The Resistance of Architecture at the time that everything and nothing changes

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THE RESISTANCE OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE TIME

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VERYTHING AND

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OTHING

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HANGES

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OSÈ

R

ICCI

Umiversità di Trento, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile Ambientale e Meccanica mose.ricci@unitn.it

Accepted: 27th_{July 2018}

ABSTRACT

How many furniture, or houses, or urban districts, that where designed and made in the 80s are still relevant today? What clothes or shoes that period can be worn without appearing old or out of time? Everybody can say almost all. In forty years the living spaces have not changed that much. Even less their projects have been modified. The way in which they are conceived and designed is almost the same. Fashion, architecture, and cities are the sensitive forms that better represent the people that generated them. They express lifestyle, a status and, in some way aspirations and expectations for the future. Is it possible that they remained so indifferent to the changes of the last decades? A few times the distance between gestalt and zeitgeist was so dramatic. The paradigm that binds the aesthetics to the projection of time blowed up. The overcoming of modernity lies especially in this. We live like an eternal present. Where the sensitive forms and their representations in solid space no longer carry an idea of the future. Even today everything changes and so much faster than before. Innovation is conducted in the intangible areas of the net rather than in the material spaces.

The Eternal Present involves us in a bounding. There is a kind of impossibility to interpret the future thought the “solid forms” of architecture. To give meaning, narrative and uses—even temporary uses—to spaces that have already given forms and turn them into attractive and ecologically efficient places to live.

Narrative can be the design device that describes the capacity for resistance of all that is appreciable through the senses (architecture, fashion, music), the digital revolution of shared information, or in other terms, to the evolution of the concept of author, of copy, of heritage, of form.

Keywords: counter-history, zero degree, Judaism and modernity

… Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes: nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange …

Who was in Venice in the autumn of 2017 had the opportunity to visit the huge Damien Hirst show “The Wreck of the Unbelievable”. It was the public exhibition of the treasure recovered from the Roman ship Ápistos sunk by a storm in the Indian Ocean almost 2000 years ago between the first and second century AD. Its introductory booklet begins precisely with the song of Ariel from the "Tempest" by William Shakespeare (1611) where the sea plays the sublime imago of time that everything and nothing changes.

The cargo of the ship belonged to a legendary libertus Cif Amotan a former slave made free and rich by his masters who had become an accountant and accumulated an immense fortune in art works, statues and jewelry from all over the world. The shipwreck dragged to the sea floor the fruit of a lifetime's work, along with the boat.

Damien Hirst funded the expedition for the ship recovery along the East African coast. He re-emerged all the magnificence sunk with the Ápistos and exhibited it in Venice in Palazzo Grassi and Magazzini del Sale, in Venice, since September to December 2017. The gigantic copy, 12 meters high, of a standing rebel devil statue stood as an icon of the exhibition in the middle of the courtyard of Palazzo Grassi. Around the various floors, beautiful busts of Venus (with the face of Cindy Crawford we could say) and impressive Medusa heads and many other findings/artifacts in their different conditions after the discovery.

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ESEMPI DI ARCHITETTURA,2018, VOL.5, N.2

Fig.1. Women dressed in traditional clothes from Abruzzo with la Presentosa jewel. Photo © LLATIKA

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Fig.3. Pavement texture of the "La Prestentosa" project for the regeneration of Corso Trento e Trieste Fig.4. Detail of the pavement with resin plates

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The exhibition opens with the video footage of underwater recovery. On the ship there were original masterpieces statues with still the marine concretions, shells and corals attached. There were also copies that give back the initial conditions and many other magnificent artifacts intact or fragmented. And there are also jewels and arms, strange and unexpected artworks like mysterious popular icons of a recent era ... a Mickey Mouse statue or a Goofy completely covered with shells and a metallic robot coming from a future past in the depths of the ocean.

Who cares? Hirst/Amotan seems to say.

In Ancient Greek, Ápistos means Unbelievable. It is the name of the sunken ship, but also its content is incredible too, and perhaps the whole story is ... What is true of the treasure and what is false? All? Nohing? What are the originals and which the copies? What is ancient and what is modern? And ultimately, what is the meaning of heritage and what is art? Who is / are the author / authors?

Who cares? Hirst/Amotan "the collector" seems to respond... Damien Hirst offers only doubts to the observers, ironic uncertainties and a motionless time in the large Atzeco calendar that looks like the Piedra del Sol of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. Its presence on the Roman ship is not explained.

Hirst shows everything together. True and false do not count. The ancient and the contemporary forms are full of meaning in the same narrative, both as re-emerged in a fixed time.

The different vision of time and the value that time gives to material things is the true provocation of Hirst. In some way -revolutionizing or mocking the concepts of heritage, authenticity, originality, authorship- he sanctions the end of a modern and exclusive idea of art and, why not, of architecture too.

Our modern education has separated the past from today by relegating it to history and inventing the future as the only dimension in which the present is projected and takes on meaning. But in the Hirst exhibition past, present and future exhibition are frozen in the thickness of the now.

