Professor Emery’s difficult architecture

As the first official post, I think it would be due to present a review of the book that contributed, even partially, to the inspiration for the title of this blog.
L’architettura difficile – Filosofia del costruire is the last book by Nicola Emery, professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Switzerland.
It is an essay whose mission is yet plain in the back cover, that we’re quoting here to criticize its intents and results:

«Today architecture gains a great success: the more it becomes spectacular, the more it gets spectacularized. But this success itself could be indicative of a crisis of sense. And a crisis of sense starts when a discipline loses the essential causes of its own existing, acting, projecting and building. Looking for a really not minor part of contemporary architecture, the one most frequently shown on every kind of magazine, the impression is that architecture ends in a series of shapes, more and more unusual and almost incomprehensible. But all these shapes, just as in fashion, soon get to a certain tire and, overworked, quickly lose their value. In this situation it seems just right to make a philosophical reflection upon the aims and essence of building. A reflection, like the one made in this book, that faces seriously and rigorously the meanings attributed to architecture by Plato as first and then by many other thinkers – Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille and Jeremy Rifkin among them -, architects, Bruno Taut, and artists, Mondrian, the Situationists and Josef Beuys in particular. The result is a philosophical map, necessary to understand and criticize contemporary and also to find better answers in projecting, with a not-ephemeral sense and value. An older Plato, for those who lost the aim of preserving the wealth for the territory as a whole and just longed for a private interest, suggested control, censure and even “the beatings”… He probably exaggerated, but today we should start a rediscovery of the virtues of creative self-control, with the aim of a space decolonization.
The free aesthetical research should then proceed at the same rate with a care for a socially and economically sustainable resolution of the organization of space as a fundamental common good.»

There’s no doubt this is an ambitious project, but it’s even more fascinating since quite close to our inquiry field.
Nevertheless, reading this essay left me with a series of uncertainties.
In my modest opinion, the worst fault of the book is to be found in the highly fragmented structure of the argumentation. The book, indeed, is divided in four sections that are apparently and actually mutually disconnected.
In the first one, with the title of The law architecture: Plato, a path of urbanism and architecture is reconstructed inside the books of Laws by the Athenian philosopher; a very interesting path, not lacking about hints of modernity despite its historical location, that the reader expects to end in an organic analysis of some possible conclusions in line with the general plan of the book.
Just read these partial conclusions to the first part, one immediately plunges into the second, looking for new, stimulating shades of the same dissertation, maybe as seen in a different historical context. And then one has to face the Abstraction and Metropolis: Mondrian section, with its lapidary incipit: «Mondrian’s identity is in the itinerary.». Lapidary and quite enigmatic for the disoriented reader who has just left Plato on his back and doesn’t know that he (she)’ll have to do with a dissertation – even by itself thrilling – about the Dutch painter that will be long more than one third of the whole book. If the artist’s personality is absolutely magnetic and the study about his Calvinist obsession for the research of ways to express the “real” leaves no room for bore, there are really a few references to architecture (some hints to De Stijl and to Le Corbusier’s shortsighted opinion about it) and the reasons that led the author to insert this section in this book are definitely obscure.
Then it is the turn of the third part, entitled Space decolonization. Finally, Emery hits the mark, and the essay is actually useful. Wheting the first chapter, that criticizes Popper’s “piecemeal tinkering” when applied to urbanism. The need for overall urban visions clashes with the effectiveness of complex urban evolutions. Are we still allowed to think a townplan as a whole project, or is it a preindustrial anachronism? The rest of the section is full of remarkable points of view too. The questions of sustainable development as seen by Heidegger, Rifkin, Bataille, Beuys, Debord, just as the back cover announced and the hungry reader expected. It’s really a pity that just sixty pages have been dedicated to this issue, which could (should?) have well been the core of the entire work.
In the end, the last short section reprises some platonic positions, but much more shallow, and concludes the essay with a fascinating “gloss” with Bruno Taut adding something visionary, but nothing new to the central meaning.
In conclusion, as I said, the work is interesting even just for the ambitious aspire initially proposed; but as it often happens, it is probably a later collage of professor Emery’s personal studies, and he indubitably owns a rich and complete vision of the matters presented, but maybe this time lacks in the will of making clearer those relations (obvious for him) that link the interesting investigations made in so many distant fields of knowledge.
This slightly sour review be not an offense for the professor, whose effort, as said, truly inspired me in opening this blog and, more, who is obviously invited here to sincerely discuss on what has been written. It would be a greatly appreciated debate: I really hope this happening. No malice!

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?