The poetic hand of Alessandro Anselmi

Alessandro Brunelli




In the fourth edition of the Modern Architecture Kenneth Frampton inserts the town hall of Rèze-les-Nantes by including Alessandro Anselmi among the masters of the second half of the 20th century (Frampton 1993, p. 390). Twelve years had passed since Frampton’s own refusal to participate as invited curator in the first Architecture Biennale in 1980.

The English historian in fact renounced the Venetian exhibition, describing it as postmodern: «I see the Biennale as a pluralist-cum-postmodernist manifestation. I am not all sure that I subscribe to this position, and I think I will have to keep my distance from it» (Frampton 1980, in Portoghesi 1980, p. 9).

Also taking a distance from the Biennale itself is Alessandro Anselmi, who participated in the architecture exhibition as a member of GRAU: Gruppo Romano Architetti Urbanisti. As Anselmi himself states: «When we arrived in Venice [...]: we considered the so-called experience of history over, so we began to review the years of the birth of the Modern Movement» (Anselmi 2000, in D’Anna 2000, p. 48).

The Gruppo Romano formally never disbanded while Alessandro Anselmi, starting in 1980, began a solitary path celebrated by his first solo exhibitions at the Architettura Arte Moderna gallery in Rome (1980) and at the American Institute of Architects in New York (1986). The exhibitions reveal the talent of Anselmi’s drawing, which describes a poetics in continuous evolution; a sign that will increasingly move away from the fixed geometries of the GRAU to immerse itself in an anti-classical and expressionist trajectory.

It is no coincidence that in 1982, Manfredo Tafuri described Alessandro Anselmi’s work in progress with these words:

 The recourse to history and memory [...] loses its primitive emphatic traits, and is «secularly» confronted with a tight game of closed forms and distortions [...]. Despite the common origins and vague assonances, the distance between Anselmi’s poetics and Grau’s pastiches has become unbridgeable. (Tafuri 1982, p. 219) 

If the Gruppo Romano continues to constitute the theoretical, and in part figurative, foundation of Anselmi’s poetics, drawing is undoubtedly the true creative act at the basis of every GRAU and post-GRAU project. Through the art of the hand, Alessandro Anselmi refines his sensitivity in shaping the figurative qualities of spatial forms that gradually become increasingly authoritative architectures.

Anselmi’s drawing, playing on different techniques and the light-shadow contrast of the Città Eterna, is an intense stroke that appears gestural in the invention phase, and more composed in the representation phase. But it is precisely in the sketch, in the first creative act, that Anselmi’s poetics is revealed: a poetics in which the architectures arise from a profound reading of the context despite experimenting with heterogeneous figurations.

Alessandro Anselmi not only practices drawing as the conception, experimentation and representation of architectural form but, as a professor and editor of several magazines, reflects on its value through numerous writings.

The lesson of Anselmi’s drawing thus has a twofold value: on the first side the theoretical reflections that narrate the art of the hand as the only necessary act to educate taste and conceive the formal qualities of architecture; on the other side the practice of the architect Anselmi that reveals the close relationship between authorial sign, conception and poetics.

 Reflections on the practice of drawing: from the formation of taste to the architectural idea

At the Vorlehre of the Bauhaus, students acquired sensitivity to formal problems by refining their gaze and by practicing drawing and plastic modelling (Argan 1951, pp. 31-84). Alessandro Anselmi’s education is based on the same principles: drawing is the necessary practice to form personal taste and to design architecture. The Roman master reflects on the value of the art of the hand through numerous texts that appear in didactic programs, books and magazines[1].

In the Principi didattici e fondamenti della composizione architettonica, Anselmi, in analogy to the Vorlehre of the Bauhaus, attributes to drawing, in addition to sight, the function of forming the taste of the student-architect who was to train himself through the exercises «of visual composition [...] realised [...] with graphic techniques» (Anselmi 1995, p. 23). In the Principi, the aesthetic primacy of architecture as part of the universe of the other figurative arts is also made explicit. For Anselmi, the exercise of drawing is a fundamental practice: it is the cognitive act that had always marked training in the beaux-arts school. 

how will it ever be possible to imagine the construction path of the future architect, the birth and taking root in him of techniques for manipulating form without [...] adequate experimentation [...]? In the academic school, the problem was entrusted to the teaching of drawing according to the principle that considered the graphic representation of nature to be the basis of all figurative research, therefore also of architecture. (Anselmi 1997c, p. 8)

 In 1979, three years before his first appointment as a professor at the University of Reggio Calabria, Alessandro Anselmi anticipates the same themes that appeared in the didactic texts in a very refined article: the writer is not Anselmi professor but Anselmi editor of Controspazio (Anselmi 1979, pp. 80-83). In the essay, the Roman architect uses Vasari’s words to describe how the activity of drawing is necessary to refine individual sensitivity and to give life to the idea and «manner».

