stanley

Jevons published a volume titled The Coal Question in which he theo-
rized a counterintuitive phenomenon observed in Britain’s rapidly
industrializing economy. He argued that contrary to expectations,
technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use
tended to increase the consumption of fuel rather than decrease it.
Jevons observed, for example, that England’s coal use soared after
James Watt introduced his coal-fired steam engine, a design that
greatly improved the efficiency of Thomas Newcomen’s earlier inven-
tion. The explanation offered by Jevons was that Watt’s innovations

112
made coal a more cost-effective power source, thereby leading to the Mirny diamond mine,
increased use of the steam engine in a wide range of industries. This Mirna City, Russia

in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal

required for any particular application fell:

If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished

in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new
capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand
2
for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more William Stanley Jevons, The
than make up for the diminished consumption of each. . . . It is a confu- Coal Question: An Inquiry
sion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to Concerning the Progress of
the Nation, and the Probable
diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.2 Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines
(London: Macmillan and Co.,
The Jevons paradox suggests that technological progress that 1865).
improves the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase –
rather than decrease – the rate of consumption of that resource. Energy
efficiency in fridges, in other words, might reduce the amount of energy
consumed by the individual fridge, but the money saved on electricity
by the fridge’s owner could well mean that he or she can afford to own
a second fridge in a second home in a remote location that requires
several hours’ travel to be reached. Energy consumption of fridges

113
 declines, yet overall energy use rises; the average European spends
the same amount of time travelling today as he or she did fifty years
ago, but uses that time to travel considerably longer distances. Today
the average German drives 15,000 kilometres a year; in 1950, the same
individual would have on average covered fewer than 2,000.
Had Jevons been a 21st-century geographer rather than a 19th-
century economist, his observations might just as easily have been
inspired by the effects of technological advancement and the “sus-
tainability movement” on the landscape. A hypothetical 21st-century
equivalent of The Coal Question might address the notion of space itself
as a finite resource, itself a victim of increased efficiency:
William Stanley Jevons
China’s Broad Group showcased their rapid building technology by con-
structing the 15-story Ark Hotel in Changsha, Hunan province, in less
3
See http://www.gizmag
than six days. The hotel used one sixth the material of an equivalent
.com/15-story-hotel-built-in sized building with a cost saving of 20% while still being able to with-
-less-than-6-days/17711/. stand a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. In addition the building uses several
technologies to result in energy efficiency five times that of comparable
buildings . . . 3

As the effort and cost of producing space – through building,

demolishing, excavating, terraforming, assembling, dismantling –
diminishes, the magnitude of transformation increases exponentially,
in a proportionate response to the demand. And paradoxically, the
explosive growth of what we recognize as “urban fabric” is the most
familiar but least significant aspect of this force of transformation:
it is the dispersed, ancillary, entangled spaces of the city, the locus
of the infrastructural underpinnings that reside in “the field” – the
uninhabited interstitial spaces that are neither urban nor rural – that
constitute the spatial legacy of the present. They are the mirror image
of density, the alter ego of “green” urbanism, the unrecognized spa-
tial corollary of unprecedented efficiency. The cultural equivalency
between technology and miniaturization in Western culture has pro-
duced a curious trick of perspective: the vastness of transformation
is concealed in plain sight, shielded from scrutiny by its failure to fall
within the preordained categories of what we call urbanism.

114
 AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

YellowOffice

Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in 1872. The protago-
nist, the London gentleman Phileas Fogg, a member of the Reform
Club, decides to circumnavigate the world in eighty days to win a
20,000-pound bet. The historical period was one of great technologi-
cal innovation, witnessing the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), the
construction of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (1870) and the
completion of the part of the Pacific Railroad called “the great trunk
line” (1869). As a consequence, the way one thought about journeys
at the time drastically changed. The dream of escaping to another
world spread quickly thanks to new means of transportation, from
trains to hot-air balloons and steamers. The boundaries of the world
changed, and consequently so did the perception of them. The hori-
zon expanded to the point of being launched into space in a projec-
tion of progress that in many cases became a stimulus for scientific
research. In Verne’s novel, the world seen by Mr. Fogg is smaller and
faster. The presupposed geographic dimension is that of a whole: you
can go around the world in just eighty days. Mr. Fogg collects, lists
and compares landscapes that he perceives according to a new speed,
a new scale. In eighty days, our hero travels to Egypt, India, Japan,
Hong Kong, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, New York and Ireland before
finally returning to London to win his bet and get married. And after
his many adventures, which take him across a dizzying succession of
fields, the hyper-bourgeois Fogg becomes the model of a new kind of
freedom, or of a new happiness. He establishes a new relationship with
technology, he experiences a new sense of scale and he experiments
with a new, dynamic perception of the self through contact with dif-
ferent peoples and landscapes.

115
What follows is a series of
excerpts from Verne’s Around
the World in 80 Days.
Chapter 1
Unheard Travellers
Had he travelled? . . . He often
corrected, with a few clear
words, the thousand con-
jectures advanced by mem-
bers of the club as to lost and
unheard-of travellers, point-
ing out the true probabilities,
and seeming as if gifted with
a sort of second sight . . . He
must have travelled every-
where, at least in the spirit.
Chapter 1
Whist
His sole pastimes were read-
ing the papers and playing
whist. He often won at this
game, which, as a silent one,
harmonised with his nature . . .
Mr. Fogg played, not to win,
but for the sake of playing. The
game was in his eyes a contest,
a struggle with a difficulty, yet a
motionless, unwearying strug-
gle, congenial to his tastes.
Chapter 3
Daily Telegraph
[Gaultier Ralph:] “The world
has grown smaller, since a man
can now go round it ten times
more quickly than a hundred
years ago. And that is why the
search for this thief will be
more likely to succeed.” . . .
[John Sullivan:] “Only eighty
days, now that the section
between Rothal and Allahabad,
on the Great Indian Peninsula
Railway, has been opened.”
Chapter 3
Pocket Almanac
“This very evening,” returned
Phileas Fogg. He took out and
consulted a pocket alma-
nac, and added, “As today
is Wednesday, the 2nd of
October, I shall be due in
116
London in this very room of
the Reform Club, on Saturday,
the 21st of December, at a
quarter before nine p.m. . . .”
Chapter 5
Newspapers
[T]he Times, Standard, Morning
Post, and Daily News, and
twenty other highly respect-
able newspapers scouted Mr.
Fogg’s project as madness; the
Daily Telegraph alone hesi-
tatingly supported him. . . .
Articles no less passionate
than logical appeared on
the question, for geography
is one of the pet subjects of
the English . . . Everything . . .
was against the travellers,
every obstacle imposed alike
by man and by nature.
Chapter 7
Passports
[Detective Fix:] “Yes. Passports
are only good for annoying
honest folks, and aiding in the
flight of rogues. I assure you it
will be quite the thing for him
to do; but I hope you will not
visa the passport.”
[Consul:] “Why not? If the
passport is genuine I have no
right to refuse.”
Chapter 7
Itinerary
[The] dates were inscribed in an
itinerary divided into columns,
indicating the month, the day
of the month, and the day
for the stipulated and actual
arrivals at each principal point
Paris, Brindisi, Suez, Bombay,
Calcutta, Singapore, Hong
Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco,
New York, and London—from
the 2nd of October to the 21st
of December . . .
Chapter 8
Watch
[Detective Fix:] “Your watch
is slow.” . . . “You have kept
London time, which is two
hours behind that of Suez. You
ought to regulate your watch
at noon in each country.”
[Passepartout:] “I regulate my
watch? Never!”
[Detective Fix:] “Well, then, it
will not agree with the sun.”
[Passepartout:] “So much
the worse for the sun, mon-
sieur. The sun will be wrong,
then!”
Chapter 10
Indian Celebrations
These descendants of the
sect of Zoroaster . . . were
celebrating a sort of reli-
gious carnival, with proces-
sions and shows, in the midst
of which Indian dancing-girls,
clothed in rose-coloured
gauze, looped up with gold
and silver, danced airily, but
with perfect modesty, to
the sound of viols and the
clanging of tambourines. . . .
It may be said here that the
wise policy of the British
Government severely punish-
es a disregard of the practices
of the native religions.
Chapter 11
Indian Landscape
. . . cotton, coffee, nutmeg,
clove, and pepper plantations . . .
[and] groups of palm-trees . . .
upon vast tracts extending to
the horizon, with jungles inhab-
ited by snakes and tigers . . .
succeeded by forests pene-
trated by the railway, and still
haunted by elephants . . .
Chapter 11
Mutsh
The elephant, which its own-
er had reared, not for a beast
of burden, but for warlike
purposes, was half domesti-
cated. The Indian had begun
already, by often irritating
him, and feeding him every
three months on sugar and
butter, to impart to him a
ferocity not in his nature, this
method being often employed
by those who train the Indian
elephants for battle.
Chapter 14
Pilgrims
Passepartout started off
forthwith, and found himself
in the streets of Allahabad,
that is, the City of God, one
of the most venerated in
India, being built at the junc-
tion of the two sacred rivers,
Ganges and Jumna, the waters
of which attract pilgrims from
every part of the peninsula.
The Ganges, according to the
legends of the Ramayana, ris-
es in heaven, whence, owing to
Brahma’s agency, it descends
to the earth.
Chapter 14
Panorama
[T]he travellers could scarcely
discern the fort of Chupenie,
twenty miles south-westward
from Benares, the ancient
stronghold of the rajahs of
Behar; or Ghazipur and its
famous rose-water facto-
ries; or the tomb of Lord
Cornwallis, rising on the left
bank of the Ganges; the forti-
fied town of Buxar, or Patna,
a large manufacturing and
trading-place, where is held
the principal opium market
of India; or Monghir, a more
than European town, for it
is as English as Manchester
or Birmingham, with its iron
foundries, edgetool facto-
ries, and high chimneys puf-
fing clouds of black smoke
heavenward.
Chapter 16
Andaman Island
[T]hey soon came in sight of
the great Andaman, the princi-
pal of the islands in the Bay of
Bengal, with its picturesque
Saddle Peak, two thousand
four hundred feet high, loom-
ing above the waters . . . [T]he
savage Papuans, who are in the
lowest scale of humanity, but
are not, as has been assert-
ed, cannibals, did not make
their appearance. . . . Vast
forests of palms, arecs, bam-
boo, teakwood, of the gigantic
mimosa, and tree-like ferns
covered the foreground, while
behind, the graceful outlines
of the mountains were traced
against the sky; and along the
coasts swarmed by thousands
the precious swallows whose
nests furnish a luxurious dish
to the tables of the Celestial
Empire.
Chapter 19
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is an island which
came into the possession of
the English by the Treaty of
Nankin, after the war of 1842;
and the colonising genius of
the English has created upon
it an important city and an
excellent port. The island is
situated . . . about sixty miles
from the Portuguese town of
Macao, on the opposite coast.
Hong Kong has beaten Macao
in the struggle for the Chinese
trade . . . Hong Kong seemed
to him not unlike Bombay,
Calcutta, and Singapore,
since, like them, it betrayed
everywhere the evidence of
English supremacy.
Chapter 22
Yokohama
[Yokohama] is an important
port of call in the Pacific,
where all the mail-steamers,
and those carrying travel-
lers between North America,
China, Japan, and the Oriental
islands put in. It is situated in
the bay of Yeddo, and at but a
short distance from that sec-
ond capital of the Japanese
Empire, and the residence of
the Tycoon, the civil Emperor,
before the Mikado, the spir-
itual Emperor, absorbed his
office in his own. . . . Here, as
at Hong Kong and Calcutta,
were mixed crowds of all rac-
es, Americans and English,
Chinamen and Dutchmen,
mostly merchants ready to
buy or sell anything.
Chapter 25
San Francisco
It was seven in the morning
when Mr. Fogg, Aouda, and
Passepartout set foot upon
the American continent, if
this name can be given to the
floating quay upon which they
disembarked. These quays,
rising and falling with the
tide, thus facilitate the load-
ing and unloading of vessels.
Alongside them were clippers
of all sizes, steamers of all
nationalities, and the steam-
boats, with several decks ris-
ing one above the other, which
ply on the Sacramento and its
tributaries. There were also
heaped up the products of
a commerce which extends
to Mexico, Chili, Peru, Brazil,
Europe, Asia, and all the Pacific
islands. . . . San Francisco was
no longer the legendary city
of 1849—a city of banditti,
assassins, and incendiaries,
who had flocked hither in
crowds in pursuit of plunder;
a paradise of outlaws, where
they gambled with gold-dust,
a revolver in one hand and a
bowie-knife in the other: it
was now a great commercial
emporium.
Chapter 26
The Pacific Railroad
“From ocean to ocean”—so
say the Americans; and these
four words compose the gen-
eral designation of the “great
trunk line” which crosses the
entire width of the United
States. The Pacific Railroad
is, however, really divided into
two distinct lines: the Central
Pacific, between San Francisco
and Ogden, and the Union
Pacific, between Ogden and
Omaha. . . . President Lincoln
himself fixed the end of the
line at Omaha, in Nebraska.
The work was at once com-
menced, and pursued with
true American energy . . . The
road grew, on the prairies, a
mile and a half a day.
Chapter 27
Salt Lake
The Salt Lake, seventy miles
long and thirty-five wide, is sit-
uated three miles eight hun-
dred feet above the sea. . . .
The country around the lake
was well cultivated, for the
Mormons are mostly farm-
ers; while ranches and pens
for domesticated animals,
fields of wheat, corn, and oth-
er cereals, luxuriant prairies,
hedges of wild rose, clumps of
acacias and milk-wort, would
have been seen six months
later. . . . The founder of the
City of the Saints could not
escape from the taste for sym-
metry which distinguishes the
Anglo-Saxons. In this strange
country, where the people are
certainly not up to the level of
their institutions, everything
is done “squarely”—cities,
houses, and follies.
Chapter 29
The Sioux
This was not the first attempt
of these daring Indians, for
more than once they had way-
laid trains on the road. A hun-
dred of them had, according
to their habit, jumped upon
the steps without stopping
the train, with the ease of a
clown mounting a horse at
full gallop. The Sioux were
armed with guns, from which
came the reports, to which
the passengers, who were
almost all armed, responded
by revolver-shots.
Chapter 33
Coal
[Engineer:] “You must remem-
ber that, since we started,
we have kept up hot fires in
all our furnaces, and, though
we had coal enough to go on
short steam from New York to
Bordeaux, we haven’t enough
to go with all steam from New
York to Liverpool.” . . .
“I have sent for you, . . . sir,”
continued Mr. Fogg, “to ask
you to sell me your vessel.”
[Captain Speedy:] “No! By all
the devils, no!”
[Phileas Fogg:] “But I shall be
obliged to burn her.”
“Burn the Henrietta?”
“Yes; at least the upper part of
her. The coal has given out.”
Chapter 37
80 Times
Phileas Fogg had, without sus-
pecting it, gained one day on
his journey, and this merely
because he had travelled con-
stantly eastward . . . In jour-
neying eastward he had gone
towards the sun, and the days
therefore diminished for him
as many times four minutes
as he crossed degrees in this
direction. There are three
hundred and sixty degrees
on the circumference of the
earth; and these three hun-
dred and sixty degrees, mul-
tiplied by four minutes, gives
precisely twenty-four hours . . .
117
 HYPERBOREA, 2011

Anton Ginzburg

The film Hyperborea is a poetic and evocative record of the expedi-

tion to “map the void” in search of the mythological land of Hyperborea,
or “beyond the Boreas (North Wind)”. The project documents the jour-
ney to attempt to locate Hyperborea according to its descriptions in
literature, newspaper articles and mythology. It takes the viewer from
the primordial, virgin forests of Oregon, to St Petersburg with its erod-
ing palaces and haunted natural history museum, and finally to the
ruins of the Gulag prisons and archaeological sites on the White Sea.
Present throughout the film is a cloud of red smoke that functions
both as a metaphor for the exalted self and as an expression of the
collective unconscious.
The body of work began with the artist’s observation that mytho-
logical patterns were undeniably woven into the fabric of everyday
reality – specifically in the tension formed between the actual and
the potential – and was expanded by the concept of Hyperborea, a
mythical region that it is claimed has been recently discovered on the
White Sea in northern Russia. Hyperborea was originally described by
the ancient Greek writer Herodotus as the land of the Golden Age and
was thought to be a place of pure bliss, perpetual sunlight and eternal
springtime. It has been an inspiration for early modernist thinkers
such as Nietzsche and Madame Blavatskaya, while acting as a central
theme in the early-twentieth-century St Petersburg poetic tradition
of Acmeism, which deals with the “golden age of man”. Hyperborea
continues to excite the imagination of the global media as the sup-
posed birthplace of numerous cultures and peoples.
Some stills from Ginzburg’s Hyperborea appear on the pages that
follow.

