In alphabetical order by speaker’s last name
Giorgia Aquilar
Italian Afterthoughts: Transcoding Discourses from the Outside
“Italian afterthoughts” refers to Alison and Peter Smithson’s Italian Thoughts, suggesting a revised view. In their 1993 pamphlet, the Smithsons investigated the influences of Italian Renaissance architects in the production of architectures and theories of the twentieth century. By contrast, the search for second thoughts and reconsiderations is here pursued by rereading the discourses and critical issues which emerged from scholarly writing – in light of the drifts and halts that occurred to the concrete substance of cities – in Italy and beyond. Conflict itself emerges as a relational matrix through which we may re-examine spaces and their imaginaries in the rear-view mirror of an afterthoughts approach.
The theoretical production of international academic journals exposes “Italianness” as a hypothetical space designed from the outside. As sites of production and critical practices, architectural periodicals engender a discursive space instantiated in transatlantic encounters and post-disciplinary exchanges. These displacements reveal — to borrow a term used in “Assemblage” — traits of “transcoding,” where theory becomes a system of mediation between architectural culture and outside worlds. In contradistinction to the trajectory of “paper” architecture, the built legacy of the “Bel Paese” indicates a foundational divergence between an assumed identity conceived abroad and actual space. When Italian theories — exported to the United States, principally by exiled German scholars — came back home to roost in the postwar years, a return effect was triggered, reshaping architecture. In order to address these discrepancies within and outside spatial theories, the architectural journal becomes the medium to retrace the double movement of exporting and reimporting spatial theory. Mapping such processes allows us to identify and recognize juxtapositions and semantic collisions, aiming to rethink and recalibrate certain genealogies that have shaped Italianness as an externally produced construct.
Giorgia Aquilar is an architect and postdoctoral researcher at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice, Italy (IUAV). Prior to her current position, she was Humboldt Postdoctoral Researcher and Technical University of Munich Foundation Fellow, and honorary research fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships for her scholarly work, including from Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University), the Stuckeman School (Penn State), and the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage. At IUAV, she is a member of the editorial staff of Vesper – Journal of Architecture, Arts and Theory, in the framework of the IR.IDE research infrastructure, tied to the theme of “Made in Italy” in architecture and the arts.
Daniel A. Barber
Italy after Growth: Models and Methods of Architecture and Climate
In 2018, Italy’s economy went through a remarkable transition point; while the economy grew, carbon emissions fell. This has long been the goal of eco-modernists, clamoring for means to “decouple” economic growth from environmental harm. Most eco-modernist theories involve targeted intensifications of renewable energy and the addition of nuclear as a means to grow while reducing emissions. For Italy, however, the hinge point was a bit different – their carbon dioxide reduction was not through energy efficiencies or new sources, it was the result of a decline in industrial activity. It was a sign of degrowth, pioneering a new model for carbon reduction.
Italy is well positioned to heavily develop renewable energy resources and position itself at the leading edge of the energy transition. Ample sun, wind, and waves frame the country’s unique geography with a series of renewable possibilities, many of them already being explored. Italy is also home to some of the most careful and creative thinking in sustainable architecture – the industry that has emerged around Piano’s workshop in the north, and the range of shading and insulating technologies developed and used around the country provide some examples.
Indeed, “Italian imprints” are also found at the foundation of climatic methods in architectural design – the lemon houses on the western shores of Lago di Garda, for example, open the discussion of Aladar and Victor Olgyay’s Solar Control and Shading Devices (1957). The practice of bespoke, careful attention to climate as part of the building process is deep in Italian culture, evidenced as well in the Italian disdain for air-conditioning.
Yet these are, also, assumptions and caricatures of Italy and the character of the region and built world. For this paper I will explore three projects in Italian domestic building across the last half-century, analyzing them according to energy use and capacity for retrofit, as a means to understand the legacy of the Italianness of building in the coming energy transformations, for better or worse. I will use these examples to outline some principles of designing with climate and the prospect of interior life after fossil fueled HVAC systems are no longer viable. The timeliness of Italian models is here seen from a different perspective, as the continuity of non-fossil-intensive practices that survived the material and conceptual onslaught of modernism and its aftermath.