Drawing is thought and language, it is: «the most penetrating tool of architectural investigation [...] and not only as «design», that is, as experimentation and verification of the architectural idea, but rather as an instrument of the idea itself, as the first poetic technique of orientation in that dark space» (Anselmi 1979, p. 82). For Alessandro Anselmi, drawing is far from any Enlightenment conception and belongs to the universe of contemporary art: it is noumenon and phenomenon, it is ideation-experimentation-representation, it is the irreplaceable poetic act of the hand in the creative process of architecture.

It is precisely the question of manual practice, dear to Anselmi’s heart, that is the conditio sine qua non underlying the conception of spatial forms. Despite an initial openness to the world of the digital and the recognition of the efficiency of the electronic instrument in the definition of the project (Anselmi 2000), the Roman architect returns to reflect on the art of the hand as an insuperable instrument of design thinking in which «the traces, daughters of the gesture, – are – direct witnesses of the emotions and difficulties of figuration» (Anselmi 2004b, p. 29).

In the age of “disposable” culture, in which the role of the architect approaches that of the fashion designer forced to produce short-term images, the «inseparable unity between concept and form in architecture» (Anselmi 2004b, p. 29) cannot be supplanted by digital processing. The complexity of Anselmi’s projects, conceived before the advent of computer graphics, testifies to how fundamental the art of drawing was in inventing articulated spaces that were faithful to the initial idea. The town hall in Rezé-les-Nantes (1985), the terminal in Sotteville-les-Rouen (1993) and the building in Fiumicino (1995), three architectures that are manifestos of Anselmi’s poetics, reveal to us how the built space has never betrayed the conceptual sign.

 The anselmian sign poiesis

From 1980 onwards, Alessandro Anselmi’s design activity has produced numerous architectures marked by completely different figurative outcomes. More than in the elevations, compositional analogies can be read in the juxtaposition of planes and surfaces around a void: the true trait of Anselmi’s poetics. The churches of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Santomenna (1981) and San Pio da Pietrelcina in Rome (2005), placed at the extremes of his professional career, are clear examples of this. Both sacred buildings, far from each other in the figuration of the elevations, are characterized by curved fragments that determine the internal spaces: in the first one, two vertical partitions curve the plan without ever touching each other, in the second one, the roof becomes a drape that generates a sequence of arches in the elevation.

If we consider, at this point, Alessandro Anselmi’s language as a problem of secondary plasticity (Pagano 1930, p. 13), or of writing elevations, the Roman architect’s work would seem to escape any code. But if we instead established a correspondence between primary plasticity (Pagano 1930, p. 13) and void, or surfaces (planes) and space, we would realise that there is a recurring code. This code emerges even more when we look at the conceptual drawings of the projects: the graphic synthesis of Alessandro Anselmi’s poetics.

The sketches also reflect the expressionist character of the Roman architect who, despite experimenting with heterogeneous graphic techniques (pastels, pencils, charcoal, biro), maintains the same gestural expressiveness in his impetuous stroke; a stroke that stops to define an architecture capable of relocating itself (Anselmi 1994, p. 6) and giving order to the dust of contemporary conurbations. In fact, Anselmi’s conceptual sign originates from the confrontation with places: the traces of “exploded contexts” [2] guide future architectural signs in the same way as the veining of Carrara blocks were capable of suggesting Michelangelo’s sculptures.

The design sketch comes to life from the representation of the context, which for Anselmi is not a cartographic drawing, but the «aesthetic presentation» (Anselmi 1994, p. 7) of the place readable through the lens of the figurative arts «in the same way as one sees a work by Vedova or Fautrier» (Anselmi 1994, p. 7). 

The “need for the archetype” has turned into a need for “place analysis”. In my recent projects, the apparent eternity of the icon is increasingly confused with the “trace” that con-forms a site [...]. But the “trace” is, first, a “ground drawing” full of its deformations and infinite complexity; however, this “ground drawing” appears, once again, as a geometric abstraction that, by transforming the concrete concreteness of the property enclosure (the “historical truth”) into a plane or surface, makes the “trace” available to assume iconic values. (Anselmi 2004a, p. 39)

 Anselmi’s architectures, never exact and crystalline, always appear as geometries deformed by the signs of the context (Anselmi 1994, p. 7) and by the desire to create «landscape ensembles» (Anselmi 1979, p. 82); whether in an external space or an internal one. A poetics incapable of designing single architectures but only ensembles of fragments (planes or surfaces) or «small buildings assembled and embedded [...] in archaeological enclosures» (Anselmi 1997a, p. 62).

