The lesson of history in architectural design

Iolanda Lima’s architecture

I met Iolanda Lima in 1993, in her course in the history of contemporary architecture, and I had the privilege of growing and forming myself through her experience. But not only through historical research: through her abilities as an architect. Working with her, I lived the spaces she had created in the 1970s and the 1980s: her house-studios, one in Mondello and the other in Palermo. And this is not a marginal aspect. Because architecture is discovered when a space is lived in – not as a visit to a monument or a museum – but when one has the privilege of seeing it change through the hours of the day, of seeing how the light reacts, how it transforms, how it changes. This is extraordinary, because it is difficult for it to happen. I was fortunate, because I had that experience.

So I shall briefly show you some images of the spaces I am speaking about. Here is the house in Palermo, designed between 1971 and 1974; and the villa in Mondello [Fondo Anfossi] of 1979 – 1982, the two places where we studied and carried out scholarly research. Those places were fundamental for me in understanding that architecture is above all space, a space that interacts with light, a space built by light.

A network built at a distance

I do not know what you know about me, whether you have read the flyer – and so you may have wondered: “who is this, speaking?”. In 2009 I was selected by the magazine Wallpaper* among the best thirty young architects in the world. I do not know whether you know it; it is a very prestigious English magazine. And I was not selected by chance: in the three years before that recognition my work was research.

After my degree in Palermo, for two years I gained experience in two architecture practices, in Milan and in Rome. So I understood that I had to decide: either to be an employee for life, or to take the leap in the dark. To try to affirm my individuality, to begin an autonomous path, with all the economic uncertainty that came with it, because I had no family that could have supported me. Today I can say, and I say it to you, that that determination was important, because it gave me the possibility of preserving my own time and so of creating a series of projects for possible clients around the world, which you saw in the video. I began to work on international relations at a distance, without standing in the shadow of large or famous practices.

And this is what I should like to communicate today: that it is no longer necessary to move and go abroad. If one travels the world one has more chance of developing contacts, that is true; but my case demonstrates that, knowing English, and having something to communicate, it is possible to weave a system, a network with foreign magazines – which are often the ones most open to discovery. In this historical moment, dramatic for Italy, it is true that we are isolated; but, through the possibilities offered by communication at a distance, it is possible to create a different condition for oneself. So I began to send my works out in a targeted way, publishing them at first in English online magazines. Today my work has a bibliography that is vast for my age, around one hundred publications, from Japan to the United States. It is rather strange, for an architect of only 35; because today it is thought that architects emerge around fifty or sixty – even though Le Corbusier was already famous before building his projects.

This is the first contribution of experience that I can pass on to you: that it is possible. If you have ambition and are disciplined – proceeding steadily, without surrendering to the difficulties you meet – the goal can be reached. Not that I have reached it! Indeed, perhaps I have not reached anything yet. The course of a communication must not exhaust itself, because it is built over time.

Against the tabula rasa

In the video you saw, in a disordered way, a series of my works: for me architecture is first of all art, then function. And the discourse on history is the point of departure of my research. I do not believe that the premise of creation is an act of erasure, of destruction of what has been: a tabula rasa; I believe profoundly in the continuation of a tradition – of that body of information that surrounds us, which possesses a historical value because these are events placed in time, occurring in different periods. This body of information speaks to us; and in knowing how to grasp and interpret it lies the key to every human creation. Creation is like music: one never knows where it comes from, nor what the promptings are that lie at its base. So it was also for those artists of the avant-gardes who upheld the idea of a linguistic erasure, because an instance of erasure occurring in the conscious mind can never be extended to the reality of the unconscious, which lies beyond our powers of control.

This is the reason for this “lesson of history in architectural design”. Much of contemporary architecture is oriented by a caesura: architects dialogue and interact culturally only with the modernity of the twentieth century. I, on the contrary, maintain that one must do exactly the opposite.

Sicilian identity as method

I believe that my deep attention to history is bound to my Sicilian identity, which I claim with pride. Our culture, however heavy at times, has the singular nature, perhaps fortuitous, of having fused into a synthesis different traditions, among them the great European and Mediterranean civilisations. That process was not intentional; it was the result of chance, of communication, of wars, of violence and of rape. I see my architecture as a transliteration of this phenomenon: what in Sicily operates at a genetic, cultural and behavioural level, in my architecture is manifested through signs, contents and meanings.

Not postmodern: synthesis against quotation

Iolanda Lima had often warned me about the risk of this way of working, recognising in it a theoretical analogy with postmodern historicism. Without showing you the result of the works, this way of working of mine might seem analogous to the postmodern phases of architects such as Robert Stern or Philip Johnson. Beyond the judgement I might give of these architects, I believe that my experience seeks to free itself from one of the fundamental confusions of postmodern architecture: that between the critical position and the historical position. To create, one needs a point of view, and therefore a critical attitude. I cannot assume a historical attitude, because I should renounce creating, renounce choosing a road; I should stand above the parties.

What I try to free myself from, then, is the incapacity for synthesis of the postmodern historicists: the excess, that lack of elaboration of the sign, whereby the historical quotation remains recognisable. In my architecture, on the contrary, the approach is irrational. I do not decide to make a work that gathers this, that and the other: no, the operation is inverse. At a certain point a spatial prompting arrives, a vision; then, investigating that vision – with digital modelling as well – I try to develop it, and I find in it references, the reworking and reinterpretation of things already seen, studied, lived; of musical structures or of films, transliterated into space.

