CALL FOR PAPERS San Rocco 5: Scary Architects

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CALL FOR PAPERS
San Rocco 5: Scary Architects
Architecture is scary.
It is not just difficult to deny this; it is impossible.
Architecture involves something oppressive. Dictators
by definition love architecture. Nothing is more typical
of dictators than gigantic, tasteless architecture (this is
the difference between dictators and gangsters: gangsters
only need gigantic, tasteless cars). In Hollywood
movies, bad characters are always hidden behind several
layers of stone. Good characters usually just have
a little house, a very ordinary one, possibly made of
wood. Clearly, if you need architecture, something is
wrong with you.
Probably this has something to do with the origin of architecture.
Indeed, architecture appeared at a moment
in time when society became more hierarchical, more
established. Slavery appeared at the same time as architecture
(as did writing, for that matter). Whether a
cause or a consequence, architecture is somehow related
to an increase in hierarchical structure and inequality.
Architecture exposes the oppression embedded
in our society; it reminds us that our great-greatgrandfathers
had to slaughter the hunter-gathers in
order to produce our lovely boulevards.
Architecture is scary because in order to build, one
must destroy. Architecture changes habits, alters traditions,
erases the existing, in order to introduce something
else. Architecture forbids: its only way to enhance
something is, in fact, to forbid the opposite. Architecture
is possibly the supreme act of creative destruction
(consider, for instance, how Bramante quickly and brilliantly
razed old St Peter’s to the ground in order to ensure
the realization of his new scheme).
Architecture is scary because it introduces an exaggerated
time-span into our daily life. Architecture not only
involves a distant past, but it also includes a distant future.
Architecture is simply too slow and too cumbersome
not to think over the (uber-)long term. Its association
with kings and dictators is not just the result
of a sadistic passion for oppression: architecture likes
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kings, tyrants and dictators because they are the only
politicians who think about buildings and infrastructure
for the long haul, and not just in megalomaniac/
monumental terms, but also more reasonably in terms
of the fortune they leave to their heirs; indeed, kings invest
in palaces because their sons will inherit them. It
is the time-horizon of dictators, not dictatorship itself,
that is sympathetic to architecture.
Despite all recent attempts to reduce the lifespan of architecture
and dream up buildings that could easily disappear
(from Futurism on), architecture still disturbs
the perfect flatness of contemporaneity, suggesting
a longer span of time. And maybe this is what is really
scary about architecture: a longer time-horizon unavoidably
ushers a new character onto the stage: death.
Architecture is scary: this is a truth, not a choice. Still,
scariness can also be a choice, a precise desire to scare
(one’s enemies? one’s subjects? one’s allies?). The Parthenon,
for instance, is a machine designed to scare
people. Given the absurd amount of money invested in
its construction (a gigantic potlatch?) and its incredible
precision, the Parthenon’s emergence in the relatively
shabby Athens of the 5th century can be understood
only as a colossal menace. The precision of the Parthenon
is the precision of a weapon of mass destruction.
For all the legends about aliens building the pyramids,
the most likely building to have been built by aliens is
the Parthenon, the scariest object ever constructed on
this planet.
So architecture is scary, and making architecture can
be a reaction to the discovery of how fundamentally
scary architecture is. If architecture is the most tangible
sign of an oppressive architecture of society, design
can be understood as an expression of this original evil.
Guido Canella understood architecture in these terms.
The dedicated desperation of Canella’s architecture is
committed to the exhibition of this primitive oppression.
As much as Canella’s ideological construction is
awkward, and as much as his architecture is repulsive
(and we’re talking about his best period), he had something
there. The offensive ugliness that Canella laboriously
erectedin the 1970s in the barren outskirts of
Milan is not just the consequence of the impoverished
life of the proletariat, for these nightmares are not only
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modern, and this oppression is not only that of the
working class: it is also the oppression of the bourgeois
architect as well as a deeper, somehow unspeakable
oppression, a universal Unbehagen. Similar nightmares
indeed appear in the work of architects as different as
Ricardo Bofill, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Kiyonori Kikutake,
Hans Poelzig, Paul Rudolph and Carel Weeber.
San Rocco 5 tries to deal with the horror of architecture.
What should we think of the architects who have decided
to scare the rest of the world deliberately? And what
about buildings that are not just big and uncanny, but
deliberately dark, windowless, gloomy, repulsive, antihuman?