120
121
122
123

Facing page:
Saul Steinberg, View of the
World from 9th Avenue, 1976
Ink, pencil, coloured pencil,
and watercolour on paper,
28 x 19 in.
Private collection
Cover for The New Yorker,
29 March 1976
© The Saul Steinberg
Foundation / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
124
EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
Kersten Geers
I.
For one of the covers of The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg offered an
image of the world as seen from the perspective of New York. It is a
view through the eyes of an immigrated European: he looks west. Most
prominent and tangible is New York, there at his feet, with its blown-
up European warehouses, its blocks and buildings of different kinds;
there are no towering structures. Then there is the Hudson River (a
watershed), New Jersey and the American plains, which are filled with
some sporadic objects, half Surrealist fake nature, half human sculp-
ture . . . Then we see Texas, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, followed by the
Pacific Ocean, Japan, China and Russia. Each of the planes is depicted
in a parallel fashion, on a different scale and with a different sense of
depth, but treated equally as patches of a larger whole.
When Steinberg’s New Yorker cover hits the stands, the date is 29
March 1976. What at first glance looks like a revisitation (or reinter-
pretation) of the Renaissance’s emblematic linear perspective and its
attempt to control the world through its depiction actually presents
itself as its opposite: it is a phantasmagoric image of the different
shades and scales of reality in a tour de force that points to its resist-
ance to description.
If the linear perspective of the Renaissance implies hierarchy (as
seen through the eyes of the prince) and (the representation of) power
through its presentation of a particular viewpoint and overview, its
sense of space is nonetheless limited, for it presents a view from a spot
out there; at most, it shows what is within eyesight.
If one has to look for its counterpart, the short film Powers of Ten
(1968 and 1977) by Ray and Charles Eames could be a good candidate.
 This survey of the universe in steps of ten is a fractal overview of same-
ness in all scales and, by implication, a truly modernist representation
of the equality of man and his perception. Powers of Ten introduced
“deep space” as an alternative to the space we actually perceive in an
attempt to explode the hierarchy implicit in imagery applying linear
perspective. The universe appears always more complex and detailed
when presented on a new scale. It is scientific space par excellence.
The space presented is deep but not wide; in other words, there is no
“field”.
Steinberg’s perspective shows a much more challenging (and fer-
tile) view of the world because he combines these two different kinds
of space. The perspectival view he produced for The New Yorker does
not represent the different scales of reality; rather, it presents the real-
ity as a field. The field presented in the image is evenly covered; it is
entirely occupied. Here Steinberg manages to represent each mode of
occupation simultaneously: there is no depth except that of perspec-
tive. There is only a field of things – small things, big things, traces of
things and representations of things. Steinberg subjects them all to
his design by focusing on some aspects and omitting others.
In redefining reality by representing it, the perspectival view dis-
penses with the complexity of the world as an organism (in contrast
with Powers of Ten) in favour of a flattened field of conditions. He under-
stands that the only possible way to deal with the world is to simplify
it by introducing a sense of perspective. Simplification is presented as
a strategy for acquisition and – ultimately – for domination. Napoleon
understood this very well when he and his scientists recorded their
survey of Egypt, the Description de l’Égypte. Although the survey con-
sists of a wide variety of drawn documents, the description’s most
emblematic product is the foreshortened perspectives of the Nile
displaying only monuments. Here, by simplifying places, positions,
relative distances and complexities, Napoleon’s Egypt became at once
as constructed and tangible as a 19th-century fairy tale.
Steinberg’s perspectival view presents the world without Europe,
yet does this essentially as a European construction, for the notion of
the “even covering of the field” is a European construction. It begins
with the perspectival view as a frame, with the map as a tool, with the
description as reality. Steinberg’s perspective combines everything
together, and in so doing it presents both problem and solution, both
topic and tool. If one compares the drawing of The New Yorker with
other more canonical artworks, interesting fragmentary parallels

126
emerge. Steinberg’s representation of space as a plane makes obvi-
ous reference to early Surrealist painting (as much as he claimed to
dislike this) as well as attempts by Juan Gris and Francis Picabia to
relate objects and spaces to one another on a flat surface (without the
influence of psychoanalysis). There is also an evident parallel with
some of Ed Ruscha’s key word paintings, in which the artist seems
to have tackled the “wordiness” of the sign- and logo-filled valleys
of California, and a fascinating similarity to some of Luigi Ghirri’s
pictures and John Baldessari’s collages, which superimpose words
as objects on plans employed as planes. What is most important to
note, however, is that Steinberg’s drawing technique allows him to
combine all of these different modes of representation together in a
single drawing, a surreal perspectival view with the bold ambition of
representing the world.

II.
Between 1972 and 1982, Hans Hollein designed and built the Museum
Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. In the dense urban fabric of the Ruhr
area, every piece of land is covered, every place has a name, every
spot is reachable, every village has a museum. The same is thus true
of Mönchengladbach. The Museum Abteiberg is a museum for the
“evenly covered field”.
It offers a constructed perspective of the field that surrounds it. It is
built as an expansion of the artificial street level of Mönchengladbach’s
shopping area and in every respect pretends to be its natural exten-
sion as an abstracted continuation of its city structure, though it is
actually its counterpart. The main museum spaces are covered by a
zinc shed-like structure that represents small city blocks, or perhaps
simply presents a strange roof; there is no communication. A strange

127
 tower marks the museum square, offering a belvedere with a view
over a sculpted set of landscape terraces. The museum is elsewhere –
under the belvedere, under the plaza – as a possible set of interior
public spaces: the floor is covered in white marble and the furniture
is of marble and leather, as if it were part of the city landscape, and
the ceiling is industrial and cheap. The only relationship between the
museum and the world outside it is the word “MUSEUM” carved and
gilded on a white piece of marble. In this evenly covered field, the only
thing on display is the field itself. The axonometric drawing and plan of
the Museum Abteiberg beautifully put this on display. Its perspectival
view shows the imaginary world – the fragments of a possible strategy
of design in the evenly covered field. In a fragment, the plan shows an
axonometry as a desire to create architecture in the two dimensions
of the surreal imagination. The real world, however – represented
by the function of the building – shows itself only once, as the word
“museum” carved into the stone next to the elevator. The word itself
is presented here as the remnant of a past era, perhaps, but also as
the only key to the understanding of that past. Ruscha expresses an
understanding of this in many of his paintings, replacing figuration
with the comparative ambiguity of the word. Steinberg has done the
same, as demonstrates the perspectival drawing presented here, which
represents with great effort exactly what has been omitted from this
image: the New Yorker.

Facing page:
Hans Hollein, Abteiberg
axonometric drawing

128
129

1 “The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin’s life can be seen –
Reference to Soylent Green, a
1973 American science fic-
tion film directed by Richard
Fleischer and based on the
1966 science fiction novel
Make Room! Make Room! by
Harry Harrison.
2
This is an excerpt from
Michel Houellebecq’s as-yet-
untranslated book La carte e
le territoire (Paris: Flamma-
rion, 2010), 429; all English
citations from the book in
this article are the author’s
translations.
130
“SOYLENT GREEN”1—THE USE
OF THE COUNTRYSIDE
Éric Troussicot
following the most immediate interpretation – as a nostalgic meditation
on the end of the Industrial Age in Europe and on, in more general terms,
the perishable and transitory nature of each human industry. This inter-
pretation, however, is insufficient to account for the malaise that grips
us when seeing these pathetic Playmobil figurines lost in the middle of
a huge, abstract futuristic city – a city that is crumbling and breaking
up, but then seems to scatter, little by little, in the limitless immensity
of the vegetation. This feeling of desolation takes hold of us as the repre-
sentations of the human beings who accompanied Jed Martin during his
earthly life disintegrate under the effect of bad weather, then fall apart
and go to pieces, seeming in recent videos to become the symbol of the
general annihilation of mankind. They are sinking, for a moment they
seem to struggle, but they are then smothered by thick layers of plants.
Eventually, everything is quiet, only tall grasses rustle in the wind. This
is the absolute triumph of the vegetation.”2
Michel Houellebecq
Has the urban future become inexorable or exclusive? If so, what is to
become of the countryside?
Rurality is often felt only on suburban shores, those of “rurbanity”,
and it is often mistaken for the return of vegetation to urban centres:
wildlife in town – a currently very powerful trend that puts the distinc-
tion between built-up areas and the natural living environment at the
heart of reflection on the contemporary city. The challenge is to think of
the city as a great living environment and to respect its rules of opera-
tion and balance, which we have wrongly believed to be avoidable.
 In Dead Cities: A Natural History, an amazing dive into the biol-
ogy of the urban post-disaster, Mike Davis examines the work of the
scientists and writers who have studied the death of cities – a fictional
death that is also the death of society and of real estate . . . Recalling
the flurry of fires that destroyed a dizzying number of houses in the
South Bronx in the 1970s, he shows how the toxins that have made
such a miasmatic hell out of Jefferies’s London are perpetuated in
new forms, reappearing in the form of the social domination of and
contempt for the lower classes: man is tirelessly eager to produce rub-
bish, even amidst opulence. Jefferies dreamed of a post-destruction
London, a city reinvested by nature and engulfed in flora and fauna.
The work of the scientists who have studied the cities destroyed by the
bombings of World War II seems to reflect this same spirit: “They dis-
covered that the war was the catalyst for a rapid expansion of foreign 3
species once rare, resulting from the creation of a new urban flora, Mike Davis, Dead Cities and
Other Tales (New York: The
sometimes referred to as Nature II.” 3 New York Press, 2002), 76.
Although modern awareness of environmental concerns now seems
largely accepted, despite the fact that it may once again be undermined
by the recent economic crisis and the prospect of inevitable changes in
the models of energy production, one can legitimately consider what
will become of the countryside around the world. What would be the
challenges involved in and the hope behind the use of the countryside,
the forests and the hinterland?

Landscapes Crossed without Stopping?

Facing our clear lack of understanding of these spaces, we experience
them ever more rapidly, coming and going without pausing for reflection.
All indications demonstrate this, like the empty corridors between two
urban centres that insulate us, or like the scenery that takes shape and
vanishes at the same velocity as our high-speed itineraries. We rediscover
the scenery again only when looking at it from the exceptional perspec-
tive of the exotic tourist who visits for just a short while in search of the
warm and rustic image generated by the local residents (because they
work there or have always expected to live there), who seem to inhabit a
sort of Arcadian revival. There are also those who, like Chinese peasants,
are under house arrest, unable to flee from the countryside.
This use of the countryside is not to be understood as a backward-
looking or reactionary attitude; it is to be seen as a reaction not to a
decline, but to the dispossession of the land, the effects of which we
are increasingly assessing. To paraphrase Michel Houellebecq once

131
 more, does the country still exist? Didn’t it blend into the absolute
triumph of landscape? The urbanization of the countryside or the
incorporation of rural populations into new social and economic rela-
tionships with city dwellers can be interpreted either as an obliteration
of the countryside by technological areas or as a cooperation between
rural and urban residents, which would result in the disappearance
of the urban/rural dichotomy. It boils down to knowing whether or
not a new “urbanized” rural society can grow and create a new bal-
ance between natural conditions and technological possibilities. The
relationship between town and country can take three forms: 1) the
city, either colonizing or intrusive, lives upon the exploitation of the
rural populations to whom it rents land; 2) the city, as an industrial
complex, grows regardless of the surrounding countryside, “steriliz-
ing” it instead of “fertilizing” it; or 3) town and country work together
to achieve mutual development.
Let’s take the example of France. Here we are witnessing the reign
of the peri-urban: the city is laid out and built ecologically, wasting
more and more land with the construction of grouped and isolated
“green houses”. It is both the end and the continuation of something.
We create landscapes that are aesthetically alike in Brittany, Basque
country or Alsace, but they are inauthentic, because the landscape
has been shaped, transformed and converted for the needs of men
(a result of the French obsession with preserving all that is old and
traditional).
The rural village was originally centripetal, but now it has become
centrifugal. It once lived in and around itself, with its own local gene-
alogy, but today, we live mostly outside of it, with all of the commut-
ing we do. The village was a dormitory for a long time. In the past, we
heard the stories of peasants and travellers; today, collective epics are
exclusively individual. This is indeed the “rurban condition”.
However, in the south of France we can observe the development
of a new rurality, one that is experienced as a re-appropriation of liveli-
hood (through subsistence practices and the networking of different
collectives). The arrival of the “economically excluded”, who wish to
settle in the countryside in search of land and a roof, made possible
the organization of independent networks in order to take into account
the specificity of the local contexts and to avoid the bureaucracy of
a centralized organization. We have moved from a “cautious” sort
of union-controlled farming to a “minimalist” subsistence farming
that runs the exchange and the transfer of knowledge. Here, rural and

132
urban struggles come together and display solidarity for an ownership
and/or recovery of livelihoods. Ultimately, the networking of these
protests ensures the development of the claims for the rights of exist-
ence and against the commodification of life. Like our right to shelter,
the right to land-use can provide the means for achieving nutritional
self-sufficiency and self-built housing, the goal being to free oneself
from any type of external assistance or subsidy.
Thus, the oasis – an artificial ecosystem or island of survival in
usually arid and inhospitable territories – presents itself as an alter-
native to the current crisis of cities: between the excesses of over-
crowded urban areas, where misery, exclusion and violence prevail,
and the lack of excesses in the countryside, where a state of neglect
and wastelands predominate, a new vision of society is made possible,
both in the north and in the south, by the synthesis of the values and
experiences of rural and urban societies, which has the ultimate goal
of achieving self-sufficiency.
In recent months, authors of fiction have taken up the subject of
the countryside’s fate and have foreshadowed what I call “the use of
the countryside”, among them Michel Houellebecq:

