On drawings - THE TRANSLATION
On Drawings
Baglivo/Gambardella/Servino
Booklist publisher 2012
A small book born recording
a distant dialogue between a group of
friends on facebook. The comparison is
not made on classical architectural grounds but on images and drawings lightly describing
an interior path.
It’s easy to be
read, not taking into account the essays,
the architects acts through captions, titles and aphorism, useful
instrument to understand the meaning of the drawing itself.
It can be read on
completely different ways, building
very personal paths, picturing
the architecture hidden behind any sign, or simply not thinking about architecture.
It’s enough to follow the
architect’s thought crossing their
gaze or jumping from one chapter to another, endlessly
recomposing our own path. The most interesting thing is that
all the material inside the book has been previously published on the social
network. All this has started on fb, slowly, day after day, a distant dialogue, plain
for all to see. The drawing is not more considered as a personal matter but a
performance. The book has come to life as the architects
needs to share some very personal views,
the serial of some representations is
not a coincidence, the net nourish continuously
itself of words and imagines.
The most interesting
thing is trying to understand what change in the architectural drawing when it
become from a private gesture to a public one. Once the drawing posted they
take a different meaning, because they are enriched on the judgments value, on “like” and "don't like",
on the immediate comment. So the new post is not completely free, but they
are growing richer on meanings both when the sign change and when it
doesn’t, the architect react instead of act and acquire
self-confidence on his own ideas. In this way
the architect is not only drawing ,
but also writing a manifest, sometime inventing a style (taking the
risk to create a consistent language where adepts cannot always match
up.
Going back to the
principal actors:
Servino, as I’ve
already written in the short comment on Architettura Simplex, enchant us with a series
of different technique, reveling a particular interest on the
archetype forms and a careful look at the thin edge
between architecture and landscape. The architecture
dialogue now and then with the existent, the infrastructure
and the landscape, the architecture become
landscape, infrastructure, structure.
Servino propose a continuity
in the different fields, going back to the traditional line of the Italian
drawing, switching from the prospective form and colour, to the paste-up.
First of all creating the atmosphere, human being are never there, the
emptiness is above all. In this kind of isolation the architecture
speaks a common language.
Baglivo, in the
other hand, chose a reality to come to term, the history of his consolidate image,
first Piranesi’s prints, then town’s image belonging to the past. Here the
absolute form define the urban space, the visions leave any
kind of logic reality becoming urban
disposal, out and out borders
between shape and background between problematic and meaning. The project is
not a direct consequence, but come to life with the interpretation.
In the second series of drawing the background is the contemporary. A simple operations of re-sampling, turning iconic buildings and landscapes showing endless possibilities hiding behind reality. A building is always a list of endless solutions. A work where is important the loss of meaning and the re-defining of the limit between idea and project. Here the technique is cut to the essential, the fundamental aspect is the image’s building as a project. Servino add Baglivo cut, but they both compare, consciously or not on the meaning of architecture, they question before giving an answer.
In the second series of drawing the background is the contemporary. A simple operations of re-sampling, turning iconic buildings and landscapes showing endless possibilities hiding behind reality. A building is always a list of endless solutions. A work where is important the loss of meaning and the re-defining of the limit between idea and project. Here the technique is cut to the essential, the fundamental aspect is the image’s building as a project. Servino add Baglivo cut, but they both compare, consciously or not on the meaning of architecture, they question before giving an answer.
Gambardella: the
drawing as the project is a slow stratification of ideas and sensations,
even inserting himself in the Italian tradition line, where the drawing was a
fundamental part for the designer
determined to follow his own visions.
But comparing to the tradition Gambardella has been the first to contaminate
his own design with traces of architecture known and unknown. Gambardella does
not sample but always compare with something else, as in his own architecture
we can see continuity with what it precede and what will succeed. Gambardella never
leave the pencil which roll endlessly in the paper (it’s not by
chance that Servino use the fountain pen and Gambardella the roller
ball). Here the hand has to be free to roll in the big format paper.
Then appears fragments of photo, architecture, monuments, but
also the material which made it.
The big difference with the other two architects is in the materiality, in the ceaseless
need of the material in order to build his own visions.
The stones
composing the walls, the existent buildings or the imagined one, are dug and put
on top of each others, drawing and image are at
the same level there is no
hierarchy. The
architectures appear in the simplest form but in the same time hiding
an unexpected complexity. The drawing is directly linked to
what architecture want to be.
It can be seen as a
book of sketches, as an archive of thoughts and models, or
it can be read as the crisis
picture, which give to architects the time to
think, starting again to design.
The book cause me
two opposite reactions.
It attract me
because I’m interested on the architect’s private visions, which goes behind
their well known projects, but in the same time it scares me because it
materialize on the net, in a place where the dialogue is limited to the comment
or to the judgment.
It would
be great if this meeting between friends could be enlarged to other architects,
it would be great to organize an
exhibition in a real space, it would
be great if that could be a starting point and not the arrival.
Thanks then to the
three architects for the vision’s gift, because the drawing hide the will and need to
carry on talking about architecture and maybe this book tell an
hidden truth.
But the truth
doesn’t exist…..and the book has been existing only on my imagination.