Talking About Space. Searching the Image

Abstract

What is art and what is technique in architecture? What has been designated by these terms in the past and what is yet to be designated? The dilemma is very similar to what has been proposed in the observations (or better in the contradictory) of Ugo Monneret de Villard on the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, published in “Leonardo” magazine in the distant 1905 [10]. I am going to quote only two passages from it: “…Criticizing the theory of the free beauty and the non-free beauty he says: the theory that architecture is a non-free and imperfect art because it has to comply with practical scopes as well, is absolutely ironic. It has to be added that the artist always has a way of preventing a contradiction from emerging. And in what way? By taking as a matter his aesthetic intuition and objectification for the purpose of realizing the object that serves for achieving a practical goal (102)…” “We can say that when the architect is thinking about a building, his thoughts are guided by a sum of considerations generated by his experience, his scientific studies, his practice and eventually by his art of technique…” and concluding “it can even be pure intuition, since the thought is initially confused because the artist does not still see the exact outlines of his opera, but he feels it like a rhythm, like music that he will later on try to express and materialize. However when he passes to this second phase – which after many decades I can call the phase of the outlined image – which is the true phase of artistic creation in which all the concepts he has accented on before come to participate.” Undoubtedly, these thoughts reveal the substratum of the discussion, which is why after so many millenniums of artistic images and techniques, and their interpretation and description, we cannot free ourselves from the doubt of how to make them retake part in the architectural discipline. If it is still true that the university education, as it has been forged during the last 2000 years, corresponds partially to the statement of Paolo Frisi about the Plan for the School of Engineering according to which “the public lectures are mostly for mediocrity (while home teaching and private lessons are for the sublime Geniuses) it is necessary to ask the question of what subjects, and not just instruments, have to be concatenated in the didactic programs and for what final goal” (Sandri in La Scuola degli Ingegneri: problemi di scienza e tecnica nel XVIII secolo. Electa, Milano, pp. 127–137, [13]).