Paolo Portoghesi, Islamic Cultural Centre, Rome (1974). Portoghesi is interesting – his best details approach Scarpa, and the intensity of his relationship to Borromini is clear; but some of his work is clunky and kitschy. The mosque of his Islamic Cultural Centre is amazing – sinuous and dense. But then he’s also responsible for this. Ignore that and look at these:
In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern one does not like to stir.”
Walter Benjamin (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p.216. [ emphasis mine ]
This weekend house consists of a large living room capable of accommodating two automobiles; small bedrooms in which the bed completely fills the floor; a study that doubles as a studio; two enclosed gardens; bathroom; and external garage. The layout plan involved disposing the component elements on a basic 3×3 meter grid. Since all surfaces are painted black, the interior is a somewhat dark box. However, daylight entering from the large and small enclosed gardens creates a varying mixture of light and dark areas.
Gained by a ladder, a small loft is provided above the living room, which is used for book storage and a reading place. A base of pebbles is placed at the bottom of the ladder, whose sounds when people are going up and down it make this little collection of pebbles something of an interior sound effect system. None of the walls are pierced by sizable openings, with lines of sight running to the exterior only in the vertical direction. Which is not to say, however, that this is a sealed space. It would be much more accurate to describe it as an open space. A ‘dark box’ it may appear, but with its innumerable holes, it is much more of a ‘bird cage’.
Weekend House: Dark Box and Bird Cage (1993), Hiroshi Nakao, Masahiko Inoue, and Hiroko Serizawa. Text and images from Japan Architect 9, Spring 1993, pp. 228-29.
A paper by Adam Sharr in the current issue of Architectural Theory Review is accompanied by this fascinating series of drawings by Luke Bray and Rob Stevens. The drawings are sober CAD plans of a shared domicile, a student flat; but instead of recording only the architectural matter traditionally recorded in such drawings, Bray and Stevens meticulously document all the mobile paraphenalia and detritus of everyday life. The drawings reveal cups, hair-straighteners, computer mice, tennis rackets, desk lamps, stereos, unmade beds, backpacks, papers, rubbish bins, wires, and photos on the wall. Each drawing exists in two states: walls-on and walls-off. In the walls-off state, the presence of the building is only intimated by the internal arrangement of of its contents.
Operation at 1:1 scale, accurate control over non-orthogonal lines, and the layering of information that can be turned on and off, are such basic features of drawing by computer that they may go unnoticed: “While many claims are made for digital representation and its novel possibilities, these less flashy properties seem among the most powerful innovations of CAD drafting, certainly where it comes to teasing-out lessons of inhabitation.” Sharr indicates, contra Pérez-Gomez and Frascari, who argue that CAD “removes the bodily experience of drawing and impoverishes the range of expression available”, that these capabilites provide new opportunities for expressing, revealing, and critiquing architecture.
Sharr writes of the role of drawing in marking out the distinction between the professional action of architects, and the unprofessional spatial ordering that all humans participate in. Methods of drawing are complicit in the division between expert and layperson. Who with architectural training hasn’t spent time trying to help a non-expert read a set of plans that seem plainly obvious?
There is a tension at the heart of this discussion: are the drawings in question just assimilating yet more territory for the professional architect – as if to say that even your hair-straighteners and socks are now a matter of expert attention? “Are the measured drawings of Bray and Stevens, then, doomed to perpetuate the alienations of orthographic drafting? Following Lefebvre and Till, are the drawings inevitable implicated – simply by their conventions – in a conspiracy of subjugation?”
[ I just remembered reading about a piece of archaeological research in which archaeologists performed a survey of a London flat which was still occupied. The point, I believe, was to make visible how the techniques of archaeological analysis skewed or might lead to misinterpretations of sites of inhabitation. I’ll see if I can find it…]
Diffusive Architectures 