In Praise of Penumbra 1119983967, 9781119983965

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
About the
Guest-Editors
Introduction: A Eulogy to Penumbra
Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot
and Francesco Bergamo
Geometric Origins
Onthology
Dwellers on the Threshold
Notes
At the Edges of
Transparent Language
The Thresholds of Chaos and Cosmos
Notes
Eden to Eden: At the Dawn of the Name
The Indominable
Penumbra 1 – arché
Note
‘In the Womb Yet Out-of-Doors’: Penumbra and the
Spaces In-Between
Light Subdued, Not Exhausted
Penumbras of the Forest Edge
Envelopment and Exposure
Notes
The Warmth of Death: Alexander Brodsky and the Necropolis in the Womb of the Metropolis
Bioluminescence
Illuminated by the Penumbra
Notes
A Path to the Light: Variations and Multiple Dimensions
An Allegory of Passing Time
A Distortion of Reality
Penumbra as a Filter
The Gardens of Paradise
Charged Space: The Anatomy of the In-between
Climatic Beasts
The Anatomy of the ‘Beast’
Notes
Efficiency Versus Game: Twilight Spaces for Homo Ludens
Finding the Twilight Point
Twilight Spaces as Activity Enhancers Through Play
Seeking the Almost: Designing Shade
Deep Meaning
Matter, Shadows and Lights
Designing a Crisis
Notes
Rhythmic Alternation: Metaphors of Light, Dark and Shadow
The Architecture of Light and Dark
The World of all the Senses
Chiaroscuro, Penumbra and the Umbraculum
Notes
The Intimacy of Neglect: Thresholds, Interconnectedness and Unexpected Glimpses
The Vertical Lane House
Mediated Third Space
Liminality as Spatial Protagonist
Notes
As If Without Time: The Nuclear Twilight Zone
What We Know
What We See
The White Light
Light and Dark
Notes
Things In Themselves: The X-Ray and Its Embodied Space
And are we here
A Question of Content
Penumbral Form
The X-ray Image, Form and Resistance
Embodiments
Notes
Projecting the Indeterminate and Enigmatic: The Painting of Marco Tirelli
A Special Garden
From the Architectural Dimension to the Metaphysical
The Mystery of the Half-Closed Shutter
Notes
Subliminal Blueprints for Other Dimensions: The Time-warped Sanatorium of the Quay Brothers
Limbo of Uncertainty
Sepulchre of a Dead Retina
Subliminal Blueprints
Notes
From Another Perspective: The Shadowy World of Domesticity
Shadowlands
The Light and the Dark
The Spirit
Notes
Contributors
What is Architectural Design?
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
FORTHCOMING AD TITLES
EULA

Citation preview

04 | Vol 93 | 2023

Guest-edited by Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

04 | Vol 93 | 2023

Guest-edited by Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

IN PRAISE OF PENUMBRA

04/2023

A Path to the Light About the Guest-Editors

5

Variations and Multiple Dimensions Driss Kettani

Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

Introduction

46

6

A Eulogy to Penumbra Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

At the Edges of Transparent Language

14

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Eden to Eden

22

At the Dawn of the Name 46

Renato Rizzi

‘In the Womb Yet Out-of-Doors’

Charged Space

Penumbra and the Spaces In-Between

The Anatomy of the In-between

Stephen Kite

Silvia Benedito

The Warmth of Death Alexander Brodsky and the Necropolis in the Womb of the Metropolis Susanna Pisciella

2

30

38

Efficiency Versus Game Twilight Spaces for Homo Ludens Giancarlo Mazzanti

54

62

ISSN 0003-8504

Guest-edited by Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

ISBN 978 1 119 98396 5

Things In Themselves 70

104

The X-Ray and Its Embodied Space Paul O Robinson

Projecting the Indeterminate and Enigmatic

112

The Painting of Marco Tirelli Antonella Soldaini

Seeking the Almost

70

Designing Shade

Subliminal Blueprints for Other Dimensions

120

The Time-warped Sanatorium of the Quay Brothers

Filippo Bricolo

Edwin Carels

Rhythmic Alternation

78

Metaphors of Light, Dark and Shadow Javier Corvalán

The Intimacy of Neglect

86

Thresholds, Interconnectedness and Unexpected Glimpses

The Nuclear Twilight Zone Matthias Bärmann

— Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

From Another Perspective

Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu

As If Without Time

‘ The ambiguity of penumbra lies in our difficulty in perceiving it, in establishing exactly where it begins and where it ends.’

The Shadowy World of Domesticity

128

Neil Spiller

96 Contributors

134

3

EDITORIAL BOARD

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Front cover Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2012. Courtesy Archivio Marco Tirelli Inside front cover Bricolo Falsarella, Lugana Winery, Lugana, Italy, 2023. © Filippo Bricolo Page 1 Paul O Robinson, Untitled Penumbrae, 2017. © Paul O Robinson

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN July/August

Volume

Issue

2023

93

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Disclaimer The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Publisher and Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsement by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised.

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ABOUT THE

GUEST-EDITORS AGOSTINO DE ROSA ALESSIO BORTOT FRANCESCO BERGAMO

Agostino De Rosa is Professor at the Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy, where he teaches Theory and Methods of Architectural Representation and Architectural Drawing. Francesco Bergamo and Alessio Bortot both graduated in architecture with De Rosa as tutor, and are today, respectively, tenure track at the Department of Architecture and Arts at Iuav and associate professor at the Department of Engineering and Architecture at the Università degli Studi di Trieste. They have taken part in many of the research projects coordinated by De Rosa in which the projective nature and applications of light and shadow, and of the penumbra between them, play a major role. Among them are a long-term project on the Roden Crater artwork in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona by the American artist James Turrell, and a collaboration with the German director Werner Herzog on an animated sequence about the anamorphic corridor painted by Emmanuel Maignan in the Trinità dei Monti church in Rome, for the film Salt and Fire (2016). Their studies have also focused on the treatises by the Minim friar, painter and anamorphosis innovator Jean François Nicéron, who was the first to describe a general method for drawing geometrically correct sun shadows in perspective, and began investigating penumbral representation just before his premature death. Agostino De Rosa coordinates the Surveying and Representing Architecture and the Environment PhD postgraduate programme at the Iuav, and also teaches at Venice International University. He has written several essays on representation, the history of images and land art. His many books include: Geometrie dell’ombra. Storia e simbolismo della teoria delle ombre [Shadow Geometry: History and Symbolism of the Theory of Shadows] (CittàStudi, 1996); La vertigine dello sguardo. tre studi sulla rappresentazione anamorfica [The Vertigo of the Gaze: Three Studies on Anamorphic Representation] (with Giuseppe D’Acunto, Cafoscarina, 2002); James Turrell: Geometrie di luce [Geometry of Light] – Roden Crater Project (Electa, 2007); Jean François Nicéron. Prospettiva, catottrica e magia artificiale [Perspective, Catoptrics and Artificial Magic] (Aracne, 2013); and Cecità del vedere. Sull’origine delle immagini [The Blindness of Seeing: On the Origin of Images] (Aracne, 2021). He has curated exhibitions for many institutions and he coordinates the Imago rerum research unit at Iuav, for which he has edited the proceedings of international seminars. Francesco Bergamo has a PhD in the Sciences of Design and teaches Drawing for Product and Visual Design, Data Visualisation for Fashion Communication and New Media, and History and Theory of Representational Methods in Architecture. His research focuses on the genealogy and forms of contemporary representational artefacts for architecture, design, politics, art and sonic ecology, and on the mutual relationship between aural and visual cultures. His books include: Stereotomia. Dalla pietra al digitale [Stereotomy: From Stone to Digital] (with Gabriella Liva, Cafoscarina, 2010); Architectural Perspective in the Venetian Villas Along the Riviera Del Brenta in the Province of Venice (with Massimiliano Ciammaichella, Aracne, 2016); and Il disegno del paesaggio sonoro [Soundscape Design] (Mimesis, 2018). With Agostino De Rosa he published ‘Geometries of Light and Shadows, from Piero della Francesca to James Turrell’ (in Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences, 2020), and darkness and penumbra are also relevant in his article ‘In Unknown Lands: Epistemology, Representation and Design in the Age of Intelligent Machines’ (Vesper, 2020). He coordinates the SSH! (Sound Studies Hub) research group and the LaSD (Laboratorio Strumentale per la Didattica) at Iuav. Alessio Bortot is Doctor Europaeus in Architecture, City and Design, with a specialisation in Representation. He has taught Descriptive Geometry, Advanced Technologies for Representation and Digital 3D Modelling at Iuav, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Padova, and at the École National Supérieure des Travaux Publics in Yaoundé (Cameroon). His research focuses on the history of representation and advanced technologies for architecture. He has lectured at international conferences and participated in national and international research projects. He is author of several publications, including: Modelli digitali. Approcci multidisciplinari alla rappresentazione eidomatica [Digital Models: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Eidomatic Representation] (with Mark Sonego, Cafoscarina, 2010); La Geomatica per la documentazione e la tutela dell’architettura e del paesaggio Veneto [Geomatics for the Documentation and Protection of Veneto Architecture and Landscape] (Iuav, 2012); and Emmanuel Maignan e Francesco Borromini. Il progetto di una villa scientifica nella Roma barocca [Project for a Scientific Villa in Baroque Rome] (LetteraVentidue, 2020). His national and international awards include the Bruno Zevi Prize and the Unione Italiana Disegno (UID) Gaspare De Fiore award. 1

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: (t) © Agostino De Rosa; (c) Image by Stefano Ceretti; 5(b) © Francesco Bergamo

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INTRODUCTION AGOSTINO DE ROSA, ALESSIO BORTOT AND FRANCESCO BERGAMO

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The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination. — Juan José Saer, The Witness, 19831 Penumbra – from the Latin paene (almost) and umbra (shadow) – can be defined as an intermediate zone of transition between light and shadow. Therefore, it indicates a liminal area, where many events can take place. Penumbra defines a space, both physical and imaginary, where everything is possible: it is the place of the uncanny, where presence and/or absence can produce wonder, or horror. The contributors to this issue of 2 illustrate and discuss the archetype of penumbra in the world of contemporary architecture, arts and critical theory, investigating the ways it permeates different expressive forms and exploring how today’s creativity is a reflection of the dramatic yet electrifying historical period we are living in, with no certainties.2 Penumbra is not only a place of the unexpected: it can provide a preferential point of view. The authors show and discuss how penumbra has shaped their creativity and modified their approach to their design process. Penumbra bears suprahistorical and global connotations; nonetheless, different cultures develop the symbolical phenomenon in different ways. It is part of the heritage of all humanity, yet it is employed through different aesthetic and designerly methods according to the cultural contexts within which it is situated, hovering between fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, past and future.

Another author who precisely described the physical phenomenon of penumbra and its artistic outcomes is the Italian painter Cennino Cennini. In his treatise Il Libro dell’Arte (written between 1390 and 1437) he introduces an interesting observation about the gradual tonal variation to which painted shadows must adapt.5 This can be interpreted as an anticipation of sfumato – the pictorial technique of the penumbra as ‘half shadow’ – and of the astronomical and geometric theory of isophotes, which are the lines of an illuminated surface whose points have a constant luminous intensity, as defined by Lambert’s law: where the luminous intensity observed from a reflecting surface is directly proportional to the cosine of the angle between the direction of the incident light and the direction perpendicular to the surface.6 According to Leonardo da Vinci, the representation of shadows is subject to the same laws that determine foreshortening in perspective.7 In his work we find no hints of a method for drawing shadows and halfshadows. This absence may be due to the dilemma of the discrepancy between geometric experimental constructions where the contours of a shadow cast by an opaque body on a surface are represented as precise lines, and his refusal to show contours in his paintings. Indeed, we read in his Manuscript G (1510–16) that ‘the boundaries of bodies are the least of all things […]. Wherefore O painter! do not surround your bodies with lines, and above all when representing objects smaller than nature; for not only will their external outlines become indistinct, but their parts will be invisible from distance’.8

Geometric Origins The first properly scientific references to the theme of penumbra can be found not in treatises about optics and shadows, as we might expect, but in those on astronomy. Such is the case of the Arab mathematician, astronomer and physicist Alhazen (Ab u ˉ al- asan ibn al-Haytham, 965–1039), author of the book On the Nature of Shadows ( ), where he defines shadows as the foundation of astronomy.3 It is a work of particular importance because, with theoretical clarity and practical demonstrations, it distinguishes ‘shadow’4 from ‘penumbra’, for the first time raising the question of the indeterminacy of the outline of shadows projected by sunlight, and determining the features of various light sources.

Pino Musi, Limes #5, 2008 Thanks to photographer and visual artist Musi's ability, the architectural frames, within the frame of the image, deny visible information outside (too much dark above, too much light below), while the inside is sculpted by half-lights, or half-shadows.

Alessio Bortot, Digital reconstruction via light simulation of the method used by Cennino Cennini to represent shapes through light, shadows and penumbras, 2022 Cennini was a Tuscan painter influenced by Giotto. His masterpiece book Il Libro dell’arte, written between 1390 and 1437, explains how the painter should use different shades of colour to give roundness to shapes through the use of penumbra. 1, 2 and 3: mixtures of brighter and brighter colour; B: towards black; W: towards white; U: background.

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Alessio Bortot, Digital reconstruction via light simulation of a drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s so-called Manuscript A (1490–92), 2022 In the original drawing Leonardo shows, in orthographic projection, the behaviour of shades, shadows and penumbras on a sphere illuminated by diffused light entering from a window. Leonardo identified isophotes several centuries before they were codified by Lambert’s law, representing the correct approximation of the various areas with equal light intensity.

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Penumbra forges a strong dialectical relationship with the darkest area close to it, and in particular with those shadows projected onto other surfaces

This uncertainty was probably exacerbated after 1505, when Leonardo studied the effects of diffused light (lume universale): here the phenomenon of penumbra is sublimated and plays a major role in his sfumato, gently enveloping his pictorial images.9 The Jesuit architect François d’Aguilon, who was also a mathematician and physicist, in his Opticorum libri sex: philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles (Six Books of Optics: Useful for Mathematicians and Philosophers Alike; 1613) stigmatises an incompleteness in the geometric treatment of the problem of shadows in relation to the phenomenon of penumbra and focuses on the tonal gradualness of shadows, both self and cast.10 In the fifth book, De luminoso et opaco (On Brightness and Opacity), and especially in the section titled ‘De umbris’ (‘On Shadows’), after having defined shadow as ‘diminished light’, Aguilon dwells on the perceptual aspect of cast shadows, distinguishing in them a uniformly dark nucleus (umbra perfecta) from the marginal areas that gradually become lighter (umbra diminuita, or imperfecta), which are penumbra. It is worth noting that this distinction had a powerful impact on the paintings of Aguilon’s near contemporary Peter Paul Rubens. Here penumbra finally becomes a precise topic within the domains of geometry and pictorial representation.

François d’Aguilon, Frontispiece of the fifth book from Opticorum libri sex (Six Books of Optics), 1613 This engraving from the Liber Quintus: De luminoso et opaco (Fifth Book: On Light and Darkness), and the others introducing each of Aguilon’s books, were based on Peter Paul Rubens’s drawings. Aguilon was a Jesuit mathematician, physicist and architect whose illustrations testify to his bond with Rubens and Rubens’s paintings, especially as regards the theory of colours, shadows and penumbra.

Giovanni Menna, The Black Heart of the Old City, Naples, Italy, 2021 Architectural historian Giovanni Menna frames a shadowy ectoplasm of a person standing in a tunnel in the historic centre of Naples, a city where penumbra reigns supreme. The area of uncertain definition surrounding the shadow cast on the cobblestones is the result of an extended light source, such as the sun.

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Giovanni Menna, Tra le ombre del Sé, Sé Cathedral, Porto, Portugal, 2020 The clear limits of the shade into this portico are the orthogonal projections of the contours of the shadow. In certain daylight conditions, the dialectic of the shadow is resolved only between these two projective elements, from which the penumbra is excluded.

Giovanni Menna, Angevin hypostyle, Monumental Complex of Donnaregina, Naples, Italy, 2020 The pillars, supporting the Gothic vaults of the nuns’ choir in the church of Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia, show their ‘heart of darkness’ through their cast shadows. In fact, they are surrounded by multiple shadows and half-light effects produced by the diffused light penetrating the building.

Onthology Penumbra is generated on a surface in that area of gradual transition from clear light to shadow, when an opaque body is interposed between a light source and the surfacescreen, producing an area of lower brightness than another contiguous one. In some of architectural historian Giovanni Menna’s photographs this becomes evident, and temporal layers which light has stacked upon architectural and urban spaces over the centuries are evoked. Penumbra forges a strong dialectical relationship with the darkest area close to it, and in particular with those shadows projected onto other surfaces: these are images by ontogenesis, faithful replicas and at the same time projective abstractions that clarify the nature of the light source that generates them and the formal complexity of the object of which they are projections. But they also conceal significant portions of its signifier and of its immediate and metaphorical signified. Penumbra generates hazy areas around the darker zones which, as German art theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolph Arnheim observes, can be considered simultaneously as integral and separate parts of the object of which they are projections.11 The ambiguity of penumbra also lies in our difficulty in perceiving it, in establishing exactly where it begins and where it ends: while shadows are linked to the interdiction of light – that is, a condition of non-visibility – penumbras live a saprophytic life, in balance between light and shadow, and from that we can draw information. As a liminal agent, penumbra can be compared to a common mediating element, not necessarily architectural: the frame. The term indicates the threshold and the border between different physical – or conceptual – dimensions, between landscape and architecture, between outside and inside, but also between reality and representation. In the visual arts it usually delimits a space, an area of significance, and triggers our curiosity to observe more carefully what it contains and delimits. On the one hand, it borders the space of representation (finite); on the other, it expands our perception (infinite). The frame thus becomes the threshold beyond which the gaze enters another world, that of imagination, exactly as happens in the figurative world that is delimited, evanescently, by penumbra. Descriptive geometry senses the unfathomable nature of this ‘heart of darkness’ of opaque bodies. However, it is condemned not to be able to represent their weight, but to describe them only partially: therefore projective images remain incapable of explaining the phenomenal world in depth. The ghost of a deeper knowledge of reality, even if only longed for, hovers in those images – technical or artistic – where penumbra is perceived as an element of necessary realism, even if in a context dominated by alienness or a climate of deep emotional distance. A definitive condition that can be recognised in penumbra is that it has no shadow: it cannot be further projected separately from its own shadow, and therefore it does not possess a real external substance, but just an illusory appearance.

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In Pino Musi’s photographic series Limes (2008), ‘architectures eliminate any layer of experience so as to create a link between elements on the margin, from the boundaries of which all things begin to “come into presence”, and the beholder’.12 It is a threshold between real and imaginary, between phenomenon and appearance, analogous to the one that this AD’s contributors invite readers to cross, entering a space where everything is possible. Dwellers on the Threshold The issue begins with University of Southern California professor Akira Mizuta Lippit’s exploration of the relation between transparency and opacity, towards the dream of a transparent language which unavoidably deals with the Tower of Babel. Language is crucial also in retired Iuav University of Venice professor Renato Rizzi’s considerations about the very essence of the term ‘architecture’. The role and significance of penumbra in architecture are examined by Cardiff University Emeritus Professor Stephen Kite in works by John Soane, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright and Aldo Rossi, and they seem to demand even more attention in today’s wounded world – a quality to which researcher Susanna Pisciella’s analysis of Alexander Brodsky’s drawings, installations and architectural works relates. It is also interesting to hear from architects from various parts of the world about their own relation with penumbra. In Moroccan architect Driss Kettani’s buildings, penumbra is a path to the desired light, recalling the Arab-Muslim tradition. Silvia Benedito offers a precise application of the role of ‘shadowing’ in architecture, presenting in detail the ‘Beastie’ pavilion designed for New York’s MoMA PS1 by OFICINAA, the practice she co-founded in Ingolstadt, Germany. For Colombian architect Giancarlo Mazzanti, the topic of this issue becomes relevant in architecture where play and entertainment dialogue with efficiency. Filippo Bricolo, based in Verona and a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Milan provides a detailed analysis of the way his work as an architect takes care of designing penumbra in interiors. From Paraguay, Javier Corvalán confronts the eastern, western and southern American worlds, his thought embodied by his Umbraculum-house. Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, of Shanghai practice Neri&Hu, start from the Chinese word jian , an ideogram composed of a sun between a pair of doors and related to notions of space and time, to explain the way liminality plays a major role in their work.

Pino Musi, Limes #7, 2008 In this image, curved space is lit by a circular frame above, and reflected below. The surface appears raw, it is not meant to be inhabited, but its shades, shadows and reflections evoke a complex threshold, engaging the eye of the observer towards another dimension.

Four speculative texts then focus on three bodies of work where penumbra is crucial. Writer and curator Matthias Bärmann discusses the extreme, white, shadowless light of Ursula Schulz-Dornburgs’s photographs of the Kazakh steppe after nuclear tests, while artist, architect and professor at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Architecture Paul O Robinson writes about his own use of ‘forensic X-ray technology to induce correspondences between spaces, their constituent artefacts and their entwined narrative structures’. Curator Antonella Soldaini discusses Marco Tirelli’s paintings – one of which has been chosen for the cover of this journal, a sort of first threshold – by considering their genealogies. And teacher, researcher and coordinator Edwin Carels’s article is the perfect companion to recount the Quay Brothers’ quintessential penumbra, happening inside and between vibrant lights and shadows. Different scholars, architects and artists provide different observations, different shades of the notion of penumbra, each according to their own history and personal geography. Yet they all seem to praise penumbra, especially for the inexhaustible possibilities of the infinite shades between whitest light and blackest darkness. Penumbra makes it possible to inhabit our world and make sense of it, just as astronomers did centuries ago as they dwelled in penumbra to discover the universe. 1 Notes 1. Juan José Saer, The Witness [1983], tr Margaret Jull Costa, Serpent’s Tail (London), 1990, p 9. 2. See for example James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso (London), 2018. 3. ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Opticae thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis libri septem, nunc primum editi – Eiusdem liber de crepusculis & Nubium ascensionibus – Item Vitellonis Thuringopoloni libri X (Latin edition of Kitab al-Manazir), ed Friedrich Risner, Eusebius Episcopius & haeredes Nicolai Episcopii (Basel), 1572. 4. On the topic of shadows in art and architecture, see for example: Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, ‘Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38, 1975, pp 258–87; EH Gombrich, Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art, Yale University Press (New Haven and London), 1995; and Agostino De Rosa, Geometrie dell’ombra. Storia e simbolismo della teoria delle ombre, CittàStudi (Milan), 1997. 5. Published for the first time as Il Libro dell’Arte, 1st edition by Giuseppe Tambroni (Rome), 1821. Chapter 31 is the most relevant for this topic. 6. See for example: Wilhelm Fiedler, Die darstellende Geometrie in organischer Verbindung mit der Geometrie der Lage, Teubner (Leipzig), 1888; Gino Loria, Complementi di geometria descrittiva, Hoepli (Milan), 1924; Orseolo Fasolo and Riccardo Migliari, Quaderni di applicazioni della geometria descrittiva 3, Kappa (Rome), 1984. 7. Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscript C (1490–91), fol 5r, in The Complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, tr Jean Paul Richter, Scribner & Welford (New York), 1888, vol 1, n 215. 8. Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscript G (1510–16), fol 37r, in The Complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, op cit, vol 1, n 49. 9. See Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art, New York University Press (New York), 1978, pp 62–6. 10. François d’Aguilon, Opticorum libri sex: philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles, Plantin (Antwerp), 1613, p 132. 11. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA and London), expanded and revised edition, 1974, pp 315–19. 12. From Pino Musi’s own notes on his Limes series: https://www. pinomusi.com/limes_2008-p11774.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6, 12 © Pino Musi; pp 7–8 © Alessio Bortot; pp 9(br), 10–11 © Giovanni Menna

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In a cosmos-wide philosophical text, professor of literature and cinema Akira Mizuta Lippit introduces the contradictory ontology of the penumbra – it is all and nothing, void and mass, light and dark, there and not there. Here he uses these dualities to examine the transparency of language, the naming of things, babbling, Babel and the nature of the Word. 14

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Mauro Sambo, DK7A4224, ‘miodesopsias’ series, 2022 In its liminal condition, the penumbra allows us to see everything and through it to reconstruct an image of the world that is not true yet consoles us.

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If there is a transparency that Babel would not have impaired, this is surely it, the experience of the multiplicity of tongues and the ‘proper’ sense of the word ‘translation.’ — Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, 19851

Matilde Sambo, Fulgur, ‘Dormiveglia’ series, 2022 Fulgur (Latin for lightning) – that flash of light that shows hidden corners, transforming the shapes of our surroundings. In that instant, space takes on a different form, causing what we thought we knew to become something else.

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At the limits of a shadow, at its threshold, is a penumbra, a point at the intersection of dark and light, where darkness yields to light, or vice versa. It is the place where total illumination and absolute darkness recede into a phantasmatic luminosity, a place neither dark nor light, material nor immaterial, virtual nor actual, but imaginary. From the Latin paene (‘almost’) and umbra (‘shadow’), the penumbra is a place where everything and nothing are imagined together. A totality and its annihilation: what once was and never was; what is and isn’t; what will be, will never be, and will never have appeared and disappeared in unison. The penumbra is neither a thing nor its shadow, but a transition between the two. A passage from here to there, below to above, one language to another. A cosmic but chaotic translation that exposes in a flash; as Walter Benjamin dreamed, ‘a pure language’ (die reine Sprache).2 In the penumbra, this impossible place of all that is and isn’t, everything is visible, perhaps only for an instant. A place, perhaps, of total transparency in which everything and its negation are fused into a totality that can never endure. Why not call this beautiful, liminal space of impossibility ‘language’? The history of transparency, of a transparency once imminent and since lost, begins in a tower. An unfinished tower that would, once complete, allow for the seamless passage between this world and the heavens, between the planet earth and the universe that surrounds it. A tower condemned by God to incompletion and ruin. It is a fantastic, imaginary tower whose

Matilde Sambo, Cave, ‘Dormiveglia series, 2022 The dream of seeing through, of seeing beyond. Imagining what hides beyond the rock, beyond the wall. To know is not only related to light, because one might even be blinded by it, but to accustom the gaze to darkness, to glimpse folds and volume.

dimensions exceed any measurable physicality. In a word, this tower is built in metaphysical units. In the metaphysics of the word. The distance between humanity and deity, mortality and immortality, finitude and the infinite would vanish in the transparency of the tower. Fully built, this tower would connect the entire cosmos in a single transparent idiom, physics with metaphysics. The name for this transparency is Babel, the dream and ruin of transparency materialised. But isn’t every form of materiality by nature opaque? Whether architectural or linguistic, aren’t all forms of materiality by virtue of their materiality at odds with transparency, with the dream of an absolute clairvoyance? Doesn’t every built structure cast a shadow that demarcates the things from its absence, the passage of light to its limit, where visibility ends? Wouldn't language then be the very signifier of such opacity, an inscription of the opaque signifier? If so, then why begin with the book, the book of books, and the etiological origin of the multiplicity of languages? Why begin with a story about transparency envisioned and revoked, with a story about the origins of opacity in language? Among the origins of the word ‘tower’ in Old English and Middle Dutch are ‘to pull’, ‘to spin’, ‘to knit’, ‘to weave’. This tower of towers, then, is also a story, woven and spun, a narrative of weaving and spinning. A story pulled from the earth, a story about the architectonics of telling stories.

