From the very first time I passed under the red-black capital ‘A’ above the entrance of the School of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, I began confronting the question every architect or student of architecture asks: What is Architecture?
Image 1: Main entrance of the School of Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, IT. Architect: Vittoriano Vigano’ (project/realization: 1970 – 1985).
Even before enrolling, during my final year of high school, the choice of university seemed obvious. Architecture felt less like a decision than a transition, almost a necessity. I will tell you why.
My aptitude for technical and freehand drawing, creativity, and craftsmanship naturally aligned with my interests in art and history. The Liceo Scientifico (High School) I attended gave me a solid foundation across humanistic and scientific disciplines — Latin, philosophy, literature, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and technical drawing — cultivating in me a lasting inclination toward interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge, which is so important for an architect. Yet, that was not the real point, since my turn to architecture was not merely intellectual: it was rooted in powerful, early encounters with buildings themselves.
As a child, entering notable buildings — churches, arenas, cinemas, museums, even certain houses — was always a special event for me. I vividly recall my first visit to the Gothic Cathedral, the Duomo di Milano, with my parents: the smell of incense, the colored light filtering through tall stained windows, the cool polished marble underfoot, the echo of my steps, the vast reverberations of the organ. That overwhelming experience imprinted itself deeply, and ever since, crossing the threshold of a church — Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, or modern — evokes those visceral, highly memorable esthetical sensations.
Image 2: Duomo di Milano, Milano, IT, 1386 – 1774.
Equally unforgettable was the dramatic inward slope of the suspended roof above me — the Palazzetto dello Sport di San Siro, Milano — the first time I attended an indoor professional tennis event, as a spectator, when I was eight years old. I will bring forever in my mind the moment in which the blue carpet of the tennis court emerged into view under the roof hovering over my head: in that precise moment, my entire body was pervaded by a profound sense of joy and emotion.
Image 3: Palazzetto dello Sport, Milano, IT. Architect: Studio Valle (1969 – 1975).
Unfortunately, for several circumstances, that boldly inclined, suspended roof collapsed under a heavy snowfall on January 17, 1985, and a few years later the building was pulled down. More than forty years after that experience, I don’t remember who was the opponent of my tennis hero at that time (John McEnroe), but I still vividly remember the emotional effect that that roof exerted on me: more powerfully than the match itself, it froze the moment in my memory forever.
Still, I can vividly remember the muffled and cozy atmosphere and the comfortable feeling of the dark red velour of the seats, the soft carpet under my shoes, and the heaviness and smoothness of the velvet curtain that I had to touch, hold, and move aside in order to pass from the lobby into the cinema hall at the Cinema Odeon in Milano — the first time I went to the cinema with my schoolmates. I wasn’t yet a teenager.
Image 4: Red Velvet Chairs, indoor Cinema Hall.
Not to mention my first unconscious encounter with the raumplan, inside the house of my primary-school teacher, when I was six or seven years old. Probably my current bias as an architect overstates the importance of a small difference between floor levels — maybe just a couple of steps, as I remember it now, which can hardly be understood as a traditional raumplan in the Loosian technical sense — nonetheless, that difference in levels, when I entered my teacher’s apartment, allowed me to sit on the steps leading to the living room in a way I had never done before inside a home. From that privileged point of view, I could admire the wide physical extension of that room, the largest I had ever seen.
Image 5: Villa Moller, example of ‘Raumplan’, Vienna, AT. Architect: Adolf Loos (1927 – 1928).
Those faraway experiences still belong to me, like many other powerful sensations aroused in me by certain buildings. To put it briefly, some memorable experiences that accompanied my physical and psychological development as a child — a happy afternoon with my parents, the live spectacle of a professional tennis match, watching a film with schoolmates, or visiting my teacher in her home — became unforgettable precisely because of the physical context (that is, the place, its atmosphere or ambience… even if I suspect that Loos would probably question my use of the term place instead of space to describe a difference of levels between adjacent rooms) in which they took place. With hindsight, I cannot describe those architectural contexts as mere backgrounds to the experiences: they were almost foregrounds, integral parts of them. My perceiving body, my mind as part of it, and the physical environment surrounding me were one and the same.[1] Many years later, I discovered that there is no ontological priority of one — the environment — with respect to the other — the body: at a fundamental level, they are made of the same stuff, and it is from the complementarity of their reciprocal actions that experience and knowledge arise. Their equally important role cannot be overstated. Ultimately, the contexts that impressed themselves so deeply in my mind-and-body were buildings. Indeed, from buildings — from certain buildings — I could distinctly perceive an undefined sense of materiality emanating from walls, windows, floors, roofs, or ceilings, vibrating through the air, reaching my body and resonating within me. It was as if the walls, windows, floors, ceilings… were trying to communicate with me. How could I interpret those messages? Well, now, after so many years, I know they were fundamentally telling me what architecture is about.
Note
[1] A beautiful and comprehensive exploration of how the phenomenon of place—what I here call ‘the physical environment surrounding me’—plays a crucial role in shaping memory can be found in Chapter IX, Place Memory, of Edward Casey’s book Remembering: A Phenomenological Study.
Work Cited
Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Image Credits
Featured Image, The Salk Institute (architect Louis Khan), on twitter.com
Image 1 (source), School of Architecture Politecnico di Milano, on polimi.it
Image 2 (source), Duomo di Milano on in-lombardia.it
Image 3 (source), Palazzetto dello Sport di Milano on milano.fandom.com
Image 4 (source), Red Velvet Chairs, by Kilyan Sockalingum on unsplash.com
Image 5, Villa Moller, from Beatriz Colomina’s essay: Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interior of Adolf Loos.
1 Comment
Alessandro Calvi Rollino
Where is ‘space’ — where is the term ‘space’ in that personal account of some experiences of built architectures? It is absent. Space does not belong to the corporeal essence of architecture; space belongs to its conceptual essence, as a derivation of men’s intellectual activity and creativity. Contrarily to most traditional phenomenological interpretations of architecture and reality, which take notions of space and place as given data, à la Newton (“I do not define… space [and] place… as being well known to all”, the distinguished physicist said in a famous passage of the Scholium), I maintain that space does not ultimately belong to the flesh of reality — which is the place where processes and experiences are finalized, or actualized, becoming discrete and concrete, or corporeal. Space belongs to the intellectual agency of the human brain, which, in the case of abstract thinking, is the place where processes, whether potential or actual ‘cogitationes’, remain in a continuous abstract state — i.e., a mental state. From this distinction, which we do not have to intend as a separation but as a standpoint for the correlation of two different aspects of One and the same reality (physical-and-mental), derives my understanding that architecture, as a discipline which acts in-between abstract and concrete domains or realms, creates spaces and modifies places for dwelling. ‘Space’ or ‘spaces’ are the product of men’s creative agency, or imagination — specifically, in the case of architecture, they are the creative product of the activity of architects. Space or spaces are abstract entities. ‘Place’ or ‘places’ are the contextual background and foreground of whatever happening, event, or process; as a natural fact, they surpass the human realm, containing it. To begin with, place or places are concrete entities. ‘Dwelling’, at the dawning of a new era — the Anthropocene —, and in the most general sense of the term ‘dwelling’, that is a sense which is inevitably grounded on an anthropocentric perspective but aims at transcending it by including all physical and living existents, is the ultimate scope of architecture. The correlation of spatial and placial states of architecture, which converge on the abovementioned extended sense of ‘dwelling’, constitute a new realism for architecture – see my brief post What Is Architecture?.