summary
readings of
smoketranslated by mariuca nedelcu
To what extend does the disposability reserve for an architectural object change with the acquisition of an attribute that is not essential by specific? How does the presence of a phenomenon that dilutes the outlines and cancels the detail affect the way of perceiving it? These questions may have different types of answers. One of them can be formulated from the aesthetic point of view, when we talk about types of spatiality: infinite-landscaped, or “natural”, and finite-handcrafted or built.
mist as phenomenon
In these terms with the first type of spatiality, the superposing of "indefinite" over a picture of already outlined shapes seems normal: I can imagine a landscape, a field covered here and there with trees or built objects, elements that do not affect its wideness, breathing the same equilibrium in a sunny afternoon or in a misty morning. The same happens with a sand cliff that offers a view of the sea as far as the horizon. The mount instead faces the mist more consistently, it resists the dilution illusion, and it resists firmly to annihilation. Its massiveness, its dimension, and the force of the shape all impose to the mist vague and phantomatic realm. The shape and the lack of shape are balanced by the mediation of the infinite space. The opposition has equal measures.The architectural object allows a different point of view. I have seen few buildings well lasting in a picture, where they are partially swallowed by ambiguity. Most often the lose of the detail seriously affects the coherence of the drawing. The built object, sternly delimited, hardly bears a diffuse, unsteady, moving infinite. Not even its relation with other objects saves him. It is enough to take a look over a drowned November street in order to realise how fragile the bound that keeps the buildings together is, how easily the mist manages to break up, to divide or to set against each other the built silhouettes. They simply do not stick together any more as finite objects, they menacingly sink in the drawing, this menace comes here from the lose of limits. Therefore the mist in the city is, in its essence, an alarming phenomenon, the only comfort being that it is transient: the fog will pass!
When the drawing still resists, the finite object should have a relationship, a dialog with an infinite space. The object breathes, “has enough room”. Usually this happens when the building borrows something from the landscape - either by simplicity, coherence or language. In order to make possible the communication between the object and the space around it, a certain isolation of the object is needed a kind of autonomy that will make it visible as “an object of the place”. The strength of the building to “the indefinite” stands in the ability the person who imagined it had to succeed in placing it in such a place, that is his cleverness to balance variables depending on time and season - those of the landscape, with an handcrafted invariant - the building.
Another type of answer can be given in terms of the established subjective relationship with the architectural object. What would consists the expressivity of the later of? Among others it is about that quality that the architecture has acquired to simultaneously induce a sensation of familiarity and to mark its uniqueness. In both cases the coherence criterion acts as censor: one does not respond to a house that totalizes very different details because "they do not match", - they create discomfort in the attempt to integrate in a known and intimate universe, and because an exaggerated eclecticism troubles the whole ensemble of elements.
But coherence is not enough a criterion. In order to read an architectural object as familiar and unique one needs more. A certain shape becomes familiar when it succeeds to make allusions to already known elements, one recognise them - even if this is accomplished through style, or materials etc. More over, the image needs its own temperament, its offer of novelty that totally belongs to it: something around surprises and so the memory is connected to a certain particular object, not to anyone among others.
the smoke in the urban reading
I have often wondered why certain urban routs, certain places of the city remind me the same hazy image, the same smoke feeling? And why, the taste for particular supplies - metal, glass, gritstone – generously used in building a downtown bank, a house or commercial center provoke in me , most of the time, the same feeling of materialised abstraction, of unreal present there, of obligatory ambiguity ?It is obvious that my relation with the built pile suffers alienation, being blocked somewhere on its way. The relation between objects also sets up difficulty, refuses the perspective both in the profound arrangement and in the same scale dialog. Every time, following two complementary processes the reading of the space becomes ghostly, nebulously. On the one hand, the abandon of the buildings in the past, the lack of some recent improvements or the presence which do not show life or personality; all these make the facades reading a simple succession of one single cliché. You wander into a dumbfounded time, which cancels the communication between the old and the new, between the past and the present. The eye slips on the details without halting to a particular one, the dust, the grey shades, and the shrivelled plasters being the only elements to be remarked. In this case the distinction between objects is not anymore operational, the shape inter-penetrate cancelling any identification possibility.
On the other hand the proliferation of certain elements and details in architecture - used without discrimination but with ostentation, determines the epicentre to propagate bit by bit anonymous volumes, inexpressive forms, or rather, forms that use up their expressivity. If a glass wall would be found interesting in a particular context, its obsessive repetition in tens of other contexts becomes tedious and conformist, even when it has nothing to reflect. The element contaminates, dilutes the taste, turns into uncontrolled stereotypy. Being new it turns into familiar, being familiar it turns into formal, it reaches the de-contextuality. You are not able anymore to see the house, you see the door or the windows or the first floor, just like many other doors windows or floors.
Among many other types of reading, these two seems to be affected by the paradox of the de-materialisation of a so substantial matter as the built object; smoke like cement, smoke like glass, smoke like street. They are not compulsory because they belong to a subjective projection, but they are not accidental either, they have certain permanence.
The situations mentioned above raise the same problem of perception: the visual attack against shape and its firmness.
The resistance of the object to an exterior phenomenon (mist) belongs to a mediation accomplishment: the continuation of the landscape (infinite space) in architecture, or, conversely, "the breath" of the object in the landscape. The strength of the built assembly to the danger of not achieving its own interiorness belongs to the calibration of its element, according to very varied criteria: different but coherent, coherent and familiar, familiar but distinct.
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