Fig.
2 - Giambattista Nolli, Nuova Pianta di Roma, 1748, (detail)
Fig.
3 - Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1929 (Plan FLC
32091)
When asking
ourselves how the way of inhabiting a space whether private or public
has changed, we need to know how to read the opposing levels that the
city is built on; this is to be found within the relationship between
volumes and voids, the latter being the place of relationships, where a
collective organization becomes aware of itself and which is
«the setting for the simultaneity of urban facts»
(Espuelas 2004, p. 13). Indeed, the aggregation of individuals
(synechism) has led to the creation of many cities where the idea of
community preceded and formed the basis of the inhabitants’
identity1.
At a time when we have found ourselves living
“imprisoned” the public space has been removed and
with it the failure of the very idea of a city founded on social
interaction. The virus has heightened and exacerbated social
disparities between the protected and the unprotected, reinforcing
existing contradictions and questioning the very “relational
matrix” between us and our surroundings which only recognizes
in alterity the essential condition which can determine the move from
“the individual subject” to the collective
(Tagliagambe 2008, p. 121).
Moved by an «immune drive, by a stubborn will to remain
intact, entire, and unharmed» (Di Cesare 2020, p. 23), the
individual has thus found himself forced into his own isolation,
deprived of the freedom that derives exclusively from the
“infra space” (Arendt 1994): the
historical-political dimension which ensures plurality, the existence
of individuals not squeezed in one on top of one another, not deprived
of their individual boundaries but where, rather, public space has a
representative role that «associates a collective ideal with
that of the individual» (Tagliagambe 2008, p.
208).
What happens when this distance increases to the point of becoming
separated when the citizen puts their own protection before
participation in public life? That’s when the feeling of
immunity prevails, thereby creating a sense of identity crisis,
replaced by the singularity2.
It is therefore necessary to avoid the mistake of thinking about space,
private or public, without thinking about the city; indeed architecture
is the art of building to the extent that it is also art of living3
understood as the way men act, relate to one another and give a real
sense i.e. not alienated and abstract, to their being in a given place.
Freed from any finalistic conception of space, “the ability
to inhabit” must therefore, be constituted, today perhaps
more than ever before, in so far as it is a quality inherent to the
places offering solutions that establish levels of
“collaboration” between building and urban space,
recovering in other words those forms of relationship that the
contemporary city no longer seems capable of producing.
The pandemic appears to be the result of too much time in the past
spent underestimating the problems related to the expansion of the city
as if environmental and social phenomena associated with it could be
easily controlled and managed. The “state of
exception” has shown an unwillingness to address the crisis
with a long-term view, although only by developing a
“prescient” environmental vision is it truly
possible to take care of the city, give it an ethical foundation, an
ensemble consisting of the individual and the community (Emery 2011, p.
113).
The risk is that the city shows itself once more to be incapable of
designing urban spaces and instead falls back on existing rules (for
economic reasons) tending towards private use4.
If in its first and most acute stage the pandemic intensified the sense
of confinement, now the role that open space has come to play, being a
place of movement and coming together, lends itself to considerations
about the shape and the use of those unresolved intermediate spaces, a zwischenraum
between the building and the street. In such circumstances the design
of the buildings’ take on the ground is seen as a
conformational structure with the aim of achieving a spatial continuity
of relationships similar to what happened in the past thanks to
architectural elements such as the threshold, the porch, the roof cover
– interpreters of a mutual sense of belonging between public
and private – an expression of a way of thinking about the
urban project that seems to have been almost completely removed in the
contemporary city.
The city of globalization that destroys its own limits and engulfs the
surrounding landscape by extending its shadow over the countryside, at
the same time creates many internal borders which define a succession
of “inside” and “outside” but
without being able to give shape to these places. Koolhaas calls it Intermediate-stan
– “middle ground” – the border
that from caesura becomes threshold and recaptures the etymological
sense of limes
as an essential condition of urban space: the city is such precisely
because it has a beginning in time, and a limit in space5. Nolli’s New Plan, which was
then made a “pretext” for the laboratory that was Rome Interrupted,
is emblematic because it shows a dialectic relationship between volumes
and voids where space is genuinely moulded into an integrated system in
which the densification is the result of a design of the city through
its architecture. While destruction and transformation are intrinsic to
architecture, it is important that this leads to a consequent
“production” not only/no longer of economic capital
according to the rules of speculation but rather of “civic
capital” (Settis 2014, pp. 57-58). To date however it seems
that the ideas and proposed solutions in the face of danger and urgency
are addressed by reasons more economic than ecological.
