“…all systems of thought, all ideological constructs, are in need of constant, conscious criticism; and the process of revision can come about only on the as-sumption that there is a higher and more universal standard against which to measure the existing system. History provides both the ideas that are in need of criticism and the material out of which this criticism is forged. An architecture that is constantly aware of its own history, but constantly critical of the seduc-tions of history, is what we should aim for today”. * Architecture has always provided an opportunity for change. It is difficult to establish how and when it adheres to the logic of trend or else makes up an element of change interpreted as a strategic phenomenon. A process attempting to stimulate designing approaches which better represent the typical characteristics of our time is certainly under way with the purpose of identifying paths and lines capable of leaving a tangible sign of our era also through architecture. The phases which have characterized the present lay-out of cities and the morphology of their constitutive elements are recognizable moments of the architectural, technological and cultural approach to building. They provide in fact the comprehensive picture of the cultural attitude of the figures involved in the processes of modification of reality, the context on which we are called to act being difficult to interpret and subject to constant and rapid change. The contemporary city appears to be fragmented into systems, fabrics and nodes, and several partial cities can be identified within it which may sometimes interact and other times be in conflict. The invariants of the transformation process must be found within the history of the city so that they can be adjusted to the situations and conditions of the 21st century. The topic of the preservation and protection of resources is a central issue within urban renovation, through not only logics of conservation and protection, but also logics aimed at the creation of new opportunities from both the environmental and social points of view. Planning the city of memory creatively means overcoming the conflict between conservation, innovation and transformation with the purpose of providing the driving force for a complex system of – social, cultural and economic – global relationships having a strong local connation. Topics, such as the control of the quality of the environment and sustainable development are the most important central issues at international level within the cultural, social and economic arena within which the land planning, designing and management activities are organized. To make use of the cultural resources of an area, also with the purpose of local development, action policies and strategies need to be deeply innovated, by integrating the process of enhancement of resources with that of the context, by giving the priority to integrated action plans rather than specific projects, by making it easier to benefit from all the economic effects of the enhancement process. In other words, it is necessary to introduce strategies based on a strong integration of the enhancement of all the cultural resources of the area with the local economic and social system. The future of the urban economy depends on the ability of cities to condition the various forms and functions of planning to the dynamics of the implemented activities, so as to optimize their competitiveness and ability to interact with the context of the global space of flows: this becomes rooted in the physical space, but the on line and material experiences have their own, increasingly perceptible, characteristics. In the network society, there is the emergence of original forms and relationships of space which make it necessary to reformulate the planning, building and management of the land and its architectural expressions. The traditional city model divided into parts and functions is today replaced by the “multiple city”, a not only multifunctional but also complex node where local and global networks intertwine. There are, in fact, some places in the city which can provide variable and dynamic responses to the ever changing demands and expectations of users, which are precisely interpreted as city users. Residence, work, sport, leisure time, production and culture are interconnected within the urban space according to diversified time plans, bringing about the reduction of trips, energy saving, a limitation to pollution and promoting connections between parts of the city within an interacting system of communities able to express different interpretations of urban life as a response to the requirements of different contexts . The city, as a model of enterprise, takes on a reticular configuration able to maintain the connections between the different centres located in the various more or less peripheral districts: a structure designed to manage the complexity within which a network of intelligent computer terminals is activated to connect all the new decentralized units to the institutional centre of the city . In the economy of knowledge and creativity, Italian cities are faced with the need to reorganize their cultural heritage, establishing new and flexible end uses of the existing structures. Within this framework, the “new services”, innovative materials and application techniques, proposed by architecture today, prove to be stimulating and promising fields of actions. The density and capillarity of the Italian heritage, the quality and spreading of cultural assets make protection activities difficult and burdensome, thus highlighting how enhancement must necessarily go hand in hand with a widespread use and the good quality of the offered services. The globalized reality proposes categories of spaces and buildings which are able to attract and absorb a large part of the political, economic, cultural, social news of the world: representative objects and iconic spaces of contemporaneity. New urban identities are originated from general processes of cultural reformulation, modification of traditional needs and redefinition of the inherent offer. New focuses interweaving cities with large cultural centres emerge, thus regenerating the urban contexts through an attractive quality which upsets tourist flows into new neo-qualifying nodes. Important contemporary examples are the Gugghenheim in Bilbao or the scenic system of the Posdammer Platz. These are already consolidated paradigms which witness how new “types” of centralities emerge and characterize the urban appearance as far as they bring about forms of communications and the swapping of