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Towers of Babble In Genesis 11: 1–9, a people that speaks one language aspire to ‘make a name’ for themselves in the form of a tower that would suture the city of Babel with heaven, the earth with the universe. At stake in this univocity is a worldly universality; a singularity that would render all matter and anti-matter transparent. One would see everything and through it. In this total language, only one word would be enough, a single word that would function as a penumbra. Perhaps the very word ‘penumbra’ itself, nearly shadow. If such a transcendental unity were realised, then all negativity would disappear, along with every shadow, since everything material and immaterial would be unified into a single, shadowless continuum. The wish ‘to make a name for oneself’ and God’s subsequent prohibition of this name, this universal proper name, takes the form of a tower, a structure and story. A sacred word made a profane thing, a language constituted in a shadow. This tower built in the shadow of language is also a shadow language that passes perpetually between the global and universal, between specificity and generality, between a single thing and everything. Making a name, in this idiom, takes shape in the making of a tower – in its construction and eventual deconstruction. The history of transparency, then, the story of transparency begins with a name: with the desire to make a name for oneself; to make that proper name universal; and to form a community in and around a single language. A single word that would eclipse all of language. The name for transparency and universality is Babel. (The name in the Biblical account is already given, before taken away. The name that the inhabitants of Babel seek to make for themselves is already theirs; and will come to name their confusion, and the confusion that languages will forever effect.) In a world bound by a single language, no word, no name – proper or improper – could fall outside of language. No word, phrase or expression – no trope – beyond language, now rendered universal. In reaching towards the heavens, the inhabitants of Babel aspire to transform a single language spoken across the world into a universal language, into the universe. This is what God prohibits, the transparency of a language universalised.

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Mauro Sambo, DK7A4300, ‘miodesopsias’ series, 2022 The limit between the realm of light and that of darkness is offered to the eye as a form of transparency almost contaminated by light and shadow: an unknown place to which we are attracted, but which we also fear.

A single, universal language would foreclose the possibility of any foreign or other language, any ‘barbaric’ language of the other. Translation would vanish because there would never be any other language. What is the relation between a universal language and the desire to transcend the human world, to exceed the limits placed upon human beings by their language? And why call this will to power transparency? A single language extended to the universe would universalise not just this language of the Semites, but language as such. There would be not only no language outside this language, but nothing outside language at all. A truly universal language would have lost its opacity and become synonymous with, which is also to say at one with, the universe.

Transparent Dream The wish for transparency designates from the beginning, in its genesis, a paradox. To see clearly and fully, to see through, trans- + pârêre, is to render otherwise opaque matter invisible. A seeing so total that it sees through the object entirely. It involves the dematerialisation of that which would otherwise appear and thus otherwise obstruct complete visibility. How to see what one does not see and that one does not see, in the form of an absolute and total visibility? How to distinguish such omniscience from blindness? In this sense, opacity would be the very condition of possibility of transparency. Which is to say, complete transparency, absolute singularity, and a universal cosmos (order) are only possible as a material form, by taking shape in and as the expression of the total absence of matter. Thus, transparency would be a name before a condition, a dream before a horizon. Because a dream is also a penumbra: that moment when the unconscious eclipses consciousness, thought yields to fantasy, and desire towers over realities of everyday life. Transparency is a tower, and ultimately the passage imagined by the tower, a detour through the realm of confusion, which is to say, of language. Such is the narrative of Babel: the desire to unify not only the earth but the heavens, the universe, into a single language, is a passage at once towards the impossibility of a world without language, of a world without many languages, and a dream of the retreat of language.

Transparency is a tower, and ultimately the passage imagined by the tower, a detour through the realm of confusion … of language

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‘Babble’, and its Greek origin barbarous, refer not to Babel, but rather to another etymology, to ‘barbarian’, to ‘nonGreek-speaking’ strangers. In this sense, all non-transparent exteriority refers to an other, to all outsiders, and to a world or universe that lies outside this and all worlds; in other words, in all other words, barbarian. Against this and every other barbarism, Babel and babble signal the collapse of sense and nonsense into an indistinguishable homophony. In the multiplicity of languages and tongues, the meaning of a word and its opposite are no longer distinguishable. Indeed one word, any word, is no longer distinguishable from any other since, in the homophony of Babel and of babble, language becomes a penumbra. If by transparency, one infers universality (universal clarity), then at stake in the dream of transparency is the universe and the name of the universe. A universe imagined, and then invoked at the intersection of cosmos (order) and chaos, at the penumbra between the two. And what kind of dream is the dream of transparency? What does one dream of in such dreams? How does one see transparency? In language, paradoxically. It is in the density of language – in its plasticity and elasticity, and even its obscurity – that one discovers the dream of transparency. That one imagines transparency. And because it appears in language, transparency appears always in translation. The Thresholds of Chaos and Cosmos Walter Benjamin understands translation as a passage towards the universe, as the means by which languages overcome their

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Mauro Sambo, DK7A3715, ‘miodesopsias’ series, 2022 The dream of a transparent language is also a dream, and as in the Babel of the biblical story, even today we are looking for that one word that comes close to silence.

finitude. In his speculation, it is language itself and not only the inhabitants of Babel that strive for universality, for a transparency in excess of the material forms it bears. For Benjamin, translation is the movement between languages marked by their own singularities that illuminates ‘pure language’: ‘If there is such a thing as a language of truth, a tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets for which all thought strives, then this language of truth is – the true language [die reine Sprache]. And this very language, in whose divination and description lies the only perfection for which a philosopher can hope, is concealed

Mauro Sambo, DK7A0827, ‘miodesopsias’ series, 2021 In the shadows the spots vanish, and everything becomes surrounded by darkness. But the liminal space between light and shadow is fertile ground for the visual imagination.

in concentrated fashion in translations. There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.’3 For Benjamin, translation marks the survival of the original, and its afterlife. It is language that lives on in the body of another, ‘pure language’. Benjamin’s phantasmatic pure language, his pure idiom, becomes visible in the reversal of Babel, in the detour around its destruction, in the reunification of languages in translation. Without translation, all language is reduced to babble. The dream of a transparent language is also itself a dream, which is to say that dreams are phenomena that unfold

at the intersection between the transparency of desire, of affect; and the very opacity it generates in the dreamwork. The dreamwork as Freud describes it, the dream apparatus, operates according to a dialectic between transparency and opacity, between affect and manifestation, desire and its representation. The dream is always, in his analysis, at once transparent and opaque, present and postponed, unique to our sensibilities, experience and desire, but universal in the force of its materialisation. The proper name of the universe would also be the universal name. The name whose singularity returns to that unique being whose name vanishes into a language without shadows. Not the dissolution of language, or even its disappearance, but rather the materialisation of transparency as a penumbra, the place where language is at once Babel and babble. To name the universe would be the achievement of transparency in language. Inversely, the proper name of language would be universal. And when I call the universe by its name, by its proper name, then language will have become transparent; all Babels babble but at the same time every word is nearly a shadow. 1 Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Joseph F Graham (ed), Difference in Translation, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1985, p 174. 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ [1923], in Selected Writings, Vol 1, 1913–1926, eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings, tr Harry Zohn, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1996, pp 253–63. 3. Ibid, p 259. Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 14–15, 18–21 © Mauro Sambo; pp 16–17 © Matilde Sambo

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AT THE DAWN

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Renato Rizzi

OF THE NAME

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If words are viewed as penumbra, in the etymological roots of ‘architecture’, within the ‘arche’ all times are present, and within the ‘techne’ chronological progression can be recorded and seen. The embodied meaning in architecture suggests self-determination yet also wonder at the ‘rapturous gaze’ of the universe, and the imperative to rework and honour it in our ideas, designs and cities. With this as a starting point, architect and professor Renato Rizzi presents a perception of the world as a continuum – from a wombic Eden to an Eden-to-be-delivered.

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In the TaNaK (the Hebrew Bible), the words ‘shadow’ and ‘image’ are tied by a common root: sel – ‘shadow’, and sel-em – ‘image’. One does not survive in the desert without shadow, and without images we are doomed to blindness. Those ancient twins grew over the centuries like a giant tree from the cosmic shadow, its trunk nourished not only by the Elohimic (ideals) sap, but also by that of theological-philosophical thought. From its branches emerged the thick symbolic foliage of abstraction (TaNaK) and anthropomorphism (Bible). Although theology – the vision of The Word of God – sank through the fissures of the centuries, Greek metaphysics swelled the ravines of the millennia, finally exploding them into today’s ever-expanding cloud of globalisation. Let us now turn our gaze to our time – the antithesis. Contemporary technical-scientific-digital knowledge envelops the entire planet in its invisible web, like a blanket of stagnant fog that obscures our minds and vision as well. We have replaced the terrestrial globe with the glassy, glowing mirror of the cell phone, naively believing we hold the world in our pockets. An abysmal mental and material leap in scale. That fog of knowledge has exalted the image of ourselves in the mirror, while manifesting its real nullity and lack of substance in endless plains of urban formlessness. We are the voiceless, just as our megacities are formless. Reflexively, to defend ourselves from the horror created, we have raised the sheer ramparts of our self-referentiality and arbitrariness. We move like automatons. The contemporary focal point does not extend beyond the ends of our noses. The Indominable As could be anticipated from the outset, these opposing worldviews – firmly anchored at the extremes of time – are nevertheless contained within the term ‘architecture’. A word that we repeat daily without awareness of its underlying meaning. But, since words are constituted – first and foremost – of both form and image, we cannot ignore their intrinsic value or bend them to our whim. Within the structure of the epistemic binomial arché-téchne (principle-practice) lies a majestic spectacle that we refuse to see out of sheer inattention or too much presumption. In fact, the indominable, eternal aspect of

Renato Rizzi,  La cattedrale di Solomon, Lampedusa, Italy, 2018 Previous spread left: Northern cliff entrance. The invisible cathedral is a response to the tragedy of the 239 victims who drowned in stormy waters on the night of 3 October 2013. In this sense, the island of Lampedusa becomes the new Ithaca for the anonymous migrants; the cave where nymphs weave the lives of men on huge stone looms. Previous spread right and opposite: Southern cliff entrance. In the cathedral’s rocky womb the migrant will rest, to be reborn. At long last he will be able to step out onto the island’s back, as if at the centre of an altar, to admire the tableau of the universe around him.

the arché constrains the dominable aspect of the téchne. Within the word ‘architecture’, the origin of the whole – ‘appearance’ – remains anchored. And appearance corresponds to the indominable aspect of the aesthetic. Everything appears and everything is indissolubly bound. This is the law underlying the root of the word. The world shows itself to us in the totality of its manifestations. First appearance, then the contents. First image and form, then logic and syntax. Hence the inertia of the primary question: Where do words (penumbra) stand in relation to the dominant state of contemporary cultural blindness? Put differently: from where does the cone of light that casts its fluorescent rays on words and things to clothe them in shadows and penumbra arise, so that the unexpected spectacle of their presence offers itself to the enchantment of our gaze? And where, by analogy, does arché, the first root of the word ‘architecture’, stand in relation to the whole? The symbolic spectrum of the word ‘architecture’ does not extinguish itself in the empty shell of the word’s text, but has continued to radiate over the ages. The arché is the timeless, it is the ahistorical par excellence. The téchne, on the other hand, is subordinate. Within the arché all the times resonate; within the téchne chronologies begin. Thus, a totally forgotten and ignored principle resurfaces: appearance, always both old and new, always re-emerges, must be repeated, preceding any logic or rationality. That is, awe, wonder, enchantment – like terror, fear, anguish – anticipate all our thinking, all our reasoning. Moreover, a second law applies: if everything, both visible and invisible, appears, then everything is eternally bound. The totality of the aesthetic lies within the circle of relationship. Nothing in appearance is separate, disjointed or unrelated. The significance and importance of Greek metaphysics for contemporary culture arises precisely from the interrogation of opposites: between the world of ‘appearance’ as the everythinginterrelated, and the world of ‘becoming’ as the unrelated set of things we produce. The pendulum of philosophy swung for centuries between the extremes of these two poles: between the aesthetic (arché), the indominable aspect of appearance, and the aesthetic (téchne), the dominable aspect of making. But then the mighty metaphysical axis began to slow its course, held back by the emergence of the sciences, until it came to a halt in our time only at the pole (which has now become the podium) of the dominable. Nevertheless, the underlying meaning of the word ‘architecture’ has remained unchanged, even if we only continue to use it because of the fascinating aura it radiates thanks to its origins. Even if we use the word as if it were on a par with a flashing neon sign, and in the end have turned it into a cliché. We behave in ways which are in total contradiction to the majestic meaning and history of our profession’s title. Nevertheless, the appearance of the everything-interrelated, as linked as the succession of day and night, is what has always resonated in the term ‘architecture’. Thus it is pure fantasy, if not childish presumption, to believe that our techno-scientificdigital culture can function while ignoring, as it does, the indominable law of appearance. The trivial, the formless, the uninhabitable, the monstrous, are clear evidence of this grave forgetfulness and inherent contradiction.

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Penumbra 1 – arché The first root of the word ‘architecture’, arché-(téchne), understood in the sense of its epistemic duality, thus imparts a radical reversal not only to the way we see the world, but also to the way we look at ourselves. If we were to linger in its shadow for a moment longer, we would see emerging from that duality the increasingly faded contours of three semantic physiognomies forgotten by our Western culture and our own contemporary experience: power, time and subject. First of all, we are faced with the dimension of the indominable, from which – in principle – the forms of all the work we produce derive. The presence of the arché has always shown us that we cannot pretend to ignore the perspective of appearance: the aesthetic, the interrelated. We should understand that the implicit dominance of the téchne should function in the context of power. Consequently, our claims of domination over the world and all things are of no effect, and translate into the uninhabitable, the formless work we produce. That which is formless, is dead. The eternal and becoming are symbolic of time, inseparable, in balance with each other. Present time is not a directional arrow, beginning in the distant past and pointing towards an unknown future. It is the crucible of the infinite, the renewing of the eternal in actuality, of which we are the obvious and living extension. We are the great accident, the unexpected opportunity of the eternal. History thus proceeds not by progressive chronologies, like a straight line in abstract space, but by sudden visions, unexpected appearances, dramatic or sublime catastrophes. Finally, we come to the zenith of the word architecture. The arché, in this case, is not only concerned with the discipline; it is also about us, our role, the task we have been entrusted with. And to understand its meaning, we must turn to another word: ‘subject’, from the Latin sub-iacere, ‘to be under’. Historically, we have always been called subjects. But this condition of subordinacy must be distanced from the oppressive weight of biblical and, more generally, Western tradition. From the perspective of the term ‘architecture’ – and from that of so much other great, buried culture – there is no indication either of punishment or of condemnation, particularly not of original guilt. Far from it. Rather, we are beneficiaries. We are destined to be the privileged ones. For we do not, as we tend to believe, abusively occupy ‘the’ centre of the world. Rather, it is we who are placed ‘in’ the centre of the world. And it is thus that the world envelops us and observes us, more curious than ever. It scrutinises us eagerly, to see what works we are capable of producing. And here all our futile certainties collapse. We are not the nominative, where the arbitrary and self-referential ‘I’ predominates. Rather, we are the dative, those who receive. Here the arché resurfaces, in its ever-new and ancient guise, with extraordinary vigour and luminosity. We are unique and singular matrices adapted to receive the rays emanating from the immensity of the cosmos (from the indominable) and then channel them into the (dominable) works we produce. The operative force in our work comes from the indominable, whereas the operating force derives from the dominable.

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Renato Rizzi, Shakespearean Theatre, Gda´ nsk, Poland, 2014

And here all our futile certainties collapse. We are not the nominative, where the arbitrary and self-referential ‘I’ predominates. Rather, we are the dative, those who receive

above: In addition to great historical symbols, the vast wings of the Shakespearean Theatre bring to mind a contemporary, ecological theme: they open upwards and outwards like the flaps of a refuse bin. right: During the day, the city’s nightmares and fears spill into the theatre’s ample belly, whereas at night the wings release its contents, transformed into dreams.

opposite: After the appearance of Aldo Rossi's Il Teatro del Mondo (Venice, 1979) there was no opportunity for anything other than kenosis, emptying. Nothing theological in the classical sense. The metaphor is about the emptying of technical-scientific culture to make room for the entrance of the arché. But on this epistemic assumption rests another contemporary theme: the symbolic one of ecology. The disposal of waste.

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We might venture to say, we are an image. Matter is compressed light, spirit expanded light. This is a rough definition of art, but one that at least forces us to reflect

Renato Rizzi, The Cosmos of Bildung, ‘School Ideas for the Future: The Ideal Classroom’ exhibition, Novocomum, Como, Italy, 2015

Education stands to the ideal, as the building stands to the real. There is no real without the ideal. In this sense, Filippo Brunelleschi's dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (1436) embodies the absolute ideal. A cosmos, to be experienced in two stages. On the highest crown of Rizzi’s proposed ‘ideal classroom’ building, where the dome rests, cantilevered eaves will be built around the octagonal perimeter. This is where 365 students from all over the world will sit.

Suspended between two voids, under Vasari's Last Judgment and above a 55-metre-deep chasm, the students will learn the fundamentals of different disciplines (without having the ground under their feet) while listening in silence to the most prestigious thinkers.

Outside the dome a golden sphere will revolve around the lantern, taking one full year to complete the circumference. One student a day will enter that unknown star to observe the spectacle of the worlds that surround them. While inside the sphere, the student will gain the experience of moving from arbitrariness to singularity.

Penumbra 2 – The Singularity To repeat: we ourselves are one more aspect of penumbra. We might venture to say, we are an image. Matter is compressed light, spirit expanded light. This is a rough definition of art, but one that at least forces us to reflect. For we are the first to receive the gaze of the indominable, addressed to a cosmos as mysterious as it is miraculous. Only after this stage, only at a later stage, will we be the ones to deflect, through the small apertures of our matrix, the rays that will flow into the works to be made. A special affective and operative equation is then formed between the world admiring us, and us admiring the world. In this sense, and for this reason, we are genuine singularities: for our receiving, filtering, reflecting uniqueness. For this very reason, we occupy the most privileged place under the rapturous gaze of the cosmos. Certainly not because of our domination over it, but, rather, to contemplate it with immense wonder, gratitude and modesty. Singularity is our authentic condition in the world – the opposite, the radical opposite, of arbitrariness or self-referentiality. For the cursor of singularity must flow freely and continuously, like our heartbeat, on that hyphen that firmly binds arché and téchne together. Systole and diastole of the term ‘architecture’.

Penumbra 3 – The Project The Project, too, offers us a completely new vision. If, as has been posited, arché and téchne lie at temporal extremes, so too the Project stretches its horizon across all of history. Beginning and end are radius and circumference, that are renewed with each life. If we return to the ancient Hebrew TaNaK, it is as if we were reading the poet Derek Walcott’s ‘The Muse of History’ in his collection of essays What the Twilight Says (first published in 1998): then, as now, man ‘is still capable of enormous wonder’.1 We are the new adam repeating, with our lives, the indelible experience of eden. In our infancy, before we enter the world of consciousness, we are placed, literally deposited, as if in a cradle, in the garden of delights. Man’s first experience takes place in that fairy sphere: the earthly paradise, where everything is alive. Awe and terror are imprinted on the child’s flesh like wax. Therefore, the child/ adam is all eyes. It regards, and is regarded, by everything. It stands astonished before those mysterious gazes. Zero logic, no morals. Everything happens there by a miracle. The instant and the eternal are interchanged in play. It is the enchantment of the aesthetic that shapes that still-winged soul. There we have the proof, the verification, the certification of that gift. Then the man/adam will come out of his garden to enter the life of consciousness. He will have the time of all his years, with the help of culture, to process the natal experience of the original gift. But, at the end of his days, another task awaits him: delivery. He will have to return the original gift in the form of his works – that same eden reworked, rethought, reformulated – for those who will follow. This is what we discover in the penumbra of the arché: the two scales of the project. The one with a capital P, goes from the eden-of-the-beginning to the eden-to-be-delivered. It is the grand design vision that engages us for life. The projects with a lower-case p, are the intermediate ones that grow like steps towards the horizon of the great Project (the arché is always at work) to renew the idea of the world, of that eden that each person experienced with his or her birth, and which we must interpret to the end to be delivered, but which we have forgotten for too long. 1 Translated from Italian by Eva Menuhin Note 1. Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 1998, pp 11–12.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 22–4 © Renato Rizzi, photos by Umberto Ferro; pp 26–7 Photos by Matteo Piazza; pp 28–9 Photos by Lorenzo Sivieri

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‘In the Womb Yet Out-of-Doors’

Sir John Soane, The Dome, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1813 Looking upwards into the Dome, the full-height space Soane created in his house-museum to display his finest antiquities.

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Stephen Kite

Penumbra and the Spaces In-Between 31

In a wide-ranging and erudite article that is historical, cultural and philosophical, Stephen Kite explores the experiential nature of the penumbra. He reminds us of some of architecture’s most celebrated spaces where subdued light calms architectural vistas. Flooding us with notable examples, he examines the penumbra in terms of sublimity, prospect and refuge, and psychoanalysis.

In his essay ‘Living in Ticino, 1947–50’ (1964) the British art critic Adrian Stokes captures the strong experiential qualities of penumbral spaces as, walking within the arcades of the Swiss city Locarno’s main square, he is drawn to the ‘clear and liquid shade of a café table with a light-blue cloth that touches a stone pier’. He thinks that there he ‘would be entirely safe … provided for, as in the womb yet out-of-doors’.1 Consider also one of Modernism’s great in-between places: the pronaos to Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1972), where one may promenade within the penumbras of its embracing cycloid vault. Stokes’s arcades of Locarno, and Kahn’s museum pronaos, prove the fecundity of penumbral spaces; yet, within a strict philosophy of shadows, only the umbra belongs to the actual hole-in-light that is true shadow. Is the penumbra, then, merely a zone of low illumination? The accretion of meanings in the following examples help us to understand the penumbra as integral to the shadow-worlds of architecture, as we examine the in-betweens of the penumbra through three critical lenses: those of the Sublime; the landscape aesthetics of ‘prospectrefuge’; and the psychoanalysis of insideness and outsideness.

Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1972 The portico to Louis Kahn’s museum makes one of Modernism’s great in-between spaces. Arcades and café tables, Piazza Grande, Locarno, Switzerland The arcades offer a strong yet intimate penumbral experience: a womb-like sense of security, yet in an outdoor setting.

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Light Subdued, Not Exhausted Just as the Kimbell Art Museum has been deconstructed as a taxonomy of ruptures and fissures, equally an apparatus of recesses and top-lights governs the Sublime of the great Neoclassical/Romantic architect Sir John Soane’s house-museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London (1812). Soane’s Description of the House and Museum (1835) captures the penumbral tinted light pervading the house, which ‘bestows on every object that mellow lustre which aids the all-pervading sentiment: it is light subdued, not exhausted – an autumnal, not a wintry and waning ray’.2 This is the atmospheric lumière mystérieuse Soane was inspired to create by the 18th-century French architect and theorist Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières and his work The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations (1780).3 In the famous Breakfast Room, Soane’s square-plan saucer-dome hovers within a rectangular zone, at the nexus of the spaces engendered by his wizardry – between the staircase, the Dining Room, the Library and the Dome of the Museum. In the slots between saucer-dome and rectangular volume, Soane made concealed skylights, whose yellow-tinted glass washes the walls with the pleasing demi-tints he desired. As equivocal in-betweens – belonging neither to the Breakfast Room proper, nor to the Dome – the slots permit lateral movement and illumination, and the aforementioned vertical fall of mysterious light. Soane was also inspired by his friend, the great Romantic

artist JMW Turner, whose Sublime canvases are bathed in ‘the golden orient or the amber coloured ether’ Turner had admired in the works of Claude Lorraine.4 The mysterious ether induces penumbral pleasures but again – to a strict philosopher of shadows, such as Roy Sorensen – we are here experiencing bodies of filtered light, not true shades or shadows at all, for the Breakfast Room is richer in photons than experience suggests.5 As we enjoy its penumbras, we must not suppose that there is no difference between day and night (or light and shadow) because there are twilit borderlines. Yet, whatever scientists and philosophers of shadow might argue – and recognising Leonardo da Vinci’s term of ‘shadowy rays’ – we feel, as children discover at play, that shadow, with its attendant penumbras, is an active agent, not a blank absence. In dethroning Beauty, and greatly extending the range of emotions available to architecture, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) argued that ‘darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light’.6 The domestic scale of Lincoln’s Inn Fields precludes the Sublimity of vastness of dimension, but its labyrinthine sequences make up for it in darkness and obscurity; indeed, its claustrophobic spaces, and multiplication of fragments, contribute to the frissons of awe. In Burke’s words, in these aspects it also owes its ‘sublimity to a richness and profusion of images’.7

Sir John Soane, The Dome, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1813 The play of lumière mystérieuse – mysterious light – as seen in this detail of the Dome at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields with its cinerary urns and fragments of sculpture.

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Penumbras of the Forest Edge British geographer Jay Appleton’s notion of ‘prospect and refuge’ identifies human beings as heirs to millions of years of environmental experience, with their needs for a ‘foragingground’ to provide food, and a ‘nesting-place’ for shelter and to raise their young – settings whose equivalent in architecture is the indoors–outdoors interface.8 One ultimate preference is the penumbral in-between of the forest edge – a place where we can see without being seen. Using devices such as arcades (cf Stokes’s Locarno), deep eaves, porticoes and so forth, architecture can mime the dappled edge-of-the-forest biome, making zones of transition between the bright expanse of the foraging ground and the deeper shadows of the nesting refuge. Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture movingly embodies these spatial archetypes; even on the deep narrow plot of his William R Heath House in Buffalo, New York (1905) he skilfully maximises protection and prospect. The Heath house is an important precursor to the Robie House, Chicago (1909) – the culminating masterpiece of Wright’s early period. US architect and architectural historian Grant Hildebrand observes how the Robie House maximises prospect-refuge cues with a rich taxonomy of mediating edge elements: massive eaves and overhangs, filigree art glass, long balconies to the elevated first-floor living spaces, and again a great anchoring chimney signalling refuge.9

As is well known, Wright learnt much from the architecture represented in Japanese prints in his handling of umbra and penumbra – even before his first visit to Japan in 1905. In his interiors, below a low horizon at screen-door height – equating to the traditional nageshi frieze band – space is pushed and pulled into all kinds of recesses, alternately glowing or gloomy. In Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki’s celebrated aesthetic essay In Praise of Shadows (1933–4), Japanese architecture first spreads ‘a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house’.10 Beneath such roofs the shadows may be soft, or cavernously dark, but are always deep and spacious.

