THE UNIVERSITY IS NOW ON AIR, BROADCASTING MODERN ARCHITECTURE

A cura di Joaquim Moreno

THE UNIVERSITY IS NOW ON AIR, BROADCASTING MODERN ARCHITECTURE

CCA-Jap Sam Books - 2018

A multi-part book edited and narrated through 8 episodes by Joaquim Moreno, which analyzes the experience and the birth of the Open University, in particular the pioneering course in History of Architecture and Design. The Open University through radio and television broadcasts between 1975 and 1982, outlines the portrait of an era, a teaching method that today seems to be very topical again.An important story, something more than a simple distance education initiative. A school that does not want to replace traditional systems but wants to integrate them with the media.The Open University is linked to the concept of teaching on a large scale, and is based on three post-war educational trends, the desire to teach an adult audience, the need to create a media-related industry, the spread of education as a system capable of levelling out class differences. Education moves beyond the physical spaces of traditional universities and reaches a wide audience. The lessons were the result of teamwork and were constructed in a completely different way from traditional didactics.A book of great actuality capable from a certain distance of talking about the present, about the many questions that the University is asking itself. What does it mean to teach in a world dominated by the media and where distance will continue to transform the space of the community? And what is the space of knowledge. Moreno tells us through his careful research, that tools in every age must be understood and exploited to amplify the meaning of physical space.

Un libro a più voci curato e narrato attraverso 8 episodi da Joaquim Moreno, analizza l’esperienza e la nascita della Open University in particolare del pionieristico corso di Storia dell’architettura e del design. L’Open University attraverso trasmissioni radiofoniche e televisive tra il 1975 e il 1982, delinea il ritratto di un’epoca, un metodo di insegnamento che oggi sembra di nuovo di grande attualità. Una storia importante, qualcosa di più di una semplice iniziativa di istruzione a distanza. Una scuola che non vuole sostituire i sistemi tradizionali ma li vuole integrare con i media. L’Open University è legata al concetto di insegnamento su grande scala, e si basa su tre tendenze educative del dopoguerra, la volontà di insegnare ad un pubblico adulto, l’esigenza di creare un’industria legata ai media, la diffusione dell’educazione come sistema capace di livellare le differenze di classe. L’educazione si sposta oltre gli spazi fisici delle università tradizionali ed arriva ad un vasto pubblico. Le lezioni erano il frutto di un lavoro di equipe ed erano costruite in modo completamente diverso rispetto alla didattica tradizionale. Un libro di grande attualità capace da una certa distanza di parlare del presente, delle tante domande che l’Università si sta ponendo. Cosa significa insegnare in un mondo dominato dai media e in cui la distanza continuerà a trasformare lo spazio della collettività? E cosa è lo spazio della conoscenza. Moreno ci dice attraverso la sua ricerca attenta, che gli strumenti in ogni epoca devono essere capiti e sfruttati per amplificare il significato dello spazio fisico.

GLASS BOX

The Empty City – for Luca Galofaro
BY Aristide Antonas

I realize now that no house is complete. What I see is a bark, a built skin; it seems to form a city, but none of the buildings is a real house; none is a complete structure. None can accommodate a dweller or a guest. The street is alive, as a true city street; but it reveals only this thin skin of a cortex. It is only the exterior part of the houses; therefore, it is just a city mask that contains nothing. “Nothing” is not the right word, but downtown is an intersection made of walls that enclose empty stages. Behind the closed windows one finds only huge empty plots. A window high up is left open; I see the sky. I discern an entrance; I cautiously enter the empty area through this broken door. Inside the block I find only birds, hawks that fly slowly, and four trees that seem to have sprouted long ago. A forgotten stream flows; it forms a small waterfall. How can it be that in a city with such animated sidewalks—full of people rushing—no one lives in homes, how can a city be completely deprived of homes? With my big shovel, I break the ground. As I was walking, I thought I heard a voice urging me to dig. Maybe there is a treasure to be found. But no, beneath the earth I only come across a horizontal vitrine; I make room with my hands to clean a part of it and see through it; it is obvious now: I can glimpse under it the lively city I had missed. The enormous, thick glass plate reveals an entire population working below; already they turn to look at this annoying sunlight coming from above.

