Care and measure. While everyone around makes noise
Alessandro Oltremarini
Fig.
1 - Yves Klein, Leap into the void, 1960.
The transition from Michel
Focault’s disciplinary society to the William Borroughs’
one of control, which Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze 1990) highlighted thirty
years ago, has today undergone a further transformation: Covid-19 has
imposed on society both, discipline and control. First of all I
therefore believe that it is necessary to reflect on the sense of the
hope for – and on the convenience in – a return to
normality: we know that this normality follows a norm and that today it
is defined by the constant state of emergency that communities and
urban policies have accumulated over the past fifty years, even before
the pandemic. Covid-19 is accelerating the process that is already
underway, widening the social gap that is engulfing the middle classes
and investing the weakest: all of this is also inevitably reflected in
the relationship between its spread and the living conditions of the
more marginal urban realities, on which the contemporary architect is
called to express his position. Surprisingly, while the lockdown has
accelerated the enhancement of virtual skills and relationships, almost
in contradiction the need for physical distance has imposed attention
to the concreteness of the measure that the virtual tends to ignore.
In this scenario, a very specific question takes on a key role: what
should architecture represents? Has it to respond, in retrospect, to
technical and social needs and contingent necessities, or is it
possible to affirm its role as a discipline useful for providing
society on the one hand with alternative visions and on the other some
cultural grids? This question is part of a well-defined framework: we
have learned, in the last half century, that the right way is between
building “for” and building “against”
something; but in this third way we have unlearned the implications of
the two extremes: this my impression is based on a principle of
generational experiences. I mean that the current generation, to which
I belong, has not experienced the tragedies and euphorias of the
fathers of modernity and democracy, except in the indirect form of the
narrative: instead we live – and we are the second or third
generation in a row – the failures of those experiences which, as
such and having removed the reasons for those failures, they take on
the function of a preventive warning that forces some people on the
average path of the minimum risk and attracts other one on the
nostalgic path of myth. The first, the most mediocre way of nihilism,
the other, the way of the most exalted surrogate.
Both attitudes trace the lines already traced on a precise ground that
corresponds to an equally precise interpretation of history. This
partial and usually inherited interpretation is taken as certainty and
feeds the desire for a specific requirement: the security. In the city,
this desire replaces interest for its definition with interest for its
control. It also reduces control to supervision, eliminating its
potential as a conceptual tool for the project and for the comparison
between phenomena. A dominant condition derives from this: it
corresponds to the identification of the control of the city with the
attempt to submit its parts and their relations to the instrument of an
intelligent grid and mathematical rules. This identification between
purpose and instrument, considered too often necessary and even
sufficient, not only brings with it the reverberation of a
functionalism that in history has proved sterile, but risks producing a
generational and cultural amnesia, and consequently an inability in
being able to preserve, reconstruct and transmit a collective thought
and knowledge, a human heritage that includes the sense of architecture
and the city. In this sense, Giorgio Agamben’s plea (Agamben
2020), during the quarantine proves to be exemplary: in an attempt to
avoid an alleged risk, we risk erasing and forgetting in indifference
the rituals and human behaviors that constitute the foundation of the
civil values that we have over time conquered.
The images of silent, immobile and metaphysical cities, even the images
of the pope in a deserted St. Peter’s Square, have laid bare the
substance of the cities: they have shown that the monuments and symbols
of a community are the only facts that can preserve its history, its
places, its identity but, above all, that they can represent the values
in which it recognizes itself (or which it does not recognize). The
expressive and poetic power of those images (much denser than many
films and TV series) in my opinion represents the claim of the specific
and the general, according to the meaning given by Deleuze (Deleuze
1968), as an alternative to the generic city that Rem Koolhaas had
prophesied and that his “Countryside, The future”
exhibition – inaugurated in February and still on display at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York – confirms.
This observation strengthens my conviction: the sense of the city
corresponds to its formal contents that constitute the substance of
urban spaces; furthermore, the change, rectification and actualization
of the city and its semantic values are based on knowledge, which
«includes what is not yet known» (Monestiroli 2014), and
these values – and contents – are formed between the
anthropomorphic interpretation of history and a sort of
“revelation” which usually has an individual origin
(Giedion 1956). So, if it is true that both are, by their nature,
unpredictable and uncertain variables, it would be wrong to say that
the technical use of algorithmic models corresponds to a conflicting
and contradictory action with respect to the task to which the
architect is called and who resides in the «reference to the
human and everyday substance of living» (Purini 1985)?
Isn’t it fair to say that in this call, in the human and in the
everyday, the principle of care is manifested and that it is
contradictory to the one of security even etymologically? In fact, if
the first evokes strength and certainty, the second expresses kindness
and unpredictability: immediacy versus slowness, gestures versus
rituality, univocity versus plurality.
Here I want to meen the care as a labile condition, in the sense of
provisionality and therefore authentically in reality, attentive to the
plural relationships between different parts and their continuous
change of meaning. The care recognizes the character of necessity that
belongs to the measure, both of “things” and of the
relationships between them. At the same time, it allows the coexistence
of specific and general choices, of rules and exceptions, according to
an inferential process of an abductive type, uncertain and therefore
always open, which implements the ideological deductive and inductive
ones, of the two ways. Furthermore, this condition accepts the
inversion of the relationship that had consolidated on the global
territory: cities, metropolises become, for those who have the
possibility, centrifugal hubs towards more reserved places, usually
small villages, which have the characteristic of being outside the
global connection network on which the virus is moving; while in the
ordinary the danger branches out, the extraordinary becomes the refuge.
I think that operationally this call to care and measure can only be
accepted if we look at the authentic value of their meaning. There is
no care that is not calm, that is not attentive and methodical,
reflective, rational, measured. There is no measure that is not double,
at the same time transitive (to measure) and pronominal (to measure oneself):
it imposes on the one hand a measure in the sense of proportion and
thus reveals the meaning of the design action, or of an intelligible
system concerning the relationship between the parts, between the
forms; on the other hand it determines a clear confrontation with
reality, of critical exploration of the unknowable, aimed at knowledge
and even its contradiction.
We can, we have to ask ourselves how all this is reflected in the
architectural project, if the standards will undergo a slight updating
or if we will be able to overcome their quantitative conception even in
practice. And again, we ask ourselves about the settlement and housing
responses that are more coherent and responsive to current needs. These
questions fall within the problematic relationship between current
interests and the possibility of affirming the autonomy of research.
Not only because it, slow by its nature, can’t compete in speed
with the former, but above all because it is believed that these are
responsible for altered values, transfigured information and the
determination of what Siegfried Giedion called «dominant
taste» (Giedion 1956). It is therefore necessary to be careful
not to confuse «practical problem with aesthetic problem»
(Persico 1935). The emergency may prove to be an opportunity to
highlight the inconsistency of the myth, which has consolidated in
recent years and which has a disjunctive as well as dogmatic character,
in favor of treatment as a new logos:
its inclusive and democratic nature allows differences to take on a
dialectical and compensatory dimension that scientific knowledge should
convey in the new methodological paradigms and in the constituent parts
of the city.
To do this it is necessary to clearly distinguish the problems that
Persico has highlighted; at the same time it is necessary to be
immersed in reality and to be extraneous to chaotic speed, hysterical
screams and the ordinary homologation of the contemporary. I turn my
thoughts to Vittorio Gregotti: «My most important advice is: when
you make architecture, make as little noise as possible. This is
achieved with attention and patience, without ever forgetting that
architecture is a job. Main rule for those who start planning, keep
quiet around, to be more careful, and able to see small: among
things» (Gregotti 1985).
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