The inhabitants of traditional rural areas had almost completely disap-

peared. They had been replaced by newcomers from urban areas with a
keen appetite for business and, sometimes, moderate, marketable envi-
ronmental convictions. They had set about repopulating the hinterland –
and this attempt, after so many other unsuccessful ones, was based on
an accurate knowledge of market forces and their lucid acceptance. It
was a success. . . . In more general terms, France, on the economic front,
did well. Today a country geared mainly toward farming and tourism, it
showed remarkable strength during the various crises that have followed
one another almost without interruption over the last twenty years. . . .
In fact the new residents in rural areas do not resemble their predeces-
sors. It was not fate that had led them to engage in traditional basketry, in
renovating a cottage or in producing cheese, but rather a business plan – a
pondered and rational economic choice. Educated, tolerant and affable,
they lived alongside the foreigners in their region with no particular dif-
ficulty – which was in their best interests, since these people constituted
the bulk of their clientele. . . . The Chinese formed a community a little
closed off from the rest of the world, but no more, and rather less, than
the English once did, and at least they did not impose the use of their
language on the locals. They showed excessive respect, almost venerating

133

4 empty discourse”. Economically abandoned and sacrificed, they will
Michel Houellebecq, La carte
et le territoire, 414–17.
134
the local customs of which newcomers usually were unaware at first. But
they practiced them with a sense of application, with a kind of adaptive
mimicry, and we witnessed a clear return of recipes, dances, and even
regional costumes.4
The “No-Go Zone”
Hakim Bey does not foresee that capitalism will vanish overnight; to
his mind, “Capitalism will experience disintegration or decay rather
than a sudden implosion.” Social selection and its consequences will
therefore become more marked now as the forbidden zone. Bey’s
“temporary autonomous zones” (of class, race, marginalized groups
or geography) won’t be subject to any control thanks to social selec-
tion, and will “fall below an adequate level of participation in the
be wiped off the map. “They will not produce any growth, they won’t
consume anymore, and they will no longer be served by any of the
offices of the show [Guy Debord’s spectacle of society]: taxes, public
health, military or police, social insurance, communication and edu-
cation – everything will disappear”. These areas will certainly not be
very comfortable, and they won’t be utopias; rather, they will be the
headquarters of wild freedom and total panic. As for Capital, it will
become the Empire of pure speed, “the immediacy of communica-
tion technology promoted to the status of transcendence, as a kind
of Gnose’tech in which the body will be ‘transcended’, marked by the
pure spirit (Information)”. The No-Go Zone will become the realm of
material economy: the Kingdom of agriculture and industry, with a
technology more human than “green”, concerned more about agri-
culture or permaculture than about real ecology. The technologies
of DIY and recycling, of the “utopian minimum” (Fourier), will lead
to a certain satisfaction, and a “People’s Militia” will be needed as a
monitoring committee.
There will be no future except in forbidden rural areas. All this,
however, will not be a Social Museum, but a living, changing situ-
ational praxis (drifting), or a nomadic DIY of social models – of real
life experiences based on harsh necessity and the obsessive passion
for freedom. Nobody wants to risk his life in the forbidden zone for
ideology, but the usefulness of some utopian models can nonetheless
be tested there.
The Use of Forests and the New Hunter-gatherers
Pending the classification of the countryside as a prohibited area, peo-
ple leave all of the countryside except for villages. The farmer, today
a full-fledged businessman, establishes a consortium and works the
land on his own. What is left unexploited becomes a vast, fascinating
subject for exploration, somehow close to a natural state, something
between a return to what is repressed and science fiction. Independent
local communities are formed (unity provides strength, especially in
winter). They observe three criteria: a limited ecological footprint,
reversibility (the possibility of restoring the land to its original use),
self-built housing – the building of huts motivated by ideological beliefs
and an adventurous spirit.
Even loners refuse developed sites and live exclusively as gather-
ers, constantly moving in and around the valleys of Ariège. In the
enchantment of the woods, they are a population of inaccessible for-
est creatures, the quintessence of life among the trees, in huts made
of branches and feeding on berries, roots and mushrooms. There is a
daily confrontation with discomfort. Here Thoreau’s cabin, with its log
walls, or the robust one of the Unabomber both seem too opulent.
So is there, as Debord would suggest, a reversal of the natural
order here? What is usually synonymous with poverty and vulner-
ability becomes wealth. There is a recovered natural state: sinking
in the woods, I become a child again, wild. By getting rid of my civil
uniform, I’m going to build a hut: in front of me, there is nothing but
greenery, and soon there will be that cold wind, and the long, hard
work that will strengthen my body. There is nothing but the land, of
which I will soon be just a fragment . . .

135
 81 IMAGINARY PUBLIC SPACES,
1:500

Matilde Cassani

What we see by examining the physical space that lies between built
structures is a sort of solid memory, a record of what happened in that
precise space in a specific moment of its history.
This space can be unplanned, or it can be the leftover of strati-
fications of time and subsequent small interventions, or it can be
completely designed, thereby clearly reflecting its function. Each view
is an imaginary portion of public soil and describes the continual
intervention of man within the field.
Each square has an arbitrary boundary.
Each square is a partial view of a potentially infinite surface.

136
 THE BAREST FORM IN WHICH
ARCHITECTURE CAN EXIST: SOME
NOTES ON LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER’S
PROPOSAL FOR THE CHICAGO
TRIBUNE BUILDING

Pier Vittorio Aureli

I.
In 1922 Chicago’s famous daily newspaper The Chicago Tribune
launched an international competition for its new headquarters,
which were to be built on Michigan Avenue. Carefully strategized as
a media event, the call for proposals attracted both interest from the 1
general public and a massive participation of 263 architects from the There are several articles
and essays on this
U.S. and abroad.1 As the winning proposal, the jury selected the Gothic- competition, which was
inspired high-rise designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood. a true landmark event in
the history of corporate
Howells and Hood’s proposal met the organizers’ ultimate goal: to branding through
redeem the brutal product of economic speculation – the high-rise – architecture. See Manfredo
in the form of a spectacular landmark for the city. Before the Chicago Tafuri, “La Montagna
Disincantata”, in Giorgio
Tribune competition, high-rise buildings in Chicago and New York Ciucci, Mario Manieri
were usually conceived and perceived as raw histograms of land value Elia and Manfredo Tafuri,
eds., La città americana
erected to serve the sole purpose of facilitating and generating busi- dalla Guerra civile al
ness. The Chicago Tribune competition, in contrast, went beyond the New Deal (Bari: Laterza,
possibility of economic value being derived from land speculation to 1973); translated as “The
Disenchanted Mountain:
the possibility of that derived from representation. Architectural rep- The Skyscraper and the
resentation – the power of a building’s image – was here rediscovered City”, in The American City:
From the Civil War to the New
not as a tool for political representation, but rather as one of economic
Deal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
interest, as branding. The remarkably heterogeneous responses to the Press, 1984). See also Luca
competition, which presented designs inspired by wide-ranging Gothic, Garofalo, Concorso per il
Chicago Tribune (Turin: Testo
Renaissance, Baroque or Art Deco styles as well as some modernist & Immagine, 1997).
ones, showed the abstract and non-representable nature of economic
interests when it comes to giving it a definitive form. In its pervasive

141
2 and fluctuating nature, economic interest can assume any kind of
Hilberseimer did not
submit his proposal to the
stylistic or formal expression. In terms of form, economic interest
competition. The project can be whatever one wants precisely because it is whatever – or has
was published for the the potential to be anything – that is at stake in an economic process.
first time in the second
issue of the journal G as an It is possible to argue that in a regime like capitalism, in which the
illustration for his short appropriation and exploitation of the potential of things rather than
piece on the high-rise
typology. Here Hilberseimer
what already exists becomes the fundamental object of economic
discussed his proposal interest, the only definitive architectural form possible is one that
for the Chicago Tribune is reduced to the barest essentials of existence: a space in which any
building and his proposal
for a residential high-rise in foreseen and unforeseen activity can take place.
order to criticize the divide The stark simplicity and literalness of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s
between construction and
proposal for the Chicago Tribune can be understood as the most
form that characterized
most high-rise buildings radical response to the problem architectural form when erected on
in the U.S. at the time. It the unstable ground of economic interest.2 The project consists of the
is interesting to note that
Hilberseimer’s publication simple extrusion of the required square metres of space enveloped
of his Chicago Tribune within a façade defined by a uniform distribution of openings. The
project followed on
design represents a radical application of the principles of the “free
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s
proposal for the Burohaus, plan” already implicit in the development of industrial architecture: a
a model for the office field of columns supporting unobstructed floors ready to be arranged
building designed as a vast
open space. The reality of
according to any kind of use. Hilberseimer knew the reality of com-
industrial architecture and mercial and industrial architecture in the U.S. very well.3 Moreover
its adaptability to other the language of his proposal seems to have been developed directly
uses was a topic that both
Mies van der Rohe and from the industrial architecture of the Plant, the Chicago Tribune’s
Hilberseimer addressed in old workshop, which the newspaper’s competition brief explained
two of their contributions to
G. See Ludwig Hilberseimer,
was to be extended or replaced with a more representative structure.
“Hochhaus”, G: Materialen for Therefore the radicality of Hilberseimer’s proposal lies not in the
elementaren gestaltung, no. originality of the architectural solution, but in its transferring of the
2 (September 1923), 3; and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, abstraction of the free plan from the material production of the fac-
“Burohaus”, G: Materialen for tory to the immaterial production of white-collar office space, where
elementaren gestaltung, no.
economic processes are even more abstract and elusive in terms of
1 (July 1923), 3.
the organization and management of space. And yet it is precisely
3 the radicality – or better, the literalness – with which Hilberseimer
Hilberseimer’s knowledge
of American architecture adhered to the abstract conditions of economic management, just as
is demonstrated by several the concave adheres to the convex, that makes his proposal a critical
articles he wrote on the
clinamen within the totalizing space of economic processes.
subject during the 1920s,
especially the important
publications Beton als II.
Gestalter, written with Julius
Vischer, and Groszstadt In his book Römischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (Roman
Architektur. In both texts Catholicism and Political Form), Carl Schmitt affirmed that the reality
examples of American of an economic process cannot be represented. According to Schmitt,

142
the economy is what it does.4 Unlike categories such as “God”, “The industrial architecture
People”, “The State”, “The Public”, “Freedom” or “The Principle of are commented on and
illustrated. See Ludwig
Equality”, the economy is unrepresentable; it cannot be real if it does Hilberseimer and Julius
not exist – it is a matter of fact. As a political and juridical sphere, the Vischer, Beton as Gestalter
(Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann
act of representing a value, a belief, a principle gives a special dignity Verlag, 1928); Ludwig
and authority to the agent of representation because who or what rep- Hilberseimer, Groszstadt
resents a high value – i.e. something that must be persuasive, or that Architektur (Stuttgart: Julius
Hoffmann Verlag, 1927).
has to feed a pathos of conviction – cannot be itself devoid of moral
value. Moreover moral value is not only a prerogative of who repre- 4
See Carl Schmitt, Römischer
sents and what is represented. It is also conferred upon the subject at Katholizismus und Politische
whom a representation of something is addressed. The crude reality Form (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
of the economy deals with data that are in themselves devoid of any 1923).

moral value and, thus, of any representational authority. According to 5

Schmitt, there is no possibility to establish any condition of value or This argument is also
addressed in Schmitt’s
charisma in a world reified by the managerial apparatus of the econo-
famous critique of the
my.5 Unlike traditions of representation like those of the church, the neutralizing ethos of
monarchy, and the state, whose masteries are based on metaphysical economic management. See
Carl Schmitt, “Das Zeintalter
and transcendental values, the abstraction of the modern factory is der Neutralisierung und
incapable of representation to the point that, as Schmitt reminds us, Entpolitisierung”, Archiv
fur Sozialwissenschaft und
the Soviet Republic had to use obsolete emblems of work such as the
Sozialpolitik 58 (1927), 66–81.
hammer and the sickle (whose symbolism did not corresponded to
the technically advanced way Lenin defined Communism as “Soviet
plus Electrification”) in order to find a “representative” symbol for
Communism. One can argue that it is precisely the impossibility of
any convincing representation of a world reified by the management
of economic processes that created fertile ground for value-free aes-
thetic expressions. For this reason it is not surprising that with the rise
of industrialization and its expanding universe made of increasingly
advanced forms of production, art and architecture were no longer
considered as an embodiment of values beyond themselves, but rather
as realities within themselves.
The rise of abstract art and the rise of modern architecture had
already been anticipated in the 19th century by theories that consid-
ered both visual art and architecture as self-referential phenomena
whose critical assessment was based only on their immanent physical
and corporeal properties. These properties were form, space, volume,
mass and movement – in other words, the generic properties of any
artefact. If there is a true artistic and architectural manifestation
of a civilization driven by its economy, then this must be the reduc-
tion of the content of a work of art to its purely generic attributes,

143
6 for any attempt to represent reality in a convincing way is made
Paolo Virno, The Grammar of
the Multitude (Los Angeles:
Semiotexte, 2004), 81.
Above:
Ludwig Hilberseimer,
Chicago Tribune Building,
view
Facing page:
Ludwig Hilberseimer,
Chicago Tribune Building,
plan
144
impossible by the fact that reality is so complex, infinitesimal and
ultimately elusive.
And yet the condition of the generic is not simply a result of indus-
trial modes of production. The generic is an anthropological dimen-
sion of subjectivity that is of fundamental importance in capitalism.
In order to extract surplus value from workers, Capital has to conquer
and appropriate the worker’s labour power. Labour power is not a
specialized sphere but rather represents the totality of the human
condition. Labour power is generic, undetermined potential wherein
“one particular type of labour or another has not been designated,
but any kind of labour is taking place, be it the manufacturing of a
car door, or the harvesting of pears, the babble of someone calling in
to a phone ‘party-line’, or the work of a proofreader”.6 Labour power
coincides with the generic ability to act, to speak or to do things both
with our hands and with words. Labour power relies on a fundamental
characteristic of the human animal: its ability to adapt to and to cope
with any unforeseen situation.
III.
The spatial indeterminacy of the free plan is a radical manifestation
of how labour power has been put to work by capital. If labour power is
characterized by man’s ability to adapt to any situation, and therefore
by the total unpredictability of man’s actions and reactions, then the
only corresponding spatial form in such unstable conditions is free
space: space emptied of any obstruction and ready to accommodate
any situation. The history of capitalistic spatial governance can be
understood as that of the possibility of accommodating the condition
of permanent unpredictability and instability that is inherent to human
nature. If labour power – the very object of any economic process – can
be understood as the even covering of the field of human potentialities
(from body to mind), then the spatial apparatuses that correspond to
this reality have to reach the same degree of openness and potentiality
of use and occupation. This condition becomes even more radical when
“production” is no longer understood as the production of goods, but
as the production of immaterial elements such as services and infor-
mation. When language, cooperation and exchange become the main
instruments of production, as occurred in the so-called post-Fordist
economy, the diagram of spatial relationships becomes so complex
and ever-changing that it becomes impossible to translate it into a
145