“The Wreck of the Unbelievable” makes us deepen in the abyss of uncertainty and of aleatory to make us understand that Time is out of Joint as Shakespeare always writes in the Hamlet and as Cristiana Collu titled the first anti-didactic exhibition (2016-18) at the National Gallery of Rome under her direction. Time has nothing to do with it. Only the narrative can give sense to the artistic performances and allows us to establish their value. The author is multiple: who conceives, who puts together, who uses and elaborates in different ways. Performance, storytelling and sharing make the concept of heritage creative and holistic, and they re-define it by allowing everyone to enjoy its immanence in the present time.

All of this does not start now. Already in the second half of the twentieth century some intellectuals active in different fields of creative culture began to question themselves about the end of Modernity and on a different conception of time. Music, fashion design and cinema understand first what is happening, as it often happens.

In other words, starting from the Hirst exhibition, I want to write about time, space and sense in the age after the modernity, in the age of the long present.

In 1979 in USA the Talking Heads publish Fear of Music. The album is edited by Brian Eno. The New York group that binds rock, pop and avant-garde in this album inserts the song “Heaven” written by David Byrne, which between the serious and the paradoxical speaks of a bar that is called, indeed, Paradise. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens and when something ends ... then it starts again:

... when this kiss is over, it will start again It will be exactly the same

It's hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be this much fun Heaven, heaven is a place a place where nothing nothing ever happens. ...

In 2010 Dave Bell, a young doctoral student from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, writes of Heaven (https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk):

... it's boring, there's no funky polyrhythms, no dada jabberings, no sequel in the lyrics, and certainly no MTV friendly video in which David Byrne repeatedly hits his head - it's just a simple mid-tempo piano song that comes and goes in four minutes and a second, yet I think it's one of the most important songs of all time, as Samuel Beckett could write it: boring, beautiful and desperate.

Are really popular, boring, beautiful and desperate the most suitable adjectives to describe not only the song but also the era we are living in? We can argue, but the question of time that seems to be still while everything and nothing changes is real and concerns the spaces of life.

In 2015 for the film "Spotlight" (Oscar 2016 as best film and best screenplay) the director Tim Burton, asks props to perfectly reconstruct every environment, the actors' clothes, the furnishings exactly as they were at the time of the events in Boston at the beginning of the 2000s. Fifteen years before the film was made.

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Fig.6. La Presentosa" at the exhibition INTRAMOENIA exhibition. Diap | Projects -Venice 2018. Photo © Luca Pilot

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ESEMPI DI ARCHITETTURA,2018, VOL.5, N.2 Fig.8. La Presentosa, Lanciano – opening. Photo © www.oraziocarpenzano.it

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After two months of research, the set designer team tells the director that nothing has really changed in the physical forms of the places and the way people dress. “You can wear the same clothes now, use the same lockers, shoot in the same places because nothing has really changed.”

How many furnitures, or houses, or urban districts, that where designed and made in the 80’s are still relevant today? What clothes or shoes that period can be worn without appearing old, unusual or out of time?

Almost all we could say.

In forty -even sixty- years the inhabiting spaces (clothes, fornitures, houses, districts, …) have not changed that much. Their projects have been modified even less. The way in which they are conceived and designed is almost the same. Fashion, architecture and city neigbouroughs are the solid forms that better can represent the people that generated them. They express a lifestyle, a status and, in some way the aspirations and the expectations for the future. Is it possible that they remained so indifferent to the big technological and social changes of the last decades?

These have been the years of the most profound technological revolution in history. More pervasive and effective than the one of the internal combustion engine at the end of the XIX Century that upsets not only the modes of production and the social hierarchies, but also the aesthetics and the solid shapes of living. When, with the second industrial revolution, all the material world changed very quickly. They invented urbanism. The architecture of iron and concrete generated new larger and larger cities. The art went futuristic and abstract. Lifestyles changed and clothes too. The modern world projected humanity in the future with its forms. The ideas of speed and of future expressed the zeitgeist in the design culture. As Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Liquid

Modernity (polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2000) "modernity is the time in the era in which time has a story" In modernity genius loci coincided with genius saeculi, the forms of art, of the city, of architecture, of fashion fulfilled the epoch. In the modern age it was unthinkable/impossible to dress or to design furnitures, houses or cities as they did in the previous century.

Today it is no longer the case. The distance between gestalt and zeitgeist has never been so dramatic. The paradigm that binds the aesthetics to the projection of time blowed up. The overcoming of modernity lies especially in this. We live like an eternal present. Where the sensitive forms and their representations in solid spaces no longer carry an idea of the future. They seem to be always more or less the same. Immutable and increasingly displaced in the rush of the sharing information technologies revolution that is upsetting the system of social relations and the way in which things and places are related one to each other. Even today everything changes and it does it so much faster than before. Innovation is conducted in the intangible areas of the net rather than in the material solid spaces. The way to experiment and disseminate information and knowledge are especially mutating in a vortex of accelerated change where the tools and virtual synapses materials involve the activities and lifestyles linked to them while the more traditional and unconnected spaces tend to remain inert, equal to themselves. Or they change slowly.

