Happy Birthday Bramante! - editorial San Rocco 11

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.