It Don’t Mean a Thing if You Ain’t Got That Swing: A Jazz-Based Model for the Public Space Project

Abstract

The architectural project can no longer be likened to a simple device enabling perceivable reality to be placed in a relation with the formal system organising it but is increasingly affected by the unexpected, compulsive invasion of data and requirements that are more and more articulate and hetero directed as regards this specific discipline. Better understood as the setting out and identifying of problems, than the outlining of solutions, it has shifted its reference base from noun to verb, practically abandoning once and for all the primary aim of realising spatial forms, to devote itself more to the processes that produce them. If willingness to accept change and give up the desire for some kind of final, completed form has, on the one hand, progressively brought the architectural project closer to contemporary life, on the other, it has consolidated the current crisis, which has now permeated the process of construction of objectives of the project and the pinpointing of tools to represent and monitor it. The problem needs to be faced relying on new instruments, no longer limited to the usual technical arsenal of the professional, which increasingly highlight sequential processes in which information is considered an integral part of the construction of the actual project. To know how to handle and interpret a changeable, unstable scenario means to accept and absorb elements like improvisation and indeterminacy. Jazz music is one of the forms of art that absorb and develop – to an outstanding degree – models which indeed place these elements at the centre of their reason for being. Jazz may offer itself as a decisive element for project construction in environments continuously under transformation. The organisational form of the creative process, be it based on the notation code or on the system of communication and transmission of content between musicians, closely approaches the diagrammatic form used by some contemporary architects. An unusual aspect is the extreme synthesis of the written form in respect of the quantity of data absorbable and manageable by the model to the advantage of the production of polysemic and self-generating creative situations. In this sense a significant convergence is singled out between the way a jazz band proceeds and the work of some of the most active architects on the contemporary scene.