Grimoire of Architecture by Marco Frascari

Architectural storytelling

2011-04-14T05:14:00.000-04:00

Vitruvius writes of an exemplary event of architectural storytelling in a quite paradigmatic practice of promotion for professional services that is found within the preface of the second book of his De Architectura libri decem; a book devoted to sensible definitions about construction procedures, descriptions of the qualities of different materials and methods of practice. It is the story of a 4th century BC Macedonian architect looking for a very specific job; Dinocrates, an architect of tall stature, pleasing countenance, and altogether of dignified appearance, used the ruse of dressing up as Hercules— his body anointed with oil, wearing a lion skin and a wreath of leaves on his head, holding a knobby club— in order to get the attention of Alexander the Great and get the commission he badly wanted. Having captured the attention of the king through his marketing trick, Dinocrates narrated to Alexander the story of how he planned to re-shape Mount Athos into the form of a man whose left arm would embrace the walls of a mighty city, and whose right hand would hold a bowl which was supposed to receive the water yielding from the mountain and from there flowing into the sea. Alexander, delighted by the brilliant presentation, asked Dinocrates if the fields in the vicinity of the mountain would produce grain. At the architect’s negative reply, Alexander declared that for that reason Mount Athos was not the right location on which to found a city, but he was so impressed by Dinocrates’ storytelling capabilities that he appointed the Macedonian architect as chief designer of the future city of Alexandria.^[i]

[i] Vitruvius. [27-23 B.C.] 2004. De architectura. Translated by B. Thayer. 10 vols. [http://penelope.uchicago .edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/home/]

2008-10-09T18:09:00.000-04:00

MANO OCULATA A thought about touch and vision by Marco Frascari

2008-10-07T08:17:00.004-04:00

But phenomenology is also a philosophy, which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their 'facticity'.
( Merlau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , p. vii)

In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves
thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body
which is better informed than we are about the world... (Merlau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, p. 23)

An amazing photomontage by the Russian architect El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich Lissitzky) entitled The Constructor (1924) shows a self-portrait on which has been printed the image of a hand holding a compass. The overlapping of the two images is done in such a way that the right eye of El Lissitzky’s is emerging within the palm of the hand. This flying image of hand holding a compass first appeared as an illustration of the hand of God in 1919 book designed by El Lissitzky. The hand and compass, as a drawing, turned up in an advertisement designed for Pelikan ink, and, as photo, on a cover for the magazine Arkhitektura. VKhUTEMAS.
Several times in his photomontages, El Lissitzky revives in modern configuration classical allegorical topos. In the case of the Constructor the reference is to the Renaissance emblem of the mano oculata as presented in a vignette used in Mario Bettini in Apiaria universae philosophiae mathematicae published in 1642. El Lissitzky reinterpretation of the emblem tells us that insight is revealed through a tactile activity. Between the action of the hand, and the hand’s relationship to the rest of the body, another form of architectural vision is available
Seeing is a remote sense. It tells us about distant parts of our environment by receiving rays and waves. Seeing is also touching at distance, for example, the haptic vision is a form of tactile vision; here the eye is used as an organ of touch. Haptic images are invitations to come as close as possible to the image. The word haptic is derived from the Greek term hapthai, meaning touch, an emotionally loaded sense, about the communicability and possibility for shared cultural experiences
In Traité des sensations (1754), Condillac illustrates his post-Lockean theory of the senses with the image of a marble statue, which gains knowledge about the exterior world by way of gradual revelation of sensory input. While the sensations of smell, taste, sound and colors, endow the statue with a sense of being, it is only through touching that the statue becomes certain of external objects. There is, however, an essential idea that neither smell, nor taste, nor hearing, nor even sight, can yield, nor that is the idea of an object, the idea of an external world. Colors, sounds, odors, and tastes are mere sensations or states, not, as yet, referred to external objects. Before external causes can be substituted for its sensations, the statue must be endowed with the most important of all senses: the sense of touch. Touch alone can reveal to us the objective world, by giving us the ideas of extension, form, solidity, and body. Even sight cannot
suggest them. Persons born blind cannot, upon receiving their sight, distinguish between a ball and ablock, a cube and a sphere, until they touch these objects. Only after having touched things do we refer the impressions received by our other senses, such as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells, to objectsexisting outside of us, Hence, touch is the highest sense, and the guide of the other senses; it is touch which teaches the eye to distribute colors in nature.
Our need to touch is passionate. Touch gives an immediate communication with internal, or external bodies. Our skin is what stands between us and the world. Skin is a language; skin records the passage of reality.
Drafting and measuring tools are extensions of the architect’s bodies. Indeed, architects used to sense the world through pencils, squares and many other drafting tools and (when this capability was developed properly), they would not be even conscious of the tools as such, but directly of what the tools touched and of how their different graphic support moved in the conjured places bounded by lines. Through the grasping and manipulating of these instruments, architects of the past developed enlightening manifestation of architectural conceptions. Through valid haptic interactions with physical tools and instruments, architects have developed rich representations and have directed constructions of amazing architectural possibilities.

Architectural thinking is quite comparable to the drawing of architecture

2008-06-30T15:41:00.002-04:00

The lines describing a plan on a site and on a drawing are one of architecture's most fascinating and puzzling enigmas since they make visible what is invisible in the constructed building. Lines present an entire building by simplifying its reality, but at the same time, they manifest a more complete view of the building's interacting parts by showing more of what is visible. The play of lines presents the invisible aspects of architecture, representing in a unique a way what can never be seen when the walls are erected; this play is spatial and temporal phenomenon, not some non-spatial and non-temporal phantasm. In the lines, the building's dynamic nature is manifested in a demonstrative interpretation of the tectonic of the building; its three-dimensional extensions are represented in the material and form of the line which we don't interpret in order to understand it, but which we understand without interpreting it.
In an architectural drawings the drafted lines in their interfacing between support and their material making reveal in cosmospoietic event that which is present in the visible building, but is itself invisible. Metaphorically speaking the drawing of lines represents the coalescence of architectural imagining. If we assume that this architectural imagining results from an intangible super-faculty that arises from the possession of a metaphysical eye able to envision a future building, the enigma of the architectural drawing is a false problem. However, if we consider the extraordinary capacity of architects to imagine a building by tracing lines, the enigma becomes real. Architects can draw the lines of a building in direct sight, reconstruct the lines of a demolished structure, or devise the lines for a future building. The common denominator in all these procedures is the making visible of that, which is invisible. Through a peculiar and curious procedure of de-composition, selection and re-composition, through a polysemic use of lines architects can trace rooms, structures and building details whose functions become self-evident in the composition of the lines that will never actually be seen in the constructed building but it is essential for presenting the inner and outer spaces simultaneously and revealing the many temporal sequences of architectural perception. The building is represented in its entirety but there is no likeness between the lines and the original.
The lines of building are neither facsimiles nor symbols. The lines produce it poetically. It is in this poetic dimension that the enigmatic beauty of the lines lays.
Lines direct the enigmatic demonstrations of architecture. To fully understand the importance of their role in architectural imagining it is necessary to remove any preconceived idea about the lines of an architectural drawing are merely a functional result of descriptive geometry, or as a graphic description that leads to verbal and graphic prescription of usage and construction. To achieve a better understanding of the play of lines as –demonstrations of architecture it is perhaps necessary to reflect on the obsolete Vitruvian term, ichnography (ichnographia) generally used to indicate the drawing of a plan. Ichnography, a compound Greek word, ichnos = foot-sole and graphos =writing/drawing, is a topical procedure by which a representation that opposes perceptions and experiences depicts something which does not exist in the visible realm. The graphic procedure involved in translating the invisible into the visible requires a reflexive dislocation. As a topical procedure ichnography contains in itself the solution to the problem that is posed. Architects can project the characteristics of a construction from the footprint of a building, as hunters, using conjectural knowledge, can envision the specific characteristics of the animal they are hunting from the footprints left on the ground.
Humans have been hunters for thousands of years. During countless pursuit of their preys they have learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of invisible animals from venatic clues. They learned to sense, record, interpret, and classify such minimal traces and to execute complex rational maneuvers on their hunting path. Hunters have passed down this rich storehouse of knowledge over the generations through storytelling. Hunters would have been the firsts “to tell a story” because they were able to reading the tracks left by their prey, a coherent sequence of events. This knowledge is characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. Also, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence. The reading of animal tracks is the mirror of divination: divination looked to the future and the interpretation of venatic clues to the past. There were great correspondences between the two; the intellectual operations involved—analyses, comparisons, and classifications—were formally identical and storytelling was the common process of communication in hunting as in divination the process was the designation of one thing through another. The lines of an architectural drawing the designation of one thing through another can tell the past the present and the future of buildings.
By using a play of lines the architect makes visible that which is in-visible. This practice is based on processes of demonstration. Demonstrations occur both in the constructing of theoretical drawings and in the constructing of building drawing; since both are forms of realization, every architectural demonstration becomes ontological. Architects demonstrate through tangible signs the intangible that operates in the tangible. This demonstration is the setting of the enigma of the labor involved in architecture. The drawing of lines, a projection using the compass of the human body, reveals a continuous search tor the human measure bridging the past and future of the constructed world An architectural play of lines is not the designing of a specific building, but rather, a projection of a future constructed world based on the transformation of the past world of construction through a specific drawings, the ichnography.

The cover of a future book

2008-06-20T03:36:00.001-04:00

2008-06-13T15:14:00.001-04:00

A new geomatrician drawing the tower of babel

fun

2008-05-18T18:14:00.004-04:00

The Angels of Architecture

2008-05-14T07:01:00.006-04:00

The Three New Necessary Angels of Architecture

By Marco Frascari

An angelic prolegomena

Three angels up above the street,
Each one playing a horn,
Dressed in green robes with wings that stick out,
They've been there since Christmas morn.
Bob Dylan, New Morning,
released: Oct 21, 1970

Architecture needs angels and to be more precise it needs three groups of angels. The three necessary Angels of Architecture belong to the First Sphere of the Hierarchy of angels and they are:

The Seraph of Storytelling and Pathos (Aby Warburg /Walter Benjamin/Carlo Ginzburg)
The Cherub of Habitus and Architectural Conceiving (Bourdieu/Panofsky/Paul Frankl)
The Ophan of Ethos and Sense(s)-Making ( Italo Calvino/George Perec/Carlo Gadda)

Aby Warburg’s “science without a name” is the discipline that can help us to uncover the cosmopoietic dimensions of architectural storytelling that had been hidden deep in the closets of architectural culture. Architectural discernment has become a unconstructive attitude that has made an idol of absence itself. Congested by the perspectives of the physical sciences, by pseudo-searches of inter-disciplinarity and by being uncritically open to memory-less scientific or artistic fashions, thinking about architecture has turned itself into an ostrich attitude to the realities of judgment generating self-contained and tautological practices and pedagogies. At present, most architectural judgment works by a refusal of the power linking the arts of building, living and thinking well.
The science without a name developed by Aby Warburg tends to spurt through the precincts of diverse epochs and cultures, from one to another in an anagogic manner. An a-temporal perception generated by supratemporal corporeal themes nonetheless allows for the recognition of forms “temporally” disintegrated by technologies of historical depictions.
In architectural criticism, this approach can assist in recovering a recognition of a cosmospoietic dimension, through the reactivation of an original pathos of architecture, liberating it from its paralyzing aesthetic and professional conventions. The cognitive imagination of architecture is an expression of the power of human beings to act and think in a pure mediality. To think imagination as mediality is a challenge to which Warburg had already risen, and one which architects should begin to grasp again. The effective presence of tectonic condensation and the poignancy of building details and constructs result from what Warburg has identified as the “pathos formula” (Pathosformel). Through tectonic pathos, the energy embodied in artifacts can be reactivated beyond the threshold of rational understanding.

Architectural Storytelling

Now, aqua in buccat. I’ll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater. And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you’d wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexen-gown.
James Joyce, Finnegan Wake

How and why it is essential to teach “architectural history (histories)” and not “history of architecture” to future architects?
The answer is straightforward: to foster a proper architectural thinking and above all a proper architectural imagination.
The teaching of history of architecture and architectural design are both based on “briefing.” From the history point of view has as its primary aim the recall of a “factual knowledge of the past;” student must recognize monuments, documents and events, meanwhile from the design the present trend is for a factual projection in the built world of the design drawings, i.e. the building must precisely look as in the drawings. “Briefing” in design becomes “executive summary.”
However is this necessary for fostering architectural imagination?
The teaching of architectural history is based on storytelling. Experience, passing from mouth to mouth, is the source from which all architectural storytellers have created. This is illustrated by the folk-notion of a storyteller as an individual that is either someone who has traveled far, or someone who has learned the laudable stories of the region, the epics of different trades or the heroic materiality of objects. In both cases, experience not readily available to all is passed on by means of the storyteller.
Within the framework of storytelling as teaching of architectural history and conceiving proper architecture, my examination tries illustrate its primeval role in setting the concepts of architectural sense-making, identity construction, and conceiving habitus.
Storytelling is no simple form of entrainment. It is a mirror for processing and reconstituting experience since the telling of a story is the root of all human communication. We tell stories "to give order to human experience and to induce others to dwell in them in order to establish ways of living in common, in intellectual and spiritual communities in which there is confirmation for the story that constitutes one's life.” Stories not only help us make sense of the actions of others, they serve to shape our own identities. The fundamental implication is that identity is a narrative construction.
Storytellers dig what they tell from their experience, or from the experience of others, and make it the experience of those listening to the tale. Storytelling is a crucial condition for making sense of both individual experience and social interaction. However, as Walter Benjamin had pointed out, the art of story-telling is dying out and with it also dies the human capability that is the essence of story-telling: trading experiences (Erfahrungen). Storytelling is dying out because wisdom, the epic side of truth, is dying out. The storyteller takes his stories from lived experience, either his or that of others, to change it into experience for the listeners.
The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his hometown or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.
Information is antithetical to storytelling, which is deformation. Information convey dry, distant facts and figures. Information explicates impersonal objects and events, a storytelling explains nothing and implicates this is the reason why does not matter how many times is told the story is still food for thought.
Walter Benjamin points out that storytelling is entranced in the rhythm of labor - such as weaving or spinning - who most naturally assimilates the story. As craftsmanship dies out, so does the story.

A New Vitruvian Figure

2008-04-23T14:52:00.007-04:00

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values, the
Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost
beyond number.
‐‐ Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi

HERMANN HESSE. MAGISTER LUDI (THE GLASS BEAD GAME) FOUR GREAT NOVELS, NEW YORK: BANTAM BOOKS, 1966‐1970 [V.1, 1970].

2008-04-15T08:09:00.002-04:00

GRASPABLE PHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND GAZEABLE DOCUMENTS

Many centuries before the invention of computers, our drafting precursors manufactured a variety of specialized physical artifacts to draw geometric shapes, to compute and measure distances and the passage of time, and to predict the movement and influence of Planets and weather.
These beautiful artifacts are untouchable and placed behind security glass in exhibition cases of many museums. These amazing artifacts were made of different metals, as brass, silver and steel, and also of precious organic materials known for their stability, hardness and durability, as ivory, boxwood, bamboo and ebony. The aesthetics and rich affordances of these historical instruments inspired much architectural achievement. Most of these tools, even in their modern versions, have now disappeared from schools, laboratories, and design studios and have being replaced with the most general of appliances: personal computers and other related electronic gadgets. (The only exception concerns time pieces, whose inner workings now reflect cutting edge technology but whose casings are still sometime made of precious materials in order to satisfy a desire for luxury and status). Architect to draw and conjure up their buildings used to work with several of these tools as media of architectural perception, sensory prostheses proffering architectural projections.

Drafting and measuring tools are extensions of the architect’s bodies. Indeed, architects used to sense the world through pencils, squares and many other drafting tools and (when this capability was developed properly), they would not be even conscious of the tools as such, but directly of what the tools touched and of how their different graphic support moved in the conjured places bounded by lines. Through the grasping and manipulating of these instruments, architects of the past developed enlightening manifestation of architectural conceptions. Through valid haptic interactions with physical tools and instruments, architects have developed rich representations and have directed constructions of amazing architectural possibilities. Unfortunately, much of this wealth of skills has been recently lost to the overwhelming flood of digital technologies. Valuable conceiving and conjuring procedures and skills have been lost within the mare insanum of the indiscriminate use of computers in the design process. Easy and fast computer programs have deluded architects into believing the knowledge and the skills accumulated in centuries of practice could be dispensed of altogether.

To compensate for what we have lost with the advent of computers the possibility of experiencing the richness of the physical world of architecture by literally grasping the tools of both the distant and recent past must be given to architectural students. This physical grasping will trigger the development of various skills and work practices for the processing of information through haptic interaction with physical objects (e.g., scribbling and drafting notes by spatially manipulating the marks through tools) as well as peripheral senses (e.g., being aware of the rules embodied in the movement of the tools). Most of these practices are neglected in current pedagogical tendency because of the lack of diversity of input/output media, and excessive bias towards graphical output at the expense of input from the experience of the world of facture.

Architects belong to the two realms of the physical and the virtual environment but in spite of this dual citizenship, the absence of seamless couplings between these parallel existences leaves a great divide between the world of electronic bites and the physical atoms. At the present, we are torn between these parallel conditions of being and restrained by greatly disjointed provisions of photo-renderings and the absurd precision of digital drafting nurturing of a new phenomenological approach to architecture. Only a proper playing with the tools of illo tempore, architects can prepare themselves to a proper architecture.

TELLING AND CASTING

2008-04-11T04:00:00.005-04:00

In practicing architecture, to dream by drawing is to make visible the invisible within the constructed world. The drafted dream is the place where the ineffable is restated into a visible fable. The drafted dream is tectonic activity and within it takes place the construction of the intangible within a tangible world.
Since Biblical time, the telling of dreams has been also regarded as an act of casting. The narration of oniric events has been always seen as an act of forecasting or an act of back-casting, since we inject ourselves in our dreams all the times.
As result of architectural labor and the narration of a dream, the visual and verbal fable of an ineffable architecture I am telling is a chimera composed of a project, a subject, an object and also an injection. These four ject-ending launching acts share a common etymological connection; since they describe various acts of casting. Project and object are parallel acts of casting forward, whereas subject is a casting beneath and injection is a casting into. The same ject-ending acts are integral part of the architectural realm and the aim of these casting games, as the existence of dreams, is to cope with the fear of death and time. This process of removal of fear is the ontological nature of these multiple acts of casting. Architects forecast buildings; consequently their designing is a project, an object and an in-ject resulting from the translations of theirs dream. Architects through their multi-directional casting operate like dreamers able to exist within their own mental images, injecting themselves together with real and virtual clients within their projecting of future buildings, bona fide architects deal with the objective and subjective presence of architecture. Architects exercise the capacity of waking up to their dreams through drawings and construction.
These architectural castings are acts of representation whose origin and nature can be explained as magical acts producing magic signs. Outside of anthropological studies, magic is a word that is not used in its technical meaning anymore; It is generally used to indicate non-sensible practices of the human mind or its poetic expressions. Regardless of this negative condition, it is essential to give back to architectural signs and designs their magical status. The results of the casting acts of architecture are magic signs traced on the ground or on the paper. Architectural dreams are expressed in drawings, a mix of conventional and natural signs. These drawings become magic tools. They translate dreams in a constructed world. As in primitive magic, they are not only externalization of desire, but practical signs of imagination. An architectural sign or its expression in a drawing is magical and following Jacques Maritain:

I call a sign ‘magical’ when it occurs in a different functional state, in which it is a sign for the imagination as the supreme or dominating controller of the whole of psychical life of the whole life of culture. Whether the sign is in itself sensible or intelligible, it ultimately speaks to the powers of the imagination, it refers ultimately to a psychic regimes immersed in the vital ocean of the imagination. (Maritain, 1937:5)

These magical signs can be found in the true drawings of architecture, not the cad drawings and the photo-renderings that flood the commercial world of architecture.
The semiotic of dreamed architecture is in the magic of drawings. These magical drawings are what Florensky and Pierce calls icons. Architectural drawings are icons where the gold background shows within the cut walls of the horizontal and vertical sections of edifices. These magic drawings, true icons of architecture, are expressions of architects’ dreams constituting the mundus imaginalis of architecture.
The theory of the mundus imaginalis is closely bound up with a theory of imaginative cognition and of the imaginative function. This is truly central position, a mediating place, owing both to the median and mediating positions of the mundus imaginalis. The immediate mediating of the cognitive function ascribable to imagining takes place within the mundus imaginalis. The cognitive function of imagination provides the foundation for a rigorous analogical knowledge permitting us to evade the dilemma of current rationalism, which gives us only a choice between the two banal dualistic terms of either “matter” or “mind.” The eminent Islamic scholar, Henry Corbin (1983:57) defines the mundus imaginalis, as an intermondo, a space where visual imagination establishes true and real thoughts: an imaginative perception and an imaginative knowledge, that is an imaginative consciousness. The mundus imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of senses and that of intellect. This mundus imaginalis is an imaginal landscape. Corbin coined the term ‘imaginal’ to discuss the realm of the cognitive imagination to not be confounding this “world of images in suspense” with the realm of the imaginary. This world is ontologically above the world of senses, and below the pure intelligible world (Corbin 1995: 11)
From this imaginal landscape depends the validity of dreams. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely an imaginative power a faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value that is as real as that of sense perception or intellectual intuition. Its existence is a basis for demonstrating the validity of dreams. This world should not to be confused it with “fantasy,” that is nothing but an outpour of “imaginings”. (Corbin 1974-1995). The imaginal dream word of architecture can be explained by making a parallel to the images in mirrors. In dreams and in drawings, buildings materialize as an image materializes in a mirror. The material of the mirror is not the substance of the reflected image, since it is always glass and silver independently of the reflected material. However, the image gives the subtle body of the reflected object and in this reflection the cognitive power of imagination is established a rigorous analogical knowledge.
Within this imaginal world, the task of the architect is not of the duplication in graphic form of a present reality (survey drawings) or future reality (design drawings), but of offering a deeper understanding of the architectonic of material and numinous meaning through synchronic and diachronic views. The task is to translate the vision on paper and then in the built form. The same mixture of sinchronicity and diachronicity, the same possibility of different spatio-temporality, the same want of making visible what is invisible, the same magic of dreaming is manifested in two specific graphic representations of architectural design, plan and section.
The contents of the plan and section integrate diachronically that which is present in the visible building, but is itself invisible in a synchronic manner. Different spaces are represented within the same framework concatenating in one vision a chain of different visions. Metaphorically speaking, the drawing of vertical and horizontal sections (the latter are generally called plans) represents the coalescence of the architectural dream, the writing and the reading of a possible architecture, of its imaginal realm. Presuming architecture ensuing from an intangible super-faculty that arises from the property of a designing mind able to present graphically a future building by processes of imitation, the enigma of the spatial sinchronicity and diachronicity of architectural sections is a deceiving question. Entrenching of the theory of imitation is the magical belief in the identity of the represented with the representation: a belief that naturally results in attributing to the likeness powers and capabilities which in a rationally ordered world would belong only to primary phenomena. However, if I consider the extraordinary capacity of architects to imagine or better to dream up a building by tracing horizontal and vertical sections of it, the enigma becomes real. It is the enigma of divination. Architectural divination is then the tracing of the vestiges of phylogenetic and ontogenetics memory on a piece of paper that are then going to be translated in the constructed world. Architectural divination is a reflection in section. The tracing of a profile is the way of determining the character of a building that acquire its meaning not only through imitation but through the faculty of daydreaming in sectional vision. The phenomenal power of this imaginal faculty, a mirror of architecture, is clearly described by Steve Millhause, in a passage of a short novel.

During three days a year, at the height of summer, the position of the sun and the position of the cliff combine to permit the castle to be reflected in the river. It is said that staring at the reflection one can see inside the castle, which reveals the precise disposition of its arched doorways, high halls and secret chambers, the pattern of hidden stairways, the shadows cast by flagons and bunched of grapes abandoned banquet tables and there high in the tower, the princess wearily, while far below in the deeps of the immaculate reflection, so deep that it is beneath the river itself, a shadow stirs in the corner of the dungeon (Millhause, 1993: 92)

2008-04-10T08:32:00.002-04:00

angelic life

2008-04-09T17:00:00.003-04:00

The Secularization of Wonder

2008-04-08T05:52:00.003-04:00

This is search held under the sign of wonder.

