Monday 3 October

LINE

S
(215)898-8321

Volume IV Number 2

A PUBLICATION

OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

FAX (215)898-9215

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6311

Say there's a million bucks buried in the house next door. There isn't a house next door. No? Then let's build one. 1
by Marco Frascari Ethical and aesthetic values no longer coincide naturally in contemporary architecture. Architects must unlearn their alB mode methods of design to rediscoverthe proper presence and the elegant role of architecture in everyday life. In the context of edification, an ethics more fantastico can and must be reincorporated in the design, construction, and inhabitation of buildings. Such a project should proceed without coveting the logic of other disciplines and must avoid producing even further convoluted definitions. Employing the considerable power of architects' curiosity, 2 the ethos and pathos of architecture can be again uncovered within the long tradition of building speculations. The assumable result of these speculations becomes a sequence of elegant demonstrations presenting the magian vigor of architecture, a discipline that is still compressible, resilient, resourceful and over and above all mysterious. I do not want to sound as millenarist, but less than a decade is separating our architectural achievements from the next millennium and I see architecture bringing together, in an abnormal arrangement, sets of questionable criteria rooted in fashion, corporate image's fabrications and dashing publicity. The current concoctions of architectur~oes not matter if produced by corporate or critical practice firms-are merely glamorous application of seductive glosses, glamorous frostings and chic decoys. The majority of architectural designers parent flaunting, brandishing and ostentatious buildings, but, at the same time, those constructions are expressing dull, prosaic, obtuse and above all discomforting grim architecture. These designers have forgotten or never learned the great art of building well and how this consequential and cogent art is both the natural cornerstone and the artificial keystone for an extremely critical art, the art of living well. To repeat, architecture, as a virtuous art, has lost its exemplary status. 3 Hardly, any ethical scope or moral standard is embodied in buildings, anymore. Future architects should disremember what they inherited from these glossy, end of millennium, designers. Oblivioning the fad, the future generation should descry the wonderful character of Lady Architecture together with her powerful ethos. This new generation of architects should not focus upon inherited specious procedures of design, but rather they should explore the inventive meanings of architectural projections and visions; they should perform acts of prediction by using elegant graphic expression to evoke future bUildings. My advice to pr,ospective architects is that they should probe creatively within the primeval idea of wonder by delving into the architectural every-day. This quest should be based on an aggressive combination of the pieces composing the puzzle of architecture. The result should be: a sum of theoretical

transactions elaborated by using tactics rather than strategies. 4 Hopefully, their assembling of these puzzle-pieces will embody wonderment and generate an inaugural image for the future art of building well. I should also warn these future architects that the nature of this motion is macheronic. Although, through alternate procedures of decanting, editing and rewriting, architecture has lost its macheronic make up, it has not lost its macaronic essence. The images, mustering up the art of building well, are genuinely macheronic. They should discover in their work as I did in my work that macheronic speculations must rule their architectural demonstrations.

.....................................................................................

.;

:............................................................................

Macheronic speCUlations are a monstrous way for demonstrating that the body of the architectural discipline is still and will always be sustainable, flexible and fertile. As I recently come to realize, I am one of these macheronic authors as Cesare Segre defines them in ending a critical essay on the macheronic tradition:

