One of the most pressing issues of topical interest and civil
commitment for architects and others concerns actions capable of
stemming the consequences of deliberate or accidental violence against
the city, of the intentional or involuntary cancellation of memory, a
unitary collective fact that binds entire communities to the
recognition of their places. It is also a fact that the theme of
reconstruction, in such a condition, has assumed a significant weight
in the development and transformation of the human environment. On the
one hand, the rapid obsolescence of some of the elements that would
have propped up the modern city refutes the thesis of the failure of
reconstruction architecture - although many of the most important
figures in modern architectural culture, from Le Corbusier to Perret,
from Hilberseimer to Sharoun, from Gropius to Mies, etc., have worked
along these lines The lack of a unified and shared response in
reconstruction policies is evident in the traumatic experiences of
recent wars in Europe, on the Balkan front for example, which at the
end of the last century generated a heated debate on the motive that
introduced into the conflict unprecedented ways of deliberately
destroying memory through the annihilation of symbolic elements: the
bridge of Mostar or the siege of Sarajevo above all.
If those events are now relegated to modern and contemporary history,
in the present condition other factors intervene to raise awareness of
reconstruction as a central theme in the architectural debate. Why
reconstruction? It is a physiological action, which occurs naturally
after a traumatic event. The actions that cause traumas are of
apparently involuntary origin, such as rapid climate change, which some
claim has a rather direct relationship with catastrophic events due,
for example, to the seismic events that have recently been constantly
undermining the human environment in terms of intensity and frequency;
or deliberate actions that, starting with the growing political and
economic instability of ever-larger geographical regions in South and
Middle East Asia, have generated scenarios where the systematic
destruction of architectural heritage has now become a sad reality.
All these are determining factors in creating an unprecedented
situation that invites architecture to question itself anew on how to
operate within the built environment. This situation is aggravated by
the processes of production and appropriation of space that affect the
contemporary city. Phenomena such as building speculation and the
privatization of land now seem to prevail as the only factors capable
of influencing urban development. The very evolution of cities is
proving to be less and less susceptible to conscious transformations in
the contextual dynamics, but rather to rehashes, self-referential and
unshared mutations, with assumptions that are now free and independent
from those formal instances moved by the settlement characteristics of
the urban structure of long duration. For this reason, there is the
need to investigate methodological criteria capable of recovering, in
the context of reconstruction processes, those qualities that have
conditioned city life as positive factors. We are talking about
qualities that are not only aesthetic and formal that the city, and its
architecture, can offer, but rather elements of social, economic,
productive, civil emancipation, we would say, able to critically
transmit that latent identity contained within the elements that make
up the urban structure. Thus, in constructing a future vision of the
city, it would be the task of architecture to critically recover both
the figurative characterizations and the structuring principles of the
urban phenomenon. In this sense, reconstruction would mean resonating
with the generative principles that have conditioned the construction
of the city over time, thus establishing a dialectical relationship
with tradition and modernity.
This issue of FAM is dedicated to this theme. The construction of this
theme has taken place through a slow and patient search for current
issues revolving around reconstruction. Episodes and facts that lie
within the recent events of the tragic earthquake in the Irpinia region
in 1980, where some evidence of concreteness and scientific consistency
still persists, starting from the comparison between the village and
the city, Castelnuovo di Conza and Naples, placed at the centre of the
research on reconstruction that has mobilised most of the best
resources on the engineering and architectural front: historians of
architecture and the city, structural and plant designers, town
planners, landscape architects and architects. Lucio Barbera recounts
this extraordinary experience of life and not only of operational
research: reconstruction as a concrete act and timely response in the
operational emergency phases, between consolidation and restoration,
transformation and new construction, where the expectations of users do
not always coincide with the aspirations of designers. And yet the two
different perspectives of work between “Borgo and
Città”, between the urban centre and rural village, show
how in the scalar polarity of the two different interventions it is
still possible to go back, not always in a linear way, from operational
experimentation to certain principles and methodological assumptions of
a problematic approach to the theme of reconstruction starting from
concrete working hypotheses, admitted to the test of the project and
its realisation and not so much from an alleged theory that imposes
settlement models, behaviours and rules only abstractly theorised and
occasionally put to the test of realisation.
