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About Me
- Mark
- For an architect, to draw – that is, to sketch – is to draw oneself into the world. And that world, ever-changing like Heraclitus' river, is replete with inconsistencies, enjambments, contaminations, and material conditions that bewilder the mind. It is here that I practice what can be considered bricolage. Yet this condition, as with the world itself, is not fatal. Often, between buildings where the sky holds apart the street where I walk, or between cappuccino and a sketchbook in the morning, or caught midway within a conversation following dinner, or on the road, bicycling nowhere in particular… in these times and others too numerous to mention, there is a glimpse of some opening that reveals infinite depth. Author of: Architecture: Land Culture Practice
Save the Duomo!
ReplyDeleteWas the weather favorable enough to enjoy your spectacular views of the Val d'Orcia?
What are your thoughts about Pienza as a model? What might Rossi say about Pienza? Can you seperate Pienza's architecture from the city?
The predicament of the Duomo reminds me of The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago. The Iberian peninsula breaks off and drifts into the Atlantic…
ReplyDeleteThe Val d'Orcia was beautiful! We drank coffee along the via Casello following the afternoon rain and gazed into the spring! The air had the scent of perfume as the flowers were just opening. Delightful!
Rossi and Pienza...
After our visit this past week to Fontivegge in Perugia, I should, no doubt, give this question some serious thought. Certainly the city and its architecture (the humanist interventions by Il Rossellino) were clearly imposed on the medieval fabric of an agricultural community… that said, it would seem possible to separate those particular works from the city. Yet, even as Pienza is a different city than Corsignano (its name previous to Pope Pius II's directives and subsequent renaming). The city is now a body of layers that remain present in the traces of its past. In this sense, there can be no separation of architecture from the city. (Rossi tells us (and I agree) that the term architecture is equivalent to the term city.) The city is composed in its building. But we can imagine another Pienza… one that comes into being following the collapse of the Duomo's apse, or following dictatorial interventions by some other politician (Burlusconi perhaps…). That distant Pienza would, of course, contain the near Pienza that we visited last week.
And Rossi...
Rationalist that he was, would have some concerns – not for the city, which he no doubt admired from a distance, but for the lack of rationalism in the early humanist approach to the design by Rossellino. Under Pius II, Rossellino wedded many different images together from the gothic interior of the Duomo, to Alberti's Palazzo Ruccelai, to the ideal city as seen in the Urbino painters, to the vernacular features of the existing town and its relation to the landscape… Rossi would definitely have come up with a different plan – one that would not have been this good. I will stick to his theoretical works and the handful of brilliant built projects that excelled!
ciao!