Essay on Public space
Public spaceThis essay was published in the book Labics – Structures
Published by Park Books, buy the book here.
1. Architecture, city, and the idea of community
The conspicuous growth of cities that is incrementally affecting many of earth’s metropolises is giving renewed actuality to the logic of the greater number;1 this is the logic that provides effective responses to what would appear to be solely quantitative needs, without considering the qualitative consequences of the response itself, or rather the quality of the urban space that this response triggers. This attitude, clearly Modernist in derivation, is based on a principle according to which the logics of the city and those of architecture are completely autonomous and split off from each other: the logics of the city can be summed up in the orthodoxy of the CIAM—efficiency, functionality, economy, and hygiene;2 whereas the logics of architecture relate to an object in its own right, located on a blank sheet of paper—architecture on a tabula rasa, devoid of context, without a before or an after. After all, we know, that for the Modern Movement, the Other in architecture, was not the city but nature.
This split between architecture and city—along with other factors outwith our discipline and largely financial in nature—is one of the causes of a dual transformation. On one hand, architecture—partly serving a technical role at the service of the market, and partly serving a decorative role at the service of image—seems increasingly incapable of making a genuine contribution to the quality of the urban space. On the other hand, cities built to be impeccably efficient turn out to be soulless, incapable of sparking affection through an inability to generate urban intensity and identity; in other words, a sense of belonging.3
This process began many years ago; as long ago as 1973, Manfredo Tafuri prophesied what would come to pass: “Having reached an irrefutable impasse, architectural ideology gives up its role as a stimulus to the city and to the structures of production and hides behind a rediscovered disciplinary autonomy or behind neurotic self-destructive behaviors.”4
This is why, in order to return to the subject of the quality of urban space, we believe it is important to revisit the relationship between architecture and city. This seems the only possible way architecture can start to make again a concrete contribution to the quality of the built environment. Discussing the relationship between architecture and city is an indirect way of tackling the role of architecture in giving shape to an idea of community.
In order to play a part in collectivity, rather than being purely super-structural and often sublimely useless, architecture must continue to seek its raison d’être, its deepest meaning, and its founding principles in the city, in its structures and in its history. We cannot simply think of architecture as an object autonomous from the urban fabric; equally we cannot think about the city simply as a machine to be organized, with its rules and functions, like a summation of independent objects or systems. As Aldo Rossi said: “Architecture and the city are interdependent parts of the same system: The Architecture builds the city which is in turn an artifact, a work of Architecture.”5
We need to start thinking again of the city as a single great building, a unitary organism capable of keeping together empty and built space, inside and outside; and together start conceiving architecture as more than an object, more than a spectacular sculptural idea, in favor of architecture that is capable of channeling the principles of urban thinking. It is a shift of meaning that involves the way we conceive architecture, the relationship between architecture and city, and naturally the idea of city itself.
This brings to mind Aldo van Eyck, who, during a period in history rather like the one we are currently living through in terms of urbanization, albeit on a much smaller scale, wrote: “Make a bunch of places of each houses and every city: make of each house a small city and of each city a large house.”6 In other words, we should start thinking of the house as a small city again, and of the city as a large house, because only by operating this shift—or superposition—in meaning can we include in the project the public dimension, the presence of a community, from the small family community to the collectivity in which we all live7. It is this concept of community that makes architecture really public, as does the concept of city itself, a collective product and human invention par excellence.8
The relationship between architecture and city in this sense is a metaphor for the ideal relationship between individual and community—no longer separate and often opposing entities, each defending their own positions, but both parts of a wider, common system.
Trajan’s Market
(Apollodoro di Damasco, 200 AD)
Trajan’s Market was described by Aldo Rossi as an incomparable urban artifact, like the Forum in Rome, the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, and the Mosque in Cordoba. These buildings, and many others, are urban artifacts not only because they actively contribute to the building of the city but also because each one is the upshot of the civil and political legacy of their time.
