Geoarchitettura. Verso un’architettura della responsabilità, Paolo Portoghesi, A cura di Maria Ercadi e Donatella Scatena, Skira, Milano 2005 (pp. 215, € 30,00)
Martin Heidegger wrote that the time of the world’s night is the time of poverty, seeing that the world is becoming increasingly poor. It has already become so poor as to no longer recognise its want as a want. Because of this, there are fewer foundations that truly “found” coming into the world, meaning ground that can be used to take root in and stay put.
Paolo Portoghesi’s introductory words are taken from one of this German philosopher’s students, Hans Jonas, who strengthens the dose: when the obstacle against which humanity puts its own liberty at stake is taken away, a society of boredom and uncommitted relationships is born, a kind of tedium from which the only escape is a lethal absence of laws, which in turn is exalted to being a virtue. An era devoid of foundation hangs off the edge of a cliff, continues Heidegger. However, generally speaking an era is given the opportunity to experience a turnaround. But to find it, the cliff must be left behind. Continuous attention and learning then helps to look for and be able to recognise those things that, although they are found in the middle of hell, are not part of hell. These must be made to last and given space.
In his new book, Portoghesi suggests that we start with considerations made by Caterina Resta, Italian spokesperson for geophilosophy, in order to climb back up the cliff and find a new human future in the relationship with our terrestrial environment. Resta forcefully attacks architecture’s territory: “It makes for an invisible corrosive force that pervades the Earth - not only the places where the effects of its drying out are most obvious, but precisely there where sparkling monuments are immediately perceived, where humans do not cease to build on them day after day. So most of all it is the metropolis that is a desert, a teeming space for people who no longer have a place, denied as they are of all means of true living. Itinerant and erratic Modern people are those who transit everywhere without being at home anywhere.”
Geophilosophy’s mission is first of all to get to know the desert and pass through all its mirages. It must bear the alienating loss of orientation without allowing itself to be seduced by the impossible idea of turning back, which would be fatal, “until it reaches the limit beyond which another land becomes visible”. This is where Geoarchitecture (the title of this book) echoes this promise to rethink types of knowledge and their relationships to one another. It also echoes the attempt to give new meaning to places and regions, the balance and imbalance that afford the earth its cosmic breath.
Portoghesi underlines how architecture in recent times has been crossed by a wave of chaotic vitality that generates both admiration and uneasiness at the same time. Large projects have become popular even though what they communicate is usually nothing but the novelty of their structure, their newness, and their diversity compared to everything that already exists. This diversity is obtained by following the laws of advertisement messages, by means of surprise, clamour and alienation. According to Portoghesi, architecture needs to regain its historical identity as a discipline at the service of society. It should be able to help humanity become conscious of its responsibility towards the future, reaching for fragments in the world panorama that are still far removed from any possible coagulation. These fragments or traces are often very hard to see and are always the spiritual inheritance of an indication that is barely foreseen. A possible cohesion is nature’s teaching seen in its totality, with humankind as an integral part. But to speak of the birth of a new sensitivity that takes into consideration the reasons and morphology of nature does not mean to profess “green architecture” (the kind made by architects who are sensitive to ecology, but that has no “ideological yeast” that could explicitly relate to the new scientific paradigm). Nor is it about a formalistic type of research on the possibilities of creating artificial structures that are formed by computers according to models derived from nature studies with a worrisome predilection for folds, metamorphoses and the upsetting of things. And lastly, it is certainly not an invocation to connect with an exterior and imitative nature.