Architecture can mime the dappled edge-of-the-forest biome, making zones of transition between the bright expanse of the foraging ground and the deeper shadows of the nesting refuge

Frank Lloyd Wright, William R Heath House, Buffalo, New York, 1905

Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, Chicago, Illinois, 1909

above: Even on this long narrow site, Wright maximises the dwelling’s opportunities for protection and prospect.

right: The Robie House maximises prospect-refuge cues with its rich taxonomy of mediating edge elements, such as the massive roof cantilevers.

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Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese housing, Milan, Italy, 1973 The shadowy and surreally silent arcades of Rossi’s housing bring to mind the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

Envelopment and Exposure Hildebrand finds a close cousinship between the environmental geography of Appleton’s ‘prospect-refuge’ and Stokes’s psychoanalytically informed interplay of envelopment and exposure. Many shadowy arcades and stoas can be found in the drawings and architecture of Aldo Rossi – but they do not offer the reassurance those of Locarno offered to Stokes. Instead, the shadows in Rossi’s drawings and buildings project a disturbing material solidity, and become figures in their own right of the darker sides of our unconscious. Rossi’s depictions, such as L’Architecture assassinée (1975), show an imagination haunted by a post-holocaust world that cannot be repaired – one of psychological and architectural fragments. The British School of psychoanalysis – to which Stokes belonged – defines this acute sense of fragmentation as ‘depressive anxiety’ when the anxious ego, facing the psychic reality of its loved objects in dissolution, strives to reassemble the good parts and dispose of the bad ones. So, Modernist art and architecture resorts to the collage, making a kind of whole from the fragments at its disposal. In April 1971, Rossi was involved in a serious car accident; the following summer – still in pain from his oncebroken limbs – he imagined the design of his magnum opus, the Cemetery of San Cataldo at Modena, as a bare skeleton, a series of fractured bones to be reassembled. And it is easy to bracket the dark arcades and looming shadows of a pittura metafisica such as Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico’s The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) with the intense shades of Rossi’s Gallaratese housing in Milan (1973).

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Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, Italy, 1978 We enter Rossi’s vast stoa in discombobulating contrast to the Neoclassical colonnades of the 19th-century cemetery.

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Rossi’s cubic sanctuary – a 20th-century realisation of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s 18th-century vision of the funerary monument as a bare play of shadows.

As at Locarno, and especially in a Mediterranean climate, such generous and lofty arcades should invite activity; Rossi himself held out the hope that the spaces he had set aside – his grand colonnade and his ballatoi (balconies) – would attract this daily life. But the Gallaratese colonnades remain surreally devoid of any common life; as in the dislocated shadows of his drawings, the unconscious inner remains too dislocated from outer reality to make a viable in-between, despite the potentially welcome penumbras. Stokes’s aesthetic writings would increasingly endorse the creative reciprocity of the two polar positions identified by psychoanalysis (the ‘paranoidschizoid’ and ‘depressive’); how – as in a fine arcade – it is possible to simultaneously enjoy the experience of insideness and outsideness, of envelopment and otherness, of being ‘in the womb yet out-of-doors’. As most of the above examples have shown, it can be a particularly fecund condition of penumbral zones. Rossi’s melancholic architecture seems particularly suited to the dead and those who mourn them, as in his Cemetery at San Cataldo in Modena (completed in 1978). The mourner passes along the supportively corporeal and humanist Neoclassical colonnades of Cesare Costa’s earlier structures (1858–76), and passes through a small opening, to be then set adrift in the vastness of Rossi’s great shadowed stoa.

Cognisant of the writings of the 18th-century French visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, Rossi shared his melancholy imaginings of a funerary ‘monument consisting of a flat surface, bare and unadorned … absolutely stripped of detail, its decoration consisting of a play of shadows, outlined by still deeper shadows. No, no gloomier images exist’. If we make such ‘abstraction of all the beauty of art’, contends Boullée, ‘it would be impossible not to appreciate in such a construction the mournful effect of architecture’.11 Rossi’s cubic sanctuary at San Cataldo realises this doleful abstraction; it is the only one, of three intended parts of the central sanctuary, to have been realised. A communal grave in the form of a monumental cone was to have formed the head of the cemetery’s skeletal morphology – as imagined through the post-accident aches of his own healing bones – with a ‘rib-cage’ of ossuaries descending from it. The sanctuary is a roofless house of the dead, a hollow cubic volume rendered in intense terracotta and studded with square frameless openings. Within – around the open void of this columbarium – galleries provide access to the tiers of funerary niches. Rossi’s stoa, or Costa’s colonnades, make in-betweens that are lateral, and grounded in the psychic challenges of lived experience; to look upwards within this roofless house-of-theDead is to be placed in the existentially starker in-between of a vertical axis. In cosmic symbolism found throughout the world – as the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade has shown – the vertical axis ascends to Heaven; at the other extremity ‘is the World of the Dead symbolized … by the ideograms of Shadows’.12 1 Notes 1. Richard Wollheim (ed), The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes, Penguin Books (Harmondsworth), 1972, p 316. 2. Sir John Soane, Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Residence of Sir John Soane, Levey, Robson, & Franklyn (London), 1835, pp 27–8. 3. Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture, or The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations (1780), tr David Britt, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (Santa Monica, CA), 1992. 4. David Solkin (ed), Turner and the Masters, Tate Publishing (London), 2009, p 217. 5. Roy Sorensen, Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows, Oxford University Press (Oxford), 2008, pp 168–9. 6. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757], Penguin Books (London), 2004, p 121. 7. Ibid, p 119. 8. Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (1975), John Wiley & Sons (Chichester), 1996. 9. Grant Hildebrand, The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses, University of Washington Press (Seattle , WA), 1991. 10. Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows [1933–4], tr Thomas J Harper and Edward G Seidensticker, Vintage (London), 2001, p 28. 11. Étienne-Louis Boullée, ‘Architecture, Essay on Art’ [1796–7], tr Sheila de la Vallée, in Helen Rosenau (ed), Boullée and Visionary Architecture, Academy Editions (London), 1976, p 106. 12. Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, Crossroad (New York), 1986, p 112.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 30–1 © Richard Boyd; p 32(t) © Buena Vista Images/Getty Images; p32(b) © Xavier de Jauréguiberry; p 33 © Dr Scott Darby; pp 34(l), 36–7© Stephen Kite; pp 34–5(b) © Hassan Bagheri; p 35(t) © Burçin Yildirim

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THE WARM OF DEAT Alexander Brodsky, October Morning at the Cemetery, Moscow, Russia, 2022

In the metropolis of Moscow, mummified by war, the image of a necropolis emerges in transparency. Where tombs become the only possible source of warmth. As if a hurricane had swept everything away. Leaving only the stoves of the buildings. Living tombs for the living dead who inhabit it.

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Susanna Pisciella

Alexander Brodsky and the Necropolis in the Womb of the Metropolis

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Moscow-born artist and architect Alexander Brodsky’s work is very much infused with its Russian context; its geography, landscape, climate and political regimes. For him, ‘penumbra is a permanent state of gaze’. Architect and researcher Susanna Pisciella looks at his continuous migration between architecture and art installation, and suggests that he also finds inspiration in the shadow of language.

Alexander Brodsky, Rotunda I, Nikola-Lenivets Park, Kaluga Region, Russia, 2009 The boundless vastness of the Russian steppe begins in the Kaluga district. The elliptical pavilion activates a double movement, centrifugal from the inside, centripetal from the outside, pivoting on the large central fireplace. Brodsky’s archetype. Built with doors reclaimed from abandoned houses in the surrounding area, Rotunda materialises disorientation. The doors, instead of directing, misdirect, like points on a compass gone mad.

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Let us reverse the laws of optics for a moment. The penumbra no longer as the result of a projection, but as the source of the projection itself. An internal modality of the gaze. In dynamic balance between light and dark, between evidence and latency. With a particular predisposition to unearth what is hidden in the shadows. Or what, on the contrary, fades in the dazzling brightness.1 Which is a new form of blindness from media excess.2 The uncertainty that accompanies the penumbra requires constant mental compensations for the gaps. An exercise that requires time and patience, which no one indulges in any more, in this age of global acceleration.3 Yet it is the way to break the obvious and its automatisms, peering into the folds of reality. In the constant search for new friction between things. To awaken in the atrophy of the customary, an extraordinary and unexpected vitality. Against the schematisms of our time. For Moscow artist and architect Alexander Brodsky, penumbra is a permanent state of gaze. In the penumbra are the coordinates of his viewpoint. So poetical and critical towards architecture and the culture of our time. Paper architect under the Soviet regime, to escape sanctions and the gigantism of propaganda. From the years after graduation until the fall of the Communist regime in 1991, he and his friend Ilya Utkin produced 30 engravings that would later make them famous. Thirty contractions of geography to contradict the logic of homogeneous and anonymous space of Communist ideology. Later, architect of small, low-tech shelters under the capitalist regime. To escape the spiral of consumerism and automatism that it triggers in architecture. Annihilating it. With his extraordinary bird-like physiognomy, Brodsky moves around the Russian territory collecting abandoned materials, windows, doors, panels, with which he assembles, dry as the twigs of nests, his small, highly detailed architectures. Lastly, at the time of pandemic and war, architect of cemeteries. Habitable

cemeteries! Where the grave, which has always been associated with icy desolation, turns into a source of warmth in the cold Russian winter. Unexplored fertility inscribed in the penumbra of language. Russia, Extreme Border of the Visible Brodsky’s work is inseparable from Russian geography. His architecture does not resist nature and does not impose itself. On the contrary. Between interior and exterior, there is no isolation, no performing shell. Fragile and slight, his structures always seem on the verge of collapsing under the pressure of the snow or the push of the wind. Whereas, as nests do, they simply go along with the seasonal cycles. The 95° Restaurant (2000), a wooden and galvanised steel pile-dwelling on the shores of the Klyazminskoe Reservoir lake in Moscow Region, is abandoned in winter, to be furnished and re-inhabited in summer. Ditto the House in the Woods (2003), in the same area. Also on the Klyazminskoe lake was the Ice Pavilion (2002), offering refreshments for ice skaters. Wooden frames supported metal grids covered with ice to form luminescent walls. Inside, only vodka was served, capable of remaining in a liquid state down to -25°C (-13°F). With the arrival of spring, the lake melted and so did the pavilion. Always poised between architecture and art installation, Brodsky’s work celebrates the periodicity of nature. Penetrating its ritual. Dissolving geographies. The pressure of that penetration even pushes the hissing of the wind and the roar of sea waves to the basements of Moscow. At the back of the well-known club Proliv, in a secluded private room, the icy sounds of the stormy sea chill the vodka glasses of Seagull Swallow (2018). Geography in Russia blurs with the inner landscape. Generations of Russian writers have walked inside their souls to the point of wearing out the soles of their shoes, as if on the steppe, or on the Urals, learning to distinguish between different temperatures of white as between the different states of the soul. In the muffling of snow or in the white summer nights, silences so profound as

to make the poet Joseph Brodsky write that from St Petersburg one could hear a spoon falling in Finland.4 Distances so boundless as to make of Russia for Marina Tsvetaeva ‘the extreme border of the visible’.5 Alexander Brodsky responds to this vastness with meticulous miniatures. The utmost concentration on small, measured things and the flourishing of their details. The same response that the biblical exiles gave to the bewildering vastness of the desert, gathering their attention on a tent and its few precise furnishings. An ark, a propitiatory, a candelabrum. The dacha – the Russian country house – is the dimensional unit of reference and the highest common denominator of all his projects. For Russians, the dacha is not only a house that reconnects with nature, but has always represented a form of individual resistance against grand narratives. Against their coercion. From the Bolshevik revolution, to Communism, to globalisation. Moscow’s cyclopean growth, first under Communist, then capitalist regimes, continues to tear down so many to make room for new allotments. Thus the dacha becomes the symbol of a fading human community. Like that of the Ranevsky family in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904).6 Plate III of Brodsky and Utkin’s 30 engravings, Columbarium Habitabile (1990) depicts an enormous vertical inhabited necropolis. Each cell houses a dacha rescued from the bulldozers through its reconstruction piece by piece inside the Columbarium. Here its inhabitants can continue to inhabit it. The dacha no longer in the woods, but in the urn. A living anticipation of Death. The extreme oblivion – absolute penumbra – of our a-mortal culture.7 Death, especially in life, is a recurring theme in Brodsky’s work. In Aquarium (Venice Architecture Biennale, 2006), a large hospital trolley filled with water transports a submerged city, where it is possible to peer into the buildings’ lives in apnoea. In captivity. The same in the metropolis of glittering skyscrapers that grows inside the rubbish bins of 20 Garbage Cans (Moscow Biennale of Contemporary

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Art, 2009). Self-segregations in the metropolitan artifice, punctuated by accelerated, fictitious chronologies. Brodsky’s small constructions, positioned between woods and lakes, are devices for reopening to the great timeless periodicities of nature. The recycling of materials from other lives again responds to this need to belong to the vast breath of the world. Where death is re-dimensioned to an internal necessity in wider cycles. Where everything is in continuity. And Venice can spill out into the underground of New York, as in his Canal Street Subway Project (1997). And the cold steppe wind can bend a pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in The Shed (2016). A special ratio between intensity of perception and penumbra, as in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. Bioluminescence Although deserted, the penumbra is nevertheless full of life that moves out of the spotlight of our time, in search of less obvious, less rigid points of view. Inhabited by all those who do not adhere to the dominant ideologies. Be it the Soviet Communist regime, so openly repressive, or the Western techno-financial one, more deviously subjugating. In Brodsky’s case it was both and, finally, the Russia-Ukraine war. Under Soviet censorship, the 30 engravings were born. Precise and chiaroscuro graphics of the great European architectural treatises. Not to illustrate new building typologies, but new perspectives of thought. Theorems. Far from propaganda and techno-mythologies. Rather, architecture as a device for accessing further degrees of experience. Brodsky and Utkin drag more three-dimensionality onto the twodimensional support of paper than we are used to grasping in reality. Plans, sections and elevations dynamically intersect with enlargements and texts. The architectural page becomes poetic. With little less pressure than that with which Osip Mandel’štam entrusted his poems to his wife’s voice, Brodsky and Utkin entrust their forbidden threedimensionality to paper. The cycle of engravings ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet regime. If for literature

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they remain an important point of arrival, for Brodsky they are merely the starting point. The gymnasium to train the eye for vision. Not for graphic virtuosity. But to translate the incorporeal into physics. To be able to give form and weight to what is spiritual. Like the cool morning breeze – hidden fans – that flutter the curtains of the false windows with which he revives an old underground anti-atomic cistern at an altitude of –15 metres (–50 feet): Cisterna (Moscow, 2011). Since 1991, Brodsky’s work has been wedged into the material. In continuous migration between architecture and installation art. In an attempt to reawaken the sensibility of form, today anaesthetised. The chiaroscuro of the engravings finds three-dimensional translation in the ripples of the materials that Brodsky retrieves from other pasts. The grafting into new projects does not generate temporal caesuras. But a continuum. Literally con-temporary. As is the case with the windows that make up the Pavilion for Vodka Ceremonies (Klyazminskoe Reservoir, Moscow Region, 2003), the doors of Rotunda I (Nikola-Lenivets Park, Kaluga Region, 2009), the ex-Soviet PO-2 diamond fences of the villa of the same name (Nikola-Lenivets Park, 2020) or the exSoviet glass blocks of the Pavilion for Cacha Ceremonies (Tbilisi, Georgia, 2018). Architectures that do not impose themselves, but absorb histories and geographies. The drawings, black ink and often extemporaneous drafting translate the density of the hatching of ancient engravings into dense human masses. Parades. Or processions. Masses of things. Obsessively. A form of reworking recent history.

Alexander Brodsky, Pavilion for Vodka Ceremonies, Klyazminskoe Reservoir, Moscow Region, Russia, 2003 Entirely built with windows recovered from a disused Moscow factory and painted white to evoke, with opaline light, the icy condition to which vodka is to be served. One table, two people, one toast to be pronounced. Not vodka as simply transparent, odourless and tasteless ‘water’ to be downed at all hours. But the magic of a ritual. To suspend convulsive chronological time and plunge into the vast breath of the world.

Although deserted, the penumbra is nevertheless full of life that moves out of the spotlight of our time, in search of less obvious, less rigid points of view

Alexander Brodsky and Anton Timofeev, PO-2, Nikola-Lenivets Park, Kaluga Region, Russia, 2020 The interior envelope of the villa is made of wood, its exterior of PO-2 concrete panels, familiar in the former Soviet Union as fence walls for no-go areas. The diamond panels of the lower part are themselves a recovery from an earlier PO-2 villa, whose only inhabitant was a large tree, fenced in from the crown down.

Alexander Brodsky and Maria Kremer, Pavilion for Cacha Ceremonies, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2018 The conical construction is a 6-metre (20-foot) high chimney. At the centre, the large fire burning in the fireplace projects pulsating reflections through the lower part of the glass-cement casing. The glass block walls are recycled from postwar Soviet history. Two layers of recycled tar papers cover both the inside and the outside of the cone structure, emphasising the lower translucencies.

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In 2022, after two years of pandemic, war. In the general getaway from Russian conscription, Brodsky’s studio empties. He retreats to his dacha outside Moscow. Later in Georgia. The first drawing of this new phase is a self-portrait. Suddenly in colour. Not a graphic background. But domestic. Then a second drawing, October Morning at the Cemetery. In colour. Elementary, hasty drawing. Not meant to remain on paper. The draft for a new type of cemetery … or cemetery-city, in a torn land. A new twist is imprinted on his work. The engravings and long rolls of ink that populate galleries all over the world now seem only refined manifestations of his outer soul. While a kind of bioluminescence begins to show the hues of his inner soul. In a Moscow returned to black and white. No longer masses, but solitudes, enclosed, each in recollection before a tomb burning like a stove, saturating the cold Moscow October sky with smoke. Men sit to pray, but also to warm themselves! For the grave is no longer a sense of frost, but the only source of warmth. The warmth of death. The twisted chimneys seem to allude to ancient vanished presences. An immense inhabited necropolis grows within the metropolis. A city where darkness has become an environmental condition. Then, Carpet 1, 2, 3. Three meticulously redesigned carpets on paper. Red. Not affectation, necessity. The carpet, with its many knots, is the ultimate expression of singularity. On one’s own carpet, one is at home. At home. A paper rug is light, transportable. A mobile homeland in times of war. Of flight. And there is no unknown space that does not magically contract into a familiar place. Form that saves from the shapelessness.

Alexander Brodsky, Carpet 1, Moscow, 2022 Part of a series of redesigned carpets, in crayon on paper. Each carpet, an unrepeatable singularity of knots. Each carpet, a home for those who sit on it. A paper carpet, a moveable homeland that can be easily rolled up into a fugue. A device for domesticating the unknown.

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Alexander Brodsky, Coma, Guelman Gallery, Moscow, 2000 The gradual reconstruction of Moscow according to financialcapitalist logic is destroying it. Sculpted in raw clay, the city lies agonisingly on a surgical table to which numerous drips are attached, from which, however, the drops of black liquid slowly submerge it.

Men sit to pray, but also to warm themselves! For the grave is no longer a sense of frost, but the only source of warmth. The warmth of death

Alexander Brodsky, Library pavilion, Veretyevo Park, Moscow Region, Russia, 2021 The small library pavilion is part of a vast architectural route through lakes, forests and heights within the Veretyevo Park. The stilted pavilion, a pitched metal frame to which polycarbonate panels are attached, is an opaline environment for concentrated reading. Transparent to the brightness of the sky. A permanent block of ice, charged with light.

Illuminated by the Penumbra In Coma (Guelman Gallery, Moscow, 2000), Moscow lies agonisingly on a surgical table. The humanisation of its pain for reawakening the lost sensibility of architecture. Today bound only to economic profit. But architecture is us. The deformed space of The Cell (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2008) reminds us that wherever we are, we are always walking inside our soul. Tub, toilet, bed, they float along the walls because in the interiority of the prisoner the void is forming. Caring for landscape implies first of all caring for our soul. And its optics.

The surreal element, used for example in Cisterna, or in the Canal Street Subway Project, where windswept windows appear in the basement as if on a top floor, or the Venetian lagoon emerging in the New York underground, are expedients to suspend the chain of automatisms, of the obvious. A way to make room for the penumbra, the discarded, unexplored part of every phenomenon. From which to draw possible new beginnings. Brodsky’s Moscow architectures are not volumes but negatives of volumes. Recesses in which new rituals can mature. Seagull Swallow, a recess protected by six false doors like a prohibitionist cupboard, overturns the Russian concept of vodka. No longer a ‘water’ that flows at all hours. But a ritual that stops time. Outside its door, geographies dissolve. In the roar of the Atlantic waves, in the howl of seagulls. The ritual of slipping out of oneself, into the intimate breath of the world. In the penumbra, the vital codes of our soul are precipitated and must be recovered. Its symbolic nature. The courage to let oneself be illuminated by the penumbra. And by its enigmas. Like the library in Veretyevo Park (2021). A fragile sliver of light charged by the moon. 1 Notes 1. See Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, tr David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2009, pp 39–54. 2. See José Saramago, Blindness [1995], tr Giovanni Pontiero, Harvill Press (London), 1997. 3. See Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality, NSU Press (Malmö), 2010. 4. Josif Brodskij, ‘Guida a una città che ha cambiato nome’, in Fuga da Bisanzio, Adelphi (Milan), 1987, pp 69–70. 5. Marina Tsvetaeva, Il Poeta e il Tempo, Adelphi (Milan), 1984, p 57. 6. See Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, tr Michael Frayn, Bloomsbury (London and New York), 2016. 7. See Ivan Illich, La perdita dei sensi, Editrice Fiorentina (Florence), 2009.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 39, 44(b) © Alexander Brodsky; pp 40, 42–3, 44(t), 45 Photos by Yuri Palmin

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A Path to Saad El Kabbaj, Driss Kettani and Mohamed Amine Siana, Guelmim School of Technology, Guelmim, Morocco, 2011 The dark and dramatic entrance of the school’s library prepares its users and visitors for the luminous interior – a feature also used in other buildings of the same project. It is designed as a transition between penumbra and light, while the protective wood beams display strong shadows as the day goes by.

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Driss Kettani

the Light Variations and Multiple Dimensions

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Architect Driss Kettani offers us a poetic exposition of the emotional and religious sensations that light, darkness and penumbra can instigate and perpetuate within human consciousness. The play of light, position of the observer, shift of colour, and the delicate, complex geometries of the mashrabiyas of the southern Mediterranean all have a role in this dance of light and shade.

Driss Kettani Architecte, Villa Agava, Casablanca, Morocco, 2016 The turquoise and black colours of the villa’s entrance, with its shadows and the grey-blue of its traditional zellige tiles, draw an abstract and pictural composition, enhancing this space as well as accentuating the feeling of surprise when one enters the luminous and fluid interior. This abstract composition changes according to the time of day and the sun’s position, offering multiple canvases as a scenic entrance.

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Light, shadow and penumbra follow one another like the screens of our lives, like canvas on which our physical and spiritual experience is imprinted. A fragmented and fluid experience at the same time, life unfolds on multiple levels of apprehension where our actions, experimentations and thoughts summon up various stimuli and feelings of joy, sadness, emotion, nostalgia or melancholy inside us. Driven by the desire for love, by the search for wellbeing and by incessant existential questioning, we often liken light to the notion of truth, certainty or a kind of reassuring presence. Light being the revealer of the cycle of life, the original spark that makes everything visible and the experience of life tangible. Sacred in our culture and repeatedly mentioned in the Quran, light floods everything with a form of evidence and dispels darkness, allowing life to blossom, creating a beginning. Nevertheless, it seems that penumbra is inseparable from light and constitutes the negative which gives even more brilliance to the celestial rays, as if the beauty of the sunlight, of the silvery reflections on the Mediterranean Sea, found its counterpart only through the contrast with penumbra – darkness, shadow – and from this balance the beauty of the world was born. Like a necessary and salutary path to better highlight and reveal the sublimeness of light; like a metaphor for life, from the maternal womb to birth and daylight. The transition from the shadow of darkness to saving light is anchored in our unconscious and is regularly used as a metaphor in various circumstances of our existence. In architecture, in the warm regions of the southern Mediterranean, this transition from shadow to light, this strong contrast, is often staged through the progression from a dark and narrow chicane hallway to the tranquillity and soft luminosity of a patio for example, or to the play of shadows and reflections found in the streets of the medinas thanks to perforated screens – mashrabiyas – that create unique dancing light movements. The staging of an entrance thus plays on both the necessary privacy and the desire to reach a compromise with the strength of the sun and its negative.

Driss Kettani Architecte, Villa Salam, Casablanca, Morocco, 2021 A curved wall with a mural of traditional zellige tiles welcomes visitors, the shadows adding a sense of theatricality and preparing them to discover the bright interior. The curve shape embraces and defines a moment of ‘compression’ before entering the house.

As well as offering protection from the harsh sun and prying eyes, mashrabiyas recompose a reality by fragmenting it and opening up the imagination to an array of stories. The notion of privacy is essential in the Arab-Muslim tradition and is manifested architecturally by a whole set of features implemented to serve social and cultural principles. The architecture draws a beauty of its own from this, and plays with the mystery of the half-light, the tranquillity of subdued and filtered light, the brilliance of the sun and the contrast of its shadows. The mastery of the dosage and composition of light comes together with the physical elements of the architecture to enhance the course of our lives with moments of emotion and an inspiring and poetic spatial experience. To engage the senses, to experience the movement of passing time, to be in harmony and in resonance with the natural elements, our bodies and souls melting into a celestial dance movement. However, penumbra cannot only be thought of in terms of light but has its own beauty and attributes, a world of sensations and representations that is born as the light is dimmed and where a whole new universe imprints itself on our retinas as our eyes close. An Allegory of Passing Time Penumbra is a beautiful allegory of passing time, a poetic marker of the path of the sun and the ticking seconds tending towards infinity. Through light sneaking into a crack, through a tree’s silhouette that gradually melts into the sky, like a celestial clock, shadow becomes inseparable from light, their dialogue telling us something about the renewal of life.