Trajan’s Market (Plan), Rome, Italy, 100–110 AD
However, Trajan’s Market is just such an artifact because it constitutes a genuine typological and material exception in the fabric of the city. What is Trajan’s Market? A large building or a collection of buildings? An urban complex or a single monument? Trajan’s Market is all of this because it is first and foremost an actual urban infrastructure: structurally because it was designed to be the substructure of the Quirinale Hill (Trajan’s Forum was famously carved out of the ridge between it and the Campidoglio) and spatially because it is halfway between the monumental scale of the Forum and the smaller scale of the Suburra. Lastly it is an infrastructure because it provides a connection to the scale of the city. Trajan’s Market was designed to be traversed in several different directions and passages, and each is an experience in itself. It can be traversed at city level, along Via Biberatica, formerly a paved public street, and a sort of prodrome of the urban passages and galleries; it can also be crossed vertically, however, like an ideal progression through an urban section.9
Descending from the upper Great Hall level to the parterre of Trajan’s Forum is a unique spatial experience; light and shade, compressed and expanded spaces, streets and galleries follow on from each other uninterruptedly, seamlessly inverting the notion of inside and outside. In this sense, Trajan’s Market is not a finished building, with a clear, defined interior, like the Pantheon and the Caracalla Baths, but an open, porous, traversable structure, made up of many different spaces, alleyways, interconnections, terraces, and prospects. This is why the ultimate meaning of Trajan’s complex has far exceeded its original program, the use for which it was intended (although there still does not seem to be a critical consensus regarding its intended use).
Crossing the complex, one feels that in the genesis of the project, in the mind of its architect Apollodorus of Damascus, its function may have been, if not an almost casual purpose, a completely secondary factor; certainly, secondary to its being built first and foremost as a physical and spatial structure, required to give shape to and connect a branch of the city. Its typological uniqueness doesn’t find its raison d’être or its uniqueness in the activities that it hosts, but in being an urban device, a border building.
2. The building-city
Let us use the term building-city to refer to a particular type of building, a building conceived and designed as an urban structure, a building capable of transcending its singular dimension to become something different: a micro-city. In actual fact, well before Van Eyck, it was Leon Battista Alberti, in De re aedificatoria, who affirmed its underlying concept: “For if a city, according to the opinion of philosophers, be no more than a great house, and, on the other hand, a house be a little city; why may it not be said, that the limbs of that house are so many little houses.”10 Architecture is then conceived as a system, therefore, just as a city is a system, a structure organized into parts, scalar in size yet all coherent parts of the system itself.
Palace Complex, Knossos (Plan), Crete, Greece, 2000 BC
While the building-city is not a typology in the true sense of the word—unlike towers or courtyard houses or terraced houses—it is still a model, one might call it an architectural type that resurfaces throughout the history of architecture, in different eras, forms, and locations, while preserving strong elements of continuity, elements that are perhaps inherent in the type itself.
Diocletian’s Palace (Plan) and Map of Split, Croatia in 1912
The earliest building-cities were expressions of a form of power. Take for example Knossos Palace in Crete, the Topkapi in Istanbul, the Alhambra in Granada or, closer to us, the Ducal Palace in Urbino—“Duke Federico built a palace, which many believe to be the most beautiful palace in all of Italy; and he furnished it so well and so appropriately that it seemed more city than a mere palace”11—or Diocletian’s Palace in Split, built along the lines of a castrum.
The concept underlying all these buildings, perhaps unconscious in some cases but consistent nonetheless, was that of a building as a world in miniature; a desire to physically translate that world into a city. Thus, the city was the world; take the sequence of courtyards at the Topkapi Palace, the labyrinth at the Palace of Knossos, the spatial complexity of the Alhambra, and then cities such as Fatehpur Sikri and Persepolis, which are really no more than great imperial houses.
Palazzo Ducale (Axonometric View), Urbino, Italy, 1455–1475
Just as a project for a city is first and foremost a project of the relations between buildings, which in turns means a project of the empty space between them, in the building-city the project is also the result of the system of relations between its components. It is a different way of conceptualizing architecture, no longer as a larger or smaller object, but as a structured assemblage of parts: just as an urban structure that has no point or meaning without a population to inhabit it.
All these palaces, even those built for a single individual, have a powerful public vocation—they were not conceived and designed simply to communicate role and power—which a castle perched on a mountain could do equally and perfectly well—but also, and perhaps especially, to welcome, entertain, and show off. At their heart, and at the heart of any building-city, there is always an empty space, be it a courtyard, a court, a garden, a street, or a square, and along with it an orderly differentiation between the public and private dimensions of the activities that take place in it. Take the courtyards at Topkapi, some of which are totally private, while others were originally designed to be open spaces for the citizens. The concept of the building-city is therefore an architectural structure that absorbs the urban logics into itself and therefore, also its inherent public and collective dimension.
