Suchergebnisse

È venuta l'epidemia del COVID-19 ed eravamo impreparati. Eravamo impreparati perché non volevamo prendere in considerazione conseguenze, perché volevamo essere impreparati. Nel lungo periodo infatti saremmo morti tutti, e quindi, del lungo periodo, non se ne è occupato nessuno: pianificare era stupido, progettare retrogrado. Poi è venuta l'epidemia e i letti negli ospedali non sono bastati. Ora forse ci siamo ricreduti. Sembra persino che ci siano i soldi per fare qualcosa. Forse siamo davanti alla "grande occasione obbligata" (come mi diceva Maurizio Crippa mentre parlavamo di questo testo). Tutti si sono messi a fare programmi e siamo tornati ai grandi successi: incentivi alle ristrutturazioni e ponte sullo stretto di Messina. Forse, confusamente, è anche un segnale promettente. Si può tornare a progettare. In caso, il programma non può che essere molto vasto. L'epidemia ha colpito tutti (anche se certamente non allo stesso modo). Se la temperatura del pianeta aumenta, aumenta per tutti. Questo è forse il punto decisivo: per anni abbiamo pensato che si potesse evitare di fare la somma, che si potessero rimandare e rimpallare le conseguenze su qualcun'altro. Qualunque tentativo di affrontare i problemi nella loro totalità (dal punto di vista della totalità, come avrebbe detto Lukács) era subito condannato come insano e totalitario, come se qualsiasi atto di realismo e qualsiasi volontà di piano fosse già un atto di violenza. In realtà, dalle epidemie e dal riscaldamento del pianeta ci possiamo salvare solo tutti assieme e solo pensando subito alle conseguenze. L'epidemia ci ha anche fatto vedere delle cose. Ha ridotto le emissioni di gas serra mondiali (le stime variano tra 5% e 10%) e ci ha mostrato città diverse. Se anche questa riduzione non sembra sufficiente a limitare le emissioni come previsto dagli accordi di Parigi 2015, fornisce tuttavia una ragionevole approssimazione di cosa vorrebbe dire adottare queste politiche. Di questo obiettivo lontano ed astratto adesso abbiamo tutti un'esperienza immediata, un'esperienza tanto spaventosa, come le strade percorse solo da ambulanze, quanto meravigliosa, come l'azzurro del cielo di Milano nello scorso Aprile.

Nobody talks about beauty. Nobody dares. (Or, at least, not in architecture; if you are in the soap business, then it's another story.) If you mention beauty – meaning a universally evident beauty – people stare at you like some sort of dinosaur who forgot to acknowledge his own extinction. Actually, they also fear that just before you ac- knowledge it, you could still eat them. If you do dare to mention beauty, then some well-intentioned idiot says "beauty is subjective", as if this indisputable truth (given that beauty is, of course, subjective) would implicitly mean that nothing subjective and shared (or universal, or common, or whatever you'd like to call it) could possibly exist; as if subjects could never agree, or could never admit their shared nature and recognize themselves in what, in the end, is nothing more than this: the sudden appearance of something that we all like, something to which we would all like to surrender ourselves (i.e., the sudden appearance of beauty). So, yes: beauty is subjective. But this is no reason to stop worrying about beauty. It seems difficult to talk about architecture without mentioning beauty. The modern idea of doing without beauty does not really seem to have worked out very well. Just randomly scan dezeen.com: Why a "circular bridge on a Uruguayan lagoon"? Why a "huge horseshoe- shaped market hall"? And why a "pre-rusted steel staircase based on the form of a single-surface Möbius strip"? What are all these buildings trying to achieve? Are they trying really hard to look efficient? Environmentally friendly? Progressive? Why all this effort? Is this just a nonsensical race towards the bizarre? Or is it, in fact, just a misunderstood search for beauty? And why don't we want to call this thing by its name? (And wouldn't this quest be at least slightly more successful if it had been explicit about its goal from the beginning?) Modern architecture murdered beauty, erasing it from the very core of the architectural discourse. In a few cases, the purge of beauty was an attempt to substitute the indirect politicalness of beauty with direct political action (although this remark probably only applies to Hannes Meyer's work and that of a few others). In the vast majority of cases, however, the expunging of beauty was just the consequence of a computational/liberal paradigm according to which anything that cannot be immediately calculated should simply be made to disappear. So beauty was suddenly dead, dead as a dead dog.

Giotto painted facts. This was immediately clear to his contemporaries. Filippo Villani wrote that the figures in Giotto's paintings perform actions "with such precision that they actually seem to be talking, crying, rejoicing". This observation needs to be considered in its proper context. First of all, to paint "facts" means to capture human actions in a fixed instant – because, of course, painting movements is simply impossible: in painting, "you cannot paint even the shaking of the head we use in the West for 'no'". Secondly, Giotto had to paint facts that in most cases do not follow what we, broadly speaking, call the "laws of nature". Giotto had to paint mostly sacred history,6 so prophetic dreams, miracles, apparitions, resurrections, ascensions. These "facts" are, for the most part, not facts at all; they are not part of "reality" as we consider it, or even as Giotto's contemporaries considered it. More than anything, these "facts" are a suspension of reality. So, Giotto painted facts that happened, and happened in reality, even though they happened in reality as a suspension of reality. Third, the facts painted by Giotto are ones known to everybody. Giotto's clients as well as his audience knew – of course, to various degrees – the stories of Isaac, Joachim, the Virgin Mary, Christ and St Francis. Giotto's paintings are certainly part of a narration (in Assisi there is even text below the paintings that explains the stories), but the informative content of these paintings is non-existent. Giotto's paintings do not communicate any new information; rather, they just repeat what is already known. The presupposition of all of this art is that everyone already knows everything.