In the present condition of wonder, an excessive wonder, it is unavoidable to think of a new interconnection of the signs of architecture and wonder. This relationship requires an inversion of the conception of wonder. This inversion is an act of translation: a passage that takes places within the elusive and subtle realm of humors. The divine and sublime wonder of a heavy 'eternal-architecture' must be translated in a light and humorous architecture.

Under this sign of a theory full of humors, architecture might regain the lost power of constructing jovial, mercurial, lunatic and saturnal built-environments. Phlegmatic, bloody, melancholic and bilious rooms compose in a humorous balance will recover the wasted wonder of our constructed world. A comic architecture is the solution to the present condition of architecture conceived under the blessing of flippant figment or under a sign of tedious novelty both signs to repudiate.
The analysis of wondrous a humorous building element designed for the Brion Graveyard to balance gravity devised by Carlo Scarpa can help our understanding of the alterity of the architectonic humors. This detail embodying the acme of Scarpa’s humorous architecture is the vertical sliding door marking the access to the Pavilion, of the Locus Solus, placed in the large pool located on the right side of someone entering the grave yard.
This metal and glass door to be open has to be push down in aperture cut in the floor. Under the floor, there is a trench large as the passage, which is connected with the big pool of water. When this amazing door is closed by pulling the glass and metal panel back up, it drips water and water grass all over its shining surfaces. Placed on the outside of the concrete wall enclosing the narrow passage, a humorously intriguing double counterweight assures a noisy but effortlessness vertical movement. The balance of this counterweight is controlled by a constellation of pulley wheels, which make tremendous and discordant sounds every time the rope connected to the inside door begins to move. Glass doors are the negation of wonder since you can see what is beyond it, but in this instance, Scarpa has elaborated a macchina admirabilis. (to be continued)

SYNAESTHESIA or synestesia

2008-04-04T04:46:00.008-04:00

Known to medical science for almost three hundred years synesthesia, a technical expression meaning crossing of the senses (Greek syn = together, and aisthesis = sensation/perception) has been recently confirmed as a legitimate neurological condition. Synesthesia occurs through the associations of two or more physical senses and other sense modalities. Called synesthetes, the individuals with synesthesia "smell" colors, "see" sounds and "feel" tastes. In these cross-modal associations, the elicited sensations are both emotional and noëtic and the phenomenon of synesthesia interfaces virtual perceptions with normal sensory perception, rather than replacing one perceptual mode for another.

Architectural
SYNAESTHESIA

DRAWING WITH HESITATION

A poetic form from drawing eternally on intellectual borders, where drafting tools buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy.

Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, architects should invent a new grimoirre of drawing construction grounded in hesitation.

HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty in doing something. Hesitation must be brought back and surrounded everyone in our confident age of aggressive digital expansion and brutal construction.

“glace et lumier”
the Arimaspians (One-eyed-people)
versus
the Nephalibates (Cloud-dwellers)

MIRROR

2008-04-03T08:35:00.004-04:00

MIRROR

ARCHITECTURE IS THE RESULT OF AN INFINITE MIRRORING OF TRANSLATIONS.

The mystery of architecture is all in the divinatory nature of the mirroring metaphors that rule the acts of translation from the built to the drawn. The translations of buildings in drawings are back-telling phenomena and the translations of drawings in buildings fore-telling phenomena. These mirror-like phenomena, a speculative chiasm, are the hypogean structure, on which the contemporary project of architecture must be erected.

The book of geomater: the movie

2008-03-27T04:27:00.004-04:00

The BOOK of the GEOMATER

The Geomatrician and the re-design of the Tower of Babel

2008-03-14T11:14:00.005-04:00

The Grimoire of Architecture

2008-03-13T11:22:00.003-04:00

The Grimoire of Architecture

Long time ago, architectural drawings were produced in a lesser quantity. It used to be that few lines were necessary to architects to describe future, present or past buildings. Nowadays, we need thousand and thousands of lines to describe a building. This is an incredible and a quite recent condition by which the favorite spell used by Carlo Scarpa in his teaching … nullo dies sine linea (do not let a day elapse without line), should be amplified to … nullo dies sine mille lineae (do not let a day elaps without thousand lines), this latter event that can be done only digitally.
Another fruitful ambiguity ruling an Architectural Grimoire is also clearly embodied in the already mentioned key reference of the “Latin spell”: nullo dies sine linea, since linea can be understood as a line of writing or a line in drawing and to its etymological and ontological origin: linea was the string made of flax (Linum usitatissimum) used by Roman builders to trace buildings .

A Grimoire is a manual of magic and “a book of spells.” The etymology can be traced from the Middle English "gramaire," to the Old French "gramaire,” and ultimately to the Latin: grammatica that comes from Greek. grammatike tekhne “art of letters,” carring the sense of philology, literature and graphic decoration in the broadest sense. The Greeks borrow from the Phoenician alphabetic script and created their own script from them. These Greek characters gave rise to both the Latin and Runic lettering. The Greek called these letters "gramma," from stem of graphein "to draw or write” but gramma also meant pictures. An individual with an understanding of these characters and pictures, and an grasp on how to use them was called "grammatikos." From this notion, it can easily be assumed that Owen Jones was indeed a grammatikos when he put together his great masterpiece, a chromolithographic book entitled “Grammar of Ornament.”
This elucidation of title Grimoire of Architecture is meant to be slightly “glamorous” since “glamour” that literally means the "gift of glamoury" keeps this manual talent craftily in the eyes of architects: eyes that must be brought together with Leon Battista Alberti’s winged eye and the accompanying motto “what next” (quid tum)? Eye
A Scottish derivative of the Old French "gramaire," glamoury” means spell-craft, and its products are tied into the arts of the eyes, and what can be done to and with them. It was particularly tied into the arts of ambiguity and until a not very distant date, Grammar was divided by English writers following the precedent of Latin grammarians into Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and strangely enough the ambiguity is reveal again in the “idea” of Orthography, a proper linguist “standing up” also use by Vitruvius to indicate the “standing up” drawing of a building.

EYE

2008-03-13T07:15:00.004-04:00

Terrible details and mundane beauty:
a knowledge within the practice of everyday life that makes architects cry.

ARCHITECTURE AND WONDER: HYBRID ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS

2008-03-12T01:51:00.007-04:00

Far from yielding less than hard line drawings or photographic renderings, hybrid architectural drawings (HAD) can be viewed in terms of iconic augmentation, since HAD challenge perceptual configuration by relating them to non-perceptual structures. They are real architectural drawings because they mirror architecture in its most powerful condition. Architecture is constantly in itself a result of hybrid factures, i.e., the building of architecture results from amalgams of high technology, low technology, sophisticated and naïve structures, complicated and simple systems, and refined and elemental construction events.

The apparatus ruling these authentic drawings of architecture is based on the possibility of constructing past or future buildings utilizing an interactive optic and haptic thesaurus. HAD result from tactics dealing with contraction and miniaturization, conversion and suppression, yielding more by handling less. In these graphic procedures, the main scope of drawings is to resist the entropy of a normal sum of perception by increasing connotations within an architectural cosmos and by capturing architectural meanings within a network of abbreviated signs, marks and traces.

The main scope of HAD is the graphic capture of a cosmos and the conquest is carried out by a denial of the immediate by favoring the mediate, since it is the glorification of the un-figurative essence of things. The positive power of the material mediation by hybrid signs ascribable to the designative character of architectural is instituted by merging analytical and symbolic properties, amalgamating discreteness, finite numbers, combinatory power, pictograms hieroglyphs and ideograms, all of which epitomizes direct, prudent and temperate inscription of human thoughts.

The use of HAD gives back to architectural graphic thinking the ontological aspect od storytelling, which has been lost because of the present anthological understanding of communication as briefing. HAD represent the eidos and morphe of the building. Unfortunately, in the relationship between drawings and buildings, the predominant tendency is firmly established on the erroneous concept of linguistic representation sanctioning plausibility. The base of this concept is the conviction that constructed buildings should visually appear as in the design drawings prepared by the architects. This conviction results from a paradigm of representation acquiescing within a rationalization of architecture. This process of rationalization, generated under the spell of verisimilitude, formally binds constructive likeness to the external qualities rather than to the internal qualities carried by architects’ graphic products. Developed during the Enlightenment and fostered with heavy propaganda during the Modern Movement, the nefarious paradigm of verisimilar representations has limited the richness of the character and the intensity of the universe of architectural invention. Constructions no longer construe architects’ poetic and amazing understanding of human dwelling. Buildings become expressions of pseudo-artistic obsessions derived from a search for celebrity and individual fame. The debates on the visual congruity between constructions and representations are unfolded under the influence of this preposterous paradigm, refusing to consider that the sign of verisimilitude appertains to a philosophical polarity. The opposite pole of verisimilitude, a plausible construct, is something implausible: wonder. This philosophical polarity recalls and intersects few others philosophical polarities, namely real and fictitious, credible and incredible, authentic and false, rational and irrational. A rediscovery of the role of marveling as embodied in freehand drawings can turn the professionals and the professors of architecture onto a path leading toward a beatific architecture, true to the qualities rather than the quantities embodies in the drawings.

Time and architecture

2008-03-09T20:58:00.000-04:00

The real virtual realty is not to insert images in the time but time in the images.

Not the movement, but the time is the real paradigm of life, that means there is life of images,

Dreaming Architecture

2008-03-09T19:37:00.004-04:00

Storytelling, geometry and architecture

2008-03-09T11:17:00.001-04:00

In the preface to the sixth book of De Architectura, Vitruvius tells one of his numerous stories. It is the story of the philosopher Aristippus (435-366 BCE), who was shipwrecked on the coast of Rhodes. The philosopher saw some geometrical figures drawn in the sand, and cried out to his companions:

"We can hope for the best, for I see the signs of men!"

Recto and Verso

2008-03-07T22:04:00.000-05:00

Architects works with the malleable stuff of perception combining dream stuff and solid stuff.

A zibaldone of stuff

A geomaternal Grimoire

2008-03-07T17:31:00.001-05:00

a pregnant geomater

Now, aqua in buccat. I’ll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater. And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you’d wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexen-gown

(james joyce, finnegan wake)

the vertical begining of an horizontal detail

2008-03-07T11:18:00.000-05:00

Carlo Scarpa's interlocking circles

RECTO VERSO PLAN

2008-03-03T14:10:00.000-05:00

Architects works with the malleable stuff of perception combining dream stuff and solid stuff

ZIBALDONE

2008-03-01T16:21:00.000-05:00

Zibaldone*

By
Marco Frascari
An infraordinary collation of critical readings and note
Excursions in the culinary, historical one and architectural realms for the Vitruvian Exercises.
A short anti-Cartesian meditation on the nature of architectural imagination

*zibaldone Italian, s. m.
1 Victuals prepared with many ingredients | (by extension) bundle of various things; confused mixture of people
2 Personal book, notebook in which notes are annotated without order, news, thoughts
3 Uncertain etymology; according to a hypothesis, it been born as voice of Emilian, an Italian dialect. It origined as a crossing between the Emilia word zibanda 'It. vivanda=cook food' and zabaione ‘a turinese desert made with eggs sugar and Marsala Wine.

=========================================================

Photographs are of no use; a drawing that is useful. Take a photograph and a drawing. I understand the drawing better. A bad photograph is a public act of falsification. The human eye is better than the camera, because is mobile, and a camera though you cannot reproach it for anything regard to … it does not state anything true, everything is false; or else, it is a great photographer who is taking the picture and then he seizes the particularly illuminating angle of view, and it is the artistic instinct of the photographer which is involved instead of colors, pencil or pastel strokes.
Carlo Scarpa quoted by Philippe Duboy, “It was long Ago,” Daidalos, Dec. 15b 1990 p. 8).

THE TEACHING OF DESCRIPTIVE GEOMETRY

2008-03-01T06:16:00.000-05:00

Taught in its historical growth as related to stereometry stereotomy and theories of architectural representation, Descriptive Geometry [DG], is and always will be an exceptional pedagogical instrument. DG fosters an understanding of the necessary junctures between architectural history and theory, tectonics and science of construction, and the multifaceted nature of theories of architectural representation during the learning of the architectural discipline. Properly taught within a curriculum of architectural studies, descriptive geometry will increase and articulate constructive imagination and architectural intelligence. Furthermore a course in DG will make the students aware of how extensive is the shift that is now taking place on the ground of architectural representation, since architects do not build buildings, but draw them. Unfortunately, its presence in the curriculum of architectural school is negligible if not nil.

The plan is to argue for making the discipline of DG formally part of the required architectural curriculum again. However, the future teaching of DG needs to have an entirely novel cognitive approach trying to avoid the failure of being understood as a revival of the old good time architectural drafting procedures but rather to become a disciplinary response to the evolving conditions of the profession and the building industry.

Before getting on with the plea for teaching DG in architectural schools it is necessary to define what it is. So, what is Descriptive Geometry? The problem is that I do not think that a single definition will do it. However, if I present you with few of them so that in the end, DG will be understood if not defined as “well tempered” drafting of architectural planes by the means of multiple lines designating lines of the walls become real architectural representations by crisscrossing over each other.
Coming from an encyclopedia, the first definition of DG, I am offering, indicates the dominant nature of DG for constructing reciprocal translation between two to three dimensions in architectural drawing.

[DG]… is Branch of geometry concerned with the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional objects; it was introduced in 1795 by Gaspard Monge. By means of such representations, geometrical problems in three dimensions may be solved in the plane. [Such problems arise in all branches of engineering.] Modern mechanical drawing and architectural drawing are based on the principles of descriptive geometry.
The second definition pragmatically and intuitively presents the unfolding power of DG.
One simply takes two planes at right angles to each other, one vertical and the other horizontal then projects the figure to be represented orthogonally on these planes, the projections of all edges and vertices being clearly indicated. The projection on the vertical plane is known as the “elevation'”, the other projection is called ``the plan''. Finally, the vertical plane is folded about the line of intersection of the two planes until it also is horizontal. This puts on one flat sheet of paper what we ordinarily visualize in 3D.

The next definition singles out unmistakably the graphicly assisting nature of DG.

Descriptive geometry, that branch of geometry, which treats of the graphic solution of problems involving three dimensions, by means of projections upon auxiliary planes.
Recently the standard definitions of DG have begun to present DG as projective geometry [PG].
Descriptive geometry (noun) – 1. The geometry of properties that remains invariant under projection. Synonyms: projective geometry.
Or as in the case of a biographic entry dedicated to its acknowledged discoverer of it, DG is present as an evolutionary steep toward PG.

Gaspard Monge, Comte de Peluse, b. May 10, 1746, Beaune; d. July 28, 1818, Paris: French mathematician who invented descriptive geometry and pioneered the development of analytical geometry, both of which have since become part of projective geometry.
DG is generally considered an applied mathematical discipline dealing with the practical performance of the process of representation as well as with the analysis and generation of objects in three-dimensional space by methods of drawing. However, this way of defining DG obliterates the fundamental and innate role of this area of knowledge within the field of architecture, a sapient play of lines and graphically elaborated visual thoughts on surfaces. DG is a sapient playing of constructive designations, motivated by certain pleasures in elegance and economy, and its results are well tempered drawings, an essential part of the architectural processes of constructing and construing architectural meaning and edifices.

THE RESUSCITATION OF GEOMATER

2008-03-01T05:54:00.000-05:00

The architectural profession has embraced the use of digital-information without proper critical reflections on the nature of architectural drawings. For architects, drawing has not only an informative substance, but also a formative consequence. Architectural drawings are callimetric technographies that weave constructional thoughts into images.

As wonderful projections of buildings, drawings provide tempered and prudent analogical places where architects perform thought experiments (Mach’s Gedankenexperiment) using graphic analogies.
Architectural drawings are not created as an end in themselves. They are produced to demonstrate the architectural conceiving of the architect to a client, or someone else or to provide the detailed information and deformation necessary to construct a building. Most importantly, architectural drawings are the fundamental scaffold to form an analogical imagination since architecture begins not in thought (as other disciplines have often implied) but in a perceptually delineated relationship between our bodies and the world.
Constructing and construing architectural drawings is a hermeneutical procedure depending on prior knowledge of possibilities since we can only recognize what we make. Drawings are often cited in discussions of architectural invention but they are rarely broken down into their constituent elements as graphic instruments that: (1) connect, (2) reconstruct, and (3) identify phenomena in an analogical mode. The hermeneutics of this research will be an applied form of the kinesthetic intelligence and on the recognition that architectural conjuring is not just a manual skill, but manifestation of a faculty acquired through appropriate techniques of information and deformation combined with visual narrative exercises comparable to what Manfredo Massironi calls hypothetigraphies.

This meditation on drawings is undertaken recognizing that a support or sheet of paper is a three-dimensional object, a fact too easily forgotten, especially when looking at a workstation monitor.. Every sheet has two sides, the front of a work is the recto, and the back is the verso, and something interesting always lurks on the other side, . To consider the recto-verso distinction and the constructive relationship between the two sides of the sheet is a crucial issue for the proposed hermeneutics. By attending to both sides of the drawings and to the transparency and thickness of the paper, it is possible to investigate an essential condition of planning and structuring of architectural surfaces, the idea of section as architectural generator, and depth as more than a mere metaphor.

Geometria Ludica

2008-02-29T07:34:00.000-05:00

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values, the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.
Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi

The Maternal Nature of Architecture

. . .there is nothing more wonderful than a list,
instrument of wondrous hypotyposis,
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

In a marginal sketch for the Palazzo Steri in Palermo, Carlo Scarpa drew a pregnant woman displaying a detail of the main entrance screen in her belly. Speculating about this elegant figure raises Acherontic concerns about the present condition of architecture. Architects have lost their maternal touch and the pregnant images it can yield. Theoreticians of architecture have croseed the river Acheron and forgotten even the possibility of auspicious thinking, while architecture itself has become a commodity administered by critics whose admonishments weigh them down. Their gloomy view of the constructed world precludes the development of conjunctions between wombs and buildings, even in the margin. They have undermined the architect's ability to foresee or foretell the future of their constructions. Scarpa's sketch reminds us of the maternal or material mimesis that is required for this procedure and which is lacking from the contemporary architectural imagination.

--------------------------------

Er Pasticciaccio of Architecture

2008-02-26T06:14:00.000-05:00

Angels angles and dream models

2008-02-25T13:24:00.000-05:00

Dreaming is a foil for an epistemological inquiry into the nature of perception. In the dream we can seek clarification of the ontological since the dream is not modality of the imagination, but its first possibility.

Let me serve you as a thoughtful appetizer an axiomatic statement, an operative principle, which will prepare your mind to the savory main course of the dream architecture.

Architects should never write and talk

about their own architecture
and should never show it
to other architects
or soon to be

architects.

This singular principle should be strictly regulated by the professional organizations. Architects should explain their works only to clients, but never to other people engaged in the same or cognate professions. As intellectuals engaged in a constructive reality, they should talk and write about their theories and practices. but always by using always someone else architecture. Nevertheless, an interesting corollary can be added to this architectural principle of constructive unselfishness. a transmogrifying in the other.

Architects can and must
draw, write and talk

about their own

architectural

dreams.

In other words., they should present their castles built in the air.