Palace Complex (Plan), Fatehpur Sikri, Uttar Pradesh, India, 1569–1574
This public dimension is not meant in the literal sense of public property, but in the physical sense of its public use and especially in the symbolic, and therefore public, representation of the community that inhabits it; whether this is made up of courtiers, children, workers, or students, at the heart of any project for a building-city there is always a space for the life of a community. Thus, becoming part of the urban realm, the building-city enters into a relationship with the community, in the broadest sense of the word, based on the direct or indirect recognition of three fundamental relationships: with the people, with the city, and also with the history. The building-city becomes part of the ebb and flow of history and of the city itself, looking to the past for the matrices of its own construction, such as the castrum for Diocletian’s Palace, the medina for the Alhambra, and the fabrics of the Dogon villages, as explored in the design research by the Dutch Team X in the twentieth century.
Horizontal Housing Unit
Adalberto Libera, Rome, 1951–1954
Adalberto Libera, Unità di Abitazione Orizzontale, Rome, Italy, 1950–1954
The Horizontal Housing Unit, designed and built in Rome by Adalberto Libera12 as part of the INA-Casa plan for the Tuscolano district between 1950 and 1954, was conceived as a house for the people. Completely enclosed and apparently compact, exactly like a palace, the Unit however was not conceived as a unitary organism, but exactly like a small city. Some 1,000 inhabitants live in 200 habitations, mostly in single-family patio houses, and in another 32 habitations inside a balcony type building.
On one hand the Unit was a clear and swift response by Libera to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, which was completed in 1952; on the other, it offered an alternative way of tackling the post-war housing issue. Libera was against the residential building as a serial construction, a container of anonymous habitations sometimes likened to the Le Corbusier “chests of drawers.”
Adalberto Libera, Unità di Abitazione Orizzontale (Plan), Rome, Italy, 1950–1954
His aim was to create housing that was a balance of both the individual and social dimensions. The recognizability of the individual homes, thanks to the sophisticated and slightly varied design of the roofs, responded to the need for an individual dimension, while the urban fabric was designed to respond to the need for a social dimension. For an architect with such a powerful social conscience, the roof gardens and internal road of the Unitè d’Habitation were not enough. He strenuously strove for the collective dimension of the city.
In 1951 Libera went to Morocco and sent a postcard to Arnaldo Foschini from Casablanca, with a view from the top of the Medina on the front, and a jokey message on the back: “Here’s the INA-CASBA.” His project for the Horizontal Unit, on which he embarked immediately afterwards, basically constitutes a reflection on the theme of the typical public/private, open/closed, dispersed/compact, interdependent spaces of the casbah, but also on the Mediterranean city more generally, on its scale, structure, and relationship among solids and voids. At the conference at the Accademia di S. Luca, held on his return from Morocco, Libera said: “Five hours of flight: the memory of the limit attempted by Le Corbusier superimposes itself on the vision of Casablanca from above, with its medina, that history and climate have created with all the medinas and the casbahs in north Africa. There, in Marseille, the block unit develops in height; here, the building unit develops in surface.”13
Village in the Rheris Valley, Er Rachidia Region, High Atlas Mountains, Morocco (31° 28' N, 4° 13' W)
Libera’s patio houses respond to a nuclear logic according to which the room, the courtyard itself, the house, and the entire district are interdependent,14 just like a casbah; but unlike them they follow a clear geometrical logic, based on a repetitive pattern. In this sense, Libera was ahead of Team X’s research, which identified the casbah as one of the matrices for their research into structural composition. In 1962, on the subject of casbahs, Van Eyck wrote in the magazine Forum:
“… It is now possible to invent dwelling types, which do not lose their specific identity when multiplied, but, on the contrary, actually acquire extended identity and varied meaning once they are configured into a significant group […] Each individual dwelling possesses the potential to develop, by means of configurative multiplication, into a group—subcluster—in which the identity of each dwelling is not only maintained but extended in a qualitative dimension …”15
Like the mat building,16 one of Team X’s most favored research subjects, the entire project for Libera’s Horizontal Unit was held together by the design for empty space. For Libera, this meant three levels of social relations: the private level of the family nucleus, identified as the patio belonging to each habitation, the open air room, which the designer regarded as the first room of the house. Then the space reserved for social interaction, defined by the little road widenings, the niches, the benches to encourage pausing, dotted along the small streets between the residences; and lastly that of collectivity, played out in the large central space of the complex.
Libera saw the Horizontal Housing Unit primarily as a model for social cohesion, and only then as a housing model.