Today it is no longer the case. The distance between gestalt and zeitgeist never has been so dramatic. The paradigm that binds the aesthetics to the projection of time blowed up. The overcoming of modernity lies especially in this. We live like an eternal present. Where the sensitive forms and their representations in solid space no longer carry an idea of the future. They seem to be always more or less the same. Immutable and increasingly displaced in the rush of the sharing information technologies revolution that is upsetting the system of social relations and the way in which things and places are related each other. Even today everything changes and so much faster than before. Innovation is conducted in the intangible areas of the net rather than in the material solid spaces. The way to experiment and disseminate information and knowledge are especially mutating in a vortex of accelerated change where the tools and virtual synapses materials involve the activities and lifestyles linked to them while the more traditional and unconnected spaces tend to remain inert, equal to themselves. Or they change slowly.

And is the idea of architecture changing? As Damien Hirst seems to suggest, there are some fundamental issues concerning time, space and the sense we must re-think about to better understand the world and the society we live. Also to understand how we can continue to propose the quality of life, happiness and culture today with a project. A project for the age of the long present. That involves spaces that already exists and that has to be ready immediately, or at least very early for the trigger of a new life cycle of the architectural, landscape and urban materials that are already there. A project aimed at improving its ecological performances, to be shared with those who live it in any way, capable to express new meanings and to tell a story that can give sense to the modern legacyes.

Narrative can be, like in the Hirst work, the design device that describes the capacity for resistance of art, as of all that is appreciable through the senses (architecture, fashion, music), the digital revolution of shared information, or in other terms, to the evolution of the concept of author, of copy, of heritage, of form ...

The project with Orazio Carpenzano for the public space of the Corso di Lanciano (Ch) in Abruzzo works on these themes. I propose it not as a role model, but as a figure to accompany these notes on the resistance of the idea of architecture at the time. As a possibility for the design action at a time when it seems that architecture is no longer needed. Lanciano is the city that perhaps best describes the idea of living in Abruzzo, which has always renewed the ancient traditions sedimented in popular culture in new opportunities for conscious development. In the middle territory between the Maiella and the sea, Lanciano is the center of reference for the agricultural production of Valle del Sangro.

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From being a place for the exchange and for the fair on the cattle track, to being the capital of craftsmanship and then of the industrialization of the South (Fiat and Honda), to being an agriculture, eco-tourism and agritourism center, Lanciano is able to continually redesign the strategic role of its territory.

The project of the public space of Corso Trento e Trieste consists in the redevelopment of the urban axis of access to the ancient part of the city, the "butterfly" of bricks defined by the deposits of the Roman and medieval routes, from Piazza Plebiscito to the former Galoppatoio park. It is the most important commercial street of the city, its complete redefinition as a pedestrian area, but also as a place for fairs, markets and for large popular, cultural and religious events. The idea is to have a project that can be able to adapt depending on the different occasions and to have a strong integration of the fruition arrangements of the Course. The project foresees the prevalent pedestrian traffic with possible access for the cars in times and modalities defined time to time, absolute prohibition of parking and the involvement of adjacent interdependent areas for the accessibility of residents.

The project is that of a large carpet, or a thousand-meter long lace laying on the Corso's surface. The iconic reference is the image of the Presentosa, the golden star made of plaques and filigree that in the women's tradition of Abruzzo the mother of the groom gives to the “stranger” bride who so also symbolically becomes woman of Abruzzo. The texture that draws the jewel, repeated and dilated, defines the entire urban axis, writing on the ground the story of the city, its pride and the sense of belonging of the people who live there.

LA PRESTENTOSA

Regeneration project of Corso Trento e Trieste, Lanciano (Chieti)

scientific coordination and project idea

Orazio Carpenzano |Mosè Ricci

design group

consultant

Laboratorio ArCO (Università La Sapienza di Roma | Comune di Lanciano

Text and images optimization

Maura Mantelli

MOSÈ RICCI. Full Professor of Architectural Design and of Urbanism at the University of Trento. Emeritus of Italian Republic for Art and Culture since 2003. Fulbright Recipient in 1996-1997 he was Visiting Scholar at GSD, Harvard University, USA, (1996-97), Visiting Professor of Sustainable Urbanism at Universitad Moderna de Lisboa (2006-2007), at Technische Universitat of Munich (2008-2009), at IAAC, Barcelona, (2015) and of Architectural design At MAUD (University of Patras) Athens (2018). Editor of BABEL series of books he is author of several books and writings that have been internationally published. His projects have got several prizes in international architecture competitions and have been exhibited in the Biennale of Venice in 1996 and in 2012. His Ghella Offices Building in Rome won the European Solar Prize in 2015. In 2016-2018 he has been member of the national commission for the scientific eligibility of full and associate professors, in 2017 membrer of the International Jury of the XX Biennale of Arquitectura y Urbanismo de Chile and in 2018 of the scientific committee and Jury of the “Emerging Resilience” Montenegro Pavillion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.