The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets - Michael ...

Guggenheim 11
‘traditional style’ of the Ticino – that is the style that preceded the Stil del Paese – is a
style that requires traditional materials (mostly stone) and handiwork, making it badly
suited for a rapidly growing town. Nonetheless, the Stil del Paese is framed as indigenous,
literally meaning the style of the countryside, the village, and the place at once.
Against this backdrop, the local authorities label the new as a whole as a foreign ‘Nordic
Import’, without any qualification of which part is responsible for the qualification
and what precisely constitutes the local, but rather using vague terms such as ‘character’
and ‘milieu’. The distinction between the local and the import rests on seemingly obvious
assumptions of the wholeness of the local and the foreign.
The promoters of modernism try to frame another relation between time and place. By
pointing out that the modern style in Germany is thought to come from the south, Keller
breaks the link between the modern and place. For him ‘our architecture’ is the architecture
that stems from the present, a specific time rather than a place. Modernism has no
place; it is international. 6 Rather than deriving desired forms from the past of the same
location, the moderns derive them from the same period, but other places. The period is
one of modern man, who connects to nature, wherever he or she is. Ironically, this portrayal
is contrary to the semantic repertoire that links the indigenous with nature and the
modern with culture. Keller manages to link two building parts with this opposition
between the placeless modern and the traditional local: he portrays the natives as not
interested in their landscape whereas modern man has an urge to connect to the beautiful
landscape by creating big windows. The size of windows defines modern lifestyle,
because the windows are the technology to connect to nature. They are not examples
of a style, but a technology to connect to nature.
The second building part, the flat roof, is the issue on which Maraini and Keller converge.
A flat roof is materialized, since it is not the flat roof anymore as such that is
linked to a given lifestyle, but the quality of its execution. It turns out that flat roofs
become proofs of the acceptability of modern architecture, not because they are uniquely
linked to modern buildings, but because they are particularly difficult to build.
Maraini and Keller both create a distinction between good and bad architecture and a
shift towards a relational understanding of fit. What is now excluded and legally banned
is bad architecture, and architecture that disturbs the existing townscape, a notion that
does not relate to a specific building part anymore, but to the quality of an architect’s
design or the execution of building work. Flat roofs for Keller were not preferable
because they were modern, but because they had preferable structural qualities, provided
they were expertly crafted. The education of the lay people allowed killing two birds
with one stone. First, it allowed attributing the rejection of the modern style to a lack
of education, rather than a problem of the local versus the foreign. Second it allowed
materializing the problem of the flat roof as one of building quality rather than of specific
building parts. What led to the bad image of modern architecture was not so much a technology,
but the structural failures of modern buildings created by bad builders.
At the end of the dispute stood a shift: initially, buildings were understood as stylistic
and thus symbolic units related to either time or place (contemporary ¼ modern ¼ international/foreign
vs traditional ¼ local ¼ old). This definition occurred either by very
broad terms or narrowly through the linking of building parts such as windows and roofs
with these styles. In an intermediate step, windows were technologized as providing
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