Generally, the macheronic persons are not revolutionaries. Their point of view is incompatible with the program of reordering of the world. Ifthey put in crisis the present institutions, it is also easy to imagine that they will put in crisis any alternative institution. They may have some polemical idols, and consequently they use, with terrible effect, the weapons of mockery, paradox and caricature, they kill using the ridicule. However, their criticism is beyond politics, religion or morals: it is a critique investing the basis of our comprehension and representation of the world. It is not revolution but demonstration, a permanent presentation of evidences. 5 The grotesque nature of macheronic rhetoric is the most proper form for architectural thinking, drawing and writing. It is through this pantagruelic nature of macheronic sapience that the taste of the marvelous nature of architectural things can be ascertained. Thus as an architecturally macheronic author I love macaroons, maccheroni al sugo, to sing Yankee Doodle, but above all to hang within the threshold of the discipline, thoughts and things that can be unveiled by a careful use of marveling. They are the mirabilia of architecture. 6 In the present production of buildings, there is a complete lack of wonder. In a Greek or Egyptian edifices, the automatic opening of a door was a source of astonishment and awe. Nowadays, the automatic opening ofthe doors, as in supermarkets and airports, is no longer a miraculous event. These transparent glass doors negate the visual aim of marveling since they open to show something that has been seen already through them. Nowadays, the expression wonderful is almost meaningless an utterance of praise and celebration, used to avoid deeper and more specific comments. Probably the present negative condition of wonder is due to what Umberto Eco has called in artful manner the "eccesso di meraviglia" (excessive astonishment), a tendency to take consequently only the most evident elements and ostentatious events. 7 Nowadays, wonderment is part of a pretentious routine forgetting that marveling must dwell above all in the minimal events. Wonder is a design quality that, in architecture, has been used excessively only for the most patent and obvious expression of human monumentality. This is done disremembering the importance of the marvelous in the familiar events of inhabiting, the habits of embodiment. The miraculous must dwell in temperate places. Consequently a new wonder should be embodied in customary buildings so that architecture will move from the present ostentatious condition of wonderment to an elegant and balanced arnazement embodied within the domestic maze of our urban dwellings. Architects must discover a new way for constructing architectural admiration in ordinary architecture. A meta-historical category, a particular and exceptional state of mind, wonder is a type of mental predicament marking the marvelous beginning of knowing and the end of unknowing in a cogent stupor of mind. In the construction of the human world, a mingling of aesthetic thoughts and practical thoughts, admiration deals with production through a project. A category of imagination and an amazing metacategory of art production, wonder is the source of any architectural project and it is always a projection of a dream. To dream architecture means to conceive a building through an act of dreaming that has not been established on a conjecture of wish- fulfillment,

but rather is the longing of architects who are not interested in one-person show. Eluding this too narrow interpretation of the constructed world, the ennobling architects of the next millennium can and must foster an architecture that can change the quality of life in an invisible but often touted way,

i.e .... the houses of dreams. The architects of the next millennium have the privilege of unveiling architecture as a kind of philosophical divination, a divination by memory. Architectural divination takes place in a dream and uses the gauge of the body for forecasting or adumbrating possible constructions: then architecture is above all a maternal and therapeutic enterprise taking place through dream incubation.

i.e ..... the house of my dreams,

The links between architecture and dreams had been stated in a critical manner and energetically by Francesco Colonna in writing his extraordinary rebus-opus entitled Hypnerotomachia Polifili, ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium essa docet. and published in Venice by Aldo Manuzio 1499. The links between drearn and architectural imagination are unequivocally and intensely efficacious, but the connections that traditionally architects and dreamers have made are ill-defined and tautological. To overcome these setbacks we must contemplate drearns as mode of thought. In reading the

Hypnerotomachia Polifil;, it is essential to understand that the Love of Polifilus for Polia is metaphorically representing the love of thinking. As Pj.G. Cabanis has pointed out the forms ofthe images of dreams are closely linked to the images of thought. The act of dreaming is the creation of a locus of thought. The world of dreams is a living forest in which fantasy dwells within the enigma by solving the riddle of architectural corporeality. A dream is an act of construction that must be construed. As Freud has stated, dreams are traces of phylogenetic and ontogenetic memory. Polifilus, the somnolent and slow hero of the Hypnerotomachia, experienced a dream within a dream. First he felt asleep and he dreamed of being lost and bewildered in a forest where he plunged in heavy sleep a second time and during this poetic stupor he dreamed his rewording architectural adventure. Descriptions of double dreams are rarely told in western culture and the device is used by Colonna in his dream-telling to indicate that is not a wish-fulfillment of Polifilus 'personal desire for Polia but rather is a dream of knowledge being twice removed from reality. Architectural dreams are always recurring dreams allowing a slow construction of the construed reality. They are a quest for an embodiment in stone, brick, glass, plaster, wood and steel of the human natural thought patterns. Little Nemo In Slumber/and, the astounding comic strip charmingly created by Windsor McCay, is another demonstration of the strong ties existing between dreams and architectural imagination. Son of a lumberman, essentially a self taught graphic artist, McCay elaborated a precious comic strip based on the dreams of a little Victorian boy named Nemo. 8 The adventures of Little Nemo take place in Siumberiand. In this dream-land, the great architecture of Classical America prevails in a powerful surrealistic dimension. In his short dreams-il page long-Nemo has the most visually wielding and intriguing nocturnal adventures. Siumberiand, most of the times, is constructed by tautly scale changing urban environments or expeditiously growing international exhibitions' esplanades or constantly metamorphosing edifices. This alchemic and weekly melanges of a recurring architectural dream is the paradigmatic environment for understanding how in any architect is always present a little childhood-self and how this childhood-self is essential part for any extended quest for architecture. This imago of architecture an idealized image of architectural bodies formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood is the motor of any successful design. As the Pythagorean Vitruvius has pointed out, the education of an architect begins during childhood and it is a slow process. Little Nemo's architecturally overloaded dreams point to this beginning and in themselves they are part of the slow process of image construction required by proper marvelous architecture. The marvelous alters the conception of the transcendental imagination, within which all perceptions are ascribed to one consciousness. The marvelous challenge the limits of this consciousness by remaining outside the standard awareness, producing a perception that is in between. The position of being in between or being located in a threshold, is the condition of pending thoughts. Macheronic thinking is all based on pending thoughts, since it is organic and 'alive: Being at the same time sublime and subliminal, this figurative procedure of pending thoughts, dreams, looms weights and plumb-lines can also weave the purple fabric of architectural theory within the marble loom of construction. The marble loom and the piece of purple fabric hanging within it are a reference to a beautiful construing of a Homeric text. The philosopher, poet and hierophant, Porphyry is the one who worded the only intact allegoric

