Architecture Muette

Architecture Muette – 建筑之声

baukuh

As human beings will move inside of the cities of the future guided by technological devices, a possibility for a new innocence appears. Indeed, in cities that are entirely mapped and commented through digital labels, architecture could be liberated from its desire to speak. As nobody will need to recognize the Law Court, the Museum, and the Prison from their exterior appearance, buildings could be reduced to their pure spatial performance and be accumulated without any interest for axes, facades, symbolism. Architecture becomes simple spectacle of space. All misunderstandings about architecture speeches can be over and we could finally move to the uncompromising purity and glorious brutality once proposed by the historian of Indian architecture James Fergusson: Architecture imitates nothing, illustrates nothing, tells no tale; it barely manage to express an emotion of joy or sorrow with the same distinctness with which they can be expressed by unphonetic brutes.

Baukuh presents two square 3-D printed bas-reliefs made of plastic and painted with glossy red lacquer. The first one contains a list of names of hundred buildings, the second one is a model in scale 1:500 of the same buildings arranged on a 3x3m square surface. The models are casts of the interior spaces of the buildings, realized in the manner of Luigi Moretti’s models published in “Spazio” in the fifties. As such, the models provide a rough description of the buildings as pure “containers of space”. Accordingly, the buildings are selected among the most spatially impressive (both in terms of articulation and sheer scale). As a result they are mainly Roman/Byzantine/Renaissance and not Gothic/Neoclassical/orthodox Modernist. All buildings belong to a shameless Eurocentric canon – a canon that has been imposed worldwide by Modernism and ended up erasing all other possible repertoires. As much as we might dislike this, this rather reduced canon is what is thought in all contemporary schools of architecture and provides the unavoidable starting point for all possible experiments in future architecture. Anyhow, the canon doesn’t really matter, important is to have something to start from and the intelligence of the new operation.

未来，人类将进入以技术设备为导向的城市，一种全新的未知性也随之而来。事实上，在完全通过数字标签映射和评价的城市中，建筑可以从表达的欲望中脱离出来。由于没有人需要从外观上辨认法庭、博物馆和监狱，建筑物可以被简化为纯粹的空间表现，并且在没有任何轴心、立面和象征意义的情况下堆叠。建筑只作为简单的空间景观。所有关于建筑语言的误解都可以消除，我们终于可以实现印度建筑历史学家詹姆斯·弗格森提出的毫不妥协的纯洁和光荣的残暴：建筑无需模仿，无需说明，也没有故事；它只需通过无声的野性即可清楚表达快乐或悲伤的情感。

Baukuh展示了两个3D打印的塑料方形半浮雕，并涂上了光亮的红漆。第一个包含上百个建筑物的名称列表，第二个是在3米宽的正方形表面上将这些建筑物的模型按1：500的比例排列出来。这些模型是建筑物内部空间的铸件，采用了路易吉·莫雷蒂于20世纪50年代发表在《Spazio》上的模型的样式。如此，这些模型粗略地说明了建筑物只是一种纯粹的“空间容器”。相应地，这些建筑物在空间上令人印象深刻，无论是在清晰度还是规模上。它们主要是罗马、拜占庭、文艺复兴风格，而非哥特、新古典、正统现代主义。所有建筑都属于恬不知耻的欧洲中心主义经典——现代主义在世界范围内强化了这些经典，并抹去了所有其他的可能性。尽管我们可能并不喜欢，但这种简化的经典却是当代所有建筑学院认可的，且不可避免地成为未来建筑中所有可能的试验的起点。无论如何，这种经典已不重要，重要的是知道从哪里开始和并有创新的智慧。

Credits:

Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Paolo Carpi, Silvia Lupi, Vittorio Pizzigoni, Giacomo Summa, Andrea Zanderigo.