Diagrams of Thoughts

2008-02-23T17:11:00.001-05:00

Le Corbusier's and Walter Benjamin cosmopoiesis

Architectural Dreaming

2008-02-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

By dream, daydreaming, revere, slumber, sogno, somnium, sopor and any other dream-related word used in this short philosophical storytelling about the conceiving of architecture, I intend specific moments of dreaming:
first, the hypnogogic dream, that is the dreaming that ushers us in sleeps;
second, the hypnopompic dream, that is the dreaming that takes places as we are awakening;
third, the dreaming that occurs during the day, viz., daydreaming and awake dreaming.
All the other times and kinds of dreams are specific fields for Freudian and Jungian analysis and they do not pertain to the scope of this book. Although, I will mention Freud’s and Jung’s intuitions, they are merely construing comments related to the discussion of how architects conceive their buildings. My story is only concerned with the driving force of the architect in relationship to the Other and not with the infinite problems of analysis of a personality. The consequence is that I will use the word ‘dream’ and its derivative in a loose way from a psychological point of view. This is done intentionally to avoid a mental cloaking.
The aim of this vagueness of language is to avoid the shrouding of the precise notion that dreams imply disciplined work by hiding beyond a psychological screen an irreducible principle of any good work of architecture:
The education and the work of imagination are a discipline just as important as the discipline necessary for the education and the working of a rational mind.
A disciplined imagination is essential in any constructed work, because a pragmatist as Charles Sander Pierce has pointed out
the whole business of ratiocination and all that make us intellectual being is performed in imagination. Many persons, perhaps have the idea that every observation about the human mind is a psychological observation. They might as well regard the sight or sound of an apple dropping from a tree as an astronomical observation. (MS 614:5).
Imagination is not a dead image; the discussion of imagination is not a peripheral issue, but a central one for making a powerful architecture. Articulating the architectural realm of this discipline by identifying it with dreaming is the best way of unraveling the role of this undisciplined discipline for the figuring out of the constructed world .
Freud, Jung and followers have interpreted dreams, but the dream in itself has been largely neglected because dreaming is a foil for an epistemological inquiry into the nature of perception. In the dream we can seek clarification of the ontological since the dream is not modality of the imagination, but its first possibility. In the dream we see the light. This light is the phos that is at the root of Phantasy and the Romans called Imaginatio.
This microstory is about the light of dreaming as Synesius of Cyrene , Pavel Florensky and Charles Sander Pierce have musingly theorized. Their theories are here presented as the delightfully indispensable, but philistinely superfluous ingredients for tossing this salad of architectural musement.
The combination of this trinity of authors, in a work devoted to the discipline of architecture, might seem very peculiar. The thought of an American pragmatist philosopher, a chameleonic Hellenistic Christian Pagan thinker and a mystic heretic Russian Revolutionary mathematician tossed together may generate—at first view—a very unusual salad. Nevertheless, all the three authors have dealt with the power and nature of the imaginal through the path of dreams. The tossing together of their ideas can make the salad quite balanced although intensely tangy. Being a way to an imaginal sapience, this salad can be an appetizer leading to a particular understanding of cognitive imagination useful to architectural designers.
Throughout his book on dreams, De imsommnis, Synesius argues that everyone regardless of status and education can interpret his or her dreams. This is significant modification of imaginative interpretation, since, in antiquity, imagination belonged only to people with certain status. Only kings, high priests or mystics could have the gift of meaningful dreams or the talent of interpreting them. Who was born outside of these preferred groups was not allowed to have and use imagination. Nowadays, in architectural schools and in the profession the status is not especially of class, but still there is the research of the gifted. An evidence of this not-so-hidden belief is the students’ portfolios reviews taking place at the moment of admissions. The reason is the assumption that architectural imagination is not a discipline and cannot be taught. Since, a proper imagination is an imprint not something which can be built. As a consequence of this apodictic assumtion no course deal directly with discipline of imagination as intermediate for proper conceiving of architecture.
Imagining is a central crucial activity in architecture. It takes imagination to inhabit a building as well as to design it. Nevertheless, in commonsensical propensity the bias of discrediting the discipline of imagination has made us dismissive of it as fancy, an immoral and tramp-like capacity which must be repressed or if it happens it is merely a trick, a cunning solution inutile to be decorously taught. Consequently imagination does not have a theoretical or a practical standing in architectural pedagogy. Architectural dreams fall within the same extravagantly cauldron of vaguely and vagrantly imaginative habits. Following the tradition set by Arthemidorus, Synesius classifies dreams under two headings. They are sorted in theorenatic dreams and in allegorical dreams. Cardano in his commentary on Synesius uses two convincing images to explain the difference between these two dreams . The thereomatic dream is like the imprint left by a seal, whereas the allegorical is constructed piece by piece, as mosaic workers compose their images, tessera by tessera. The thereomatic is a stroke marking a presence without mediation, whereas the allegorical dream is always a mediating constructive activity. In the allegoric dream, the image must be built before it could be construe.
Synesius sees dreams, as the highest expression of imagination and his text is an excursus on the superiority of the imaginative life. The analogical domain selected by Synesius to explain the faculty of imagination is the realm of light. This is the light emanating phantastikon pneuma (translated in Latin as spiritus phantasticus). This powerful and luminous spirit irradiates beams of lights that allow the dreams to be seen within the nocturnal theater of sleep. The phantastikon pneuma dwells between the rational and the non-rational worlds. This pneuma is the powerful agent that captures the ediola that wanders within the universe and their construction in the mosaic of a dream metamorphoses our understanding of reality.
Oneiric images show the possibility of transformation. This is a translation that makes visible the invisible. A dream is the first step toward an understanding of the invisible. Father Pavel Florensky sees dreams as something on the threshold joining and separating the visible sphere of the real with the invisible sphere of the imaginal. The dreams are our sensing and making sense of the imaginal since they enact the connection between the visible and the invisible. They are the inverse perspective for the translation of the imaginal into the real.
Florensky sees the dreams of the night as psychological, but the hypnopompic dream, that is the awakening dream, is the one accomplishing the translation from the sphere of the imaginal to the real and vice versa. A dream, in itself, can last a short instant in our time, but the corresponding dreamtime can last from seconds to millennia. During dreaming, the speed of the vector of time can be infinite and its direction can be inverted by moving from the future to the past. This inversion of time is essential for Florensky’s understanding of the role of dreams as icons hanging on the wall enclosing the imaginal. This inversion corresponds to the inverse perspective of the looming icons attached at the iconostasis of the Orthodox churches. Dreams and holy icons partake of the same ontology since they have the same causally inversed time. For Florensky, dreams are comparable holy cons and the holy icons are solidified dreams. Dreams are gates open with the barrier separating the imaginal from the real.
An instance of the causally inversed time of the dream as an opening in wall enclosing the imaginal is given by Florensky by telling the story of a person who dreamed of being active during the French Revolution. Then, after intensely long and complicated adventures, this early morning dreamer finds himself in front of a Revolutionary Court. At the end of the proceedings, being sentenced to death by guillotine and wakes up with the cold of an iron bar of the bed-head pressing the neck (Florensky 1977:28-30). This inverse vector taking place in dreams is a demonstration of how tempus fugit backward in imaginal sphere.
In the dream, time runs, and runs fast, toward the present, inverse from the awake consciousness .
We are brought on the plane of an imaginary space, by which the same event seen from the plane of the real space is seen imaginally as it was taking place in a teleological time. (Florensky 1977:30).
Two are the imagining cogent elements that make, icons reversed vectoriality within the imaginal. Within the Icons, the powerful tools performing the inversion are the inverse perspective and the gold of both background and lumeggiature. The gold correspond to the innate light of the dream and the inverse time to the inverse perspective.
Florensky has dedicated several reflection on the ambiguous geometrical topic of the inverse perspective (Obratnaia Perspektiva). In a remarkable essay, dedicated specifically to the topic and in his lectures at the Vuthcemas, Florensky points out that through the inverse perspective we are looking within the imaginal sphere of human understanding. In this essay Florensky is attempting a demonstration of the existence of the inverse perspective through the so-call perspective mistakes that can be seen in all the representations before the affirmation of the costruzione legittina and in few others after the legitimization of this monocular view took place during the Italian Renaissance.
The geometry of the inverse perspective is utterly visual and tasks directly with light: not the external light. but the internal light. Arthur Zajonic, a physicist interested in quantum optics, points out that two are the light of vision: one exterior and one interior. To explain this duality, he refers to clinical cases of born blind people that after having regained perfect physical sight cannot see anyway what is in front of them. This, as Zajonic proves, is because they do not have the interior light. They see the objects but the do not know how to envision them; there are not images in their mind. He describes that they know an object only when they touch them. They have tactile images, but the simple vision of an object is not enough to build an image of it. To have vision entails much more that having a functioning organ of vision: it is essential to know how to construct the image.
Florensky to demonstrate how the perspective of the costruzione legittima fails to recognize vision as a necessary component of representation analyzes four famous Durer’s incisions demonstrating the mechanisms of the costruzione legittima, in Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirkel vn Richtscheyt ... . One of these illustrations has been abused lately by the many interested in the gaze and other byproducts of the ‘scopic regime’ that is dominating the theater of a visual culture that does not know how to visualize.
The first illustration of the sequence produced by Dürer shows a bedroom where an artist is making a perspectival portrait—probably a legitimated likeness—using a portable perspective machine. A table on which is vertically set a frame containing a glass or a sheet of oily paper constitutes this portable machine. In front of it, an adjustable contrivance holds the draftsman by the nose in position. This machine is a crude empirical rendition of the mathesis of the costruzione legittima that has held by the nose architects for too long.
The second illustration is the one that has been recently misread and misapply by the pseudo-philosophical-gazers. It shows a working table on which a dead-looking lady reveals her nature through a Lucinda to a draftsman who is going to transcribe his view on a piece of paper that has traced on it the same grid of the Lucinda. In this case, the Lucinda is a square frame holding a grid of strings that divides the view in 36 squares. The eye of the draftsman is kept in the required position by a phallic miniature obelisk. In this machine there is already a reference to a coordinate system that will eliminate sight from the site of the perspective drawing.
The third illustration shows a bedroom—a dim room—where an artist is reproducing an urn on a luminous oily sheet using a singular apparatus, an optical pipe connected to a string that is fastened to a ring on the wall. The artist eye is still part of the process. It moves deliberately following the tracing of lines by looking inside the narrow pipe, but is not part of the construction anymore. The real point of construction of the objective vision of the urn is beyond the head of the artist. It is located in ring secured on the wall.
The fourth illustration, the most explicit of the series, shows a very narrow room with a pair of artists and a pair of windows. One window is open and the other is closed. One artist is standing and the other is sitting. At the center is a huge working table holding a lute and a special kind of apparatus where a movable Lucinda has been coupled with a frame holding a drafting sheet. The perspectival string is connected with a ring in the wall and it is kept in tension by a counterweight and on the other side is maneuvered by a wand held by the standing artist. The sitting artist uses an orthogonal coordinated device to record the points of the construction of the image. The point is then marked on the movable panel holding the paper for the drawing. No human, nor divine vision is needed in this perspectival construction. The two folks presented by Dürer are two visually impaired artists making a Braille rendition of a lute. With their machine they can do any other three-dimensional object in a jiffy and probably with fewer distractions of two visually paired artists executing the same task.
A powerful commentary on Dürer’s drawing machines is a canvas done by a Sicilian architect practicing the surrealistic vice. Entitled Colloquio (Conversazione), this oil painting by Maurizio Clerici shows all the drawing machines presented by Dürer sublimated in super-drawing machine located within a perspective box. The characters presented together with the super-drawing machine within the box are a mask and an eye. The eye is the eye of the draftsman and the mask is the object to be represented. The background of the mask is mirror. The presence of the mirror reveals the other side of the mask. The converse side of the mask is visible to us as well as to the sublimate eye of the draftsmen. The incidental presence of the mirror delegitimizes this view of perspective and it projects the potentiality of this super-drawing machine as key to the real of dream.
Although skeptical about creating a “key to dreams” (CP 6.423), Pierce was confident in the power of dreams as sources of meaning for human reasoning.
A meaning is the association of a word with images, its dream exiting power (CP 4.56)
For Pierce, dreams are images devoid of any reference to actuality (3.459), but tools able to call up images from the realm of the imaginal.
The importance of dreams in the philosophy and semiotic of Pierce has been pointed out by Vincent Colapietro.
While take individually these reference to dreams [by Pierce] may seem of slight insignificance, taken together they add up to something of deep, if not obvious, importance. Moreover, when these references are connected with texts stressing the importance [of] imagination for inquiry, they cease to appear incidental. Finally, the fact that these references are found in some of Pierce’s most important early writings as well as in his most brilliant later pieces contributes to our sense that dreams are not peripheral to Pierce’s account of meanings (especially of how meanings emerges and evolves in the context of inquiry).
For Pierce, icons are the most powerful expression of dreams.
Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them ...
So in contemplating a painting there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that is not a thing, the distinction of the real and copy disappears and it is for a moment a pure dream—not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon (Pierce 3.362).
An icon, a “vagueness” is a dream. An icon does not draw any distinction between the self and the other (Pierce 5.75). “It is all one with object” (Pierce 4.572) . Icons as a “magic” representations constitute and substitute any object and it is the perfect tool for our mental motions. Our mental images are icons and working with icons is the most powerful tool for communicating in a constructive way (Pierce 2.270). Imagining and imaging are, iconically speaking, the same activity, since both them make visible the invisible processes of the human mind within its cosmic framework. The phenomenology of images is that of mediation and this is accomplished with what Pierce has labeled Existential Graphs. These are graphic tools, effective icons transcribing facts and “experincing them is as experiencing the things (Pierce 4.86). As conjectural tools Graphs are scribed on the sheet of existence. Dreams and graphs perform the same function since both are lighted by the lume naturale (Pierce 1.80; 5.604). Pierce’s Icons as Florensky’s icons are divinatory process originated in the realm of the imaginal.

VITA BEATA

2008-02-22T07:40:00.000-05:00

VITA BEATA ARCHITECTONICAE

To develop an understanding of the vita beata and its eudemonic nature, it is crucial to carry on a concise recognition of the architectural happiness. In many contemporary buildings the conceiving and nurturing of architectural happiness has been prevented by a regrettably anti-conceptional amalgamation, i.e., the merger of fashionable elations with financial gratifications. This amalgamation has changed the thought process of many architects: they do not think anymore within architecture, but merely think about architecture. The responsibility of thinking “within architecture” has become a depressing activity lately. It seems that the majority of architects have forgotten that, on the one hand, the function of any theory is to make humanity happy and the other hand that architecture plays a major role in setting the necessary “high spirits environment” for developing cognitive and sensual activities that are capable of leading the inhabitants of such environments to the happy facture of life.
In dealing with architectural and human happiness it is necessary, on the one hand, to identify what is intrinsically valuable and is extrinsically valuable in a building and, on the other hand, to make a distinction between constructing useful desires of shared delight or construing desire-fulfillments of personal self-gratification). The built environment within which we live sets an important backdrop to what we are and what we do. It is a thinking and living within architecture that reflects and cast a light on the values existing in the society. However, architectural happiness is not the result of emotional states translated into the built world; it is more about having a building that can be all that it can, i.e., fulfilling human and architectural potentials all together.
Happiness is an ambiguous word. Happiness is hypothetical, a longing, not a categorical, imperative, but it is essential for human life. A natural aspiring to joy, happiness is principally satiation of the intellect. Happiness is a sensation that arises from a certain conscious state, namely when elating and enjoying experiences are captivated and assimilated by both the mind and body. By living in an edifice that foster happiness, its inhabitants can reach their full potential by blooming or flourishing and being able to display the best characteristics of what they can be.
A sustainable happiness can be viewed as the foundational condition for an alternative approach to architectural sustainability that is presently dominated by a narrowly techno-scientific view, an instrumentalized circumstance that considers Green Architecture an innovation without historical and above all without human dimensions. Happily conceived and built edifices make human edification possible and edified human beings can only be involved in cosmospoietic acts and consequently accept only durable and sustainable constructions
Architectural happiness is both retrospective and prospective in character, it is a traveling trough the past, the present, and the future of constructions. These three temporal components of happiness are never alone in their influence upon the feeling of architectural contentment: interrelated and concurrent in their actions, they mutually perform and bring about the edifying potentialities of any well-tempered edifice. Well-tempered buildings must be conceived, build and inhabited happily. Metaphorically speaking, the amalgamation of what it is, what was and what will be, reminds the configuring aspects of a typical Italian conversation around the dinning table where the meal eaten, its planning and its cooking are compared with past and future experiences of planning eating, of other meals. From this point of view, meals and buildings belong to the activity of world-making, a cosmospoietic living totality, where any individual becomes “copula mundi,” i.e. the locus of the connection between mind and matter, spirit and substance, food for thought and for the body.
Following the convention of many medieval texts on theory, at the conclusion of the preface of his De Architectura, Leon Battista Alberti, wishes a joyful grasp of his theory to the reader of the treatise by an imperative directive, lege feliciter “read happy.” This conventional wish makes clear that reading is a journey through the text since the condition of delight is not a condition to reach, but a manner of traveling. For Alberti, “man … is born to be happy.” In the De Iciarchia, following Seneca’s lead, Alberti acknowledges that felicity is an essential condition for humanity that is also the results of architectural virtues. Furthermore, in his allegorical dialogue Profugiorum ab erumna, he indicates how efficient can be a well-conceived and built edifice in shielding individuals from physical and mental unhappiness. The facture of blissful architecture is a crucial activity based on the thinking well about the everyday essence of living well by using the ordinary resources of building well. Alberti is following the Tomistic tradition. The Tomists points out that joy is the response to happiness and results from delectatio in bono, a gladness to be appreciated in both the sensual and intellectual senses. Fostering a good life, joyful architecture is the result of living well in well thought and well built buildings.
If the pursuit of delight in the making and joyful use of buildings is not a futile quest, what are the means or steps by which we should undertake it? Is felicity an actual principle of architectural edification and construction? Are there felicitous buildings, building element or details? In the unfolding of architectural theory and practice what is the difference between the promise of ‘feeling happy’ and the declaration of ‘being happy’? Quite often, in the greedy world of fashionable architecture, the answer is given by substituting the vital question of "What is good?" with an escapist question, "What looks good?” In this case, the tail wags the dog; instead of architecture defining and constraining our satisfaction, our gratification delineates architecture. The result is intellectual emptiness where architectural theory is not seen as virtuous pleasure anymore. Consequentially, the notion that the role of edifices and the acts of building should foster happiness has become an elapsed concern and buildings became unsustainable and do not offer any sustenance to the human mind.
One of the predicaments to appreciate and comprehend felicitous constructions is that in their designs and theoretical statements, the majority of architects tackles the question of architectural happiness indirectly. The only architect who addressed, in an explicit manner, the matter of virtuous pleasure in architecture is Antonio Averlino (1400-1469), an artist that evolved from the physical alchemy of metal casting(the central doors for the old St Peter's Basilica in Rome) to virtuous alchemy of architecture(the Ca’Granda, the Main Hospital of Milan). A strange Neo-Galenic architect, Averlino was so conscious of the ethical importance of implementing virtuous happiness through constructed works that he carefully selected as his professional designation the Greek name of Filarete (Φιλαρετε, Lover of Virtue).
In his architectural treatise, the first one ever wrote in Italian, Filarete indicates that virtuous architects begin construction knowing that they are going to work with the malleable fabric of kinesthetic and visual intelligences and consequently to make our building both livable and edifying. In their ambiguous duality of making and doing, virtues are undeniably essential components of any architectural facture. On the one hand, humility, magnanimity, integrity, fortitude, simplicity and ingenuousness are the edifying virtues to be embodied in the architectural configurations, and on the other hand, prudence and temperance are the cardinal moral standards of architectural edification. For Filarete, all these virtues must be loved and embraced in order for them to become part of our constructed environment. Architects and patrons must appreciate them in an undeniable relation, so they easily can take on a prudent and temperate tone when they project future constructions, knowing well that they have virtues to protect.
Filarete’s Trattato di architettura (1461-1464) is a parable, which begins with a debate initiated meanwhile sitting at a dining table and continues in a sequence of social calls and work outings to the construction sites of a new city named Sforzinda and later to its port Plusiapolis. During the visits, the architect Otinona (anagram of Antonio) tutors a young prince in felicitous architecture and righteous happiness by explaining that architecture sustains a beatific life when the edifices increase the inhabitants’ potential for investing in emotional ability. For virtuous architects and patrons happiness is an ultimate goal in life: a final good combining joy and delight. In architecture, joy is an objective beatitude and results from the making and use of architectural events that make us feel good, whereas delight is a subjective beatitude and results from the intellectual possession of architecture. Identifying the supreme good with an edifying happiness, Otinona strongly asserts that edifices “could grow the soul” of their inhabitants.

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Elinor Ochs, Merav Shohet, “The cultural structuring of mealtime socialization,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 111, 2006, pp. 35-49.
Blum-Kulka, S. Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (1997).
Alberti, Leon Battista, “Della famiglia,” Opere Volgari, vol I, Collana "Scrittori d'Italia" Cecil Grayson ed. Laterza, Bari, 1966p.134
Alberti, Leon Battista, “De Iciarchia,” Opere Volgari, vol II, Collana "Scrittori d'Italia" ed Cecil Grayson Laterza, Bari, 1966
Alberti, Leon Battista, “Profugiorum ab Aerumna libri III”, Opere Volgari, II, Collana "Scrittori d'Italia", a c. di C. Grayson, Laterza, Bari, 1966.
An edifice “cresce l’animo” of its inhabitants, Filarete 1972 1:42.

A WARNING

2008-02-22T03:55:00.000-05:00

I should also forewarn the readers that the structure and the theories presented in my blog are utterly products of a gourmet manner of thinking that, in its critical form, is called a macaronic art. Generally we speak of macaronic language, but its inventor, Teofilo Folengo speaks clearly of macaronic art not of language.
Macaronic thinking is a monstrous way, a constructive dream, that I am using for demonstrating that the architectural discipline is still and will always be sustainable, flexible and fertile. As I already mentioned, this macaronic achievement was done before my meals—my favorite dinner is maccheroni al sugo—thought readers will sample while they have theirs after dinner macaroon.
Macaronic undertakings are necessarily autobiographical, displaying the other as self. Non-macaronic theories are like maccheroni senza sugo (macaroni without sauce) they lack sense, taste and concinnitas. As I recently come to realize, I am macaronic thinker. As the progenitor of all the macaronics, Merlinus Cocaius, (1) and any other macaronic person, I am not a revolutionary. My point of view is incompatible with any great program for reordering of the world and I consider critical thinking beyond politics, religion or morals: it is a critique investing the imaginal basis of our comprehension and representation of the world. The aim of a truly macaronic person is not revolution but demonstration, a permanent presentation of monstrous evidences. The macaronic art is a special manner that allows a successful investigation of the un-empirical, by making analogies resonate in the mind.
Macaronic persons know the power of edible expressions that instead of being simulated or dissimulated can be assimilated by their audience. Digesting these resonating and analogical utterances, , the audience is compelled to carry out phenomenological readings. The importance of macaronic readings lies in a thorough enlightenment of a person’s awareness wonder struck by the possibility of association built in the images.

1 A non-reformed friar, Teofilo Folengo was born in Cipata near Mantua (Italy) on the other side of the Lago Inferiore, in front of Pietole (Andes) the place where Virgil was born. He used the name Merlinus Cocaius to sign his macaronic writing. The most famous among them is the Baldus. The word macaronic have been invented by Folengo himself whose `macaronic' book (Liber Macaronices) was published in 1517. He explains (ed. 2nd. 1521) that the macaronic art is so called from macaroni which are “quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum.”

Pedagogical thinking

2008-02-21T12:57:00.000-05:00

The degradation of our environment is global and we have already caused irreversible damages—finding a remedy to this way of life is of utmost importance. Unfortunately, it is the architectural pursuit of modernity that has been, in part, a direct and indirect cause of many misuses of our planet’s resources. By only paying attention to spaces and forms, many architects share the responsibility for physical and psychological damages caused to our social and physical environment.
In this epoch cursed and blessed with never-ending architectural motions and emotions, I do not want to sound negative and paint a bleak picture. However, surrounded by architects continually making architecture by formalistic displacing, I have to acknowledge that these habits are endangering architectural virtues. Under the bizarre sign of cupidity merged with the fashionable, the practices and theories that dominate both the profession and architectural education, demonstrate more concern for signature-architects than for architecture itself. The consequence of this self-absorbed approach is that our constructed environment is not only becoming out of control, but also becoming out of place. The only solution possible for such distressing displacements is to acknowledge that we do not live in architects’ spaces but in architectural places.
Crucial modern rethinking of the program of architecture has resulted in our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While the present trend towards sustainable architecture has put green water back in the washbasin, a positive and fortunate event, the baby is still missing. The missing baby is the principle of a beatific life, a vita beata, a principle based on the merging of three essential arts: the art of living well, the art of building well and the art of thinking well. This principle of the vita beata is the fundamental and necessary ground to rebuild genial and substantial architecture that is predicated on moral and cultural imagination rather than economic, social and behavioral predictions.
In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon: “You will understand then that the most important part of any work is its beginning.” A School of Architecture is about the beginning—the introduction to merging the art of living well with the art of building well and thinking well. Accordingly, architectural teaching is about the importance of architectural virtues to avoid producing on the one hand designs conceived for pure financial profit, or on the other hand absurd buildings. Students strive for the wonderment that can be made real through elegant design principles embodied in the drawings and models created by architects who know how to respect the real measures of architecture. The teaching should not mythologizing design, but rather it must open a window onto the intense reality of an architectural cultures--complex systems of people, relationships, rules, and habits in which the conceiving and making of buildings are anchored.
The use hybrid methods of documentation and the study of innovative, hybrid forms of representation that both reveal the invisible measures of architecture and animate the visible world of building is the main mandate of architectural pedagogy nowadays.
An architects’ essential work is not always obvious—even to sensitive observers. To only see architects as designers of buildings does make sense, but it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story of what an architect does. Their ability to deal with a sensuously built world becomes evident when we consider the less visible aspects of the practice—do not just consider the obvious visible aspects of designing for a specific client request, but also contemplate the subtle dimensions of architects’ tectonic expressions: architects construct and construe the invisible tone that enlivens the world of buildings. Students must learn that Architects’ unseen work takes place in the planning of appropriate reciprocity between dwellers and dwellings by preserving tectonic heritage and achieving both civil and civic sustainability in their conceiving of buildings. In their studio work the students should be learning how to unfold well thought representations derived from dialogue set between the technological tuning of sound constructions and the fostering of a worthwhile quality of life for the future inhabitants of their buildings.

Architectural Dementia

2008-02-20T16:11:00.000-05:00

The first sign of dementia is usually memory loss and indeed the architectural discipline is suffering of amnesia.
Architectural dementia can loosely be thought of as a progressive form of didactic dementia, where educational losses result in cognitive impairment. Pathologically it has various characteristics, not all of which are necessarily present in every case.
As the disease begins to make an impact in the representational region of the discipline, more partial serious symptoms manifest. This is evident by the impairment of graphic and interpretation abilities, co-ordination skills (aphasia and agnosia respectively), and also by the development of apraxia which affects tasks such as drawings. A general loss of initiative and the ability to demonstrate clear or abstract thinking can lead to objective and subjective observations of symptoms at this stage.
As in the human dementia, the ultimate cause of Architectural Dementia is unknown.

A Chapter of a Book I am on the verge of completing.