Daniel A. Barber is an associate professor of architecture and chair of the Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania. He researches historical relationships between architecture and global environmental culture, reframing the means and ends of architectural expertise towards a more robust engagement with the climate crisis. His second book, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning, will be published in 2020. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for the Environment, the Princeton Environmental Institute, the Sydney Environmental Institute, and through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Daniel edits the Accumulation series on the “e-flux Architecture” online platform and is a co-founder of “Current,” a platform for the discussion of environmental histories of architecture.
Frank Bauer
Realizing the Albertian Paradigm – from Renaissance Precision to Computational Uncertainty
Architects owe the Renaissance much, perhaps the very invention of their profession in which the divide between design and construction, the claim that architects should draw, not realize buildings, became established. While some conceive of the “digital turn” as an Albertian paradigm in reverse, reinstating master builders in direct control of manufacturing chains, I suggest this turn may instead finally realize a fifteenth century notion.
Approaching the Renaissance project from such underlying technological revolutions as printing and projective geometry reveals the importance of mediating devices and instruments for humanist architectural production. This exposes how the Albertian “project as projection” implied interpretation and tacit knowledge, as plans not only did away with the relation of architect and craftsmen but translated them into drawings. I will extend the recent concept of an “Uncertainty Principle of Cultural Techniques,” the assumption that open forms of notation may result in more productive representations of creative intent (“precision of uncertainty”).
I question notions of digital craft and present computational technologies as another chapter in the twentieth century’s grand narrative of precision, rationalism, and standardization in industrialized construction. It was not only with the emergence of parametric design and building information modeling that architectural culture produced descriptions of form which are often redundant, even detrimental, to their processes of materialization (“uncertainty of precision”). One may argue that architecture has a history of increasing projective distance, successively displacing supervised construction from the eyes of the architect, from notational media, over an industrial rationale to computer-aided manufacturing chains.
I suggest reading the digital turn as the final implementation of an epiphanic notion of “disegno.” While both pre- and post-Albertian construction culture implied close cooperation of trades on an operative and material level, these logics are challenged by the seemingly exhaustive and discrete descriptions of an “Architecture after Drafting.” A contemporary architectural culture that fetishizes digital design, imaging, and production workflows might learn a more collaborate spirit from its Italian birthplace.
Frank Bauer is the Elsa-Neumann Ph.D. Fellow in the Department of Digital and Experimental Design at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). He investigates instrumental and operative logics of computational modeling and fabrication, embedding them in their wider cultural, historical, and transdisciplinary narratives. Bauer graduated in architecture from UdK (M.A. 2017), with stays at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, as well as social scientific, art, and cultural historical studies at Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, the Free University of Berlin, and The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (M.A. 2012). After positions at the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence and KWY Lisbon, he co-founded Büro Vogel Bauer, a planning agency for contemporary fine arts production. Bauer was a nominee for the Young Talent Architecture Award and the Association of German Architects (BDA) and the Polish Association of Architects (SARP) Award. He is a Margot and Paul Baumgarten Foundation scholar as well as a Max Taut laureate. He currently holds a doctoral fellowship from the state of Berlin.
Dijia Chen
Aldo Rossi’s Kitchenware Models as the Mediator of the Irreconcilable: Analogue, Artifact, and the Desire of the Object
Architectural models are commonly referred to as either design apparatus or presentation tools. Both definitions presume architectural models as physical realization of human thoughts, exclude models from the field of architectural theory, and deny the capability of models as productive agents in constructing narratives. Models, by an inclusive definition, mediate between theory and reality with the potential of reconciling the incompatibles. In this research, I investigate Aldo Rossi’s giant coffee vessel models exhibited in “the Domestic Theater” project as the mediator between conflicting ideas in his architectural and urban theory to challenge the common definitions of architectural models as conceptual realization of design ideas or as scaled representation of built works. The coffee vessel models, generated from the imagery hallucinations and physical productions of Rossi’s “Alessi” series, are repeatedly inscribed with new significations which analogically refer to various incompatible prototypes. As analogues both modeled on human beings and lifeless artifacts, domestic objects and theatrical settings, fictional scenes and real-world utensils, the scale-less and displaced kitchenware models frame and accommodate the irreconcilable and allow them to dialogue with and penetrate one another in its physical existence. By analyzing the kitchenware models’ development process through analogy and repetition, I posit models as autonomous, generative, and impenetrable object-subjects that reconcile the contradictories and complete the unspoken, unconscious part of Rossi’s architectural theory. Bringing new perspectives to the functioning of models in a disciplinary sense, I argue that the physical existence of the kitchenware models, not textual elaborations and logical deductions, master Rossi’s unresolved struggle between dissonant yet irreducible forces to achieve “the difficult whole.” The research therefore calls for re-examinations on the role of models in architectural theory in a broader sense.