Cinema, music, sequence

Cinema, together with music, is the art closest to architecture. Much closer than painting and sculpture. Why? Because architecture is principally a sequence, and cinema is the art of montage – the art of assembling not only the narrative structure but also that of an image.

Architecture, then, is a sensibility, a cinematic experience, even when it first arrives as a vision. The affinity is extraordinary: some of these houses were inspired by films.

History is not decoration

The study of history, then, is not decorative, subsequent or accessory. This personal experience of mine has been recognised as singular in relation to other Italian architects, even more established than I am, who nevertheless appear homogenised within an international discourse. The Italian scene does lack modernity, and certain stylistic operations might seem interesting and innovative; but they are not, if referred to an international context where modernity has become the new architecture of corporate power. Today architects are formed – and it is not an Italian problem, we have adapted somewhat – carrying on the experience of the Bauhaus, to consider architecture as a technical craft, released from history. So the dominant contemporary architecture is based on the same linguistic koine: that of twentieth-century architecture. And what happens in architecture today is no different from then; there has been no true rupture, linguistic or communicative.

The sounding box

Architecture is first of all an interpretation of light – Iolanda Lima will probably have spoken of this in earlier lectures, and I myself took this concept of mine from her experience – that is, the way light enters a space and is reinterpreted by the form, the nature, the disposition of its surfaces. Do some of you play a musical instrument? The sound that we call music comes out of an instrument. It is different from any other sound because it interacts with a sounding box – as in the piano, in the guitar. What is a sounding box? It is a harmonic form which causes the initial sound to be interpreted: that sound, rebounding and resonating on those wooden walls, becomes a complex sound; and so a different nature is created, proper to music. Although this analogy seems simple enough, strangely it is never stated; and yet architecture is nothing other than this: the building is a sounding box – that is, its interior space. A building without an interior space, therefore, is not architecture, it is only a building – we remain within the realm of construction. Architecture qualifies as such when it gives an interpretation of light; just as music is distinguished from noise.

Now I shall try to explain this concept better by presenting the image of a work of mine. This sculpture is a house, and it is called Vaulted House. In this image the openings are reduced. The spatiality is built. There are opaque surfaces of traditional materials: a barrel vault, vertical walls of concrete and a travertine floor. Where is the light? The light lies in certain cuts, placed so that this visual intention is realised. And how is it realised? Light has properties similar to sound: when it strikes a surface, it interprets that surface and is transformed. If the surface is reflective it will emit a mirrored beam, equal and opposite to the angle of incidence; if instead the surface is opaque, rough, coarse, the light spreads. The same happens with sound: sound changes if it meets a hard or a soft wall, of metal or of wood. I propose this analogy because the experience of sound seems more familiar to us, as a way of understanding the experience of light: music production, the sound engineering of a recording, the way sounds are modified to build a song, is more familiar to us. So the materials – their smoothness or coarseness –, the form of the room and the way light enters it define its quality.

An autonomy of communication

Why is history here? Let us start from the plan: the building is made of three pieces ordered on a symmetrical layout – even though within it reveals contradictions: a tall parallelepiped with one bulging side; a low parallelepiped with a vault; a polyhedron on a trapezoidal base. Three forms that from the outside are perceived as three juxtaposed objects. There is Le Corbusier in this method, but he does not juxtapose. There is Frank O. Gehry too, but without his expressionism: I wanted this juxtaposition to be a more European and Italian operation, an operating at the limit.

These three objects, within, are excavated, almost like grottoes, and among them they reveal interferences, spatial but also luminous. The rectangular space is derived from a journey to Marrakesh. In Marrakesh much of the historic residential building is structured by great halls, narrow and long, with a plan ratio of 1:3 (three squares in sequence), onto which, at the centre of the long side, an accessory room is grafted; these halls are empty because in Muslim architecture one often sits on the ground. These spaces have a great power of communication: it is the form of the space, its surfaces, that create the elegance of the building. Then, during the French protectorate, French architects introduced fireplaces on the shorter sides of the halls. The space of the Vaulted House inherits this scheme with the fireplaces and the central niche. Onto this scheme I grafted a great vault that I had long had in mind. I wanted to restate that material quality of the vaults of late antiquity. I decided to live in Rome, and not in London, in order to learn from close contact with history.

So the rectangular Moroccan hall is covered by this Roman barrel vault: a dry arch, of constant curvature but lowered at the springing. Now, the grafting of these two elements might appear incongruous, because the two elements are distant from one another. But Moroccan architecture inherits this massive feeling of the wall from Roman domination.

What happens, then? If you look at the space of this house, you will not say: “this is a Moroccan house”, or “this is a late-antique house”. Space possesses an autonomy of communication of its own. And this is what I try to do.

Note

1. ^ At the beginning of the lecture, Iolanda Lima had not introduced Cardillo.
2. ^ The Bahia Palace in Marrakesh was begun in 1866 by the grand vizier Si Moussa and enlarged between 1894 and 1900 by his son Ahmed ben Moussa, known as Ba Ahmed, to the designs of the architect Mohammed ben Mekki Mesfioui. Following the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912, the palace became the seat of the French Resident General and was subsequently adapted for European use.