exegesis of a poetic text handed down to us from Classical Antiquity. Homer describes a cave located on the shore of Ithaca, and inhabited by Nymphs. Beneath it lies, the Naiads delight Where bowls and urn of workmanship divine And massy bearns in native marble shine; On which the Nymphs arnazing web displays Of purple hue, and exquisite array. 9 The Hellenistic hierophant interprets the passage as a representation of reality as corporeality. For the formation of the flesh is on and about the bones, which in the body of animals resemble stones. Hence these instruments of weaving consist of stones, and not of any other matter. But the purple web will evidently be the flesh that is woven from the blood. 10 In his interpretation of Homer's figure of thought Porphyry singles out architectural corporeality to construe the artifacts located in the cave. The native marble and the purple fabric are two wonders of the corporeal nature embodied in the extraordinary tectonics of architecture. These divine artifacts are simultaneously the cosmos and the cosmetic of the constructed world, its bare structure and pleasurable clothing, the skeleton of an edifice and its necessary decorative flesh. The marble loom, a representation of a door frame within which is hanging a red curtain generates a mute representation and a pause. In it the pending thought of the corporeal figure becomes an allegory of the architectural body. To be more precise two are bodies incorporated in the artifacts, the human body, the weaver, and the body of the artifact itself. Sometimes they merge and sometimes they are far apart. This tension between them allows the constructing as well as the construing of human artifacts. The Italian and French verbs pensare and penser mean to hang something as related to thought, combing accomplishment with the idea of pending-to think with pause, the thing with visual lulling. This timespace oxymoron is an elegant notion tying together posing wonder as a desire for deferment to make present in the making of images. Furthermore this image of a marble structure incorporates two other fundamental bodies of architectural thinking, the divine bodies of Janus and Cardea: the god of doors and gates and the goddess of hinges The desire of wonder is the hinge of the gate to the understructure of architecture. Wonder and the wondrous are obsolete ideas but they are also the solely feasible way for escaping from the present impasse of architectural design where novelty must be traumatic and buildings disconcerting. The present trends, in architectural design fashionable practices, are multifaceted acts of propaganda for making unhappy edifices, loaded with envy, anger, displacement and fear. Many theoretical and real constructions, most of which published by architectural magazines, do not advance nor envelop the human art of living well anymore. They impose envy, as a way of life, by augmenting our human terror of time. Within our contemporary reality, the writing of architectural criticism rejects forcefully any thoughtful and learned elaboration on the therapeutic tempers of the constructed world. This hides the hideous reality that artistic preposterousness isto conceal the existence of an architecture conceived as commodity, rather than as commodious structures. Since wonder is a gratuitous praxis and not a highbrowed commodity output, the outcome is that the elaboration of the magic properties of edifices is an occult practice that does not convert in currency. The hideous consequence is that the practice of wonder does