Is scary architecture just a desperate quest for
love? As Black Sabbath would put it, “Happiness I cannot
feel and love to me is so unreal”.

Cases
• Scary Architects: A Portrait Gallery •
Send us a portrait of your favourite scary architect!
• Ricardo Bofill, Scary Architect •
Ricardo Bofill understood from very early on that he
himself would be the most despotic and, hence, also
the most rewarding client. After a bizarre stint during
which he had practically taken over a project of former
friends, enlarged it and famously/supposedly driven
its developer bankrupt while at the same time building
some of the most exciting megaliths on the Spanish
coastline, he founded the Taller as a self-constructing,
post-hippy “community”. The magnificent Walden 7
complex soon became the epitome of a social community
driven berserk. As a city-within-the-city of gigantic
proportions, it had more in common with the Death
Star than a building. Unfortunately, after all of this the
prolific mind of the (self-declared) genius began to suffer
delusions of George Lucas–like proportions. New gigantic
design opportunities inspired a bizarre version
of an all-encompassing classicism. Bofill became the
unstoppable Sun King of a new palace-inspired, mirrored-glass
classicism. Only the French could embrace
this Jean Michel Jarre–style complete lack of self-relativity
without any irony; lasers and columns can be surprisingly
similar.
• Kiyonori Kikutake, Scary Architect •
Kiyonori Kikutake fought a lifelong battle with the permanence
of the built object. He started his research
on impermanence with a project of an intimate character,
the construction of the Sky House for his family
in 1958. His research got progressively out of control,
however, and ended with the creation of gigantic megastructures
floating on the most extensive and generic
surface on the Earth: the ocean. His tendency toward
impermanence, material and spiritual lightness, and
a social and physical interchangeability finally generated
monstrous concrete accretions intended to provide
the infrastructure for plug-in inhabitable cells. Kikutake’s
designs for floating nomadic cities that were to
be sunk to the ocean floor once no longer useful to humans,
perhaps to serve as an artificial reef for marine
life (Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo would have fun swimming
through them), foresaw a romantic future for these
massive cruise settlements, far away from Japan’s postatomic
nightmares and the pressure generated by his
native country’s explosive mix of land scarcity, overpopulation
and brutal economic development.
• Morris Lapidus, Scary Architect •
During his long life, Morris Lapidus designed over 1,200
buildings, including 250 hotels around the world. He
brashly said things to which culturally engaged architects
would never confess and he coined slogans like
“Too much is never enough” – pure treason for Miesian
loyalists – or “I gave them the kind of backdrop to make
them feel ‘I really have arrived’”. More or less consciously,
Lapidus set the standard for both gaudy leisure architecture
and the tastes of ambitious newcomers to
the criminal milieu (the Scarface set designer definitely
owes something to him).
How can we not feel at least a little sympathy for someone
who, after his retirement, feeling angry and bitter
about his reputation, burned fifty years’ worth of his
drawings?
• Hans Poelzig, Scary Architect •
In his book Das Antlitz der Zeit, August Sander described
the state of society during the Weimar Republic. In a
group whose every element had to represent an entire
class, the subjects he chose were unavoidably caricatures:
the notary wore a light-coloured coat and was accompanied
by a black Doberman, the span of the sergeant’s
moustache equalled that of his shoulders, the
butcher was bald and fat . . . and the architect was Hans
Poelzig.
• Paul Rudolph, Scary Architect •
Paul Rudolph (the Brutalist one, not the early modernist
from Sarasota) liked to impress people, or better,
he liked to daze and scare them. It’s at least as hard to
confute this as it is to deny the fact that he was terribly
good at it. Indeed, his preference for using the section
as the main tool for controlling and describing his
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architecture is deeply related to the task most of his
buildings were asked to perform, i.e., vertigo. His obsession
with spaces that were at least triple-height,
with hyper-complex, vertically connected, interlocking
spaces and with endlessly free-falling, edgy volumes
becomes clear once you accept a continuous quest
for vertigo as the core of his work. Similarly, his preference
for diagonals, whether this was manifested in
the geometry of the masses or the tension in the inner
voids, helped cause the same kind of dizziness. And
we shouldn’t forget how he used to handle materials,
pushing their defining qualities to almost disturbing
extremes, from the super-shiny, mirror-like polished
steel of the handrails to the abrasive roughness of the
béton brut. His famous apartment in Beekman Place, as
a true self-portrait of the architect, condenses all his
obsessions into a relatively small-scale project and displays
them with extreme clarity.