Conversely the pandemic phenomenon has made even more evident the need
for reflection, too often rejected, on those architectures which, given
their very function, construct “uninhabitable”
spaces because they are designed with the clear purpose of
limiting/denying the very meaning of habitation. In a pandemic, places
which more than others question the architecture as to its direction
and, in particular, on the rigour with which the architecture itself
assumes the responsibility of “building” before
“inhabiting”, aware that only by overthrowing the
usual consequentiality does coexistence become plausible and, perhaps
even survival: to design you need to know to how to inhabit, and indeed
we must learn to inhabit.
How to design situations in which the coinhabiting is forced, where
being confined is the rule and not the exception? «What
architecture is it that is based on the impossibility of
inhabiting» (Agamben 2018)? An architecture that no longer
recognizes that its starting point and its rule is habitation, will be
hostile to those whose needs, transforms into an “alien
dwelling”, so that the heimlich
is transfigured into unheimlich.
A feeling of “disturbing” that showed how much
“habitable” and “uninhabitable”
are in fact contiguous, next door neighbours, separated by a fine line.
The “uninhabitable”, the negation of architecture,
constructed before or without being inhabited i.e. without being
thought out, until that moment removed from the architecture, has
resurfaced with the experience of the pandemic6. No longer a split so much as in
conflict with the inhabitable space, which can enrich the architectural
thinking and generate a creative tension which would otherwise be
unattainable. Places for which you need to re-establish a
re-composition of urban relationships so that these structures no
longer present themselves as a separate body in the fabric of the city.
In Michelucci’s plans for the Garden of Meetings
in the Sollicciano Prison we can recognize the desire to address the
issue of the uninhabitable by constructing a space that appears to
cancel the separation between inside and outside which evoke one
another in their use of materials and the figurative choices; in which
structural clarity is not simply displayed but is at the service of the
invention of a new spatiality whose intrusion provokes a somewhat
complicated semantic crisis compared to the very idea of prison.
If the answer to the Covid-19 emergency was addressed by adopting a
common strategy – the lockdown – thoughts on the
post-Covid city must rather be an exercise in specification which,
starting from the inherent differences in each city, from the knowledge
of its history, its past, is capable of producing a glimpse of the
future: a trivialization of the answer would only surrender the city to
the same problems to which the aestheticization of architecture has
condemned it until today. Vittorio Gregotti’s conclusions on
the self-referencing nature of bigness are useful for distinguishing
the current disaffection with the past that feeds contemporary
architecture by the rejection for the past of some avant-garde
movements from the beginning of the 20th century represented a
distinctly utopian interpretation of the architectural project as an
alternative.
The poietic vision that animated the work of architects such as Le
Corbusier, and which now appears to have been completely replaced by a
pure aesthetic emotion, was actually the result of a deep reflection on
materials, a profound look at the historical and geographical
connections of the location of the project. What turns out to no longer
postponable is precisely the need to recover this ability to imagine
the city and not just to design it, or deal with an extended and ample
period of time which does not think in terms of the contingent but
rather reflects on the future so to be able to give back to city its
own memory, going beyond the Generic
City7
and proposing a radical rethinking of urban space. In other words to
analyse the conceptual fracture resulting from globalization in a more
current perspective that, without the illusion of producing a viable
urban structure anywhere, embraces the specific condition and has as
its prospect the city understood as a complex artefact, rich,
differentiated8;
a process that moves from the constant interpretation of the city
before the project and the transformation brought about by the project.
.
Note 1 «[...]
L’Aquila’s medieval statutes ordered the
inhabitants to produce collectively (uti socii) public
spaces (squares, fountains, churches) before settling individually (uti singuli) in the
home» (Settis 2014, p. 91). 2 Singularity, what not supported
by alterity, is fragile and exposed to fragmentation unlike identity
which is supported by the principle of community. We can thus delineate
a paradoxical “immune democracy” summarized by Di
Cesare as Noli me Tangere. At the centre there has to be your
safety – today in relation to the virus, more generally
toward what is different – based on the separation between
the condition reserved for the protected as compared to the excluded
“others”. 3 Etymologically the Latin verb habitare, the
frequentative form of habēre has the meaning of “continue to
have” in the sense of “have a habit” of
being in a particular place as a result of the action of the person who
owns and thus retains the place they inhabit, by transforming the space
from natural to artificial. 4 «In some places, both
rural and urban, the privatization of space has made it difficult
for citizens to access areas of outstanding beauty; elsewhere
“ecological” residential areas only available to a
few have been created, where they make sure people are not allowed in
who might disturb an artificial peace». (Pope Francis 2015,
pages 44-45). 5 Argan’s words in the
introduction to Rome Interrupted ring truer than ever today for many
cities: «There being no longer any relationship between
history and nature or architecture and countryside, Rome has begun to
swell and deform like a bladder, no longer having either architecture
or countryside [...]. It is no longer a city, but a desert packed full
of people, disrupted by the same speculation that has allowed it to
grow out of control» (Argan 1978, p. 12). 6 The debate surrounding the
“uninhabitable” has deep roots (in the
philosophical and the psychological sense) and is already recognized by
Adorno when he affirms that «to inhabit, in the true sense of
the term, is now impossible» and Heidegger’s
attitude to the shape of the “modern” house that
despite it being a response to unhealthy conditions appeared to be
entirely focused on the pure functionalism of the technique, making its
inhabitants like guests separated from their fate. 7 «The generic city is
the city liberated from the bondage of the centre, from the
straitjacket of identity. The Generic City breaks this
vicious cycle of dependency: it is simply a reflection on
today’s needs and capacities. It is the city without history.