7 attempts to redeem the generic form of productive space by subtly
On the rise of white-collar
and intellectual work as
mass work phenomena, see
Sergio Bologna, “I lavoratori
della conoscenza fuori e
dentro l’impresa”, in Ceti
medi senza Futuro? Scritti,
appunti sul lavoro e altro
(Rome: Derive e Approdi,
2008), 108–36. Also relevant
is Sergio Bologna “Nazismo
e classe operaia”, paper
presented to the Camera del
Lavoro in Milan, 3 June 1993.
8
See Ludwig Hilberseimer,
“Hochhaus”, Das Kunstblatt
(1922), 531.
146
fixed spatial arrangement. The increasing importance of tertiary
and intellectual work within the development of industrial cities was
already becoming evident in the 1920s, particularly in Germany and the
U.S.7 While industrial work was dominated by the rigid pattern of the
assembly line, in which workers were the silent controllers of machines,
tertiary work was already seen as being carried out by a multiplicity of
human relationships and associations whose unpredictable pattern
overcame any rigid organization of space. Hilberseimer’s proposal for
the Chicago Tribune building takes this reality into account by reduc-
ing architecture to its barest formal state: generic floors supported by
a homogeneous field of columns, reached by elevators and enveloped
by uniform façades. While Mies van der Rohe’s office buildings, such
as the high-rise building in Friedrichstrasse and the Burohaus, were
manipulating the envelope, Hilberseimer’s is simply the most literal
representation of the open-ended logic of capital when it comes to
the question of form. At the same time, Hilberseimer’s design shows
how architecture, once it is emptied by the destructive character of
economic management, returns to being what it used to be at the very
beginning: an enclosed space, an absolute form.
In this respect a crucial element in Hilberseimer’s project is the
façade’s uniform pattern of openings. The pattern is the vertical projec-
tion of the logic of the interior’s structural grid. However, Hilberseimer
explained how this formal solution eliminates the opening as an
individual piercing element on the wall of the façade and makes the
building appear to be a composition of pure volumes.8 Hilberseimer’s
interpretation of the principle of “the even covering of the field” within
the plan, the section and the elevation of the building through a reli-
ance on the simplest spatial and formal organization – the isotropic
grid of columns and openings – has an ambivalent meaning. On the
one hand, this organization of the building form derives from an
attitude that has accepted the abstraction of economy; on the other,
Hilberseimer develops a legible limit out of this condition by turning
the spatial logic of the free plan against itself in the form of the abso-
luteness of the volume. The barest condition in which architecture can
exist is presented here not as a stylistic exercise, but as a paradoxical
act of representation, as a will to give to the conditions of the city its
adequate form, whose meaning is the definitive renunciation of any
will to representation.
 THE NEUTRAL FIELD:
2A+P/A INTERVIEWS
ANDREA BRANZI
2A+P/A: In this issue of San Rocco we are debating
the consequences of the unlimited urbanization
slowly spreading over the earth’s surface that we
have named the field. We would like to revisit some
aspects of your theoretical work, which seems to
recount a different history of urban design, one that
is devoted to showing the potential of a “neutral field”
that can no longer be ascribed to the categories of
city or landscape. What was the starting point of this
project?
Andrea Branzi: The origin of this “project” (and of
almost all of my urban projects) was a “philosophical
concept”: the neutral field (or simply the field) I
work on emerges from the need to recover the
concept of “infinity”, a spatial and cultural category
that had a great influence in the Renaissance
and gave birth to linear perspective as a means of
symbolically representing unlimited mental vistas,
but then disappeared in modern times, leaving us
in a fractured, specialized and delimited cognitive
territory without a horizon (and not only in a physical
sense). The concept of infinity doesn’t imply having
the key to the interpretation of the universe and of
history; rather, it means being conscious of the fact
that we live in a chaotic, polluted, unstable time that
“no longer has an exterior”, as philosophers would
put it. Ours is an infinite, imperfect and monstrous
universe of which we can only perceive fragments
and debris, but it nonetheless possesses a sense of
political and anthropological greatness.
2A+P/A: Your “No-Stop City” project had the aim
of visualizing the extreme consequences of a
technologically advanced capitalist society, while
your “Agronica” project shifted attention away from
the urban phenomenon to the rural one. Can the two
models coexist? Or is one the “natural” evolution of
the other?
AB: The division of the world into urban and rural
territories is an 18th-century distinction. Both are, in
different forms, the same reality responding to the
shared influences of history and economics. Built
architecture and rural technologies are the result
of different coagulations of analogous activities
that transpire throughout the entirety of the space
occupied by (and even that not occupied by) man,
transforming it into a productive “field” that is
articulated but at the same time homogeneous when
discussed in relation to globalized capitalism.
2A+P/A: In “Agronica”, technology diffuses itself over
unbuilt territory and architecture loses its image in
order to fade away into microclimates, immaterial
flows and flexible and temporary systems. Will the
field’s evolution bring about the city’s disappearance?
AB: The contemporary city is no longer defined by
the presence of “architectural boxes”, but by the
flow of information, services and commodities; the
contemporary city is already an “abstract” reality,
a continuously evolving mass of plankton. In this
sense, agriculture is a more evolved form than
the contemporary city, because it is produced by
a diffusive technology powered by natural energy
and by chemical, seasonal and genetic processes: it
147
lacks “cathedrals”, and it has no formal, overarching
image. It is anti-landscape and anti-typological.
2A+P/A: In projects like “Agricoltura-Architettura”
(Agriculture-Architecture) and “Agricoltura
Residenziale” (Residential Agriculture), there seems
to be an abandonment of technological aspects in
order to favour a return to a primordial rurality. Do
you really believe that it would still be possible to
forge a symbiotic relationship between urban life and
rural production?
AB: What we are talking about is two different
didactic models. “Agricoltura-Architettura”
illustrates the agricultural origins of classical
architecture as well as the classical origins of
agriculture (as in Virgil). “Agricoltura Residenziale”,
on the other hand, illustrates the possible
hybridization of city and countryside (as in
“Agronica”), with both being perfectly integrated
into a single residential and productive system.
Twentieth-century architecture grew out of the
model of the mechanical “factory”; perhaps that of
the twenty-first century could arise from the model
of the agricultural farm. Both of these models have
a pedagogical function, however, not a constructive
one. While Le Corbusier’s Charter of Athens may never
have been realized, it still offered an interpretation
of the Fordist city. The New Charter of Athens that I
showed at the twelfth Venice Biennale, in contrast, is
about the city in the post-Fordist era . . .
2A+P/A: Your projects have a strong link to the socio-
political context in which they are developed. In your
opinion, are there cultures or geographic areas in
which “the field” is naturally showcasing its potential?
AB: My projects are situated within the historical
frame of a “self-reforming society” that no longer
has a comprehensive model of operation and
148
therefore has to adapt itself every day in order to
positively manage the permanent state of (political
and urban) crisis in which it finds itself. This is an
important consideration. In the twentieth century,
modernization outside of Europe came about
through the spread of modern architecture, which
served as an indicator of industrial development.
Nowadays a rapid reverse process is at work whereby
many urban and productive (and mental) models are
arising in non-European countries. What is more,
these models are adapting themselves better to the
transformations that are underway, to the advent of
diffused work, to the entrepreneurship of the masses
. . . I am thinking of the huge Asian metropolises, and
the African ones, where human relationships and
exchanges totally influence the form of the city.
2A+P/A: In your projects, you seem to outline a new
grammar, one that lacks a language but provides a
rich alphabet of solutions. In your opinion, could “the
field” possibly have an aesthetic?
AB: The aesthetic of the field is not the result of
design or a constructive mega-process. It is more the
consequence of energies that appears through the
diffusion of swarms of micro-projects, sub-systems,
commodities and services that are managed by
design rather than by architecture. Processes that
are capable of penetrating the domestic interstices
of everyday life, are not governable and are the (often
unpredictable) result of the market and of social
creativity . . . The quality of a territory is largely a
result of that of the multitude inhabiting it.
2A+P/A: The sum of these models of weak and
diffused urbanization are based on the principles of
temporariness, flexibility and reversibility, all with
the goal of achieving a greater adaptability to the
continual exchanges of a reformist society. Is “the
field” a necessarily temporary territory?
AB: The field is an unstable territory because it is
inhabited by an unstable society (a multitude). The
“neutral field” is not inactive. It is criss-crossed by
magnetic fields that are unpredictable and often
impossible to manage (by way of traditional politics).
Recent events in North Africa demonstrate that
territorial and social destructuration can lead to
violent forms of rebellion. This will happen in Europe
soon, too.

2A+P/A: In the last Venice Biennale you presented all

of your urbanization models together with the aim of
defining a “New Charter of Athens”, allowing us to see
the possibility that your research could evolve from
the visualization of scenarios to the identification
and elaboration of practical tools. Do you believe that
it is still possible to plan the field?

AB: The field can’t be planned, but it can be managed.

My Charter of Athens didn’t propose solutions; rather,
it outlined a new critical reading of contemporary
society. The aim was not to propose a new city, but
to interpret a world that already exists and that no
longer intellectually belongs to us.

Above:
Archizoom Associati,
No-Stop City: Diagram of a
Homogeneous Habitat

Following pages:
Archizoom Associati,
Diagram of a Homogeneous
Habitat Hypothesis for a
Non-Figurative Architectural
Language

149
150
151
152
153
 ENTROPY, NATURE AND THE
DISCONTINUOUS FIELD: A PROPOSAL
AND SOME SPECULATION ON THE
THEME OF FAKE ESTATES: REALITY
PROPERTIES

Nicholas de Monchaux

Popular images of entropy – a saucer of cooling tea, a lowering heap

of compost, even our own descent into dust – provide a comfortable
but subtly inaccurate thermodynamic image. Viewed through an
informational lens as well as a physical one, entropy is not a consist-
ent movement towards flatness and uniformity, but something else
entirely. A true random-number generator (an electronic service pur-
chased by lotteries and statisticians), for example, only manages to
avoid the inevitable, subtle informational patterning of man-made
algorithms by taking the form of a constant, radio-telescopic read-
ing of cosmic background radiation – the dispersed entropy of our
universe’s founding instant. This stochastic distribution is precisely
an expression not of uniformity, but of stochastic difference and
unpredictable distinction. As we shall see, in certain contexts this
notion has enormous value. Particularly in a world ever more subject
to digital sampling, measurement and positioning, one of the most
essential opportunities might not be (as is currently the fashion) to
seek virtuosic systems of order or even coordination, but rather to
better examine and instrumentalize disorder, disorganization and
the difference between the world as we structure it conceptually and
the world as it actually is.
Local Code: Real Estates is a project that seeks to identify and
transform legally and socially abandoned urban sites, turning undocu-
mented and marginal conditions into a social and ecological resource

154
through the use of emergent, digitally mediated methods. It takes as 1
its starting point an instrumental and unfinished project by Gordon See Gordon Matta-Clark
et al., Odd Lots: Revisiting
Matta-Clark: Fake Estates: Reality Properties. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake
From 1971 to 1974, it took Matta-Clark months of sifting through Estates” (New York: Cabinet
Books, Queens Museum of
microfiche to locate the fifteen fragments of New York real estate – Art and White Columns,
vacant and moribund sites – that comprise the work Fake Estates: 2005).
Reality Properties. Photographs, maps and the property deeds of the
sites, all collected by Matta-Clark, were subsequently assembled by his
widow, Jane Crawford, into exhibitable artworks after 1980.1 Today,
using a Geographic Information System, or GIS, the same search
Matta-Clark carried out over the course of months can be accomplished
in minutes, locating thousands of marginal, city-owned vacant lots
throughout the five boroughs of New York. When Matta-Clark’s Fake
Estates were first presented together in 1992, the mere fact of their
documentation was cause for attention. Today, however, Fake Estates
may be essential to considering how we might respond to a revolu-
tion that has occurred since Matta-Clark’s time: the almost uniform
presence of digital information in our encounters with, and designs
for, urban environments.

Real Estates
New York, of course, is not unique. Analysis of other North American
cities shows a similar pattern of urban vacancy, revealing thousands
of remnant parcels and hundreds of acres of fallow public land. As one
example, a case study of San Francisco revealed over 1,500 city-owned
remnant parcels. Seen separately and individually, these are litter-filled,
residual spaces, concentrated around highways and industrial sites.
When accumulated and considered together, however, these sites can
be seen as a unified, if unsettling, figure on the larger urban ground.
This is especially true when we deploy digital techniques to study
more commonly considered indicators of neglect and decay. Against
this background, these sites describe an uneasy penumbra of urban
freeways, as well as the outlines of entire neighbourhoods – Hunter’s
Point, Bayview, the Outer Mission – that are, in the city’s usual debates,
entirely “off the map”.
Forming a distributed surface that rivals Golden Gate Park, a
targeted, land-banking renovation of these sites has the enormous
potential to solve the very same problems that the presence of the
sites seems to trace. For each of the 1,625 Local Code proposals for
San Francisco, a GIS model of water flow and sun and wind movement