Imagine that a party was held last night. You wake up
barefoot, lying on the super-thick Loosian carpeting.
Still drunk, you drag yourself to the kitchen and sip a
coffee. Your eyes wander over the space. Above you, a
movement attracts your attention: three floors up, people
are fucking in the glazed-bottom bathtub.
• Louis Kahn in Dhaka •
In the middle of an endless landscape of slums there is a
castle. In the perennial grey fog, this grey castle emerges,
just a castle surrounded by water in the middle of a
lawn in the middle of slums. It is surreal, scary . . . and
entirely absurd. But to be fair, what would make sense
in a place like Dhaka? Maybe here Louis Kahn’s terrifying
dishonesty finally became strangely reasonable.
• Stanley Tigerman’s Black Barn,
or the Dark Side of the Force •
In 1973–74, some four years before Star Wars came
out, Stanley Tigerman was already envisioning the main
traits of Darth Vader’s devilish black mask. In charge
of renewing a barn and turning it into a house, he was
able to condense an almost tangible negative aura in
this small, potentially banal building. And he was able
to convince the client to build it, too. Although the
barn is still there and its proportions are familiar, at
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the same time it is an obscure, alien object in the flat
Michigan landscape. The structure is completely clad
in black asphalt shingles and all of the glazing is greytinted
plate. The openings are pierced into the flat
surfaces in a variety of triangular shapes, suggesting
arrows pointing at the ground (like a divining rod, Tigerman
has said). No recognizable element helps us
determine the true scale of the structure. A theatre organ
located downstairs pervades the central free-fall
of connected spaces with its sound. Beside the building,
a pond with white swans (white swans!) reflects its
dark profile.
• And Justice for All! •
Beginning in 1750, Carlo di Borbone and his architect,
Ferdinando Fuga, started an ambitious construction
programme dealing with the enormous amount of poor
people in the city of Naples. The first building of this
programme was the beautifully gigantic, and still unfinished,
Albergo dei Poveri (Hotel of the Poor), which
was erected on the eastern edge of the city. The poor
were relegated to this area and fed in exchange for a
bit of work and disciplined behaviour. The problem of
getting rid of the bodies of the dead among the poor
with a little decency was solved through the erection of
a scarily rational cemetery for the masses, which was
established in 1762 further east. The so-called Cimi-
tero delle 366 Fosse (Cemetery of the 366 Graves) was
a proto-Enlightenment machine for processing bodies.
Its name derives from the number of mass graves,
one for each day of the year, including the 366th in a
Leap Year. The graves are arranged in a grid-like manner,
in boustrophedonic order. Each day, the bodies
were thrown in the proper pit, which was then closed
in the evening to remain so for an entire year. The bodies
were pressed against a horizontal iron grid by their
own weight, thus accelerating the process of decomposition
and allowing the periodical clearing of the
bones. Any trace of rite was erased from the event of
death, which was treated in purely logistical terms.
Perhaps for the very first time, the foundation of the
modern city – the (Lumpen)proletariat – was understood
as such and was directly transformed into the
stuff of architecture.

• Scary Modernism •
Modernism dealt with quantity. It terrifyingly organized
masses of people within a Cartesian space: the
houses of Pagano, Diotallevi and Marescotti’s Città
Orizzontale were distributed among city blocks according
to the number of members a family had. Pigeonholed
as if placed in the methodical cabinet of an
obsessive entomologist, dwellers’ interrelations were
strictly classified and predetermined on the basis of
physical quantities: singles, couples, three-person
families, four-person families, and so on . . . In a sort
of desolated metonymy, apartments stood for inhabitants,
city-blocks for groups of people, cities for masses.
In such a non-human landscape, people acquired a
surreal quality. Surprisingly, human figures appear in
Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt perspectives.
As shapes cut out in black shown in groups of two and
equally distributed in space, they stand on the bridges
that the architect kindly provided. You won’t notice
them at first glance, but they are there nonetheless.
You have to wonder if their inclusion was a joke . . .