A simple crack in the walls of Jørn Utzon’s wonderful Can Lis in Mallorca creates a thrill, provoking a unique architectural emotion for a few minutes that bring us closer to eternity. Built in 1971 as a holiday retreat for his family, following the Sydney Opera House drama when he was dismissed as the project architect for financial and political reasons, this house plays perfectly with the elements and enhances the daily course of time and light. Deliberately highlighted, the shadows in architecture resonate and dance in a unique choreography and lengthen as the hours pass until they gradually merge with the surface on which they are projected – an architectural timepiece that is amplified even further in the world’s sunnier regions. The architecture of JeanFrançois Zevaco, sculptural and playing with the rays of the sun, is a fine example, such as in the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex (1960) or the Ouarzazate School for Teachers (1962), both in Morocco. While subject to gravity and static constraints, architecture is not immobile, but changes according to the angle from which it is viewed, the path of the viewer and the passage of time. It manifests with its own language, through its interaction with humans and nature, our very place in the world, like a medium or a prism multiplying sensorial experiences. The beauty of nature is also revealed through this unfolding of time, from the darkness of the night to the diluted, mixed, uncertain tones of the first light of day and the burning colours of twilight. These colour changes and reflections transform landscapes and architectures over time, drawing shifting silhouettes that alternately dazzle under the sun or present uncertain contours, giving them a haunting beauty. The palm groves of Morocco’s Draa Valley, the minarets of Istanbul and the kasbahs of southern Morocco thus live several lives throughout the day and are adorned with a unique aura when the gaze becomes less precise and opens up to new dimensions. A Distortion of Reality This transition from light to shadow is a space where perceptions can be dramatised, reality distorted and different sensorial experiences confronted. The elongated shadows, the distorted shapes and the fascinating chiaroscuro of Giorgio de Chirico’s canvases open us up to a phantasmagorical dimension and a singular poetic feeling. Bringing us back to ancient times and a kind of allegory of memory, it is our very notion of reality that is questioned, penumbra being the locus of diluted borders, uncertain contours and vaporous glimmers, and opening the way to a world of possibilities and a multiplication of dimensions, like an escape from the contingencies of reality. This dramatisation gives architecture a power and a solemn charge, magnifying cultural or institutional works. It makes the link with a world full of senses, with ancient resonances, far from the asepsis of the modern world. The power of volumes, abstraction, the play of proportions, chiaroscuro, accentuated contrasts, elongated perspectives – all of these are architectural tools that take a unique turn under the scorching sun and with the gradual onset of darkness. A lyrical feeling is imprinted on our retinas and our souls, and opens the door to a space-time where dreams take on different shapes, where beauty becomes more uncertain but also

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more hypnotic and where human beings are confronted with themselves. An exploration of intimate memory, souvenirs of the future and hopes of yesterday. In painting, the works of Mark Rothko and Georgia O’Keeffe admirably translate this world of uncertainty, of the poetic veil that covers raw reality and enables us to see something other than the tangible surface of things. Through some of his photographic series, Cy Twombly transcribes a vaporous universe where the simplest objects are bathed in semi-darkness and take on a strange and poetic aspect – like a photographic lens that opens and closes according to the artist’s intentions and captures moments of evanescent beauty. In film, there are those unforgettable shots in the works of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, composed of characters and landscapes but also a skilful dosage of light, as evocative as the most sophisticated of sets. This phantasmagoria of moving forms with fuzzy contours sends ripples through our certainties and questions the splendour of the truth by enriching it with a different perspective, thus reflecting the complexity of the world around us and the importance and richness of the invisible. A surreal and captivating world that is discovered each time in a different way.

Saad El Kabbaj, Driss Kettani and Mohamed Amine Siana, Guelmim School of Technology, Guelmim, Morocco, 2011 The relief and rhythm of the openings is highlighted by the dancing shadows, which grow longer and stronger as the sun recedes. This interplay of colours, forms, light and shadows reinforces the solemn feeling of the project.

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The narrow stairs, ochre colour and shadows emphasise the opening overhead, revealing a strong contrast between the architecture and the clear blue sky. The protective walls, simple raw materials and contrasted colours are designed with this interplay between outside and inside, and this changing perception depending on the time of day, in mind.

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2002 With his photograph series – and this one especially – Cy Twombly masterfully captures uncertainty as a poetic and almost phantasmagorical scene where the soul can navigate.

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Penumbra as a Filter Penumbra is the moment of change and artistic uncertainties. Colour shifts in unpredictable tones, precision fades, materials alter in appearance and characteristics, and the passage of time conceals specificities of its own which reconfigure our relationship to the tangible. The world around us takes on a completely different aspect, its forms become mobile, vague and endowed with an aesthetic specific to these moments. Some surfaces only find the fullness of their beauty when the intensity of the light fades and allows them to express an element of sophistication and subtlety. The gaze itself takes sides, depending on the position of the observer and the light source. A game of variations, reflections and tangled shadows amplifies primal perception and writes a story with multiple perspectives. Architecture plays on these artistic deformations, a space being perceived as much by its shape and proportion as by the quality of a ray of light that caresses it or of a shadow that transforms and attenuates its limits. Chiaroscuro, backlighting, reflectivity of materials, surface relief and the subtlety of colours construct and deconstruct the apprehension of architectural space and play an essential role in the creation of atmosphere. The dosage of light and the understanding of the sun’s cycle thus become intangible elements of the architectural palette in their own right, the imponderable and the unforeseen adding a sense of magic.

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Saad El Kabbaj, Driss Kettani and Mohamed Amine Siana, Taroudant University, Taroudant, Morocco, 2010 Through a play of surfaces, colours and shadows, the setting sun emphasises the composition and the chiaroscuro, as the limited palette enhances the pictural and abstract qualities. The ochre colour combined with the simple geometrical volumes reacts to the declining light in a dramatic effect.

The gaze itself takes sides, depending on the position of the observer and the light source. A game of variations, reflections and tangled shadows amplifies primal perception and writes a story with multiple perspectives

This distortion of reality is particularly striking in our apprehension of nature, which takes on a whole new appearance as night approaches. Reflections of an olive tree’s foliage gradually merging with the dark night, vaporous glimmers of dawn emerging from the darkness, the awakening of the sea in the morning light; the choreography of clouds taking on shifting shapes before proudly standing out against the sky. Desert dunes sculpting unreal shapes, a starry sky drawing a surreal canvas, changing outlines of mountains. The infinite evocative power of Nature is augmented by this filter and reminds us of the artist Paul Klee, who claimed to be constantly rediscovering nature as if using a microscope, and that new, unexpected aspects appeared to him at each degree of enlargement. Changing nature, changing light, dancing shadows, vaporous atmosphere, redesigned contours, desaturated colours. A whole different world takes its place, in the same way as night replaces day.

Driss Kettani Architecte, Villa Agava, Casablanca, Morocco, 2016 Scenic light at night, as the villa’s chicane entrance is highlighted by the play of colours and shining reflections of the traditional zellige tiles. The composition works in a certain way during the day, enhanced by the shadows and play of colours, but sets off another kind of expression when the night comes with its blurry and poetic sensations.

The Gardens of Paradise The rigour of the sun and its hypnotic presence are magnified by these moments of tranquillity and calm in the shade of a patio, under a century-old olive tree. Refreshed by a breeze, our mind wanders and dreams of the Gardens of Paradise, admiring the beauty of Creation and living this fleeting moment of serenity and contemplation to the full. The hours pass by, the sea’s twinkling transforms into myriad shades of blue, until it merges with the sky and time seems suspended between sky and earth – a metaphor for the richness of life and its cycle, of Nature and Humanity being one and of the infinite beauty that presents itself to our sight and our souls. A Path to the Light. 1 Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 46–50, 51(l), 52–3 Photos Fernando Guerra – FG + SG; p 51(r) © Fondazione Nicola Del Rocio

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OFICINAA, The Beastie, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York City, 2018 Simulated night-time view with artificial light accentuating the cooling sensation of the Beastie.

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Silvia Benedito

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Co-founder of design practice OFICINAA, Silvia Benedito highlights alternative ontologies of ‘void’ and ‘penumbra’ – as spaces of expectation and opportunity within which to create areas and objects that exploit these notions in beneficial ways. The ensuing atmospheres cosset natural resource conservation and human delight, related spaces of umbra/penumbra that formed the basis of her studio’s Beastie project in New York.

The concept of ‘void’ is often used to identify the condition of the space ‘within’; in other words, it describes the intangible in-between framed by the tangible, the left-over, or the vastness in front of our eyes. The use of the term, while interchangeably applied in the design disciplines – architecture, landscape architecture and urban design – is nonetheless ontologically elusive. ‘Void’ still describes the condition of emptiness and a design opportunity for development and future inhabitation. For instance, the urban theorist Ignasi de Solà-Morales characterises the void as a metonym for design possibilities: ‘void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation’.1 If one assumes that ‘the void is what does the vessel’s holding’, as Martin Heidegger elaborated in his 1971 essay ‘The Thing’,2 then what is the materiality of that void? Repositioning these reflections into the realm of the design practices, it is worth asking: which aspects can be determinants in constructing space for human delight and spatial wellbeing? Could umbra and penumbra, light and heat, wind or humidity, or sound, for example, be substances in the void? The idea of ‘nothingness’ seems ontologically unsuitable because it does not exist in the realm of earthly design practices.3

OFICINAA, The Beastie, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York City, 2018 Seeking to turn New York City’s suffocating summer heat to an advantage by transforming solar energy into ice, the Beastie was a finalist in the 2018 Young Architects Program Competition organised by the city’s Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 contemporary art museum, for a temporary pavilion in MoMA PS1’s courtyard. This concept sketch captures its various atmospheric interactions between cold, umbra/penumbra and heat.

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General plan representing the thermal landscapes and the various gradients (from colder to hotter temperatures) within the pavilion at 7 pm.

While the above contributions have been productive in describing an expectant absence – about to be inhabited – this article expands on the urgency of claiming the void’s ontological constitution, more precisely concerning atmospheric conditions and microclimatic performance as design agents in effecting delight. It does so by exploring other reciprocal relationships, such as the ones between weather and human activities, energy and resource conservation, or plant life and public wellbeing. This reflection thus highlights alternative ontologies to the term ‘void’ followed by an architectural proposal for public life, delight and comfort embodying such substantial premises informed by the various conditions of light, umbra/penumbra, humidity and wind. The architects Alison and Peter Smithson, in their book The Charged Void: Urbanism (2005), have associated the idea of ‘void’ to the notion of ‘charged’ space. Here, the meteorological phenomena occur, and humans do exert influence: ‘The space-between speaks to the sky … the space-between puts a charge into that sky.’ 4 Their account implies that humans affect this aerological volume just as we are affected by it – as the cosmonauts of our own anatomico-physiologies and related life-regulatory mechanisms. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, furthermore, in his book Terror from the Air (2009), describes the aerological medium as ‘human-ambient’: the volume that supports ‘ecologically-dependent vital functions: respiration, central nervous regulations, and sustainable temperature and radiation conditions’. He adds: ‘economic conditions excepted, critical attention today is focused on the essential environmental conditions for human survival’.5

This set of references triggered the premises of a project developed in the context of the 2018 Young Architects Program Competition run by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 contemporary art museum, in which OFICINAA were finalists. The project, titled The Beastie, was developed in collaboration with climate engineering firm TRANSSOLAR and set out to create innovative cooling strategies for the envisaged public programme – an outdoor pavilion operating during the hot summer months in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 to host those visiting its art events. One of the questions addressed at the outset of the project development was: How could the idea of ‘charged-ness’ form an inviting and inclusive space? Those who have lived in New York City during the summer and visited MoMA PS1 will be familiar with the experience of a wide-open urban fabric sparkling with the continuous buzz of the elevated train tracks, and the intense heat and humidity in the air. Beyond supporting emerging architectural practice, promoting architectural innovation and encouraging community engagement, the pavilion project needed to inspire delight and enhance comfort through a state-of-the-art energy strategy. This became an opportunity to reflect upon the notion of ‘charged-ness’ and the conditions of umbra/penumbra, for a space that could provide shelter during the hot afternoons with cooling atmospheres for the multiple publics: from children to the elderly, and from active individuals to resting ones. Serving as a manifesto on atmospheric imaginaries and delight, the project re-materialised the ‘void’ by acknowledging our anatomical physiologies and related life-regulatory mechanisms. Therefore, the body, as a bioclimatic sensor, and its aerological envelope are the project’s core domains.

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Climatic Beasts The project began with a core question: How can architecture embody the anxieties of today’s anthropogenic climatic degradation? Marrying the heavens with the earth, the Beastie is a climatic offspring. It transforms solar heat into ice. The choice of name for the project places it within a genealogy of climatic ‘beasts’ – some real, others fictional – born in moments of climate awareness and environmental vulnerability. As identified by several authors in the domain of ecological criticism, the appearance of many ‘beasts’ – such as Count Dracula, Jack the Ripper, Frankenstein and Godzilla – has occurred at moments of atmospheric anomaly: thick air from dense airborne pollution and sulphurous skies, diurnal darkness, steady temperature decline and radioactive fallout.6 Embodying fear or awe, these ‘beasts’ are mirrors of humanity’s relationship with the disrupted atmosphere. They are also sites of wonder and speculation in their uncanny, almost animal yet still-human features. In this line of thought, another question emerges: What is the new ‘beast’, in architectural terms, relative to today’s anthropogenic atmosphere? Timothy Morton, in his book Hyperobjects (2013), establishes the paradoxical and inspiring association between objecthood – a concept so close to architecture – and ‘things’ that are boundless and unframed by tangible limits, something ‘viscous, which means that they “stick” to beings that are involved with them’. He writes: ‘the term hyperobjects … refer[s] to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.’7 In this argument, Morton ontologically associates hyberobjects with spatio-temporal manifestations of the Anthropocene: phenomena caused by humans and, although abstract and unbounded, sensed by them, such as climate change, large-scale storms, bomb cyclones, wildfires, and the melting of the ice caps. These are the current climatic anomalies amid which a new ‘beast’ would materialise. Ice as architectural substance (and associated thermodynamic phenomena) and related spaces of umbra/penumbra formed the basis for the Beastie project, as spatial opportunities to cool and delight during the hot summer months in New York. The Anatomy of the ‘Beast’ Inspired by the architectural precedent of the yakhchaˉ l icehouses in the Iranian desert, the Beastie would offer an alternative spatial climate-control strategy to the status-quo of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. Expanding on thermodynamic phenomena that are able to mitigate high thermal stress (such as radiant cooling, conduction and condensation),

The borough of Queens (circled), site of the project, in the context of New York City’s urban heatisland effect.

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ice as a material promotes a more efficient cooling strategy through conduction, in lieu of high-carbon-emitting HVAC mechanisms and maintenance-heavy sprinklers. Therefore, the Beastie is designed as a friendly, self-sustaining refrigerator transforming solar heat and humidity into ice, a cooling pavilion for the hot summer days with thermally reactive materials, and an architectural folly in tune with people and weather. The site is in the borough of Queens, in one of the hottest areas of New York City, with peak temperatures close to 45°C (113°F). The Beastie explores the principle that this heat energy could be harvested to improve public comfort. Its anatomy is therefore composed of several ‘organs’; it resembles a large open greenhouse, made with parts found on regular construction sites that can be easily dismantled and reassembled: metal trusses, PVC panels, a compression chiller, radiant coils, a ventilation shaft, moveable PVC curtains on metal tracks with an iridescent finish, fixed lowemissivity (Low-E) curtains for high-cooling rooms (the ‘grottoes’), moveable chairs and a cold ‘rain’ shower.

The anatomy of the Beastie: assemblage of the pavilion’s various structural parts. The compression chiller would convert solar energy into ice that would emerge on the forest of vertical radiant coils, amongst layered low-emissivity (Low-E) curtains that could be shifted along metal tracks by users to create ‘grottoes’ with a range of comfortable temperatures to suit different publics.

The Beastie is designed as a friendly, self-sustaining refrigerator transforming solar heat and humidity into ice, a cooling pavilion for the hot summer days

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Rendering of the interior of one of the Beastie’s ‘grottoes’, formed by the higher density of iced pipes and surrounded by Low-E curtains.

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Electricity from the sun would feed the chiller, and the ventilation shaft would release the excess heat. The ice would emerge on the radiant coils in 35 vertical loops, 4 metres (13 feet) tall, dispersed throughout the space, resembling a forest of vertical pipes amongst layered PVC and aluminised Low-E curtains. The articulation between the various densities of iced pipes, the Low-E curtains and the various spaces of umbra/ penumbra throughout the interior space of the Beastie would generate various temperatures – sensed and choreographed by the visitors. The orientation of the approximately 30-by-7-metre (100-by-23-foot) pavilion is conceived to respond to the geometry of the sun’s path relative to the optimised array of photovoltaic panels and the user’s movement within the PS1 courtyard. Despite the Beastie’s evocative aims, the ‘sun-to-ice’ prototype applies physics to

demonstrate green energy. It uses solar energy via photovoltaic panels for electricity generation that is either directly used by a compressor chiller or stored in batteries to be used later. The physical phenomenon of generating ice is based on first gathering the air humidity, then condensing it on pipes, and finally freezing it. A –10°C (14°F) water-glycol mixture in the pipes was selected to cool their surface and to generate the necessary condensation of the air humidity and its transformation into ice. With the help of the layered curtain arrangement, solar radiation would be reduced in the interiors, thereby minimising the additional energy needed to produce ice. The thermal interaction between the iced pipes and the chambers surrounded by the PVC/Low-E curtains would create an estimated average interior temperature sensation of 28°C (82°F) in the context of the outside temperatures of 37°C (98°F). Despite the general cooling sensation within the Beastie, its interiors embody several conditions of umbra/ penumbra created by the various layers of curtains and its transparencies. These, in articulation with the iced pipes, would generate various thermal thresholds and different cooling environments to cater to the variety of publics present at such events and their respective metabolisms dependent on age, health and activity levels. For instance, the dark ‘grottoes’ would be at a regular interior temperature of 6°C (43°F) and the surrounding areas would range between 17°C and 28°C (63–82°F) in response to the density of iced pipes, the interactive organisation of the PVC curtains (moveable by those visiting) and the density of people within the same space. The ‘grottoes’ would be the perfect space for the more active bodies seeking immediate thermal decompression. While the thermal interactivity between the Beastie and its users is an essential dimension of the design, the resulting impact of the anthropogenic heat on the melting of the ice gathered on the radiant coils brings us back to the initial idea of the project – reminding ourselves of the individual and planetary vulnerability in today’s disrupted atmosphere, where the condition of umbra/ penumbra equals one of integrative design addressing multiple publics. 1

above: The Beastie in its intended context: the courtyard of the MoMA PS1 contemporary art museum.

Notes 1. Ignasi de Solà-Morales, ‘Terrain Vague’, in Cynthia Davidson (ed), Anyplace, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995, p 120. 2. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’ (1971), Poetry, Language, Thought, tr Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row (New York), 1975, p 164. 3. See Silvia Benedito, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation, Lars Müller (Zurich), 2021. 4. Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Urbanism, Monacelli Press (New York), 2005, p 2. 5. Peter Sloterdijk ,Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) (Los Angeles, CA), 2009, pp 16 and 15. 6. See contributions to ecocriticism from authors such as: Lawrence Buell (The Environmental Imagination, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995); Jonathan Bate (The Song of the Earth, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000); Timothy Morton (The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2010); William Ruddiman (Earth Transformed, WH Freeman (New York), 2013); and Gillen D’Arcy Wood (Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2014). 7. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2013, p 10.

opposite: Section showcasing the Beastie’s various thermal thresholds.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © OFICINAA, GMbH

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El Equipo Mazzanti, Public space module proposal for Corriere della Sera competition, 2020

below: Designed for a competition run by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the non-site-specific prototype offers different functional configurations. Therefore, it hovers in a state of between-ness like the penumbra. Here, it serves as a musical stage. opposite: In the daytime, the module can adopt a configuration for selling newspapers.

Efficiency Versus Game Twilight Spaces for Homo Ludens

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Giancarlo Mazzanti

Modernist dogma declares that ‘form follows function’, which historically has led to the design of buildings that tightly prescribe what can happen where and when. These uni-functional spaces often lack a sense of happy expediency and joy. Columbian architect Giancarlo Mazzanti believes spaces and buildings should occupy a twilight zone that facilitates changes of function, is performative, and encourages unexpected social interactions between users and the city. Here he explains some of his firm’s spatial tactics.

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The 20th century established an idea of architecture based on the factory, where efficiency and productivity are at the centre of the discourse. Consequently, the 20th-century industrial building is an effective connection system, and above all establishes relationships that consider the user as a passive and controlled being, in order to be efficient and productive. This determined what can be called ‘functionality’, a view of the world rooted in the notion of homo faber (literally translated, ‘man the maker’) and the factory. Architectural designs were produced according to a specific production model, controlling the habits and dynamics that could occur in the space and determining a passive user and observer based on contemplation. These ‘dark’ spaces make for an inactive architecture, lacking energy and vitality. Why, then, do humans continue to organise projects based on efficiency and productivity? Reflecting on this approach, an alternative is proposed here in the form of an architecture based on the notion of homo ludens (‘the man who plays’), where spaces are not devices of control embodied by the building, systematically outside sensory experiences. The user is now a creative agent, so the value of architecture does not lie in itself but in what it activates when interacting with each user, in terms of what stimulates behaviours and social relations. This is an architecture endowed with light, vitality and synergy, which refutes the idea of contemplation as the most appropriate way of designing and instead advocates studying architecture’s ability to promote actions. Dynamism is generated in properly illuminated spaces, rather than the contemplation and control that occur in dark and static spaces.

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Finding the Twilight Point How can ways of organising space be conceived that are not based on efficiency and economic production? One of the key elements in answering this question is by looking for an architecture that is action. Performativity is the ability to capture a community’s needs to adapt through movement. El Equipo Mazzanti’s entry for the 2020 competition run by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to design modules in public space is an example of this, adapting as it does to the surrounding urban activity. The design achieves this through its free transformation, which during the day allows for a newsstand or sale of products, and at the end of the day transforms from a play space to a platform for events, thanks to its modulation and structure. However, programming activity is an equally important element for a building to be inhabited, since no building would exist without the activity for which it was commissioned. This is how the device – meaning any architectural space able to contain a performative programme – is designed: not for the purpose of functional rigour, but for the human actions that can occur within it. Architecture should be designed according to the effects it can have on the immediate environment, and its ability to stimulate it; the shadowy space we look for is then a place between the functional and the changing, the urban and the architectural, the rational and the free. Because, for a building to promote human relationships and exploration, it needs not only to possess the free, playful and mobile aspects addressed to homo ludens, but also to deal with the programmatic and the functional.

The performative condition of twilight architecture aims to recover social ties

El Equipo Mazzanti, La Ilusión Kindergarten, Cajicá, Colombia, 2018 opposite: The kindergarten is composed of spaces that operate in a non-specific shadowy way that encourages exploration and creative play. The maquette illustrates its nuanced spaces, gardens, spongy façades and mobile enclosures. below: Programme plan illustrating the kindergarten’s free activity zones and meandering circulation routes.

At El Equipo Mazzanti we call this critical point ‘twilight’ – the midpoint, or space of shadows, not only between social and functional needs, but also that integrates performance without affecting the specific programme. In tropical architecture, this has been implemented as what is called estrategia climática (climate strategy), focusing on comfort and intermediate spaces, between the exterior and interior, between light and darkness, such as the porch and the arcade. These are free, flexible, mutable spaces that allow the opportunity to generate actions such as meeting, inviting, surprising, resting and playing, which make for a vital, holistic, community-friendly place. This approach requires the cooperation of other disciplines to enable an understanding of the complex realities that accompany each project – something that is lacking in the previous ways of designing. Thus, today it is possible to design by finding more relevant and logical ways to infer reality, while at the same time considering the problems and concerns that architecture has always solved starting from traditional typologies, in the spaces of darkness. The performative condition of twilight architecture aims to recover social ties; it seeks to build a common life shared by all the Earth’s inhabitants. It is important to explain that interdisciplinary practice and the participation of different social actors in a project do not limit or eliminate the responsibility of architects, of the professional experts. It is in this mediation, or ‘designerly half-light’, that the true values and effectiveness of the performative lies. The activities and needs are dictated by external factors, but it is up to architects to define how to produce both the performative strategy and the ‘spaces of

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darkness’. This does not bring full, overexposed light to a project, but neither is it obscured by functionality and imposition. These ‘spaces of darkness’ enhance the project’s function, such as in educational facilities where they are considered as a ‘third teacher’ – not only buildings, but learning mechanisms as well. The architectural space of a school designed for early childhood should not provide a solution based solely on technique, function and formal elements, but a building that itself teaches, stimulates, animates – that is itself an educator. The ‘spaces of darkness’ allow diversity and multiplicity of experiences for each member of a community, and are therefore more enriching than those buildings where each space corresponds to a specific function. This is the case of the La Ilusión Kindergarten in Cajicá, Colombia (2018), where a sinuous corridor is an example that can nourish the children’s perception of the world with the different factors they encounter, stimulating their imagination and ability to relate; but it also allows them to quickly reach a quiet point, if the situation requires it. A mobile enclosure allows different degrees or nuances to be generated between the functional core of the building and the outside, a penumbral space that has not only a bioclimatic function, but also enhances performative activity. Another example can be found in the Flor del Campo School in Cartagena (2010). The project was developed according to rings that work as perimetral circulations around the functional core, but at the same time they are also areas of intersection between cores, embodying the

El Equipo Mazzanti, Flor del Campo School, Cartagena, Colombia, 2010 Model showing the functional programme perimeter, the rings of circulation and areas between the gardens that are nondeterministic functionally and can adapt to varying configurations and uses – existing in a state of blurred use and delight.

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shade between the exterior and the interior, between the environment and the building. They are not only spaces for play, but for holistic learning, incorporating nature into the classroom and enabling ecological education. Designing a school is different from designing an environment for learning: the former refers to certain architectural typologies; the latter invites an expansion of architecture, and a timely articulation together with the different actors involved in the process. This reflection allowed El Equipo Mazzanti to design the Cartagena school in this way, seeking and finding new ways to generate ‘spaces of darkness’ – spaces that incorporate performance and function and, even better, enhance it by generating a ‘hidden curriculum’. Twilight Spaces as Activity Enhancers Through Play How can play and entertainment contribute to other ways of using space? Penumbral spaces can exist not only in educational architectural programmes, but also in hospitals, offices and other facilities. Designing architecture through play, anomaly and heterotopy allows us to find new ways of exploring relationships in nuanced spaces. Playing is a way of hacking a life based on production and mercantilism, which we face every day. Trying to integrate efficiency in a global economy with multidimensional aspects that favours more human conditions should be the ultimate goal, allowing us to engage in rituals and forms of common relationship, and finding them in nuances. The Fundación Santa Fe in Bogotá (2016) is an architecture designed for care,

where the ‘space of darkness’ has been integrated in two ways. The first is the fuzzy façade, which is not only an environmental strategy but a way to connect to the landscape of the city: in any of the building’s spaces, its residents are invited to look and explore outside, without losing the privacy of a hospital setting. The other important strategy is the interstitial space, the vertical garden that connects the welcome rooms and the corridors on each floor, generating an environment that disrupts the common idea of clinics as gloomy. The notion of the medical building is here enhanced by incorporating these healing spaces, where the enjoyment and holistic care of patients and their families is at the centre, without affecting the efficiency of a medical clinic.