155
2 parametrically governs the dispersal on each site of a range of hard-
See Haan-Fawn Chau,
Green Infrastructure for
Los Angeles: Addressing
Urban Runoff and Water
Supply through Low Impact
Development (Los Angeles:
City of Los Angeles
Department of City Planning
and UCLA Department of
Urban Planning, 2007);
E. Gregory McPherson,
David J. Nowak and Rowan
A. Rowntree, Chicago’s
Urban Forest Ecosystem:
Results of the Chicago Urban
Forest Climate Project
(Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Agriculture,
1994); and American
Forests Association,
Urban Ecosystem Analysis
for the Washington, D.C.
Metropolitan Area (2002),
http://www
.americanforests.org
/downloads/rea/AF
_WashingtonDC2.pdf.
3 are important caveats to such an elaborate system-driven process,
Nancy Miller, “Interview
with Matta”, in Matta: The
First Decade, exh. cat. Rose
Art Museum (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University, 1982),
19.
4
Gordon Matta-Clark,
unaddressed proposal (ca.
1974), Estate of Gordon
Matta-Clark.
156
scape and softscape, mediating air quality and drainage and energy
loads, and enhancing both site and city. Further speculation suggests
that the same digital media used to isolate and identify each site could
also serve as a testing ground for community engagement and design,
localizing each proposal even as digital techniques allow its custom-
ized, site-specific fabrication.
This proposal draws upon established and important precedents in
neighbourhood greening on a local scale in places such as Baltimore,
Chicago and Los Angeles.2 These efforts, however, have been justified
on substantial social and political grounds. Through locally optimizing
energy performance and water storage and through the remediation
potential of such sites, however, Local Code sustains a policy argument
at the level of the entire urban field.
As but one example, a 1.5-billion-bond measure was approved last
year to upgrade the capacity of San Francisco’s combined sewer system
in order to better manage peak flow. Using established engineering
metrics and the parametrically derived form of each of our thousand-
plus design proposals, we estimate that between 88 and 96 percent of
this investment could be replaced by the surface spending we propose –
and all of this at half the cost of underground work. And yet, there
several of which stem from the incandescent and “unfinished” life of
Matta-Clark himself.
The Ongoing Fallacy
Central to Matta-Clark’s view of urban design was the experience of his
father, Robert Matta, who had worked for two years in the “scientific”
studio of Le Corbusier before rejecting the master’s work as being suit-
able only for a (nonexistent) “creature that lived in perfect harmony
with society and his work”.3 Matta-Clark traced his own interest in
adaptive reuse to the observation that “the availability of empty and
neglected structures [is] a prime textual reminder of the ongoing fal-
lacy of renewal through modernization”.4
Rosalind Krauss begins her 1996 essay-collaboration with Yves-
Alain Bois, “A User’s Guide to Entropy”, with a thermodynamic con-
sideration that parallels the epigrammatic physics with which our
present discussion began. In particular, Krauss cites Robert Callois’
description of “hot and cold water mixing together to settle into a uni-
formly tepid blandness,” as well as Robert Smithson’s fluid image of
a boy running in circles in a sandbox, mixing black and white grains 5
in an ever-greyer “movement towards uniformity”.5 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind
Krauss, “A User’s Guide
Later in the text, several sections contributed by Bois consider to Entropy”, October 78
the work of Matta-Clark as being exemplary of “entropic” practice. By (Autumn 1996), 38–88.
ordering Matta-Clark’s works’ collective disorder in successive scales, 6
Bois first considers the artist’s experiments in moulding, layering and Mary Jane Jacobs, ed.,
burning physical objects (such as the scorched, gold-leafed Polaroid Gordon Matta-Clark: A
Retrospective, exh. cat.
prints of Photo-Fry). He then moves on to Matta-Clark’s cutting and Museum of Contemporary
dis-membering of buildings, and concludes with an extended consid- Art Chicago (Chicago:
Museum of Contemporary
eration of Fake Estates. Bois consistently emphasizes the “sovereign Art, 1985), 96.
contempt in Matta-Clark’s attitude toward architects” – the artist’s
violent rejection not only of high modernism, but also of the formalist, 7
Antoine Picon, Digital
autonomous discourse that, during Matta-Clark’s own architectural Culture in Architecture
education at Cornell from 1965 to 1969, proposed its replacement. (Basel: Birkhaüser, 2010),
45–46.
Matta-Clark’s rejection was, of course, never so vivid as when he
shattered the windows of Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture 8
and Urban Studies with shots fired from an air rifle. The violence of Bois and Krauss, “A User’s
Guide”.
the act, at least for Matta-Clark himself, deliberately recalled the aban-
doned, shard-shrouded interiors of New York’s great modernist housing
projects, which by the 1970s were far more abandoned and blighted
than the ostensibly obsolete urban fabric they replaced. (Matta-Clark
had installed his own photographs of these vandalized apartment
blocks in a group show with Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and
Michael Graves just prior to the violent escapade.6)
If the Institute’s “white” formalism was a child of modernism,
then it is also an influential part of the history of data-driven practice.
As argued by Antoine Picon, “Computer culture, or rather the compu-
tational perspective that accompanied it”, is “inseparable from the
formalist and semiotic turn that constituted both a feature of late
modernism and one of the early manifestations of postmodernism in
architecture”.7 Beyond the social history connecting the formalism of
the 1970s to contemporary practice, there is the family resemblance, in
which the formal complexity and the bleached complexion of contem-
porary parametric practice bear witness to the conceptual bloodline.
Standing between these generations is “Deconstruction”, the particular
formalist turn of the 1990s whose attempts to appropriate the work of
Matta-Clark are held in particular derision. Bois adopts Matta-Clark’s
voice for the purpose: “What I do, you could never achieve, since that
presupposes accepting ephemerality . . . [A]rchitecture has only one
destiny, and that is, sooner or later, to go down the chute . . . ”8

157
9 Network Enclosures
My own discovery of this,
ironically, post-dates Local
Code.
10
Gordon Matta-Clark, “Draft
of A Resource Center
and Environmental Youth
Program for Louisada: A
Proposal” (18 August 1976),
Estate of Gordon Matta-
Clark.
11
Otto Piene, letter rejecting
Matta-Clark’s request to
use the Center for Advanced
Studies in the Visual Arts
at MIT (8 December 1975),
Estate of Gordon Matta-
Clark.
12
Matta-Clark, letter to
Wolfgang Becker at the
Neue Galerie, Aachen (10
June 1975), Estate of Gordon
Matta-Clark.
13
Jane Jacobs, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities
(New York: Vintage, 1961),
428.
14
Warren Weaver, “A Quarter-
Century in the Natural
Sciences”, Rockefeller
Foundation Annual Report
(1958), 1–91.
158
Yet if Matta-Clark’s creative destruction was anathema to its
Deconstructivist appropriation in the mid-1990s, we can find some
tantalizing evidence of the artist’s renewed interest in more alternative
modes of constructive architectural practice at the time of his death.9
One of Matta-Clark’s last, unfinished works was the physical construc-
tion of a community centre on an unused site in Manhattan’s Lower
East Side, for which he was preparing a proposal when he passed away
in 1978. Matta-Clark described the audience for his community centre
proposal as precisely “a network of community groups and individuals
engaged in open space and rehab projects, sweat equity, community
gardens, playlots, cultural events, alternative living structures, etc.”,
adding that the proposal had “brought these groups together”.10
Matta-Clark’s use of the word “network” is notable. At the same
time, as his design work engaged more and more with the real and
social fabric of cities, Matta-Clark also became intrigued by what at the
time was the state of the art in digital practice. For a nascent project
combining urban pneumatic architecture in what Matta-Clark termed
“network enclosures”, the artist wrote shortly before his death to both
MIT and UCLA requesting the use of digital architectural, mapping
and visualization software,11 declaring that the use of computers was
“a part of my search to chart and reoccupy space”.12
Today, much of contemporary algorithmic design appropriates a
language of networks, particularly that of complex, non-hierarchical
natural systems. We should remember that one of the earliest critics
to connect such biological theories of emergence with urban design
was, like Matta-Clark himself, a student of Manhattan.
Death and Life
When, in the last chapter of her 1961 opus The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, “The Kind of Problem a City Is”, urban activist Jane
Jacobs sought to articulate a metaphor for urban planning as being
distinct from the “collection of file drawers”13 she abhorred, she turned
to recent work at the Rockefeller Institute, which had provided her
with funding and an office in which to type her manuscript. At the
Institute, her neighbour, Dr. Warren Weaver, had specifically iden-
tified new thinking in the natural sciences describing “organized
complexity”.14 Quoting from Weaver’s essay, Jacobs made a case for
the special affinity between urban landscapes and biological systems.
Invoking the example of a single urban park, she submitted that any
attempt to isolate the variables leading to the success or failure of an 15
urban enterprise, however numerous they may be, is inherently dubi- See, for example, Michael
Hensel, Achim Menges
ous, for such variables are too numerous and interconnected. and Michael Weinstock,
The Rockefeller Foundation’s subsequent funding played a catalytic “Fit Fabric: Versatility
through Redundancy
role in today’s interdisciplinary discussions of emergent form, and in and Differentiation,”
particular the adoption of a biologically inflected “morphogenetic” Architectural Design 74,
language in formalist, “parametric” proposals.15 The apparently coded no. 3 (2004); Michael
Hensel (ed.), “Techniques
and constructed quality of biological systems, however, may turn out and Technologies in
to be just that. Recent work in evolutionary biology has underlined a Morphogenetic Design”,
Architectural Design
new understanding that the relationships between genetic content 76, no. 2 (2006); or Karl
and resulting form, far from occurring measurably, are intercon- Chu, “Metaphysics of
nected, numerous and, as Jane Jacobs has said of urban variables, “as Genetic Architecture and
Computation,” Perspecta 35
slippery as an eel”.16 (2004), 86.
Within such a context, we might reflect on Adrian Forty’s observa-
16
tion that the consistent application of natural, and particularly biologi-
Jacobs, Death and Life. For
cal, language to architecture (as particularly evidenced in the formalist more on this biology, see,
discourses noted earlier) has served historically as a persistent barrier among others, J. Arjan et
al., “Perspective: Evolution
to considering the manifold natural systems to which a building is and Detection of Genetic
actually connected.17 Most problematically, such metaphors tend to Robustness,” Evolution:
International Journal of
buttress the enduring fallacy of the building as an independent object
Organic Evolution 57, no. 9
rather than merely an ephemeral part of many larger systems, cities (2003); J. Piatigorsky, Gene
being chief amongst these. Sharing and Evolution: The
Diversity of Protein Functions
More recent studies on urban form, infrastructure and even intel- (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
lectual productivity have revealed uncanny parallels between biological University Press, 2007); or
systems and the ephemeral flexibility of urban form. In such a con- Andreas Wagner, Robustness
and Evolvability in Living
text the city is not even a formalist “collage”, but rather a contingent, Systems: Princeton Studies
emergent and adaptive system whose complex dynamics will forever in Complexity (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press,
evade measurement and certainty.18 2005).
It is to this vision of the city that Local Code aspires. And we should
remember that in such a dynamic and ephemeral nature, the genetic 17
Adrian Forty, Words and
code of DNA, or even our own “local code”, becomes much more like Buildings: A Vocabulary of
a real architectural blueprint than our profession’s idealized version Modern Architecture (New
York: Thames and Hudson,
of such a thing. In nature, as in the city, such elegant texts turn out to
2004), 220.
have only the subtlest effect on the way the world takes shape.
18
See, for example, Luis
What follows are samples selected from more than two hundred mod- Bettencourt et al., “Growth,
els created for the project Local Code: Real Estate. innovation, and the pace of
life in cities,” Proceedings
of the National Academy of
Sciences 104 (2007), 7301–6.

159
 3rd Ave., Lake De Long St., Outer Mission

Stevenson St., South of Market Augusta St., Silver Terrace

Alameda St., South of Market Tennessee St., Potrero Hill

Aerial Way, Golden Gate Heights 4Th St., Financial District South

Vermont St., Potrero Hill 4Th St., Financial District South

160
 Arbol Ln., Anza Vista Baden St., Glen Park

Bache St., Bernal Heights South Unnamed 108, Clarendon Heights

Benton Ave., Bernal Heights South Chilton Ave., Glen Park

Wyton Ln., Lakeside Burnside Ave., Glen Park

25th St., Potrero Hill 48th Ave., Outer Parkside

161
 BALDESSARI ALS ERZIEHER

Francesca Pellicciari
and Pier Paolo Tamburelli

I.
Although we can sense, despite our relative lack of knowledge in
the field of contemporary art, that what is coolest to like about John
Baldessari is his series entitled Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club
so that They Are in the Center of the Photograph (and we certainly do not
want to deny that it is fun to hit things with golf clubs, particularly if
they are not supposed to be hit that way), this text is nonetheless about
the easier and most famous part of Baldessari’s oeuvre: the works dis-
playing white cuts and yellow-and-red dots on black-and-white movie
stills. It is precisely the easy-going quality of this part of Baldessari’s
art that we consider relevant as a starting point for contemporary
urbanism, for Baldessari is our Virgil: he guides us through the infinite
mediocrity of the field and he teaches us how easy it is to find beauty –
“pure beauty” – in it. In fact, Baldessari is an educator (he started
teaching at high schools during his art studies, and later went on to
teach at juvenile correctional facilities, art schools and universities),
and more precisely an educator in contextualism.

II.
Baldessari started to produce collages out of black-and-white movie
stills in 1976. Even if his work is decidedly anti-dogmatic, over time
the production of these images seems to follow a recurring pattern.
The process is simple: The artist goes to a shop and buys second-
rate movie stills, files them away using a provisional classification
system and then selects some and cuts parts of them, sometimes
adding touches of colour to certain areas, sometimes adding col-
oured dots and sometimes combining various images together.

162
Baldessari selects the most generic images, the ones with no iden- John Baldessari, Violent
tity – the “stuff nobody wants”: Space Series: Two Stares
Making a Point But Blocked by
a Plane (For Malevich), 1976,
At one place I go to for movie stills, I look where the photographs are black-and-white photograph
randomly thrown in boxes. It’s stuff nobody wants. Photographs they with collage, 61.2 x 91.4 cm
can classify or identify go upward in price . . . The stuff I get is twenty-five Courtesy of John Baldessari

cents a shot. But I like that because I don’t want stills from movies that
I’ve seen or when I’m familiar with the stars. It has to be really obscure
because I don’t want any baggage to come with it.1

The starting point for Baldessari’s work is as mediocre as the field: it

is the relics, the background, the “stuff nobody wants”, the almost-trash
(not the pure trash – Baldessari does not want to shock anybody – but
the almost-trash). The ugliness of these raw materials is as mild as the 1
ambition of his artworks. The tone is quiet (and realistic). Baldessari’s John Baldessari, quoted
in Pure Beauty, exh. cat.
art is accessible and tolerant. No particular skills are necessary for Tate Modern (London: Tate
doing this. Everything in the process in obvious – the kind of movie Modern, 2009), 54.

163

2 of the Photograph).
Aldo Rossi, L’architettura
della città (Padua: Marsilio,
1966), 69. The translation is
the authors’.
164
stills, the categories for classification, the artistic means . . . What kind
of art could be more obvious than this in contemporary society? Even
kids could do what Baldessari does (in fact, making a fake Baldessari
would be a perfect kindergarten exercise, provided you remember to
have the kids use safety scissors).
III.
Baldessari works on found images in which he refuses to recognize
a figure or a background. He understands the pictures as perfectly
flat; the entire surface is equally interesting, and all of it lends itself
equally to artistic intervention. Baldessari teaches us that everything
in the field is capable of becoming the centre of attention (just like in
Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club so that They Are in the Center
Baldessari’s interventions modify their contexts, but never erase
them: only what is already part of the field can be a subject for formal
modifications. The collages are episodes of a larger, endless landscape
with no differentiation between figure and ground, subject and context,
nature and artifice. The flatness of Baldessari’s collages is the flatness
of the field: there is no centre, no hierarchy, just atomic splinters scat-
tered all around – California ist alles, was der Fall ist.
This flatness is surprisingly similar to the inherent (metaphysical?)
flatness that Aldo Rossi attributes to the city in a fundamental passage
of his L’architettura della città (The Architecture of the City):
Accepting the spatial continuity of the city means accepting all of the ele-
ments that we encounter in a given territory – or better, in a given urban
area – as being homogeneous without supposing that there is a divide
separating each element from the next. This proposition can be very
controversial, and we will have to return frequently to its implications.
(For example, this proposition is not accepted when one maintains that
there is a qualitative jump between the historic city and the one that takes
shape after the industrial revolution, or when one talks about open cities
and closed cities as being of different natures, etc.).2
Rossi talks about the “spatial continuity of the city”, but it is easy
to adapt his argument to the field.
As soon as something happens in the field, as soon as new mat-
ter organized in some way is introduced into it, this immediately
becomes one more element among the others. It does not matter what
the goals, the causes, the ambitions and the fears related to such a
transformation were. As soon as a transformation is material, as soon
as it moves soil, piles up stones or establishes borders, it immediately
becomes mass within the field that confronts and reacts with all other
masses distributed in the field on the same abstract and material
plane. The continuity of the field is simply the continuity of things that
are placed next to one another, and this banal proximity is enough to
establish positional (i.e. architectural) relationships within the field.
The field is messy, dirty, perfectly indifferent and yet organized accord-
ing to space. As such, the field is a context, even if there is hardly any
place within it, and even if there is definitely no genius loci. The field
is obviously natural (in the way that a nuclear plant is as natural as a
mountain creek) and obviously urban (in the way that a parking lot
in the middle of the fog is as urban as Piazza del Campo). Baldessari’s
begins with this (desperate and liberating) indifference/equality. 3
Everything in the field has some sort of right to exist, and everything John Baldessari, quoted in
Pure Beauty, 47.
in the field has some kind of legitimate desire for beauty. At this point,
a biographical detail might help to explain the artist’s omnivorous
attitude towards the field: his father was in the “salvage business”.
As Baldessari recalls, “He would contract to tear down buildings . . .
either buy them for very little or just get them for nothing . . . and
then salvage all of the material.”3 Baldessari recycles the field in the
same way, with the same combination of cruelty and dedication of
his father’s “salvage business”.