2008-02-20T14:48:00.000-05:00

Food Transactions in France, England, Naples and Venice

Sed prius altorium vestrum chiamare bisognat,
o macaronaeam Musae quae funditis artem.
Teofilo Folengo,
"You are what you eat."
Modern American proverb
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony.
Marie-Antoine Carême
Life is a combination of magic and pasta.
Federico Fellini
I … have worked hard to make my readers laugh, but also make them feel they are involved in a through inquiry into, and a worthwhile explication of real life.
Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, p.7

It is a widespread knowledge that Monsieur Descartes did not accept as factual what his senses communicated to his mind because he had a quasi-total mistrust in sensorial information. Nevertheless, when sitting at his breakfast table, being a good Frenchman, he had to make up his mind about his cook’s gastronomic efforts. During his repast, Monsieur Descartes had to put aside his philosophical thinking to consider the omelet and the bread he was eating through a sensorial assessment resulting from the savoring of the meal carefully laid out for him. Monsieur Descartes knew that a good chef prepares food anticipating the multiple effects caused by the meal and catering to a combination of different sensory phenomena and evaluations. Listening to the sizzling and cracklings of fats, paying attention to the fizzing, murmuring, and gurgling of cold and hot liquids and monitoring the change in color shades during browning, glazing and clarifying, cooks make decisions conjecturing the final taste and effect of their work. In other words, they work within a set of non-verbal but all-sensual configurations of procedures that will lead to what the final dish shall “feel,” “look” and “taste.”
On a daily basis, sitting at the dining table, Monsieur Descartes was facing a dilemma. The products of the process of cooking, a process that could be easily recognized as a rational activity as described in recipes and cookbooks, were always subjected to the irrational judgments of a mingling of sensory activities taking place before, during, and after each meal. His solution to this contradiction was the formation of a cloven world: on the one hand, there is the trustable mental reality of res cogitans and on the other hand the dreamlike physical reality of res extensa. Res cogitans cannot be eaten, but res extensa can be discerningly prepared, appreciated, and assimilated. Consequently, Monsieur Descartes, who indeed was a clever individual, hired and fired his chefs of cuisine on the finding generated by an appreciation and estimation of res extensa as embodied in the dish presented on the table rather than on the arid logic of the res cogitans as computed and explicated in cooking instructions and formulas submitted to his attention by the cook. He knew the two domains intertwined on a laid table and that his cautious philosophy could not be practiced at repast time.
Across the English Channel, in the Oxonian countryside, a few years later, a tolerant Esquire named John Locke was facing the same daily breakfast problem. Looking at the reality of his toast and fried egg with pork and beans on the side, this alert reader of Monsieur Descartes had to unravel the same conundrum regarding the qualities of his breakfast to decide the parameters that he was going to use to hire or to sack his cook. In order to solve the problem, Locke had to rely on empirical thinking. Planning not to have any preconceived idea about his breakfast, Locke worked out his decision on the one hand by analyzing the ideas that come from experiencing the toast, the egg, and the pork and beans and on the other hand by looking at the presentation, representation, image, and perception of the concept or notion of an English breakfast. No innate ideas, as the one asserting “mother’s fried-eggs were the best,” feint his judgment, but he knew that through his innate faculty he could perceive, remember, and combine an idea of breakfast that came from without and through desires, ponderings, and wills. Locke worked out a twofold theory of experience: observation may be employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds. The external experience is the source of most of the ideas that individuals have, and, as it depends entirely upon our senses, is called sensation. The internal experience is a source of ideas that wholly reside within the individual and reflective self and it is based on internal sense.
For Locke, the semiosis of a simple idea is the test and standard of reality, whether the mind contributes to our ideas or removes them further from the reality of things. In becoming generic and general, knowledge loses the capability of being in touch with things. However, not all the simple ideas carry with them the same significance for reality; colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and the like are simple ideas that produce those sensations in us. Simple ideas of sensations are embodied in Locke’s breakfast eggs by the qualities of being yellow, white, hot, cold, soft, runny, and so forth; they are the secondary qualities of bodies. Solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number fall also in the Lockian category of simple ideas. These ideas are resemblances of what really exists in the bodies themselves and in the case of eggs using a contemporary terminology these qualities are the lipids, the carbohydrates, the proteins, and the immunoglobulins and they stand for the primary qualities of bodies which indeed are the essential qualities useful for writing the labels of egg-based products and comprehending the pharmaceutical and nutritional values of eggs. Nevertheless, the knowledge of their presence and the comprehension of their functions are completely unnecessary to achieve the gourmet assessment of a perfect fried egg.
Foodstuff is not an abstract category, but for Cartesian dieticians and Lockian food designers, foodstuff is only a set of controlled properties to be listed in specifications and worked out in a speculatively value-efficient production. Nerveless, foodstuff always works within a collective memory, charged with meaning and the resulting dishes are always loaded with cultural weight and social solidity. The Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, an unusual philosopher of the eighteenth century, was interested in the power of imagination and discovered the beginning of humanity in the ontological dimension of stench—a secondary Lockian quality. Being an underpaid university professor of rhetoric, Vico did not have to face the problem of discovering the parameters for firing or hiring a cook since he could not afford one. Nevertheless, very likely he faced a similar dilemma when deciding to buy a pizza from a street vendor. Vico, who had addressed in one of his rhetorical exercises the dining habits of the Romans, knew that the pizza was a product of the Ancient Italic wisdom as demonstrated by philological investigations. “Pizza” derives from Latin pinsa a past participle of the verb pinsére that means to crush, to pound, to flatten. The flattened bread he knew to be excellent given a long tradition of baking that had brought it to perfection, except that it was covered with a tomato sauce (in Neapolitan: pummarolla), a concoction that according to Cartesian Botanists was dangerous because the tomato plant is a berry member of the lethal nightshades, in other words an herbaceous plant of the poisonous Solanaceae family. The suitability of tomatoes as foodstuff was debated for a long time by botanists and by cooks after they had been imported from the New World. Such a plant also struck popular imagination and its genus name Lycopersicon (wolf-peach) was enthused by the folk credence that upon eating a tomato a person will become a werewolf. However, having observed that no one was dying nor changing in wolf after eating tomatoes, the Neapolitans, realistic people used to make their judgments through their senses, in this case, their testing taste had made tomato a staple of their meals. By the end of the 16th century, the Queen of Naples, Maria Carolina, convinced her husband, King Ferdinand IV to allow the pizza, the humble fare of the urban poor, to be prepared in the royal kitchens.
An English cultivator wrote in 1596 about tomatoes, "these love apples are eaten abroad," and described them as “of rank and stinking savor.” Initially brought to Spain from South America, tomato was labeled toma(lt) de los Mores (Moors’ tomato). Altered by a French corruption, due perhaps to suspected aphrodisiac properties, the name becomes pomme d'amour (love apple) and consequently liebesapfel in the German speaking countries. In Italian, the linguistic corruption generated the term pomo d’oro (golden apple), a materic recognition of valuable produce product. In an act expressing his full dissatisfaction with the absolute certainties of the Cartesian method, Vico enjoyed the tomato sauce on his pizza, knowing that he could trust the ancient sapience of the Neapolitan eaters.
Vico's disapproval of the traditional Cartesian system pivots around the point that Cartesians focus on the studies of mathematics and physical sciences while undermining the significance of other facets of human knowledge, namely art, law, history, rhetoric, and language. Vico sees “knowledge making” as mostly consisting of uncertainties as it can be found in the opposition: You say tuh-MAY-toe, I say tuh-MAH-toe. For Vico, "keen perception and vivid language [were] sources of all freshness in a culture as well as the guarantee of its future.” The above mentioned considerations on the history of the changes in its naming makes “tomato” a “pomodoro,” a perfect candidate for the realm of Vico’s imaginative universals. Vico draws the imaginative universals from a common mental language that manifests itself as “vulgar” wisdom (maxims, proverbs, etcetera) that, through different manifestations across the world, expresses the same underlying concepts and views. To Vico, these took the form of primal and primary metaphors, universally recognized and preceding language, that on the one hand caused a configuration of categorizations and on the other led the mind's ability to objectify and operate critically.
To reach a decision over the possible toxicity of tomatoes Vico had to consider that mythos and logos combine in a sensually sentient solution. As he explains in his New Science, the power of imaginative metaphysics is a solution to human knowledge.
Rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.
Vico’s discovery is that the world of senses begins in the periphery of our bodies and moves to inner and higher levels of perception. From there, in analogical manner, the senses rule the way we willfully and wittily act in our world is at the basis for a sated human sapience.
Nowadays, people working in the subject of Artificial Intelligence and “natural stupidity” are aware of the weird and wonderful contradiction of the cloven Cartesian world. They know that it is easier to develop computer-processing systems that can straightforwardly substitute the work of engineers, lawyers, and physicians, but it is an impossible task, plainly, a Sisyphean effort, to develop systems that can replace draftspersons, cooks, gardeners, and architects. Engineers, lawyers and physician base their profession on a sequence of logical steps or protocols worked out by deduction and induction whereas draftspersons, gardeners and architects practice imagination and base their profession on analogies, homologies and demonstrative tropes generated by conjectural thinking that transcends professional boundaries. The solution is to discover how the findings of the “ancient” sapience of cooks, gardeners, and architects were achieved. The tensions is created by a tri-polar structure of different kinds of intelligences. One pole identifies a theoretical intelligence that knows materials and procedures only in an abstract and intangible manner, a second pole corresponds to an experiential intelligence that knows material and procedures in an ostensive and tangible manner and a third pole recognizes a sensual intelligence that knows materials and procedures in an imaginative and bodily manner. The tensions between these three forms of intelligence materialize in sollertia, a cunningly transformational sapience, and a cardinal virtue, which knows how to take advantage of the propensity of things. Sollertia, an act of cunning judgment, is an essential transformational intelligence.
Sollertia, a clever sense, is the cardinal virtue in both practicing and theorizing of construction, cooking and puffing, the fundamental virtue for prudent, resourceful, well-educated and ingenious architects, cooks and alchemists. In the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of his architectural primer, Vitruvius suggests that architecture is a meditated carry out of cunningly constructed objects. Good architecture is possible only when an architect is expert (peritus) and gifted with a quick and cunning intelligence (ingegno mobili sollertiaque) (Vitruvius V, 6, vii). Happily (feliciter) concluding his treatise, in the last paragraph of the last book, the Roman architect generates a remarkable promotional line for the profession by declaring that, during wars, cities can free themselves from enemies by relying on the cunning intelligence of their architects (architectorum sollarties sunt libertae) (Vitruvius X, 16, xii). Sollertia is potentiality. It is the power of one “who can take in a situation at a glance” and can solve problems that could not be forecasted in the plotting of a project.
On the one hand, sollertia is a particular kind of intelligence that is based on a compassed prudence. On the other hand, sollertia requires a quick mind, able of presaging the problems of factures. Sollertia is mobility of thought and caution of execution based on a simultaneous seeing of past, future and present. Such prudential multiple nature of sollertia is essential to any person in producing contrivances that will become significant tools for those who possesses them. Sollertia’s nature is part of the rhetorical configuration used by Vitruvius to define architecture as a prudent profession. The practice of construction (peritia) is based on a reflective labor (meditatio) whereas the theoretical demonstrations are based on craftiness (sollertia). Accordingly, sollertia is a wily knowledge that dwells between slow formulas and quick metaphors. For instance, the architectural Orders are defined by Vitruvius using quick metaphoric references to gendered bodies (virile Doric, matronly Ionic and virginally Corinthian), and by slow formulas defining the proportions existing between the diameter and the other dimensions of the column and the intercolumniation.
Sollertia is also forewarned prudence, a meditated procedure of construction enlightened by flashes of intuition. The mythical Greek architect Daedalus, who invented the glue-paste, the fish-glue (isinglass), the saw, the axe, the drill and the plumb line, was gifted with sollertia since his inventions expedite the work. As a consequence of these inventions and other contraptions devised by the function of sollertia architects can spend more time in constructive thoughts, balanced between slow numerical formulations and swift metaphorical images, between slow appraisals and flashing visions, and between organic metaphors of the artificial and inorganic visions of organisms.
The Roman word sollertia is the exact translation of what the Greeks called “metis,” a form of non-rational "sapience". In the Theogony, Hesiod informs us that Metis is the daughter of the Titans, Okeanos (Oceanus) and Tethys. She is also the first wife of the Olympian god Zeus and mother of the goddess Athena. "I am Prudence," were the first words that Metis spoke to Zeus. In The Library, Apollodorus let us know that Zeus slept with Metis, although she had turned herself into many forms in order to avoid his sexual attentions. When she was pregnant, it was prophesied that Metis would bear children more powerful than Zeus himself, for instance one of them was going to be Expediency. In order to forestall this ominous future event, Zeus assimilated Mètis in himself, by swallowing her when she was in a form of a fly and keeping her within his own belly, “so that this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil.” The sapience of the belly is therefore metis or sollertia, a form of intelligence, using conjectural and oblique knowledge, which anticipates, modifies and influences the outcome of events in difficult and ambiguous circumstances. When abstract generalizations (episteme) are unable to handle a changeable and unpredictable situation, and when the know-how (techne) does not have any grip on a chancy and fluid reality and when practical wisdom, drawn from social practice (phronesis) does not come up with any solution to a mutable and unsure event, it is precisely at that moment that a different dimension of intelligence steps in. It is an intelligence that no rational discourse could teach and no pragmatic set of words can fully contain. It is the knowledge of short cuts, of sagacious envisioning, of perspicuous intervention. This intelligence is even more mutable that the situation it has to cope with, it is discreet, operative, and conjectural: it is the sollertia or metis of architects cooks, and alchemists.
To define metis/sollertia in familiar terms, one could say that it is a form of unspoken knowledge, learned from those events and incidents that make professionals and professors of sapience valuable assets regardless of their technical know-how (techne), of their science (episteme) or of the depth of their social involvement and expertise (phronesis). The flair, the ability and the elegance of such successful professionals and professors derive from this form of an embodied, incarnate, substantial intelligence. An intelligence that is located beyond the realm of metaphysics, which does not institute a quest for perfect models, but rather a search for a sensible and sensitive purposeful transformation of “stuff.”
Sollertia/metis operates between what is humanly perfunctory and what is intricately human. The comprehension of the difference between the desire of imitation and the magic of transformation is the crucial mean of access to the proper use of lines on paper for conjuring up building. The positive power of the material mediation by graphic signs ascribable to the notational character of design is instituted by the merging of analytical and symbolic properties: discreteness, finite numbers, combinatory power, pictograms hieroglyphs and ideograms, all of which epitomizes direct, prudent and temperate inscription of human thoughts on paper. In Architecture, the sapience of transformation of drawing-stuff—graphite, inks, paper, etc. —into drawings actually mirrors the transformation of building-stuff—bricks, stones wood, etc. —into buildings. These transformations, in their essential nature, mirror the nature of the conversion of foodstuff into prepared food which is performed by cooks, by means of cunning plays of sapience in their ovens or on their stovetops. The nature of these culinary and architectural translations is ruled by non-rational sensorial procedures derived from the human orders of res extensa. The ruling force is that of a sensual craftiness used by architects cooks and alchemists through which secondary qualities of colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces-perception, cultural and psychological times, and so forth are connected with one another in manifold ways, coupled with emotional dispositions of mind, feelings, and volitions that cannot be merely computed.
The concept of cognition is associated primarily with "rational" forms of mental activity: reasoning, thinking, and the conscious manipulation of knowledge, deduction, and computation. Conventionally, consciousness is divided into three principal functions: cognition, conation and affection. Conation and affection are mental processes associated, respectively, with volition (motivation, purposes) and emotion (moving subjective experiences). Formal models of cognitive processes are restricted to typically deductive or computational ways of manipulating information, and it is unclear how to model emotional phenomena computationally. Nevertheless, emotion and motivation are no longer considered to be outside the scope of cognitive science; they are considered necessary non-rational presences progressing from a modeling based on explicit, controlled, neoclassical deterministic processes of deduction and computation towards a modeling based on implicit, spontaneous, classical non-deterministic processes of intuition, association and moving experiences.
Imagination, fantasy, vision, memory, perception, representation are all part of a cognitive cluster and the semantics are so entangled—or as Gadda will put it: they are a “gnommero,” (Roman dialect for Italian gomitolo, matassa: a skein)—that in comparison the Gordian knot is a simple love knot. To solve this cognitive tangle by just cutting through it would only give an ambiguous characterization, even if intended to produce a merely operational definition of imagination. I am proposing instead to analyze and describe this tangle, as it exists: an impenetrable unsolvable knotted-snarl of phenomena entangled with their causes, with concomitant causes and with causes of causes. It is essential to acquire a real operative to observe it and to question it, to inquire on its nature, without untangle the “gnommero” of the cognitive cluster but through our finite perception reach an infinite number of relations.
Repeating a metaphor I have use already, imagination can be seen configured as a double-sided coin: we know that there are images on both sides, but we can see only one at the time. On the one side, imagination is the human faculty that keeps together what has been collected by different and discrete perceptions. This faculty has the gist of the Aristotelian koine aesthesis, also known as sensus communis, an internal sum of senses by which the complex configurations of objects such as architectural culinary and alchemic products can really make sense. This sensus communis is not our “commonsense,” but an amalgamation, a combinatory perception, an internal sensing collation bringing together and coordinating the data perceived by the external senses. Dishes, buildings, alchemical products are enjoyed always by a sum of perceptions that allows us to understand the encoded images (visible, aural, tactile, olfactory and gustatory) as accumulating in layers on the world of experience. Any of these layers may be experienced as a primary image gustatory in culinary encounters or visual in architectural or alchemic occurrences but the reality the results are a summa of the totality of the layers. The sensus communis is at the basis of the development of the clinical eye of pre-statistical medicine able to recognize the always-changing configurations of illnesses in diagnostic syndromes.
Sometimes this sensus communis can fail because of improperly and badly fed senses. A few years ago, I was climbing together with a group of students the recently restored Gothic campanile, located at the very edge of the left side of the Sant’Andrea façade in Mantua. During the climbing, I realized that many of those students had assumed that the campanile was of recent construction because of the pungent smell of the quick lime mortar used for re-pointing the bricks. To them, something smelling so strongly new could not be old although the guise was clearly gothic and the regularity of the brick-courses had been clearly deformed by the centuries of aging. This peculiar event demonstrates how the disentangling one perception from the others alters and hampers the metis or prudence in charge of the sensus communis.
The other side of the coin shows imagination as the virtue by which the sensory images of building we have seen and the flavors of food we have tasted can be transmuted in new buildings and dishes by recombining the layers of the sensus communis in a new cosmospoiesis. Imagination can reconstruct something absent, but also can make a re-elaboration of it; everybody can imagine a man riding a horse as well as a centaur. A poetic virtue that makes objects and events memorable and by its power I can remember my grandmother’s roasted chicken. However, this poetic virtue is also the power by which chef Dunan finding himself with no foodstuff in his battlefield pantry generated a novel dish. He rustled the nearby chicken coops and snatched tomatoes and garlic from peasant gardens and after sautéing everything in herbs and olive oil, he refined it with a splash of cognac. By using the cunning power of imagination chef Dunan could figure out the recipe of the poulet a la Marengo to help Napoleon Bonaparte to celebrate his strategic victory of the battle of Marengo during the second Campaign in Italy, on June 14 1800.
Sixty-two years after Bonaparte’s celebration, in a lecture, delivered at the School of Military Engineering at Chapthan, James Fergusson explained that to acquire the knowledge of the true principle of architecture was necessary to study the work of the great chefs of cuisine rather than the work of Pugin and Vitruvius. He pointed out that the imaginative process by which a hut built to shelter an image is refined into a temple and a meetinghouse grows into a cathedral is the same, by which “a boiled neck of mutton can evolve into cotolettes a l’imperiale and a grilled fowl into poulet a la Marengo.”
The double sided nature of imagination operate also within the alchemic modus operandi conceived by Paracelsus, a mercurial alchemist who located the origin of iatrochemistry in the processes of daily cooking and coined the momentous German word einbildungskraft (literally: craft of image-building) to translate the Latin term, imaginatio. Imagination is the cunning power of the mind to reproduce the appearances that are prearranged in intuition, thereby making possible the relationship of representations under the concepts of the understanding. That is, imagination is the indispensable hinge between intuition and understanding and therefore a necessary component of any cognitive knowledge. The synthetic, synoptic character of knowledge could not be realized were it not for the reproduction of images, or representations, accomplished by the imagination. In his alchemic dictionary, following Paracelsus, Martin Roland defines imagination as “astrum in homine” (the star in man), a light that was more powerful than any star.
As artisans of images, when working toward their future products, do architects cooks and alchemists see actually “see” them? The first answer that comes to mind is “no,” since what is designated is still absent; the second answer is “yes,” since they can relate to their future careful constructions precious metals and sophisticated dishes through a long series of intermediary and itersensorial steps. If we were to take preparations, i.e., the marks laid on paper, the foodstuff set on a table or the chemicals in the alembics literally, either by denegation that they really refer to something or by claiming that what is referred is therefore present, we would miss what makes preparations interesting for the sensorial culture of a macaronic thinker that operates within material cosmospoiesis.
The function of cosmospoiesis is the making of actual and possible worlds wherein others can find their place and human life may be envisioned in its varied dimensions. In a cosmospoiesis, deictic images point at remote phenomena and absent features. The deictic images created by alchemists cooks and architects designate a reality; as references they force us to transcend the setting in which we are immersed. In their definition of absence, presence, reality, phenomena, transcendence, visibility, invisibility, opacity and transparence, the gestures performed by alchemists cooks and architects on their tables help us see objects that are intangible, and yet they are completely different from the one performed when the objects are tangible. By using the language of the Second Council of Nicea, where the crucial discussion on the role of images took place, it is possible to say that the majority of architects and probably many chefs and alchemists have shifted from "iconophilia" to "idolatry.” Iconophilia is not love for images but the love for the translations that take place among them, i.e., the conversion from one form of image to another. By contrast, idolatry can be characterized by a morose concentration on the image per se. Thus, the phenomenon of iconoclasm may be defined either as an aggression to idolatry or as an annihilation of iconophilia, indeed two very different conflicts. Because, it is so difficult to resist the temptation inherent in all images, that is, to freeze-frame them, the iconoclast dream is an unmediated access to truth, which operates within a complete absence of images. Nevertheless, if we follow the path of iconophilia, we should, focus even more on the chains of transformations for which each image is only a provisional condition. In other words, architects should be iconophile in all domains at once. They should follow James Fergusson’s advice and study all translations that took place from the images carried by a grilled fowl to the images carried by a poulet a la Marengo and iconocastily speaking they then should proceed to destroy the frozen images of the idols nibbled or gobbled down by architectural gluttons.
A demonstration of the idolatrizing exploitation of images is in the title of an article published in the Real Estate section of a well-known newspaper: “Appling to the crowds: Model Homes project perfection right down to the fake food.” In the article, it is described how these model-homes, after they have been used to promote the selling of housing, have a special market of their own. They are sold as they have been displayed. Some individuals buy with all the trimmings included, i.e. all objects paraded in them, furniture, curtains, pictures on the wall, even the fake food displayed on the dishes set on the dining table or inside the refrigerator. In buying these houses in their commercial totality, people buy images not the buildings. These model-homes have become fake idols that help to hide the dominant condition that, in architecture, the merging of the art of living well with the arts of building well and eating well is not happening any longer. The architecture of the houses built in the new suburban divisions does not give per se images, consequently the model-homes in their carefully selected generic qualities becomes the only genuine image available to the perspective buyers and consequently it is bought not only mentally but physically. The content of these model-homes are then talismans, complete and completing elements that can give to the future owners, what many of humorless and memory-less houses cannot give anymore. Lacking the depth of both emotional and sensual images, these new homes have been embodied artificially and temporally within a cosmospoiesis via a cosmetic coalescence of sensibility and sensitivity by decorators specialized in designing model homes.
Lunch at the Gaffaro
The uneasy cloven arrangement governing the correlation between sensible procedures and sensitive objects was the subject of reoccurring debates taking place between Professor Carlo Scarpa and the court of his assistants at a table of the Trattoria del Gaffaro. This was a restaurant not far away from the IUAV (ISTITUTO UNIVERSITARIO ARCHITETTURA VENEZIA) at the Tolentini in Venice, where, during the days devoted to the review of student work for Scarpa’s design courses, the Professore and his assistants enjoyed their lunch. During the meal, delving into the problems of architecture as a cloven world bound by design and construction a recurrent dialogue was generated by some comment or recollection over the taste or the making of the common victuals that Scarpa autocratly had selected for everybody. The resulting move was always a reconstruction of an aphorism coined by the French architect Auguste Perret. Nobody could ever remember it exactly; it was always necessary to launch a laborious process of reconstruction of the original lines of the aphorism by coalescing reminiscence and reasoning. The rebuilding of the phrase invariably turned up something sounding like: “You can become an engineer, but you are born architect.” The main step in the reconstruction was the recalling that Perret’s aphorism was an acknowledged paraphrase of another well-known adage coined by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French politician with a gastronomic penchant. Brillat-Savarin’s adage states: “you can become a cook, but you are born a rotissier” (a chef specialized in roasting meat) and it was published in his Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, a collection of gastronomical ruminations written at the end of the first quarter of the19th century. Having reached the restatement of the two aphorisms, Scarpa’s discussion with his assistants lingered in a distillation of the idea embodied in the aphorisms. The ending of the conversation was a condemning of the reliance of cooks-engineers on formulas and recipes belonging to the dry disciplined realm of the res cogitans. In contrast, rotissiers-architects were eulogized because their ways of thinking were based on the sensuous surrounding of crucial procedures inabling them to recognize when a piece of meat is properly cooked or a building has been properly conceived; a process—everybody at the table agreed—becoming altogether too rare.
The connection between res cogitans and res extensa is given through the mysterious dominion of memory. The realities of materials and mind interact through emotional traces that generate sensual images. Scarpa’s table-conversation with his cohort in concert with the related memory exercises invariably condemned the foundations of an artificially transcendental objectivity impossibly unbiased that is searched within a construction of a continual teleological pursuit for subjectivity. By including in their lunch speculations dealing with the res extensa the bathetic collision of high and low registers Scarpa and his assistants have set the empirical self-based on humor as the source of architectural imagination. At the dessert, the reached conclusion was that architects who cannot be aware of the sensual and transcendental relationship between gastronomic provisions and gourmet food consumption cannot be aware of and therefore value the quintessential sensual and rational correlations characterizing the undisciplined discipline of architecture. Non-gourmet architects would never be sympathetic to the epicurean non-Cartesian connection existing between the arts of living and eating well with the arts of cooking and building well.
Eating and communal drinking are the social events that combines private, intimate gregarious experiences and maneuvers between ritual solemnity and carnivalesque. Scarpa and assistants were natural macaronic thinkers who by jovially eating maccheroni saltati in padella and mercurially utilizing the tripartite nature of the macaronic art to destabilize the false sublimity of objective finitude within the framework of a continual teleological quest for subjective infinity, and the result was a palatable theory of architecture. As Folengo theorized in the Chaos del Triperuno (Chaos of three-per-one), a curiously and highly enigmatical work, only tripartite amalgams fully free consciousness from the tyranny of its own condition and its own myth. Parodic-transvestiting forms flourish under these conditions, and only in this milieu, they are capable of being elevated to completely new ideological heights. The Chaos del Triperuno is a strange farrago of prose and verse, Latin, Italian, and Macaronic, abounding in anagrams and other fanciful devices, with passages of remarkable beauty interspersed here and there. In it, Folengo claims that his verses are sonorous and terse in expounding of his ontological thinking. In their sonorous and terse recollection and speculations, the group sitting around the table at the Gaffaro was practicing the powerfully parodic labor of macaronic imagination grounded in homological constructs. In working out his semiotic doctrine, Charles Sander Pierce, a pragmatic philosopher addicted to tripartite signs structures, deals with the inferential and iconic creation of images, an act that brings together realities more or less remote. Pierce’s classification of inferential reasoning differs from most the taxonomies listing the modes of reasoning. He adds a novel type of inference, “abduction,” to the traditional typology of induction and deduction. Abduction is concerned with the reasoning necessary to adopt hypotheses or new ideas. It refers to “all the operations by which theories and concepts are engendered.” The structure of this process of reasoning originates in surprise, i.e. wonder.
The surprising fact “C” is observed. But if “A” were true, “C” would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that “A” is true.
Deductive reasoning is based on the application of a general rule (B is C) to a particular case (A is B) to obtain a result (A is C). Inductive reasoning is the inference of a general rule (B is A) to form the specific cases (A’s are B’s) and results (A’s are B’s). Abductive reasoning is the inference of a case (An is Bn) from a rule and a result (A is C). From this point of view, abduction is a highly productive procedure. New understandings are continually generated. A rotisseur –the “born rotisseur” understands when a piece of meat is perfectly cooked (a case) by inference from rule and results. That is a culinary practice of abduction.
Pierce describes abduction as “the spontaneous conjecture of instinctive reason.” The most important contribution of abduction is economic in nature; its task is to formulate hypotheses based on the tangible dimension of facts, things that can also be the bases for the semiotic shaping of them into artifacts. In a process of “transformation,” the tactile icon of the fact is embodied in the artifact, such as the enjoyment of eating a successful dish, or dwelling in a thriving building. The task of abduction is to initiate the process of transformation. Deductive and inductive inferences—that is, visual inferences—do not help if they are not guided by a tasteful tactically generated inference, i.e., abduction. “Figuring image” and “figured image” are unified in the acts of eating, building and drawing. The pleasures of taste are naturally disposed before reflection.
To have a taste, supposes something more than merely to perceive, and to discern with accuracy, the beauty of any work or object. This beauty must be felt, as well as perceived; the mind must be touched and affected by it in a lively and sensible manner.
In theorizing beauty and being just, Elaine Scarry delineates how the process of figuring out beauty results from a complex synesthetic process:
A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm of touch (as when the seen faces incites an ache of longing in the hand, and the hand then presses pencil to paper), which may in turn reappear in a second visual event the finished drawing. The crisscrossing of senses my happen in any direction. Wittgenstein speaks not only of beautiful visual events prompting motions in the hand but, elsewhere, about heard music that later prompts a ghostly sub-anatomical event in his teeth and gums. So, too, an act of touch my reproduce itself as an acoustical event or even an abstract idea, the way whenever Augustine touches something smooth, he begins to think of music and of God.
Deduction and induction aid in theorization, but abduction helps to produce within practice, the practice of beauty. Abduction is an inference based on signs interpreted by the “labile body” in search of taste (sapor) seeking pleasure in discerning and obtaining a sapiental synesthesia.
The Gourmet Notion