Within the theme of reconstruction moves the work of Enrico Bordogna,
on case studies around the problematic issue of the very recent
earthquake in Central Italy in 2016. The controversy over the new
provisional equipment, given to the local population in an illusory
attempt to alleviate the drama of loss, has shown the contradiction of
a model of intervention that bases on paternalism (public and private)
a propensity to seek consensus rather than the will (or ability) to
manage and govern the effects of the seismic event, not only in the
emergency phase but also in the much more dramatic loss of identity of
the community affected by the earthquake. In examining the question of
reconstruction, this testimony points straight to the heart of the
architectural issue, which poses the problem that has often been
debated on both a theoretical and operational level in the conflict
between the attitude of “where it was, how it was” and the
latent risk of “false history”. This issue is addressed
scientifically starting from the analysis of cases and concrete
experiences in the field through the operational verification of the
outcomes of the architectural project. An attempt to put in order an
autochthonous experience of reconstruction (which would deserve much
more space than that reserved here for this occasion) that tackles the
problem with all the trappings of scientificity starting with a
critical and dialectical comparison of the attempts made in the
reconstruction of the Messina earthquake of 1908, and subsequently the
emblematic case of Belice in 1968, to the devastation of Fruili in
1976, Irpinia in 1980, up to the recent cases of L’Aquila in
2009, Emilia Romagna in 2012 and the most recent one, a few years ago
in 2016, which concerned central Italy, between Marche, Lazio, Umbria
and Abruzzo. Here the problematic approach places the obligation of
experimental architectural verification, case by case, before the
theoretical assumption of abstract precepts, measuring point by point
the susceptibility of the architectural project, the adequacy of the
conditions that the context offers to the ductility of the design and
the peremptoriness of the creative architectural act, without any
abstract preclusion, refuting, on the other hand, in the making of
architecture the theoretical and operational questions that the theme
of reconstruction poses to the practice of design. It is along these
lines that the tests carried out for Amatrice should be understood,
moving from even subtle questions of type-morphological relations to
attempts at linguistic experimentation in the adoption of particular
expedients in the figurative treatment of the elevations and the size
of the buildings.
Along these lines, Tommaso Brighenti’s work also calls for a
unified reflection on the act of reconstruction and community identity
through the dislocation of strategic functions capable of revitalising
a social fabric weakened by the consequences of the earthquake, both in
the case of Amatrice and that of Norcia and Camerino. This fabric was
rebuilt through the recomposition of revised and updated specific
functional programmes able to support not only the weak local economy
through innovative models of productive, commercial and tertiary
settlements but also to shore up education, exhibition, sport and free
time as a driving force for economic and cultural emancipation.
If in the European tradition the cases of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and
others, have placed a well-known and well-documented experience of
work, there are other cases that on the theme of reconstruction have
generated singular experiences that are by no means secondary to those
conventionally documented by the literature in the post-war period.
This is the Lusitanian case of Alvaro Siza’s reconstruction of
Chiado, following the fire that destroyed parts of the city between
Baixa and Bairro Alto in August 1988. Siza’s experience
demonstrates how a critical reconstruction takes on the city’s
most subtle contextual incentives, rediscovering the richness of the
historical stratification of the urban fabric and transforming this
endowment into the re-discovery of a memory almost dissolved in the
geometric rigour of the 1775 reconstruction. The selection of
unpublished layers of the city is explored in its richness, also
formal, in the articulation of the urban palimpsest, as if to decipher
and revive through the project the peremptory and essential features of
a complexity that would otherwise be lost.