IV.
The ways in which Baldessari works on his found images are not
overly numerous. Here we will try to provide a provisional list of them,
despite our relatively limited knowledge. The list is surely incomplete,
and by no means corresponds to any kind of predetermined plan on
Baldessari’s part:
1. the erasure or cutting out of a polygonal shape within the picture
(e.g. Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a
Plane [for Malevich], 1976)
2. the juxtaposition of images with a regular polygonal shape and
of the same size arranged orthogonally (e.g. Concerning Diachronic/
Synchronic Time: Above, On, Under [with Mermaid],
1976)
3. the juxtaposition of images with a regular polygonal shape and of dif-
ferent sizes that are variously rotated to leave empty space in between
them (e.g. Violent Space Series: Six Situations with Guns Aligned [Guns
Sequenced Small to Large], 1976)

165
 4. the geometric cutting out of details from the same image (e.g. Violent
Space Series: Nine Feet [of Victim and Crowd] Arranged by Position in
Scene, 1976)
5. the composition of fragments with polygonal borders derived from
different original source material within the same picture (e.g. The
Soul Returns to the Body, 1986)
6. the insertion of coloured dots on found imagery (as in Yellow [with
onlookers], 1986)
7. the displacement of an irregular, sort of figurative shape into a
new context and the filling of it with a solid colour (as in Pelican in
Desert, 1984)
8. a combination of the above (as, for example, in Bloody Sundae, 1987)
Unlike classic modernist collages like those by Karel Teige,
Baldessari does not cut out neat figures in order to bring them together
on a neutral background and produce surreal marriages. For Baldessari,
it is impossible to separate the figure from the ground. The original
context never disappears; traces of it always remain attached to the
figures, which are never precisely cut along their borders, but usu-
ally enclosed in roughly geometric shapes. Baldessari allows empty
space within the picture or between the pictures, but he does not use
the empty canvas as his starting point. He does not add figures to a
tabula rasa; instead, he erases parts of an already crowded image. If
Teige’s images are entirely constructed on the canvas, Baldessari’s
begin with a picture that is already created and can only be modified.
In his work, form means subtraction, modification, commenting –
marginalia on boredom.

V.
Under all circumstances, Baldessari’s formal interventions are nega-
tive and contextual (and therefore dialectic). The pure negative of the
cuts he makes and the almost negative of the dots he adds reverberate
within the original pictures. Form produces consequences around
by suspending the given order. The negatives of the cuts and the dots
enjoy their lack of precision, expanding possible relations. This delib-
erate imprecision has a liberating (maieutic) potential. By suspending
consent here and there, Baldessari’s instinctive scepticism activates
a microlandscape of new possibilities. Still, his artistic actions need
a context in which to react.
In Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a
Plane (for Malevich) (1976), a white figure appears in front of two men

166
in dark suits. Baldessari’s contextualism is proved by the (generally
overlooked) fact that this figure is a rectangle and not a square. In
fact, the line of the parapet on the lower left corner defines one side of
the rectangle while the perpendicular running from the point where
this line meets the left border of the picture to the upper border of
the image defines the other. The ratio among the sides is 1 to 1.1. The
figure is almost a square. Geometry gives place to context.
In Violent Space Series: Nine Feet (of Victim and Crowd) Arranged by
Position in Scene (1976), traces of context survive in the seven circles
containing the nine feet cited in the title. Shoes, pavement, socks and
trousers provide several pieces of unnecessary information about a
murder we do not see. The serene boredom of the context tames the
tragedy. A constellation of quiet, everyday elements emerges from the
suppression of the tragedy in the foreground. A pacified landscape 4
appears. Baldessari usually works with Hollywood debris, mainly Ibid.

kisses, killings and the like, systematically depriving these scenes of

any trace of drama. Faces are obscured with dots; feelings disappear;
psychology ceases. His dots are generalizing devices: the figures they
obscure can thus “be seen as types – the mayor, the police chief, the
student, whatever”.4 Tragedy is removed from the scene. In fact, trag-
edy is not allowed into the field. Given that there is only global tragedy,
local tragedies have to disappear. Tragedy is, in the face of the field, just
a form of impoliteness. Within the field, form achieves the beautiful
indifference of Handel’s music. Baldessari’s consistent amateurism
is as impeccable as Handel’s professionalism.

VI.
The field lacks more than a genius loci: it also lacks an aura.
Baldessari’s work shows that, even under these conditions, form
can still exist, a new kind of form, one that is humble, comic and
weak, with an ambition as limited as that of producing a straight line
by throwing balls in the air (e.g. Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get
a Straight Line, 1973).
Form does not seem to need particular justifications within the
field. According to Baldessari, the situation is incredibly simple:
as long as there are movie stills and yellow dots, there can be art.
(What about that, Theodor W. Adorno?) The means are modest, as
are the goals, but there is still an ambition to form. “Pure beauty”
is deliberately the aim, and “pure” beauty is “artificial” beauty; the
field is definitely not natural or picturesque. “Pure beauty” is not that

167
 of “nature”. Baldessari activates abstract microlandscapes that are
flat, logical, labyrinthine, baffling, erudite, artificial and funny – like
Italian gardens.

VII.
Baldessari takes on the risk of form – the risk of making better and
worse compositions, of being successful and of becoming commercial
(which is inherent in form, at a certain point). Sometimes a Baldessari
is good, and sometimes it’s not (and that is art, with all its risks).
Baldessari also teaches that making art is fun. He has been faithful
to his 1971 oath I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. There is pleasure
in making art, and Baldessari’s work is thoroughly consistent with this
assumption. Dealing with the boredom of the field can be fun.

VIII.
All of Baldessari’s work, from the conceptual works of the late 1960s
onward, is a sort of training for painting, an escape from painting
and a preparation for painting – a detour on the path that returns
to painting. His pieces of advice to painters from 1966–68 (such as
“Composing on a Canvas”, “Exhibiting Paintings”, “What This Painting
Aims to Do”, “Quality Material . . . ”, “Tips for Artists Who Want to
Sell” and “An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer”) need to be
taken seriously. They are bits of advice that Baldessari addressed first
of all to himself.
Just one last thing seems to be missing: why did Baldessari not go
back to painting?
Maybe because he is an educator, somebody who waits for someone
else to continue what he started.

168
FAKE BALDESSARI

Kersten Geers,
Who’s Afraid of Yellow and
Pink

169
Milica Topalovic,
The Strip Is Almost

170
Above:
Stefano Graziani,
B for Baldessarri

Left:
Pier Paolo Tamburelli,
To Return Good for Evil

171
 LEWIS BALTZ’S PARK CITY

Stefano Graziani

Lewis Baltz’s Park City with an essay by Gus Blaisdell entitled “Skeptical
Landscapes” was published in 1980. It is a 246-page hardback book
illustrated by 102 photographs that is the third and final component
of a trilogy that began with The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine,
California.
The following pages of this article reproduce the first double-page
spreads of the book. The first two photographs in the book show views
of the site from a hilltop, while all of the others were taken in the space
seen from a distance in the first two photos.
Lewis Baltz worked two and a half years on this project. Park City
is a place that grew very fast. It is located 35 minutes from Salt Lake
City and was founded around 1860 because of the presence of some
silver mines. In 1898 a terrible fire destroyed most of the city, which was
never properly rebuilt due to the collapse of the silver market. Already
by the 1950s Park City was turning into a ghost town.
The new construction depicted in the book is the result of the town’s
new boom as a skiing destination in the sixties. The photographs in
the book document the town’s reconstruction. They set the stage upon
which the future was to unfold, the imminent nightmare of a world
driven by anxiety. As Blaisdell states in his essay, “We speak to each
other, and to ourselves, in one another’s voices, some of which must
be our own. This is at least a precondition for philosophical conversa-
tion, the sound of an internal dialogue, since the soul that converses
with itself through aknowledgments gains, as always, self-knowledge
of the other. When that other is so totally different as to horrify us, as
in some of these pictures, then we are awakened to a fact like cruci-
fixion – the sequence spreads out and deepens as it exhibits all of the

172
terms of its criticism – indignation and outrage and disgust, steps
far beyond any misanthropy, defensive aestheticizing, or contempt.
The world depicted here is indeed as Cavell wrote of another, one in
which instinct is estranged, birds droop at noon, and strange gods
are readied.”

Park City, photographs by Lewis Baltz, essay by Gus Blaisdell

(Albuquerque / New York: Artspace Press / Castelli Graphics, 1980).