Erected on an “architectural gourmet notion” not on “design gluttony,” architecture is “a gastronomic craft” that when carefully translated in well-constructed artifacts promotes a beatific life. The homological connection between gastronomy and architecture set by Scarpa and his companions is a long-standing one, and it keeps surfing in the architectural culture. The Spanish medieval polygraph, Isidor of Seville, in his etymological and truly macaronic studies, postulates the origin of architecture in the dining hall, rather than in the original hut.
The ancients used the word aedes, i.e., dwelling in reference to any edifice. Some think that this word was derived from a form of the term for 'eating' (edendo), citing by way of example a line from Plautus: 'If I had invited you home (in aedem) for lunch.' Hence, we also have the word 'edifice' because originally a building was made for eating (ad edendum factum).
In his Macaronic Book (Liber Macaronices), Teofilo Folengo explains that the macaronic art is so called because of macaroni, which are an ancient savory foodstuff “bound together with flour, cheese and butter, which is fat, coarse, and rustic (quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum rude, et rusticanum)”. A non-reformed friar, Teofilo Folengo—secular name Gerolamo—was born in 1491—1496 for a few scholars—in Cipata (Cipada) a hamlet near Mantova (Italy) and died in Campanese near Bassano del Grappa in 1544. He used the pen name Merlin Cocai or in Latin spelling Merlinus Cocaius and later a second pen name: Limerno (anagram of Merlino) Pitocco (Destitute).
In the modern history of western literature, macaronic writers were never fully acknowledged even though they have been a constant presence through the centuries. The present downbeat view of macaronic works began with the dismissal of their intellectual fruitfulness began during the Enlightenment. Voltaire could not stand the macaronic and in his Dictionnarie Philosophique he wrote:
De ce mélange monstrueux naquit le style macaronique: c’est le chef-d’oeuvre de la barbarie. Cette espèce d’éloquence, digne des Hurons et des Iroquois, s’est maintenue jusque sous Louis XIII.
Macaronic also has an association with the eighteenth-century London dandies who were called macaronis because they were fond of Italian food and culture, that they experienced it during the Grand Tour. In England, as far back as the 17th Century, Peers of the Realm and members of the wealthy families would go on long trips to travel the European continent. The journey was called the "Grand Tour," and it was an expected part of a young gentleman's education. The Grand Tour could last for several years, and was made by horse-drawn coach. Major continental cities, including Paris, Florence, Venice, etcetera and historic landmarks were stops on the route. The very final destination was always Rome, the center for the European art and culture since the Renaissance. When in Rome, the Grand Tour participants would socialize with their peers and scholars, and enroll in courses of academic study to pursue a classical education. A cynical connotation of the term related to the English dandies immigrated to the Colonies in North America. It was common practice to use the slang phrase 'that's macaroni' to describe anything of the most up-to-date of fashions with a satiric nuance. A traditional song of the American Revolution contains the macaronic associated to the dandy sense. :
"Yankee Doodle went to town, / Riding on a pony, / Stuck a feather in his hat, / And called it macaroni."
A macaroon is a chewy cookie made with a mix of sugar, egg whites, and almond paste, comes from French macaroon and derives from Italian maccarone, "a trodden mixture." Possibly, the Italian verb maccare derives from makar, Greek for "blessed," but also indicating by metonymy a trodden holy piece of bread to be used in religious events. In classical Greek, the term makar was associated with the immortal gods. Kari means fate or death, but with the negative prefix ma, the word means being deathless, no longer subject to fate, a condition both inaccessible and longed for by mortals. It was because of their immortality that the gods, the hoi Makarioi, were the blessed ones; the related adjective makarios is generally applied to humans by meaning a happy fellow. It is also used as first name and to get out of this cultural gnommero and to bring back the issue, in a Gaddian encyclopedic fashion, to its crucial making of macaroni. It delightful to recall that San Macarios of Alexandria, called the Younger was himself a confectioner and strange destiny he has been sorted by the Church to be the saint patron of pastry chefs.
Gadda uses the term gnocchi, a synonym for macaroni, with a precise theoretical meaning in his frustrated attempt to philosophical writing. A view of the world as a system of systems, a disharmony establish before hand, had been expounded in a notebook found among Gadda’s philosophical papers and published after his death under the title Medidazione Milanese. Using a macaronic salad of his favorite philosophers, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, as a starting point, Gadda had constructed a “discourse on method” where every element of a system contains within it another system; each individual system in turn is linked to a genealogy of systems. A change in any particular element results in a breakdown of the whole and the result is hundreds and hundreds of macaroni or gnocchi in cosmic pot connected by strings of cheese.
… like a lump of dough (a dumpling, a gnocco ), as a postal package. I stated already that all “gnocchi” are chunks of dough, buttery and stringy because of the cheese and the sauce, not clean and neat. They are stuck together by glutinous strings and a “gnocco” drags a hundred more, and every one of those hundred sticks to a thousand, and every one of those thousand to a million, and so on ad infinitum. Much more so then of what happens with cherries, which, according to the experts, one pull another into one’s mouth.
For Gadda, the conceptual nature of a “gnocco” is a facture, a “lump,” which is anatomized in a set of multifarious working relationships by the structurally parallel complexity of the sensory organ. Houses, built lupms, are the results of such infinitely entangled synesthetic relationships.
The structural complexity of the sensory organ, having such a powerful influence over the mythical learning processes of our brain, is the reason compelling the ancients to imagine whole entities, whereas there are only relationships in the act of happening [relazioni in atto], like we say or think ‘clinic’ or ‘laboratory’ or ‘factory’ like objects (postal packages) where there is noting except for a weave of interacting relationships. A house is not a house (postal package): it is instead a lump or a converging of complexes of interactions required by the inhabiting, by the reposing, by the taking shelter, by the writing – by the financial possibility to build the house itself (knot of financial relations)--by the no-earthquake--by the relations of the hardening mortar, by the relations between iron, bricks, technique etc. etc. (millions of billions of converging relations)…
… So it is said of the sensory organ: complex and rich of multi-colored aspects, a 500 pages volume would not suffice to describe it. But this does not mean that it is a specific “gift” given by nature or by God: it is an amount of systems of relations and its complexity will only tell us that it is a system of systems eighteen times over (that is to the eighteenth power) rather then six times over (that is to the sixth power)…
Gadda’s philosophical use of “gnocchi” jumbled with chese filaments and Folengo’s metaphorical definition of macaroni as belly-filling lumps made of flour, cheese and butter, correlates to the essential tectonic nature of architecture, a mixture of different frame of minds belonging to different and sometimes opposite realms.
Architecture and macaronic art share a comparable jumble of tectonic technologies. Buildings are erected using a tripartite mix of technologies: low technologies as mortar bricks and snap-lines are combined with high technologies such as steel beams and laser beams levels, while hybrid technologies bringing together organic and inorganic materials and passive and active actions. However, a clarification is necessary before furthering this theoretical claim. In macaronic art, the mix has been always considered between two opposite groups of ingredients, high, erudite, polite and sophisticated components together with rude rough and crude ones. In the case of Merlin Cocai’s macaronic writings, two are generally the recognized ingredients: sophisticated Latin language and unrefined Mantuan dialect. However, as in the case of the macaroni, three are the necessary ingredients (butter, flower, cheese). Cocai’s macaronic tongue is baseden on a sophistically learned Latin idiom combined together with unsophisticated quotidian Mantuan slang to which he had also added a leavening Italian language. This latter is an artificially tongue derived from of Latin and Greek and others linguistic leftover transcendentally recycled in a tangy Florentine vernacular chowder. This tripartite essence transforms the usual opposition between high and low with the introduction of a tertium comparationis that advocates an understanding of hybrids, of mixed bodies, a comparative knowledge and compound sapience in which any practice of purification is regarded with suspicion. Macaronic art always calls for a new utterly hybrid form of sapience.
The idea of a tertium comparationis and the law of three are at the foundation of any real culinary understanding. For instance, Lino Turrini, a renown and exceptional chef presiding over a restaurant in Dosolo, a small settlement not far away from Mantua, states that the culinary law of the three means to prepare a dish by combining two main contrasting ingredients to which is added a third one that works as stimulator of the taste. The sensually powerful illustration of the phenomena of the rule of three, given by Turrini, is the organolettic combination of three ingredients of the pasta with tomato sauce (pasta al pomodoro) that must always be served with excellent aged Parmesan cheese grated on top of it. Then to prove his point and to complete his demonstration in a sensually empiric confirmation, he suggests to try eating the pasta al pomodoro without the cheese to discover how right he is about respecting the law of three ingredients is essential in the making of a dish. Of course, Turrini’s reflection on the power of cheese as a tertium comparationis was already in the Italian vernacular perception as in the locution “come il cacio sui maccheroni” (as the cheese on the macaroni) that is generally used to denote achieved perfection.
The law of three applies also to architecture; a great illustration of its power is the makeup of Scarpa’s architecture. In Scarpa’s constructions, the law of three amalgamates Viennese Jugendstil (the tomato sauce) with contrasting Italian Rationalism (drained pasta) tossed together with his personal interpretations of Venetian building technology (the cheese on the macaroni) to stimulate the “architectural taste.” In the mixing and re-mixing of objects and techniques of making, the law of three extracts a broad range of processes of signification by combining in polyphonic presences of robust, vulgar and magnificent traditions or avant-gardes.
The third as it manifest in architecture cooking is an alchemical cathalist, an hybrid being that both separates and fuses--that both disturbs and mediates, thus being, as it were, both excluded by and included within the established order. This quality allows us to speak of the figure and figuration of the third.
Triadic group processes are present in many twentieth century discourses relating presenting concepts of "third space" and cultural hybridity. The range extends from Georg Simmel's sociological arithmetic and psychoanalysis as a theory of affective triangulation to Niklas Luhmann, and Michel Serres’ contemporary theories of third quantities that undermine prevalent dichotomous schemas for drawing distinctions and shaping orders; and from Wittengenstein's three-partite theory of language-plays, to the already mentioned triadomania of Peirce's semiotics take.
From the Christian dogma of the Trinity to Neo-Platonist triads that took on renewed significance in the Renaissance, the semantic systems of old European dualism were always accompanied by a highly elaborated triadic metaphysics. Within triadic ruling imagery, the third “ingredient” was usually chosen to overcome the world's division and to restore a unity understood as an uncritically generated arche, but in Folengo’s Treperuno the rule of tree or better the “sign of the three” unfolds under the effect of polyvalence of his polyglossing manifestations. They are not linguistic medleys produced by polyglot but, rather, expressions that combine and supersede other conventional systems of meaning. Macaronic thinking, ¬ accentuating the inconsistency existing between the inanities of items, materials and objects--in a word: of stuff--their possible artful uses, creates always potentially generative representations. By coalescing the ethereal sublime with rational thinking and low mockery, macaronic production transmutes “irony” from being merely a rhetorical trope to be a metaphysical implement for transcending from the worldly finite to the spiritually infinite. By presupposing a simultaneous comprehension and all-embracing use of the three ingredients (transcendent, wise and contempt), macaronic ostention becomes an intellectual practice that creates unexpected ways of thinking. Convivially sitting at the table of the trattoria del Gaffaro, Scarpa and his associates playing between languistic, culinary, and architectural theory were abiding by the rules of macaronic ostention not only as a modus operandi to elaborate a pleasant conversation, but also as a way of mulling over on the makeup of architecture. They were carrying out the essential task of macaronic thinkers that is a vigilant identification and extirpation of fraud that grows most of the times into the most inner bowels of thought.
From the point of view of the macaronic art, the preparation and use of food and edifices represents our humanity and it defines us. Architecture and cuisine encompass love, friendship and family; these two arts mark rituals, celebrations and solace, and they also articulate hopes, dreams and aspirations. The analogical merger of victuals and edifices, although attempted several times, is not getting the deserved consideration; many have acknowledge its cultural importance, but these comparison have always disapperad after short-lived appreciation of their significance. However, the solution of proposed analogy between the two is not a simple comparison between the processes of thinking and by exploiting similarities that take place within the two disciplines. Nowadays, architects have become a class of isolated thinkers who are no longer immersed in the edifying world of construction. Architects are engaged in all sorts of interactions, but most of them seem to have lost the capability of crossing over the rigid theoretical boundaries they have erected in their continuous attempt to make architecture a “respectable” profession. The majority of them have forgotten that respectability does not come from a philistine refusal of the ordinariness of architectural poiesis and they have embraced the narcissistic desire of “unique design,” as their chance to professional accomplishment.
Primarily architectural poiesis results from a concentration on the everyday and commonplace. It works as a magnifying glass: it takes the sunlight and focuses it to a single, fine, burning point. This burning and dangerous site is the igniting point of architectural poiesis. The profession is not lacking skills, these days, but a proper intellectual ambition is sadly missing. Few architects seem willing to risk disappointment: a precondition for anything of real value. Today, so much architecture of the pseudo-avant-garde is so boringly and suffocatingly safe and architectural offices have become halls of mirrors, where architects and their clients can constantly admire themselves. The metaphorical and ironic magnifying glasses lays dusty and forgotten in the storage room thinking that the zooming power of the computer screen can automatically can find anything except that it cannot be used to generate a burning point to ignite the much needed poiesis.

Sollertia Architectonica

2008-02-20T11:07:00.000-05:00

By Marco Frascari.
Monday, October 29, 2001
The role of architects is to make visible the invisible by using a clever technique or better by proceeding in a cunning way. The key element of architects’ efforts is not the construction of buildings, but it is rather the elaboration of drawings and models as operative predictions of future edifices and their processes of construction. One of the chief aspects of any architectural practice is the architect’s elaboration of the built milieu performed at a distance and generally through the power of visual representations. This essential characteristic of architectural work assumes that we have to sense how architects describe buildings if we are to realize how clever drawings might help architects in designing buildings.
To be cunning is a virtue and a morally guided cunningness must be loved and embraced in order for architects to be part of our constructed environment. Architects must appreciate the virtue of cunningness in an undeniable reality, since it essential that in their professional work they must develop effortlessly tactics of construction out of their constructs when they draw lines on paper, knowing well that they have architectural virtues to guard.
Architects inaugurate constructed representation in edifices by elaborating graphic representations. A representation is something that stands for something else; it is a cunning procedure; buildings are built in virtue of tactical representations. A representational status is a matter of how physical entities are used, and more specifically it is not a matter of actual causation, information, specifications or code relations with intentional object building. Nowadays, in the majority of architectural offices, a myriad of drawings and models are brought into being in digital formats using Computer-Aided-Design (CAD), Building Information Management (BIM) and other visual media tools. Digital media have absolutely transmogrified the way by which many architects accomplish the daily activities of design. These changes have progressed to be in control of both the mundane and sacred attitudes of practice and teaching architectural design have become based on strategies rather then on tactics. Making architecture the result of devices or strategies of power rather then the result of tactics of resistance aiming to a merging of three arts, the arts of living well, the building well and thinking well. The understanding these new tactic of resistance are essential to avoid that a culture which was for long time cunningly oral and then essentially artfully chirographic can become slave to controlling strategies
Unquestionably, on the one hand digital systems have made the daily inconsequential architectural procedures strategically efficient, but on the other hand, digital systems have been of little benefit—if not of hindrance—in conditions where architectural tactics have to be conjectural and speculative in nature, as during the multiple beginnings which mark any authentic process of architectural design. The countless failed efforts carried out to inaugurate CAD and other cyber drafting procedures into the critical aspects of architectural design reveal the anachronisms existing between the demands of a virtuous design and the a-critical configuration of the digital media available tools. The production of many components, the visualization and simulation of environmental performance are now evaluated and judged by the computer: complex 3D models of whole buildings, functional locations, products costs and quantities evaluations are all read from virtual modeling.
As information age technology continues to evolve, it implements increasingly complex tasks with less and less thought and input from the user. Currently, we are assisted by strategic electronic agents, wizards’ templates and guides which do not any longer limit themselves to advise us on how to do the thing we want to do, they just do it, sometimes without our asking, often without our knowing, usually without our understanding. As an expected consequence of these support devices, the use of digital processing turns out to be easier, digital applications become more predictable. However, an unforeseen domino effect of this process is that we become less involved. De-skilled and morally less implicated our capacity for ethical judgment is consequently delegated to the cyber black boxes of these agents, wizards and guides, mindless genies evoked by a light stroke of the keyboard or the click of the mouse ready to produce whatever we whish! No matter how, or why.
In the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of his architectural primer, Vitruvius suggests that construction were a meditated carry out of buildings. Then he advances the idea that theory is a graphic illustration devised to explain cunningly constructed objects. Sollertia, an act of cunning judgement, is an essential intellectual procedure to build any construction.
Sollertia, a clever sense, is the cardinal virtue in both practicing and theorizing of architecture. Sollertia is the fundamental virtue for a prudent, resourceful, well-educated and ingenious architect. Good architecture is possible only when an architect is expert (peritus) and gifted with a quick and dexterous intelligence (ingegno mobili sollertiaque) (Vitruvius V,6,vii). Happily (feliciter) concluding his treatise, in the last book, the Roman writer generates a remarkable propaganda line for the profession. In the last paragraph of the book, Vitruvius declares that, during wars, cities can free themselves from enemies by relying on the cunning intelligence of their architects (architectorum sollarties sunt|libertae) (Vitruvius X, 16,xii).
Sollertia is the Roman translation of what the Greeks called metis. This quick-wit is a crucial mental operation for any compassed architect who hurries up slowly. Aldo Manuzio, the great publisher of the late Venetian Renaissance, printed his books under the logo of an ancient Latin saying: FESTINA LENTE, hurry up slowly. To mark his productions in a meaningful way Manuzio used an emblem taken from an illustration of the Hypnerotomachia Polifili, (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream), printed in Venice in 1499. This is the most mysterious book printed by the Venetian publisher, a book that reads very slowly but its narrative develops at a dreamlike speed.
A sinuous dolphin quivering around a heavy anchor composes the Hypnerotomachia Polifili emblem. The books published in Manuzio’s printing shop are characterized by a slow elaboration anchored to a tradition of printing accuracy while their reading will quickly stimulate quivering thoughts.
The book art of Manuzio proves the discovery of slowness is essential for the discovery of speed. To discover speed, it is necessary to discover slowness. Unless they are reached through a slow elaboration, human outcomes turn out to be utterly convulsive efforts.
The objects equipped with speed can only derive from slow and meditated construction. Meditated construction is a building event quickly executed while the construction of an object for speed is slowly executed. This polarity of execution is to be found in the measuring unit that switches from spatial to temporal condition.
We can represent speed metaphorically through the swift movements of the hands of a mason building a brick vault destined to be eternal, while we can represent slow execution with the slow construction of a racing car which will allow us to speedily move from one point to another. Both processes yield a saving of time, since they give us time to loose. On the one hand, no longer we have to daily build dwelling space because our dwelling is now eternally lasting and so we have time to move around as much as we want. On the other hand, our moving from one place another is nowadays nearly immediate as a result; we can spend our time contemplating the eternity of a swiftly built brick vault.
Sollertia is mobility of thought and caution of execution or seeing in the past and in the future at the same time. This multiple dual nature of sollertia is essential to any craftsperson in producing contrivances that will become significant attributes for those who possesses them.
Sollertia is potentiality. It is the power of one “who can take in a situation at a glance” and can solve problems could not be forecast in the plotting of a project. Sollertia’s bipolar nature is part of the rhetorical chiasm artfully used by Vitruvius to define architecture as a prudent profession. The practice of construction is based on a reflective (meditatio) labor whereas the theoretical demonstrations are based on craftiness (sollertia).
On the one hand, sollertia is a particular kind of intelligence that is based on a compassed prudence. On the other hand, sollertia requires a quick mind, able of presaging the problems of artful constructions. Accordingly, sollertia is a wily knowledge that dwells between slow formulas and quick metaphors. For instance, in Classical Architecture, the Orders are defined by metaphoric references to female and male bodies and by formulas defining the proportions existing between the diameter and the other dimensions of the column and the intercolumnation. Sollertia is forewarned prudence, a meditated procedure of construction enlightened by flashes of intuition.
The mythicalDaedalus is one who invented the glue-paste, the fish-glue (isinglass), the saw, the axe, the drill and the plumb line. These tools speed up the work, thus we can spend more time in the contemplation of our artifacts. Daedalus’ sollertia reveals itself as a constructive thought balanced between slow numerical formulations and swift metaphorical images, between slow appraisals and flashing visions, between organic metaphors of the artificial and inorganic vision of organisms, between what is humanly perfunctory and what is intricately human.
Daedalus is remembered as the builder of amazing statues who would move by themselves and could not stand still. To prevent their running away were chained to their pedestals. A criminal, Daedalus murdered Talos, his sister’s son who was also his apprentice. The young apprentice invented two fantastic tools, the compass and the metal saw. Out of envy, Daedalus killed Thalos-Circinus by throwing him down from the highest point of the Acropolis.
Although the different versions of the myth do not say anything about it, it is evident that Daedalus was upset because his nephew, in showing the use of the compass, was revealing the secret of the statues: the legs of the compass were the legs of the figures
To meditate is to construct a plot and a plan is woven. A physical expression of sollertia is the use of a “line” which allows the cutting of beams and planks straight. The lines and the plumb lines used by master masons in laying the bricks during the building walls are all expressions of metis. Used to comment the proper accomplishment of something, an Italian saying “executing something following the line and the mark (per filo e per segno) is a snappy language codification of sollertia. It derives from the use of a line or strong string deepened in colored dust by mason and painters to mark by a snap line walls and floors.
Sollertia has its origin in the art or techne of weaving. All the “lines” used in other crafts requiring metis derive from the “lines” used in a loom. The tracing on the ground of the future building shows clearly the textile origin of construction. On a construction site, pull between battered boards; the tracing lines mark the plan of a future building. This site marking looks like a huge horizontal loom, showing that a plan of an edifice is woven, just as fishing or hunting net. The plumb line also derives from the weights used to keep in tension the woof in the loom.
Probably, this phenomenological derivation explains why the majority of architects prefer to use parallel bars instead of versatile drafting machines, during their designing. A parallel-bar is just a portable loom for weaving the lines of a plan or of an elevation, by running a square back and forth as a shuttle, waiting for a design occasion.
The design occasion and the tactic of drawing rules the work of Mario Ridolfi used layers of heavy tracing paper (carta da lucido) and a fountain pen. These drawings were also completed with a skillful use of scissors and adhesive transparent tape. Ridolfi’s use of freehand drawing ranged from first sketches to refined perspectival presentation and from dreamy site planning to precise construction documents. They are tactical drawings of a an “architetto solerte” since he knows that the tactical has no need of a complete specificity of place or site, as it intelligently adjusts across multiple scales and sites on the sheet of his carta lucida. His sign is vibrant and has the magic-realistic qualities of the of the astonishing architectural background delineated by George Herriman for the comic strip Krazy Kat. The intense and vibrating fountain pen etching imparts to Ridolfi’s drawings an appearance that is at the same time hyper-realistic and magic. Analogical expressions of the processes of construction, Ridolfi’s drawings are delightful expression of the calligrams of technography. Visual descrip¬tion of not visible processes, they are con¬ceived not to be read as prescriptions, but as visual suggestions and evocations carrying out a multi-layered display of tectonic intents. They are a building on paper, a lucid constructive dream on carta da lucido to which a building on site will concurs, later on. They are well-tempered and provident drawings sagaciously demonstrating a building rather than preposterously specifying it. The lines, the shadows, the strokes and the contours of freehand drawings are magical signs. The comprehension of the difference between the desire of imitation and the magic of transformation is the crucial means of access to the proper use of lines on paper for conjuring up building.
The positive power of the material mediation by graphic signs ascribable to the notational character of design is instituted by the merging of analytical and symbolic properties; discreteness, finite numbers, combinatory power, pictograms hieroglyphs and ideograms, all of which epitomizes direct, prudent and temperate inscription of human thoughts on paper.

