The
first design steps in my practice always start with a reading of the
context, and,
whenever this happens, we realize
that a proper perception of the place just comes while sketching it,
while putting on paper its values, both natural and man-made, through
hand-drawing.
It
is actually renown among architects that the best way to know a place
or a building is to sketch it. Every time you perform that simple act
you discover details you hadn't noticed before.
It's
perhaps not so well known that the relationship between the
perceptive values of a place and the ability of man to understand it
is primarily physical rather than just visual. The act of drawing is
both visual and physical, as Juhani Pallasmaa has deeply disserted in
the recent years, but the relation between the phisicality of a place
and man's ability to understand it goes far beyond the very act of
drawing.
The
term 'drawing' derives from the proto Germanic 'dragan', which means
to pull, and in particular to pull an object in a place,
exactly like when we
pull a pencil on paper. The equal term in Neo-Latin languages derives
instead from the Latin 'designare', which means to mark with a sign,
to choose
through a mark. Today
we also say design, from designare, with the same meaning of choosing
between different possibilities.
The
first architectural marks in history
were stones and timbers, that, pulled
to the
right place could mark
it with the sign of man and make it a chosen place.
Thus
it's the making of things that makes us understand, feel the identity
of a place and feel it as 'ours'. The understanding of the natural
environment does
not
precede building: it's the very act of building that makes us
completely understand a location, that makes us feel it as 'our place
in the world', and comprehend its realm among our deepest
psychological experiences.
These
latter concepts have been first and systematically investigated by
Christian Norberg-Shulz in his 'Genius Loci',
where the author has developed a complete theory of a phenomenology
of architecture related
to the concept of place.
This theory is also an architectural explanation of Heidegger's
writings on the inhabiting, through
which the philosopher expresses the idea that man's fundamental need
is to experience his existence as meaningful. The act of settling,
says Norberg-Schulz, is not just the making of a physical refuge, but
the act of entering an existential dimension and need, from which man
finds his place
in the world. Architecture is
the existential foothold of man.
Placemaking
is thus an ancestral experience, through which man identifies himself
as belonging to a greater whole that constitutes an understandable
realm and thus that let man himself experience his acts as
meaningful.
Is
every later experience of place a repetition of this primeval
emotion, related to our mood and to what we are performing? Related
also to our level of understanding of the place and of our role in
it? What is the role of place regarding our self-awareness?
Architecture
is a framework of meaning, the physical structure of our minds in the
world. Building is for bodies. Architecture for souls. Buildings and
architecture should be inseparable, as our beings are.
The
role of rite is attributed to architecture from the beginning of
time. The most ancient architecture of history is Göbleki Tepe, a
stone-age sanctuary up to twelve thousand years old, made before the
invention of agriculture. The most important lesson that Göbleki
Tepe tells us, says K. Schmidt, its discoverer, is that "First
came the temple, then the city". First came architecture, then
building.
It
is difficult to operate with these concepts today, after so many
decades of urban sprawl. Architecture seems a lost art, at least
regarding common building. The spontaneous quality of vernacular
settlements seems almost anymore reachable. Nevertheless a
re-appropriation of historical approaches to design
could be the only way out alienation and a good way to take back man
to feel the place he lives in as his own so to experience life as
meaningful.
I
like to define what I try to do with my practice as an act of
disclosing. Both with new buildings or on existing ones, both in
natural or urban
places. Disclosing means designing something that enhances the
existing quality of a place, or, paraphrasing Kahn's sentence 'what a
building wants to be', disclosing means, through the act of building,
revealing what a place
wants to be.
When
architecture realizes itself it gives us "an instant of beauty",
wherein we perceive a place as a complete whole. In this moment we
lose the perception of ourselves, while at the same time our feelings
get enhanced, thus architecture is revealed to us as a world in
itself, a world complete. When this happens we feel the genius
loci,
the spirit of the place, and what we call placemaking
happens.
When
this happens, adds Peter Zumthor, our observation embraces a
presentiment
of
the entire world, because there is nothing that cannot be understood.
There
are no fixed recipes to start again to
disclose
places.
Within my practice I have nevertheless discovered that you begin
having a design strategy directed to placemaking, instead to
designing 'objects', when it's placemaking that you care for. It's
also an act of humility, a way to say something with your
surroundings and not to them. This act is very similar to what Robert
Venturi calls inflection,
i.e. a design device not strictly related to the single building but
to a greater urban whole, with the building becoming de
facto
part of it. As I have already and better detailed in the article
published on Edge Condition Vol#01, my design method uses paths near
to critical regionalism, to the use of local/natural materials, to
shape a proper atmosphere for each function of the building/place and
to reinvigorate the civic values of the site.
An
approach like this can favour the appropriation of the place in
personal and collective memory and ease both the conscious and
unconscious perception of it as a part of personal experience; it can
foster relationships and social interaction as well as casual
encounters.
Everybody
knows that climbing to a high point with a great view gives pleasure.
The reason, as here explained, is that a panorama gives knowledge,
and with knowledge self-awareness and thus meaning. Good architecture
can act exactly like that panorama, and tell us that our lifes are
meaningful.