173
174
175
176
177
 VITTORIO GREGOTTI IN
CONVERSATION WITH ROLF
JENNI, CHRISTIAN MÜLLER
INDERBITZIN AND MILICA
TOPALOVIC
Rolf Jenni, Christian Müller Inderbitzin and
Milica Topalovic: When you published Il territorio
dell’architettura in 1966, the phenomenon of the
“città diffusa” (diffused city) had already appeared.
Could you sketch an impression of how the Italian
“territory” has been transformed between then and
now? Which aspects of this transformation do you
consider the most important and most surprising?
Vittorio Gregotti: Italy is very different from other
European countries. The only thing that these
all have in common is having a dense network of
settlement. Compared to the rest of the world,
Europe and Italy represent a special case where
development is dense but made of many parts –
where small and medium-sized cities still have a
recognizable dimension. Then there are phenomena
of conurbation, as can be found around Naples and
Milan. These are phenomena that should not be
misunderstood, as frequently happens, because
in Italy the administrative system that defines the
areas of jurisdiction of an urban centre does not
follow a logic of unification based on economic or
infrastructural factors. These fields or areas stand
as historical administrative areas or units, but
they have become quite detached from reality. The
difficulty in Italy, as in other nations, is that these
178
administrative dimensions are often political in
nature and inevitably produce conflicts between each
city and the others around it. All of this creates an
obstacle that can only be overcome with difficulty by
those who still have the will to engage in urban and
territorial planning. The fact that this does not exist
anymore is another matter altogether. The reason for
this situation is that we have surrendered. No one has
the desire to formulate hypotheses about the future
anymore, and this situation has been getting worse
since 1966.
There is a fantastic book called La megalopoli padana
(The Megalopolis of the Po Valley) by Eugenio Turri,
an Italian geographer, that describes the megalopolis
of the Po River area interpreted as the degeneration
of Gottmann’s concept of the megalopolis: an urban
system that has become unified without any sort
of design or calculation, eating up the agricultural
territory around it. This is the most amazing thing,
this renunciation of any attempt to predict or
hypothesize about the future.
RJ, CMI, MT: We have made an interesting discovery
in Italy that we call territorial globalization. In our
research, we didn’t find places that still function
based on a local or rural economy; from the nation’s
coasts to the summits of the Apennines, nearly all of
the areas we looked at have been affected by global
economic relations in various ways. This holds true
for other parts of Europe, too. Could you comment on
this phenomenon?
VG: Well, we must first clarify what globalization is.
It is not the relationship between civilizations but
rather a neocolonial attempt to homogenize values,
behaviours and consumption. This is the condition
in which capitalism has found itself since it shifted
from being industrial in nature to being financial
and global in character. Financial capitalism
generates points of view regarding its relationship
to architecture and landscape that are completely
different from those of industrial capitalism.
First of all, industry no longer has a relationship
with the landscape; instead it has a relationship
with a place that is purely based on short-term
convenience, so contemporary production is entirely
de-territorialized. This is a particularly important
phenomenon compared to what happened in the past
with the spread of the service sector and with the new
possibilities that were opened up by communications
technologies and their homogeneous messages. If
you go to Shanghai or Mexico City, in the centre of
the city you find not only the same stores with the
same brands, but also the same values, behaviours
and expectations that the media has promoted.
Obviously, the interconnection between things has
become stronger in Europe as well: here, too, there
has been huge development in both intersubjective
and collective intellectual communication. This
completely different form of communication
has been changing local culture greatly over the
last thirty years, sometimes in a positive way, but
sometimes with lethal consequences for the culture
of our discipline.
It is my opinion that local communities do not have
the ambition of contributing to our civic future
through their uniqueness; instead they prefer
to imitate the overarching culture of the global
community. For almost half of the twentieth century,
a country like Italy was organized primarily on the
basis of agriculture. Now agricultural production
is entirely secondary, or it has been industrialized,
and so it functions differently. Rural culture in Italy,
in turn, has been urbanized in terms of both its
tastes and its expectations, just as it has throughout
the rest of Europe. All social behaviour has become
urban in nature, even if you live in a farmhouse in the
countryside. Even our ways of thinking have become
urban: they all reflect an urban condition whose
terms are defined by the oligarchies in power.
RJ, CMI, MT: It is tempting to say that the character of
these transformations undermines the very notion
of territory. Territory is, by definition, created by the
presence of political borders and other boundaries,
as well as the clear distinction between countryside
and city. In contrast to the notion of territory, that of
the field is about the loss of borders and clarity. Since
the 1960s, we might say, territory has been vanishing
and the field has been forming. How would you define
the relationship between these two concepts of
“territory” and “the field”? Are they in opposition to
one another?
VG: No, underlying these two concepts of territory
and the field there is the notion of geography – or
rather anthropological geography, since natural
geography does not exist. Geography is all based
on the fact that the community decides on whether
to leave certain natural areas as they are, turn
them into agricultural resources or use them for
construction. French geographers paired geography
with history, perceiving that within a basin, zone
or area there are a number of settlements and
that these settlements have relationships that are
based on the way in which people have settled there
over time for economic and political reasons. This
situation has been consolidated throughout the
twentieth century to the point that in the 1960s
John Gottmann outlined a theory of territory that
raises the question of how a territory could be
organized according to the issue of distance and the
different roles of its component parts – the idea of
the city-region. This concept enjoyed little success,
however, because there was an abandonment of
the idea of imposing a territorial design due to the
productive change of global capitalism. There was a
renunciation of imagining this type of organization,
which offered the possibility of managing the
territory. This occurred especially in Europe, where
in fact the density of settlements, combined with
179
the possibilities provided by communications
technologies, allowed the assignment of different
roles and functions to various parties without
merging them into a single confused urban field.
The endless aggregation of buildings that resulted
is simply the consequence of speculation. There
are no other reasons for this, except the diffuse
(and primitive) notion that freedom is only a lack
of obstacles. According to this approach, everyone
does whatever the hell he wants to. This particular
understanding of invention and of freedom is
essential to understanding not only the Italian
situation, but also, I believe, that of the European
Union. The reason that “the territory” is no longer
organized is that we have given up on the idea of
planning. The expansion of the city – its infinite
expansion – has resulted in sprawl (or slums, in
developing countries).
Along with this development, citizens became city-
users, and the city became a series of camps with
very precise borders between rich and poor areas,
between areas occupied by people who migrate
to the city for work and areas where temporary
inhabitants live and between the parts occupied by
foreigners and those inhabited by the city’s regular
residents. There are entire areas of territory outside
the city that have been transformed into such
“camps”, and these can be extremely useful, because
they are places that can be easily supplanted by
more financially expedient territorial uses.
RJ, CMI, MT: In your book, you urge architects to
broaden the territory or scope of architecture beyond
the matrix of the traditional city – to make contact
with the territory and to measure, modify and utilize
it. Do you think that this approach is still valid today?
VG: I have to make a clarification here. We must be
careful, because the term “traditional city” does
not mean much. There are very different types of
180
traditional cities; Greece invented the polis while
Rome invented the complex realization of the concept
of civitas, whose combination of different elements
occurred without any sense of order. The Roman city
was much more complex, much less ordered and
much less clear than we think, and I think this is true
of many ancient cities; they were far more complicated
systems than we realize. We must consider that there
is an important issue related to the size of the city.
When the scale of the city is perceived, understood
and remembered by its citizens, this perception
produces an identifiable image and a shared memory.
But if the image is no longer identifiable because, for
instance, the city has a population of 30 million, then
this is no longer possible.
Today the architect is extremely weak. The architect
now has less and less influence over the development
of the territory and the city; he is one of the less
important actors. Think about the fact that large-
scale building projects today are usually overseen
by powerful real estate companies that have certain
priorities – marketing, economics, safety – a fact
which makes architects entirely secondary players.
To give you a specific example, when it came to
redesigning Milan’s trade fair in the city’s centre,
they held a mock competition that got prominent
architects involved, but the only thing that mattered
in the ultimate selection of the winning entry was
the economic aspect, despite the fact that the project
associated with this proposal was the most anti-
urban of them all.
RJ, CMI, MT: The territory’s form is the result
of both natural processes and human activity.
To acknowledge this form, you once wrote, is
to experience “a shock between geometry and
geography”. The construction of territory can
therefore be an aspect of the architect’s competence.
How, then, should we approach the territories of
today through architecture?
VG: The relationships between things are as
important as the things themselves. The spaces
between buildings need to be designed just as much
as the buildings do. If we had the opportunity to
control very large development projects, we could
imagine attempting to address the territory and
its geographical, historical and natural features.
If we could look at things from this point of view, I
am absolutely convinced that we could put forward
interesting proposals. The problem is that the
architectural culture of recent years has gone in the
opposite direction –the direction of the object – and
is more interested in enlarging the object than in
fostering the relationships that can exist between
objects.
RJ, CMI, MT: André Corboz, among others, has
made the argument that territory has become
fully urbanized – that it has been conquered by the
city. Through technology and infrastructure, any
location, no matter how remote or hostile, is now
accessible to an urban dweller and fit for urban living.
Furthermore, the city itself seems to be ever more
emancipated from the constraints of geography and
the conditions of the physical context in which it is
situated. Corboz thus concluded that under these
conditions “territory can no longer serve as a unit of
measurement of human phenomena”. But what does
that tell us about territorial planning and design?
Have these practices become completely arbitrary,
decorative processes?
VG: If these practices were simply decorative, it would
be better not to deal with them at all. Nobody would
care. There is always this misunderstanding when
the discussion comes down to territory or geography
and these are understood simply as a backdrop. In an
area with a big city operating as a matrix with respect
to its surroundings, relationships and developments
obviously depend on this centre. The city spreads
out in different ways over its surrounding territory.
Starting from a recognition of these circumstances,
it is possible to begin to develop a few ideas. One may
think that this spreading out over the surrounding
territory is infinite and without interruption, or one
may think that the territory is arranged according to
a discontinuous pattern. This is another method of
organization, which is totally different, and this is
the central problem of the entire debate.
The problem is that in the 18th century a discipline
called “urban planning” was born, but now it
practically no longer exists. Planning has become
economic planning, or large-scale political planning
or geographic planning, or else it has shrunk to
the point of focusing on the isolated architectural
object. There are no intermediate steps anymore:
from the architectural point of view, the concept of
urban design has disappeared. At the same time, the
whole idea of the regulation of large urban systems
has disappeared; this now lies within the purview of
economists, geographers and politicians, not that of
urban planners.
RJ, CMI, MT: In Italian debate during the 1950s and
’60s, the concept of il territorio (territory) played
an important role in the work of various writers
and groups. Along with you, Rossi and Tafuri, for
example, Muratori and Archizoom used it as well.
Could you tell us how the concept of il territorio
appeared in this context and what its specific
meaning was? How did it compare to territory, or le
territoire?
VG: When Il territorio dell’architettura was published,
no one used the word “territory”; it only entered the
cultural debate in the 1970s. Before that, we used
words like city or metropolis, but not “territory”. For
instance, the Archizoom group had a fascination
for technology. They did not deal with the territory;
instead, their designs flew over it – the land no longer
181
existed. They had an abstract idea of the ground, not
a concrete one. In contrast, there were others who
saw the ground in terms of its history, distilling an
architectural style from the understanding of this
history.
Several interpretations have been given since the
discovery – which occurred ten years earlier, between
1951 and 1952 – of this relationship with history.
The big difference is the fact that the CIAM began
to discuss modern architecture’s relationship with
history, and this became a big issue. “The Heart
of the City” was the title of the groundbreaking
debate, which I myself witnessed, among the
great architects of the modern movement about
the meaning of history, and about whether or not
history was something that was compatible with
the methodology of the modern. This discussion
occurred in 1951 in Hoddesdon, and it was what
largely characterized that period. These positions
not only react to one another, but also obviously
have differences that over time have undergone a
change in perspective. Looking back, the terrifying
discussions that I may have had with my friends in
those years now seem of little importance. Muratori
is a typical example of someone we all considered
to be highly conservative. For instance, his project
for social housing in Mestre was considered very
conservative, particularly compared to Quaroni’s,
which we all considered very appropriate and suitable
to the site. This view, which would change over the
years, produced very radical differences at that time.
In my book, I was playing with the profound
ambiguity of the word territorio, because in Italian
this word can have two meanings: it can be used to
define the area in which a discipline operates, but
it can also be used to define the physical geography
of a place. A friend of mine who is a psychoanalyst
suggested the book’s title to me precisely because
it brought this ambiguity into play. The book
investigates the specificity of the territory of the
182
architect, both as a territory of expertise and as an
expertise with regard to territory. Perhaps this double
meaning of territorio exists in French, too; I am not
sure that it exists in English.
Aldo Rossi, for example, maintained a very rigid
notion of territory from the point of view of the first
meaning of the word – that is, the field in which the
architect has to operate. For me, the interesting thing
was the ambiguity of and the relationship between
these two meanings, while for him the territory of
architecture had very precise boundaries: those of
classical architecture. He moved within these limits
and demanded that everybody else do the same. His
rationalism was of a passionate kind, whereas mine
is critical in nature.
RJ, CMI, MT: In your design practice over the years,
you have continued to work on an exceptionally large
scale, usually with a strong focus on the relationship
between the architectural object and the landscape.
You have also written that implementing large-scale
works led you to examine principles and methods
that could be adapted to the realities of production.
Could you talk a bit about large-scale design
strategies that have proven feasible over the years,
both conceptually and in relation to the realities of
production?
VG: Let’s take the case of Pujiang, a new city of
100,000 inhabitants near Shanghai. It is located in
a place where initially there was nothing but a few
houses, but it was criss-crossed by a large number of
waterways. The strategy has been to try to focus on
the only thing that Chinese culture and European
culture have in common: the pattern of the city, its
orthogonal layout. This concept of using the grid as
a regulating and mixing device is a very important
one, and it has always been present in the tradition
of European cities. It is a tradition that incorporates
monumental parts and less monumental ones,
thereby creating a functional and social mix that
has been one of the most important elements of
the European urban tradition. These two elements
then encounter a landscape that has its own specific
characteristics and provides certain opportunities.
The landscape of Pujiang is a flat one where there was
water, which could become the dialectical element
that was integral to the overall composition of the
city.
Of course, this concept is challenged by a multitude
of other elements involved in the process, such as
the client, planning regulations, Chinese habits
and attitudes, and the harmful influences that the
Chinese have absorbed from the Russians and the
Americans, among other things. All these issues
must then deal with regulations, size, techniques and
other problems of this kind, which are the ones that
ultimately articulate architectural form. For us, the
confrontation with reality is unavoidable, and it is
necessary that this relationship become critical, not
just a mere reflection of the state of affairs.

In recent years ETH Studio Basel has been investigating

the processes of the urbanization of territory in Europe,
Africa and the U.S. As a result, ETH Studio requested
an interview with Prof. Gregotti in order to revisit his
pioneering concepts on territory in the context of the
present day.