Dijia Chen is a second-year doctoral student in the Constructed Environment program at the School of Architecture, University of Virginia (UVA). Her research work lands at the intersection of media theories, Asian studies, and contemporary architecture, and examines architectural production as a mediated cultural phenomenon in the context of global exchange under asymmetrical power relations. She has actively participated in the preliminary curatorial works and on-site exhibition coordination works in Shanghai, Berlin, and Venice. The early stage of her research was funded by Dumas Melone Graduate Research Fellowship, Ellen Bayard Weedon Travel Grant, and UVA Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation Grant.
Lionel Devlieger
Slow Down your Kunstwollen, Young Man, or What a Practice in Building Deconstruction Learnt from Tuscan Aristotelianism
The debate on the arts in “cinquecento” Tuscany crystallised around notions like “concetto” and “designo,” which left a heavy imprint on art and architecture theory. These notions encouraged me, as an architecture student, to envisage good buildings as the outcome of a collision between powerful mental images and passive matter. My doctoral research, focussing on Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi’s contribution to the debate, allowed me to unravel, among other things, how much “machismo” is in disegno, but also how productive it can be to rethink the notion altogether. Rotor, the design and research practice I co-founded in 2006, has built a reputation for itself around designing from reclaimed materials. Quite often our successes have derived from refraining from design altogether and acknowledging, after careful observation, qualities already present in a work. It took Italian lessons in humility to open myself to this possibility. This contribution will explore this autobiographical movement between historical scholarship on debates concerning design and matter in cinquecento Florence and an architectural practice concerned with the life cycles of building materials and processes of realization in architecture.
Lionel Devlieger is a researcher, designer, educator, and exhibition maker. His work focuses on the material implications of contemporary culture, especially in the realm of architecture. In 2006 he co-founded Rotor asbl, a research and design group that has won major architecture awards for its pioneering work on building element reuse. He has taught architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Delft University of Technology, Columbia University, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and other schools. He has curated and designed internationally recognized exhibitions on architecture and material culture with Rotor; the most recent of these, “Underground in the City,” just opened in Ghent, Belgium and has received critical acclaim. Lionel co-authored Deconstruction et reemploy (EPFL, 2018), a reference textbook on building component reuse.
Chris French
A Stone on the Ground: Ecological and Architectural Measures of Vittorio Gregotti’s The Territory of Architecture
“A simple exterior,” Vittorio Gregotti suggests, “appear[s] as a measure of the larger environment’s complexity.” “A material,” he continues, “is not actually a thing of nature, it is more earthly and more abstract, alluding to the form of the place.” “Architecture,” he concludes, “functions as a way of gauging the landscape.” These reflections – on place, landscape, environment, and nature – made 10 years after the publication of Il Territorio dell’Architettura in 1966, describe a position on architecture and landscape that is consistent throughout Gregotti’s practice. Underlying this position is a particular view of landscape, one in which – in a direct challenge to Rykwert’s Adam’s House in Paradise – the origin of architectural practice lies in a negotiation between an experiencing body and the unknowable expanse of the world. “Before a support was transformed into a column,” Gregotti suggests, “man put stone on the ground in order to recognize place in the midst of the unknown universe.” The placement of this stone, the precursor to the siting of a building, modified place to the extent that it could be reconciled with human consciousness – “the project transforms place into settlement.”