El Equipo Mazzanti, Fundación Santa Fe, Bogotá, Colombia, 2016 This highly site-specific building sets up a visual dialogue between itself and its urban context, utilising ‘spongy’ façades that facilitate spatial permeability and viewpoints.

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The construction of organisational systems based on games, events, participation and heterotopic strategies generates unexpected relationships between users and the space itself. This is true of the Control and Operations Centre (CCO) in La Pintada, in Colombia’s Antioquia department (2020), which is not only a road infrastructure facility but also a meeting place for officials and the surrounding rural community. By raising the functional programme and playing with the topography, a lower public floor was generated that can host sports activities, rest areas and a local market. In this case not only was the programme enhanced by incorporating social elements, but the different parts enhance each other, thanks to the partially covered plaza with its qualities of semi-darkness as well as ventilation and comfort. With this approach in mind, each of the projects designed by El Equipo Mazzanti has sought to integrate both components – play and efficiency – by incorporating them in a space or in a series of nuanced spaces, leading to strategies for penumbral spaces such as fuzzy, deep, ‘landscaped’ or mobile façades, serpentine circulation routes, transformable classrooms, sloping squares, bridges, parks and urban devices. These and other spaces of action nourish everyday places to break free from the contradiction of situations more in line with the world in which we live. The penumbral space is then a common element, whose value is in its capacity to modify already established social visions or to blend with them. This is the meaning of a shadowy and performative architecture: architecture as a material practice that operates as a strategic device to connect, multiply and manage.

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El Equipo Mazzanti, Fundación Santa Fe, Bogotá, Colombia, 2016 Gardens punctuate the plan, creating areas of natural beauty to augment the patients’ healing experience.

Not only from the point of view of human actions, but also considering the behaviour of matter, organisational systems are also performative mechanisms that have a formal intelligence to react and change over time. El Equipo Mazzanti has a strong interest in working on projects with schematic functions that can be adapted, due to their operational nature. The projects propose a catalogue of instructions that define the material conditions, the relationships, the programmes, the intensity and the data, and therefore qualify and define the actions and the way a building operates as a living being. El Equipo Mazzanti places great importance on designing the organisational and performative properties of its projects: their systems’ interchangeability, their programmability through the idea of pure and archetypal form, their growth over time, their capacity for reorganisation through new pieces or modules without becoming alien to the system, and their replicability in similar conditions and in different places, among many other qualities, make each project an instrument and not just a representation of an idea. This means looking for relational devices that can activate community and environmental actions. Architecture is more than ever a problem of space-action construction and no longer a problem of representation, of space-observation. At El Equipo Mazzanti, we like to imagine an architecture that dialogues and allows integration by means of penumbra and nuances, referring both to activity and to spatial qualities, and that is open to the range of variations that each architectural element offers, beyond binary definitions of only light or only darkness. 1

El Equipo Mazzanti, Control and Operations Centre (CCO), La Pintada, Antioquia, Colombia, 2020 This project conceptually is constituted around a ‘floating’ wooden box which orders and holds its functional programme. A contrast between the more prescribed space and the more freeform landscape that addresses the surrounding community is thereby established, and this becomes the motif of the whole development – an overwhelming sense of spatial betweenness.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © El Equipo Mazzanti/Giancarlo Mazzanti

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Filippo Bricolo

Bricolo Falsarella, Lugana Winery, Lugana, Italy, 2023

The semantics of penumbra. At the darkest point of the underground barrique cellar carved into the depths of the earth, a beam of natural light enters from above, confronting the visitor with an evocation of nature.

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Co-founding partner of Bricolo Falsarella Associati, Filippo Bricolo describes himself as a designer of penumbra, and spends much of his studio time choreographing the practice’s designs and buildings. He believes the fast pace of contemporary living, communication and technology, with its techno-positivist agenda, has made consideration of the penumbra almost extinct. Here he describes some of the architectural shadowy set-pieces of his office and others.

Filippo Bricolo, Lugana Winery drawing, Lugana, Italy, 2023 Drawing the penumbra. It is penumbra, and not space, that is the real subject of the drawings Bricolo has been making every day for years. Drawing is the best way to free the penumbra from the cone of invisibility into which it has fallen. To draw is to see consciously.

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If someone were to ask me, ‘What do you do for a living?’, I would say ‘I design penumbra’. But that would not be a provocative answer. Every day, in fact, I get up very early, go to my studio and for a few hours I design penumbra spaces in the silence of my room. I don't use computers, renderings or models, but a simple pen and two or three colours, often always the same ones. Slowly I begin to understand how the lights will enter that space, where the more intense shadows will thicken and where the softer ones will linger. It is a slow process that requires many hours and a lot of patience. This process is the opposite of the fast pace of our contemporary times. And it is no coincidence that it is. Because it was the speed of the modern, which comes from the hybris of positivism, that killed the value of penumbra. The more I practise this exercise of consciously drawing the penumbra, the more I realise that these lights and half-shadows have now entered a cone of invisibility and can no longer be seen if one remains in the tight and superficial time of our daily life. One has to go deeper, descend into slow time, where awareness and poetry, which are then the same thing, are produced. By going deeper, one realises that all these things coincide with that lack of definition that is characteristic of the penumbra, with that programmatic indecision that makes it a sort of perennial promise. Drawing the penumbra means wanting to remain in that suspended epiphany, in that almost oblivion that is a little bit rebirth, in that almost shadow, in that almost light, in that almost everything that is then our existence. But these are nothing new. They are things that have always been part of us. They are cultural elements, identity factors, even secular things.

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We see the blackness of the marble that welcomes us at the entrance almost as if it wants to coincide with the shadow

Deep Meaning I cannot say whether the penumbra can be traced back to the laws of semantics. Many might disagree with this fact. Yet, somehow, the penumbra is a bearer of meanings that we all know how to read and experience if only we decide to access its slow time. This is what Jože Plecˇnik and Gunnar Asplund wanted to suggest to us in drawing those dark staircases of theirs that intentionally lead us to the rediscovered light of knowledge. When we think of the spaces in semi-darkness, of the black staircase in Plecˇnik’s National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia (1941) or the similar ones in Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library, Sweden (opened 1928), we see them as one spatial and experiential message telling us about the possibilities of semi-darkness. We see the blackness of the marble that welcomes us at the entrance almost as if it wants to coincide with the shadow, almost as if it wants to merge with it, and then we see this rediscovered union between architecture and darkness, accompanying us up the dark staircase to the very clear space of the main hall invaded by the allusive transcendence of full light. These two sequences, which represent in a small space the ideal path of our existence, seem to demonstrate how penumbra can be an element of a project that can even claim its own centrality due to its strong bearing of meaning and potential. It is a sense, in fact, that finds its effectiveness by exploiting that fertile non-verbality that is proper to the language of architecture. Through this process of happy indefiniteness, we can easily overcome the binding and invalidating plane of conceptual contents and logical structures typical of the word, arriving at designing spaces that open up to an encounter with ourselves. For this ability to speak to us, the penumbra is a spatial gradient of great importance for architecture because it can bring it closer to the mysterious intensity of poetry. If poets, in fact, wrote their poems in an attempt to reduce the reductionism brought about by concepts, architects can find in the allusiveness of the penumbra a device that, through its natural veiling, invites the inhabitants of our spaces to unveil themselves and search for an awareness. Bricolo Falsarella Associati’s design for a winery in Lugana, Italy (2023) sought this path, creating a descending and slow movement that progressively leads from the light of the vision of the vineyards to the penumbra of the barrique cellar located deep inside the soil. Descending downwards, the natural lights, due to architectural devices, slowly reduce their presence and visitors find themselves imperceptibly passing from light to darkness. At the end of the path, at the darkest point, a natural light descends on the rough wall made of recycled bricks, bringing into the depths of the earth the evocation of the cyclical nature so important for our life and for the production of wine.

Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm Public Library, Stockholm, Sweden, 1928 The black-walled staircase leads to the circular central space bathed in natural light.

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Jože Plec ˇnik, National and University Library, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1941 The dark staircase leading to the full light of the reading room.

Bricolo Falsarella, Villa Saccomani, Sommacampagna, Italy, 2017 Penumbra and evocation. Inviting awareness, every morning a ray of grazing light enters the penumbra space and glides over the rough stone wall for a few minutes before disappearing.

Matter, Shadows and Lights This evocative light, always present in our architecture, reminds me of the beautiful book that French poet and art historian Yves Bonnefoy dedicated to the American realist painter Edward Hopper. The book has a beautiful title, La fotosintesi dell’essere (The Photosynthesis of Being),1 and describes the paintings pervaded by a sense of intense expectation where suspended and solitary souls are portrayed in the act of gazing at an evocative light. Bonnefoy goes so far as to define these paintings as ‘annunciations without theology’,2 forging a definition that very effectively conveys the idea of light entering the penumbra as a message, as a revealing entity. This idea of light as message ran through the entire history of pre-20th-century architecture and continued beyond thanks to the work of some doubtful masters who wanted to oppose the whiteness of the International Style with a domestic sacredness of great intensity. We need only think of the works of architects such as Dom Hans van der Laan, Sigurd Lewerentz, Juliaan Lampens, just to mention the Europeans who have always been imbued with this sense of time, sedimentation and humble wear and tear. Their architectures are full of intense spaces in which the idea of light as annunciation that has always been part of Mediterranean culture is alive. This is perhaps what Le Corbusier had found inside the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa and had tried to bring back forcefully in the last 15 years of his life, but it is above all what Postmodernism had not understood – that what modernity had erased was not history in its formal manifestation, but history in its relationship to structure, light, penumbra, matter and construction, and that without these aspects, form lost its meaning because sense simply derived from the inseparable relationship of a millenary adventure made up of dialogues between matter, shadow and light. Of all the 20th-century spaces where the relationship between shadow and evocation is most intense, the most poignant is probably the central space of Can Lis (1972), Jorn Utzøn's house in Majorca. Here, a ray of light enters the penumbra gliding diagonally across the rough masonry for a few minutes. It enters through a small hole in the stone masonry, a hole that takes on the task of confronting us with the fleetingness of existence. Its significance perhaps implies that it can be something more than a cut in the wall and is meant as an invitation – the best condition for architecture, and one that Bricolo Falsarella has tried to create in many of our works. For example, such a window can be found in the practice’s restoration of the rustic annexes of the 18th-century Villa Saccomani in the moraine hills of Lake Garda in Italy (2017). Every day, when the sun rises, a ray enters the room and moves over the rough wall of moraine stones. Like the most intense moments of our lives, the ray lasts only a few minutes, during which we witness this dance between light and penumbra. Designing a Crisis Penumbra and light are complementary opposites that cannot exist independently. Between them there is a mutual alley that inextricably binds them together. To say this is perhaps almost banal, but from this apparent banality may arise instead a consideration of great impact for architecture, namely that designing penumbra always means designing a crisis. On this

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reasoning, it is necessary to focus on questioning ourselves in order to move towards an anti-iconic and non-assertive architecture that can approach the complex motions of the human soul. Designing a crisis means giving presence in a project to the duplicity of our feelings, always suspended between desire and impediment, between light and darkness. This duplicity is the principle of every narrative and the main condition of the coexistence of opposites that is the penumbra. In the East Wing of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, Italy (2018), Bricolo Falsarella designed the passage between the light area of the entrance and the space in semi-darkness to be dedicated to the Mosaic Room using a dichotomy of elements: an iron portal invites one to enter while a panel seems to oppose it. It is the trigger of a gentle crisis that forms an atmospheric threshold that preludes the entrance of the penumbra by bringing about a necessary slowdown. Beyond the panel is a fragment of a Roman mosaic suspended in the half-light; what is missing is speaking through its absence. Here, the undefined of the penumbra mingles with the unfinished of the mosaic fragment on display, encouraging the observer to question the image. The act of visiting the museum therefore entrusts individuals with the task of questioning the relationship between the uncertainty of the penumbra and the imperfection of the fragment.

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Bricolo Falsarella, Gorgo Winery, Verona, Italy, 2022

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Bricolo Falsarella, Castelvecchio Museum East Wing, Verona, Italy, 2018 above: Penumbra and the undefined. A fragment of a Roman mosaic is suspended in the semidarkness of the room, absence blending with the indefiniteness of the penumbra, inviting the observer to question the scene. opposite: Designing the crisis. To design the penumbra is to design a crisis: light and shadow, affirmation and negation as in this portal based on a dichotomy of invitation and denial that determines a slowdown before entering the penumbra space of the Mosaic Room.

right: Penumbra and the imperfect as a verbal form. Dialoguing with the indefiniteness of the penumbra, the building seeks the path of a timeless architecture by attempting to decline the narrative of spaces in the allusive verbal form of the imperfect.

Today, architects need to respond to the anaesthesia of gaze that is characteristic of the new age of the overabundance of images. In the places where I was born and have lived, in the rural areas around Lake Garda in northern Italy, there is an intimate historical relationship between the rough surfaces of walls and shadow, and the strength of these places lies in this age-old love affair. We need to take the baton from the shadows that surround us and bring them back in new, imprecise walls that tell of belonging and permanence. More than an atmospheric manifestation, the relationship between penumbra and imperfection is a fundamental element of my culture. But not just the physical imperfection of rough masonry; the imperfect as a temporal action. In the Italian language, the verbal form imperfetto is used to set a story in an undefined past time. The Bricolo Falsarella studio seeks to do the same in architecture in creating works that can be declined in the form of the imperfect and projected within the suspended and activating time of the penumbra. As long as we remain in the penumbra, we will continue to be seekers. 1 Notes 1. Yves Bonnefoy, Edward Hopper: La fotosintesi dell’essere, Abscondita (Milan), 2018. See also Yves Bonnefoy, ‘The Photosynthesis of Being’, in Musee Cantini and Editions Adam Biro (eds), Edward Hopper, Tabard Press (New York), 1989, pp 15–28. 2. Bonnefoy, Edward Hopper, La fotosintesi dell’essere, op cit, p 48.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 70–1, 73 © Filippo Bricolo; p 74 © Hassan Bagheri; p 75(t) © Gary Yeowell/Getty Images; pp 75(b), 76–7(t), 76(b) © Filippo Bricolo/Atelier XYZ; p 77 © Filippo Bricolo/Alessandra Chemollo

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Javier Corvalán

Metaphors of Light, Dark and Shadow

Javier Corvalán, Kechê House, San Bernardino, Paraguay, 2020 The principal access to the house, perched on a hill overlooking a ravine, is defined by a metal plane that obscures the sun as it moves above it, creating a shadow that represents that created by an eclipse.

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The ocular-centric methods of defining, describing and designing architecture, while still prevalent, are predicated on modernist protocols of pure white and strong light. However, recent work and research releases architecture from the dominance of seeing. The penumbra forces us to comprehend buildings often without the full advantage of sight, and to instead rely on haptic sensations, smell and sound. Architect and researcher Javier Corvalán describes this other world of the visceral experience of architecture.

Like most living things, humans have a fundamental relationship with day and night, and our basic physiology and social interactions are intimately linked with the rhythmic alternation of light and darkness. As diurnal beings – active primarily during the daytime and with relatively poor vision in the dark – it is no surprise we have an evolutionary preference for light and that early in human history night and darkness came to be associated with potential menace. This is reflected in the way we think, speak about and conceptualise light and darkness. They are not only physical characteristics of the world we live in; they have acquired connotations that are often expressed metaphorically, varying from culture to culture, in images, attitudes and language. The emergence of light out of a primeval darkness begins the account of Creation in many cosmologies, and the end of the world is described as a twilight, or disappearance of light. Light has played a role in Islamic, Buddhist, Christian and other religious traditions, and the concept of the ‘light bringer’ or ‘light bearer’ is common to various mythologies and religions, representing a hero or saviour who brings light or fire to a world shrouded in darkness and cold. Light and dark are also used as metaphors for good and evil in everyday conversation. Light is associated with truth, knowledge and enlightenment, while dark is associated with ignorance, secrecy and malevolence. We might say that someone is ‘enlightened’ if we consider them wise, or that an explanation ‘illuminates’ a difficult concept, making it understandable, or that someone is ‘the light of our life’ if we love them. Conversely, we may describe someone as having a ‘dark’ side to their character, or as ‘shady’ to mean that they are untrustworthy or have hidden motives. Western, Christian belief is permeated with associations of light with divinity and goodness. These ideas became narratives that described the shift from medieval ignorance and superstition to rationality and science. Yet, because light and darkness are contingent upon each other, they can equally be viewed as complementary rather than oppositional, equally necessary even to our most basic perceptions and navigation of the physical world. And although dualism of some kind is common to all religions, not all cultures give darkness and shadow such an almost exclusively negative weighting.

Osypyte, drawing by Wilky, member of the Chamacoco indigenous community, undated The drawing depicts the axis mundi of the Chamacoco cosmos, linking its multiple existential levels and showing how beginning and end meet in a continuous spiral.

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Shadow is often seen as an integral part of the dual nature of the universe in Eastern thought, representing the unseen or unconscious aspects of the self and the world. In such philosophies, shadow is not necessarily associated with negativity or evil, but rather is seen as a natural and necessary part of the balance of life, as in Daoism, where shadow is seen as the yin to light’s yang, representing the feminine, receptive and passive aspects of the universe. In that worldview, the balance between the two allows for harmony and flow in the world. In many South American cultures, shadow is seen as a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds. Shadow is not necessarily regarded as a negative force, but rather as a powerful tool for spiritual growth and transformation. In Paraguay, where cultures and traditions associated with the native language are kept alive, light and shadow are summarised in a single spiral movement: the origin and the end of all things, neither positive nor negative, expressed by the word osypyte in the language of the indigenous Chamacoco people. However, the diverse values and meanings of darkness and, especially, shadow are still rarely discussed in contemporary Western thought. Yet shadows evoke a sense of mystery and potential, qualities of sensitivity, subtlety, imagination and perception, as famously expressed in the Japanese author Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki’s book In Praise of Shadows (1933).1 The Architecture of Light and Dark The West’s focus on progress, and desire for clarity and illumination, is reflected in its ever-more-pervasively lit cities. The nocturnal experience is transformed; as artificial light becomes more glaring, the hard shadows it creates become blacker because our eyes never have the chance to adapt to them. It is worth noting, however, that even in the light-loving West, romance and emotion are associated with the muted glow associated with candles; imagination and mystery with the soft light of the moon and stars. Japanese culture, on the other hand, is – or was, as Tanizaki laments modern Japan’s shift towards a Western aesthetic – characterised by an appreciation for shadow and subtlety. He makes particular references not only to objects, and the use of gold leaf as a source of reflected light in dim interiors, but also to architectural spaces, from a tea room to a bathroom located outside a house surrounded by nature, suggesting that an appreciation of shadow is a cultural value. Architects have always given shadow its due, in a formal sense at least, because by necessity form, defined by light and shadow, is an essential component of an architect’s vision. Le Corbusier, one of the pioneers of modern architecture, referred to architecture as ‘the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage.’2

Javier Corvalán, Osypyte House, Luque, Paraguay, 2005 The house is articulated in a 70-metre (230-foot) long spiral, from the ground floor to the terrace. The design is informed by the concept of the Chamacoco cosmos in which Origin and End are one and the same.

Although Le Corbusier knew that shadow, inseparable from light, is vital in the perception and experience of space and volume, it might be fair to say that he regarded light as the true material of architecture, manipulating it in a masterful way for both its plastic and aesthetic qualities. Decades later, in contemporary, minimalist Western society, the dramatic increase in fully glazed walls to wrap buildings questions the very significance of shadows, and in general there is the tendency to give vastly more importance to the lighting of interior spaces than to how shadow might define their mood – the point Tanizaki made so eloquently – and their effect on our perceptions and other senses. The World of all the Senses In architecture and design, until very recently the multisensory nature of the human mind has been ignored in favour of prioritising our dominant sense of sight. However, as our ancestors were aware, we have other

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ways to apprehend the world, and the richest potential of darkness and shadow is that they stimulate our other senses such as touch, smell and hearing. Those like the blind who must customarily navigate their way through dark space, are able to locate themselves by sound, even by echolocation, and smell, and their enhanced tactile sense allows them to discern subtle distinctions between surfaces and gradients. They develop a habitual, non-visual sensory familiarity with their local environment, often surprising us with their acute perceptions of a world of which we are only dimly aware because most of us do not pay attention to it. Chris Downey is a Californian architect who lost his sight after an operation for a brain tumour in 2008. Since then he has continued working as an architect and consultant with architecture firms designing for the public, including the visually impaired. He focuses not on what a building looks like, but on designing with his other senses, with how the textures of materials, temperatures and acoustics feel. In the process he is not just imagining a new architecture, but a new concept of the city, an urbanism shaped by the senses where accessibility for blind people can benefit the rest of the population in a powerful way.3 Just as shadow is ephemeral, subtle, intangible, hovering somewhere between the ‘real’ of physicality and the ‘unreal’, so are the sensations evoked by architecture when deliberately conceived to offer a multisensory experience. Berlin’s Jewish Museum (2001), by Daniel Libeskind, is an example of a building designed specifically to affect our non-visual senses. The ‘Memory Void’, a symbolic space on the ground floor of the building, includes an art installation by Israeli sculptor Menashe Kadishman of more than 10,000 faces cut from heavy, round iron plates, lying loose on the floor, producing a shuddering noise as one walks across them. The ‘Holocaust Tower’ produces a feeling of real unease because of the darkness, the silence and the cold. Chiaroscuro, Penumbra and the Umbraculum In Italian, ‘chiaroscuro’ means, literally, ‘light-dark’. Architecturally speaking, chiaroscuro refers to the use of strong contrasts between light and dark areas to create a sense of three-dimensionality and to highlight the form of a building. The space of partial illumination, of soft shadow, between the deepest shadow and the full light is the penumbra, and the transformation of materials to deliberately create this transition zone – to create a sheltering penumbra by controlling light – is one of the earliest and most fundamental manifestations of human architecture. Javier Corvalán, Obscura House, Mariano Roque Alonso, Paraguay, 2012 Designed as a holiday home for a filmmaker, the house is defined by darkness. The windowless superstructure opens and closes by means of a winch, and when closed functions as a camera obscura, a pinhole in the wall projecting an upside-down image of the outside world onto the interior walls.

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The space of partial illumination, of soft shadow, between the deepest shadow and the full light is the penumbra

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Javier Corvalan, Umbraculo House, Asunción, Paraguay, 2007 The dappled light of this open-air room is reminiscent of that under a tree in sunlight, and the varying textures of the materials used appeal to the sense of touch.

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Shade structures are probably as old as humanity, ranging from the gunyah, a common type of temporary shelter used by many Australian Aboriginal groups made of branches, reeds and other readily available local materials to create a cool, shady environment, to the vine-laced arbours in Mediterranean gardens. And there are the personal umbracula (from Latin umbrare – ‘shade’), the parasols or umbrellas depicted on Attic painted vases and Assyrian monuments dating back to before the 7th century BC. Shade is a more-than-metaphorical benison in hot climates, where too much of the sun’s light can burn or even kill, hence the concept of shade also became a metaphor for protection in general, and even for the power which the ability to protect others implies. The umbraculum itself gained a similar metaphorical definition: when the Pope visits any basilica, its yellow and gold striped Umbraculum, a symbol of the Catholic Church and the Pope’s authority over it, is opened. Thailand’s Nine-Tiered Great White Umbrella of State (Nopphapadon Mahasawettachat) symbolises the physical and spiritual protection the king gives to his subjects. In a sense, both as architecture and metaphor, the shade cast by the umbraculum might be regarded as a middle way, a golden mean, between light and dark, sunlight and shadow. As expressed in the design of my Umbraculo House (2007) in Asunción, Paraguay – a tribute to the original concept of the umbraculum – it does not block the light, it does not oppose it, but shares its surface in the form of a filter to create penumbras where the pluralities of the human spirit, senses and body can meet and be reconciled in an environment designed to cultivate life and allow it to flourish. 1 Translated from Spanish by Agustina Zelada Notes 1. Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki, In Praise of the Shadows [1933], tr Thomas J Harper and Edward G Seidensticker, Leete’s Island Books (Stony Creek, CT), 1977. 2. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture [Towards a New Architecture], tr Frederick Etchells, Dover Publications (New York), 1986, p 29, originally published 1923. 3. See Fred A Bernstein, ‘Design for All: Chris Downey’, Architectural Digest, 3 December 2021: www.architecturaldigest.com/story/chris-downey.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 78–9 Photo Daniel Ojeda; p 80 Courtesy of Javier Corvalán; pp 81, 84–5 © Javier Corvalán; pp 82–3 Photo Pedro Kok

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Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, Waterhouse at South Bund, Shanghai, China, 2010 A little girl overlooking another guest room through her bedroom window: a voyeuristic gaze typical of lane houses throughout the city.

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The Intimacy of Neglect Thresholds, Interconnectedness and Unexpected Glimpses

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Architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu situate the output of their practice, Neri&Hu, in spaces of liminality, subverting traditional typologies of buildings and the city, and blurring the boundary conditions. Their spatial and material investigations use Shanghai as a palimpsest microcosm, its historical, cultural and contemporary architectural accretions there to be reimaged and manipulated.

Dense high-rise development in Hong Kong, 2020 Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. This image, from Kris Provoost’s photo essay ‘Eden of the Orient: Hong Kong’s Dilemma’, captures the commercial trend of urbanisation that produces lifeless buildings with no regard to local context.

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The Chinese words for describing space and time share one common character – jian ( ), an ideogram composed of a ‘sun’ between a pair of ‘doors’. Jian can be roughly translated as a gap, a pause, a space, or the space between two structural parts, and is often used as the counterpart to another character to form a range of meanings. When combined with the character for ‘empty’, it takes on the meaning of ‘space’; combined with the character for ‘late’, it takes on the meaning of ‘night’. Some meanings are abstract and general, such as ‘within’, ‘among’ or ‘between’, while others are more specific, to describe ‘room’, ‘chamber ‘or ‘world’; still others are related to the temporal realm, expressing ‘evening’ or ‘time’. Some have associated the concept of jian, like that of the Japanese word ma or similar, to many musicians’ definition of music as the silence between notes, or evoke it even more poetically as an emptiness that holds possibilities or a promise to be fulfilled. While there is no direct English equivalent to jian, in an architectural sense this term is often used to describe a threshold condition, or the physical mediation between two contrasting spatial environments, such as interior and exterior, or public and private. In practice, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is often more interested in the overlap and blurring of these diametric oppositions, as well as hybrid conditions where they coexist. Shanghai, the practice’s home city, functions as a palimpsest of experimentation from a myriad of external influences, resulting from the legacy of the foreign concession settlements that were established from the 1840s onwards, as well as the rapid development China has undergone since the country opened up to foreign investment in 1978. As with many postcolonial cities, the notion of hybridity is essential to Shanghai’s cultural identity. As defined by anthropologist Néstor García Canclini, all cultures may be considered as border cultures due to the constant transformations they undergo, effectively making them hybrids of each other.1 Similarly, in postcolonial discourse, Homi K Bhabha speaks about boundaries in culture as a place of liminality or a ‘third space’ where translations and negotiations occur, allowing for disruptions of hegemonic colonial narratives.2 In this context, Neri&Hu regards liminal space as a place engendering new possibilities, and the notion of hybridity and hybridisation as agency for transformation to challenge the status quos or traditional typologies. This is the context in which Neri&Hu intentionally situates itself, with a constant effort to insert meaning into its work by drawing from these liminal contexts, both spatial and historical. The root word limen is derived from Latin, literally meaning being on a threshold. Neri&Hu often explores clues within these spaces and how it can inform them, believing that Shanghai’s alleyways (longtang) – remnants of the old city fabric – are where life happens and where history and culture are made. These are the sites that are full of potential for a newer, more engaged architectural design and experimentation. The concept of liminality in this extremely congested city is felt most intensely in these alleyways: they act as spaces that mediate between the private and the public, dividing the domestic and urban realms. They have been appropriated in varying contexts, from social to cultural, and also infiltrate into spaces within the urban fabric, where they become an integral part of the city.