Orphanage
Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam, 1955–1960
Aldo van Eyck, Orphanage, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1960
In Aldo van Eyck’s project for the Orphanage, the building–home–city relationship appears to be the upshot of a precise and, in some senses, necessary choice. The orphanage had to be able to house 125 children who would live there for most of their youth. With this in mind, Van Eyck did not build a protective and domestic environment, but the exact opposite. His project for the Orphanage is designed to say that it is not by defining an enclosed and protected space that a feeling of security can be transmitted to children in need, but quite the contrary, that a feeling of security can be achieved through the freedom of an open and continuous space because it is only there that the presence of a community can make itself felt. Van Eyck therefore opposed to abandonment and solitude the open city space rather than the reassuring environment of a traditional home.
Aldo van Eyck, Orphanage (Aerial View), Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1960
This is where the value of his project and also his humanity and idealism reside. The house is conceived like a city, and this city is conceived as a place for children, a labyrinth of little territories, intimate and private “like a constellation of little stars.”
Furthermore, no discussion about the Orphanage project can fail to mention the 700 or more playgrounds, designed and built between 1947 and 1978, with which Van Eyck managed to bring the streets of Amsterdam back to life, rehabilitating a city shattered by the ravages of war.17 Van Eyck’s envisioned playgrounds as the smallest possible unit of urbanity, an instrument for activating the city; modular, combinable, non-hierarchical, and repeatable. Van Eyck’s playgrounds breathe life into the city as backdrops for people’s lives. It was this backdrop that Van Eyck actually built in his project for the Orphanage, a backdrop that does not cancel out the complexities of life, but rather accepts them.
Piet Blom, “Noah’s Ark,” Project for Urbanization of the Netherlands, 1962
In the Orphanage we find that “unity in diversity, diversity in unity” characteristic of Van Eyck’s work. Apparently discordant concepts—open/closed, simple/complicated, interior/exterior, individual/collective, central/decentralized—all become part of a system within a structure that unifies, gives shape to the space and to the way in which it is used. The eight spatial units dedicated to education, in turn defined non-hierarchically by aggregating the smallest programmatic units, and interconnected by streets and squares, create a fabric with continual and multiple spatiality, within which collective spaces and informal spaces, open spaces and enclosed spaces, exteriors and interiors follow on from each other. The structure of the public space, built with the same materials as the exterior so as to trigger the spontaneous behavior typical of open spaces, is, as it is in cities, a space for interpretation, a space for invention.
The result is a space that is all at once both introvert and extrovert: the individual spatial units are defined by their singularity, but equally there is a powerful and clear sense of being part of a system, a bigger whole. Individual and collectivity are no longer opposite entities. If collective is understood as shared and individual as personal, the Orphanage project systematizes and harmonizes the desire for freedom and the need to belong.
The Collegio del Colle
Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino 1962–1965
Giancarlo De Carlo, Collegio del Colle, Urbino, Italy, 1962–1965
Giancarlo De Carlo endeavors firstly to establish a link with history. The Collegio del Colle clearly references the urban fabric of Italy’s historic city centers, not just in terms of the shape of their structure, which is reticulated and irregular, but especially regarding its ability to dialogue with its context. Collegio del Colle is first and foremost an idea, a concept; it is not a geometrically atopic structure, like many coeval European examples18; it is an architecture capable of deforming, of adapting, of dialoguing, without sacrificing rigor or clarity, just like the historic city centers that conform to the territory, include it, welcome it in. In this way the Collegio del Colle connects not only with history and with the community, but especially with the territory, in the broadest and most comprehensive meaning of the word, adopting not just the tangible data but also the intangible. De Carlo’s project evidences that “singular yet universal relationship that exists between a particular local situation and the buildings that are in that place,”19 in other words, to borrow another of Aldo Rossi’s words, the locus.
Giancarlo de Carlo, Collegio del Colle, Urbino, Italy, 1962–1965
While for Adalberto Libera the minimal spatial unit was the room and then the patio house, and for Aldo van Eyck it was the educational unit, Giancarlo De Carlo had to aggregate 150 individual student cells in Urbino. By gently manipulating the geometry of the minimal spatial unit—from rectangular to slightly trapezoidal—De Carlo managed to overcome the rigidity of the pattern and thus enable the aggregation of the cells to make continual exceptions, to curve, adapt, and conform to the shape of the territory. The system of connections, which makes up the real structure of the project, does not lose clarity but acquires value, diversity, and variety.
The greatest strength of the system of connections at the Collegio del Colle is the fact that it is an external, open, urban system; it unquestionably dialogues with the individual units and with the private/public dimension of the Collegio but also, and especially, with the landscape. The connections are often oversized and evolve into squares, terraces, views, widenings, and sometimes actual streets; structures that mediate between public and private, meeting places, stopping places, which set up a relationship with the surroundings, made up of discoveries, views, and visuals.
