“We want to deliver
Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and
antiquaries.
Italy has been too
long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable
museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
To admire an old
picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it
forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the
best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you
will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?”
Taken from ‘The Futurist Manifesto’ 1909, F.T Marinetti
"For me 'the past' does not exist, because I consider that everything is simultaneous in our culture and similarly in judging architecture I do not see any fracture between ancient & modern."
Gio Ponti, Amate l'architettura, 1957
^Universita degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata Administrative Centre, the totemic Stack project, together with Calatrava's pools dominating the city's eastern suburbs
“The past is no longer
a burden. It is no longer an immense archive of untouchable and superior
achievement that presses down on an unworthy present. It isn’t the dead weight
of millennia that must be cast-off before anyone can be free enough to do
anything. We no longer need to unburden ourselves of the knowledge that nothing
we will ever do will ever compare to anything in the countless multitudes of
past perfections.
Historians no longer
have a monopoly on our history, they cannot continue to tell us where we come
from, who we were and therefore what we are. They are not the guardians of a
one and only unitary truth, or of sterile debates about fine distinctions in
polite disagreements. They have lost their gatekeeper status, they were caught
unawares, asleep on the job, their chickens have flown the coop.
Their libraries and
primary sources and secondary sources and boxes of files, and opinions and finely
framed debates have escaped, they have dispersed on the wind for any of us to
catch. The old wise men are just old men now that anyone can share what they
had always before kept locked up for themselves. Like the shrivelled and tiny
Wizard of Oz behind his screen and the magician without his secrets, they are
revealed to be the terrified little humans that they are once stripped of their
magical hoard.
History is not in
Museums any more either. The carefully crafted didactic order, the geographic
hierarchies, the chronological sequencing, the derisory narrative summaries, it
is all over. It has all run into the streets. It has all escaped into the
ether, onto the internet, for our delectation, for our use, for our own ideas
and madcap creations, it has run away from the convent and is discovering the
joys of the world.
History is a lithe,
liberated, vivacious young woman who is free to mingle with whomever she so
wishes, is free to sleep with whoever tickles her fancy. She is lush and
fertile and whimsical and serious and silly and capricious and profound and in
turns she pirouettes between wanting to go to the Opera House, the Gallery and
the Library, and other times the fetish club, the protest and the beach.
The entirety of the
past is now as light as a smartphone, and as fun as a theatre’s wardrobe.
History belongs to us.
Each of us. We can cut it up and put it back together in whatever manner we
choose. It doesn’t belong to those who made it: they bequeathed it to us in the
very act of dying. It definitely doesn’t belong to an Oxford Don, or in an
ivory tower. It is our gift, it is our head start, it is what makes us uniquely
twenty first century human, it means we do not need to begin each time from
scratch, it means we have material with which to build our future.
History is our quarry.
History is an ancient monument on our doorstep that is ripe for plunder. It is
our Colosseum from which we get bricks and blocks and metal to put together our
own churches. Only in this case the Colosseum isn’t diminished by our
rapaciousness, it is nourished by it, it gets bigger every time something new
is formed from its bones, it grows and fattens. Every stone we remove sows the
seed for three more in its place.
Our acts of creation
with the stuff of the past transforms the whole of history. We keep it alive.
We keep it growing. We save it from the
Historians and the Museums. It is us who make sure that the most obscure
medieval painter is as much a part of our lives as the latest dancing puppy
video.
The past is out. The
bible has been translated, published and distributed and we can all interpret
it however we like. The priests be damned.
The past is now, and
it is ours.”
Taken from ‘The Doge-storia Manifesto’, 2014 or ‘15,
un-attributable collective
^detail of the stack in the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower
As a designer, artist or architect in Rome, positioning
oneself in relation to the past has always been of primary importance, its all-pervasive
everywhereness sort of forcing the issue. Each successive generation hosts its
own debate with its own set of positions expounded throughout the period in texts,
works, academic positions and public commissions.
There are always the progressives and the reactionaries. Or
as some would rather say there are the philistines and the civilised. Or
perhaps it is always just a divide between those who are eager for dramatic
change and those who favour continuity. Then again, maybe it’s the aesthetic
manifestation of a perennial tension between those who have vested interests in
keeping things as they are and those who don’t.
A consensus of sorts is normally achieved, a status quo, an
equilibrium of mutual disagreements in which either party agrees to look the
other way so long as any territory they have staked out is not infringed upon,
clients are not stolen, sectors not entered into.
Things can however sometimes get a bit vicious. Occasionally
civility and decorum break down, descending into petty recriminations, and a
truce needs to be enforced.
As was well documented at the time in the pages of the quarterly
journal “Estetica Epiche” (whose online archive I have been delving into), the controversy
between the popularly labelled ‘Stacks’ & ‘Slices’ was not an amicable
affair of respectfully disagreeing parties. It was more a playground turf war
dressed up as academic debate, a mud-slinging affair in which both sides
repeatedly accused each other of being the perfect embodiments of everything
they considered wrong with society at large.
The whole drama was perhaps quite so nasty because the camps
happened to be much closer to each other than had any previously arguing oppositional
pair. The proximity made them mad. Although they would never admit it, they
felt tarnished by association.