Despite never being translated into English, Gregotti’s early theories in Il Territorio dell’Architettura and the work that has arisen as a result of these theories, continues to be the subject of international, critical attention. In 2009, OASE journal published an issue titled “On Territory,” which was prefaced with a partial translation of Gregotti’s text. A retrospective exhibition in Milan in late 2017 (at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporane), and subsequently Lisbon in late 2018 (at the Centro Cultural de Belém, designed by Gregotti and Associati) used Il Territorio dell’Architettura as a titular frame for Gregotti’s work. In this paper, I will discuss how Gregotti’s description of a “stone on the ground” – or, taking a cue for Tullio Pagano, a “pagus in paesaggio”) might enable a critical reflection on Gregotti’s architectural territoriality. By exploring Gregotti’s use of the term measure – “misura” – and Franco Cassano’s term moderation, I will ask to what extent Gregotti’s reconceptualization of the environment as a “material for architecture” might in fact be considered a radical re-territorialization of architecture in, and as a materialization of, landscape.
Chris French is a lecturer in architecture and contemporary practice at the University of Edinburgh. He received his doctorate in architecture by design from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His research follows two threads: an investigation into critical forms of representation in relation to the production of the political, architectural imaginary and the relationship between architecture and agricultural and urban landscapes. Central to both of these interests is design-research and design-practice. French has worked in architectural practice in Scotland and Spain and is a co-founder and director of the Atelier for Architecture: at-018.studio. He is also the co-founder and editor of the architectural research by design e-journal “DRAWING ON.”
Ignacio G. Galán
From the Chair to the Nation
The slogan “from the spoon to the city,” coined by Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers in the 1950s to address the expanded expertise of Italian architects and their ability to engage in designs reaching from objects to urban environments, is well known by architects worldwide. The expression was popularized at the same time that Italian designs obtained international recognition, with spoons, chairs, and whole interiors circulating beyond Italian cities, reaching international markets, and displayed in numerous exhibitions. However, a particular approach to design was consolidated prior to that period in the first half of the twentieth century, when Italian architects’ celebrated attention to furniture and interiors was shaped at the same time that Italy underwent a process of national consolidation. Before seamlessly designing from the spoon to the city, architects needed to bridge, in the words of art critic Ugo Ojetti, “from the chair to the nation.” This paper explores how both Italy and a particular approach to the design of objects and interiors were shaped simultaneously in the first half of the century in a way that is key to understand the contribution of Italian design discourse and practices to shifting disciplinary priorities since the postwar period.
I will focus on an unfolding culture of what Italians call architect’s commitment to the “arredamento,” a term that highlighted provision of cohesion to the increasing heterogeneity of objects populating modern interiors. I will explore how this pursuit supported larger processes of social and cultural consolidation reaching the scale of the nation, in ways that were particularly significant in relation to the contemporaneous processes of population migration and colonization. Finally, in historizing the formation of Italian design discourse and practices, I will emphasize their particular contribution to the understanding of interiors in the modern period (different, as the emphases of arredamento are, from the association of interior and interiority of the German philosophical tradition); their relation to other practices taking shape at the time; and their relevance in current discussions concerning architecture’s relation to both nationalism and population transience throughout the last century.
Ignacio G. Galán is a New York-based architect and historian and an assistant professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. His scholarship addresses the relationship between architecture, politics, and media, with a particular focus on nationalism, colonialism, and diverse forms of population transience. His research has led to the production of several publications and exhibitions including the installation “Cinecittá Occupata” for the 2014 Venice Biennale by invitation of the general curator Rem Koolhaas. Together with the After Belonging Agency, he was the chief curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale (Graham Foundation Grant, 2015) and editor of the homonymous volume (Lars Muller, 2016). Prior to joining Barnard, Galán taught studios and seminars at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
Phillip Goad
The Shadow of Italy: Robin Boyd and Architectural Criticism after World War II
In 1960, on the title page to Part III of his book, The Australian Ugliness, Melbourne-based architect Robin Boyd placed a man in a contemporary business suit and wearing a homburg hat at the center of Leonard Da Vinci’s famous diagram of a generic naked man’s body fixed in the center of a superimposed circle and square. It was Boyd’s introductory image to his next chapter, “The Pursuit of Pleasingness,” his reflection on the tendency in current architecture globally towards a new sensualism, an idea he had already explored in print in an article of similar title in Progressive Architecture in 1957. This invocation of Renaissance architecture in a book ostensibly about the state of contemporary Australian architecture invites questions more generally about the nature of Italy’s presence in Boyd’s architectural writing.