Giancarlo de Carlo, Collegio del Colle (Structural Plan), Urbino, Italy, 1962–1965
The Collegio del Colle is a perceptual structure as well as a physical one. The landscape completely infiltrates the project and its system of empty spaces, becoming its protagonist, as it does in several Italian cities, such as Pienza and San Gimignano.
3. Architecture for the city
While the building-city absorbs the urban logics and therefore its public dimension within itself, this section will deal with a more structured relationship between architecture and city, a relationship that gives shape to both simultaneously.
We are talking of a two-way relationship: on one hand, it is the project for the city that harnesses the architecture, absorbing it into the urban continuum and its public space, along with the streets, the squares, and the urban fabric in its entirety—think of the urban interiors in Giambattista Nolli’s (1748) plan of Rome—and on the other there is an architecture that wants to build the city fabric and is therefore not attempting to be an exception, but a part of its history, tangible and intangible, constantly endeavoring to give shape to an idea of the city.
Giovanni Battista Nolli, Map of Rome, 1748
In the history of pre-modern architecture, Italian in particular, architecture and urban fabric have always interacted. The porticoes, the loggias, the staircases of palazzi and churches, the galleries, the passages, and the urban courtyards are some of the best-known and most common mediation components between architecture and city. Take, for instance, the Rialto Market or the system of porticoes in Bologna, the Piazza della Signoria in Gubbio—or, on a smaller scale, the little stone benches around S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato—to get an idea of how normal it once was for architecture to take on the urban public dimension.
These are examples of architecture—although the list could be a good deal longer—that does not just form part of the urbs, meaning the tangible mass of buildings and infrastructure, but which fully expresses a concept of civitas, the real intangible and symbolic infrastructure of the city. Without the concept of civitas cities cannot exist. Because it is the concept of civitas that gives shape to the urban space, which gives it its meaning and its symbolic value as an expression of community. It is only through the concept of civitas that cities can be considered as and become unitary organisms, expressions of a shared vision, a continuum in which empty and built space are part of the same system or structure, in which streets, squares, and all the open spaces establish a complementary and necessary relationship with the built environment, in which the buildings are conceived and built not as single entities but always, and generously, as part of a wider system. In this sense, the examples mentioned are architectures that go beyond their programmatic or functional value to make a generous contribution to the city; they are buildings intended to be at the service not just of their more direct users but also to be lived, in different ways, by the entire community, and therefore designed to be a part of the urban landscape, to blend with the shared public space. They are architecture that belongs to the city and thus have a part to play in shaping the civitas, capable of equilibrating and balancing the pragmatism of the urbs and its economic laws.
With hindsight, the pre-modern city makes the relationship between figure and background of modern and contemporary cities seem ancient and dated, paradoxically overtaken by a more hybrid, more nuanced situation.
Architecture conceived as a component of the urban landscape overcomes the dichotomy between buildings and cities that abounded in and marked twentieth-century debate and still informs many cities, or parts of cities, built with only the logics of the urbs in mind.
Thinking of architecture and the city from the perspective of civitas would appear to be a necessary condition. Nothing seems more important these days than taking care of the public dimension of the city, in order to build a sense of communality and accept the diversities that we must and always will have to tackle of necessity.
Palazzo della Ragione in Padua
Giovanni degli Eremitani, 1306–1309
Palazzo della Ragione (Plan), Padua, Italy, 1218–1309
In the third of his four books, Palladio had this to say about the Palazzo della Ragione: “Si come gli Antichi fecero le lor Basiliche, acciò che ‘l verno, e la state gl’huomini havessero ove raunarsi à trattar commodamente le lor cause, & i lor negocij: cosi à tempi nostri in ciascuna città d’Italia, e fuori si fanno alcune Sale publiche; le quali si possono chiamar meritamente Basiliche: percioche lor presso è l’habitatione del supremo magistrato, […] & anco perche vi stanno i giudici a render ragione al popolo. (…) Di queste Sale Moderne una notabilisima n’è in Padova (…) nella quale ogni giorno si raunano i gentil’huomini, e serve loro per una piazza coperta.”20
In the same spirit as the Roman basilica mentioned by Palladio, the Palazzo della Ragione was built for civic purposes. Following the Peace of Constance in 1183, which sanctioned the independence of the Italian municipalities, there was a need to realize new buildings—including Palladio’s Palazzo della Ragione in Vicenza—that were not merely symbols of the new organization of the territory but, with a duty to host the new government and legal bodies, were symbols of both the freedom and the autonomy of the municipality. The Palazzo della Ragione was thus conceived as a landmark for citizens and institutions, and also as a physical place in which they could take an active part in civic activities.
