Visions
There are no obsessions. Passion and curiosity, but no obsession.
In the observation of the hexagrams of the I-Ching the n. 53 stands out for its vague resemblance to the letter A, or for the analogy with the shape of a small house, as a child would draw it, but with a flat roof.
A door. A window
Then it turns out that, like all the symbols in the game, it is made up of two overlapping trigrams, whose single meaning reveals the usual mystery of a language far from ours, built through images.
Below: Mt
Above: the wind – the tree
In the boundless allegory that connects these two elements, with the tree that, exposed to the wind, grows silently and slowly above the mountain, the interpretation is unleashed: Gradual Progress, Calm Advancement, Development. It urges us to treasure the trials to which we are called, making each one a possible ground for forms of initiation, never ceasing to learn.
All this represents a seductive metaphor for making architecture, even in a weakened and difficult context such as that of the province on the borders of the Empire, in which, building every day, one must still try to give answers to common questions, both ancient and contemporary, like that of living.
Tortona, Province of Alessandria
In the 20 years from 1951 to 1971 the population increased by approximately 30%. Subsequently it stabilizes to arrive, today, at a number that corresponds by default to the 1971 figure. This indicator is common to many small towns (but Pavia is not exempt from it either) that gravitate around the Po line.
In 1970 a new master plan for the city was drawn up. This plan, based on the statistics of the previous decade, envisages that by the end of the century Tortona could have a population of approximately 65,000 units, with the consequent need for housing.
Therefore, a series of new areas for expansion and completion are identified, as well as generously modified building permit indices right up to the areas bordering the centre, resulting in the urban form we recognize today.
Obviously, such an abundance of rooms will never correspond to a coherent number of inhabitants, and therefore, 50 years later, the deaths are counted, that is, the collapse of the real estate market is helplessly observed (evidently determined by an unequal balance between demand and supply) and the consequent ghettoisation of areas.
Let’s give the numbers:
100 years ago Italy had around 35,000,000 inhabitants
Today Piedmont is the second Italian region in terms of number of municipalities and is at the same time the penultimate region in terms of average inhabitants/municipality.
3 of the 5 least populous municipalities in Italy are in Piedmont: Macra (40) Briga Alta (40) Ingria (43)
The Province of Alessandria, where I live, has 187 Municipalities, several of which converge towards the so-called “4 Provinces” area, i.e. the first hilly and then mountainous area of the Ligurian pre-Apennines.
Observing the demographic data of many Municipalities that are part of this sector, we note that, on average, a recurring average population of around 1000 inhabitants a century ago corresponds today to around a fifth, with exceptions ranging from 350/400 inhabitants of the municipalities better strategically located with respect to services, to the 85 units of Castellania and Carrega
The example of Val Curone, which branches out into Val Museglia and Valle Arzuola as it goes up, is emblematic. Obviously, as you go up, the population on the contrary goes down, making services rarer.
San Sebastiano Curone, the valley floor today has 533 inhabitants compared to 1035 100 years ago, but going up in altitude, in the municipality of Fabbrica Curone, which is 7 km from S. Sebastiano and which covers a vast surface area of over 50 square kilometres, the inhabitants went from 3000 (1911) to 590 (today)
But this supposed mass of people (we always take into account the demographic decline that has characterized Italy since the 90s) has not simply descended to the plain, whose terminal is represented by Tortona (which, see previous post, has been decreasing in practice since 1971, with some recent exceptions caused by immigration). This mass moves towards the nearest metropolis, where there are indeed the services that are progressively lacking in the hilly mountain context, but in the face of an exponential increase in costs.
And therefore either we settle in the outer belt of the metropolis, fortunately in Italy not yet as degraded as in other European realities, or we go back.
The map (taken from the Atlas of Small Municipalities) illustrates the current state of the data and the areas in which the so-called counter-exodus occurs.
How will it end?
In a book by and about Fellini (making a film – Einaudi) his reflections return, even more precisely, on the difference between the film conceived and the film made.
This reflection allows me to build a bridge with the practice of architecture.
When Fellini talks about the conceived film, he even alludes to the indistinct dream vision, in which a face is not a real face, for example, but the sensation of a face.
In the complex translation of this aspect into reality, a bloody struggle takes place with real faces, with their epidermis, pores, moles, etc… to be able to restore that impression, and the necessity, beyond the ordeals during who nevertheless try to impose their being “directors” of the practical operations that underlie the implementation process. To then confront reality, accepting it.
It’s interesting that it can work like this in architecture too. I think it was, to give an example that concerns me, with the entrance to the S+V house, in which something imagined in a vague way then had to take shape and substance. I remember the small trauma in the difference between the colors of the solid walnut of the vertical sticks and the veneered one of the box above.