Between 1951 and his relatively early death at age 52 in 1971, Boyd was Australia’s sole international voice of architectural critique. His works of design criticism, his building, and book reviews – which were featured in British and U.S. journals – were widely respected, as were his two books on Kenzo Tange (1962) and contemporary Japanese architecture (1968). But, from the perspective of the global periphery, what was Boyd’s engagement with – and connection to – Italian architecture? Was Italy present in Boyd’s pioneering accounts of twentieth century Australian architecture? How was Italy positioned within Boyd’s critique of the state of contemporary architecture? Was Boyd’s form of engagement typical of a broader model of the way in which contemporary critics, external to Italy, appreciated Italian architecture?
Phillip Goad is the Gough Whitlam Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2019-2020 and the Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and chair of architecture at the University of Melbourne. He is the co-author of Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to Hygeia (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture (Miegunyah Press/Power Publishing, 2019) and Australia Modern: Architecture, Landscape and Design (Thames and Hudson, 2019). He was co-curator of “Augmented Australia” at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2014, visiting professor at the Bengal Institute of Design in Dhaka in 2016, and Visiting Patrick Geddes Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. He is currently researching his next books: one on post-World War II Australian-U.S. architectural relations, and the other on Australian architect and critic Robin Boyd.
Raúl Martínez Martínez
New Methodological Approaches in Architectural History: Italy as a Testing Ground in the Twentieth Century
Aesthetic theories formulated by late-nineteenth century German-speaking scholars provided new theoretical frameworks and original analytical methodologies – aesthetic formalism, the theory of empathy, the psychology of form, the revelation of space in architecture, among others – to art historians. Many looked back upon Italy, the Renaissance in particular, as a reference for social, political, religious, and artistic ideals, contributing to the emergence of interest in Italian architecture. A new appreciation of the Baroque further awakened interest in Italy, which became a testing ground for the application of innovative methodologies.
These ideas permeated into other spheres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bernard Berenson and his circle at Villa I Tatti played a leading role in the transmission of these aesthetic theories into the Anglo-American context with Italian Renaissance art as their primary vehicle. Berenson’s article “A Word for Renaissance Churches” (1893) was one of the first attempts to directly relate these methods to architecture and his pupil, Geoffrey Scott, expanded this framework with The Architecture of Humanism (1914). The introduction of German scholarship into Anglo-American discourse was extended by the 1930s and 1940s diaspora of German emigrants to England and the United States.
Architectural historians educated around the Second World War were better exposed and more receptive to these ideas and methodologies. This generation included key figures such as Vincent Scully, Bruno Zevi and Colin Rowe who promoted new readings of Italian architecture. This paper reveals a panorama of attraction and magnetism towards the Italian past, keeping its architecture central within twentieth century discourse. Twenty-first century scholars and architects inherited this same deference towards Italy, continuing the tradition of drawing back to it as an architectural guidepost.
Raúl Martínez Martínez is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of History and Theory of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. He was a guest lecturer at the Poznan University of Technology in 2017 and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign between 2014 and 2016. Specializing in the historiography of modern and postmodern architecture related to methodologies of analysis, he has published in Journal of the History of Ideas, The Journal of Architecture, and arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, among others, and has coordinated exhibitions on Vincent Scully, Eduard F. Sekler, and James A. Ackerman between 2017 and 2019. In 2019, he received the Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship by the Society of Architectural Historians.
Silvia Micheli and Lorenzo Ciccarelli
Made in Italy: When Italian Design Culture went Global (1972–1992)
At the beginning of the 1970s, three events triggered an unexpected international wave of interest in Italian design culture: two exhibitions, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” organized at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 1972) and “Architettura Razionale,” curated by Aldo Rossi for the XV Milan Triennale (1973), and the special issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourdhui Italie 75 (1975), edited by a pool of professors from the School of Venice. Between 1972 and 1992, Italy became one of the pivotal forums of discussion for architectural, urban, and industrial design, initiating relationships and exchanges with European, North American, and Asian cultures. This was the first time in the twentieth century that Italy gained such a robust international recognition for the production of contemporary design and architecture beyond its historical heritage. This interest sprang only partially from built projects. There was fascination for an exceptional production of architectural, urban, theoretical, and industrial design, all parts of a broader intellectual discourse. This period coincided with the establishment of the “made in Italy” campaign, a vehicle to promote a specific quality of manufacturing and design that eventuated in the promotion of the Italian lifestyle. After two decades of international exposure, the exhibition on “Deconstructivism Architecture” at MoMA (1988), Aldo Rossi’s reception of the Pritzker Prize (1990), and the fifth edition of the Venice Architectural Biennale directed by Francesco Dal Co. (1991) marked the end of this memorable wave of Italian design. This paper aims to discuss the global success of Italian postmodern design culture and the modes of its dissemination. How was Italian design culture of these two decades exposed, captured, and interpreted beyond national boundaries? Why did it become so influential abroad? What were the places of diffusion, the vehicles of circulation, and the main advocates? Finally, why was Italy design so fascinating to push scholars to learn the “lingua Italiana” in order to join a culture intrinsically related to its politics and intellectual production?