183
BOOKS
ARE
AUTOMATIC BOOKS
NOT
OVER!
IF YOU WANT IT
192
 CALL FOR PAPERS
San Rocco 3: Mistakes
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
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In principle, there are no limits – either minimum or maximum –
imposed on the length of contributions. Minor contributions (a few
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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
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external contributors publish their work under Creative Commons
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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 3 must be submitted
electronically to mail@sanrocco.info before 31 July 2011.
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 in-
terested in another kind of mistake: mistakes that are
the product of a disproportion, of a displacement; mis-
takes that are somehow generous, open, brave; mis-
takes 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 com-
plete refusal of the rule; instead, mistakes try to es-
tablish 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 clumsi-
ness. Mistakes are a comedy about rules, or the stum-
bling 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 cor-
rection, 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 possi-
bility (and the necessity) of a new kind of rule, one that
could even cope with this specific kind of mistake. Mis-
takes somehow point toward some forgotten potential.
Mistakes are progressive.
Mistakes sometimes display a certain hubris. Behind
every mistake there is somebody that believes he can
afford to make that very mistake (as in the case of Bra-
mante and the different dimensions of the orders in his
Belvedere, or in that of Bernini and the Doric colonnade
with the Ionic frieze for St Peter’s Square).
Mistakes are sometimes the product of humbleness:
provincial mistakes, made out of distrust, a lack of self-
confidence or instinctive conservatism (like the exqui-
site provincialism of the pillars of Figini’s House of the
193
Journalist, or the touching clumsiness of the church in
Roccaverano).
Mistakes can be intelligent, but they are definitely not
smart (smartness, in fact, is about avoiding mistakes).
Smart mistakes are what Castiglione and Raphael – who
were too smart to really like mistakes – called sprezza-
tura, a subtle negligence that undermines the rule with-
out 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 in-
volves running the risk of a total failure.
Sometimes mistakes happen precisely where different
sets of rules conflict, or where different scales inter-
sect. Here the rigorous observation of the overall log-
ic demands that mistakes be made on a smaller scale:
“Good reasons must, of force, give place to better” (Ju-
lius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III). Bramante’s Belvedere is
full of such mistakes.
Mistakes are sometimes elegant. They can have a par-
ticular beauty. They can be as sweet as Buster Keaton or
Krazy Kat. They can turn the rule into something mild-
er or gentler. There is a particular talent for 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 his having written necessarily 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 Zur-
barán’s depiction of St Bonaventura’s funeral, the wrong
perspectives of the Kaaba in popular Muslim prints, the
repulsive façade presented to the visitor by the mon-
astery of La Tourette, the portico in front of nothing of
the Collegio Elvetico, and the fake windows at Schloss
Tegel . . .
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 col-
lides with the stubborn world that refuses to comply
with it. Thus, Palladio’s Basilica crashes its proud stairs
194
against a little mediaeval house, and almost all of Gior-
gio 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.
San Rocco 3 is interested in mistakes and in the gram-
mar of architectural mistakes. On the following pages
San Rocco presents a list of mistakes we would like to
know more about.
.Fake Geography.
When Gaspar de Lemos arrived in Guanabara Bay on
1 January 1505, he believed he had discovered the
mouth of a great river (therefore naming it the River of
January).
Rio de Janeiro never overcame the lack of this missing
river. Even today, the city remains a marvellous cul de
sac: a Potemkin city with 6 million inhabitants and with
no hinterland, a European stage attached to the Ameri-
can coast. There is no valley that ends at Rio – no terri-
tory, no agriculture, no economy. It therefore does not
come as a surprise that the exploration (and exploita-
tion) of Brazil started elsewhere (in São Paulo, a city
curiously close to the Atlantic coast, but entirely pro-
jected towards the mainland). Rio still survives in the
fabulous, mistaken geography unintentionally invented
by Gaspar de Lemos.
.Wrong Pilotis.
Luigi Figini designed the Casa del giornalista (House
of the Journalist) in 1933, four years after Le Corbusier
completed the Villa Savoye at Poissy. The house by Fi-
gini takes the five points quite seriously: free plan, free
façade, roof garden, ribbon windows, pilotis. Yet some-
thing is wrong here: the atmosphere is contracted,
somehow frozen. The pilotis are not round. More like a
Lombard farmhouse than a modernist villa, the House
of the Journalist has long, clumsy, squarish pillars.
Regardless of Figini’s bourgeois background, the House
of the Journalist looks like a relative from the country-
side at an elegant dinner: it is too rigid for the occasion
and too serious. Zero savoir faire. The squarish pillars
are clearly a mistake, for they kill the modernism of the
villa in one fell swoop. The house does not float; rather,
it is brutally re-attached to the earth. Here, modernism,
as if seen through the eyes of a Lombard farmer, looks a
little less glamorous.
.The Pond of the Glass House.
In 1951, Lina Bo Bardi completed a villa in Morumbi,
which at the time was a remote green area outside of
São Paulo. Due to her infatuation with tropical life, Bo
Bardi designed a pond to be filled with rainwater col-
lected by the roof. A gigantic spout was built to fun-
nel the water into a large concrete pond located just
in front of the house. The pond proved to be a failure,
however. The stagnant water immediately became a cul-
ture broth for mosquitoes, and the Bardi soon got rid of
the pond. The mediocrity of everyday tropical life took
its revenge on an idealized world that could exist only
in the fantasy of European émigrés. Real Brazil was way
more annoying than ideal Brazil.
.Villa Conti at Barlassina.
Villa Conti is a single-family house in Barlassina (a vil-
lage north of Milan) by Mario Asnago and Claudio Ven-
der. Asnago and Vender restored (re-made) this villa in
1958. Villa Conti is full of mistakes, so much so that we
do not even know which one to begin with. It is mod-
ern merely in order to collapse the banality of the villa,
and it is banal merely in order to ridicule modernism.
The villa is pink, with thin steel columns attached here,
a greenhouse there, a pitched roof that somehow be-
comes a sheet covering a wood-panelled rotunda with
a steel staircase, a crazy façade with two round win-
dows and a modernist-looking bow window inserted in
the roof. At Villa Conti, Asnago and Vender’s architec-
ture of small adjustments (small deviations from a sub-
stantially unquestioned rule) makes a quantum leap:
the number of exceptions overturns the rule. The result
is surprisingly radical. Villa Conti looks like “everything
you should never do”. It looks like an early work by Frank
Ghery, but Italian, bourgeois, provincial, spoiled, eclec-
tic, lazy . . . and strangely cool.
.Wrong Pyramid.
In Dahshur, some kilometres south of Saqqara and Giza,
stands the so-called rhomboidal, or double-slope, pyr-
amid. It is the pyramid of Snefru, Cheope’s father, and
was built around 2596 BC. Its characteristic form de-
pends on the changing inclination of the façades. At
about the middle of its height, the external stone walls
change inclination, thereby defining a faceted volume –
a sort of diamond emerging from the sand. There are
several hypotheses that attempt to explain this anoma-
ly. The most qualified one talks about construction dif-
ficulties: the first inclination of 54°46’ would have pro-
duced a pyramid that was 140 metres high, an impos-
sible mission. To avoid the pyramid’s collapse, which
they started to sense once they reached a height of 49
metres, the architects reduced the inclination angle to
43°60’. The final height of the pyramid is 105 metres. The
Dahshur pyramid did not become a model. Its geometry
did not convince the pharaoh; only the finishing of its
surfaces was successful. In fact, the flat external walls
substituted the steps introduced by Djoser at Saqqara.
As a result, what could have been a refinement (a gen-
tle modification of an obvious geometry) that started a
tradition of refined diamond-shaped pyramids was sim-
ply understood as a mistake, a contemptible departure
from the search for geometric perfection.
At any rate, some mystery remains. What exactly hap-
pened at Dahshur?
.The Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
The Statue of Zeus was one of the Seven Wonders of the
Ancient World. It was produced in Olympia in 433 BC by
Phidias. The statue was about 12 metres high and rep-
resented Zeus seated elegantly on his throne. The work
was often criticized for its gigantic size, which did not
fit well in the relatively normal space where it was in-
stalled. Strabo was one of the work’s critics: “Although
195
the temple itself is very large, the sculptor is criticized
for not having appreciated the correct proportions. He
has shown Zeus seated, but with the head almost touch-
ing the ceiling, so that we have the impression that if
Zeus moved to stand up he would unroof the temple”
(Geographica, Book VIII, 3, 30).
.Vitruvius against the Doric (Book IV, 3, 1–2).
“Some ancient architects have asserted that sacred
buildings ought not to be constructed of the Doric or-
der, because false and incongruous arrangements arise
in the use of it. Such were the opinions of Tarchesius,
Pitheus, and Hermogenes. The latter, indeed, after hav-
ing prepared a large quantity of marble for a Doric tem-
ple, changed his mind, and, with the materials collect-
ed, made it of the Ionic order, in honour of Bacchus. It is
not because this order wants beauty, antiquity, or dig-
nity of form, but because its detail is shackled and in-
convenient, from the arrangement of the triglyphs, and
the formation of the soffit of the corona.
“It is necessary that the triglyphs stand centrally over
the columns, and that the metopae which are between
the triglyphs should be as broad as high. Over the col-
umns, at the angles of the building, the triglyphs are
set at the extremity of the frieze, and not over the cen-
tre of the columns. In this case the metopae adjoining
the angular triglyphs are not square, but wider than the
others by half the width of the triglyph. Those who re-
solve to make the metopae equal, contract the extreme
intercolumniation half a triglyph’s width. It is, however,
a false method, either to lengthen the metopae or to
contract intercolumniations; and the ancients, on this
account, appear to have avoided the use of the Doric
order in their sacred buildings.”
.Mistakes and Consciousness
in the Early Work of Peter Märkli.
In 1995, Peter Märkli built his first sort of modern build-
ing, a two-level single-family house on a plot on the out-
skirts of the village of Grabs. The square-based paral-
lelepiped in polished concrete seems to float a few
centimetres above the unfenced lawn, fully exploiting
196
the structural possibilities of the in situ construction.
A terrace screened by aluminum panels wraps around
two sides of the ground floor, while the upper level is
pierced by a bunch of horizontal windows. Everything
seems to fit into the panorama of the late modernistic
Swiss architecture of the nineties. But something does
not feel completely right. Indeed, and significantly, the
plan is almost a square. Only the entrance corner has an
angle of exactly ninety degrees; all the other ones es-
cape perfect orthogonality. At first glance, even an ac-
curate observer is not able to detect the almost imper-
ceptible distortion, which is clearly revealed only in the
terrace, where the non-parallelism between the outer
perimeter and the inner glazed walls becomes notice-
able. One could argue that this apparent mistake is a
reaction of the platonic form to the trapezoidal plot,
and, therefore, that the house is opening up toward the
landscape (indeed, the ninety-degree corner faces the
most consolidated part of the village, while the distor-
tions take place on the other side). A diagonal tension
along the entrance–living room–terrace sequence dis-
torts the square. But site-consciousness is not what is
at the core of this bizarre choice. The point is that the
house, being almost a square in drawings, becomes a
square in reality. Remember all the stories about visual
corrections in Greek architecture? There is a pre-mod-
ern, and thus post-modern, mastery at work in Grabs:
perfection by means of mistakes.
.Ferrari’s Factory.
Rumour has it that the Ferrari factory stands on a plot
that is on a 0.8-degree incline. One of the most glamor-
ous Italian companies – known all around the world for
the beauty of its sports cars, which are an indisputable
symbol of speed and precision – has a factory built on
an (almost) undetectable spatial flaw. This would nor-
mally not be all that important, but in the new exten-
sion of the Ferrari assembly lines recently designed by
Jean Nouvel, a 180-metre-long building, this slope pro-
duces a noticeable variation in height of 1.44 metres. It
was not possible to use steps in the building’s design
due to the need for continuity in the assembly lines,
so the brand new building of the “Ferrari City” is on an
incline itself. To hide the mistake, the second floor of
the building has the same inclination of this new refer-
ence plane too. Thus, a building with a surface of 21,000
square metres – which is divided into assembly lines for
the company’s 8- and 12-cylinder cars, test and proto-
type-development areas, offices, meeting rooms, relax-
ation spaces – is tilted by 0.8 degrees. Here a minute
error, one not visible to the naked eye, forces architec-
ture to find solutions and produces a complexity that
becomes surreal.
.The Forbidden Side.
Charles Jencks “revealed” – it must have been in one of
the seven incarnations of his book on postmodern ar-
chitecture – the forbidden corner of the Seagram Build-
ing. In most canonical publications showing the build-
ing’s front and square, the back and side façades are
elegantly avoided. The forbidden side of the building,
with its unresolvable glass inside-corner (a mistake,
according to purists), reveals that Mies van der Rohe
is a strange contextualist. Not only does it elevate him
above the mediocrity of his minimalist epigones (the
ones who just drop buildings on empty planes), but it
also seems to sneakily introduce another kind of imag-
ery, one disguised as some kind of screwed-up Euro-
pean urbanism in the “city of possibilities”. Perhaps
it shows the inevitable cohabitation of success and
failure, reality and dream. But then again, what is the
dream?
.The National Gallery.
Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery is
deliberately designed as a mirage. Squeezing as many
elements of the original Wilkins building as possible
into the small plot reserved for the extension, Ventu-
ri makes a contemporary building with a compact plan
sitting atop a museum shop, auditorium and storage
spaces. The question here, perhaps, is this: Which is
the mistake of what? In this attempt to marry a com-
pact, contemporary museum with a classical envelope,
it is not very clear what came first. Ultimately, one could
understand the outer façade as a correction, a mask or
even a bridal veil designed to protect the bride from the
world before she can actually wed.
.The Upper Belvedere.
Bramante built the Belvedere to represent the self-styled
greatness of his client, Pope Julius II, who, in an attempt
to match the splendour of his ancient Roman predeces-
sors, not only renamed himself Caesar, but expected an
equally imperial architectural work to represent this
identity. Bramante’s solution was the bold answer one
would imagine for such a deluded mind. He constructed
a gigantic “hole” that was to function as a perspective
machine to be seen from the papal headquarters. Any
tool was permitted, from different sequences of orders
and different heights inside of the same order, to fake
perspectival views, the most important being outright
architectural mistakes. Since the side walls of the up-
per courtyard were designed with pilasters of decreas-
ing height while maintaining the base height of the ped-
estal, they create a shifting proportion. Bramante even
considered it possible to design the concluding façade
with proper proportions and different measurements.
The corner confronts both and, upon closer inspection,
reveals the trick: it shows the mistake, which was invis-
ible to the deluded patron sitting far away in his papal
headquarters.
.Scamozzi vs. Sansovino.
Jacopo Sansovino died in 1570, leaving the Library of St.
Mark unfinished. The building, described by Palladio as
“il più ricco, & ornato edificio, che forse sia stato fatto
dagli antichi in qua” (the richest and most ornamented
building to have been made since antiquity), displays
the results that were attainable by reemploying the
tools of classical architecture with the utmost freedom.
Yet the ease and confidence with which Sansovino uses
the classical repertoire were no longer acceptable only
a few years later in 1581, when Vincenzo Scamozzi was
asked to complete the Library and build the new admin-
istrative quarters of the Republic (the New Procuracies)
on St. Mark’s Square. Scamozzi attacked Sansovino from
two sides: on one side, the orders of the Library and the
197
Mint clash violently against each other, while on the oth-
er side the correct Ionic frieze of the Procuracies clash-
es with the irregular one of the Library. Scamozzi dedi-
cated all his energy to underlining Sansovino’s mistakes,
strictly refusing any adjustment that could have hidden
them (he thus extended the Library, without modifying
it, just so that it would crash into its architecturally cor-
rect neighbours). There is something pathetic in this af-
firmation of the rule. The aggression against his dead
rival reveals the vulnerability of the censor. Mistakes
were a luxury he simply could not afford.
.Doric with an Ionic Frieze.
The classical order of St Peter’s colonnade is Doric.
There is probably some relationship to the supposed
“heroic” nature of the Doric order (St Peter was a mar-
tyr), but the main reason for its use is a formal one: the
Doric is the simplest order and the church’s square re-
quired a repetition of simple columns to define its bor-
der. The colonnade’s frieze, however, is Ionic. Bernini
did not care too much about the correct syntax of the
orders (he probably also knew precedents that could
justify this solution, but that is not the point). The Ion-
ic frieze was necessary to the design for the same for-
mal reasons that required the columns be Doric. The
scale of the square requires the most extended, most
uniform solutions. A correct Doric frieze with metopae
and triglyphs would have introduced dramatic shad-
ows, interrupted the continuity of the horizontal rib-
bon of the frieze and compromised the quietness of the
space. Here the city required that the architecture be
incorrect. Bernini did not lack the courage to make a
mistake.
.Bramante at Roccaverano.
Roccaverano is a super-small village in Piemonte. There
is a church there by Bramante. Bramante was asked to
design the church by the manager of the construction
site of the new St Peter’s in Rome, Bishop Enrico Bru-
no, who was originally from Roccaverano. The church
was not a really fancy commission for the architect of St
Peter’s. We suspect that Bramante was not particularly
198
enthusiastic about the task (he was, after all, quite old
at that point), but he probably could not refuse. At any
rate, he put together a design, recycling his previous
proposals for the church of San Celso. A wooden model
was probably made and sent to Roccaverano (most like-
ly on the back of a donkey). Later on, since it probably
took about a month for the donkey to arrive, the citizens
of the small village received the model, thereby landing
the most radical architecture (or better, the most radi-
cal architecture ever) in the most provincial spot on the
planet. What was to be done with this crazy thing?
Well, the citizens of Roccaverano did not do that bad a
job. The church is still there, and the interior is impres-
sive: it is an abstract, radical Renaissance experiment
with five domes in a quincunx arrangement and a very
refined use of the orders. Only the façade is a bit ugly;
the pediment is too steep. However, it does snow heav-
ily in Roccaverano . . .
.Hagia Sophia.
The construction of Hagia Sophia began with Emperor
Costantine, and later the church was reworked time
and again until its fundamental reconstruction in 532
under Emperor Justinian and his legendary architect-
scientists, Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles.
Fires, earthquakes and many collapses of the dome,
which is 31 metres in diameter, required several differ-
ent reinforcements to keep the building viable. A detec-
tive’s eye capable of investigating the weakness of the
structural project would uncover a minor history of tri-
als and errors, an instructive fable that points to no es-
tablished conclusion.
.Bad Photographs.
Since its beginnings, photography has grown through
mistakes. Technical limitations were what first pushed
photographers to invent new strategies and devices.
And once photography had reached its technical per-
fection with work by the likes of Walker Evans or Paul
Strand, a new generation of photographers felt the de-
sire to investigate and ask themselves new questions
about the potential of photography as a language. The
candid “wrong” photograph became the starting point
of a new exploration of the photographic language. A
de-institutionalizing attitude and a new gaze emerged;
a new attention to what had been ignored before devel-
oped; and a new sense of curiosity generated a differ-
ent sort of imagination and produced a new kind of real-
ism. Paul Graham and Wolfgang Tillmans thus inherited
some of the formal issues of authors like William Egg-
leston and John Gossage, and built up an attitude that,
while classic, opened up new possibilities in the evolu-
tion of the language.

.Apollodorus Criticizes
Hadrian’s Mistakes (A Bad Idea).
In what, to our knowledge, is the only surviving piece
of debate among protagonists of Roman architecture
(Cassius Dio, Historia Romana, LXIX, 4, 3), Apollodorus
of Damascus criticizes Emperor Hadrian’s design for the
Temple of Venus and Rome. According to Apollodorus,
Hadrian made a mistake by not using the large founda-
tions of the temple as storage space for the machines
needed for the nearby Colosseum. The Emperor did not
like the critique, so he exiled Apollodorus.
Interestingly enough, the only surviving bit of Roman ar-
chitectural debate only talks about the combination of
formal and functional aspects. The art of Roman archi-
tecture is all about coupling rhetoric and pragmatism in
the radical blending of the hyper-functional with the hy-
per-formal. Apollodorus did not criticize the functional
mistake; rather, he blamed the emperor for not taking
formal advantage of functional needs. In any case, the
real mistake was Apollodorus’s; it is better not to put
your faith in the open-mindedness of emperors.

Next page:
Alberto Sinigaglia, Basilica
Palladiana (south-west
corner)

199
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 San Rocco • THE EVEN COVERING OF THE FIELD
2A+P/A in conversation with Andrea Branzi Ioanna An-
gelidou interviews Kumiko Inui Pier Vittorio Aureli on
Hilberseimer’s Chicago Tribune project Florian Beigel
and Philip Christou imagine a collage city Matilde Cassani
designs eighty-one public spaces for the field Simon de
Dreuille on Sam Jacob’s ballpoint pen Campo Marzio
Nicholas de Monchaux on fake estates Kersten Geers on
Saul Steinberg and Hans Hollein Anton Ginzburg’s film
Hyperborea Stefano Graziani on Lewis Baltz’s Park City
Joseph Grima on Jevons’s paradox Mathias Gunz re-
counts some anecdotes about the Nile Valley Rolf Jenni,
Christian Müller Inderbitzin and Milica Topalovic in con-
versation with Vittorio Gregotti Michele Bonino and
Subhash Mukerjee on Gabetti and Isola’s contradictions
Erica Overmeer on the beauty of landscapes Francesca
Pellicciari and Pier Paolo Tamburelli on John Baldessari
Freek Persyn on Switzerland Virginia Chiappa Nunez and
Pietro Pezzani on the Bawa House Giovanni Piovene on
fog Giovan Battista Salerno on Alighiero Boetti’s stamps
Jonathan Sergison on Georgian London Giorgio Talocci
on the Baan Mankong Program Oliver Thill on the Nile
Valley Luca Trevisani compiles a provisional bibliography
of the field Éric Troussicot goes back to the countryside
Ignacio Uriarte draws labyrinths Around the World in 80
Days according to YellowOffice Andrea Zanderigo com-
ments on Colonel Creswell and photos by Lewis Baltz,
Luigi Ghirri, Bas Princen and Giovanna Silva

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