Wonders of the Modern World: America - ricerca e pubblicazione del lavoro degli studenti del semestre invernale 2014/2015 UIC Chicago

Project of a Historical Architecture is an attempt to look back at Johan Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff einer historischen Architektur (1721) and try to imagine a realistic, collective and comparative approach to contemporary architecture. The first episode of this research is dedicated to the United States and is called Wonders of the Modern World: America. In the Entwurff einer historischen Architektur, Fischer combines two apparently conflicting acts: he selects only monuments and he selects only real buildings (or at least buildings he believes to be or have been real). Fischer so delineates a possible method for the understanding of monumental architecture that is both realist and comparative. Fischer implicitly proposes a theory of architecture based on the common as opposed to the individual and suggests the possibility of an anthropological approach to architecture. Fischer seems to implicitely suggest a critique of the liberal presuppositions of contemporary architecture that is similar to the critique addressed by anthropologists and economists such as Malinowski (1922), Polanyi (1944) and Mauss (1950) to the interpretations of primitive economy in classic liberalism. These realistic critiques – as well as the arguments we can discover in Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (1966), Loos’ Architecture (1910) and Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978) – oppose the ideal constructions of both Laugier and Adam Smith, and allow to think of architecture as something intimately collective. Acknowledging architecture as something immediately immersed into linguistic exchange and inextricably linked to social and religious ceremonies, it will become possible to define a new way of observing the multitude of contradictory traces deposited into the contemporary landscapes. Starting from an innovative reading of the Entwurff, it is possible to look at the contemporary American landscape as an index of contemporary America’s multifaceted collective memory.