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

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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
attention for relational logic, which defines the architecture described in his second treatise on Intertwining, all the way up to the logic of the Parallax of the third treatise. Abalos and the picturesque metamorphosis The concept of parallax brings us back to the topic of “picturesqueness” that I mentioned before and this leads us directly to the issue of landscape. A recent, very interesting treatment of this subject is made by Iñaki Abalos in his Atlas pintoresco and is called “picturesque metamorphosis”. Once again, the phenomenology of perception suggests an interpretation of space and landscape that goes beyond a static prospective view and produces a mutual relationship between spectator and landscape, where objects themselves tend to transform into subjects and the spectator’s look extends to a sensory experience that is increasingly all-absorbing, all the way up to the experience of living in it. Iñaki Abalos’ idea develops along the same line of reasoning. He is the last and most committed author reappraising picturesqueness in contemporaneity. Abalos opposes to the notion of landscape as an object, looked at in a totally detached way and with a constant sense of abstraction, a more subjective and sensitive relationship, that “listens to” landscape as well as looking at it. A central element in Abalos’ reflection is the proposal to conceive landscape (both in ecologic and aesthetic terms) as a subject, which we should not only look at and analyse but also listen to: a subject-landscape which claims a life of its own, which you experience going through it, living it. What is proposed is an architecture of relations which retrieves, through a close relationship with landscape architecture, the possibility to create a significant landscape of architecture. Abalos looks for an answer in a provocative way: putting beside two pictures of Central Park in Olmsted and Ville Radieuse by Le Corbusier, two antithetical visions of the relationship between architecture and landscape, both in terms of discipline and ideology, which nevertheless lead to an almost identical image, in which figure and background, landscape and architecture engage in a tight dialogue by means of inverting the usual relationships of 18 th Century landscape painting. So much, that they end up creating a unicum, in which architecture learns from landscape art new rules to learn and design a world of living forms, and in which landscape art learns from architecture the rules of formal abstraction. In this way, landscape architecture and the landscape of architecture present themselves in a new and wellpromising symbiosis. The space of landscape Moreover, the perceptive-spatial component of landscape has always been, as is the case with the temporal dimension, a key-factor in design compositions, from historic experiences onwards. In the already mentioned experience of Japanese gardens as well as in the British experience of “picturesque gardens” of the 18 th -19 th Century, the kinematic features of moving “view” and of “direct experience” are an essential component of the architecture of new landscapes. Contemporary landscape architecture experiences also express a constant and strong interest for both phenomena of perception while moving and, more in general, for the process of designing landscapes, definitely including in this the incidence of the time and evolution factor and also the need to account for maintenance techniques and deterioration. Undeniably many landscape projects also feature “objective” elements of the composition (including trees) that are actually meaningless if not considered in their mutual relation and in their relation with the surrounding landscape. Space becomes again decisive as the connective substance matter of the project, crossed by connections that you experience physically while moving or visually, looking at them. This grid of virtual construction of space constitutes the main strength lines of the project and defines its key system of perception. And more: we may say that it is increasingly processes (the development, the becoming of things) that are the real protagonists of landscape works: The Atelier Le Balto stated: “precisely therefore, rather than talking about “finished” gardens, we prefer to display the process of creation leading to their implementation”. The project of a landscape, or garden, becomes therefore an infiltration in the interstices of existing landscapes, aiming at re-establishing the role of “art like nature” in the construction of the new “contemporary space”. Le Balto, quoting Anselm Franke, wrote: “A garden is like silence in an artistic piece, both for the professional and for the occupant”.
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2^ BIENAL DE CANARIAS The Belly of
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“Los jardines zen abren un espaci
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Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
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Montaña Tindaya, Fuerteventura 199
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Montaña Tindaya, Fuerteventura 199
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Peine del Viento, San Sebastian 197
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“La dimension de una obra de arte
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“La condicion del sueño es la ce
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“El paisaje que nos rodea lo pose
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James Archibald Turrell: Architectu
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“Non si tratta tanto di appropria
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“Il mio scopo è realizzare un’
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“La rappresentazione di un luogo
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"lo spazio non è una forma-base im
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"Nel Proun viene in luce in modo nu
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Mies van der Rohe, Resor House
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Giovanbattista Piranesi Carceri con
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Pablo Beitia, Museo Xul Solar, Buen
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Le Corbusier: “promenade architec
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Le Corbusier, Soviet Palace, Moscou
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