Lane house in Shanghai, China, 1990 A man taking a break sitting on a stool in a longtang (lane) having his breakfast. In contrast to soulless commercialism, these lanes within Shanghai’s historic core are where life happens. Neri&Hu sees them as sources of inspiration for more engaged architectural design and an experimental approach that explores liminality.

The concept of liminality in this extremely congested city is felt most intensely in these alleyways: they act as spaces that mediate between the private and the public, dividing the domestic and urban realms 89

The Vertical Lane House Neri&Hu’s first architectural project, the Waterhouse – located on the South Bund of Shanghai and completed in 2010 – began when the client approached the practice to convert a dilapidated 1930s building that was formerly premises of the Japanese army and had then served for many years as a warehouse, into a 19-room hotel. The team was taken by this relic, and the initial response to the assignment was to resist the natural urge of an architect to fix every flaw. The practice was very careful to delineate the new architectural elements that it was planning to add while leaving the old untouched. Although some of the spaces have been refinished and smoothed over, some portions of walls are left crude, exposing crumbling bricks and delicate lath work behind the deteriorating plaster. The practice carefully peeled back the layers of finishes to uncover the lives and narratives hidden within each imperfection, thus excavating memories that will bring the most intimate moments of inhabitation into the public light. As purposeful as the design was in respecting the demarcation between the old and the new, there was equally an interest in designing a hotel that would represent the city. Neri&Hu questioned what a hotel in a city would be like if it was conceived to cater to the traveller as opposed to the tourist – that is, to a visitor who is interested in the essence of the city as opposed to just going to a tourist-designated destination. Alleyways were introduced as the main connector within urban Shanghai that links the past and the present, the old and the new, the public and the private, the visitor and the local. This pursuit is manifested in the planning of the hotel’s restaurant, which is an extension of the street all the way into the inner courtyard, so that the public realm penetrates deeply into the core of the private sphere. In essence the restaurant is now between the public pavement and the private courtyard. Cuts in the restaurant’s ceiling allow occupants of the guest rooms above to participate peripherally in the lively activity among the diners below. The seemingly mispositioned windows throughout (such as the one above the main reception in the lobby), rooms with louvres clad in reflective stainless steel, and unexpected circulation paths, all offer the constant thrill of a stolen view and a wayward glimpse. The three existing concrete stairways were purposefully kept, and an atrium with skylight above which also acts as part of the roof bar separates the hotel rooms and the corridor. This vertical in-between sectional space allows both physical and visual connection for guests to interact with one another like they would in an alleyway in the city.

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, Waterhouse at South Bund, Shanghai, China, 2010 Located in Shanghai’s South Bund District, facing the Huangpu River, the Waterhouse is a four-storey, 19-room boutique hotel designed by Neri&Hu dealing with old and new. A reflection of life within this community.

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The practice carefully peeled back the layers of finishes to uncover the lives and narratives hidden within each imperfection, thus excavating memories that will bring the most intimate moments of inhabitation into the public light Surprisingly placed windows, cleverly situated reflective surfaces and unexpected circulation routes offer the intrigue of stolen glimpses.

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Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, Waterhouse at South Bund, Shanghai, China, 2010 Section drawing showing the vertical relationship between public restaurant and private hotel rooms.

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In its very conception, the Waterhouse seeks to question the typology of a hotel – how to interpret notions of ‘home’ and domesticity in a foreign environment, and how to give meaning to a traveller’s experience. To accomplish this, Neri&Hu drew from the rich experience of a typical Shanghai longtang, where everyday living is full of discoveries and surprises, and where the concept of true privacy does not exist. By challenging the most basic rituals of daily life and transforming their familiarity into something wholly unpredictable, such as presenting bathing in a glass box, the practice amplified the constant play between the notions of comfort and discomfort. These unexpected moments are intended to heighten the guest’s emotional journey. The graphic wall markings throughout the hotel spaces evoke and suggest the complexity of the traveller’s psychological states – longing and exhilaration, uncertainty and desire, discomfort and relief – while the distinct rawness of the material palette establishes an intense sense of time, place and being.

The graphic wall markings throughout the hotel spaces evoke and suggest the complexity of the traveller’s psychological states

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Mediated Third Space For the most recently completed project, the Nantou City Guesthouse (2021), Neri&Hu was presented with a site in Nantou – the old city at the heart of Shenzhen – which has evolved from a well-heeled ancient capital to the overcrowded inner city it is now. Visitors today are immediately immersed in the tightly knit alleys, plazas and dead-ends, where residents, street vendors, unsupervised children and nomads alike roam. Inspired by the vibrant milieu of the alleyways, the project seeks to reflect on the cultural heritage of the mundane. Scenes of the everyday – people, objects and their settings – are the primary source material for the design. To celebrate life in the urban village, the existing structure was cut into as a massing strategy, allowing such ‘urban incisions’ to foster a new public realm on the inside of the previously private apartment block. At the same time, the excavation revealed the many material layers and building structures as if at an archaeological site, only to allow new interventions to instigate unexpected dialogues between the past and the present.

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Like the bustling scenes in the alleyways below, the roofscape across the Nantou urban village has a life of its own, with makeshift gardens and vegetable farms popping up along the jagged skyline. To reframe views of this ever-evolving village, a flat floating roof is installed to create a dramatic panorama of the street life below, and a new public ground above. Housing public spaces and service functions, the metallic monoliths of the rooftop play on vernacular add-ons, which are much sought after by space-starved attic-level residents.  To engage with the uniquely organic circulation that is quintessential to Nantou’s urban fabric, the guesthouse’s access and public realms are designed to be woven back into the network of intricate alleyways found on site. The new entrance to the guesthouse is created by extending a side street directly into the heart of the building, as if to invite neighbours and friends into one’s private home.  Old and new are juxtaposed throughout the building to celebrate ruins. Once the visitor arrives, the public gesture of opening the building up along the urban axis is turned upwards.

An existing stairwell that had previously connected all nine tenement floors was cut open and expanded to create a new vertical courtyard. Natural elements are allowed to pass through from the open façades to the side and a lightwell above. A new metal stair suspended within the vertical courtyard takes the visitor on a journey to the guest rooms on the mid-levels, and finally to the public rooftop gardens. To cut does not simply connote destruction, but also creation, in this case of spaces and meanings. By absorbing the urbanity into the building, this hotel in turn makes its private history legible and becomes fully ingrained in the ebb and flow of the city. In that transformation, the self-healing incision opens a new portal, as much into the past as into the mundane yet singular present.

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, Nantou City Guesthouse, Shenzhen, China, 2021 opposite: Nantou City Guesthouse sitting in the urban village, or cheng-zhong-cun, of Shenzhen. It is a phenomenon where the remnants of pre-industrial settlements are nestled amidst a seemingly modern metropolis. above: The hybridity of old and new juxtaposed to celebrate life in the urban village.

Liminality as Spatial Protagonist In both projects, the liminal spaces have the primary characteristics of being in-between. They sometimes connect and sometimes separate, but in most cases they are distinct spaces in themselves. In Waterhouse, it is the restaurant, the corridors, the stainless-steel-clad louvres and the three-storey lightwell with the existing stairways that bring life to a rather ordinary hotel. With Nantou, it is the elevated rooftop, the new metal stair suspended within the vertical courtyard, and the multiple openings throughout the building that connect the hotel back to the city. Spatially these liminal volumes are ambiguous, and yet they possess many possibilities where the realms of the conscious and the unconscious find common ground. The creation of these spaces in architecture where programmes and spatial constructs are reconsidered, intermingled and reassembled based on a narrative connected to the local context brings about new potentials. These threshold spaces are no longer just transitory connectors and separators but rather a new spatial entity that brings another dimension to the entire spatial configuration of the project. Typologically, these threshold spaces challenge the typical notion of how a hotel should be designed. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light the need for a clear separation between public and private as well as inside and outside. The mandatory confinement within our private space has created an environment for our human desire for more public or semipublic spaces. Images of balconies and decks filled with people, finding comfort in the idea of the community, reinforces the need for these liminal spaces in our urban environments. It is precisely in this jian – a gap, a pause, a space between two spaces – that one can create new zones with spatial meaning and construct. If taken seriously in architectural discourse, threshold spaces – be they defined as liminal, in-between or the third space – can be the main protagonist of space making and typological transformation. 1

Notes 1. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, tr Christopher L Chiappari and Silvia L Lopez, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1995. 2. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics (London), 2nd edn, 1994. Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 86–7, 90–1 © Pedro Pegenaute; p 88 © Kris Provoost; p 89 © Haifeng Xu; pp 92–3 © Neri&Hu Design and Research Office; pp 94–5 Chen Hao

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AS IF WITHOUT TIME

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Matthias Bärmann

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Opytnoe Pole series, Kazakhstan, 2012 ‘The buildings you see in these images were specifically designed to be exposed to nuclear explosions so that scientists could measure the destructive impact of their latest armaments.’

‘They were built in 1949, four years after Hiroshima, when the Soviet Union was testing its first atomic bombs.’

THE NUCLEAR TWILIGHT ZONE

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In the post-nuclear explosion test zone of Opytnoe Pole in eastern Kazakhstan, light seems to have beaten darkness. Yet it is an eerie light, bland and cast over a ubiquitously barren landscape devoid of animals and humanity. Contemporary art curator Matthias Bärmann describes the extraordinary and disturbing history of the site that has created the stark vistas and bleached structures in the work of photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. People are seldom to be seen in Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s photographs. But the traces of human habitation and life are, left behind by people of various cultures at various times: hermitages in the Pyrenees, meditation cells carved into cliffs by early Christian monks, stations of the Hejaz railway or, in an expression of extreme minimalism, bus stops in Armenia. Places of shelter; of waiting for a long or short period of time. Layers upon layers of time are formed by the alternation of continuity and transience; only the last, the immediate present, is visible. ‘Between then and 1963 there were 124 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests; after that another 350 nuclear devices were detonated underground.’

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What We Know No other place in the world has seen more nuclear explosions than the Semipalatinsk (now Semey) Test Site. This area of 18,000 square kilometres (7,000 square miles) of steppe in the

vast expanses of eastern Kazakhstan is also called ‘the Polygon’ because of its geometric shape on the map. In the northern half of the Polygon is an area called Opytnoe Pole, which simply means ‘experimental field’. This is where the Soviet Union detonated 116 nuclear warheads in the open atmosphere between 1949 and 1963. And this is the area Ursula SchulzDornburg photographed in 2012. Between 1963 and 1989, 340 more nuclear tests took place at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, this time underground, bringing the total to 456 nuclear tests, with an estimated total equivalent explosive force of 2,500 Hiroshima bombings. At the time of the atmospheric tests, several thousand cattle herders and nomads lived in the immediate vicinity of the test site. They, as well as the people living in the nearby towns of Kurchatov and Semipalatinsk, were turned into

experimental subjects when the test area was officially declared uninhabited by the government before detonations began. The explosion of the first bomb on 29 August 1949 killed all 1,538 animals that had been locked in cages nearby to test the effects of pressure, heat and radiation. In the region, which is still contaminated today, cereals and vegetables are grown, fish are taken from radioactively contaminated lakes, and the water is drunk. The bodies of all living organisms are contaminated, their genetic material damaged by radioactive fission products such as iodine 131, caesium 137 and strontium 90. In a special room at the Anatomical Institute of Semey University, foetuses showing unimaginable deformities, illustrating the effects of the Polygon’s radioactive fallout, are preserved in glass cylinders filled with formalin.

‘In 1991 the Russians left.’

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What We See In the vast expanse of the Kazakh steppe lie architectonic structures made of concrete, seemingly scattered at random. Towers, cubes, ramps. Each ancient-looking ruin stands on its own, not connected – or perhaps no longer connected – to the others by paths or roads. Individual walls have openings, presumably where measuring instruments were placed. The surfaces of these structures are scarred, as is the earth of the steppe, which is littered with numerous troughlike depressions. Shattered concrete slabs in the ground indicate the foundations of earlier structures that have since disappeared. We know the tower-like structures, arranged in lines at regular intervals, were supports for instruments used to measure the energy of the explosion at various distances from the point of detonation. The cube-shaped structures were bunkers from which the thermonuclear blasts and the devastation they caused were observed. The ramps were access roads to long-defunct bridges over which presumably no car was ever driven, over which no human being ever walked. A little further on there is even a complete metro station, sunk deep into the earth. For this question, too, obviously had to be answered: what happens to a bridge, what happens to a metro station, in the immediate vicinity of an atomic explosion? None of these buildings were ever places of life and habitation; they were never intended to be. Their sole purpose was to visualise and record destruction, to illustrate the effects of processes such as nuclear fusion that in the natural world take place inside suns, not on planets such as our Earth.

‘Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union these facilities have been heavily plundered, leaving only the naked structures.’

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The soil of the steppe looks as if it has been shattered by tremendous hammer blows. One does not need to know about the invisible dangers, such as the radiation that permeates everything, to intuitively comprehend: this thoroughly uncanny place is one of the darkest on earth. Nevertheless, Schulz-Dornburg’s photographs emanate light. They radiate a uniform white light that does not seem to come from any specific source. This light, which is both bright and diffuse, an almost empty light, seems to come primarily from the sky, which appears without depth, two-dimensional, flat, like a tautly stretched cloth. One does not necessarily need to have seen photographs of the nuclear explosions themselves. Their intense, electromagnetic flash resonates in the form of this completely shadowless light, which is rooted in the total transformation of matter into energy. ‘You can’t describe this light, only from very far away.’1 These images of light let us see, perhaps even sense, what we know. Much more than documentation; they are evocations.

‘So these buildings, standing around in that highly polluted, radioactive landscape, have taken on that surreal look and exude a unique potency of their own.’

The White Light The space of Schulz-Dornburg's Opytnoe Pole series is permeated by this white light, which seems to radiate both from everywhere and nowhere. A mysterium tremendum that may be rooted in the fact that both visible light and radioactive radiation belong to the same electromagnetic spectrum – their difference consists only in a shift of frequencies and wavelengths. The transgressive character of this light, which blurs and transcends the boundaries of human sensory perception, is described by Don DeLillo in a passage from his great novel Underworld (2003). An American plane has taken off, and a thermonuclear bomb is to be detonated below it on the ground in order to test the effect of the explosion on the crew: ‘“Three, two, one.” Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that’s like the touch of God. And Louis can see the bones in his hands through his closed eyes, through the thick pillow he’s got jammed in his face. I move my head, there’s whole skeletons dancing in the flash. The navigator, the instructor-navigator, the sad-ass gunner. We are dead men flying.’2

With the nuclear flash that reverberates in the Opytnoe Pole photographs, the millennia-old discussions about the relationship between dark and light seem to have come to an end; light has conclusively superseded darkness. There is no longer an inbetween area, a zone of shadow, of transitions – and thus no area of life. Light has become an absolute. After the explosions of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945 mysterious white spots were found on the asphalt in the centre of the two cities. They would eventually be identified as shadows of people who had been instantly incinerated in the atomic glow: the outlines of their bodies. White shadows. The ultra-hard echoes of light of nuclear explosions, which, as the photographs show, still completely impregnate the steppe, the architecture, the atmosphere and the sky of the test area decades later, like a visual white noise, make the victory of light over darkness final. The light has taken possession of the dark. The suspicion remains that this violent usurpation has its consequences, in the sense that what is repressed – the darkness – gradually transforms itself into the aggressor, imperceptibly at first, entering into the other. In any case, it is striking that one of the most frequent terms used to describe the Semipalatinsk Test Site is ‘dark’. Schulz-Dornburg writes: ‘This space is light – but one’s own perception: dark.’3 The test site was officially closed on 29 August 1991 by Nursultan Nazarbayev, then President of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Radioactively contaminated metal residues were sealed in specially constructed tunnels, but were soon removed by illegal traders and sold on – across the border to China, to the world.

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Light and Dark Schulz-Dornburg is one of the great photographers of our time. Over a period of more than 40 years, countless journeys – not infrequently involving great hardship and even danger – have taken her to the places she has given a voice to, and questioned, in her work. These are frequently in the Middle and Far East: in Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, Yemen, Nepal, Laos, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. She has always been particularly interested in Russia, especially in Leningrad/St Petersburg and former republics of the Soviet Union, such as Armenia, the border region between Georgia and Azerbaijan and, eventually, Kazakhstan. Her interest is politically and historically oriented and firmly committed to interrogating the human condition: the landscapes shaped by history, the libraries and archives, the abandoned monasteries and hermit chapels, the bus stops or escalators in a metro station. Schulz-Dornburg’s artistic work manifests itself in series of black-and-white photographs that are both documentary and conceptual in character, within which two important thematic categories become clear: time – passing or standing still – in stratified layers and decipherable from vestigial traces, and architecture in the form of places of shelter and human habitation on earth.4

‘Here, too, where massive destruction seems to have created a zone “without time”, there are of course still layers of time that should not be forgotten by anyone visiting that site or contemplating the images.’

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Twenty years before photographing the Opytnoe Pole series, she devoted herself to interiors in her extensive 1991–92 series Sonnenstand (Solar Position).5 She documented the daylight that entered the interiors of small, remote and abandoned hermit chapels in the Pyrenees, on different days of the year and at different times of day. The light that penetrates through narrow openings travels through the dark interiors over a period of time. The course of the days and the seasons is reflected inside the chapels in wandering configurations of light. The space is expanded by the dimension of time. A rhythmically structured time-space unfolds in the viewer’s perception, within which the rhythms of the sun’s passage converge with the rhythms of human life – macrocosm and microcosm. The sunlight appears in the form of bright shining rays that pierce the darkness of the interiors. And between light and dark lies another, extensive area that mediates between the two: that of reflected light, which settles in an infinite number of intermediate stages on the stone surfaces of the chapels’ interiors. An inconclusive play of darkness, light and graduated shadow zones unfolds, in which light and dark continually change and thus alternately bring each other into being. The light does not extinguish its opponent here, but moves together with the dark in a living process. As a result of this movement, space becomes vivid as a plastic dimension in constant flux, and so does time in the rhythms of the successive constellations of light, dark and shadow. These are movements of life, as Jun’ichiro¯ Tanizaki describes them in his famous treatise In Praise of Shadows (1933) as characteristic of the traditional cultures of East Asia: ‘And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else.’6

‘In my most pessimistic moments it seems to me that this is what our world could look like one day to someone gazing back at it.’ Excerpts from conversations between Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Julian Heynen in ‘The Verticals of Time’, December 2017 and January 2018: https://www. schulz-dornburg.com/en/opytnoepole-chagan.

The opaque, shadowless white light above the nuclear test site in Kazakhstan is diametrically opposed to these living shadowplays. What might have prompted Schulz-Dornburg to visit the former nuclear test site of Semipalatinsk in the Kazakh Steppe? She herself sees points of connection to her earlier work, but also the great negation that has taken shape in Opytnoe Pole: ‘After the end of the Soviet Union, a lot of the facilities were looted, so the bare structures remain. The buildings take on a surreal quality, and thus possess a special power as they stand scattered in the radioactively contaminated landscape. Even here, where everything seems to be “as if without time” due to the enormous destruction, there are of course different layers of time that one should take into account when one is there or sees the pictures. But when I’m feeling completely pessimistic, for me this place is also an image of how the earth as a whole could be at some point when we look back at it.’7 At the end of her work in Opytnoe Pole, Schulz-Dornburg pressed the camera cover onto the lens and closed the Hasselblad in its black case. A final gesture. 1 Translated from German by Eva Menuhin

Notes 1. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg in an email to the author, 9 July 2022. 2. Don DeLillo, Underworld, Scribner (New York), 2003, p 613. 3. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg in an email to the author, 10 July 2022. 4. See Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Huts, Temples, Castles, Mack (London), 2022. 5. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Sonnenstand – Acht Kalenderbauten auf dem Weg nach Santiago de Compostela, Galerie Wolfgang Wittrock/DuMont (Düsseldorf/Cologne), 1992. See also www.schulzdornburg.com/en/sonnenstand 6. Jun’ichiro¯ Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows [1933], tr Thomas J Harper and Edward G Seidensticker, Leete’s Island Books (Stony Creek, CT), 1977, p 18. 7. ‘The Verticals of Time’, Opytnoe Pole/Chagan, Kazakhstan, 2012: from conversations between Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Julian Heynen in December 2017 and January 2018: www.schulzdornburg.com/opytnoe-pole-chagan.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

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The X-Ray and Its Embodied Space 104

Paul O Robinson

Paul O Robinson, Homage to ‘Ode to Terminus’, 2020 Ode to Terminus refers to the poem by WH Auden penned during May 1968. For this diptych – only the left-hand panel of which is shown here – the original radiograph was imaged in correspondence with Bernardi Roig’s An Illuminated Head For Blinky P, installed in the ancillary spaces of Venice’s Palazzo Fortuny during the 2017 exhibition ‘Intuition’.

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At the dawn of the 20th century, the development of the X-ray and new-found visions of the interior of bodies inspired artists including Marcel Duchamp. Visual artist and architect Paul O Robinson explores these ‘bones and organs’ within contemporary contexts, artistically exploiting the shadowy, invisible world of interiority, visible exterior form and the uncanny correspondence between them through transformative spatial and material manifestations. And are we here, perhaps, merely to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jar, fruit tree, window – at most, pillar, tower? But to say them, you understand – to say them in such a way that even the things themselves never hoped to exist so intensely. — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, 19221 This article emerges from a body of work that uses forensic X-ray technology to induce correspondences between spaces, their constituent artefacts and their entwined narrative structures. The enfoldment of indexical castings (the X-ray image) with narratives derived from selected contexts initiates manifold processual modes leading to the manifestation of embodied forms. The work also explores a personal resistance against the prevalent tendency to exclude narrative content from the syntax of architectural/visual form. The title is loosely derived from construed readings concerning the nature of things in themselves as presented in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781): the readings, readings against the work, and those confronting it, maintain a presence within both constructs and productional processes.2 The work’s processual trajectory and outcomes do not necessarily presume to reveal an object’s thingness outside of self-referential processes; if anything, they proffer potential disruptions in assumed hierarchical directives towards the assessment – the reading of – the object at hand (with a nod towards circular processes). Notions of things in themselves gradually emerged through process rather than arriving as an a-priori preface to the work.

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A Question of Content At the time this work began, I was revisiting the marginalia in two books by Joseph Brodsky: Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)3 and his Venetian memoir Watermark (1992). Watermark awakened latent questions regarding hierarchical assessments of surface and its connection to generative content (a core architectural problem), where he alludes to content’s spuriousness and notes that ‘Surfaces – which is what the eye registers first – are often more telling than their contents, which are provisional by definition, except, of course, in the afterlife’; 4 and passages from Less Than One augmented a desire to integrate narrative content within the work’s productional processes, particularly elucidated in Brodsky’s description of a late-night-walk along the Neva River in St Petersburg, where he effectively renders surfaces – in this instance façades – a palimpsestic narrative excavated by his lucid, history-fuelled imagination. One can logically conclude that Brodsky’s notion of afterlife is connected to the corporeal finiteness of death, but his usage remains curious, as the finite could potentially close the door leading to any reassessment of content as a harbinger of origins and/or analogy, the very thing he addresses – the excavation of embedded origins – in Less Than One. For Brodsky, ‘after-life’ presciently presupposes those metaphors prompting liminal transferences, and as such, at least in terms of surface’s provisional relation to content, he repositions the ‘after’ as an ontological preface forecasting the imagination’s penetration of the finite, where the conventional modes of visual archaeology are necessarily challenged and reordered.

Paul O Robinson, Homage to Angelus Novus, 2017 One panel of a diptych comprising a composite X-ray of a wooden figure over a hybrid oil painting. Due to variations in material density, the internal armature is visually located in the foreground, and the outer figure in the background. The figure’s projection – being pushed forward into the future while facing the past (staring at the observer) – is analogous to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus, found in the ninth thesis of his 1940 essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.

His words level a critique of content as the sole arbiter of truth and hence they question the efficacy of surface’s – and form’s – perceived morphology; as Brodsky alludes, one tends to rely on the linear myopia of the eye’s expertise – its frontality – to order and then recount the layers of experience. Brodsky’s peripatetical descriptions, however, are analogical, oblique, multifarious and suggest a less hierarchical arrangement of amalgamates serving to animate surface’s provisional relation to content: those things less overt and marginal, even things ‘unseen’ and dependent on the poet’s transformative prowess of analogy to shape surface. The poet’s penetrative voice emerges as a catalyst to contemplate alternative tools for exploring the ways and means that entwine narrative content with its artefactual evidence – key constituents in the material formation of this work. The undercurrent of Brodsky’s passages harbours a resonant spirit of melancholy, a kind of betwixt-and-between melancholy that buoys a practice questioning formalism’s hubris and power of persuasion. Penumbral Form X-ray is there only momentarily to distance the reality of the object. The eidetic intensity of the work is not because of a phenomenological reduction, bracketing, that yields essences. It is there because the meticulous calibrations of each iteration altogether form a space of ordering that consciously discontinues the object while constantly referring back to it. — Levent Kara, ‘Not from Scratch, the Sweet Moment of Discontinuity’, 20155

Penumbral space is an inherent byproduct within the processes leading to both two- and three-dimensional works; perhaps by technical default, it is an intrinsic referent that interstitially holds – discontinuing and referring back to – space, and has a syntactical role in the narration of sitespecific installations. Penumbra is conventionally understood as the luminous aura formed at the boundaries of the umbra – the form of absolute darkness – as projected by a source or sources; conversely, penumbra, as considered in the work, is not formed by boundaries, but rather via an indexing of electromagnetic energy – the radiant source – passing within and through the form of matter. Radiographic penumbrae are visual artefacts shaped by the correspondences between variations of content, and as such this array of captured penumbral evidence can be reformed by alternative, at times anonymous, contextual narratives. The X-ray Image, Form and Resistance An X-ray image is a visual form of resistance that becomes manifest by way of the focused projection of photons upon an object whose shape and thickness determine a visual presence of manifold resistances. One can consider the X-ray image an indexical artefact of entwined causal resistances. The X-ray is a controllable yet violent interloper. As the pulsating radioactive particles pass through a material, the material’s molecular structure resists the onslaught; cellular associations are then shuffled and, depending on compositional form and density, the traversing photons cast a gradated history of its path of least resistance upon sensitised film or directly, through digital mediums, as an image.

