CALL FOR PAPERS San Rocco 5: Scary Architects

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.