It’s big enough for everyone It’s convenient. It
does not require maintenance. If it becomes too small it simply
expands. If it gets old it simply self-destructs and renews itself. It
is equally interesting and uninteresting in all its parts. It is
“superficial” like the boundary wall of a Hollywood
film studio, which produces a new identity every Monday
morning» (Koolhaas 2006, p. 31). 8 «Urban design means
taking as a starting point the geography of a given city, its needs and
suggestions and introducing the architectural elements of language to
shape the site. Urban design means keeping in mind the complexity of
the work to be done rather than rational simplification of the urban
structure. It also means working inductively, generalizing what is
particular, strategic, local, generative» (Solà
Morales 1989, p. 8).
Bibliografia
ARENDT H. (1994) – Vita
activa, Bompiani, Milano.
AGAMBEN G. (2018) – Abitare
e costruire. Conferenza tenuta
alla Facoltà di architettura
dell’Università Roma La Sapienza, 7 dicembre 2018.
AGAMBEN G. (2020) – A
che punto siamo? L’epidemia
come politica, Quodlibet, Macerata.
CANNATA M., a cura di (2020) – La città per
l’uomo ai tempi del Covid-19, La nave di Teseo,
Milano.
CLEMENT G. (2004) – Manifeste
du tiers paysage,
Éditions Sujet/Objet, Paris; Ed. It.: (2005 e 2016)
– Manifesto
del terzo paesaggio, Quodlibet, Macerata.
CONSONNI G. (1989) – L’internità
dell’esterno, Clup, Milano.
CORBOZ A. (1993) – “Avete detto spazio?”.
Casabella, 597-598, 20-23.
DE SOLÀ MORALES M. (1989) –
“Un’altra tradizione moderna. Dalla rottura
dell’anno trenta al progetto urbano moderno”.
Lotus, 64, pp. 6-31.
DI CESARE D. (2020) – Virus
sovrano. L’asfissia
capitalistica, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, p. 95.
EMERY N. (2011) – Distruzione
e progetto.
L’architettura promessa, Christian Marinotti,
Milano.
ESPUELAS F. (2004) – Il
Vuoto. Riflessioni sullo spazio in
architettura, Christian Marinotti, Milano.
GREGOTTI V. (2010) – Tre
forme di architettura mancata,
Einaudi, Torino.
HEIDEGGER M. (1976) – Costruire
abitare pensare, in
Saggi e
discorsi, a cura di Vattimo G., Mursia, Milano.
HUET B. (1984) – “La città come spazio
abitabile”. Lotus, 41, 6-17.
KOOLHAAS R. (2006) – Junkspace.
Per un ripensamento radicale
dello spazio urbano, a cura di Mastrigli G., Quodlibet,
Macerata.
KOOLHAAS R. (2020) – Countryside.
A Report, Taschen, Colonia.
LE CORBUSIER (1934) – “Urbanismo e
architettura”. Quadrante, XII, 13 (marzo).
NICOLIN P. (2017) – “Dopo i Grands
Ensembles”. Lotus, 163, 46-53.
SETTIS S. (2014) – Se
Venezia muore, Einaudi, Torino.
SETTIS S. (2017) – Architettura
e democrazia. Paesaggio,
città, diritti civili, Einaudi, Torino.
TAGLIAGAMBE S. (2008) – Lo
spazio intermedio. Rete, individuo
e comunità, Università Bocconi
Editore, Milano.
VIDLER A. (1992) – The
Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the
Modern Unhomely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge-London; Ed. It.: VIDLER A. (2006) – Il perturbante
dell’architettura. Saggi sul disagio
nell’età contemporanea, Einaudi,
Torino.
ŽIŽEK S. (2020) – Virus.
Catastrofe e solidarietà,
Ponte alle Grazie, Milano.