Rather, it is about going back to the deepest and most secret roots of human existence. L. Battista Alberti pointed to the simplicity of nature as an example to follow. In this field, like in all the others for that matter, sobriety deserves just as much praise as excessive building mania (aedificandi libidinem, I, IX) deserves blame. The idea of returning to an “original simplicity” was not naïve, anti-scientific or beyond reality. Reduction can be a solution in these times, too. Art is the work of humankind. It is remarkable how often this phrase makes images of plant life come to mind: “Trees and stones will teach what you can never learn from masters”, preached Bernardo da Chiaravalle. In 1936, Le Corbusier advised young people to devote themselves to the impassioned study of the reason why things are, to the exploration of the unfathomable domain of nature’s riches. “That is where the real architecture lesson lies: in the grace, the lightness, the precision, the indisputable reality of the combinations. From the inside to the outside: serene perfection.” Arch, frame, column and pillar – tree, leaf, the wood that becomes a roof. “Think of the plant’s story”, said the Greek poet Dionysios Solomos.But according to Portoghesi, there is more. Architecture has ethical responsibilities towards the Earth. Hölderlin wrote that, although full of merit, man lives poetically on the Earth. To speak of inhabiting means looking at the fundamental quality of the fact that human beings exist, i.e. their inhabiting, being poets and building. Humankind with its inhabiting certainly makes itself meritorious in many ways. Indeed, it takes care of (or cultivates) the things that grow on Earth. However, humankind does not only cultivate that which develops by itself by means of its own growth, but it constructs and builds things that could not be born or subsist by means of their own growth.
In Inhabiting the Earth, constructing can go back to being inhabiting. Mankind becomes conscious of the fact that the worlds it builds cannot be separated from taking care of them. “In this way, architecture will not violate and corrupt, but if it is real architecture, it will give meaning and value to the landscape. The concept of place will transcend its geographic definition, becoming a space that is meaningful for the relationship between humans and their surroundings.”
This explanation shows how important it is to ask nature to help us bring to the environment in which we live the secret aesthetic harmony of the biological world, its ability to compose balance and imbalance, tranquillity and movement, simplicity and complexity, all the while teaching the senses to uncover the profound unity that underlies everything. The word “structure” is no longer a separable part of the work, but a structure that connects. It is a hidden, mysterious rule that is concealed in the essence of things, showing harmony and the happy co-existence between things (the golden section is a structure that connects). In this serious and strenuous exercise, the history, memory and tradition of all peoples are the indispensable nourishment of imagination and thought. History magnifies time and tends to systematise facts in closed boxes and give them an order. Memory puts things in disorder, ignores boundaries and has a paratactical quality. It is a storehouse that can be drawn on without any pre-established order, unleashing an association process of ideas and images, a chain reaction that is potentially infinite. This is what the author unexpectedly creates by juxtaposing images that are analogous but different, taken from the world of plants, the world of the microscope and the world of architecture. This is a very effective sequence: flowers and the concept of centrality, trees and the concept of lightness, veins of a leaf and the veins of vaults and so on. Earth, sky, crystals, seashells and stellar constellations make up the elements of a brand-new iconography. Each one is a frame of a film, a fragment that perhaps only takes on meaning in the succession. It then becomes one of the many possible sequences of figures that are eligible for construction on the subject of architecture. These figures, often repertory images, types that have settled into our memory, commence the exercise of “transcription”.
Finally, within this architectural way of thinking that is anthropologically based and technically precise, there is a study of the continuous integration between the possibilities offered by different materials and their adoption for use, between adoption for use and formal invention: a material and its use in tradition, the great uninterrupted tradition of organic architecture, contact with collective memory. Examples are Frank Lloyd Wright (I am not referring to the most plundered part of his heritage, but to his concept of space and the energy-materials relationship that is visible in his last projects), B. Taut outside the narrow limits of organic tradition, which is extremely fertile among the branches leading in the direction of architecture that is reconciled with nature. There is also Michelangelo, and last but not least, that great influence on the author’s imagination, Borromini. Portoghesi writes that to speak of Borromini today means tackling the issue of freedom from rules that were imposed in the past. “It means to distinguishing between rules that are obsolete and ones that are permanent.” But above all, it is to follow the concept of tradition as free research, because in humanity’s inheritance, tradition can still be used for its susceptibility to change.
Luisa Ferro Professor of Architectural Design at the Polytechnic of Milan