not become a theoretical cult with a proper divulgence embodied in operative writings, drawings and constructions. Not so long ago, I wrote a book concerned with the divinatory intelligence required for the creation of architectural monsters. Analogy is the founding canon of the ars combinatoria that makes our constructions comprehensible. A famous, but totally enigmatic, Vitruvian aphorism suggests that this intersecting occurrence of the signifier with the signified is the leading principle of architecture Both in general and especially in architecture are these two things found; that which signifies and that which is signified. That which is signified is the thing proposed about which we speak; that which signifies is the demonstration unfolded in systems of precepts. 11 The concocting the incorporeal with the corporeal is the kernel of the Stoic semantics that originated this Vitruvian aphorism, postulating a divinatory intelligence. Monsters, special events of human representation, are meaningful occurrences inviting transmutations, that is the merging of the signified with the signifier through a translation. Architectural monsters, as extraordinary events, celestial novelties, untouchable sacred signs of possible building elements for future constructions must be taken as prophecies standing against the conventional criticism of depressing and anointed design routines. Monsters are mantic sema foretelling future events, since they are signs originated in analogic reasoning. Architectural mantic procedures are founded on analogic thinking in its most refined forms. Analogic thinking yields our perceptions of what we see, smell, taste and make. Analogies consent us to discern in formless matter the semantic relationship by which our own bodies become the basis of our construing. For instance, the construction of geographical naming sees bodies in the landscape and the resulting teratology or collages of body parts satisfy our expectations. A visual form of this rule can be derived from Arcinboldo's painting of human figures represented by an assemblage of seemingly related objects, as in the Four Seasons that he painted by making personification out of still life compositions arranged with fruits of the corresponding pedod. In the personification of Summer, cherries make the lips and peaches the cheeks. Science is born of the codification of experience, whereas magic is born of the pregnancy of tradition. Architecture is born by the union of experience and tradition. Science is founded on the believe that experience and reasons are always valid. Magic is founded on the certainty that hope cannot fail and desire cannot deceive. Architecture derives its strength from the merging of experience and desire, and that reason and hope share the same ground. Scientific knowledge is dictated by a reasoning logic, architecture by analogical reasoning since it is the constructed result of the human autonomous power of creating desired need. Architecture ritualizes humans' optimism to enhance their faith in the victory of hope over fear, as it was stated by Alberto Sartoris in a rich figure of thought where he said that it can befound in the architectural grotto of AIi-Baba. Architectural magic, Sartoris' magie constructive is ruled by the three principles of the General Theory of Magic elaborated by the great French anthropologist Marcell Mauss, viz similarity, contiguity and opposition. Architectural mantic processes are based on a mimesis unifying metaphor i.e., similarity, metonymy i.e., contiguity and irony i.e., opposi-

tion. These three tropes rule the most mysterious aspects of our amalgamation of pragmatic and symbolic attitudes towards reality. The intent of architectural quests is a critical compilation of suggestive fables of thaumaturgic urban and architectural events. The ambition is to ascertain if thaumaturgic intelligence can be restored to its consequential capacity within the domain of architecture. In 1678, the English definition of teratology was "a discourse or narrative concerning prodigies; a marvelous tale or a collection of such tales: 12 In this dictionary definition, the relationship existing between marvel and monster is revealed to be the same as the Greek primeval association between thaumas and teras. Architectural monsters are thaumaturgic enigmas to be interpreted with vague precision. Teras and thaumas can be assimilated in an ontology. Considering that architecture has lost the sense of measure, a telling of wondrous stories might help to ascertain again technologically appropriate tactics in constructional knowledge. To transcend the obstacle of too many fields to know, the architect must possess the analogical structure that links and solves them in architectural constructions. This knowledge of logical connection, i.e., the similarity of logos existing among all the technai of a construction, derives from a concert between theory and practice, a merging of the homo faber with the homo sapiens. This merging generates the homo solerte that is the architect.

PHIlADELPHIA

09fl4/1994.

Notes 1 The title is a quotation of a joke-line of the Marx Brothers. 2 Curiosity kills cats not architects. 3 Architecture as queen of virtues is the extraordinary personification of the discipline presented by Barbaro, Caporali, Palladio and many other Renaissance theoreticians. 4 For a clear discussion of the difference existing between tactics and strategies De Certeau( 1984). 5 As Teofilo Folengo, I am de sanguine Mantos. Folengo's consequential. epic poem, Baldus was my preferred reading during the early stages of my education. Probably most of my philosophy generated out of this protoreading. 6 The travels of architects are similar to those of the macaroni, well-traveled young Englishmen of the 18th and 19th century who aHected foreign customs. 71n his /conologia, Cesare Ripa (1603:305) wrote: -Meraviglia (wonder) is a certain stupor of mind that occurs when something new (una cosa nuova) is represented to the senses; and the suspension of the senses in that new thing makes man marveling and stupid: 81n latin: Nemo=nobody. Nemo is also Ulysses' alias, intended to make the other Cyclops to think that Poliphemus has dreamed up the whole story. 9 Porphyry, Selected Works, T. Taylor tr., London 1823, p.171. 10 ibidem, p.180 11 Vitruvius, De Architectura, l,iii,3. 12 Short Dxford English Dictionary, 1983, vol. 2; my underlining.