Architect and architectural historian Silvia Micheli is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Micheli’s research investigates global architecture and cross-cultural exchanges in the twentieth and twenty-first century architectural context. Her studies on Italian postmodern and contemporary architecture have been published internationally. She co-edited the book Italy/Australia: Postmodern Architecture in Translation (Melbourne, 2018); co-authored the book Storia dell’Architettura Italiana 1985–2015 (Turin, 2013); and co-edited the volume Italia 60/70. Una Stagione dell’Architettura (Padua, 2010). Micheli is currently co-writing a monographic book on the work of Paolo Portoghesi, which will appear in 2020 for Bloomsbury. She has a range of collaborations with international institutions, including the Alvar Aalto Foundation (Helsinki), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein), MAXXI Museum (Rome), and the Milan Triennale. Micheli holds a bachelor of architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan and a doctorate from the University School of Architecture in Venice, Italy.
Lorenzo Ciccarelli is a research fellow in the history of architecture at the University of Florence and a member of the scientific committee of the Renzo Piano Foundation. Ciccarelli’s research investigates the international connections of Italian architecture of the twentieth century. He is the author of the books Renzo Piano Before Renzo Piano, and Masters and Beginnings (published in Italian, English and French edition in 2017, and a Chinese edition will appear in late 2020), and essays on Vittorio De Feo, Carlo Aymonino, and other protagonists of Italian post-war architecture. He was a visiting fellow at the Architecture Theory Criticism and History Research Centre of the University of Queensland, Australia in 2019. His new book, titled The Myth of Balance: The Anglo-Italian Debate on Town-Planning Strategies in the Post-War Years, will be released in February 2020. Ciccarelli holds a bachelor of architecture from Marche Polytechnic University and a doctorate from the Tor Vergata University of Rome.
Caspar Pearson
Eternal Return: The Discipline of Architecture, the Italian Renaissance, and the Search for a Home
The Italian Renaissance has often been characterized as a pivotal moment in the development of the modern discipline of architecture. Described by Manfredo Tafuri as the “epicenter” and “true origin” of modernity, and by Françoise Choay as the moment in which urbanism first emerged as an autonomous discourse, the Renaissance has sometimes been treated as a starting point and even a sort of figurative “home” for the discipline. This paper considers how these ideas are, to some extent, rooted in discussions of architecture that took place in the Renaissance itself. Specifically, it examines how writings relating to two key projects of the fifteenth century – the construction of the cupola of Florence cathedral and the transformation of the village of Corsignano into the city of Pienza – themselves reveal a marked preoccupation with the condition of exile and the desire to return to a lost home. This notion of a yearned for but never fully recoverable home arguably continues to exert a pull upon architectural thinking, and the paper will explore how it has been manifested in some recent examples. At the same time, it will consider how this tradition has become ever more frayed, asking whether it has now, in fact, reached its breaking point.
Caspar Pearson is a senior lecturer in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. His research specialization is the art, architecture, and urbanism of the Italian Renaissance, and he is the author of Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City (Penn State Press, 2011). His work has also appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Oxford Art Journal, City, and the Papers of the British School at Rome, and has received research support from the Paul Mellon Centre. Additional areas of inquiry include historiography, exhibitions, and globalization in relation to the European Union. His current book project, The Classical Disorders, relates Italian Renaissance architecture to wider geographic areas and chronological periods.
