1964

sketch of the Parabita Cemetery, Alessandro Anselmi

[…] The human and cultural disintegration of our age doesn’t lead to a generic extension of issues and responsibilities but, in a vast extent, to a better specification.

And we mean the close connection between a vision — which tends to describe the development arc of social formation and architectural activity as a whole — and an operative attitude that tends to separate in that process the single abstract moment of compositional research.

That moment appears to us as a chain-like succession of logical abstractions, rings of a formation and justification of an architectonical language as a «form of thinking».

From the linguistic recognition of architectonical activity to the satisfaction of human necessities through social assimilation: this is the «way forward»; from the transformation of the perception under the weight of artistic and extra-artistic context (social, economical and scientific) to the mutation of the compositional process, echoing the new conditions in reality: this is the «way back».

By unifying these two process, without any exclusions and as a whole, the cultural landscape of the architect is formed. The formal distinction of direct or indirect responsibility falls down; the reunification is true in specific techniques themselves, as assimilations of every kind of issue, since none is more important than the other…

… This specification is, then, also the renewal of the responsibility of the architect in his operative landscape: and its necessary nowadays more than ever, after the failures of the escapes towards far fetched disciplines, extraneous to the boundaries of architecture, apparently ephemeral, cast-iron in truth.

And the price payed by the Modern Movement was a double impotence: from the transformation of the society on one side, through purely formal social illusions, and on architectural design on the other side, through the fake assimilation of social, technical and typological parameters with impossible compositional laws…

… Another thing is new: the tendency of expecting an effort from the architect that coincides with the struggle for a better planning at a local and territorial scale: a tendency that we hope it doesn’t hide a faith in urbanism «tout court» as abstract solution to contradictions in collectivity or, worse, as autonomous step of the class struggle.

This would hide the identification of techniques of urbanism and techniques of architectonic composition, and the consequent necessity of a new definition of urbanism as a scientific discipline, unification of heterogeneous elements…

… These considerations are based on the essential diversification of artistic and scientific languages and their consequent characteristics. Semantic opening in the scientific case, and closure, emblematicity or even «tipicality» in the artistic discourse.

In this context the nature of the artistic language must be specified from the inside, abstracting then, from the continuity (and historical accuracy) of every product. It must be noted that every stylistic examination, in our acceptation, tends to the definition of the «organicity», clear result of elementary needs of formal delimitation and clarity of expression: so it remains confirmed the rational nature of the compositional process, a process of thought.

A general thought, that uses «material» elements and «linguistic» elements in an original and logic organization that is expression of needs and relationship of every needs.

Every work of art is a rigorous stylistic construction, of autonomous symbols that exclude, in their level of synthesis (tipicity) any omni-textual element.

… Let’s keep in mind the differentiation of methods instituted first between aggregation laws of architectural elements and the real forms of their manifestation. Let’s define then as stylistic evolution the generalization-transformation of those laws or architectural idea: the signal of this evolution is in the difference born in every moment between architectural research and the average -social architectural language.

This process as a whole and its verifiable historical continuity establishes a semantic area not necessarily unique but surely delimitated: many of them can be found evolving in the course of history, meddling or autonomous.

These developments can be analyzed through two main abstractions: the first one, already described is the rational-analytic; the other one is only the reference that can be addressed to the whole heritage of the past and of the present, concurrent or extra-concurrent, from the inside of those semantic areas or in others, so with other artistic or extra-artistic techniques.

We have established then the notion of representational antecedent, or reference, of the architectural research, with all those characteristics defined before: non chronological, non geographical but logical in the context of artistic logic, based solely on figurative analogy.

Every semantic current of the past can be reclaimed, even if considered dead, and every linguistic transposition born from the coherence of the contemporary architectural research.

And it is this very coherence itself that shows the revolutionary potential of the architectural research.

original text in G.R.A.U. isti mirant stella - Architetture 1964-1980, edited by Kappa / A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna, 1981, Roma - Città e progetto 1. Collana di Architettura diretta da Francesco Moschini