Unlike the Roman basilicas, usually in the background behind the peristyle of the Forum, the basilicas of the municipal era, which largely carried out a dual, physical and symbolic role, frequently had a powerful architectural identity. In its new role as the center of the city, the Palazzo della Ragione effectively filled the vacuum left by the Forum. Therefore, just like the Roman Forum, the Palazzo della Ragione was not conceived or built as a single entity, closed in on itself and with a purely representative role, but as a central element of a larger system, a comprehensive expression of civitas. This is why the portico, as Palladio always tells us, unlike the forum basilicas, is on the outside—“… oltre acciò, quelle haueano i portichi nella parte di dentro [ …] e queste per lo contrario, ò non hanno portichi, ò li hanno nella parte di fuori, sopra la piazza”21—and constitutes the intermediary element between the city and the building, while also representing a place for exchange, the market space.
Situated right in the middle of the system of open spaces, the Palazzo della Ragione immediately became an integral part of the trade system of the city squares, becoming its spatial and functional linchpin, a covered square. Sellers of fabrics and furs installed themselves beneath the Great Hall, while the wrought iron and wine sellers established themselves at the foot of the steps, underneath the arcades, hence the name of the respective staircases. Like the Rialto Market, the edifice allowed the city into its spaces, creating real functional and morphological continuity with the public space.
The Palazzo della Ragione is not just part of the collective memory as a civic monument and symbol of the city of Vicenza; it is also an integral part of the daily lives of its citizens and of the fabric of the open spaces in which life takes place. This is thanks to its history, to the reasons behind its creation, and to the civic spirit that it embodies.
Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Architect as res publica
For an architect, or for the universe of architecture and urbanism, there’s no privacy, nothing private. Everything is public. Private architecture doesn’t exist or private urbanism. Privacy we only have in our minds. If you engender a poem, your first concern is to publish it, to make it public. Or else nobody would know that you were a poet, nothing would be done. Indeed, our life is regulated, is configured by the public dimension of our existence. You couldn’t be private even if you wanted to be.22
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Butantã Houses, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1964–1966
Architecture for Paulo Mendes da Rocha is always res publica; even residences, theoretically the most private typology of all. Just think, amongst others, of his Butantã Houses, which he built for himself and for his sister in Sao Paulo in 1964: suspended, lifted above the ground, they are all characterized by the prevalence of common spaces, always large and shared, in visual and spatial continuity with the exterior. The truly private space is confined, defined, almost incidental within the domestic space.
In this sense, Mendes da Rocha thought of the house not as a territory in which to seek refuge, but as the prime place for socializing. Making the domestic space public is, above and beyond, an architectural choice and at the same time a critical thinking that both lays bare and challenges the bourgeois conception of the home; a process reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread’s plaster casts of domestic spaces and everyday objects, which give shape to and expose the intimacy of human beings. For Mendes da Rocha even the domestic space is an expression of architecture as a tool for triggering people’s demand for sharing and participation.
This puts us in mind of the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who identified three conditions of existence in her book The Human Condition: work, which ensures survival; production, which generates the concrete world in which we live; and public space, which is the physical environment in which people interact through discussion, the main consequence of which is action.23 It is in this political sense that, for Mendes da Rocha, a public space meant a place in which what Hannah Arendt called the vita activa took place; the place for encounter and clash, in which a common feeling, and thus collective action, takes shape: “We are in the habit of making spaces. A space is built with active life. That is where the architecture springs up.”24
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Brazilian Pavilion at the Osaka Expo (Elevation), Osaka, Japan, 1970
Mendes da Rocha always saw architectural projects as an opportunity to create social spaces, in an ideal continuity with the urban, public, and collective dimension; suspending houses above the ground carries the same meaning of not occupying, not taking over, allowing them somehow to be a part of the shared dimension of the city. This is why roofs played such an important part in his work, as a spatial archetype, an element capable of defining a space while equally ensuring continuity with the public space. It is a lesson learnt from his master, Villanova Artigas, which Mendes da Rocha applied from his design for the Brazilian pavilion at the Osaka Expo—of which he said: “The roof is a fundamental architectural art, indispensible, whether it’s a Bernini cupola or a country shed. I therefore thought of a primeval covering, emblematic”25—to his project for the Museu Brasileiro da Escultura (MuBE) where he took the radical decision to break the mold of the classical building in favor of a design for a large roof and an empty space.