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The X-ray beam is conical; the resulting image can be construed as an infinite series of oblique spatial sections; and the broader the conical projection (as determined by the X-ray source’s power and distance from the object),6 the more distorted the image will be. In effect, the X-ray image is a series of splayed sectional slices through all the matter in the beam’s path. The image is not a visual discourse on flatness; rather, it is a layered topography, a shadowy representation of interiority recomposed as surface – a spatial casting of the material content that animates surface. The penumbral interstice between light and dark, shadow and surface is content; content forcibly sliced from the superficies defining an object’s protective carapace: content transposed and reformed by way of causal resistances, form reforming form, the mould to the moulded – betwixt. In this sense the X-ray image presents a strange form of stereotomic transference, yet rather than borne via linear projection – lines geometrically projected upon surfaces – the invisible beam proffers an energy that embodies the strengths, weaknesses, fissures, breakages and blockages within the object. The X-ray beam’s terminus does not present a complete narrative; it projects an incomplete, at times inexplicable aura in the form of an image as embodied content. It offers only hints to its origins, which in turn incites transmogrifications and the intercourse of the spurious with the real; there is a deep quietude harbouring the potential for speculative appropriations and the machinations of abstraction. Penetrative incisions upon any surface, any body, are a type of violation, a violation of privacy, ownership, authorship and intentions – not only physical, but those incisional glances proffered by the focused voyeurism of the detached eye in want of something more.

Paul O Robinson, Untitled Penumbrae, 2017 The X-ray was imaged in correspondence with Claudine Drai’s Untitled, 2016, during the 2017 exhibition ‘Intuition’ at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy.

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Paul O Robinson, Fortuny Wall Squint, X-Ray sequence, 2018/2022 Radiographs of settlement fissures in stone walls separating private and public spaces in Venice's Palazzo Fortuny. ‘Squint’ is the colloquial for hagioscope – typically an oblique splayed opening/incision in the wall (interior or exterior) of a church enabling worshippers to view the altar (from hagio (saint) + scope (viewing instrument)).

Paul O Robinson, Squint Stele, ‘Form of Resistance’ exhibition, Galerija Krško, Krško, Slovenia, 2022 Made of Maiella stone and cold-rolled steel, Squint Stele is a material translation of Fortuny Wall Squint. The installation image shows its vertical correspondence with the ceiling at the Galerija Krško – the 18th-century former Church of the Holy Spirit in Krško, Slovenia, which was deconsecrated shortly before the Second World War.

Embodiments [In the work] we witness the hopeful unveiling of meaning for embodied sight, beyond the purely retinal: the moment depth becomes surface, … like the two sides of the penumbra that many centuries ago the insightful Giordano Bruno suggested was the true nature of everything that is, without ever becoming simply ‘light’ or ‘shadow’. — Alberto Pérez-Gómez, in ‘Site Castings: Entwinements in Palazzo Fortuny’, 20197 In the above, two-sidedness implies that neither side can manifest as a totality, as each side is generatively codependent on the correspondence between each other and therefore forms a material/immaterial interstice held in a constant state of becoming. Penumbra is the embodied form of this correspondence, of potentiality, of becoming, and via this ‘neither/or’ condition the thing – that is – in itself unfolds into the vastness of the unknowable and within the realm of poesies. And herein lies the ephemeral space born of anticipation. Like that of the uncertainty felt while waiting for the dreamed response from a loved one, time is a conditional factor within the liminal threshold of becoming that introduces experience to the imagination. Each installation emerges from the material transformation of evidence – a museum, an artefact, a crime scene, a house … a room – initiated by forensic X-ray documentation. The X-ray is the processual point of departure and initiates an unscripted material exploration defining the tectonic language of embodied forms. The works are spatially interconnected by the syntactical relationship between the subject space, its artefacts and narrative content, where the radiographic inversion of surface (countenance) and subsurface (content) construes the latent currency of evidence and unwittingly addresses the oft-fraught processes of abstraction and memorialisation – the after-life.

Paul O Robinson, Unpropped, A Book for R Serra, page 4 of 10, 2019 X-ray of a layered encaustic oil painting over an original X-ray used to initiate processes leading to three-dimensional enfolded reliquaries.

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Paul O Robinson, ‘Form of Resistance’ exhibition, Galerija Krško, Krško, Slovenia, 2022 below: Exhibition view showing layered correspondences between original X-Rays, enfolded reliquaries and the gallery space.

Paul O Robinson with Maja Licul, ‘Artifacts of Evidence’ exhibition, Galerija Kresija, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2022 above: Partial installation view showing pieces from work done in the house and atelier of Jože Plecˇnik, in particular the enfolded reliquary Recumbent (2015/2022) – made of high-density mould foam, cold-rolled steel and oak and measuring 180 by 100 by 350 centimetres (71 by 39 by 138 inches).

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The multivalent pieces – radiographs, paintings, talismanic sculptures – are interdependent enfolded amalgams in constant correspondence with each other and where one’s experience of the work is defined through obliquely layered associations. The organisation of each installation is formed by the parallactic relationship between the works and the spaces that hold them. The space not only participates in the morphological character of the installation, but in many cases also becomes part of the work’s processual narrative – its making. The space is considered an embodied form within which the preternatural pieces conjoin; it is not thought of separately or a place where objects are ‘brought to’, but as an interlocutor, where the movement of the observer animates reformed narrative structures as an entwined haptic experience. There are many influences that reach as deeply into the body of this work as the writings of Brodsky, and I could have picked any one of them to begin this essay, in particular the French poet and translator Michel Deguy and his Recumbents (2005);8 Marco Frascari and his Monsters of Architecture (1991);9 the Austrian architect and artist Walter Pichler with his houses; or the architect, artist and educator John Hejduk, who reinforced the potential for narrative as a harbinger of form and structure. These influences are not mentioned as a post-facto courtesy; their imaginations contemporaneously encircle and permeate the work while continuing to induce fundamental questions regarding the entwinements through which art and architecture emerge. 1

The space not only participates in the morphological character of the installation, but in many cases also becomes part of the work’s processual narrative – its making

Notes 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Elegy Nine’ [1922], in The Duino Elegies, tr Gary Miranda, Tavern Books (Portland, OR), 2013. 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781], tr Paul Guyer and Allen W Wood, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1998. 3. Joseph Brodsky, ‘Less Than One’, in Less Than One: Selected Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, pp 4 and 5. 4. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York), 1992, p 21. 5. Levent Kara, ‘Not from Scratch, the Sweet Moment of Discontinuity’, in Paul O Robinson – Form of Absence: Radiographs|Paintings|Reliquaries, Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida Tampa (Tampa, FL), 2015, pp 75–7. 6. See ‘XR200’ product page on Golden Engineering website: www.goldenengineering.com/products/xr200/. 7. Alberto Pérez-Gómez in ‘Site Castings: Entwinements in Palazzo Fortuny’, Vesper: No 1 Supervenice, Autumn/ Winter 2019, p 29. 8. Michel Deguy, Recumbents, tr Wilson Baldridge, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2005. 9. Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory, Rowman & Littlefield (Savage, MD), 1991.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Paul O Robinson

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Antonella Soldaini

Projecting the Indeterminate and Enigmatic The Painting of Marco Tirelli

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Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2003 Here, Tirelli conjures a sense of spatial depth and inside and outside. The graduated suggestion of light creates for the viewer the notion of varying degrees of architectural enclosure.

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Curator Antonella Soldaini describes the work of Italian artist Marco Tirelli. His enigmatic spatial speculations force us to abandon our usual optical protocols of assessing art, instead bidding us to enter a space of indeterminacy. Our unfamiliarity with the material presence in the work is conducted by the artist’s mastery of light, shadow and penumbra, producing a sense of mystery and infinity.

Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2010 Tirelli’s work straddles the interstitial world between the abstract and the figurative. It can be viewed as a minimalist composition, but equally as a three-dimensional form in space, in this case a plinth placed in a corner of a room.

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Spaces located in penumbra exert a fascination. The Mexican architect Luis Barragán would come to define the need for penumbra as the characteristic element of an architectonic composition. And in the case of Marco Tirelli, the contemporary Roman artist whose work has been evolving since the mid-1970s, the penumbra within his pictorial world assumes a special importance. In his paintings, this specific quality of light, which characterises the spaces he portrays and within which the various objects he depicts are immersed, contributes to creating an effect of temporal suspension in which objects – even the simplest ones such as a sphere, a polyhedron, an alembic, a spiral staircase or a lamp – assume an enigmatic and perturbing aspect precisely because they find themselves in this state of semi-darkness. Guido Ceronetti, one of Italy’s leading intellectuals and poets, speaking of his own life, describes it as a ‘shadowed life’: ‘Certain lives have lain entirely within the sign of penumbra (Kavafi’s, my own perhaps, the month of Elùl, the astrological sign Virgo. … The line of shadow in The Shadow Line (1915), the novella by Joseph Conrad, is an intangible instant of penumbra that refers to the transition between boyhood and manhood; the traditional Japanese house about which Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki has enlightened us in his 1933 book In Praise of Shadows is completely in penumbra.’1 For Ceronetti, penumbra represents the counterpart of light and represents a mental zone where one can take refuge, find rest, focus and inspiration.

Tirelli’s interest in the specific effect created at the moment of transition from light to shadow – the word ‘penumbra’ was coined in 1604 by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, from Modern Latin paene ‘almost’ + umbra ‘shadow’ – derives from the symbolic implications this physical phenomenon carries and the poetic references implicit in its representation. Penumbra is a quality of light that has always attracted painters, from Caravaggio to Georges de La Tour, to Caspar David Friedrich and Odilon Redon. In Friedrich’s landscape paintings, such as Cross on the Mountain (1807–08) or The Chalk Cliffs of Rügen (1818), he frequently shrouds a portion of the landscape he portrays in penumbra, within which the only human presence populating the scene can be found. The penumbra both conveys and alludes to the human state of mind, and the sense of loneliness and desolation, by which these figures seem to be pervaded when confronted with the natural scenery before them, and which is, by contrast, strongly illuminated. In several of his self-portraits, such as Self Portrait (1880), Redon, one of Symbolism’s greatest masters, portrays himself with his face half-hidden in penumbra. The semishadowed zone is representative, in his case, of the part of reality that is less visible, different, intimate and therefore allegorical of a deeper, personal and less easily shared dimension of existence. A Special Garden Tirelli spent his childhood in the Villa Mariani (Otto Mariani,1905), during the time his parents lived at the Swiss Institute of Rome, and his first conscious explorations of his surrounding environment took place in solitude; the artist was born in the Institute’s gardens. His visual approach and subsequent speculative apprenticeship originate from the simple yet simultaneously infinitely extraordinary and mysterious reality represented by that green space located far from the noise of the city, where the intensity of the morning light fades into the ever-shifting penumbra of twilight: ‘Already as a child I had great passions: chemistry, mechanics and biology, and at the same time I was drawn to religion, to mysticism and ritual … It was a mystical feeling of attraction to mystery in all its manifestations. It was a way of examining the world in all its aspects, that is from both the rational and scientific viewpoint and the metaphysical one. I was as interested in the phenomena of the visible world as I was in those of the invisible one.’2 Right from the start, beginning with these early and emblematic steps, Tirelli reveals a dual perspective that will remain a personal constant that distinguishes his work: if, on the one hand, there is an obvious drive towards rational investigation and a scientific approach in order to grasp the meaning of things, on the other hand the artist indulges the desire to cross beyond the threshold of immediate observation to transcend their superficial aspect in the name of freedom of the imagination. The penumbra in his paintings belongs to the realm of the possible, the unexpected and the recondite, which he finds just as intriguing as the more easily decipherable

Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2010 There is a delicacy in Tirelli’s work that gives his images a tender, momentary equilibrium, but at any moment one feels that with the slight movement of light they could dissolve into nothingness.

aspect of events driving his exploration in their direction. The entire existential problem that characterises Tirelli’s work, although contained and supported by a rigorous pictorial process, is contained in the dialectic between the concrete and the spiritual, the particular and the universal, the contingent and the immutable. During this exploration – which reveals a highly speculative attitude towards light – light, shadow and penumbra play an essential role. Taking advantage of the particular quality inherent in places that lie in penumbra, and their ability to evoke resonances in the sensibility of the observer, Tirelli compels us to enter an unfamiliar space and time, in which the mode of learning we are accustomed to exercising in the act of observing a painting must be abandoned: ‘I work on revelation, appearance and the other, on the visible and the invisible, light and shade, the mystery of the world: yes, of the whole world in all its manifestations. I want to find traces of infinity in every single thing, process or phenomenon that surrounds me or acts in me.’3 Thanks to the penumbra, the geometric forms the artist frequently portrays, while remaining within the two-dimensionality of the pictorial surface, acquire a thickness – a presence – and thus escape ‘toward the infinite, knowing that they could perish any second, swallowed by the darkness’.4

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From the Architectural Dimension to the Metaphysical It has often been said about Tirelli’s painting that it shares with pointillism the technique of using infinitesimally small touches of colour to achieve figuration. One example is Untitled (1992), a painting in which the transition from light to penumbra, to shadow and then darkness is masterfully rendered. By making use of this technique to create the effect of three-dimensionality, the artist has managed to create the impression that we are standing in front of a portion of a sphere partially illuminated by a light source that appears to come from our direction. At the same time, the space created in this work remains impenetrable, abstract and intangible. The object within seems as if it is immobilised in a dreamlike dimension, and its elusiveness allows us to open ourselves to multiple hypotheses of meaning, for example finding ourselves in front of a wandering planet within the cosmic darkness. The refusal to accept an unambiguous reading of the meaning of things in favour of a more complex and less one-dimensional existential vision of reality lies at the heart of Tirelli's artistic vision. Hence his interest in artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and metaphysics in general, and also in certain individuals in the world of utopian and visionary architecture such as the French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, with whom Tirelli finds points of affinity through that sense of suspension and the rarefied atmosphere obtained by means of the strong juxtaposition of full and empty volumes, of areas of light, shadow and penumbra, that can be found in their work.

Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 1992 The use of varying degrees of shadow can imply a curved surface. The image here could be a planetary horizon or, seen at a smaller scale, a finely honed piece of marble.

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Dwelling on his relationship with architecture, Tirelli speaks of the ‘mystery’ factor as an essential quality that drew him to the discipline: ‘Contrary to 20-century aspirations of bringing painting to the space of architecture I intend to bring mystery. From architecture to painting. To sublimate physical places into metaphysical “atmospheres”.’5 Closely related to architecture and the dialogue between light, shadow and penumbra is a series of works Tirelli created between 2003 and 2012. In Untitled (2012), the illusion of standing in front of a door-cum-threshold that divides the space by means of its vertical shape outlines the silhouette of a wall. Here, the subtle shades of light amplify our predisposition to trace an image, to create a narrative that will, however, always remain within the realm of supposition. The scene in Untitled (2003), painted a few years earlier, is tinged with a sinister atmosphere: a central opening is outlined, from which a beam of light is emitted that goes on to die in the space before it. The lower portion of the space appears sunken in penumbra while the upper portion is being sucked into darkness. However, it is in another painting, Untitled (2020), that the relationship between light, penumbra and shadow becomes the real subject of the work. What we see is an enclosed space, within which a luminous box is outlined on the back wall from which a strong light radiates. However, this is interrupted by a black square element that appears in the centre of the composition and divides the space into two zones, one of which is illuminated and one in half-light. The play of projections refers to Plato's allegory The Cave, to which Tirelli has often referred: ‘The shadows are absences, they are non-light, and yet we see them: they are what remains of reality, a reality provided by spectres. They are the same as those seen in Plato's cave or those Giordano Bruno speaks of in De umbris idearum [On the Shadows of Ideas].’6

Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2012 The tension between light and shade here again creates an enigmatic reading of form. At first glance we are looking at an internal corner of a building resting on its floor; at another we see an elastic skin pushed towards us by an indeterminate object behind it.

Tirelli’s artistic tactic of using the expression ‘Untitled’ for his works refuses the viewer any clue that would condition the way they perceive them

Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2020 Tirelli’s work tests the metaphysicality of the mind and its perceptions of space and time, absence and presence, and void and mass. Here, a room-like tableau is implied in the image yet the exact spatial relationships between objects and spaces is ambiguous.

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Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2001 Tirelli’s artistic tactic of using the expression ‘Untitled’ for his works refuses the viewer any clue that would condition the way they perceive them. For Tirelli. the active participation of the viewer is crucial to the reading of his work.

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The Mystery of the Half-Closed Shutter Tirelli has frequently made use of penumbra, both in abstract compositions and in others that are more figurative. The space created in Untitled (2017) is to be found in penumbra. It is – or at least that is what we are led to believe – a floor located in penumbra on to which the shadows of a window frame are projected, of a window we imagine to be on the right side of the painting, convincing us that what we are looking at is the interior of an enclosed place. The truth is, that by observing this work we end up being victims of a perceptual vertigo; we set in motion chains of association from which we cannot escape. We are led to decode the scene into something recognisable. In Untitled (2001), the subject is a window with halfclosed louvred shutters. The light from outside filters in just enough to prevent the visual space from remaining in darkness, typically one of the most conventional devices for representing dimness. This is an almost mundane subject, yet precisely because of the skilful way Tirelli portrays the various passages of light, it takes on an eerie and indecipherable connotation. Here, the outlines of forms blur and lose their sharpness. A state of unfathomability permeates the painting, leaving it open to us to conjecture what is happening, what has already happened or will happen on this side or beyond those half-closed shutters: ‘I consider these images as spectres

because they are visible entities, but at the same time they have no body, we do not really know what they are and what relationship they establish with things. They are suspensions … like Giorgio de Chirico’s shadows, present in the painting but referring to something else, for example to a statue outside the field of vision.’7 These works are all examples of how, for Tirelli, penumbra signifies an elsewhere, a space between the real and the imaginary, constituting a threshold between the physical and the mental. A place where time seems to remain as if suspended and is charged with unexplored potential. Absurdly, faced with these paintings, the more our eyes observe and delve into the shaded areas, the better we are able to ‘see’. The more they dwell on the better-lit areas, the less we are able to ‘look’, to focus and relate to what is in front of us. 1 Translated from Italian by Eva Menuhin

Notes 1. Guido Ceronetti, La Pazienza Dell’Arrostito [Patience of the Roasted], Adelphi Edizioni (Milan), 1990, p 325. 2. Antonella Soldaini (ed), Marco Tirelli, Silvana Editoriale (Milan), 2022, p 339. 3. Ibid, p 346. 4. Ibid. 5. Marco Tirelli, ‘Light, Shadow, Rule’, in Marco Tirelli: Light, Shadow, Rule, Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Baldacci Arte Contemporanea (Milan), 1997, unpaginated. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2017 Using his mastery of artistically projecting and representing light and producing the perception of form from it, Tirelli implies other forms unseen and outside the frame of the image, allowing the viewer to imagine what they might be.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Courtesy Archivio Marco Tirelli

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Edwin Carels

The Time-warped Sanatorium of the Quay Brothers

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Quay Brothers, Dream Pools and Collecting Holes, TENT, Rotterdam, 2020 The Quay Brothers at the entrance of the exhibition, during the installation of a diorama with their main character Jozef, negotiating position and lighting as if they were in their animation studio.

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Over recent decades, the Quay Brothers (identical twins Stephen and Timothy) have developed an aesthetic language that is immediately recognisable and has gained them many admirers – no matter what media they express themselves in. They combine filmmaking, drawing, calligraphy, puppetry and moody chiaroscuro décor and installations. Edwin Carels, former curator of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, guides us through one of their recent installations.

Quay Brothers, Dream Pools and Collecting Holes, TENT, Rotterdam, 2020 Overview of the ‘Deep Pools’ section with images from the film and a model of the Sanatorium. A dark pool of water doubles the mystery around the mysterious location. A vision of purgatory, with the river Styx running underneath?

For several years now, the Quay Brothers have been working on their third feature film, the long-awaited follow-up to Institute Benjamenta (1995) and Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005). At the occasion of the 2020 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), they met their admirers’ impatience with an elaborate, immersive installation in Rotterdam’s TENT art space, under the title Dream Pools and Collecting Holes.1 Along a trajectory through darkened spaces a string of motifs, images and objects were introduced to trigger our imagination about an otherworldly time and place, a sinister sanatorium. Taking their cue from the Polish novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937),2 the brothers invite the public to enter the mythopoetic world of writer Bruno Schulz, using his literary and graphic works as the foundation to construct an autonomous filmic world. His second (and last) collection of short fiction includes the story of a man who travels by train to visit his father at a sanatorium, where the old man at different instants appears alive or already deceased. With their typical sense of calligraphic confusion, at several spots in the installation the Quay Brothers insert the abbreviation SPK on the walls of the exhibition, referring to the original title of Schulz’s book: Sanatorium pod klepsydra˛. Whereas the hourglass is indeed commonly understood as a symbol for the irrevocable yet also reversible passing of time, a clepsydra or water clock is an even more elusive metaphor, as it measures time by the fall or flow of a quantity of water. In an unpublished treatment for the film, the Quay Brothers describe the microcosm of the sanatorium as ‘a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness, in a morbid ambiguity of time that cannot be measured by clocks, where whole chunks of it are casually lost and control over continuity is loosened’.3

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Limbo of Uncertainty Within the confinement of their studio, the duo master a whole range of magic tricks to evoke a cinematographic universe that defies all sense of gravity and narrative logic. The video fragments incorporated in the installation demonstrate how ‘objects and events roam with a force all their own within the sanatorium’s labyrinthine limbo of uncertainty’, as the Quays formulate it in the festival catalogue.4 Yet how to transpose such an intrinsically filmic experience, provoked through an interplay of light, lenses and editing, from the big screen into a gallery setting? How to make the exhibition visitor a fellow traveller of the film viewer? As a spatially expanded trailer for their upcoming film, the brothers orchestrated a succession of liminal spaces. Their installation largely consists of two zones and a brief interval, the corridor in between. At the entrance of the exhibition, the first impression is that of a waiting room in a train station at night. With all the walls painted black, a prevailing darkness immediately slows the visitor down. At the very start a small, built-in diorama already halts us to ponder over a puppet figure, caught at the very instant of stumbling on top of a small wooden bridge. His horizontal posture seems to hesitate between falling and flying. Thus we are introduced to Jozef, the project’s central character, whose main feature is an oversized top hat, for which the brothers took their cue from Schulz’s original drawing for the cover of his book. The hat also seems arrested in mid-air between Jozef’s hand and the water underneath the bridge. Repetitive sounds of train wheels lure the visitor further inside where one finds oneself immersed by two large video

Quay Brothers, film stills from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, forthcoming above: A large-scale projection of a train wagon invites the visitor to join the journey. Perhaps inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, the Quay Brothers also resort to the soporific motif of a prolonged, monotonous train ride. right: A film scene hidden inside a stereo-viewer: a sneak preview inside the Sanatorium. The scene depicts an encounter between the intruder Jozef and the resident Doctor Gotard, who controls all the institution’s operations with his six arms.

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projections on either side of the room, which creates the suggestion that we are standing in the middle of the wagon, together with Jozef. Besides the hypnotising, pervasive soundscape and the flickering restlessness of the film images, the space is also punctuated by some static displays. Deeper inside this oneiric train station, instead of ticket windows, a couple of faintly lit vitrines beckon the visitor. Distributed around the central pillar in the room are four small tables, each bearing a metal-cased stereo-viewer. The binocular peepholes offer some further glimpses of the film to come: decrepit interiors where a devilish creature hides behind a pillar, a puppet with six arms in a frantic pose, a gathering in a crepuscular room around a lying figure with bright light hitting its skull … That the twin brothers have a predilection for stereoscopy should not come as a surprise, but their motivation goes beyond the obvious. As they explain in an interview for the magazine Film Comment: ‘We also liked the way the three-dimensional [quality] renders scenes in theatrical planes, rather than in the fluidity of depth we normally view things in. It ferociously isolates things – the planes themselves become almost invisible walls. Within these viewers, the miniatureness is powerfully magnified – it becomes utterly unique and physical.’5 One of the most appealing characteristics of their film work is the haptic quality the Quay Brothers imbue their images with. In their installations as well, they seek to make the viewer aware that the act of vision is always a physical, embodied experience. When raising the head from the stereo-viewer, a sudden confrontation with oneself is unavoidable as there are vertical mirrors hanging on all four sides of the pillar in this fantasmagoric antechamber.

Sepulchre of a Dead Retina The Quay Brothers gave this section of their installation the title ‘Collecting Holes – Apparitions on Glass’. One could suspect an occasional reference to the cliché-verre technique that Bruno Schulz used to create the images of his Book of Idolatry (1920). Then again, the bizarre title of this section might just as well serve as a motto for a large part of the Quays’ oeuvre. Since the brothers combined a dozen peepholes for their first museum object, Loplop’s Nest (commissioned for the 1997 IFFR exhibition ‘Loplop /re-/presents: the im/pulse to see’ at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam), they have been encapsulating several of their miniature sets and dioramas behind glass to form a constellation of optical boxes that travelled the exhibition circuit as their Dormitorium (2006). In their films they obsessively thematise the wondrous effects of lenticular transformation. Street of Crocodiles (1986), their first Schulz adaptation, starts with a drip of saliva spit into the viewer of a mechanical contraption. This optical box, vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Edison’s peephole Kinetoscopes, serves as a gateway to their animated world. In the Quay Brothers’ most recent independent film, A Doll’s Breath (2019), the structuring element is a recurrence of scenes behind vitrines. In the case of Sanatorium the narrative trigger comes from an auctioneer. The first object he aims to sell is a Maquette for the Sepulchre of a Dead Retina. This lot – number 39 – is described in the script as ‘An enigmatic object with the appearance of a miniature travelling funerary box containing the remains of an eye which purportedly liquefies once a year. The box is comprised of seven randomly placed lenses which magnify the last seven images the eye beheld.’ Before the viewer will be able to abandon themselves to the dream logic of the film on the big screen, the visitor of Dream Pools and Collecting Holes can already explore the evocative imagery inside the installation. One glass vitrine, encapsulated in the dark walls, contains a spiral staircase that leads to nowhere. At its base stands a bell jar containing a string of little metal balls that form an elegant curve. On close inspection each step of the staircase has a geographic destination marked upon it, several of these being situated in Eastern Europe. This enigmatic combination bears the title Quarantined and was first shown at their exhibition ‘Curfews’, at Antwerp’s Tommy Simoens Gallery in 2017–18. A second vitrine contains a larger bell jar with inside a miniature electric pylon and a few parts of what may have been a toy train, and in the background a very dense and dark charcoal drawing of uniform housing blocks. These are stylised in such a way that their windows look like film sprocket holes. The title of this monochrome, morose still life is borrowed from a 1960 Polish New Wave film: Nikt nie woła (No one is Calling), a postwar story of romance and alienation that starts and ends with a train ride.6

Quay Brothers, Quarantined, ‘Curfews’ exhibition, Tommy Simoens Gallery, Antwerp, 2017–18 top: A metaphor for transportation or a modest monument for the step-by-step art of animation? This enigmatic still life is perhaps a warning that the journey evoked is largely mental. bottom: With every step, a different geographic location is brought back to memory. From their native Philadelphia to rather famous destinations, such as Prague, or resolutely obscure ones: Sopron? Bydgoszcz? Elbla˛g?

