The 12 sections
OltreCittà / The 12 sections
1. Desired City
Sometimes images tell us of friendly, desired cities, places of memories and identities. They are sub- jective spaces, dreamed of or reinterpreted by nostalgia, hardly ever real, sometimes never even hav- ing existed. They represent places we would have liked to live or believe we lived. Or they are mirages, hopes, illusions that a form of city capable of improving the human condition can exist. “I wanted the cities to be splendid, spacious and airy, their streets sprayed with clean water, their inhabitants all hu- man beings whose bodies were degraded neither by marks of misery and servitude nor by the bloat- ing of vulgar riches… This ideal, modest on the whole, would be often enough approached if men would devote to it one part of the energy which they expend on stupid or cruel activities” (Yourcenar, 1951), the emperor Hadrian comments in Marguerite Yourcenar’s book. From Wols’s Ville arabe, the sudden blue flash of a mirage, to Gerhard Richter’s Firenze (III/XII) which melts blue skies, flaming sunsets and slimy water in brushwork that dissolves boundaries, up to Le Corbusier’s dream of a new city made to the measure of man in faraway Punjab, the city that becomes the space of desire.
2. Hostile city
The civitas has lost the dimension of community and has become hostile; it no longer tolerates diver- sity, divergence, whether of forms, culture, gender, or ability, and the urbs has filled up with spaces that create discord and violence. Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote, “If one observes reality carefully, and above all if one knows how to read around objects, in the landscape, in urban planning and, above all, in men, one sees that the results of this carefree consumer society are the results of a dictatorship, of a true and indeed fascism” (Pasolini, 1975). A dictatorship that has distorted the meaning of public space, no longer open to all, but closed off to many, who, not being ‘consumers,’ do not have the right to appear, to affirm their identity. So then we look at Cittadella ostile by Vinicio Berti, Arrivando in città by Titina Maselli, and Mauro Staccioli’s prickly, hostile, unreachable citadel to understand how it appears evident to artists that the new city has produced wasted lives, lived in discarded spaces.
3. City maps
Sometimes cities can be ‘maps,’ diagrams, scores, paths; attention can be shifted from the well-defined volumes of three-dimensional space to the residual, interstitial spaces where any- one can get lost, find what they are looking for, do what they wish. The map becomes an image of a boundless city without a centre or limits, since “I like maps,” Szymborska writes, “because great-heartedly, good-naturedly they spread before me a world not of this world” (Szymborska, 2012). A scheme repeated and repeatable ad infinitum, which becomes a “patient labyrinth of lines [that] traces the image of his face” and the city ceases to exist as a place and becomes an intimate condition that reflects existence. And if a map were nothing more than the trace that time has left on us, we find it again, unpredictable, in Constant’s New Babylon, planned for a new humanity finally free to trace the countless lines of its existence, or in Venturino Venturi’s Mappa, where the aggregations of grids explode towards other, infinite dimensions, similarly to the sound diagram of 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs by John Cage.
4. City of Man
The city produces wasted lives lived in discarded spaces, made up of the “burning lava of the ugly, of noise, roads on top of roads, tremendous iron bridges, trains, trucks, tractor-trailers, blocked- off lanes, impassable highways, a real war theatre” (Ceronetti, 2014). In these urban contexts, then, all you have to do is look ‘over the fence’ to see that “the brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. … The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts.” The images by Moriyama Daido show all the violence and beauty of the street where broken creatures look for and find a new beauty that lies also in the total absence of homogenisation, those same creatures caressed by the very human gaze of Mario Giacomelli, coming finally to the collage by Benedetta Tagliabue from which the new city rises, the new beauty of disorder, diversity, reappropriation, the only true source of the new city of man.