ARCHITECTS’ VIRTUES

2008-02-19T07:54:00.000-05:00

ARCHITECTS’ VIRTUES

A much need Demythzation of shallow Design procedures

By Marco Frascari

Casting the Future of the Profession by Looking at Architecture’s Two Cardinal Qualities

During this age of place-panic, a time both cursed and blessed with life never-ending motions, I do not wish to predict misfortunes or failures, but, surrounded by architects aspiring to make architecture through pseudo-anarchic displacing, I must admit that these new habits, sanctioning professional vices, are slowly endorsing an evaporation of architectural virtues into virtual architecture. Under the signs of cupidity and vainglory, the discourses ruling the practices and fueling the theories of both profession and education flaunt more concern for architects than for architecture. A tragic consequence of these self-absorbed aspects is that our constructed environment is not only getting out of control, but also literally getting out of place. The only remedy possible for such distressing displacements is to admit and accept an often too forgotten provision: humans do not seek to spend their life in architects’ spaces but in architectural places.

My speculative account dealing with the virtues of architecture is founded on the forgotten architectural principle of beatific life (vita beata), in fact a canonical stance, but aiming to cause new thoughtful realizations, This principle rules the interface between intellectual and architectural constructions, since harmoniously intertwined intellectual and architectural activities make life not only possible, but also happy. Consequently, vita beata results from the merging, in a construction, of three complementary arts, the art of thinking well, the art of living well and the art of building well. The objectives of both intellectual and architectural edifices and edifications, the real projects of architecture, are to offer us a vita beata, although I must recognize that too many architects belonging to the present professional praxis deem this projection as ill fated. In order to hide the gratuitousness of design, these designers resist the projection of a beatific life and generate distressful architecture, which coerces body and mind into unnecessary mental or emotional conflicts.

My theoretical speculation rests on the Epicurean awareness that the main role of the art of architecture is to make our life pleasant and happy, an invaluable vita beata. Accordingly, my account of the power of architectural virtues does not focus upon the idea of design values, which unfittingly always becomes value-design, but it predicates on a wonderment made real through elegant design principles embodied in the drawings elaborated by knowledgeable architects who are respectful of the edifying and beatific measures of architecture. The quasi-doctrine of the vita beata is the fundamental and necessary premise to rediscover genial and substantial architectural cosmologies and cosmographies, which are predicated on moral imagination rather than on social and behavioral predictions.

The architect’s essential intermediary role between humans and places, between the individuals and their construction of cosmological structures of edification is unfortunately not always obvious, even to most sensitive observers. To see architects merely as designers of buildings is a sensible reaction but it is not comprehensive of the most significant function of architects’ work. The majority of people do not see architects as individuals able to operate within enrapturing realms outside of the perceptual boundaries of senses demarcated by cultural regions and enforced by social customs, collective behaviors and language constructions. Architects’ ability of dealing with worlds beyond cultural perception becomes most evident when we consider the less obvious parts of architectural practice. Such talent is brought to light not through the obviously observable tasks of designing for a specific client request, but during the privileged ritual and procedural gestures of setting up the drawings for a construction. This is the subtlest dimension of the architects’ art since by the way of it architects can envision the hidden tone enlivening the palpable presence of buildings. During this specific phase of architects’ work the arrangement of actual reciprocity between dwellers and dwellings takes place and the ineffable things of architecture carries on a silent dialogue unfolding far below verbal awareness and fully independent from programmatic functions. This condition establishes a well temperate correspondence between the tune of the building and the tone of its inhabitants, between the tune of living and the tone of architecture.

People can be spaced out, but cannot be placed out. Therefore, it is essential to recognize that the qualities of architecture deal with emplacement, which is merely the result of a construction of arcane cosmological structures within which we store the memories of our daily inhabiting. Cosmologies create systems through which we understand the existence of the phenomenal world, and our own existence within it. They offer us a plan, a perception of our existence, where we are, tell us why we are here and most often, where we are going. In these archival cosmoses, virtues do not take space, but they do take place. These places are instituted on the power of edification and in virtue of this authority, architecture produces tectonic edifications, cosmological plans, dignifying edifices realized within the order of intellectuality through moral imagination, that is to say, participating in the highest order of nature.

A diverse rather than a minor emergence of judgment, moral imagination is a subtle condition, which should be pervasive of constructed environments. Static and unimaginative morality is a mechanical obedience to rules, while imaginative or dynamic morality is inspirational, relating the work of individuals to the cyclical time and candid humanity and not just abiding by constrains of linear time and closed rules of tribal settings. Architectural imaginal cosmologies and cosmographies mirror moral conditions by establishing crucial profiles of relationships between architects and the unknown others.[1] Buildings last much longer of the clients who requested the design and inaugurated them. It is a crucial moral duty for architects to design also for unknown others who will benefit of the building virtues in a later date.

These crucial but temperate relationships must be fostered both on the tangible plane of a civil practice and on the mysterious planes of theoretical meditations. The acknowledging of this state of affairs is the necessary condition for setting moral tactics that allow access to the phenomenology of architectural experience and to the dignity of architecture. The forming and discerning of the essence for an architectural cosmology, the quest for an architectural being-in-place, are predicated on a set of phenomenal and passionately radical issues that inscribes the status of the phenomenology of architectural sapience.

Dealing on the one hand with routinely mundane sociological and behavioral studies and on the other hand with the vulgarization of theory by intentional borrowing from literary criticism or social sciences, the majority of the professors and professionals have excluded from their practicing and teaching the quintessential procedure of moral designing by a palimpsestic erasure. Deliberately overlapping architecture to architect, they translate the “arche” in architect as an affirmation of their dominance. They do not seem aware that the prefix arche in architect carries a meaning, which is entirely different from the one conveyed by the identical prefix in the word architecture. In architecture, the prefix is an affirmation of the power of the art, an assertion of architecture as a Queen, a noble mother of moral virtues, born to command, because it measures the dimensions of our living with regard to an ultimate end. It appears that they have long forgotten that as architects, they rule inauguration as a breakthrough to otherness or alterity within the maternal nature of architecture. Understanding arche as an assertion of their alleged ruling power rather than an affirmation of them as inaugurators or beginners of edifying constructions, architects no longer appreciate what, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon: “you will understand then that the most important part of any work is its beginning” (377b).

Most of the times, non-provident and non-prudent architects tend to neglect this quintessential part of their work: inauguration. Disregarding architectural cosmologies and beginnings, they act arrogantly as preposterous Gnostic demiurges. Too many architects assume they know by heart the values of dwelling and building and consequently they ludicrously believe that they understand what is good for us, pathetically powerless dwellers. These bad pseudo-gnostic architects do not recognize that the wonder of designing a building dwells in the art of architectural edification that is above all a moral activity, not merely centered on ethical values, but above all established on virtues. The aim is not the embarking on the delineation of a masterpiece assimilating to the art of living well in an edifice, but a telic construction of personal power built on the glossy pages of architectural magazines. The most horrible result of the lack of beginnings is the encouragement of design gratuitousness, which merely evolves in a cacophonous, and cacothecnical constructed environment. The unknowing dwellers of such an environment are affected by a sense of acute cosmophobia and the results are fearful mystification and misunderstanding of the relationship among tectonic articulation, decoration and ornament, which leads to a basic to mistrust of all edifying representations.

A moral standing of edification is essential for the beginners of edifices as Antonio Averlino, a Neo-Platonist Renaissance architect, has captured in his chosen Greek compounded pen name: Filarete (Filarete: Lover of Virtue). Virtuous architects begin construction knowing that they are going to work with the malleable fabric of kinesthetic and visual intelligences. Humility and magnanimity, integrity, fortitude, simplicity, ingenuousness are the edifying virtues of architectural design, but prudence and temperance are the cardinal moral standard of architectural edification that make our building both livable and edifying. In architectural making and doing, virtues are undeniably essential components. All these virtues must be loved and embraced in order for them to be part of our constructed environment. Architects must appreciate them in an undeniable relation, so they easily can take on a prudent and temperate tone when they draw lines on paper, knowing well that they have virtues to protect.

The major component of architects’ work it is not the construction of building, it is rather the elaboration of drawings--and models—as operative prediction of future edifices and their processes of construction. The role of architects is to make visible the invisible. One of the chief attributes of architectural practice is that it is an elaboration of the built milieu performed at a distance mostly through the power of visual representations. This essential characteristic of architectural work assumes that we have to sense how architects describe buildings if we are to realize how temperance and prudence might help architects in designing buildings.

Architects inaugurate constructed representation in edifices by elaborating graphic representations. A representation is something that stands for something else; it is a virtuous procedure; buildings are built in virtue of “blueprints.” A representational status is a matter of how physical entities are used, and more specifically it is not a matter of actual causation, information, specifications or code relations with the intentional object of building. Nowadays, in the majority of architectural offices, a myriad of drawings and models are brought into being in digital formats using Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) tools. Digital media and CAD have absolutely transmogrified the way by which many architects accomplish the daily activities of design. These changes have progressed to be in control of both the mundane and sacred attitudes of practice and teaching.

Unquestionably, on the one hand CAD systems or similar programs have made the daily inconsequential architectural procedures efficient, but on the other hand, CAD systems have been of little benefit—if not of hindrance--in conditions where the design elaborations have to be conjectural and speculative in nature, as during the multiple beginnings which mark any authentic process of architectural design. The countless failed efforts carried out to inaugurate CAD and other cyber drafting procedures into the critical aspects of architectural design reveal the anachronisms existing between the demands of a virtuous design and the a-critical configuration of the digital media available tools. The production of many components, the visualization and simulation of environmental performance are now evaluated and judged by using the “facile” computer programs: complex 3D models of whole buildings, functional locations, products costs and quantities evaluations are all read from virtual modeling.

As information age technology continues to evolve, it implements increasingly complex tasks with less and less thought and input from the user. Currently, we are assisted by electronic agents, wizards’ templates and guides which do not any longer limit themselves to advise us on how to do the thing we want to do, they just do it, sometimes without our asking, often without our knowing, usually without our understanding. As an expected consequence of these support devices, the use of digital processing turns out to be easier, digital applications become more predictable. However, an unforeseen domino effect of this process is that we become less involved. De-skilled and morally less implicated our capacity for ethical judgment is consequently delegated to the cyber black boxes of these agents, wizards and guides, mindless genies evoked by a light stroke of the keyboard or the click of the mouse ready to produce whatever we whish! No matter how, or why.

Do not get my argument wrong, this discussion is not against the use of representation in cyberspace and virtual measures, but it rather points to a failing which is integral with the CAD system, where codified language procedures fashion these black boxes and hamper the perceptive use of visual provisions and virtual imagining. Following the standard set by verbal intelligence; the value system embodied in these always-helpful, every-ready cyber-assistants tell us what is right and wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Hidden intemperate and imprudent virtual modeling substitutes the virtues of the design, the eventual visual experiences are constructed with events that are not visual anymore. Edification does not take place in front of the eyes, but it hides in electronic memories that are not cosmological or cosmographic. These electronic transactions refuse the temporal eidetic nature of architectural drawing, by which we do not literally see buildings in visual representations but we grasp them by extraordinarily accurate and vivid recalls, always resulting from mediated constructions obtained from the interfacing between drawings and a possible diachronic view of tectonic history.[2] However, when this process is merely reduced by the use of Cad to immediate pictures, the results are misused representations, which lack transhistoricity and are indifferent to thoughts presented in material form, and above all are entirely devoid of virtues.

Architects must conceive their buildings within a “transhistorical structure’ to place their building in “history.” This structure is an idiosyncratic humanistic construction corresponding to what, from a canonical point of view, can be called a proper work of architecture. Proper works of architecture have a particular “constancy.” This is a transhistorical condition set in successive alternative interpretative formulations of the same tectonic product. The reality of a “transhistorical structure” is connected with the intersubjective character of tectonic rules derived from a cosmology shaped by memories and previously made construals. This is a process of transmitting virtues in mediated visual representations. Thus, it can be said that the “transhistoricity” of the structure of a work of architecture consists in various graphic interpretations of constructive matrixes ruling a built environment.

The types of representational media and techniques of depiction that architects use have a direct and lasting effect in the architectural interlocking of the subtle substance of design with the lasting building materials. Buildings and drawings organize physical reality through the dream stuff, i.e., the virtuality intertwined with the ordinary fabric of our reality. The cognitive function of imagination provides the foundation for a rigorous constructive knowledge permitting us to evade the dilemma of current rationalism, a dilemma that gives us only a choice between the two banal dualistic terms of either “matter” or “mind.” By way of the cognitive function of virtuality, it is possible to sanction architecture as the built storytelling of the human interweaving of historically visible solid stuff with transhistorically invisible dream stuff: a moral occurrence converting architectural edifications in edifices.

This merging of the invisible with the visible is the quintessential contingency necessary for having a proper act of building able to establish meaning through a rich and powerful tectonic conglomeration of solid and dream stuff. Nevertheless, the present a-critical use of CAD reduces, on the one hand, building to solid stuff completely lacking the dream stuff and on the other hand, it reduces drawings to dream stuff totally devoid of the solid stuff. These graphic results of CAD application and modeling programs can be described as a quasi-abuse of visual representations. They are farcical pseudo-representations which merely give information and show a pointless abiding to programs, codes and prescriptions. They are not auspicious cognitive phenomena translating architectural edifications. This allegation may seem surprising given that digital media offer a set of extraordinarily easy instruments for producing and delivering images. In reality, their visual superficial fullness vilifies the representation by hiding beyond pseudo-completeness the cognitive problems and realities embodied in the plotted design. The most pragmatic side of the construction course also feels this problem. In contractors’ experience, this negative quality of completeness hides costly consequences since CAD allows architects to continually repeat their mistakes by presenting drawings that always look neat and clean since as a polite contractor said: "Designers can pull out the same detail they had problems with before without modifying it.” (Dean 1998:57)

This effort of saturation and culmination on the diminutive space of the two dimensional surface of a piece of paper is in opposition to ordinary vision which depends on a cognitive cosmography to achieve augmentation. In this sense, CAD drawings have an effect akin to unskilled photography, which grasps everything but holds nothing but information. CAD drawings and renderings are what an acute Baroque art theoretician, Federico Zuccari (1542-1609), called disegno esterno, a sheer form without any substantial substratum. Cad drawings are nothing but shapes circumscribed by lines, devoid of mental and corporeal substances, filled with patterns and tiling. The architectural details designed in these 3D software programs look 2-dimensional and flattened when built, as if the building still existed on a computer screen. These flat buildings are the dominant presence in strip malls, builder tract housing, office parks and high rises, buildings that look much better on the flat pages of a real estate brochure than in the reality of a built human environment.

The counterpart of disegno esterno is disegno interno, as Zuccaro puts it, the true edifying sign in God (God in Italian Dio: DI-segn-O=GO-sign-D), this internalized imaging solves “divinely” the relationship between mind and matter, between intrinsic materiality and extrinsic significance. The enchantment operating within disegno interno generates real cognitive drawings. In these graphic enchantments, design sorts the essential edifying qualities by structuring powerful depictions that are selective rather than exhaustive. Within the inner potential of these cognitive drawings, accuracy, quantity and efficiency are not the crucial criteria for useful graphic demonstration: true architectural drawings have certain properties without which they would be useless for conceiving and elaborating projects. [3] They are well-tempered and provident drawings sagaciously demonstrating a building rather than preposterously specifying it. The lines, the shadows, the strokes and the contours of freehand drawings are magical signs. The comprehension of the difference between the desire of imitation and the magic of transformation is the crucial means of access to the proper use of drawings for conjuring up building. On the one hand, the ideal of imitation is that of an organic recreation from earlier configurations of lines of objects, in the sense of formal or substantive adoption, as it happens in the look-alike contests. On the other hand, recognized as necessarily repetitive, drawing conversions aim to match form and substance in different means of expression; this is the compelling nature of freehand drawings which are not superficial imitations, but magic conversions of images.

The drawings developed for the construction of an edifice are strictly a process of transmutation by which the facts of an architectural project become the reality of any building. Through an act of construction, a sharp magic transmutation takes place and drawings develop into transfigured buildings. Freehand drawings are tense modes of representation equipoised between magical-associative (symbolic) and logical-dissociative (allegorical) forms. In magical-associative representations, the symbol and the symbolized merge, and in the logical-dissociative, a relation of disjunction operates between the symbol and its object. Because of these methods of representation can be applied to architects what Aby Warburg said in his famous lecture on the serpent ritual.[4]

"They stand on the middle ground between magic and logos, and their instrument of orientation is the symbol. Between a culture of touch and a culture of thought is the culture of symbolic connection" (Warburg 1938-39, 277-92).

Trained to use the interaction existing between paper and pencil, between touch and thought, tactically architects elaborate conceptual and cognitive representations of designs. With the iterative act of freehand drawings, they mediate between the sensible and the intellegibles, between the visible and the invisible parts of architecture. Their freehand drawings, vivid materialization of touch and symbol, become charts of a cosmos suggesting an ordered system of ideas between tracing and envisioning.

Nowadays in the age of digital design, architectural freehand drawings, typically regarded as a digressing event, should become the quintessential edifying portraiture whereas tectonics becomes graphic tactic. The insipid aftermath imitations generated with the help of fancy graphic filters after digital designing has taken place cannot certainty be a substitution. Freehand drawing always begins with a dialogue between seeing and signing, between form and construction. Freehand sketches play a crucial role in design, when designers draw to explore a design project by recording ideas, recognizing possible functions and meanings from drawings, by finding and adapting new forms into the design. By being a persuasive choreographic notation of architectural thinking, freehand drawings compel the designers to articulate visually the invisible relationships existing between the parts composing a construction and not to leave them hidden within the electronic or mechanic tools used to elaborate them. The visible presence of these relationships stimulates the reciprocal translations and transmutation into edifices of building and dwelling. By tracing, signing, looking, by unearthing visual analogies, remembering relevant examples, and discovering new constructions based on previously unrecognized configurations, freehand drawing actually helps designers to envision and evaluate the forms and shapes they work with.

Freehand drawings differ significantly from template-hard-lines, digital-style drawings; although they appear vague and imprecise, they have the exactness of creative thinking impressed in them. This is especially true when they are used not only during the stages of initial design, but also during the elaboration of development and construction drawings. They support ingenious and innovative judgment by suggesting diverse visual correlations and associations to the designer.

Far from yielding less than hard line drawings, freehand architectural drawings can be viewed in terms of “iconic augmentation.” The tactic embodied in these authentic architectural drawings is to construct past or future buildings within a limited optic alphabet. They result from a tactic of contraction and miniaturization, yielding more by handling less. In this graphic procedure, the main scope of drawings is to resist the entropy of normal vision by increasing the meanings within an architectural cosmos by capturing them in a network of abbreviated signs, marks and traces. Freehand drawings challenge perceptual forms by relating them to non-perceptual structures. The graphic capture of a cosmos is carried out by a denial of the immediate by favoring the mediate, since it is the glorification of the un-figurative essence of things. The positive power of the material mediation by graphic signs ascribable to the notational character of design is instituted by the merging of analytical and symbolic properties; discreteness, finite numbers, combinatory power, pictograms hieroglyphs and ideograms, all of which epitomizes direct, prudent and temperate inscription of human thoughts.

The use of freehand drawings gives back to architectural drawings their ontological aspect, which has been lost because of the present anthological understanding of communication. In the relationship between drawings and buildings, the predominant tendency is firmly established on the erroneous concept of linguistic representation sanctioning plausibility. The base of this concept is the conviction that constructed buildings should visually appear as in the design drawings prepared by the architects. This conviction results from a paradigm of representation acquiescing within a rationalization of architecture. This process of rationalization, generated under the spell of verisimilitude, formally binds constructive likeness to the external qualities rather than to the internal qualities carried by architects’ graphic products. Developed during the Enlightenment and fostered with heavy propaganda during the Modern Movement, the nefarious paradigm of verisimilar representations has limited the richness of the character and the intensity of the universe of architectural invention. Constructions no longer construe architects’ poetic and amazing understanding of human dwelling. Buildings become expressions of pseudo-artistic obsessions derived from a search for celebrity and individual fame. The debates on the visual congruity between constructions and representations are unfolded under the influence of this preposterous paradigm, refusing to consider that the sign of verisimilitude appertains to a philosophical polarity. The opposite pole of verisimilitude, a plausible construct, is something implausible: wonder. This philosophical polarity recalls and intersects few others philosophical polarities, namely real and fictitious, credible and incredible, authentic and false, rational and irrational. A rediscovery of the role of marveling as embodied in freehand drawings can turn the professionals and the professors of architecture onto a path leading toward a beatific architecture, true to the qualities rather than the quantities embodies in the drawings.

By reintroducing the eighteen-century term of technography, architecture can be placed within technometry, a workable and dual system of human measures and elegant technology. Technometry is a comprehensive procedure, elaborated within the blueprint for a Puritan technological encyclopedia, proposed by the philosopher and theologian, William Ames, a leading figure of American Protestantism.[5] His cultural encyclopedia--the circle of the arts—is a moral interpretation of the Ramist intellectual system. This Puritan system was based on encyclopedic outlines of all knowledge. Ames defined it as a measure or survey of art namely technometry, a locution which later readers and interpreters had sometimes corresponded synonymously with technology. Using the sensible context of technometry, drawings and edifices can be analyzed to discover how the faculties of building well and living well can be again incorporated into the eidetic nature of architectural representations. Through the elegant and mediated representations of technography, it is possible to trace the vestiges of the virtues of architecture.[6]

“Practice and theory coincide in every art” (thesis #8) is one of the Technological Theses discussed at the Harvard Commencement Exercises, in 1687 (Rand 1933:550-51). This thesis was derived from thesis #90 of the one-hundred sixty-nine propositions composing the primer written by Ames (1979: 43). This small book is entitled Technometria, Omnium et Singolarum Artium Fines Adequate Circumscribens (Technometry, a Delineation of Individual and General Arts, Conformed to Their Ends). In his mini encyclopedia, Ames outlines the arts according to their use, origin and scope, within a systematic delineation of the nature and uses of technology, as a theory derived from a contemplation of the physical environment in relationship to final causes. Technometry is the measure of both rhetorical (theory) and practical arts. Technometry is the common measure ruling both the techne of the logos (theory) and the logos of the techne (practice) in the making of artifacts. In other words, technometry is the measured merging of physical and psychical functions in a representation where reason and construction come together within the sphere of a teleological hermeneutics, which produces artifacts. This coming together is based on a comprehension of the nature of the artifacts’ causes which is obtained through a representation.