IMAGES

Image-Worker
BY. Tarek Elhaik


During his visit to AIL, the Anthropology of the Image Lab I direct at the University of California in Davis, Luca Galofaro generously shared with us past and current work, architectural, photographic, and curatorial. The encounter with his photographic image-work, in particular, provided us with an inspiring tool-kit that connected the image environments of contemporary architecture with the conceptual problems of both modernist and contemporary anthropology. While the term ‘contemporary’ means many things to different people, the same can be said of the word ‘modernist.’ Although not a Modernist, Galofaro nonetheless continues to have one foot in the photomontage tradition of László Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe, a mode of image-work put to the service of designing a New Man illuminated by an intelligence to come. With the other foot in the post-1960s photographic, cinematic, and anthropological inquiries of Superstudio, he too deploys images that draw from, accelerate, and exhaust the “architecture of Reason” imagined by the “primitives of modern architecture” (Bauhaus, the 1920s) who paved the way for a natura naturata and man-made environments built on a Monumento Continuo.

Yet, Galofaro’s collages and pictorial compositions transform these image-making traditions and pictorial archives. He fishes in a pictorial reservoir peopled with another type of images: time-images swollen with sheets of time, with unexpected futures, outcome of new forces coalescing less and less in the figure of the New Man imagined by Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy and Superstudio.
Through interventions in all kinds of objets trouvés — postcards and vintage photographs — Galofaro foregrounds instead intriguing affinities with the practice of bricolage celebrated by anthropologists during a time where the scope of Architecture and Art were also being redefined. While Lévi-Strauss famously located art between Magic and Science, and the Artist between the figures of the Bricoleur and the Engineer — the former beginning with already available and existing things, the latter from a tabula rasa — Galofaro, the architect, likewise locates his photomontages in terms of a “thinking through images” and as a “kind of magic, not an art.” Galofaro’s writings and image-work invite us therefore to relocate the figure of the Architect — a figure notoriously in tension with both those of the Artist and the Engineer — in an intermediary zone and gallery of figures between the Anthropologist and the Artist. Moreover, the cinematic metaphor and concept of montage, to which some anthropologists, including myself, have always been drawn resonate with Galofaro’s reflections on his own image-work, “not as a form of artistic composition but as a tool of research to orient ourselves in the chaos of the history of forms.” At least as much, if not more than with artists, what emerged from our conversation is a conceptual and creative friendship where both the Architect and the Anthropologist can flourish together.

POSTCARDS

Montage City

by Pablo Castro

Luca Galofaro’s photomontages propose an alternative architecture, one that, at the risk of superficially appearing unconcerned with structure or internal organization of space—or indeed even with purpose and intended use—focuses instead on a consideration of the value and design potential of the image as one of the crucial cultural issues of our time. The image is not a neglected issue: image seems to be perhaps the most powerful incentive animating design practice today. We live in an image-driven society, images are powerful, easy to produce and cheap. Sometimes it seems, image is all that matters. Driven by image, everything is exaggerated and even grotesque, an obsession with instant and unambiguous communication with an absent-minded public has done away with all subtlety and complexity. Everything in design needs to be reduced to epigrammatic visual ‘sound bites’ that might hopefully fit within the narrowly limited opportunities afforded by an audience with a stunted attention span.

Living in a society wired to spend and discard as fast as possible, image is the main driver and enticement to all action, there is no time for anything other than the skin-deep. The economic system under which we live and work produces and propagates its own form of ignorance; it is, after all, what keeps it alive, and because of that, what passes for quality, luxury or necessity is often superficial and almost completely image-dependent. Decisions concerning the most difficult problems are postponed or abandoned altogether while a thin veneer of optimistic technological overreach is applied to cover over the gaps. A case in point is the complete absence of any debate regarding the slow destruction of the world brought about by continued massive production of articles of consumption that nobody really needs. Instead of engaging in debate regarding this issue in any significant way, the professional response of the architectural ‘mainstream’ has been little more than attempting to deploy a thin ‘green’ layer of technological ‘innovation’ so as to ensure that the production and commercialization of superfluous commodities continue unabated while cowardly avoiding any substantive political debate about the situation. The disenfranchisement of the architectural discipline is only the logical consequence of all this; by agreeing to let others make the important decisions, architects are giving up architecture as the key competence on issues of the design of the public realm. The disappearance of the design of the city from the list of disciplinary competences of architecture is only the most dramatic example of its growing cultural irrelevance.