5. Utopias
Utopian cities are, for some, the mirror of the harmony of the universe or are a dream, ou-topia, a no- place; for others, a possible reality, eu-topia, a good place, a precise political and social commitment. The forms in which the ideal city manifests itself over time are varied: from literary narrative to philo- sophical treatises; from the planning of space to social planning. Each of these rests on the conviction that it is possible, through the implementation of a given physical and social scheme, to succeed in changing the face of the earth, to create the “best of all possible worlds,” to make people happier and society better. But “can one design happiness?!?,” asked Bruno Taut (Die Stadtkrone – Bird’s eye view, looking west, 1919) at the beginning of the last century, promoting the dissolving of the city and the “stone houses [that] make stone hearts.” Happiness: “we – all – can experience it – and build it” (Taut,1920), was his firm conviction. From Alberto Burri who defied fate by rebuilding a new Gibellina (Bozzetto per Grande Cretto, Gibellina, 1981), a concrete trace of the life lived there which must not be lost forever, to Lorenzo Bonechi with his Città celeste which in its perfect Renaissance rigour reflects the utopia of Saint Augustine, up to the Terzo Paradiso by Michelangelo Pistoletto, the good place from which a new mankind will rise.
6. Urban signs
The cities speak: over the centuries history deposits a patina of signs, meaning, memories, values onto the elements that make it up. To the language of architecture, which was the first to be specif- ically urban, have been added other codes, invented dialects, verbal games that have paradoxically diminished the communicative power of urban space as such by trivialising its message, reducing its level of communication. “Let’s go back,” Aldo Palazzeschi writes, “amid the pastilles of Re Sole, Modes, nouveauté, and great uproar at Montecitorio…” (Palazzeschi, 1913).This is the city of noise, the contamination of advertising images, user information, official signals and contrasting sounds, seductive and stimulating for some, annoying and alienating for others. In the attempt not to remain mute, and to break free of a communications hegemony, some have also begun to flank official communications channels with another system, new signs, urban slang covering nameless, faceless surfaces devoid of any message. In Nino Migliori’s Muri, Mimmo Rotella’s torn manifestoes, Gianni Berengo Gardin’s Valvasone, and Ritratto di città by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, and Roberto Leydi, the city resounds, sometimes empty and clanging, other times poetically present
7. Memories of Cities
There are cities that live on, enclosed in our memory, which nostalgia transforms when it calls them back to mind. The environment where we live intervenes in the construction of our identity, roots us in a place, which is made up not only of form and matter, but of emotional landscapes, personal memories, shared traditions. Giovanni Michelucci writes, “Of my city… I remember when we chased each other around the Piazza del Duomo after school and would hit each other, throw our book satchels at each other… I have those moments still inscribed inside me; those moments, without my yet being aware of it, aroused in me the sense of the city” (Michelucci, Cecconi, 2002). But it can also happen that the city shapes the memory, becomes the transcription of a recollection, of a tradition in the circumstance of a real place. The city of memory thus is not erased, but risks vanishing because it is obliged to remain always the same in order to be remembered. An example is Piazza d’Italia by Giorgio de Chirico, composed like a puzzle of interrupted memories reassembled in a fictive land- scape made only of recalled fragments. “Cities are made of overlapping layers, created by the various eras when we lived in them. … Our memory tarries first on one layer, then on another. It lights there like a bird” (Ginzburg, 2016), writes Natalia Ginzburg, and memory enables Gherardo Dottori to fly high in his Sintesi di Padova, while the city map becomes for Carmen Andriani her Autoritratto.
8. Guerrilla City
Abandoned, uncertain, functionless urban spaces can become refuges for diversity, places where the beauty resides not in order, but in variety. There is a city that resists, populated by minorities that rebel against the conviction that they don’t matter, that they can’t fight back. The city, the neighbourhood, the ghetto will then be enriched by an infinite range of individual “alterations” going from the physical and functional modification of common spaces to anarchic bursts of writing and colour on the walls, to building gardens in a jar. Here the collectivity takes back the urban spaces, transforming them, and in transforming the space tries to transform itself. This is the city that welcomes, that leaves time and space for expressing one’s identity, that promotes a pluralistic society, built on multiplicity instead of uniformity. Where lost ‘spontaneity’ re-emerges unstoppable amid the mesh of urban planning. Evidence of this are Richter’s Besetztes Haus and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect, which in opposition to efficient demolition has made room for the humanity that streams forth from those punctured walls.