Anselmi’s sketches, of undoubted figurative value, become increasingly expressionist, like his architecture, as one moves further and further away from the GRAU experience; an experience in which Anselmi’s talented stroke is still recognizable.

Rereading the conceptual drawings of the three architectures mentioned, the public buildings for Rezé-les-Nantes (1985), Sotteville-les-Rouen (1993) and Fiumicino (1995), it is possible to identify the traits of Anselmi’s poetics. The three buildings reveal three different figurative investigations that range from the “neo-art-déco” of Rezé (Frampton 1993, p. 390), to the zoomorphism[3] of the terminal in Rouen, to the “informal” architecture of Fiumicino.

The final image of the French town hall still appears linked to an abundance of “decorative” signs reminiscent of the GRAU period, but only in Rouen and Fiumicino the figurations become even more abstract. Beyond the final images of the three architectures, the line sketches tell about the same design strategy: the poetics of fragments around a void. In Rezé, the elliptical tower and the “mask” (Anselmi 2004a) of brise-soleil tend the space towards the unitè d’habitation; in Rouen, the roofing delimits the main space in which the volumes of the commercial areas are placed; finally, in Fiumicino, the surface rises from the ground, generating two distinct bodies and a public void. Anselmi’s sketches also show «the desire [...] for context and the impatience to interact» (Tafuri 1982, p. 219), which is reflected in the imagining of the architecture first externally and then internally:

 My architectures are not objects – with an inside and an outside – but are like a bridge, between an outside and an inside. The void makes it possible to design the relationships between the elements that make up this void and to reason about the physical quality of this void. (Anselmi 2004, in Guccione 2004, p. 22) 

Anselmi imagines his architecture from the outside to the inside through human or bird’s-eye views that recall the Roman paintings of the masters Poussin, Cambellotti and Sartorio (Anselmi 2000, p. 67). From landscape views to perspective sections in which exterior and interior interpenetrate, Anselmi investigates architecture in relation to landscape. But the mythical referent of Anselmi’s landscape is undoubtedly Rome: the city par excellence of Venturi’s stratification and contradiction, which influenced his poetics and graphic line.

Alessandro Anselmi’s sketches are the product of a corrupted sign, a sign that connotes spaces through a dense contrast of light and shadow; that chiaroscuro that enhances the baroque moulding of the Eternal City.

 But if Anselmi’s poiesis is that creative act in which the gesture of the hand gives life to architectural thought, from the reading of places to the language of fragments around the void, what is the creative energy behind this process?

For Alessandro Anselmi, an unquestionable talent of the hand, there is only one vital energy at the basis of every creative process: solitude. 

Solitude [...] is indispensable to the creative act, [...] the mother of all spatial awareness and every image. Solitude is a necessary condition for the difficult retrieval of information, for cultural nutrition, for the dialectical work that slowly or suddenly conforms images, makes them possible, transforms them into communicable code, into project. (Anselmi 2003, p. 9)

 Loneliness, a trait that has distinguished the Roman architect's creative moment, is also the term that best describes Alessandro Anselmi's career: from his solitary path with respect to the GRAU, to his personal celebration beyond the Alps, to his isolation in the Italian panorama that has ousted him from the creation of many works. Perhaps the inertia of the capital, perhaps the distance from the power ganglia, Alessandro Anselmi leaves us few architectures to visit but many to understand on paper through the signs of his poetic hand.

Notes

[1] Anselmi’s activity as a writer, and not as a theorist as he claims, is certainly less well known than that of Anselmi the architect, but it is nevertheless of considerable interest for the acuity of its form and content: «This interest in theoretical speculation is true, however I have never had the pretension of a true organic organisation of these reflections of mine». (Anselmi 2000, in D’Anna 2000, p. 48).

[2] «In other words, it is necessary to get used to [...] considering the “form of the place” (now distinguishable even in the “non-form” of the informal tendency) as a dialectical referent of the “architectural form” ». (Anselmi 2004, in Guccione 2004, p. 21).

[3] «The fascination of Calder’s static sculptures or, also, the great sculpture of Chicago, as well as the atmospheres of some of Arp’s and Miró’s paintings [...]; an imagery [...] of signs with forms of natural origin» (Anselmi 1997b, p. 165).

References

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