Professional servility has won over disciplinary integrity and architecture has become the obedient amanuensis of interests that—to give it sense within the narrow range of concerns that define their own universe of action—demand its cultural inconsequence and slow-burn self-destruction. Today, architecture as a professional practice is trapped within the narrow confines it has been forced to set for itself in order to survive as an increasingly modest profession. It has been separated from its capacity to imagine and build the city.

It is perhaps in this context that the importance of these photomontages can be best assessed. They are obviously not meant to describe complete architectural propositions—that would distract us from their real purpose—they have instead a more precise objective: they outline hypothetical design propositions at a large scale, releasing the imagination to envision again architecture as a complete practice.

A building has a within—the space defined inside itself to provide for the infinite ways in which life will unfold for its users—but it also has a without. Even if neglected or misunderstood in its potential, this without is the building’s contribution to society and the unitary building block in the construction of the shared space of the city.

Through these photomontages, Luca Galofaro proposes visions of the architecture of without as pure public appearance; their sharp focus and deceivingly ludic character address exclusively the liminal zone separating interior and exterior spaces. This zone, the boundary setting apart the private from the public, is the precise locus of any debate about the ownership of the city, the critical issue in an urgently necessary political discussion about the future of urban space. These montages attempt to re-artificialize the city, proposing an understanding of it as something other than a natural phenomenon, one that we would be forced to logically accept as a given fact. For them, the city can be re-conceptualized and reinvented through the power of the imagination, and free from the implicit chains of causality directing the trajectories of all things taken to be natural, made to re-enter the debate of history and regain the right to fight for its own future. Since the 18th century the city has been considered to be as indifferent to human destiny as the forest or the sea might be. As a matter of fact, it is the park—the artificial urban form of the forest—which first provided the model and justification for an understanding of the city as a natural phenomenon. By proposing architecture in self-conscious metamorphosis, these photomontages vehemently deny this customary naturalization of the city, proposing instead the idea of a city considered in-motion as a dialectical hybrid between nature and culture: one that, being a product of human ingenuity and work, can and must always be guided by the compass of human intentionality.

The skin of buildings is the agent of architecture’s representational value in the city, the surface of contact between their social use and their cultural significance. Buildings’ façades are the articulating plane between built physical infrastructure and the unfolding evolution of the collective consciousness of a community. It is here, on the surface, that the continued design and construction of buildings can seek to remain a relevant cultural project by developing the prospects of an alternative architectural rhetoric. This is why one important characteristic of these photomontages is their determination to cement a vision of the future of architecture and the city grounded not in fantasy but in empowered imagination. These artworks propose a space of diachronic evolution, flashbacks and simultaneously running plots preserve the montages from the resigned temptation to blame the facts on natural causality and from the simplifications of a chronological linearity leading not to more accurate predictions of possible futures, but to sheer fantasies.

Beyond the myriad of antiquarian recombinations suggested by Luca Galofaro’s graphic works, we see them as embodying a clear poetical disposition. They are visual poems, poems made not with words but with images, in the sense that they are made out of parts with limited individual value. For both poems and photomontages, individual parts are relatively inert; true value for these art forms is really only acquired dynamically when words and images are put in motion and enter trajectories promising near-misses and head-on collisions with other words and images. Just like worn-out words that get metaphorically recharged in poetry, the images in photomontage can get recharged too; in this case, they acquire a capacity to make promises about the possibility of a reconsidered relationship between architecture and the city.

We are in the presence here of a long-term project, interesting also in the manner in which these works have evolved deploying different strategies towards achieving consistent objectives in different and imaginative ways. Architecture and Nature (2009), for example, and Sketchbook (2002-2014), appear as extremely compact site-less compositions of epigrammatic eloquence and muscular form, while, by very different means, Archetipi – moon bases 01 (2013) and The Ring (2013) present us with ironic demonstrations of the resilience of the power of basic architectural forms, which continue to radiate the aura of the urban even when located on the moon, under the extreme conditions of radical de-contextualization of the interstellar void.

Most surprising perhaps are Crescita e Forma 01 (2010), Postcards Berlin – Innesti (2013) or Accumulazioni 01 (2014), works in which accumulation and relentless repetition lead to a sort of demolition of the monumental component of well-known architectural icons which are, this way, reduced to a more pedestrian and also more relevant condition of simple fragments of urban fabric. Although radically changed, the assembled fragments remain, by virtue of their original iconic value, recognizable as rhetorically charged. These are the fragments of a new possible city, one not without monuments, but one for which a new form of monumentality has been spread out in potentially equalitarian profusion. This is a new form of city proposing fragments of urban fabric as monuments and monuments as fragments of urban fabric.