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Subliminal Blueprints As with most installations by the Quay Brothers, Dream Pools and Collecting Holes’ elegant mise-en-scène and suggestive configuration of objects induce a sense of ‘elsewhere’. Eschewing any overseeable set-up, they rather incite the eye to roam from one peephole to the next vitrine, from one type of space to another. After inducing maximum dilation of the pupils, required to scrutinise tiny details at very low light levels, the artists trigger the eyes to drastically adjust once again, when turning the corner to move through the corridor. An animated projection of letters throws a bright, almost aggressive light on the empty white walls there. And yet another disorienting contrast is created when the visitor reaches the threshold of the second section, what the brothers refer to as ‘Deep Pools’. This room, with a high ceiling and the proportions of a school gym, plunges the visitor again into atmospheric darkness. Against the back wall a very large projection offers further glimpses of the film in progress: an undulating choreography of steam, smoke, clouds and trees in sepia tones, but also the recurring motif of Jozef’s hat tumbling in slow motion through the air. Fixated in the middle of the empty space stands a rather small, strangely angular object, reflected in a pool of dark water. This wooden, enigmatic shape vaguely resembles a hefty book that unfolds while it is falling. From closer by it appears to be an anamorphic architectural maquette of Jozef’s

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travel destination, the Sanatorium. Reversing Goethe’s notion of architecture as frozen music, the Quay Brothers’ play with light imbues the static model with a quiet vibrato. The rooftop features large sections of glass panes, in the style of the glass ceilings typical for Parisian passages, as famously described by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project.7 Some walls are crumbling but through these openings no sign of life can be detected, apart from some tree branches that have manoeuvred their way inside. Although one can walk around the maquette and investigate from close up, the microcosm remains largely impenetrable. As the Quay Brothers remind us in their documentary short The Art Teacher from Drohobycz (2022), Schulz initially championed the ambition to become an architect. For that he went first to the Polytechnic College in Lwów and then continued in Vienna. Exercising the imagination through architectural speculation is also what the Quay Brothers intuitively did. Right after they finished their studies in graphic

Quay Brothers, Dream Pools and Collecting Holes, TENT, Rotterdam, 2020 The maquette of the Sanatorium is the central location, both of the forthcoming film and of the installation. Although it opens up in all directions, it hardly reads like an open book.

arts in Philadelphia and then in London, they created a series of pencil works, ‘The Black Drawings’, that almost systematically feature architectural and scenographic references, heavily inspired by their first trip to Poland in 1974.8 From these twodimensional, imaginary film sets they moved on to create entire universes at the level of a tabletop. Whether graphic works or films, dioramas or installations and theatre or opera sets, when the Quay Brothers shine their sophisticated light on their humble materials, they know how to mesmerise their viewer, whatever the scale they work in. As the opening pages of their unpublished script illustrates, the play with dimensions always remains a starting point: ‘A miniature architecture model of a cathedral-like building straddled entirely by a modern electrical high-tension pylon.’9 Even when restricted to words, they deliver subliminal blueprints for other dimensions: ‘In a vast cathedral space, bonfires illuminate a congregation of burned out chairs set against an immense organ.’10 When precisely the new Quay Brothers feature film might be completed cannot be calculated in metric nor decimal time; we can only hope it will soon emanate from these Deep Pools and Collecting Holes. 1 Notes 1. The exhibition was curated by Edwin Carels, with the support of Koninck Studios and Tommy Simoens Gallery. 2. Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod) Klepsydra˛, 1937, first English edition translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniewska, Walker & Company (New York), 1978. 3. Quay Brothers, untitled, unpublished typescript treatment for the film, author’s documentation. 4. IFFR Catalogue 2020, International Film Festival Rotterdam editions (Rotterdam), 2020, p 163. 5. Jonathan Romney, ‘Eyes in the Darkness’, Film Comment, March–April 2020, p 19. 6. Nikt nie woła, directed by Kazimierz Kutz, screenplay by Józef Hen, produced by Studio Filmowe Kadr, Poland, 1960. 7. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Das Passagenwerk, 1927–40, unfinished), eds Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1999. 8. Edwin Carels and Tommy Simoens, Quay Brothers: The Black Drawings, Philadelphia Pennsylvania 1974–1977, Ludion (Brussels), 2018. 9. Quay Brothers, unpublished script for the film Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hour Glass, author’s documentation. 10. Ibid.

Quay Brothers, architectural model, London, 2019 First version of the maquette, on the tabletop of the Quay Brothers’ studio in London, where they were used to working on a very small scale, largely due to lack of space. They have since moved to a larger space but kept the table.

When the Quay Brothers shine their sophisticated light on their humble materials, they know how to mesmerise their viewer, whatever the scale they work in Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 120–1, 127 Images courtesy Edwin Carels; pp 122–3, 126 Images courtesy Bas Czerwinski; p 124 Images courtesy Atelier Koninck; p 125 Images courtesy Tommy Simoens Gallery

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A Word from 1 Editor Neil Spiller

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There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 19631 The House to those of a certain Surrealist persuasion is a repository of fears, desires and oscillating chimeric bodies – a mixture of inside and outside. Its windows and doors are its orifices to the outside world, its attics and basements contain other worlds of shadowy portent and brooding danger – both physically and psychologically. Yet, as Sylvia Plath noted, even the house’s most commodious areas, when read in a certain way, contain miles and miles of shadow. Shadow is both in continual flux but also can be still for decades. The Surrealist house presents itself as a place of mystery and wonder, integrating dwelling and dream. Rereading it can probe the relationship between interior and shell, object and space. The haunted house, the cabinet of curiosities, the ruined castle, the cage, the cave, the box, the labyrinth, the bell jar and the womb are among its analogical counterparts.

Yorgos Loizos, Analogical House: Window Set Piece, 2021 opposite: The eyes of the Surrealist house are its windows, framing views within and without. They also allow the fluctuating light of the sun and moon inside to create waxing and waning shadows that move and reconfigure over time. Yorgos Loizos, Analogical House: Attic and Window Photographic Rigs, 2020 below: For Surrealists, the attic is a place of shadowy mystery, a repository of ghosts, desires and foreboding, its dark recesses concealing all manner of uncanny and haunting hallucinations.

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can be used to create architectural drawings that are based less on the author’s preconceptions and more on elements of chance and automatism, these last being regarded as valuable moments for architectural exploration and for pushing the medium of architectural drawing further. While studying these methods, I explored how they can be translated spatially through the photogrammetric drawing process.’

Shadowlands

An architect and architectural teacher who has been exploring this extraordinary terrain for more than a decade is Yorgos Loizos. His education included a stint at Odile Decq’s École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris followed by a postgraduate year in the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His work is interested in photography, the body, the act of seeing and the shadowy Surrealist notion of the house and its constituent parts – its stairs, its corridors and internal vignettes, for example. In his words: ‘For the purpose of attempting to investigate the relationships between architecture, photography and the body, I have developed the Analogical House; this is an architectural project created through a series of design experiments dealing with an exploration of its interiors and bringing together theoretical and artistic influences and positions.’2 The Analogical House consists of five main parts: the staircase, the window, the bathtub, the hallway and the attic. These domestic fragments were selected because they have often been identified in the narratives of Surrealist houses, and represent notions of the uncanny in domestic life. Loizos’s exploration required the making of very intricate ‘dark room probes’. At first these were relatively simple, but as the project evolved, they became highly articulated, moveable constellations of 3D-printed materials that also acted as the stage set and armature for his photography. Mannequins were also used in the work to establish a sense of scale and bodily inhabitation and interaction with the parts of the house. ‘I proposed a mechanised architectural scenario – a machine of chance – that manipulates the drawing of a space of the Analogical House by adjusting the light conditions, with the human body becoming a site of a projection. As the house fragments became larger in scale and more complex, the darkroom probe machines developed into larger pieces informed by filmic rigs.’ The output is the reverse side to the ‘form follows function’ dogma of the design of the Modernist house, as it exposes and charts a shadowy ambience of objects, bodies, spaces and textures melded together into exquisite photographs and representations. The project brings together and further elaborates on the work of the first wave of Surrealist artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico: whilst pioneering itself, it still maintains the original Surrealist ‘whiff’ depicted in these and other artists’ works produced at the turn of the 20th century. ‘I hypothesised the photogrammetric drawings as new types of screens, ones that can imprint and visually manipulate the photographed human body and surrounding architecture. Combined with a study on experimental drawings and filmic methods which explore the manipulation of photographed bodies, I attempted to understand how I could destabilise the medium of architectural drawing for my project. This

The Light and the Dark

The design of the staircase photographic rig studies the daily domestic routine of ascending and descending a staircase, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No 2) of 1912. Loizos’s studies seek to produce similar representations yet using contemporary methods, again like Duchamp’s Nude with a concentration on velocity, speed and duration, and transcribing an invisible reality. And we must also not forget our perception of events, our points of view, and the binding adhesive of our culture: desire. Desire is the most powerful fuel for Surrealists – virulent, all consuming, potentially destructive and marvellous.

Yorgos Loizos, Analogical House: Overview of the Bathtub Set Piece, 2021 The bathtub is yet another Surrealist icon. In fact, much is made of bathroom equipment – particularly sanitaryware – in the art’s mythology.

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The rig explores the possibilities of tracking the body’s movement by projecting light, where light is becoming the primary agent to record the interstitial space between the body and the staircase. This house set piece questions the ways that the design of the staircase and its surroundings can evolve photographically to reappropriate and defamiliarise the body with the play of light and shadows. What interested the Surrealists is the moment of transition and its potential for all manner of hysterical interpretation and creative power. Especially beguiling for them were the opportunities of combining the mechanistic with the organic. ‘The Analogical House Window serves as the archetypical domestic scene of light projection, as well as an attempt to link Surrealists’ obsession of juxtapositions of mechanised elements, and the strange possibilities of their malfunction. A photogrammetric drawing of the window collapses the distances of its mechanical elements – frame, shutters, curtains – and human body, which unify altogether, with the analogy of light and shadow being translated in the photograms as solid and void.’ The Bathtub design series is an exercise about the reflection of light, and features a mirror that diverts light to other elements of the house and casts long shadows which can obscure areas of the set during the photographic process. After each pass of photographic exposure, the darkened areas are gradually replaced with new casts of light and shadow, teasing out a continuous metamorphosis of the house set piece. This metamorphic tactic was also much used by the Surrealists, who often depicted things changing into other things or iterations of movements across an image.

Yorgos Loizos, Analogical House: Mannequin Ascending a Stair, 2021 The motif of the staircase and the body’s descent down it is at the heart of Surrealist iconography. Loizos plays with this formal lexicon, showing ascent rather than descent as a set piece of his fragmented house.

We must also not forget our perception of events, our points of view, and the binding adhesive of our culture: desire

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Yorgos Loizos, Analogical House: Attic’s Photogrammetric Drawings, 2022 Some of Loizos’s most arresting images are created when he foregoes the chromatics of the set pieces and rigs and produces monochrome representations of the spaces, which augments the uncanny nature of the Analogical House.

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Yorgos Loizos, Analogical House: Constellation of the Hallway and Window Set Pieces, 2021 This image particularly reveals the great dexterity of Loizos’s rigs and armatures and the effort he has invested in constructing them. It is through their complexity that he can project the light and articulate his modelled environments in minute detail.

‘The Hallway is designed to be observed from a specific point of view with the platforms that are further away gradually reduced in scale, employing false perspective to create the illusion of a greater depth-of-field. The continuous additions to the hallway – adding new architectural pieces to interact with its protagonist – and new light sources casting delicate shadow patterns on the photographic papers, create opportunities that the architecture and its drawings can be perpetually re-made.’ The attic is the culmination of the project suite, a very fecund space of light and shadow, where the sources of light and origins of the shadows they create are complex and ambiguous. Loizos says: ‘The Attic, and the dome in particular, are designed so that the orthographic imprints of the photogram merge with a point of view witnessed from an adjacent rig, thus collapsing two-dimensional shadows from the photogram with views of three-dimensional objects. The opportunities that are brought about by the photograms begin to blur this distinction, where the shadows casts from architectural elements, human body and lighting rigs merge altogether, creating a drawing language of hybrid forms.’

The Spirit

There is a spirit in Yorgos Loizos’s work that is modern yet referential to the artistic traditions of the Surrealists and the artisans of wet photography. There is another spirit of sustained intellectual engagement and also a long-standing industriousness in crafting his rigs, articulating and lighting them, placing his mannequins and selecting his points of view whilst generating iteration after iteration of photographs – truly a work on the nature of the infinite possibilities of the poetics of space and the domestic environment – a long project to be savoured, read and reread as an engine of further creativity and speculation. 1 Notes 1. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Faber & Faber (London), 1963, p 120. 2. All quotes from Yorgos Loizos are from email correspondence with the author during October 2022.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Yorgos Loizos

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IN PRAISE OF PENUMBRA

Matthias Bärmann works internationally as a curator, author, editor and translator in the field of modern and contemporary art. He has a special interest in interfaces for traditional Asian cultural technics, cognitive science and philosophy. He is engaged in the field of a phenomenologically oriented science of meteorites. Collaborations have included: Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid; Fundacion Bancaja, Valencia/Madrid; Thyssen Foundation, Madrid; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen; and Museum Folkwang, Essen. Silvia Benedito has been teaching in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) since 2011. With Alexander Häusler, she cofounded the design practice OFICINAA in Ingolstadt, Germany. She is a former Senior Associate at James Corner Field Operations in New York and is also currently a climate adaptation consultant at Uniola GmbH. Her last book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation (Lars Müller, 2020), with photographs by Iwan Baan, received the inaugural Book Prize for Architectural Innovation and Sustainability from the Portuguese League of Architects and the Minister for the Environment and Climate Action. Filippo Bricolo studied at the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice where he graduated together with his wife Francesca Falsarella, with whom he set up the studio Bricolo Falsarella Associati in 2003. The studio has won several awards and their work has appeared in leading architecture magazines. Filippo has been teaching at the Mantua branch of the Polytechnic University of Milan since 2012, dealing with contemporary interventions in historical contexts. His books include La casa felice: Investigation on Marcio Kogan, Studio mk27 (LetteraVentidue, 2018) and Forse: 31 dubbi sull'Architettura (2020).

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Edwin Carels is a teacher, researcher and coordinator affiliated with the School of Arts KASK/HoGent (University College Ghent – Faculty of Fine Arts). For more than two decades he was senior film programmer and curator for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. As a writer he publishes essays on media-archaeology, visual arts, film and animation. As a curator he has worked together with, among others, Dora Garcia, Luc Tuymans, Chris Marker, the Quay Brothers, Robert Breer, Jan Svankmajer, Zoe Beloff, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kubelka, Apichatpong Weeraseethakul, Philippe Parreno and Jean-Luc Godard. Javier Corvalán graduated from the Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in Paraguay, and undertook his postgraduate studies in Rome at the University of La Sapienza. He teaches at several Latin American universities and is a Visiting Professor at the Università Iuav di Venezia. In 2018 he received the Medaglia d’Argento del Pontificato for his work as designer of one of the Vatican's representative chapels at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He holds a PhD on Architecture, City and Design from the Iuav Institutto di Urbanismo e Architettura. Rossana Hu co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an interdisciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, with Lyndon Neri in 2004. She received her Master of Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University in New Jersey, and her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, with a minor in music. She has taught and lectured in numerous universities. She was appointed the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, the Design Critic in 2023 and the John Portman critic at the Harvard University GSD in 2019 and 2021, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018

at the Yale School of Architecture. She was appointed as Chair of the Department of Architecture at Tongji University in 2021. Driss Kettani graduated from the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco, in 2003, and founded Driss Kettani Architecte in 2005. In 2006 he won the competition for the Taroudant University with his partners and friends Saad El Kabbaj and Mohamed Amine Siana. They also completed the Guelmim School of Technology in 2011. These two projects have been published in numerous international architectural magazines and exhibited in New York, Paris, Venice and Milan. Guelmim School was also short-listed for the Aga Khan Prize for Architecture in 2016. Kettani has lectured internationally and is currently teaching at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir. Stephen Kite is an Emeritus Professor at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, Wales. His research explores the history and theory of architecture and its wider links to visual culture. His many publications include the monographs Shadow Makers: A Cultural History of Shadows in Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Building Ruskin’s Italy: Watching Architecture (Ashgate, 2012). His most recent book is Shaping the Surface: Materiality and the History of British Architecture 1840–2000 (Bloomsbury, 2022). Akira Mizuta Lippit teaches literature and film at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is the author of four books: Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (University of California Press, 2013), and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Cinema Without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Giancarlo Mazzanti graduated in architecture from the Javeriana University in Colombia, with postgraduate studies in Florence, Italy. He has academic experience as a visiting professor in Colombian universities, as well as in worldrenowned universities such as Harvard, Columbia and Princeton. He is the first Colombian architect to have his work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His architecture seeks to realise projects that give value to social transformations and build communities, improving quality of life through the design of the environment and the idea of social equality. Lyndon Neri co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office with Rossana Hu in 2004. He received his Master of Architecture from Harvard University GSD and his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside his design practice, he is deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured in numerous universities. He was appointed the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, the Design Critic in 2023 and the John Portman critic at Harvard GSD in 2019 and 2021, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. Susanna Pisciella is an architect and researcher at the Università Iuav di Venezia, focusing on the cultural roots of architectural projects. She has worked for the University of Parma, HafenCity University Hamburg and Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago de Chile. Among her most recent monographic publications are John Hejduk, Bronx: Manual in Verse (with Renato Rizzi; Mimesis, 2020) and Peter Eisenman: Gher-Ghar – House 11a (Mimesis, 2018).

Renato Rizzi is an architect and Professor of Architectural Design at the Università Iuav di Venezia. In the 1980s he worked for a decade at Peter Eisenman’s studio in New York. During the same period he developed a deep friendship with John Hejduk, then Dean of the Cooper Union, New York. He advances his cultural education by frequenting both sides of the Atlantic. Reduced to a Cartesian synthesis, the three fundamental axes are represented by as many pairs of names: John Hejduk-Carlo Enzo; Derek Walcott-Andrea Tagliapietra; Herman Melville-Emanuele Severino. His most recent book, with Susanna Pisciella, is John Hejduk, BRONX, Manual in Verse (Mimesis, 2020). Paul O Robinson is a visual artist, architect, educator and Fulbright Fellow in art and architecture. His primary studio is located in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he intertwines X-rays, paintings and castings to form narrative spatial correspondences. He continues to lecture and have solo exhibitions and installations in the US and Europe, and teaches design and theory in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana, where he is the editor of the journal Architecture Research (AR).

Neil Spiller is Editor of 2, and was previously Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Greenwich in London. Prior to this he was Vice Dean at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). He has made an international reputation as an architect, designer, artist, teacher, writer and polemicist. He is the founding director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group, which continues to push the boundaries of architectural design and discourse in the face of the impact of 21stcentury technologies. Its current preoccupations include augmented and mixed realities and other metamorphic technologies.

Antonella Soldaini began her career as an associate curator at the Wexner Center for Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio in 1988. She returned to Italy in 1991 where she became curator at the Pecci Museum in Prato, assistant to the Director at the XLVII Venice Biennale, and curator at the Prada Foundation in Milan. She has curated more than 50 exhibitions in Italy and abroad, and published books on artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Jan Fabre, Tadashi Kawamata, Alicja Kwade, Tobias Reheberger, Erwin Wurm, Marco Tirelli and David Tremlett. Together with Germano Celant, she co-curated a series of exhibitions dedicated to Arte Povera in 2012. Since 2020 she has been a curatorial consultant and head of research at Studio Celant in Milan.

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What is Architectural Design? Founded in 1930, Architectural Design (2) is an influential and prestigious publication. It combines the currency and topicality of a newsstand journal with the rigour and production qualities of a book. With an almost unrivalled reputation worldwide, it is consistently at the forefront of cultural thought and design. Issues of 2 are edited either by the journal Editor, Neil Spiller, or by an invited Guest-Editor. Renowned for being at the leading edge of design and new technologies, 2 also covers themes as diverse as architectural history, the environment, interior design, landscape architecture and urban design. Provocative and pioneering, 2 inspires theoretical, creative and technological advances. It questions the outcome of technical innovations as well as the far-reaching social, cultural and environmental challenges that present themselves today. For further information on 2, subscriptions and purchasing single issues see:

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

FORTHCOMING 1 TITLES

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2023

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024

Volume 93 Number 5

Volume 93 Number 6

Volume 94 Number 1

ISBN 978 1394 170791

A SUBLIME SYNTHESIS Architecture and Art Edited by Neil Spiller

The link between architecture and art and the sublimity it can create has a history that stretches back millennia. From cave paintings to the stained glass and saintly icons in churches and cathedrals, to the geometric and calligraphic treatments of mosques and contemporary artists channelling architecture and vice versa, and so much else. This 2 is about the contemporary interactions between living artists and architects, and the artistic practices, such as poetry and abstractions, that architects adopt to develop ideas for their projects. The issue features artists, architects, curators, musicians, poets and designer craftspeople, illustrating the current rich mix of architectonic constructions, interventions and set pieces that range from musical performance to exhibition designs, glass works and digital 3D scanning. It lays out the wide spectrum and beauty of these sublime correspondences, with contributions from architects about their own artistic practices, and creative works viewed through the eyes of architectural commentators. An explosion of colour, form and creative tactics for making multifaceted work that above all is architectural, it offers a cornucopia of possibilities.

Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Kathy Battista, Nic Clear, Mathew Emmett, Paul Finch, Paul Greenhalgh, Hamed Khosravi, Eva Menuhin, Felix Robbins, and Simon Withers. Featured architects and artists: a-project, Captivate, Brian Clarke, Andy Goldsworthy, Barbara Hepworth, Danny Lane, Ben Johnson, Brendan Neiland, Ian Ritchie, and Zoe Zenghelis.

ISBN 978 1394 163540

ISBN 978 1394 170036

MULTISPACE Architecture at the Dawn of the Metaverse

POSTHUMAN ARCHITECTURES Theories, Designs, Technologies and Futures

Guest-edited by Owen Hopkins

Guest-edited by Mark Garcia

Multispace exists at the intersection of the physical and digital, and in the blurring of their previously clear dividing lines. Multispace is not a single space, but a hybrid space where, in effect, we occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. We enter it on a Zoom call, when we are in our office and in a meeting with 20 people; when we are cycling down a country lane whilst racing against thousands of others who also use the Strava app; when we are watching a TV show whilst live tweeting; or, perhaps most literally, when wandering around the local park looking for creatures that only appear on a smartphone screen. A fundamental question of this 2 is why the phenomena that multispace describes are of concern to architects. The answer is that multispace points to a situation that is at root an architectural one. Offering both a collective and highly personalised experience, static and dynamically customisable, and above all at the same time public and private, multispace lies at the centre of a set of tensions, concerns and preoccupations at the core of our conception of architecture as theory and practice. It is the messy space between, with rough and uneven edges that are constantly shifting.

The Posthuman is the new paradigm of architecture. Encompassing related topics such as the postAnthropocene, more-than-human, non-human, trans-human, anti-human and meta-human, this 2 presents a synthesis of the architectural Posthuman. Proliferating and diversifying, the Posthuman is now as planetary as it is everyday, and as disruptive, contested and contradictory as it is sublime. From the detail to the interplanetary, and from real and fictional designs and spaces to more proleptic universe-building futures, the issue describes and speculates on these spectacular and shocking new species. It envisions the Posthuman through the array of emerging technologies and features original contributions from academics, professionals, design studios and related disciplines and domains. These new spaces include the full electromagnetic spectrum and present new entanglements of Posthuman theories and technologies.

Contributors: Aleksandra Belitskaja, Alice Bucknell, Jesse Damiani, Wendy Fok, Andrew Kovacs, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, Micaela Mantegna, Holly Nielsen, Giacomo Pala, Paula Strunden, Lucia Tahan, and Francesca Torello and Joshua Bard. Featured architects and artists: iheartblob, Mamou-Mani, Space Popular, Liam Young.

Contributors: Mario Carpo, Paul Dobraszczyk, Alberto Fernandez, Ariane Harrison, Steven Hutt, Barbara Imhof and Petra Gruber, Sylvia Lavin, Jacopo Leveratto, Tyson Hosmer and Roberto Bottazzi, Colbey Reed and Dennis Weiss, Andrew Witt, Brent Sherwood, Xavier DeKestelier and Levent Ozruh. Featured designers and architects: Blue Origin, Christian Rex Van Minnen, Harrison Atelier, Hassell, Liquifer, Zaha Hadid Architects, and Blue Origin.

Guest-edited by Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthias Bärmann

In Praise of Penumbra

Silvia Benedito Filippo Bricolo Edwin Carels Javier Corvalán Driss Kettani Stephen Kite Giancarlo Mazzanti Akira Mizuta Lippit Susanna Pisciella Renato Rizzi Paul O Robinson Antonella Soldaini

FEATURED ARCHITECTS AND ARTISTS

Alexander Savvich Brodsky Neri&Hu studio Quay Brothers Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Marco Tirelli

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

July/August 2023

Penumbra, from the Latin paene (almost) and umbra (shadow), can be defined as an intermediate zone of transition between light and shadow. Penumbra is therefore that space, both physical and imaginary, where everything is possible: it is the place of the uncanny, where presence and/or absence can produce wonder or horror. This 2 positions this archetype in the contemporary world of architecture, investigating the ways it permeates different expressive forms – from critical theory to architectural drawing, from design and planning to photography. The contributors illustrate and discuss how penumbra has shaped their creativity and modified their approach to the design process. As a physical phenomenon, penumbra has supra-historical and global connotations; nonetheless, different cultures elaborate its symbolism in different ways. Its wide semantic spectrum powerfully inspires creative forms that hover between fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, past and future. The critical perspectives in this issue offer a wide analysis of penumbra’s expressive potential and the key to an in-depth understanding of this elusive layer of reality.

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