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Brazilian Pavilion at the Osaka Expo, Japan, 1970
In his design for MuBe, Mendes da Rocha obliterated the building completely, the figure, in favor of the background, the background absorbing the figure and thus itself becoming the figure. His project for MuBe involved in fact the entire plot, transforming it into a real urban space, a garden, a piazza, a shady resting place, and, as required in the program, an outdoor space for open-air exhibitions. The museum itself, semihypogean, is reached after a journey of discovery. The free span of the striking 60-meter beam acts as a landmark that betrays the presence of the museum within the city, but it is also and especially a symbolic object: “Two issues coexist in the project: the architectural—urbanistic issue and the landscape-technological one: the great beam has an undoubted symbolic value, the construction is a codex. It has a symbolic value because it affirms the site, it underscores its existence by determining it; it is a paean to technology, but the concrete stones show that it is in reality a very simple beam, the viaducts have greater light. With sixty meters of free space, it is as if we were affirming that anything is possible, demonstrating the possibilities of technology.”26 That beam lends an almost monumental scale to the project, while the Burle Marx garden and the design of the open space define the human scale. It is the urban dimension that prevails in the MuBE—it is a space to be lived in, a space for the citizens.
MuBE designs a landscape.
Lina Bo Bardi
Architecture as urban incubator
The MASP Sao Paulo Museum of Art, which opened in 1968, before being a museum, is an urban device. As one walks along the Avenida Paulista, the building appears like a gap in the lengthy sequence of skyscrapers, a break that obliges one to stop.
Lina Bo Bardi, Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1968
Whatever the real reasons behind the design choices—in other words whether Lina Bo Bardi was constrained by local legislation or whether this was an architectural statement of her own—it scarcely matters. Certainly, her previous project for the Museum on the Edge of the Ocean in 1951 would suggest that the MASP project was a deliberate choice,27 part of a research path and perhaps also to some degree the realization of Pietro Maria Bardi’s idea of an anti-museum: “It seems to me that in Brazil one realizes that bold ideas are not necessarily utopian and that, on the contrary, utopias are never bold.”28
Most important to us is that MASP has generated a new place, a place imbued with identity. Within such a dense, continual urban reality, often as uniform as the now-gigantic city of Sao Paulo, MASP still remains one of its few recognizable points, managing to generate a space of rare intensity with relatively little. This is the capacity of the primary elements, of true monuments. This is fundamentally also true of the SESC Pompeia complex—also by Lina Bo Bardi, completed in Sao Paulo in 1982; what is it if not an urban structure, a space for the community, a generous place conceived for other people? What are the concrete walkways linking the two new buildings if not basically a network of paths, of suspended streets? What are the great warehouses if not great squares?
After all, both MASP and SESC Pompeia make up two urban centers, each in its own way. And while SESC already held a hint of its vocation, MASP assumed it through a few, yet fundamental actions. Who knows whether by chance or thanks to an unconscious memory—Lina Bo Bardi graduated and trained in Italy—these are actions typical of a certain way of relating architecture and the city in the Italian tradition: lifting up, stratifying, hybridizing.
Lina Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1977–1986
MASP rises above the ground—just as the Rialto Market rises up above the ground in Venice—leaving the underlying space empty, a piazza, a meeting place that belongs to the city of Sao Paulo and its community, a place of collective identity. But that’s not all. In turn, the new piazza, a terrace looking out over the city, forms the roof over the educational spaces, the auditorium, and all those programs that rotate around the exhibition space, conceived by Lina Bo Bardi as a hall civica open to the city, in continuity with the urban spaces. Exactly like the Piazza Grande in Gubbio, MASP generates through the eye of the visitor a visual relationship with the city and the landscape.
Both at MASP and at SESC Pompeia, the architecture dialogues with the city, becoming the city itself.
Maria Claudia Clemente
The subject of the greater number was a recurring theme during the massive post-war reconstruction; in 1964 Aldo van Eyck described it as “l’habitat pour le plus grand nombre.” Giancarlo de Carlo also used The Greater Number as the title for the XIV Triennale di Milano in 1968.
These principles are set out in the 1933 Athens Charter, a Manifesto for Urban Planning, drawn up during the fourth CIAM conference, the theme of which was “The Functional City.”
In this regard, the recent book by Richard Sennet, Building and Dwellings: Ethics for the City, London: Allen Lane, 2018, would appear to be pertinent.
Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1973.
Aldo Rossi, L’Architettura della Città, Milan: CittàStudi, 1987.
Aldo van Eyck, “Steps Toward a Configurative Discipline”, in Forum, August 1962.