roles” . As a result, the so-called “attractive cities” start taking shape: these are the main advocates of the definition of new urban geographies within which the economy of culture can provide answers and opportunities to urban and architectural planning projects which, in their turn, have the task to redefine the places of sociality and workplaces. In this arena, the relationship between architecture, town planning, design, new technologies and materials borrowed for architectural purposes, takes shape as one of the great issues of our contemporary era. We are witnessing the coexistence of opposed, even extreme, design approaches. On the one hand, they are aimed at reaffirming the historical and traditional building paradigms by re-proposing opaque, heavy, ancient, pre-existing and eternal features which the establishment architecture has always promoted. On the other hand, they tend to interpret the increasingly intangible connotations of development that our society is adopting as elements of daily life, by absorbing the principles of transparency, innovation, lightness, modernity, speed, security, temporariness as instruments conveying an increasing ly ethereal and dynamic thought. Hence, architectural structures are proposed with growing strength within this context as places for circulating information. The presence of these buildings is always greater within residential areas. They acquire different values depending on the cultural contexts and have been defined by the French philosopher and town planner, Paul Virilio, as media-buildings, i.e. places where the information function prevails over the housing function by guaranteeing permanent profitability. The cost of information is such that it allows any building to become profitable more rapidly than by performing its housing function. This information belongs to the community, has an urban dimension and compares with spaces which often have an intangible origin . Somebody believe that architecture states its meaning of expression of the advanced levels of technology by recovering credibility through the recent innovative and complex design approaches. Ephemeral, changeable and recyclable materials are the best interpreters of the present reversal in trend. In the past, it was the great services which were the well-established symbols implemented through materials and technologies aimed to last, whereas ordinary and residential building was expressed with sobriety and technological simplicity, i.e. qualities achieved through non durable building systems, but aimed to focus their existence on their social and functional role. Today the opposite phenomenon is true: residential housing is now the very icon of eternity and the “contemporary monument” is designed to represent a moment, an historical fragment of short duration. This aspect gives the priority to the transfer of memory and characterization – through a DNA which typically belongs to contemporary architecture – which is called to make its choices between dualist and extreme options, whose importance and dramatic role we will try to summarize below. The following observations originate from the acknowledgement of the following. Unlike that which is historically consolidated and strongly confirmed by the Modern Movement, the contemporary design practices often tend to reverse that relationship which once interpreted the architectural language as the outcome of capillary work carried out starting from inside the building towards the outside, symmetrically favouring processes which originate from phenomena outside the structure to be later verified internally. In other words, there is a trend which tries to conceive and prefigure, in the first place, the architectural envelope, by defining languages, stylistic features, materials and technologies, and then control the space it defines, in the second place, by reversing the well-proven function-to-form path into a so-to-say unusual form-to-function one. All this deteriorates a logical mental process which has always proposed a simultaneous and circular relation between these two factors. This aspect can be traced back to a set of multiple variables which basically originate from the search for an either harmonic or disharmonic dialogue with the landscape and the environment in general. Such activity is reinforced by the will to elect the architectural moment to be a driving force of both public and private initiatives characterized by an entrepreneurial approach, which often show the need of the players to exhibit or obtain spatial and morphological pre-figurations able to anticipate the outcome with respect to the method. This is a phenomenon which discloses, at the same time, an ambiguous interpretative approach reserved to the existing heritage and its relationship with modernity. A policy which sees modern action as a correct practice aimed to enhance the value of the existing elements, while demonizing any attempt of static inactivity promoted in the name of some allegedly legitimate, simple and passive, conservation, should be strongly pursued. In this context, the role of the architect, and even more that of the designer, changes. Only after this phenomenon is understood, can any objective considerations be made on the features and outcome of his work. Hence, observations relating to some new “moments” of contemporary building have emerged and raised real issues with which the present architectural culture should be put to the test. To formulate observations, we shall proceed by the opposition of dualities. Supporting one or the other position does not only involve making a simple nominal choice but, first, it moves the conditioning created by the individual practice and, then translates into the definition of a representative style of its time. The universe of concepts, included within the five theme families proposed, represents the theoretical and constituent themes characterizing a particular time, taste and method. That which is proposed below is not a dichotomic vision of the process, which defines architecture according to its general constitutive elements, but rather an analysis of the state of the art of the architectural subject and practice, developed through the differential analysis of items which are opposed in terms of methods and products. *_Alan Colquhoun, “Three kinds of historicism”, Oppositions, n. 26, 1984; in Id. Modernity and the classical tradition. Architectural essays 1980-1987, MIT Press Cambridge, Mass., London 1989

Moments of contemporary building, that is the architecture of dissonances

FAROLDI, EMILIO
2009-01-01

Abstract

