The Belly of Architecture (Space and Landscape) - Changing ...

perceptively - the spaces of a house and the inside with the outside; it deploys the relations between plan
and section, it shows the relations between the various heights of the rooms, it breaks spatial rigidity both in
the plan and especially in the elevation and therefore in its section; in short: it introduces movement as a
category of spatial definition.
In the same way, Le Corbusier, starting from the studies of the Acropolis, directs his interest for the dynamic
vision of space and its composition, by juxtaposing and mounting separate bodies, to an urban landscape.
Consider, for instance, the project for the Palace of Soviets in Moscow and the famous comparison Le
Corbusier proposes for it with the Square of Miracles in Pisa: space is resolved with a system of inner
tension between the separate individual architectural bodies and their relation with the horizon connecting
them (the wall of the graveyard in Pisa, the river in Moscow) This is again a topologic space, which cannot
be measured using Euclidean categories.
It is certainly not by chance that Le Corbusier’s architectural investigation is again considered with an
explicit interest by Eisenstein and linked to his studies on film editing. Giuliana Bruno wrote: “From this
perspective, you notice that cinema and architecture are connected by a narrative action … The visitor is
the subject of this practice: a transit through spaces of light”.
We go back to the “peripatetic” spatiality that Yve-Alain Bois talks about the modern “picturesque”.
Giuliana Bruno wrote: “If I assert the affiliation between picturesqueness and cinema even beyond the
aspect of editing, it is because I am interested in showing that the connection between the two consists of a
cultural transit …. The act of attributing this special genealogy to cinema is in itself a way to acknowledge
for both cinema and picturesqueness their nature of complex mapping practices, which imply an emotive
design”.
I believe that this topic of “emotive design” may also introduce the use of other editing techniques for
“narrative” and “emotional”, purposes, that hybridize strictly cinematographic pictures with other material –
either technologically very sophisticated material (Bruno wrote: “with Prospero’s Books, for instance,
Greenaway proposed a new figurative modality, including recent technologies such as the Graphic
Paintbox” and using interpolations with graphic writing and painting) or archival bricolage material (the
amazing and highly effective narrative-emotional technique developed by Alina Marazzi in her documentary
films, editing exclusively archival material, including both films and photographs, written material and
sound).
Steven Holl’s space of multisensory perception.
Now, let’s go back to architecture
The American author Steven Holl is central, because of the attention he devotes to an architecture of
relations. It is not by chance that his work constantly refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the
phenomenology of perception and to the attempt at bringing them back to the architectural work.
Holl’s investigation is therefore very close to the rediscovery of the principles of picturesqueness that Yve-
Alain Bois attributes to Richard Serra’s sculptures. I believe that it is definitely not by chance that a number
of interior spaces, designed by Holl, recall with surprising accuracy the perceptive deformation of space that
you can experience inside Serra’s big corten steel sculptures. Nor can it be by chance that even Holl, like
Serra, explicitly refers to the geometrical principle of the parallax to describe the essence of his architectural
investigation.
Holl’s architecture is based especially on the creation of spaces featuring a complex perception and on a
refined and equally complex usage of materials, light, and textures, to achieve a multiple, multisensory
perceptive sense.
Consequently, all Holl’s architectural works are constantly changing in their formal characters, both when
perceived while moving, from the outside, and passed through inside: think, for instance, of the
kaleidoscopic Y House.
The Kiasma museum in Helsinki, designed together with Juhani Pallasmaa, is probably the clearest
example of this investigation: the concept of chiasm the project is based on, entails an interplay between
the mass of the building and the geometry of the city and of the landscape that defines the shape of the
building itself, applying a torsion which is decisive in the making of the external architectural object and of
the internal subdivision of spaces.
The relationship between building and landscape is decisive in Holl. And yet it is not a simple question of
“contextuality”, it is a constituent element of form itself: the building introjects and represents in itself the
complexity of the urban and natural landscape surrounding it, in an almost syncretic way.
Kiasma, in this, represents a development more in Holl’s work, passing from the attention for rootedness in
a place, distinguishing his first works and described in his first treatise on Anchoring i.e. rootedness, to the