La Città Ideale: Tomaso Buzzi's La Scarzuola

Eckhard, P. (Redner/in)
Gethmann, D. (Redner/in)

Aktivität: Vortrag oder Präsentation › Vortrag bei Konferenz oder Fachtagung › Science to science

Beschreibung

In architectural modernism, the city becomes the primary setting and resource to postulate the autonomy of architecture. This paper argues that in the periphery the city as a frame of reference can be replaced with a new and different frame of reference: that of narration. Rather than studying urban structures and operations, the examination or close reading of literary texts can enable another alternative approach to architectural autonomy.

This approach will be exemplified with a case study in which the planning of an ideal city was based on the reading of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance romance by Francesco Colonna published in 1499 in Venice. In 1956, the Italian architect Tomaso Buzzi (1900-1981) quits his career as a successful architect and professor at the Politecnico di Milano and buys a former Franciscan monastery located in the picturesque countryside of Montegabbione, Umbria around which he builds his ideal city and personal residence, inspired by his ideas, dreams and reading experiences of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – a book full of detailed architectural descriptions, which Liane Lefevre calls “a treatise on the role of dreams in design.”

This paper argues that Buzzi’s dream city—an architectural endeavour which is surprisingly anti-urban in terms of method, program and execution, is based on a narrative logic (rather than on an urban logic) which understands the dream and the cosmological as the main design strategy. Using architectural quotes from antiquity, he reconstructs but also deconstructs historical examples of the urban. Conceived as a non-exhaustive structure without a defined centre or clear boundaries, the ideal city was conceived by Buzzi as a city permanently under construction. With a group of students from the Faculty of Architecture at Graz University of Technology, we have approached Buzzi’s city in the periphery for observations and continuations of this design project, using the same literary and constructive frame of reference: the dream structures narrated in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Zeitraum	26 Okt. 2023
Ereignistitel	AHRA International Conference 2023 Situated Ecologies of Care: AHRA 2023
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	Portsmout, Großbritannien / Vereinigtes KönigreichAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	International

Fields of Expertise

Sustainable Systems

Dokumente & Verweise

Architecture is always deeply entangled with both ‘big’ issues and with everyday lives. Architecture’s ‘produce’ directly participates in various intertwined ecologies, including those of the environment, culture, economy, the political, and the aesthetic. Whether we are looking at climate catastrophe, the distribution of wealth or the nature of community empowerment, the transformative power of the disciplines and practices of architecture (and its cognate disciplines) cannot be underestimated. The transformations occur through our ethos and methodologies in encounters – materials, constructions, ideas and concepts – with various pressing situated matters of concern which might be local or shared across the globe. :: In the title of this conference, Situated Ecologies of Care, we bring together parts of an ‘apparatus’ with which to encounter and interrogate various themes. Through the notion of ecologies we understand the complex contingent interrelationships amongst various seemingly separate entities, be they materials, people, constructions, non-humans, concepts, imaginings, speculations. From one perspective, there is only one all-inclusive edgeless ecology. But, in those contingent interrelationships, demarcating different ecologies not only allows us to engage without being overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all, but also affords us possibilities to render our own political and ethical positions. Care, for us, encompasses approaches of pedagogy as well as placemaking, biopolitics in addition to architectural representation, and spatial and performative activisms not uncoupled from the more conventional spaces of care. Being care-ful means paying radical attention to one-another, recognising kin in a multitude of forms.