“…all systems of thought, all ideological constructs, are in need of constant, conscious criticism; and the process of revision can come about only on the as-sumption that there is a higher and more universal standard against which to measure the existing system. History provides both the ideas that are in need of criticism and the material out of which this criticism is forged. An architecture that is constantly aware of its own history, but constantly critical of the seduc-tions of history, is what we should aim for today”. * Architecture has always provided an opportunity for change. It is difficult to establish how and when it adheres to the logic of trend or else makes up an element of change interpreted as a strategic phenomenon. A process attempting to stimulate designing approaches which better represent the typical characteristics of our time is certainly under way with the purpose of identifying paths and lines capable of leaving a tangible sign of our era also through architecture. The phases which have characterized the present lay-out of cities and the morphology of their constitutive elements are recognizable moments of the architectural, technological and cultural approach to building. They provide in fact the comprehensive picture of the cultural attitude of the figures involved in the processes of modification of reality, the context on which we are called to act being difficult to interpret and subject to constant and rapid change. The contemporary city appears to be fragmented into systems, fabrics and nodes, and several partial cities can be identified within it which may sometimes interact and other times be in conflict. The invariants of the transformation process must be found within the history of the city so that they can be adjusted to the situations and conditions of the 21st century. The topic of the preservation and protection of resources is a central issue within urban renovation, through not only logics of conservation and protection, but also logics aimed at the creation of new opportunities from both the environmental and social points of view. Planning the city of memory creatively means overcoming the conflict between conservation, innovation and transformation with the purpose of providing the driving force for a complex system of – social, cultural and economic – global relationships having a strong local connation. Topics, such as the control of the quality of the environment and sustainable development are the most important central issues at international level within the cultural, social and economic arena within which the land planning, designing and management activities are organized. To make use of the cultural resources of an area, also with the purpose of local development, action policies and strategies need to be deeply innovated, by integrating the process of enhancement of resources with that of the context, by giving the priority to integrated action plans rather than specific projects, by making it easier to benefit from all the economic effects of the enhancement process. In other words, it is necessary to introduce strategies based on a strong integration of the enhancement of all the cultural resources of the area with the local economic and social system. The future of the urban economy depends on the ability of cities to condition the various forms and functions of planning to the dynamics of the implemented activities, so as to optimize their competitiveness and ability to interact with the context of the global space of flows: this becomes rooted in the physical space, but the on line and material experiences have their own, increasingly perceptible, characteristics. In the network society, there is the emergence of original forms and relationships of space which make it necessary to reformulate the planning, building and management of the land and its architectural expressions. The traditional city model divided into parts and functions is today replaced by the “multiple city”, a not only multifunctional but also complex node where local and global networks intertwine. There are, in fact, some places in the city which can provide variable and dynamic responses to the ever changing demands and expectations of users, which are precisely interpreted as city users. Residence, work, sport, leisure time, production and culture are interconnected within the urban space according to diversified time plans, bringing about the reduction of trips, energy saving, a limitation to pollution and promoting connections between parts of the city within an interacting system of communities able to express different interpretations of urban life as a response to the requirements of different contexts . The city, as a model of enterprise, takes on a reticular configuration able to maintain the connections between the different centres located in the various more or less peripheral districts: a structure designed to manage the complexity within which a network of intelligent computer terminals is activated to connect all the new decentralized units to the institutional centre of the city . In the economy of knowledge and creativity, Italian cities are faced with the need to reorganize their cultural heritage, establishing new and flexible end uses of the existing structures. Within this framework, the “new services”, innovative materials and application techniques, proposed by architecture today, prove to be stimulating and promising fields of actions. The density and capillarity of the Italian heritage, the quality and spreading of cultural assets make protection activities difficult and burdensome, thus highlighting how enhancement must necessarily go hand in hand with a widespread use and the good quality of the offered services. The globalized reality proposes categories of spaces and buildings which are able to attract and absorb a large part of the political, economic, cultural, social news of the world: representative objects and iconic spaces of contemporaneity. New urban identities are originated from general processes of cultural reformulation, modification of traditional needs and redefinition of the inherent offer. New focuses interweaving cities with large cultural centres emerge, thus regenerating the urban contexts through an attractive quality which upsets tourist flows into new neo-qualifying nodes. Important contemporary examples are the Gugghenheim in Bilbao or the scenic system of the Posdammer Platz. These are already consolidated paradigms which witness how new “types” of centralities emerge and characterize the urban appearance as far as they bring about forms of communications and the swapping of roles” . As a result, the so-called “attractive cities” start taking shape: these are the main advocates of the definition of new urban geographies within which the economy of culture can provide answers and opportunities to urban and architectural planning projects which, in their turn, have the task to redefine the places of sociality and workplaces. In this arena, the relationship between architecture, town planning, design, new technologies and materials borrowed for architectural purposes, takes shape as one of the great issues of our contemporary era. We are witnessing the coexistence of opposed, even extreme, design approaches. On the one hand, they are aimed at reaffirming the historical and traditional building paradigms by re-proposing opaque, heavy, ancient, pre-existing and eternal features which the establishment architecture has always promoted. On the other hand, they tend to interpret the increasingly intangible connotations of development that our society is adopting as elements of daily life, by absorbing the principles of transparency, innovation, lightness, modernity, speed, security, temporariness as instruments conveying an increasing ly ethereal and dynamic thought. Hence, architectural structures are proposed with growing strength within this context as places for circulating information. The presence of these buildings is always greater within residential areas. They acquire different values depending on the cultural contexts and have been defined by the French philosopher and town planner, Paul Virilio, as media-buildings, i.e. places where the information function prevails over the housing function by guaranteeing permanent profitability. The cost of information is such that it allows any building to become profitable more rapidly than by performing its housing function. This information belongs to the community, has an urban dimension and compares with spaces which often have an intangible origin . Somebody believe that architecture states its meaning of expression of the advanced levels of technology by recovering credibility through the recent innovative and complex design approaches. Ephemeral, changeable and recyclable materials are the best interpreters of the present reversal in trend. In the past, it was the great services which were the well-established symbols implemented through materials and technologies aimed to last, whereas ordinary and residential building was expressed with sobriety and technological simplicity, i.e. qualities achieved through non durable building systems, but aimed to focus their existence on their social and functional role. Today the opposite phenomenon is true: residential housing is now the very icon of eternity and the “contemporary monument” is designed to represent a moment, an historical fragment of short duration. This aspect gives the priority to the transfer of memory and characterization – through a DNA which typically belongs to contemporary architecture – which is called to make its choices between dualist and extreme options, whose importance and dramatic role we will try to summarize below. The following observations originate from the acknowledgement of the following. Unlike that which is historically consolidated and strongly confirmed by the Modern Movement, the contemporary design practices often tend to reverse that relationship which once interpreted the architectural language as the outcome of capillary work carried out starting from inside the building towards the outside, symmetrically favouring processes which originate from phenomena outside the structure to be later verified internally. In other words, there is a trend which tries to conceive and prefigure, in the first place, the architectural envelope, by defining languages, stylistic features, materials and technologies, and then control the space it defines, in the second place, by reversing the well-proven function-to-form path into a so-to-say unusual form-to-function one. All this deteriorates a logical mental process which has always proposed a simultaneous and circular relation between these two factors. This aspect can be traced back to a set of multiple variables which basically originate from the search for an either harmonic or disharmonic dialogue with the landscape and the environment in general. Such activity is reinforced by the will to elect the architectural moment to be a driving force of both public and private initiatives characterized by an entrepreneurial approach, which often show the need of the players to exhibit or obtain spatial and morphological pre-figurations able to anticipate the outcome with respect to the method. This is a phenomenon which discloses, at the same time, an ambiguous interpretative approach reserved to the existing heritage and its relationship with modernity. A policy which sees modern action as a correct practice aimed to enhance the value of the existing elements, while demonizing any attempt of static inactivity promoted in the name of some allegedly legitimate, simple and passive, conservation, should be strongly pursued. In this context, the role of the architect, and even more that of the designer, changes. Only after this phenomenon is understood, can any objective considerations be made on the features and outcome of his work. Hence, observations relating to some new “moments” of contemporary building have emerged and raised real issues with which the present architectural culture should be put to the test. To formulate observations, we shall proceed by the opposition of dualities. Supporting one or the other position does not only involve making a simple nominal choice but, first, it moves the conditioning created by the individual practice and, then translates into the definition of a representative style of its time. The universe of concepts, included within the five theme families proposed, represents the theoretical and constituent themes characterizing a particular time, taste and method. That which is proposed below is not a dichotomic vision of the process, which defines architecture according to its general constitutive elements, but rather an analysis of the state of the art of the architectural subject and practice, developed through the differential analysis of items which are opposed in terms of methods and products. *_Alan Colquhoun, “Three kinds of historicism”, Oppositions, n. 26, 1984; in Id. Modernity and the classical tradition. Architectural essays 1980-1987, MIT Press Cambridge, Mass., London 1989
2009
Convegno Innovation in research. The challenge and activities in progress
9788864530369
architecture; project; form; function; image
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