Both accepted the primacy of history. Both rejected
abstraction. Both believed in continuity. Both used collage. They simply
defined it differently. Very, very differently. In their texts anyway. To the
amateur bystander the results were often interchangeable, the disagreements
comic.
The ‘Stacks’ (known to themselves as “I Conservazionisti Ricostruttivi”)
liked the history books, the museums, the grand narratives. Continuity for them
was the reiteration of an epochal historic sequence, the elaboration through
design of a series of sacred chronologies in which one thing led to another,
which gave birth to the next thing and so on in a scientific enumeration of
civilization’s progress through time.
They saw their job as the perpetual reiteration of moments
within that great story, the re-construction in miniature of sections from
within the eternal sequence which would function as didactic displays, educational
reminders to the rushing commuter of our place in a formidable history, our rootedness
in a proud past.
Each project became an opportunity to construct the layered
historical strata of Rome anew, but this time more clearly, not just an
incomprehensible crush of rubble, but a legible text in architecture, clearly
legible to the average passer-by. Hence the stacking. Each project was to have
a sequence, a set of styles, was to represent the progress from one period to
the next. But clearly, with each era in its carefully allocated place, discrete
and beautifully complete, with the relationships between these separate but neighbouring
parts absolutely determined, absolutely set. Like in a Museum. Only stacked one
on top of each other in piles, like layers of uncovered ruins.
^detail of the slice in the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower
The ‘Slices’ (known amongst themselves as the “History
Whores”) were directly inspired by the Doge-storia movimento, the manifesto of
which I have partially appended above, and which sought to radically alter the
way in which the past was dealt with by the progressive sector.
They were firmly in the camp of creatives who were of the
belief that to not acknowledge the past, to reject it and attempt to start
again each time with a clean slate, was only to be unwittingly ruled by
unquestioned beliefs, habits and assumptions from that very past itself. To
truly break free of the hegemony of history required a new kind of ownership of
history itself.
Doge-storia were particularly influential and eloquent, but
they were just one of many contemporary groups calling for history, for
heritage, for the past to be disrupted, democratised, blown apart and reborn in
the same way so many other sectors had been rendered completely unrecognisable
since the advent of the digital era.
So the History Whores sliced, they diced, they wilfully upended,
mirrored, flipped upside down, monstrously recombined at entirely incongruous
scales the elements, the facades, the materials and languages of every single
architectural style that could be found through a google image search. Sequence
meant nothing, the overall effect, the juxtaposition of parts, the dynamism of
contrasting and contradicting elements meant everything.
The Stacks were the Museum, the academy, row after row of
orderly cabinets, while the Slices were the wild illogic and pure joy of a private
collection, the plastic pig next to the roman fragment, they were the profuse
abundance of over-stacked living room cabinets.
^elevation of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower
Both became highly successful. And they despised each other.
To the point at which public competitions became unmanageable, or rather
unbearable, for those organising them. Every decision was either overturned or
disputed, endlessly, and if a commission was awarded, slander, personal
denouncements, lies, sympathetic newspaper editors commandeered to discredit
the individual members of each and every management committee, their names
dragged through the mud.
There were two deaths in rapid succession. the murder of a
prominent Slice and of a young Stack. They most probably had nothing to do with
the controversy, and nothing was ever proven, but the atmosphere was so
poisonous that everyone involved believed foul play.
^Aerial view from the South of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies tower on Piazza Venezia
As the general chaos began also to negatively affect a host
of public procurement projects, from the new City Subway line to the new school
program, the Mayor stepped in to force a resolution to what he saw as an
utterly ludicrous situation. Their buildings looked so similar anyway, it was
an absurdity that they could not work together.
Which meant that the Slices and Stacks were forced to work
together. Always. On every single new public project in the City of Rome.
Forced to work together, with neither running the show, instead with an
engineer in charge making all the final calls. There was a rigidly imposed new
code of conduct and set of procedures and criteria to follow for every stage in
every project.
That was it. Controversy over. The fights could continue on
the pages of ‘Estetica Epiche’ if they so desperately wanted to vent their
accumulated bile, but not in the professional sphere.
The new protocols were worked out on the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower that replaced the Palazzo in front of Piazza Venezia which was heavily
damaged in the Latina earthquake and the subsequent tremors.
The tower effectively marked the end of both movements, with
the explosive passions that had propelled an exciting period of formal
innovation, rapidly simmering into a tepid bureaucratic approach in which the
fundamental formal approaches were maintained, and half-heartedly incorporated
into each project, but all the vivacity was lost, all the ideological fervour
was extinguished. No more towering columns of historical literacy, nor vast,
coruscating slabs of dynamically intersecting architectural epochs. Just a
couple of things on top of each other here, a diagonal slice there. The
exhausted iterations of mutual failure. The tower on Piazza Venezia, the token
slice, the sad stack, whilst still not entirely devoid of interest, absolutely
embodied all the failings of the generation of projects that were to follow.
^Aerial view from closer
The topping-out ceremony for the new Ministry building marked the
resolution of a controversy (which had lasted little more than five years), the
death of two ideologies, and the birth of an undead official style that
dominated the city for the next decade and a half.
.......................................................
N,B. In case you hadn't realised this is a post based in Fiction.
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