Inherent in Ames’ technometric vision is the recognition that human understanding is a representation ruled by representations. In contemporary language, technometry would be called a metadiscipline, or a general theory. Trying to overcome the sharp distinction between the practical and the theoretical (thesis #90), this metadiscipline presupposes the existence of several disciplines and strives to find the common limit that governs them (thesis #84). When applied to architectural representation, the technometric concept might facilitate the figuring out of a measure for architectural edification. Structured as an all-embracing map of human knowledge, the Greek techne and the respective Latin ars are the substantial footing of Ames’ technological construct.[7] Ames’ technological recommendations propose an inner road to coalesce the intellectual with the productive arts. Technometry is the measure for the transmutation and the integration of tangible and intangible substances and by merging sapience and making, it befits the matrix of those crafts transfiguring "inanimate" matter in meaningful presences.

Technometry is not an art in itself, but rather “the precognition of the arts” (Ames 1979:29). Consequently, technometry is not the a priori imperative of knowledge or a Platonic idea, but a preconceiving of the general faculties and uses of art, so it is possible to “represent and by representing (to) rule the action” (thesis #3). Before Ames’ use of the concept of precognition, Vincenzo Scamozzi, the most learned among the Vicentine architects of the seventeenth century, uses ‘precognition’ as a necessary condition to practice architecture. In his encyclopedic treatise, entitled L’Idea dell’Architettura Universale (The Idea of Universal Architecture), a treatise devoted to the mirroring of architectural representation, Scamozzi points out that precognition is a necessary condition for architects’ working between edification and construction and should results from an encyclopedic education. Furthermore, Scamozzi holds that the relationship between theory and practice mirrors in the relationship between architects and builders and that an appropriate use of representations is indispensable to cultivate properly this relationship. Representing the client, the architect cannot be the builder, but the architect rules construction with the use of well-constructed graphic representations, which mediate among the three powers governing every design: the client, the builder and the building design concept.

A well-done oeuvre of design should always be concerned with representing and it should be guided by appropriate representations, since the sense of measure, a correct motion, is at the very basis of any proper representation. Such representations are technographies. Within Ames’s technometric framework, technography, like calligraphy, would belong to the group of the less dignified, but eminently productive faculties, which would not be unworthy if they were practiced with natural talent rather than “artificially” (Thesis #132). In the Technometria, a striking declaration of Ames makes architecture--the faculty of building well--part of the lower but more dignified philosophical faculties, rather then placing it with the less dignified, mechanical, illiberal faculties. In Ames’s encyclopedia, architecture is not presented as a trivial art, as was often claimed within the tradition of the Trivium and Quadrivium. It should be noted that Ames’s favorite metaphors for explaining the precognitive dimension of technometry is the image of the architect at work with representation. “Likeness of a form is called an idea, just like the likeness of a house preexisting in the mind of an architect is call the idea of a house” (thesis #4). This is making or framing (thesis #49). The essential concept is that architecture deals with the bringing into existence a construction that lies in a well done representation generated by the architect-maker and not in the delineation derived from the requirements or specification set for building (thesis #33).

The art of measuring well (ars bene metiendi) is one of the special arts analyzed and discussed by Ames in his proposal for a technological encyclopedia (Ames 1979:43). The ars bene metiendi relates the discreet parts of physical and intellectual works and technography. Technography belongs to the art of measuring well since it is concerned with the concept of measuring. Technography is an art that becomes tangible in itself, but it also a component of another art: the art of doing the work of nature well (ars bene naturandi). In the cosmological encyclopedia elaborated by Ames, all arts derive from other arts, but the art of doing the work of nature well is a special art that does not enter any other art and whose counterpart is the art of living well (bene viviendi). In the ars bene naturandi, artistic production arises out of an imitation of the act (an analogic procedure) rather than through an imitation of the object. All the arts that partake in the art of doing the work of nature well must follow this crucial and dynamic condition of the relationship between mind and matter to a common substratum that unifies intangibility with tangibility.

The common substratum between mind and matter revels itself in the technographies of not-yet-built artifacts for the reason that they incorporate in themselves the same qualities which adumbrate the representations of still life. Technographies do not search for likeness as the basis for relating building and design, but for a mutual measure derived from a familiar nature, which constructs both the drawing and the edifice: the essence of edification. Technographies are demonstrations related to the built world through still-life representations that contrast conventional notations of geometrical and factual construction since they deal with the representation of processes of construction. Technographies embody the Janus-like nature of technology, since they are a perfect instance of the non-separation of the techne of logos from the logos of techne in architecture. As specific acts of demonstration, technographies are based on an architectural almanac: a lexicon of technological images.

Ames concludes the sequence of his technological theses presenting an analogic thought on the notion of trial-work (tyrocinium) and the notion of masterpiece (meisterstuck) (thesis #169). A masterpiece is a piece of work representing in itself the measure of the mastering of an art within a cosmology. In his elaboration of the analogy, Ames formulates a reference to an apprentice who, at the end of his training, has to produce a beginning, a trial-work, that is to say a piece of work that must become a masterpiece marking his o her initiation. The production of demonstrative-masterpieces is the necessary measure to avoid cacotechnics, and the proficient making of them is a demonstration that converts a practice into a theory and vice versa. The trial-work is not merely a trial of skills but takes place as a display of an intention that develops into a revelation marking the beginning of novel tradition. Only when this process is brought to fruition as such the trial-work can be a masterpiece.

Architectural technographies belongs to the realm of this kind of masterpieces. They are inaugurations of construction not merely exact likenesses of future buildings. They are not similar images but rather they are precise analogical demonstrations of its construction. As Hubert Damish masterfully points out, “an image can never replace a demonstration.” (Damish 1986: 212). Technographies are constructions demonstrated in representation. Technographies help architects to solve one of the most difficult tasks of their profession; they give the appropriate measure of the building. They are the matrix of the edifying nature of an edifice. Mario Ridolfi, an Italian architect, who’s drawing and constructions will play a major role in the last part of my discussion of architectural virtues, has noted this intuitively.

The difficulty is in finding the just measure of the individual parts ... the willingness to give life to things almost to make them to breathe, to try to make them speak (Ridolfi 1977:3).

Technometry is the techno-mother giving breath to edifices. Technography makes buildings play a part in a common cause by finding an eidetic graphic notation for the vital measure of harmony that is necessary between the well-built parts and the well inhabiting of an edifice.

Within the analogical procedures developed by the freehand technographies, the aspects of the macrocosm of architecture become once more related with the microcosm of architectural drawings. Architecture results from a unique agreement of virtues that can be understood through the formulation of taut questions on the one hand to avoid the wickedness of gratuitousness and on the other hand to generate a definable explanation of order within the universe. Five epitomical questions must be asked to articulate the issues concerning the cosmology of architectural virtues.

A) Do we know how building takes place?

B) Do we know how dwelling takes place?

D) Do we know what to design means?

E) Do we know how drawings translate into buildings?

C) Do we know how buildings translate into drawings?

These questions concern the dignity of architectural imagination and intelligence. To further elaborate this framework, an imaginal diagram will help to set the motif of my musing on the architectural advantage of freehand drawing or technographies as a callothechnical way to preserve pedagogically and professionally the virtues of architecture. To better figure out the cosmological complexity embodied in this configuration of questions I would like to suggest using an edifying emblem which through a cognitive image-processing-assisted framework can help us to focus on a one of the infinite sphere of discussion contained in these five questions. In his philosophical oeuvre Giordano Bruno, an irregular scholar so controversial that ended up burned at stake in Campo dei Fiori at Rome in 1600, pictures nature in all its multiplicity descending from divine unity to matter. He uses the multifaceted symbol of the pentagram--a pentagon circumscribed by a circle--to represent emblematically the creative essence resulting from the taut contrast between multiplicity and singularity. (Fig 1) The mapping of the five questions on Bruno’s pentagram generates a mnemonic device and a cognitive tool that is essential for singling out the singularities of architectural design. The quintessential nature of the emblem can help in figuring out, in an anthropomorphic representation, the nature of the interaction among the five questions and their role in setting a relationship between the architect’s microcosm and the macrocosm of architecture. This pentagram is an imaginal cosmography that allows metaphoric and metonymical readings much in the same way a later cosmography, a blueprint developed by Le Corbusier, the Iconostasis—an imaginal representation of his powerful cosmos—map and allows multiple possible readings of the cosmological perspective he wrote in his Poem of the Right Angle.[8]

Unfolding diachronically the temporal and material vectors of this imaginal pentagram, I will try to single out different answers given to the above-mentioned questions during a succession of different regimes. These regimes result from diverse approaches to architectural edification. The first regime is governed by the star and god gazers; the second regime is presided by the perspective gazers and the third is managed by the cathode gazers.

During the first of these regimes, the fertile exchange of ideas taking place between the stargazers and the god gazers controlled the acts of edification. These practical and theoretical gazers wrote texts that are considered traditional architectural treatises. Within these traditional texts, the directives for edification in the built world were constructed as considerations based on an unbroken relationship between theory and practice.

In the imagination of the architects of this first regime, theory and practice were two different persons joined within the same hypostasis: a maternal architecture. Buildings and drawings were empowered by an imaging imagination. The translation of building into dwelling and of dwelling into building took place through an approach constantly threading between the tactility and the divinatory nature of time and space. In other words, architectural design shuttled between tactics and vision of construction. Governed by an active gaze, this edification extracted universals from the shapes of things exuded by their materiality. The result was that tactility and taste participated in a common and powerful vision. In these designs, the desire empowering architecture radiated from pupils to embrace the edifices, to fuse with them, so the eye could be saturated with the same colors and characters alive in the buildings. The transcendental desire of edification constantly consubstantiated building and human bodies. The virtues of the humanity were keen to the virtues embodied in edifices; edification was the aim of our constructed world. The time spent in building and designing had a fair exchange rate with the time spent in dwelling and in drafting measured drawings. The cardinal virtues of architectural intelligence were temperance and prudence.

During the second regime, the laying out of the rules pertaining construction controlled architectural edification. The elaboration and distribution of architectural theory was established through handbooks and projections. Within the frame of the unnatural window of projection, a merging of the pyramid of imagination with the vision cone took place. Temperance was lost and prudence was the only virtue left to architects. With the eye now considered an optical instrument, the view deliberately moved from transcendental subjectivity to natural objectivity. Tactics of construction were replaced with building strategies. The essential epitome to understand this second regime is the perspectival image created by a camera obscura. What takes place here is what has been called costruzione legittima.[9] Marked by its impelling naming, prepensely established as the only legitimate perspective, the costruzione legittima demonstrated and validated its predominance by affirming that all the other forms of visual edification were “costruzioni bastarde” based on errors or generated by errors. The paradigm of the costruzione legittima is the benchmark used by many to understand the position of the architect. The eye of the viewer is the source of the architectural visualization, which is resolved in an easy model based on external vision while the internal visions are disregarded. The result of this regime is essentially a mediated gaze. Graphically speaking, during this regime, design drawings are separated from construction drawings and furthermore the body of drawings is separated from the building body. The traditional Tracing Floors and Tracing Houses have almost disappeared from the construction site. The gaze is partially disembodied. The eye, a limited instrument, needs other optical tools to be objective. The architects are still prudent but intemperate. However, toward the end of the regime they also become unwise and move from being heads of the art to be bohemian artists.

Professional cupidity, generally disguised as architectural glory, is the conceded desire ruling the third or final regime. At the beginning of this period, science originates new certainties by using axonometric rather than perspectival views. At this point, the gaze becomes completely disembodied. A diagrammatic hermeneutics or exegetical oblique visions, dominates this epoch. The architectural use of axonometric drawings begins as a movement to discover the invisible side of the many possible kinds of fourth-dimension to be found in the constructed environment, but in the praxis of manufacturing, axonometric drawings have been degraded as 2D forms of 3D objects.[10] Ignoring their vilification in the manufacturing world, architectural practices and schools have made the utilization of axonometric drawings mechanically dominant, forgetting that controlling the motions and actions of milling machines and lathes is one thing whereas calculating the placement of two-by-fours or the pouring of concrete walls as cosmological frameworks is an altogether different matter.

Views for axonometric drawings are prepared by using parallel lines of sight to project the object perpendicularly onto the viewing plane. Most of the architectural drawings produced nowadays are axonometric, and this is the view normally seen in AutoCAD.[11] Orthographic views of CAD architectural drawings are not translation of rigid bodies in space as for instance in the Vitruvian triad of architectural drawings: Icnographia, Orthographia, Scaenographia, diagrams representing loci of construction. Although the CAD plans, elevations and sections gives the impression of being akin to the Vitruvian triad, they are merely a special case of axonometric drawings in which the viewing plane is placed parallel to one side of the object, rather than being set at an angle and inclined to show three sides at once. When the images adopt the assuredness of the digital construction, a drastic change takes place since these drawings give diachronic certainties rather than cosmological synchronism. These new certainties have produced the Cathode gazers, the cad lovers of nowadays-corporate profession. The present indifference to the wonder of real architecture is cultivated on these exhausting and excessively wonderful images. Under this regime, imaging and imagining are no longer within the same gaze and architects have lost both prudence and temperance, and rather than dealing with the search of a vita beata, architecture nowadays mostly establish spaces for a psychically impaired life.

The last two questions of the cosmological mnemonic pentagram of architecture correlating the acts of building, design and drawing are the most important for architects since, as I have previously pointed out, architects do not built buildings but rather they use drawings to inaugurate constructions. Architects’ technometric images serve as "non-prepositional" substitutes for practicing architectural qualities, since, by virtue of their formal and expressive borrowings they demonstrate buildings in absentia. Through the measured time of freehand drawing, architects could practice again the architectural virtues of prudence and temperance. The thinking formulated during the tracing of freehand drawings makes architectural thoughts visible, while these drawings are instruments of awareness and intuition since in the everyday reality, architectural graphic representations aim to delineate the alterity of the not present. Consequently, the capacity of the architect is to make visible and to think what is absent. “To design means to literally involve oneself in a practical experience with signs” (Nadin 1997 590). The talent of real designers is in their ability to project themselves in artifacts appropriate to human experience. “The squares and the parallel bar on the drawing-board of the architects who practice freehand drawings are a haunting guarantee for the proper use of the carpenter squares and batter boards, strings, plumb bobs and snap lines on construction sites. The tools used in freehand drawings are not the abstract tools of drafting machines or cad plotting; they set the common aspects between the microcosm of drawings and the macrocosm of construction.

Cad Programs cannot deal with magnificence, joy, hope, fear, piety, sorrow, and patience whereas freehand drawings can because they are at the basis of edification. During the remote age of practical experience, there was no design microcosm but only the construction macrocosm. Nevertheless, the individual impulse to construct her or his environment generated the need for temperate and prudent transformations and it became crucial to develop an analogical procedure. The development of design microcosms was the ensuing result. These microcosms became the musing and fertile resources for elaborating the changes that were going to take place. The presence of cardinal virtues and human pathos, as expression of the understanding of others, leads to the recognition that architects are agents of change. Through drawing inaugurations, architects govern the technometry of architecture and became agent of change ruling the built environment. Through their design work, they become aware of aspects of other people’s time and life, features altogether missed by the language intelligence currently ruling the request of design. Architectural design expressed in edifying drawings liberates the human being from the total conditioning of language expressions and leads to a way of imagining and discernment of the world that is very different from the understanding generated through language. Freehand drawings as a technography are the last resource for obtaining this attuning between building and designing.

A particular building, Casa Lina, designed by an Italian architect, Mario Ridolfi (1904-1984) will help to advance a better understanding of the nature and the role of technography as presented in freehand drawing and its grounding in the reciprocal relationship between architectural edification and construction. Casa Lina is an inspirational measure of technometry. This building inaugurated an intriguing sequence of construction; mostly single family houses, designed by Ridolfi during the last period of his life.

The Well Tempered drawings of a Reflective Architect

Ridolfi is a singular Roman architect who was labeled by Manfredo Tafuri as one of the two disquieting muses of Italian architecture— being Ridolfi’s dearest friend, Carlo Scarpa, the other muse (Tafuri 1975, pp. LXIII-LXIV, pp. 4-34). Ridolfi worked mostly alone or in joint ventures; toward the middle of his career, he forms a partnership with Wolfgang Frankl. [12] Ridolfi’ firm worked mostly in Rome and in Terni (Ridolfi’s hometown), Ridolfi also had taught at the University of Rome and Pescara. A charismatic figure for many of his Roman students, Ridolfi does not quite belong to the so-called Roman School, or to a pre-post-modern view of architecture, as some trendy Roman Professors have tried to label him.[13]

Ridolfi conceived his architecture in direct reference to local and critical realities and constructive facts. He was able to devise the implications of the simultaneous presence of several tectonic elements. He handled magisterially the elegant, the rough, the concrete, the abstract and the dynamic factors and characters of building elements. Ridolfi’s building elements compose architecture by establishing meaning within a rich and powerful tectonic conglomeration of architectural virtues. Carefully examining the sets of drawings that Ridolfi has developed for his designs, the first impression is that he produced more drawings than it was necessary to execute the work, but a closer scrutiny reveals that those set of drawings are the necessary total rendition of the macrocosm of future constructions within the microcosm of representation. To elaborate these constructive edifications Ridolfi used layers of heavy tracing paper (carta da lucido) and a fountain pen. These drawings were also completed with a skillful use of scissors and adhesive transparent tape. Ridolfi’s use of freehand drawing ranged from first sketches to refined perspectival presentation and from dreamy site planning to precise construction documents. His sign is vibrant and has the magic-realistic qualities of the astonishing architectural background delineated by George Herriman for the comic strip Krazy Kat. The intense and vibrating fountain pen etching imparts to Ridolfi’s drawings an appearance that is at the same time hyper-realistic and magic. Analogical expressions of the processes of construction, Ridolfi’s drawings are delightful expression of the calligrams of technography. Visual description of not visible processes, they are conceived not to be read as prescriptions, but as visual suggestions and evocations carrying out a multi-layered display of tectonic intents. They are a building on paper, a lucid constructive dream on carta da lucido to which a building on site will concurs, later on.

Consider my work almost as a building on paper and all at full scale, unconcerned with the large quantity of paper necessary. Because only in this manner one can be ... drawing ... as it is my habit, which pushes me to ascertain and to consider every aspect of building, and to give oneself the joy of working and to the builders, the indispensable tool for its execution (Ridolfi 1977:2).

Ridolfi’s drawings are illustrations belonging to a grimoire of tectonic foresight. They are graphic conjuring, recounting a future built world. They are divination on paper.

Divination is a sophisticated form of semiosis that, in general, is considered negatively since it is thought of being based on a semiotic fallacy, a misjudgment of the pragmatic effect of signs and their semiotic object relation. However, the explanation of divination, as an imaginal reading and writing of a cosmological edification, disallows this negative interpretation. Following a non-rational method, architects are then augurs who trace on their boards non-rational graphic constellations mirroring the needs of future builders and inhabitants. To be non-rational does not mean to be irrational, but rather to be able to work out ineffable procedures for the understanding of the ratio aeterna, the foretelling of the eternal tale of edification, the foresight of a miraculous inhabiting. In the architectural ratio aeterna, objects make an impression on percipients, just as percipients impress themselves onto objects through the daily use of them.

Ridolfi’s freehand drawings are technographic representations of these virtuous and cosmological processes of edification. They stand for both themselves and their reason by portraying the material object, its instrumental, final, formal and material causes fused in one technographic event: a construction and its possible interpretations. These freehand drawings solve one of the most difficult tasks of design, since they give the measure of the building by orchestrating joints, reveals, courses, frames, slabs, girders, I-beams, joists, rafters, cornices, moldings, friezes, beams, duct, doors, skylights, glass, windowpanes, doorjambs, fascias, bricks, floorboards, baseboards, parterres, domes, baseboards, canopies, ceilings, nails and wires, all in a well integrated assemblage which maintain human imaginativeness alive.

During his very active professional life, Ridolfi undertook the compilation of a thesaurus of architecture, an encyclopedia of tectonic images. An illustrative effort, which started back in 1940 as a collection of building details, finally was published as the Manuale dell’Architetto (Architect’s Manual), in 1946. Ridolfi was the chief editor and he personally drew over seventy of its plates. The Manual was a gift of USIS [United States Information Service] to the reconstruction of Italy. In its original political intention, the Manual was supposed to be an Italian Version of Ramsey and Sleeper's Architectural Graphic Standards, a way of putting Italian architecture—facing the problem of post-war reconstruction of the architectural patrimony of the country--within the track of industrial construction procedures. The Architectural Graphic Standards is a platonic book—being the Sweet Catalogue its Aristotelian counterpart— providing only standards, carefully avoiding any concern for the relationship existing between cosmological and tectonic norms.[14] However, Ridolfi converted the Manuale dell’Architetto into his contribution to the process of the architectural project by refuting industrial standards in favor of tectonic norms. A superficial reading of this architectural thesaurus will position the Manuale dell’Architetto among the visual products of after-the-war Italian Neorealism, ranging--in film production--from the artistic highs of Rosellini’s Roma Città Aperta, to the lows of Pane Amore e Fantasia. However, the Manuale dell’Architetto embodies the subtle imaginal approach characterizing another famous movie of the period: the mundus imaginalis of De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano. Ridolfi’s manual is a map of the imaginal landscape of Italian tectonics, its plates are a collation of details not unlike the ones gathered within the memory of an artisan, repeating a tradition enlighten by a gentle magic-realism. Gathering a rich and useful imagery, part real and part invented, transparent drawings that always come in handy to represent meaningfully dense objects, the pages of the Manuale dell’architetto are prosperous Dada collages of a possible Italian Merzbau,[15] The manual plates can be considered an atlas of a wunderkämmer of architecture, a non-empirical work. They have the same pathos of Aby Warburg’s famous picture atlas, called Mnemosyne, a giant scrap album of panel with pin on them overlapping and intermixing art images demonstrating how a collage of images can pass beyond the threshold of a rational understanding to become transparent visual cognitive notations. The manual plates are architectural images of an architectural lexicon based on construction details, which becomes transparent in their transhistoricity.

Pupils should learn to represent objects in such a way that they can be reconstructed […] I tell them that they should see the opaque objects as if they are transparent. They should learn to see also beyond them to be able to draw them in a constructive manner. [Ridolfi in Polo & Casadei, 1972, pp.4-7)

For Ridolfi, it is clear that it is one thing to apprehend directly an image as an image, and another thing to shape ideas regarding the nature of images in general cognitive representations of constructive processes, graphic construing of a construction, and the ascertained elements of a tectonic pathos.

A tense constructive reality, a tectonic pathos is at the core of the sequence of well temperate designs that has been named the “Cycle of the Marmore.” This Cycle is a chain of designs indicative of the power of what Kenneth Frampton has called Critical Regionalism. Ridolfi, who later become blind and tragically took his own life, elaborated these designs during an untroubled period of his intense professional life. Observed during the cycles of times, through the reoccurring of seasons and the occasions of the ever-changing everyday life in the various instants of distract inhabiting, the architecture of these edifices offers glimpses of the marvelous reality that is attained in the transcendent moments of beatific life. The details, the building elements and the constructional devices turn into vigorous and playful demonstration of arcane and inaugural events, which had been both consciously and unconsciously embodied in an edifice by the designer. The realization of these constructions is based on a set of concerns with craftsmanship or workmanship and with the quality and quantities of the physical mental materials employed. Hinged between decoration and tectonic expression, between local and traditional system of construction and modern manufacturing, between reality and dream, in these buildings and drawings takes place what Massimo Bontempelli asks in his manifest for magic realism.

I would like to see the most normal and everyday life as an adventurous miracle as a constant risk.