• Phalaris Takes Power •
In his Politics, Aristotle recounts that Phalaris (who
lived from around 570 to 554 BC) was a Greek architect
entrusted with the building of the temple of Zeus
Atabyrius on the acropolis of Agrigentum. Phalaris
is, by far, the greatest “success story” if we consider
the historically one-sided relationship between architects
and politics, in which the latter almost always
strong-arm the former. Indeed, after receiving
the commission for the temple, Phalaris lamented the
lack of resources for the project and asked for more
money and more workers. After his request was accepted,
he used the money to arm the workers and
installed himself as the tyrant of the city. Under his
rule, Agrigentum seems to have attained considerable
prosperity.
Phalaris was renowned for his excessive cruelty. His
alleged atrocities included cannibalism: he was said
to have eaten suckling babes. Phalaris is also famous
for his brazen bull, which was invented, it is said, by
Perillos of Athens. The tyrant’s victims were shut up
inside the bull and a fire was then kindled beneath it,
roasting them alive; their cries were supposed to represent
the bellowing of the bull.
Phalaris’s exploits (except the bull, maybe) somehow
remind us of everything Manfredo Tafuri always wanted
(but never dared) to do: quit architecture, jump
into politics, seize power.
• Julius Caesar’s Bridges •
Julius Caesar allowed the construction of two bridges
across the Rhine during the Gallic Wars in 55 and 53
BC. The construction of the first bridge most likely occurred
somewhere between Andernach and Neuwied,
downstream from Koblenz. Book 4 of the Commentarii
de bello Gallico provides technical details about this
wooden-beam bridge. With over 40,000 soldiers at his
disposal, Caesar built the first bridge in only ten days.
He crossed with his troops over to the eastern bank and
managed to burn some villages, but he found out that
the ur-Germans had been smart enough to escape further
east. After eighteen days without any major battle,
he returned to Gaul and burned the bridge. Two years
later, close to the site of the first bridge, possibly where
the modern town of Urmitz is found, Caesar erected a
second bridge, again built in just “a few days”, according
to Book 6. His expeditionary forces raided the countryside
but did not encounter significant opposition, as
the Germans had retreated once again. Upon returning
to Gaul, the second bridge was taken down as the first
had been.
Caesar used his technological superiority to scare more
than to conquer. The bridges were, in reality, utterly
useless, for the army could have crossed the river in all
kinds of different manners; Caesar just wanted to put
on a terrifying show for his enemies.
• A Career as a Scary Architect •
Even though there are scary architects who have enormous
firms, it is the smaller practices that are arguably
the most interesting. These small firms are almost
invisible and operate in stealth. They seldom have real
offices, and this makes their practices extremely agile
and opportunistic; sometimes they even use another
practice to make what they want to make. They
rarely take full responsibility for what they actually do,
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ut they leave no doubt about their involvement in the
things for which we think they are responsible. They
play hard, drive fancy cars, but have no proper office.
Perhaps their work could be considered the equivalent
of hit-and-run investment. By the time one realizes
what these scary architects are like, they have already
vanished, or at least the myth and the reality are so intertwined
that one doesn’t exactly understand what really
happened. Here, there is never liability, and traces
of their involvement are hard to find; their presence is
felt in their absence. Since scary architects are hardly
there, people take for granted that they are everywhere,
all the time. Extreme examples of the type would
probably be Bramante and Carel Weeber. Their absence
created their niche. In both of these cases, it turned out
that that niche was so big that it almost encompassed
the whole market.
• Pentagons •
Is there something inherently scary in pentagons?
Indeed, pentagons are among the most violent shapes
in Abbott’s Flatland (even more than squares, despite
Abbot’s belief that the fewer the sides, the nastier
the shape). In architecture, pentagonal ground
plans are very rare (it is a pretty uncomfortable geometric
form requiring rare skill to be employed). Nonetheless,
they do appear sometimes, and they are always
strangely associated with power. The two most
famous pentagonal buildings are the Pentagon at Arlington,
Virginia, and the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola.
In confirmation of this theory, the Palazzo Farnese was
used as Pinocchio’s prison in the Italian TV series of
1972.
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Following pages:
Pasquale Poccianti
(b. Bibbiena, 1774; d. Florence, 1858)
Hans Poelzig
(b. Berlin, 1869; d. Berlin, 1936)
Photograph by August Sander

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