Postmodern, postcontemporary, almost ancient.

In Casabella 754, Souto de Moura elaborates an interesting analysis of the completion of the Madrid Banco de España isle, by Rafael Moneo.
The analysis is interesting non merely for the theme of restoration/renewal, which, as the same Souto de Moura states, has never gone much farer than what Ruskin and Viollet-Le Duc had been debating about; it is rather the hint – so faintly dared to seem possibly unconscious – to the conceptual size of the workas an inquity about the postmodern question.
What Moneo does, shortly, is someway the overtaking and the synthesis of the sterility of both the extreme positions: neither a fake-antique remake of the artisanal splendour of plasters and molded stone of the late 800’s, nor the violence of a renounce, publicly defended in the name of futures, no matter they being next, or far.
I confess that giving a judgment to this work costed me hours of mental elaboration. Much of the trouble was caused by the comparison that Souto de Moura made between the new facade decoration of the building and Duchamp’s Nude going downstairs: if in those sculpture he (maybe) found the same dignity of the avant-gardist signs of the cubist allusion, I saw (almost) only a step backwards from detailed to rough, probably inspired more by money saving than by declarative intentions, or at least some sort of banal rasterizing, an out-of-scale low resolution rendering of antiquity; in other words something to easily get out of the muddle. Somewhat I still believe it, but I admit that the work is not lacking on the conceptual side; Souto de Moura itself, indeed, can’t bypass Aldo Rossi’s contribute (particularly, Schützenstrasse isle), that, maybe reasonably but mostly for an acquired consuetude, seems to be biuniquely linked with all that Italy produced postmodern in architecture.
But, at this point, the difference: «a completely different position from the one took in Berlin by Rossi, for whom the meaning came from the simulation of historicized architectonic elements, out of scale, reproduced in plastics – but, actually, we were at the top of post-modern…», says Souto de Moura about Moneo, someway unequivocally declaring that the postmodern era has ended and that another one has started, the postcontemporary one, as somebody calls it. Then, how about the theory of the end of theories? The postmodern should have been the last of all the ages, we could say, and last infinitely; it is clear that something happened and destroyed the exactness of this auto-postulation that, even if apparently plausible (and, after all, reassuring in its lapidary will of destabilization), reveals itself as inesorably false, just as in Anselmo d’Aosta’s demonstration. So, Moneo can get through that bit of so 90’s bad taste that – let’s admit it – Rossi and someone of his contemporaries suffered after, and synthesize antiquity and this future-longing present with a certain grace and no more reverential fear.
Did the multimedia panacea rebuild the meta-language that the wall fall had destroyed? Or did it maybe accelerate its ruin, giving man such an immense power that it changed reality and art into ineffability? Can the post-modernity overcoming (considering that era as ended) ever be a step towards, existentialistically speaking?

In memory of

«If I should turn to the new generations, I’d say the following things:
1. Avoid to attend university, by now institutionalized and bureaucratized. Architecture cannot but be outside the academies.
2. Suspect anyone talking about “project culture”. It’s an evasive alibi. The only valid culture is architectonics.
3. Distrust not only dogmas and idols, but also pseudo-super-structural philosophizings, that characterize most of the time wasting chattering made in the project courses.
4. Aim to the language, high, low and middle. For clarity: high, Frank Lloyd Wright; low, Frank O. Gehry; middle, Günther Behnish. Poetic communication, slang communication and modern literary communication.
5. Trust the new, the risky modernity, modernity that “makes value out of crisis”. Then stop underlining how much old there is in new, and recognize how much there is of authentically new instead. Our culture is full of “suspended” values, virtual, not yet developed, to be affirmed and to let live.
6. Try to draw as few as possible. Space cannot be drawn, and that’s the only important thing in architecture.
7. Reject any deductive method, which university research is based on. Einstein and Popper taught: without deducing, inventing and verifying. Maybe to falsify.
8. Reference points: William Morris and the theory of the contents and functions list; Art Nouveau and Bauhaus for asymmetry and dissonance; Expressionism (from Häring to Scharoun) for the anti-perspective three-dimensionality; Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl, the quadric-dimensional scomposition (today reprised by decostructivists); Fuller, Morandi, Musmeci for the structural involvement in architecture; Wright for the flowing space; the most advanced landscape studies for the continuum between building, city and territory. Seven invariants, or principles, or features not only in the language of modern architecture, but in the modern language of architecture.
9. Banish every talk about “autonomy of architecture”. Architecture is splendidly free because structurally involved.

That’s all. I hope my absence makes you happy.

With every cordiality,

Bruno Zevi»