Post-war European experiences on the theme of reconstruction have had
different fates. The case of Vienna explored by Gundula Rakowitz is
emblematic in recognising how the Planungskonzept Wien drawn up in the
years 1958-1961 by Roland Rainer was a precursor of initiatives that
virtually took on some of the fundamental features of the city’s
paradigms. Reconstruction along the course of a narrative capable of
symbolically deciphering substantial traits of the urban fabric, by
fragments, episodes, remnants of destruction that finds a possible
narrative not in a chronological sense but in a qualitative one, by a
critical and conceptual selection of the value, even iconological, of
the architectural datum. A value in itself recognised in the planning
of the Stadtentwicklungsplan Wien STEP 2025, which not only insists on
the areas examined by Rainer, the area to the north-east of the city
centre and the south-west but also assumes architectural determination
and conceptual approach in the operation of the project as an
instrument for implementing a design where form and structure still
intervene to define the essential features of the city’s future.
If we wanted to extend this trajectory from the Italian experience to
Europe, Asia and America, the cases of Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in
Iraq -very different cities that share a tragic destiny in the epilogue
of the well-known “Syrian Crisis”, which began in March
2011 - would become paradigmatic of what the theme of reconstruction
and human dignity, represents in concrete planning action today, in the
protection of a huge heritage torn apart by a deliberate act of
violence. The cities of Aleppo and Mosul take on this ethical, rather
than aesthetic, the frontier of making architecture, of recomposing the
meaning of human things: houses, prayer, ritual, culture, life. And in
this process, the form of life, like the form of people’s things,
takes on a significant value, because it becomes the act that helps the
community to revive itself and reconsider the meaning of its existence
following a deliberate and violent annihilation.
But in the current reconstruction process, there are natural events
that cyclically, and recently more frequently, affect certain places
most exposed to the effects of climate change. For example, these
episodes in Central and South America have prompted architectural
culture to tackle problems and issues that until recently were the
exclusive preserve of other disciplines. Anna Irene Del Monaco gives an
account of this interesting frontier of research on the relationship
between design and reconstruction, where recursiveness becomes a
variable that is not secondary in the problematic approach to this
specific aspect of architectural design, grafting a greater degree of
complexity than the models established in the literature and in the
practices most accredited by the scientific community, regarding, for
example, the issue of planning, prevention and maintenance of the
entire settlement system, natural and artificial. Starting from the
experience of the environmental and economic disaster caused by two
successive hurricanes that struck the island of Puerto Rico in 2017,
Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, this testimony documents a
different frontier of work on reconstruction, with the commitment of
Martha Kohen of the University of Florida and local research centres,
which in recent years have shown how the question of reconstruction is
susceptible to a much broader vision and how it is possible to explore
some unprecedented aspects of the ordinary paradigm on the approach to
the “reconstruction theme”.
As a conclusion to this perhaps bumpy itinerary, we should pause for a
moment and rethink the role and meaning of our approach to this
specific aspect of our work.
If there is still a faint trace of artistic value on this extraordinary
theme, Bruno Barla Hidalgo’s essay turns the point of view upside
down, from an extraordinary observatory such as the Valparaiso school
in Chile, which “literally” looks at this world upside
down. Sign and light as a creative act from the centre of the earth to
its surface, in a process of “poiesis” where the object of
the creative act is experienced in its deepest etymological meaning and
adherent to doing, to the Greek “poieo”: inventing,
composing, creating, even in verse. A poetic act that has not only the
value of creation, it manages to go beyond it, intrinsically linked to
generating, to generativity; by its very nature, it presupposes a
meeting between at least two entities, which give life to a third: the
project, a world project for Barla, on the margins, on the edge
overlooking the Pacific of an entire continent.
So poiesis also takes on the meaning of “poetising”,
transforming suffering - where things are devitalised and unchangeable
- into new stories, new contexts, new worlds composed of poetic acts
capable of vibrating the senses, restoring vitality to things, opening
up to other worlds. In this way, it is possible to grasp the vital
impulse, towards others and towards the world, that the poet, or the
architect, preserves and keeps alive alongside the suffering and the
wounds of a destructive natural event, which is revealed in its beauty,
leaving in the beholder that sense of fascination, emotion and wonder
that one feels when looking at the flower that grows and blossoms on
the rocky edges of the ocean.