Nothing prevents this productive critique of monumentality from working at multiple levels, and we can also sense in them an implicit critique of the cult of personality in architecture. These montages are the work of an architect with an erudite knowledge of the discipline, and they manage to be critical while, at the same time, paying loving respect to names of the recent past apparently dear to the author. Amongst them are well-known ones such as Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn and Lina Bo Bardi, but the work of more obscure masters is featured as well. That is the case with Clorindo Testa’s Banco de Londres in Buenos Aires and Enrico Tedeschi’s Facultad de Arquitectura in Mendoza, Argentina. There is a clear equalizing intent at play in these works: one that makes ‘high’ architecture accessible through simple repetition while it elevates ‘low’ architecture through compositional care.

Notwithstanding the ambition to catalogue an organized codex implicit in the effort, the work overflows with a desire for exuberant typological invention. The reorganization of matter produced by montage speeds up the intrinsic time of the imagined architecture in a way that suggests forms in state of premature evolutionary fruition. In these images we are sometimes able to look ahead into moments of advanced typological development that, we imagine, would otherwise take many years to achieve.

In closing, it should be noted that these works are not indifferent to pragmatic concerns, and in the end, they present us with images of an architecture vindicated by the implicit justification of a complete purpose. Without a presumptive socially necessary use, architecture would be an object like any other; there is a social component that, added to the brute object of architecture, realizes it as such. Ultimately, architecture only ‘happens’ when created to align with our most intimate desires and fears. We build a house because we hope to be able to mate and reproduce, we build a school because we want children to grow to be wiser than us and avoid repeating our mistakes, we build a hospital because we don’t want to die, and we build cemeteries because we don’t want to be forgotten. Each one of these different building types presents a form of articulation between society and our personal hopes and fears. They expose the strict differentiation between public and private increasingly articulated in the organization of our cities as a gross simplification and a naïve illusion. Architecture has no choice but to attempt a return to the city or finally perish.

New York, July 2018

ARCHITETTURA + DESIGN

Architettura + Design 1965-2015

Germano Celant

Quodlibet Habitat 2018

Questo non è un libro di saggi ma un breviario che raccoglie impressioni, storie e percorsi da approfondire in modi diversi. Un viaggio nella geografia del mondo dell’architettura e del design.

Testi brevi pensati come istantanee  per definire in modo chiaro e intenso una storia filtrata dallo sguardo critico di Germano Celant, che nell’arco di cinquant’anni ha commentato e scritto la storia dell’arte. Si va dal testo su Marcello Nizzoli, fino a quelli su Frank O. Gehry e Rem Koolhaas, passando per il celebre Architettura Radicale, che ha dato il nome ad un movimento che dalla fine degli anni sessanta ha caratterizzato una ricerca internazionale che ha avuto il pregio di anticipare il nostro presente.  

Questi testi  brevi offrono un prezioso spaccato globale della cultura progettuale a cavallo di due secoli, sono consigliati specialmente ai lettori più giovani che forse considerano i libri come una perdita di tempo inutile, così convinti delle potenzialità della rete.

Sono testi che rimandano sempre ad un approfondimento ma hanno la capacità di fotografare i significati e i fatti. Rendono evidente  l’autonomia dell’arte intesa come un una lingua capace di operare in modi sempre diversi sul reale.

Lo stesso Celant scrive nell’introduzione «Sin dal 1965 la pratica di transitare da un territorio all’altro mi è apparsa interessante per il suo potenziale teorico, perché permetteva di lavorare su un tutto avvolgente, dove poter immettere ogni manifestazione creativa senza adottare margini esterni. Così si poteva assumere ogni entità espressiva come equivalente, senza doversi collocare negli interstizi specifici di un particolare linguaggio. Aderendo alla supremazia di un tutto dall’inesauribile forma e materia è stato facile intraprendere un viaggio globale, quello che permetteva la registrazione di tutti i possibili punti di sbarco e di attrazione, connessi alla mia esperienza in continuo divenire. Così sono entrato in una “circolazione” aperta, non localizzata, che si è concretizzata da un luogo ad altri luoghi, dall’arte alle arti».

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