“We are not only breathing in, nor are we exclusively breathing out. This is why it would be so beneficial if the relation of interior space and exterior space, between individual and common space inside and outside, between the open and the closed (directed towards the inside and outside) could be the built mirror of human nature, so that man can identify with it. These are formal realities because they are mental realities. Moreover, they are not polar but ambivalent reali-
ties. The dwelling and its extension into the exterior, the city and its extension into the interior, that’s what we have to achieve.” Aldo van Eyck, Over Binnen—En Buitenruimte, Forum 11, no. 5 (1956), p. 133.
As the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss wrote “The city may even be rated higher since it stands at the point where nature and artifice meet. A city is a congestion of animals whose biological history is enclosed within its boundaries, and yet every conscious and rational act on the part of these creatures helps to shape the city’s eventual character. By its form as by the manner of its birth, the city has elements at once of biological procreation, organizations, evolutions, and esthetic creation. It is both a natural object and a thing to be culti-
vated; individual and group; something lived and something dreamed. It is the human invention par excellence,” in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955.
Trajan’s Market now contains the Museo dei Fori Imperiali, opened in 2007.
Leon Battista Alberti, The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti in Ten Books, Chap. IX p. 62, London: Edward Owen, 1755.
Baldassarre Castiglione, “Il Cortegiano,” in A Renaissance Architecture of Power: Princely Palaces in the Italian Quattrocento, Silvio Beltramo, Flavia Cantatore, Marco Folin, eds., Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016, p. 241.
Adalberto Libera was in charge of the central technical office of INA-Casa from 1949 to 1952; his tasks included designing various typological models and publishing manuals for the many architects involved in reconstruction schemes. One of his models formed the basis for the of the Horizontal Unit project in Rome.
Francesco Garofalo, Luca Veresani, eds., Adalberto Libera, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1989, p. 149; English version from “Adalberto Libera’s Mediterranean Climate; From a Problem of Style to a Category of Dwelling,” pp. 5–6. (Archnet.org, accessed 06.07.2018.)
“The latter [sticking to the nuclear city model] corresponds in particular to his vision of a ordered universe arranged by graduations, ranging from small to large, from the room to the home, and hence to types of building, to their composition in a ‘scheme’ arranged according to geometrical rules and therefore capable of infinite extension,” in Francesco Garofalo, Luca Veresani, eds., Adalberto Libera, p. 12.
Aldo van Eyck, “Steps Toward a Configurative Discipline,” in Forum, August 1962. The architectural magazine Forum was set up by Aldo van Eyck in 1959.
Alison Smithson, “How to Recognize and Read a Mat Building,” in Architectural Design, no. 573, September 1974.
Between 1947 and 1978 Van Eyck designed hundreds of playgrounds, first as part of the Department of Urban Design and later on (from 1952) for the municipality and from his own office. Of the grand total of 700, only 90 survived into the twenty-first century with their original layout.
Giancarlo De Carlo was also a member of Team X.
Aldo Rossi, L’Architettura della Città, p. 145.
“As the Ancients made their Basilicas after such a manner, that in the Spring and in the Summer People might come together there to treat of their affairs and to carry on their Law-suits for in our times in every City, in Italy and out of it, do erect certain spacious publick Halls, which may deservedly be term’d Basilicas because that near to them is the residence of the supreme Magistrate […] as by reason the Judges attend there to administer justice to the People […] Among these modern halls there is a very remarkable one in Padua […] in which Gentlemen meet every day, this place serving them for a covered Square to walk in.” The Architecture of A. Palladio; in Four Books: containing a short treatise of the five orders, and the most necessary observations concerning all sorts of buildings: as also the different construction […]. London: printed for A. Ward [etc.], 1742. (ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 2443, http://doi.org/10.3931/e–rara–4821 / Public Domain Mark. Accessed 24.7.2018.)
“… moreover, they had their porticoes on the inside […] and the modern ones have no portico at all, or they have them on the outside towards the square.” Ibid., p. 100.
Carlos Haag, “Paulo Mendes da Rocha: Rocha and Concrete,” in Pesquisa FAPESP, No. 123, May 2006.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Carlo Gandolfi, ed., Quarantacinque Domande a Paulo Mendes da Rocha, CLEAN Edizioni, 2016.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Daniele Pisani, “Breve Contro-Storia di un’Icona Riluttante,” in Casabella, 883, March 2018. pp. 33–36.
Pietro Maria Bardi, “Come Dovrebbero Essere i Musei,” (1951) in Casabella, 883, March 2018, p. 38.