But on the one hand, as mentioned, this project must be accepted, certainly fighting as much as possible, but on the other it can only happen in the relationship between an idea and its comparison with reality.
If not, it’s writing (and it becomes literature if the writing is of quality)
And the realization also includes those events that you ideally cannot predict (the argument with the owner, the rule that prevents you from taking action, you wanting to bring a stranger to the construction site, the wrong material that cannot be returned…)
Karl Marx published the Communist Party manifesto in London in 1848
In the same year, in the same city, the Pre-Raphaelite artistic movement was founded, one of the greatest exponents of which was the then twenty-four year old William Morris
The influence of Marxist theories took root on Morris, who would become one of the pioneers of socialism in the United Kingdom.
Morris, based on principles previously hypothesized by Pugin and Ruskin, began in 1861 to create artisanal works according to the methods of medieval guilds, aware of the fact that saving the quality of the work could be represented by a return to an ancient and humanistic activity. Within 20 years the idea took hold and in 1895 the movement (called arts & crafts since 1887) had 130 companies joining it. Evidently, since the founding principle of the movement is manual work in which artist and craftsman find agreement, the “enemy” is represented by industrial production.
Hermann Muthesius was born in 1861 and, after a professional apprenticeship as an architect in a German studio, which took him to Asia, upon returning to Germany he was appointed cultural attaché to the German embassy in London in 1896 by the Prussian Ministry of Public Works, and in the following six years he deepened the study of aspects linked to the English lifestyle and homes, then reporting the fruit of the study in three volumes, published in 1904, under the title of “the English house”.
Once back home, he forged intense relationships, also by virtue of the extraordinary knowledge accumulated in diplomatic activity, with eminent personalities from the German industrial world and in 1907 he founded, together with Neumann and Schmidt, the Deutscher Werkbund.
Various people from the industrial and artistic world immediately joined. Among them Peter Behrens, an eclectic and prominent architect of Berlin culture (in that year he received a detailed assignment from AEG to deal with the group’s architecture, but also with its coordinated image).
In the space of a few years, Walter Gropius (1907/10), Le Corbusier (1910), Mies (1908/13) will pass through Beherens’ studio, so at the center of these crucial dialogue activities, as young architects.
….it’s a curious fact, sometimes underestimated. I visited the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, which is an emblematic example. A series of successive gems, starting from the octagon that Carlo had built on a model that is not frequent but dear to the Christian tradition, and which today are practically not perceived by the user, even the advanced one.
To make a courageous comparison, it would be as if the “divine comedy” that we read today was the manipulation of a series of authors who, depending on the time, necessity (a variable perhaps present only in architecture), taste, had added to the original text personal contributions, integrating content different in form and language.
This aspect, especially in the stratification carried out up to the nineteenth century, is almost not recognisable, except by very attentive eyes, probably for various reasons. Two come to mind: the first is the ability of the architectural artefact to absorb these different contributions within itself, especially if distributed over a vast time span, transforming its original form into another, sometimes more complete or interesting, or useful. It is clear that a non-negligible aspect is the designer’s ability to manage addition.
The second lies in the fact that, until the advent of the avant-garde, architecture has always been regimented within a traditional system, with its laws and rules. However much we intended to transgress them, we always remained within the already known grammatical elements which, only to attentive or expert eyes, emerged for reasons of syntactic recombination.
(…among other things, when writing Kafka the proofreader automatically changes the name to Kakà, which says a lot about the present times…)
I remember reading somewhere that Christo (Javacheff, Bulgarian artist), packed up the Reichstag in Berlin, before its transformation by Norman Foster, to ensure that all those who passed by it every day ignoring it, finally perceived its ‘existence.
The excuse is useful to me. I too am distracted (it’s a genetic inheritance) and I have often noticed the presence or shape of some macroscopic element after decades of indifference. This happened with everything: architecture, people, or, as in this case, the contents of books.
I purchased Kafka’s book “Zurau’s aphorisms” (ed. Adelphi) in 2004. I know this because I keep the receipts for the books for this very reason (a psychopathology that is not harmful to others), and I have always been instinctively struck by what talks about the King and the king’s couriers (I found confirmation of my instinct in one of his comments by Cardinal Ravasi, still available online)
However, it took almost twenty years of indifference for me to consciously notice another, who perhaps ideally represents the consequence, and who says this:
You don’t need to leave your house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, stay in perfect silence and solitude. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it cannot do without it, it will writhe in ecstasy before you.
To me they seem to be the best instructions for the present time, complex yes, but also and above all in Italy, unnecessarily complicated, and it seems to me that the cinematographic work of Jean Claude Rousseau is a perfect translation of it in artistic terms.
It is an offer to listening, to silent vision, in which the random event pierces the veil of what we conventionally call “reality” and unmasks the world, which cannot do without it…