Rosa Sessa
Forgotten Italy: The (Erased) Influence of Neapolitan Architecture in the Post-war American Architectural Culture
The influence of the city of Rome in the biography of Robert Venturi is well known. As a fellow in architecture at the American Academy in Rome in the mid-1950s, the young Philadelphian could fully immerse himself in his research on the Baroque and Mannerist architecture of the “Eternal City.”
However, if Rome served as the main object for Venturi’s investigations, it is the city of Naples that inspired unexpected reflections in his studies. Described in his letters as “an especially fascinating city for me,” Naples contained many refined examples of Baroque architecture, soon becoming the privileged destination for Venturi’s excursions outside Rome. Even his last Italian trip before leaving the American Academy, in June 1956, is dedicated once again to Naples and it is specifically undertaken to say farewell to his “favorite things,” including the buildings of Ferdinando Sanfelice (1675-1748).
Notwithstanding his interest in the city, little or no reference to his reflections on Neapolitan architecture remains in Venturi’s later studies and projects. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture only a few paragraphs reference Naples: the facades of Villa Pignatelli and Villa Palomba are presented as expressions of contradictions adapted and juxtaposed, while a photograph of the historic center is called to represent the “plastic forms of indigenous Mediterranean architecture.”
Through an analysis of archival findings and documents, this paper looks at the studies of Venturi on Naples during the 1950s, comparing his experience and interpretation of the architecture of the southern city with works of other architects and scholars, such as Kahn, Huxtable, and Rudofsky. The removal of Neapolitan architecture in the American discourse of the period – in favor of a debate that focused on the examples of Rome and Milan – is the basis of a partial and unbalanced interpretation of the Italian contribution to contemporary architecture, which still persists today.
Rosa Sessa is a research fellow in the history of architecture at the University of Naples Federico II, where she is conducting research on the impact of women architects and travelers on the architectural culture of the Postwar period. Her Ph.D. dissertation (“Naples,” 2017) investigated the formative years of Robert Venturi and the influence of his knowledge of Italy on his first projects and publications. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Technical University of Munich. As a curator, she has worked for museums and art foundations, collaborating in the scientific committees of cultural events and exhibitions, such as the exhibition “Italy in Hollywood” on show in Florence at the Ferragamo Museum in 2018-19.
Lori Smithey
Disciplinary Decadence in Venice: Three Vignettes
In 10 Immagini per Venezia (1978), Francesco Dal Co described Venice as a city preserved in its decadence. This was not a particularly original observation given that Venice had long been identified as a site of decadence from John Ruskin to Thomas Mann. But what was unique in Dal Co’s argument is that he did not simply read the city as a decadent stage set, but rather as a disciplinary analogue. Instead of framing the decadent landscape as evidence of moral failure or as producing a romantic atmosphere, Dal Co identified decadence as a forfeiture of power. Attendant with it, through his disciplinary extension of the concept, were disintegrations of formal unity, professional practice, and, ultimately, disciplinary coherence. This paper traces those registers of disciplinary decadence through three Venetian vignettes. The first considers the crisis of formal unity in one of John Hejduk’s Venice projects, “Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought.” The second turns to Carlo Scarpa’s restoration of the Manlio Capitolo courtroom as a site where questions of licensure and professional practice were disputed. The third vignette leaves the Veneto and lands in New Canaan, Connecticut, where Philip Johnson hung and re-hung fabric by the Venetian designer Fortuny on the walls of his Brick House. Johnson’s plays on referentiality and interiority between his Glass House and Brick House put pressure on the disciplinary coherence his Modernist colleagues sanctified. The decadence of Venice, and its disciplinary analogues, offers a foil to Italy’s powerful position in architectural culture and ideology. By examining three practices that embraced forfeitures of power, this paper argues that decadence productively broadens the field’s disciplinary horizons.
Lori Smithey received her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2019. Her research examines the architectural dimensions of nineteenth century literary decadence and the ways in which decadent aesthetics inform subsequent design sensibilities into the twentieth century. Her recent work has been published by the Journal of Architectural Education and has been presented at the College Art Association; Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand; and the Architectural Humanities Research Center. She holds a bachelor of architecture from the Cooper Union and a master of science in architectural history and theory from the University of Washington.
