The “category” of the picturesque provides a comprehension of many elements in which is rooted the idea of contemporary city. Asymmetrical devices and compositional procedures based on independent parts have opened new horizons also at the scale of architectural composition. The very word “composition”, thought often dismissed by contemporary architecture, actually doesn’t coincide with the hierarchic Beaux-Arts partis and the supremacy of geometry: coeval to “picturesque” it has its origin in the 1700s disquietude, when city became an enormous “irregular pile of confusion and absurdity” in which typology and geometry lost their power to give order. In the “ville comme une forêt”, predicted by Laugier, free asymmetries that couldn’t be included in academic procedures took part in defining a precociously design-based “città per parti”. Underlining Choisy’s contribution to modernity, Banham has stressed the role of principles referring to the picturesque. For some Anglo-Saxon authors, moreover, the opposition between symmetrical/dissymmetrical at the base of the picturesque is replaced by that between formal/informal. Yet an informal disposition -as Pevsner noticed- does not mean ruleless since it may have rules of a more subtle kind, notably those of the picturesque. As it is shown by the juxtaposed designs for the City of London by Soane and Dance, the picturesque of gardens transposed to city and architecture provided a strategy for governing new kind of structures, open-ended, composite and open to variations. Its “artful confusion” allowed transforming chaos that connoted first modern urban condition in a composite city integrating urban fragment, landscape and infrastructure. As the principle of classical unity is upset, architecture cannot seek any longer in itself only the raison d’être (Tafuri) and appeals to the “union of the arts”. The main issue of character foster architecture to elaborate compositional theories by confronting with painting, poetry, rhetoric, with theatre and its genders along with the new theories of the picturesque, gardening and the aesthetics of sublime, expanding architectural registers beyond the limited expressivity allowed by classical orders. Since Soane’s works, plan has ceased to be the key tool for design being turned into an open system of multiple relationships, a path of discovery along a heterogeneous assemblage of spaces whose narrative character prevails on the axial arrangement of the “poché”. Subsequently coordinated framings intended to stir a variety of sensations prevail over a unifying whole. The multiplication of the point of view implies the “deplacement” of the individual to understand architectural space. Independence of elements, movement and time came into architectural design long before the 1900s, when Pompeii’s and Villa Adriana’s assemblages provided again food for thought, emphasizing figure-ground reversal. With the “free plan” the aggregative tool considered by Le Corbusier as picturesque composition of independent “organs” was transferred from rooms to parts and then, with Kahn, to rooms again. Nevertheless, in the “ville nouvelle” organs broke down promoting an object-based strategy that definitively prevailed over space and its “suite d’événements”, so that city was reduced to a neutral carpet on which free-standing buildings were laid independently. After the culture of Townscape and architectural assemblages keeping elements together despite of their heterogeneity -like those of Stirling- the contemporary city has turned the homogeneity of the modern Cartesian grid into a collision field of all-singular objects, infrastructures, natural fringes. Though some picturesque tools are assumed again, space as a category is absent in favour of objects and images deprived of any relation between the bigness of containers and the scale of districts in which are placed. Referring to a more complex interaction between space/void, object/solid, perception/sensation, the tools of the picturesque may help to conceive a richer spatial experience and anthropic dimension of dwelling.

Picturesque Tools in the Idea of Modernity. Learning from John Soane

PEZZETTI, LAURA ANNA
2012-01-01

Abstract

The “category” of the picturesque provides a comprehension of many elements in which is rooted the idea of contemporary city. Asymmetrical devices and compositional procedures based on independent parts have opened new horizons also at the scale of architectural composition. The very word “composition”, thought often dismissed by contemporary architecture, actually doesn’t coincide with the hierarchic Beaux-Arts partis and the supremacy of geometry: coeval to “picturesque” it has its origin in the 1700s disquietude, when city became an enormous “irregular pile of confusion and absurdity” in which typology and geometry lost their power to give order. In the “ville comme une forêt”, predicted by Laugier, free asymmetries that couldn’t be included in academic procedures took part in defining a precociously design-based “città per parti”. Underlining Choisy’s contribution to modernity, Banham has stressed the role of principles referring to the picturesque. For some Anglo-Saxon authors, moreover, the opposition between symmetrical/dissymmetrical at the base of the picturesque is replaced by that between formal/informal. Yet an informal disposition -as Pevsner noticed- does not mean ruleless since it may have rules of a more subtle kind, notably those of the picturesque. As it is shown by the juxtaposed designs for the City of London by Soane and Dance, the picturesque of gardens transposed to city and architecture provided a strategy for governing new kind of structures, open-ended, composite and open to variations. Its “artful confusion” allowed transforming chaos that connoted first modern urban condition in a composite city integrating urban fragment, landscape and infrastructure. As the principle of classical unity is upset, architecture cannot seek any longer in itself only the raison d’être (Tafuri) and appeals to the “union of the arts”. The main issue of character foster architecture to elaborate compositional theories by confronting with painting, poetry, rhetoric, with theatre and its genders along with the new theories of the picturesque, gardening and the aesthetics of sublime, expanding architectural registers beyond the limited expressivity allowed by classical orders. Since Soane’s works, plan has ceased to be the key tool for design being turned into an open system of multiple relationships, a path of discovery along a heterogeneous assemblage of spaces whose narrative character prevails on the axial arrangement of the “poché”. Subsequently coordinated framings intended to stir a variety of sensations prevail over a unifying whole. The multiplication of the point of view implies the “deplacement” of the individual to understand architectural space. Independence of elements, movement and time came into architectural design long before the 1900s, when Pompeii’s and Villa Adriana’s assemblages provided again food for thought, emphasizing figure-ground reversal. With the “free plan” the aggregative tool considered by Le Corbusier as picturesque composition of independent “organs” was transferred from rooms to parts and then, with Kahn, to rooms again. Nevertheless, in the “ville nouvelle” organs broke down promoting an object-based strategy that definitively prevailed over space and its “suite d’événements”, so that city was reduced to a neutral carpet on which free-standing buildings were laid independently. After the culture of Townscape and architectural assemblages keeping elements together despite of their heterogeneity -like those of Stirling- the contemporary city has turned the homogeneity of the modern Cartesian grid into a collision field of all-singular objects, infrastructures, natural fringes. Though some picturesque tools are assumed again, space as a category is absent in favour of objects and images deprived of any relation between the bigness of containers and the scale of districts in which are placed. Referring to a more complex interaction between space/void, object/solid, perception/sensation, the tools of the picturesque may help to conceive a richer spatial experience and anthropic dimension of dwelling.
2012
9782930301563
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/690036
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