Depth architecture

Architecture is made for the dead. Its existence is an enigma. It is rarely inhabited by those who commission it. Often the purposes that determine its construction are modest, and its future in the world of objects is always a happening. Patrons, places, and laws are the circumstances with which the form-idea converses or struggles in order to enter the image of the world. Yet architecture is above all the place where the dead speak to the living. Jung writes in the Red Book:

There is a necessary, but hidden and singular work, a masterwork, which you must accomplish secretly for the sake of the dead. […] Do not look too far ahead; rather look back and into yourself, so as not to miss listening to the dead.

Shortly before his death, Paolo Portoghesi confided to me that in the 1960s, together with his then close friend Bruno Zevi, he had submitted to the Italian National Research Council (CNR) a project for a national research programme intended to integrate academic studies of architecture and psychology. That project was to be grounded in depth psychology and, in his words, to have a ‘high tone’, capable of representing the recognition of a conjoining between two forces: architecture and psychology. ‘The work that Zevi and I could have done was to give it this Jungian imprint—Portoghesi said—because it is Jung who truly gave the fundamental impulse.’ The CNR rejected the proposal. A few years later, a violent conflict arose between Portoghesi and Zevi, which polarised the discussion on the architectural debate of their time into the reductive opposition of modern and postmodern.

According to Nietzsche, the history of facts is a ‘horrid accident’; according to Lessing, history is ‘the giving of meaning to the meaningless’. Thus, this brief prelude would like to introduce the thought of the heart of our seminar. Our symposium will be structured in three movements of conversation:

On each movement, a few brief reflections will constitute the moments of an imagined garden, in the attempt to give continuation to that interrupted desire between Portoghesi and Zevi.