For Ridolfi, the adventurous miracle takes places in the design and inhabiting of Casa Lina, the house he designed for himself. The design of Casa Lina is the inaugural masterpiece of the Ciclo delle Marmore. With its 125 freehand drawings, drafted 1:200 to 1:1 scale, this design is the foundational technometric setting where Ridolfi refines his powerful method of technographic descriptions for cosmological design. He has defined this construction as his “design paradigm.” Casa Lina is the result of a technometric search that had began much earlier, when he designed his famous Tower of Restaurants. Compiled by eleven circular floors rotating along a helicoidal axis and supported by a huge cantilever, this amazing edifice is a cosmological tower. Presented by the young Ridolfi at the First Italian Exhibition of Rational Architecture held in Rome in 1928, one year before he graduated from the Roman Scuola Superiore Di Architettura, this eccentric and cosmologically arcane tower, poorly reviewed by the contemporary critics, is a masterpiece of the tectonic imagination. The axonometric worm’s eye view of these eleven circular platforms was the most outstanding image of the all exhibition. The drawing—a rendering in tempera now lost—on the one hand has the same arcane cosmological richness of El Lissitsky cosmological Prounen--a visualization of tense abstract constructive concepts—and on the other hand makes its presence believable through an ordered collection of solid building elements.[16] Ridolfi indicates as sources of its inspiration the columns of the Bernini’s Baldacchino in San Peter, but the tower is not a product of formally strereotomic imitation, but it rather is a vivid demonstration and a transmutation of the tectonic potentiality manifested by the rising movement of Bernini’s columns.

Casa Lina and all the buildings of the Marmore cycle are highly developed elaborations of the concept of central plan. Renaissance architects codified and advanced central plan buildings as the cleverest expression for mirroring the sublime encompassed by the influential correlation existing between cosmos and humanity. A cosmographic depiction of universe, these edifying built representations were intended to make possible a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world, within a full understanding of our position in the universe. These magnificent Renaissance edifices, mostly churches or palaces, draw us through their emblematic representational nature into the cosmology of the sacred, where every bound can be outdone until even self-consciousness is obliterated. However, Ridolfi, with a particular use of the central plan which he developed especially for a single family dwelling, move us into the sphere of the mundane, the territory of material necessity, where every task has to be completed with skill and small mistakes can have far-reaching consequences for the vita beata of its inhabitants. In his central plan designs, he weaves the mundane of sleeping, eating, working and resting. Ridolfi’s mundane is not a banal absence of diversity or pleasure, as it is assumed to be in modernist depictions of bureaucratic order; it has its own aesthetic perfection tied to its norms of aptness which have been developed by imbricating sublime and mundane details. An expression of the negation of cacothecnics, technometric beauty is a principle of practical action and results from the attentiveness to the relationship in persuasive practices between the sublime and the mundane. Living this dialectic between inside and outside, between virtuous and profane, the inhabitants of these edifices realize all of that but also experience powerful humor changes, visions of affirmation, acts of magnificence in the minute, and moments of collective consummation.

Casa Lina, designed at the beginning of the sixties, located the district of the Marmore, his mother’s native region, is Ridolfi’s prototype for the Marmore cycle and it is an extensive design reflection on the use of a central plan for the everyday living, a theatre for the quotidian taking place in the human comedy of the vita beata. The plan of Casa Lina is created by using cosmological tactics rather than from functional strategies. In an early version of the design, the plan is generated by two interlocking squares, an octogram, which later on Ridolfi will use in the design of other houses of the Cycle. The octogram is traditional figure of cosmological representation; Vitruvius uses Athens octagonal tower of Winds to present in an imaginal manner his cosmological theory for an ideal city.[17] Many baptisteries and churches were designed using this geometry and an octogram is the cosmological figure used by Filarete in his planning the city of Sforzinda. In subsequent elaborations of the design, Ridolfi changed the rotational geometry of the double square into a pentagonal plan with a spatial core enclosed by an annular enfilade of slightly trapezoidal rooms and quadrangular service areas. The functional use of the rooms and services results from tempered and prudent considerations of their orientation both physically and culturally.

In this pentagonal version of the design, the key detail studied by Ridolfi is the internal door and its hinges especially when located on the radial wall separating the enfilade of rooms. This detail, trying to relate the geometry of orthogonal rotation of doors with the slanted geometry of a pentagonal layout, demonstrates the transhistorical permanence of the products of the art of living well and the art of building well. The tectonic condensation and poignancy of building details and constructs as an effective edifying presence results from what Aby Warburg has identified as the "pathos formula" (Pathosformel). Warburg accepts the work of art as "stored energy" (Energie-Konserve), containing in itself the powers of its own regeneration which transcends the boundaries of time and space." In architecture through tectonic pathos, the energy embodied in artifacts is reactivated beyond the threshold of rational understanding.

Through a tectonic-pathos, formula of construction ancient insight, modern conception and the classical perception overlap and intermix for the architectural beholders at a later period in a different cultural setting. In Ridolfi’s edifice, the detailing of the doors makes them Ianuae; Ianua is the Latin word for door and is connected with Ianus (Janus) the Roman god of doors, gateways, and beginnings, who the Romans believed ensured also good endings.[18] The pre-Classical Romans had a frugi religio or in modern terms, an infra-ordinary-fructuous religion and they thought their gods resided in everything. These unpretentious, familiar numina[19] filled the Roman world and (as their adjective-names show – Flora (Flowery) Pomona (Gardenlike) Vaticanus (cowlike), Argentarius (silvery), and etc. --presided over each sub-section of roman life and buildings. The ordinary individual situated the whole of religion in the doing, making, connecting and setting of the infraordinary within extraordinary things (re- + ligare = thing-tying/selecting) in his or her construction of a cosmological and imaginal world.

Janus main temple in the Forum had doors facing east and west for the beginning and ending of the day; his other temple call Ianus Quadrifrons faced the four cardinal directions and was a cosmological pivot placed on earth and water. Romans sought Janus’ help mostly in domestic undertakings and that was why the opening of the doors of his temples marked the periods of wars, the most fearful times for domestic life. Cardea, the goddess in charge of hinges,[20] was Janus’ wife and presided over domestic health—especially chest affections. The North-South main axis in Roman city layout is called Cardus Maximus, and it was a cardinal pivot line cast on the equinox and used as main reference for tracing the city. The Cardus Maximus was named after Cardea since it was the hinge of the city, the solar plexus of its chest. Both Janus, and Cardea, unassuming custodians of a cyclical universe, reveal the cosmological insight and the tectonic pathos hidden by Ridolfi in Casa Lina. A sequence of alternative annular designs based on cosmography of circular rooms arranged in cycles and epicycles, after the pentagonal design, furthermore confirms Ridolfi’s search for a logic of coincidence within a tectonic religio and for a hidden sense of things acquired trough the sense of their making.

In the last stage of the design of Casa Lina, Ridolfi’s tectonic and edifying insight is carried on by a restatement of the pentagonal cosmography. In this final form, the layout becomes an affirmation of multiplicity in a unity. Using two interlocking pentagons Ridolfi generates a decagonal layout for the perimeter and the interweaving of the rooms. However, the central space stays pentagonal and houses the omphalos. [21] This umbilical axis of the design is revealed in a sequence of mundane details. First, at the bottom of the house, it is marked by the metal pentagonal cover of the central drain that with its twenty-five holes and five sides becomes the geometric standard for the radial pattern of the terracotta tiles paving the basement. On the main floor, the marking of the omphalos is accomplished by a wooden five-pointed star held in place by a metal button and as in the case of the drain plate in the basement; the configuration of the star becomes the standard for the layout pattern of the hardwood floor. On the rooftop of the house, centered on the plumb line of the axis mundi marking the Omphalos, there is a pentagonal louver topped with a weathervane--a classical black metal rooster. This small pentagonal ventilation and illumination tower sets the standard for the terracotta tiles covered roof. A special terracotta ventilation tile devised by Ridolfi is used to make the louver openings. Composed with two interlocking square pipes, this hollow tile is a transformation of a traditional building component in an elegant tectonic element. Ridolfi’s ventilation tile results from an elaboration of the shape of a traditional extruded terra-cotta tile generally used for erecting ventilation screens in most of the barns and stables of Central Italian Vernacular architecture. Ridolfi worked out a slanted cut of the clay-extruded tile. This cut, a penne-pasta-like cut, negates the orthogonality between outside planes and inside surfaces by interweaving transcendent and commonplace. This tectonic detail does not allow rainwater to stagnate inside it and at the same time modulates the substance of light cast within the pentagonal central place.[22]

The use of this tile reveals how the successful merging of the sublime and the mundane is a deeply characteristic of architecture. The conceiving of this detail shows how the inter-penetration of these two attitudes results from a canny tactical intelligence gained through technical skill, vigilance, indirection, flair, and other attributes suited to competitive advantage when contending amidst natural or social manifestations of life. The lure of the sublime and the call of the mundane world are both opposites and complements within the intelligence that guides architecture, a tectonic expression that registers how humanity is both mundane and sublime, dwelling in a world of economy and awe, technique and terror, physics and metaphysics.

In Casa Lina, the interaction among the interlocking shapes reveals that the dominant edification is produced by an architectural transformation of the curiosity for light, a quasi-material power. For instance, Scholasticism argues that light is an influential substance that emanates from even the humblest material: glass is made from sand and ashes, fire comes from coal and wood and a polished stone shines. In Ridolfi’s designs, light is materially embodied spirit; the substance of light distributes divinity to all details. The substance of light as a distillation of pathos triggers the internal power of architectural aspirations both in the drawings and in the built artifact. This happens on the paper in the contrast of the etching with the line marking the canons of construction. In the building the stone sponga—a local material—and the baked clay of the bricks with their natural porous filigrees allow the same powerful play of dark and light evoked by the chiaroscuro of the pencil and pen traits, revealing an internal light source, an arcane lume materiale.

Ridolfi’s technographies are the result of architectural curiosity a design procedure based on a divestment of habits of believes which will consent to consider future tectonic events with insightful wonder. Architectural curiosity is a reflective, or better yet, a speculative, procedure that takes care of the constructed world. The taking care of construction is always based on the idea of scrupolositas, a concern for minutiae. This concern for minutiae is at the basis of one of the most powerful tool left to architects for ameliorating their own tectonic imagination. The attention to minutiae, in relationship to a cosmological framework, develops a visual clarity that also causes a peculiar lulling of the mind. The aim is to lead the distracted inhabitants of architecture to their limit of visual clarity. The consequence is that edifices move us as we enthused them. Architecture is a curious science, which deals with the metamorphosis of the constructed environment by producing significant images, which unifies the natures of the dwellers with that of dwelling.

Transmuting thoughtfulness is the main resource the non-linear path demarking the complexity of growth and change embodied in Ridolfi’s vocation to construction as an act of powerful tectonic imagination. This powerful act not only creates thaumaturgic and beatific private buildings, but also it transmutes the vision for a vita beata from the realm of private to the negotiation of the public realm, from the infraordinary of dwelling to the extraordinary of monuments. In a true architectural opus, this vision, which can be attained only for very brief moments, when listening to rain and wind blowing against a brick wall or when contemplating its shadow under the slanted sun of a late summer sunset, later becomes the necessary canon for any other work.

Forty years after the Tower of Restaurants and few years after Casa Lina, in the design for a major public building, a Motel Agip, Ridolfi advances the cosmological and tectonic themes proposed in Casa Lina by elaborating it through a constructive curiosity which also considers edifices as events intended as opportunities to cause marvel and wonderment in others. This motel, a tower of two hundred rooms, was to be located in Settebagni, on Rome’s Beltway (between the Salaria and the Autosole). By looking at the elevations of this compelling motel, the first image that comes to mind is the neo-medieval towers of Fritz Lang’s 1926 sci-fi film Movie, Metropolis. The decagonal plan of this eleven-story building unfolds in a three-dimensional structure following the same helical rotation characterizing the Tower of Restaurants. Furthermore, Ridolfi has added to this effective configuration a carefully controlled tectonic play of the weatherproofing paneled skin that becomes a propitious demonstration by which this new edifice, as in the Tower of Restaurants, is projected into the realm of the cosmologically arcane. Ridolfi’s Motel Agip presents the same power of arcane constructive tension embodied in the many Flemish representations of the Babel Tower the truly inaugural central-plan monument of human imagination. In his history of Italian Modern Architecture, Tafuri categorize the Agip Tower as a Ridolfi’s manifestation of “a desire for the night (passione per la notte)” (Tafuri 1982:112)[23].

A restatement of the human inaugural imagination of the Babel Tower is also the Bidone. The”Bidone,” is the untranslatable pun used[24] by Ridolfi to indicate the design for an addition to the historical buildings composing the City Hall of Terni. Elaborated in 1981, an addition to three contiguous buildings, [25] the “Bidone” is the last version of a design commission that has first begun in 1964. The addition is eleven stories high (three underground and eight above ground) and it is a 16 modular sections polygonal building inscribed within an oval, with alternating bow windows and recessed walls. Frankl and Ridolfi’s Bidone is the modern omphallus of the city of Terni as the baptistery of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini was and it is the omphallus of Florence. [26]

The building is free standing in the center of the square created by the trio of the renewed palazzos, its major axis is facing south and in the rear is links up with them with a bridge. The typical plan has a part generated by two concentric ovals of concrete column. The outer oval consists of 16 columns which are hexagonal underground and pentagonal above ground. The internal oval consists of eight hexagonal columns. The plan of this structure does not seem to derive from any known geometrical form; however it contains in its alternate edge manipulation a reworking the dynamic rule of Ridolfi’s a cosmological framework. The stone panels of the weather proofing cladding are alternatively recessed and protruded both horizontally and vertically. When the stone panels are protruded above a recessed space, there is no water problem since the rainwater can be kept off the wall with a dripping-cut under the floor slab. When a recessed space is above protruded panels, the exposed lozenge-shaped area of the floor slab is protected with a stone piece having a double surface extending outwards to the edge of the slab with under it the usual dripping-cut. The tectonic demonstration ruling the cladding of this addition is infused by both the compelling dream stuff making Borromini’s Sant’Ivo della Sapienza and the solid stuff characteristic of Gothic structures. Based on the norms of constructing and living well, the dream stuff and the solid stuff are inseparable parts of our constructed environment. Their interweaving through graphic demonstrations, constructive plays and arcane beginnings make the project of architecture possible.

Conclusions

In the project of architecture, integrating the art of thinking well, the art of building well with the art of constructing well, drawings and buildings exemplify and suggest rather than determine or impose. The union of dream and solid stuff in tectonic events becomes an expression of pleasure, a subjective presence rather than an objective procedure to which both the user and the architect must be subjected and the details and the fabricated devices are playful demonstration of cosmologically constructed events in an edifice. A building can be designed only trough a continuous creative, intellectual dialectic between imagination and imagining. Using this bipolar condition, architects do not make a sensory phenomenon out of an idea, but on the contrary, they shape the sensory phenomenon into an idea using freehand drawings. Architects with their graphic dreams do not open the doors for the spirit to enter everyday life on the contrary; they raise the everyday to the imaginal world, releasing the imaginal content of physical reality. The sapience of beginnings that is the core of architects’ moral imagination is expressed in conjuring drawings, which elaborate the relationship between the mundane and the sacred in a transhistorical condition. Rejecting the pseudo-completeness of the present digital drawing techniques, which cannot perform the fundamental act of establishing the indispensable cosmological relationship material order of cultural order; freehand drawings are the necessary masterpieces of these inaugurations.

Freehand design procedures cannot be abstractly constructed or described; they can be exclusively exemplified through moral tropes, geometric ordering and constructive analogies embodied in buildings. We can master these elegant design procedures only through what Pascal has called “esprit de finesse et esprit de geometrie.” Fostered by fluid mental attitudes, these procedures dwell between the classical dichotomies proposed by philosophy and the mystifying but powerful structure of thinking by images. Freehand drawings are the only remaining locus where this condition between rationality and non-rationality results in a cosmography that sustains the architectural making of places. Freehand drawings are instruments capable of integrating both the solid stuff of the space that is encircling us with the dream stuff, which takes shape in our mind. The most difficult assignment for architects is to design by virtuous reflections a construction, which is to extract from the empty surface of paper the inauguration of a building. This demanding task is based on the assembling in a visible design of invisible configurations and through such a process to concretize in a set of lines, marks and strokes, the potentiality of a construction, which cannot not be fully expressed but it is present in our thinking. In architectural design, there are no perceivable differences between sacred and mundane actions, as we sensible moderns believe to be. Every action, no matter how mundane: plowing, sowing, reaping, brewing, building ships, waging wars, playing games, system of weights and measures, building a brick wall, laying a floor, dancing on it, opening a door, has to be viewed as an “earthly” symbol for a specific “divine” activity. No aspect of this knowledge can divorced from any other aspect, which makes architectural design a difficult task. This procedure of architectural conjuring is not just manual skill, but it is a manifestation of a faculty of design acquired through appropriate techniques of prudent visualization and temperate exercises of architectural storytelling. Only through this thought-provoking procedure, the drawings become callimetric technographies which are “just the weaving of thoughts into images,” (Bloom, 1996:113) wonderful projections of buildings, tempered and prudent analogical places which make possible the construction of a vita beata in edifying edifices.

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[1] The eminent Islamic scholar Henry Corbin identifies the mundus imaginalis as an intermondus, an infra-place where visual imagination establishes true and real thoughts: an imaginative perception and an imaginative knowledge, which becomes an imaginative tectonic consciousness. This mundus imaginalis, a world ontologically real as the worlds of senses and intellect, contains everybody imaginal cosmos. Corbin coined the term ‘imaginal’ to discuss the realm of the cognitive imagination, a “world of images in suspense,” which should not be confounded with the realm of the imaginary. This mundus imaginalis is ontologically above the world of senses, and below the pure intelligible world. This is a realm where architectural constructive imagination, the world of architectural images, can be explored.

[2] Allegorically speaking, tectonic history must be seen as a person standing next to the drafting board, whose presence is felt necessary, but who cannot be talked to or be heard.

[3] I am not using the word magic as a synonym of poetic or artistic, but I am using it to designate a different form of intelligence frequently described as illogical and meaningless since it is intentionally deviant from the scientific intelligence. Magic is basically a different use of material reality and its existence defines and demonstrates the marginal by bringing in focus the tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, centrality and diversity; as such, the name magic is usually used to represent "otherness" in society.

[4] An internationally known early twentieth century art critic and a member of the famous Warburg banking family, Aby Warburg elaborated a bold survey of the meaning of visual representation, which transcended the borders of time and space, suggests a refreshing and illuminating basis for the comparative or anthropological study of art

[5] William Ames was born in 1567 at Ipswich in Suffolk, that region east of Anglia where Puritanism had begun, and died 1633. Ames is called “the father of American theology.” The first books at Harvard were the one wrote by Ames. He was of such profound influence upon the theology of New England that Technological Theses were routinely debated at the Harvard and Yale Commencement Exercises during the second half of the seventeenth century. (Ames 1979: vii). For a discussion of Ramist cultural structure and for an understanding of the complexity of encyclopedic structures and relations cf. Ong (1958) and Salsano (1977:3-62).

[6] In regard to technography, I am reviving in anglicized form a term devised by Carlo Lodoli, an 18^th century Venetian architectural theoretician and master of Christian moral. Lodoli advocates a correct use of representation in the practice of architecture. He calls these drawings tecnografie. See: Lodoli,s “Outlines,” in Frascari (1981: 257 & 29).

[7] A closer examination of Ames’ conception of the arts reveals that the roots of technometry are in the exegesis of Greek and Roman Classical writings, Scholastic thought, and Renaissance humanism.

[8] The Poem of the Right Angle was published in September 1955 by the éditions Verve, and it consists of 155 pages, including 20 color lithographs with a format of 32x42 cm; it was written, illustrated and designed by Le Corbusier and printed by Mourlot Frères. The Iconostasis is a wall enclosing the altar in orthodox churches, a place where icons make visible the invisible. Le Corbusier by using Iconostasis as a metonymical naming to indicate the spread-like tarots planned for the 20 cards composing the poem denotes how important is emblematic thinking for the development of architectural intelligence. For the amazing imaginal qualities of reading spreads of tarots see the appendix in Calvino 1977.

[9] Generally the locution “costruzione legittima” (legitimate construction) is related to Leon Battista Alberti’ s perspective method, even so Alberti never used it nor would he would have used being a very sophisticated manipulator of language would have know that such a locution would branded as bastard or illegitimate any other visual construction. He himself was an illegitimate son of Lorenzo Alberti.

[10] An exception to this unconstructive use of axonometric views was a series of axonometricly arranged architectonic abstract shapes executed by El Lissitsky from 1919 to 1924. Lissitsky called this kind of images PROUN and they are for him "the interchange...between painting and architecture." The word PROUN (pl. Prounen) is acronym for PROjekty Utverzhdeniya Novogo (Projects for the Affirmation for the New). Lissitsky took the pure, reduced geometric shapes produced by the Russian Suprematist movement and gave them an ambiguous materiality and broader cosmological array of function. Kuppers (1988:11) says of the Prounen: "There, within the confines of the picture-frame, was cosmic space, in which floating geometric forms were held counterpoised by tremendous tensile forces,"

[11] The only exception is when the perspective mode is turned on.

[12] Son of the distinguished Architectural Historian Paul Frankl, Wolfgang Frankl, is the young partner of the firm. Frankl joined officially the firm of Ridolfi in 1948—although his collaboration with Ridolfi began before the II World War. Frankl contributed to the firm’s tectonic view of the architectural project with his German tradition of Werkgerechgkeit, the aesthetic of a proper building art, to the development of Ridolfi’s poetic search in the realm of tectonic

[13] Ridolfi’s work had been presented as proto-post-modern in the famous Venice Biennale of Architecture canonizing and inaugurating architectural Post-Modernity 1979.

[14] This is true only of the post-war editions of the Graphic standards. The first edition of this manual was carefully grounded in a cosmological vision. Its first plate—paid by the Bricklayers Association—was a cosmological diagram of site location beautifully decorated with twelve Art Deco side vignettes of the Zodiac signs.

[15] A German artist Kurt Schwitters conceived the Merzbau, a cosmological construction of edifying negotiations, which as John Elderfield states, “...was not the by-product of an amusingly eccentric way of life, but a visually and thematically remarkable, complex and ambitious work of art.” Kurt ascribed the birth of the Merzbau to 1923, (the same year that Russian Lissitsky presented his 'Proun' theory of architecture-painting environment).

[16] For the Prounen see footnote no 9.

[17] To fully understand Vitruvius cosmological theory, the account of the Hellenistic Tower of Winds has to be combined with the explanation of the layout of theatres.

[18] Janus, the door, when he was personified was represented with two faces; originally, one face was bearded while the other was not (probably a symbol of the sun and the moon). Later both faces were bearded. In his right hand, he holds a key. The double-faced head appears on many Roman coins, and around the 2nd century BC even with four faces. He gives the name to the month of January (the eleventh and last month of the Roman calendar).

[19] At the beginning of Rome, the divinities were mysterious numenae, they did not have a persona but they were not less influential. The idea of anthropomorphized gods came later, with the establishing in Rome of the Greek gods, who had human appearances.

[20] To continue with a Warbugr-like mood:
“ ...Cardo, the [door] hinge, is the same word as cerdo, craftsman - in Irish myth the god of craftsmen who specialized in hinges, locks and rivets was called Credne - the craftsman who originally claimed the goddess Cerdo or Cardea as his patroness. [...] Ovid says of Cardea, apparently quoting a religious formula: 'Her power is to open what is shut; to shut what is open.'..." (Graves 19 )

[21] Apollo's Temple in Delphi contained a famous rounded stone called an omphalos, which was believed to be the center of the world. Omphalos is the Greek word for navel, or umbilical button.

[22] This tile was conceived and used for the first time for the making of small apartment building in Via Vetuloni in Rome.

[23] Unfortunately, this tower was never built. The firm Frankl-Ridolfi proposed a similar design for the Motel Agip in Belgrade, but also this tower was never erected.

[24] In Italian, the word bidone means metal barrel or drum, but it is also a slang term for “swindle” The design of the building is reminiscent of a barrel, but Ridolfi in the naming is also evoking the economic vicissitude of a partial and insufficient payment of the design fee

[25] The main building is the late Renaissance Palazzo Spada, designed by an architect of the School of Sangallo il Giovane.

[26] Probably the tectonic source for Ridolfi is the Baptistery designed by Benedetto Antelami for the City of Parma, a town where Ridolfi went to school.