9. City Elements
Sequences, rhythms, repetitions often characterise the urban image. Sometimes they are part of its structure, other times they represent the materials used to build it, others still they are simply fragments, ruins of something that no longer exists. Volumes, lines, surfaces, coloured, horizontal, and vertical planes are the words of a grammar that speaks to us of an ‘elemental city,’ which seeks harmony through the balance of the relations among its different elements. Inventive jux- taposition of elements can turn into a ‘participatory method’ of building a city, which renounces the rigour of the ‘total plan’ of the urbanist-demiurge, preferring instead the collage of an artist who proceeds by fragmenting and recomposing urban materials, enabling continual variations in an apparently unending game. From Mario Nuti to Alvaro Monnini to Giuseppe Uncini up to Sol LeWitt, artists have populated the urban imagination with assertive presences indifferent to urban planning, as in a ‘Cubist’ play of breaking apart and putting back together simple elements nec- essary for a complex and fragmentary world.
10. Urban Nature
Parks, gardens, vertical forests bring a tamed nature into the city, subjected to logics of order, decorum, aesthetics, hygiene, environmental mitigation, but then “night falls and the parks rebel… Thus, suddenly, urban morality wavers beneath the trees” (Aragon, 1926). The battle against dis- order and weeds is destined to be lost: chaos resides in the intervals and the inevitable interstices that defy any prediction or norm. In these ‘waiting’ or ‘abandoned’ spaces the urban unconscious resurfaces and the impossibility becomes evident of separating humanity and nature, city and environment, order and disorder. Perhaps this is the city we would most like: a ‘grafting,’ a physiological fusion between man and nature that turns it into a place not of integration, but of ‘welcome’: of the different, the unexpect- ed, and the countless nuances of urban ‘bio-variety.’
11. Urban Landscapes
Urban landscapes are theatres where the stratification of cultural, structural, economic, techno- logical changes introduced by man over time take the stage. At the same time, they tell people’s ‘stories’: little everyday events, signs, symbols of the domestic life of a given time and place. Action and narration contribute equally to constructing the image of the city, which is made up of monu- ments but also tiny stories, the web of tales told. Building an urban landscape could be compared to a ‘score,’ a choral action, with which technicians and citizens, directors and actors, composers and performers give life to a ‘collective’ work of art. Cities then become landscapes “welcoming to the unexpected, … which continually invite us to dance, each with our own steps or all together to the same music” (Metta, Di Donato, 2014). So then, may the rhythmic score of Francesco Lo Savio accompany us, or Gualtiero Nativi’s Modulazione or Pietro Consagra’s Città frontale, visions of a vocation for dwelling where the urban web recedes in the face of new spaces which each of us is called to trace, once or forever.
12. Metropolis
The vision of the ‘future’ city has always been counterposed to the urban reality of the present time: an ideal place, where past and present dissolve, giving rise to timeless spaces. This is the metropolis projected into an undefined tomorrow, which feeds the perennial human illusion of being able to ori- ent, through the configuration of space, the trajectory of progress and evolution. It is a city made up of spaces often hybridised between innovation and tradition; science fiction contexts scattered about the universe, or territories where a renewed reconciliation between man and nature could generate self-sufficient spaces capable of feeding and generating themselves. These are almost always images of super-technological works made up of super-architectural structures floating in the air, or of grids traced ad infinitum that completely wipe out local specificity. So far from and indifferent to earthly reality that only very rarely are human beings found there. A fantastical story dramatically devoid of life, from the archetype of the metropolis imagined by Citroen which then teemed with imitators to Antonio Sant’Elia’s dream of an urban plan, to the New York of Superstudio, all beautiful just as the Renaissance ideal cities were beautiful, and lifeless, since reality with its unpredictable disturbances goes counter to the ‘designs of man.’