Francesca Torello
Unexpected Encounters: Henry Hornbostel in Italy, 1893
As a recent Columbia graduate, Henry Hornbostel toured Europe in the spring and summer of 1893, before gaining access to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In his as yet unpublished travel journal and sketchbook, Hornbostel describes his stay in Italy: he visits the monuments, sketches details, refers to books and photographs studied at Columbia, and even notes “Ideas” to be used in “modern buildings” of his own design. Yet the observations included in the manuscript map out rather surprising reactions to his relatively canonical Italian journey. The classic sites do not really impress the young architect, while great enthusiasm is stirred by buildings “off the beaten track,” casually encountered along the way or on a bicycle ride, noticed because of an attractive detail or a shady portal, then described at length with admiration by the young man “happy as a child with this treasure I thought no one else had ever seen before.” In the journal these buildings seem to be slowly coalescing into an alternative canon, motivating Hornbostel’s criticism towards the more formulaic versions of classicism back home.
I will use Hornbostel’s manuscript as a starting point to discuss the need for a more nuanced reading of the actual Italian itineraries and references of Beaux Arts architects, in the broader context of the creation of the American Academy in Rome and the early debates about the study plans for its fellows. I will also discuss the unexpected effects of Italian travel and its long-term influence, using as example Hornbostel’s return to the observations from his 1893 travel journal in the design of the College of Fine Arts on the Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh Campus, a building that offers a rich tapestry of European travel references, meant to teach and inspire the students of the newly created architecture school.
Francesca Torello is an architectural historian and is special faculty with the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. She writes about the role of history and archaeology in architectural education and practice, particularly at the turn of the twentieth century. Part of her work combines historical research with digital media. Torello is currently working on American travel to the Mediterranean between 1870 and 1920, in connection with the study of two “Grand Tour surrogates” from Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age: the Great Hall of the College of Fine Arts, a Beaux Arts building on the Carnegie Mellon campus, and the collection of architectural plaster casts of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Federica Vannucchi
The Human Body as Space of Diplomacy: “Studi sulle proporzioni” at the 1951 IX Milan Triennale
Curated by librarian Carla Marzoli for the 1951 IX Milan Triennale, the exhibition “Studi sulle proporzioni” (“Studies on Proportions”) revamped architecture humanism. It collected texts, images, and objects – from antiquities to modernity – on the relationship between human proportions and architecture, orderly arranged on a black thin tubular structure designed following Le Corbusier’s Modulor. With the participation of Le Corbusier, Rudolf Wittkower, Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, among others, the conference titled “De Divina Proportione” (“On the Divine Proportion”) followed the exhibition while producing an international discussion on what seemed a universal and rightful claim for a more human architecture.
This paper challenges the canonical narrative of “Studi sulle proporzioni” by looking at the internal organization of the institution that produced it, namely the Milan Triennale and its effect on architecture international debate. The human body presented at the exhibition, in its various interpretations throughout the history of architecture, was not simply a model for architecture knowledge but also a carefully crafted vessel for diplomatic exchange. Its universality was confined to specific geopolitical limits and ideological claims. In the climate of the Cold War, Marzoli’s exhibition and international conference took form in the office of the Triennale’s president Ivan Matteo Lombardo, who served as minister of industry and trade (May 1948 to November 1949) and later as minister of foreign trade (January 1950 to April 1951). Lombardo’s exchanges with Marzoli hardly concealed the political use of the Milan Triennale. In keeping with the politics of the central right, Lombardo turned the Milan Triennale into a diplomatic enclave for the Marshall Plan, which Lombardo had himself negotiated with the United States. Studi sulle proporzioni proved how the Milan Triennale produced architectural knowledge within an international context by the use of local politics.
Federica Vannucchi teaches global history and theory of architecture, and urban history and analysis at the Pratt Institute, and has also taught at Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, Yale University, and Princeton University. She holds a doctorate in architecture from Princeton and master’s degrees from Yale and the University of Florence. Her scholarly interests include the global history of architectural pedagogy, radical design experiments from the post-war era to the 1970s, and architectural exhibitions, international relations, political theory, environmental design, and urbanism. Her book manuscript concerns the role of the architectural exhibition as a national and international agent of cultural, political, and diplomatic exchange. Her work is published in journals and edited volumes such as Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox? (Phaidon Press, 2018) and Exhibit A: Exhibitions That Transformed Architecture (Yale School of Architecture, 2015).