Bramante is the most important architect in the history of Western architecture. This fact alone would be a sufficient reason for this issue, but the additional fact that Bramante died 500 years ago merits its own celebration. Most of all, now that globalization has come full circle and we live in an entirely unified market, we must address Bramante's work as the foundation of universalism in Western architecture. Bramante imagined a single, universal architectural language that could deal with any potential architectural problem. Of course, universalism implies a sort of suspicious generosity, and Bramante's project is certainly a colonialist project. Still, universalism – at least in the form of the market – won, and now it can only be criticized from within by recognizing the violence it brings with it, as well as by rediscovering the generosity that is equally implicit in a universal project. Bramante was probably the most ruthless intellectual of the Renaissance, for he promoted his cultural project with the haste and cold- blooded brutality of a military campaign, seizing control over classical antiquity in the same manner in which a conquistador lays claim to a luxuriant paradise. And yet Bramante – der Zorn Gottes – is also, together with Machiavelli, the most conscious intellectual of his time with respect to the double-sided nature of the Renaissance. Bramante never underestimated the darker side of his cultural project. Braman- te conquered an empire on behalf of Western architecture that was as splendid as it was fragile and then bequeathed it, with all of its implicit burden of oppression, rage and fear, but also with its unlikely humanity and problematic innocence, to all Western and Westernized architects (including us). The violent generosity of Bramante's work remains the foundation of any contemporary attempt to imagine a universal architectural language for a globalized world.

Architecture of the past twenty years has had to respond to contradictory requirements: on the one hand, it had to be scaled back in order to provide neutral structures open for a variety of uses. On the other, it had to present inimitable, eye-catching objects with a unique design and high recall value. Pursuant to the idea of "specific neutrality" and strategic key terms such as "low cost monuments" or "Ikea classicism," Atelier Kempe Thill has continually come up with new solutions that, despite times of upheaval and increasing costs, still manage to recall the legacy of European architecture in a powerful, natural, and innovative way. Today, the office, founded in Rotterdam in 2000 by André Kempe (*1968 in Freiberg) and Oliver Thill (*1971 in Chemnitz), has about fifteen employees. This publication illuminates the architects' distinct approach based on very personal and not always politically correct statements with respect to selected projects from the past twelve years.

L'architettura è un gesto. Ludwig Wittgenstein architetto [Architecture is a Gesture: Ludwig Wittgenstein, architect] Daniele Pisani. Quodlibet Studio, 2011 (261 pp., € 28) With great earnestness, Daniele Pisani tells the story of the Kundmanngasse house, designed by Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and built by Wittgenstein in the period from 1926 to 1928. Pisani quietly puts together all the pieces necessary for understanding the house and its role in the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. He accurately describes the philosopher's biography as well as that of his sisters who were involved in the project (Margaret, but also Hermine), providing us with information about the Wittgenstein family and the political and cultural situation in Vienna at the time. He reconstructs the era's architectural debate in which the story of the house is (reluctantly) placed. The quiet tone and the accuracy of the story help eliminate the many legends that have accumulated over time about the house. The Kundmanngasse house is in fact a favourite subject for architects' philosophical dilettantism (second to this is only the exegesis, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" by Martin Heidegger) as well as for philosphers' architectural dilettantism (think of the crazy interpretations that see in the house a petrified philosophy, a logic transformed into a house—hausgewordene Logik ).

Tirana is the European capital that has changed most over the past 15 years. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1990, the city experienced the following sequence of episodes: the advent of democracy, mass immigration, a dramatic and grotesque economic recession followed by unrest and foreign military intervention, rapid and disproportionate economic growth, a fanciful and pragmatic urban policy at the hands of its postmodern prince and, lastly, a surreal stalemate period during which the city awaits the outcome of an extenuating duel between the mayor and the prime minister. Domus visited Tirana at this crucial moment in its development.

The 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 2007 is emblematic for the 50th birthday of the European project itself. This symbolic point in time presents the ideal opportunity to turn the spotlight on the current and future role of Brussels as the Capital of Europe. What image does Brussels want to project as a capital city within the European Union and beyond? What are the indisputable qualities of the European presence in Brussels? How can Brussels consciously do justice to its European mission and be a true embodiment of the European political project? Led by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Elia Zenghelis, an international team of 16 architects and urban planners who are associated with the Berlage Institute investigated these questions and devised a plan for the possible future of the Capital of Europe. Brussels- A Manifesto is a pamphlet that treats the city's self evident, hidden or forgotten qualities as building blocks for a tangible project that revolves around the relations between the European institutions and the city. By adopting this perspective, the pamphlet makes the discussion about the future of the European Union and its capital city concrete, palpable and accessible, rescuing it from a discourse that often remains abstract. The project of the new Parliament of the European Union expose a possible approach to monumental public architecture in Brussels.