neomediavalism manifest

A neo-A neo-medieval medieval

approach to approach to architecturearchitecture

by by Marco FrascariMarco Frascari

A neo-medieval A neo-medieval approach to approach to architecturearchitecture

I am going to present a gentle I am going to present a gentle manifesto for manifesto for

neo-medieval architecture…neo-medieval architecture…

A Neomedieval Paradigm

This Manifesto Neomedieval Architecture

is based on a conjectural paradigm established in micro-history

and to the winkling out the small details

capable of challenging our established views of architectural thinking

The proposed method aims to detect the large in the small

and to combine an understanding of the abstract driving forces in architectural making with the analysis of seemingly chancy and insignificant

incidents. This method belongs to a paradigm of clues reading.

The proposed methodology aims to detect the large through the small and to combine an understanding of the abstract driving forces in architectural making with

the analysis of seemingly chancy and insignificant incidents.

This method belongs to a paradigm of clues reading that ends in Tectonic Liturgies.

In other words, it deals with the essence of a knowledge that cannot distinguish between intelligible

and imaginable. Great architectural changes can only be fully

understood when analyzed at the micro-level, where the consequences of major constructive powers always

make themselves felt In Wonder.

Julio Cortazar’s HopscotchBut it is not a question of return to the Middle Ages …

Neomedievalism is a neologism coined by

Umberto Eco– In short essay entitled

• "Dreaming the Middle Ages,"

•Eco says "..we are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination.."

• Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hyperreality, transl. by W. Weaver, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1986, 61-72.

Why a Neo-Medieval Approach to Architecture?

What Neo-Medieval

really means from an Architectural point of view?

Let’s do a little bit of terminological and historical

clean up• Medieval• Gothic • Neo-Gothic • Maniera Toesca• Why we persist in the curious usage of calling

European architecture of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries after a barbarian tribe of late antiquity?

• Why we call that period dark ages?• Who did turnoff the light?

neo-medieval modernism

• Following Marvin Trachtenberg, I would like to propose that we should give to late medieval architecture a name more descriptively accurate than Gothic. The name would be medieval modernism; consequently, by revealing the hidden meaning of the terminology, my locution will be neo-medieval modernism– Marvin Trachtenberg, Gothic/Italian "Gothic": Toward a

Redefinition The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Mar., 1991), pp. 22-37.

• French medieval modernist methodology was deeply antihistoricist. Italy was never antihistoricist but, to the contrary, always extremely historicist, deeply and irrevocably bound to its vast ancient heritage that was so much richer, more pervasive and culturally omnipresent, than else in Europe.

• This play was based on anywhere active choices as demonstrated by the ability of Italian architects to reinterpret and to play with antique forms, and even to disregard them on occasion at will The source material of Italy’s gothic works was open to virtually all directions: the classical past, the wider Mediterranean world of Byzantium and Islam, and vernacular types, as well as the inventions of northern medieval architecture. In other words, Italian architecture in the Gothic period was in method the very antithesis of purist, idealizing French modernism

Teodoricus a King of the Goths

A Neo Gothic View of Alaric The Goth

• The presence of WONDER in Neomedievalism Albertus Magnus,

• in his Metaphysicorum tell us:,

• Wonder is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart

suffers a systole. • Hence wonder is something like fear in its effect on the

heart. • This effect of wonder, . . . springs from an unfulfilled but felt

desire to know the cause of that which appears portentous and unusual.

• Albertus Magnus, Metaphysicorum, tract 2, chap. 6, in Opera omnia, vol. 6, ed. Auguste Borgnet (Paris, 1890), 30: “Admirationem autem vocamus agoniam et suspensionem cordis in stuporem prodigii magni in sensum apparentis, ita quod cor systolem patitur. Propter quod etiam admiratio aliquid simile habet timori in motus cordis, qui est ex suspensione. Hujus igitur motus admirationis . . . est ex suspensione desiderii ad cognoscendam causam entis quod apparet prodigii.” The translation is that of J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver: Denver University Press, 1951), 79.

Let’s begin within a contrast of Wonderland

Let’s go to the beginning of Neomedievalism … that is Medievalism

and then let’s then move to contemporary “wonderlands”

powerful expressions of a never dying Medievalism

to reach the Real Nature of Neomedievalism

Augustus Welby Pugin,

Contrast or a parallel between the architecture of the 15th and the 19th

centuries, 1841

19th century 1841

15th century,

Carlo Aymonino, Origini e sviluppo della città moderna,

Padova, Marsilio editori, (1965) 1971

Giotto

VS.

Philip Johnson

A.W. N. Pugin, Frontispiece "The Present Revival of Christian Architecture."

(1843)

Little Nemo by Winsor McCay

SlumberlandWonderland

In his essay "See You In Disneyland," Michael

Sorkin writes: • At Disneyland one is constantly poised in a

condition of becoming, always someplace that is "like" someplace else. The simulation's referent is ever elsewhere; the "authenticity" of the substitution always depends on the knowledge, however faded, of some absent genuine. . . . The urbanism of Disneyland is precisely the urbanism of universal equivalence. In this new city, the idea of distinct places is dispersed into a sea of universal placelessness as everyplace becomes destination and any destination can be anyplace. (216-7)

Michael Sorkin is describing the medieval dream of the new Jerusalem the Heavenly Jerusalem

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Sacro Monte di Varallo

Sacro Monte di Santa Maria Assunta, Serralunga di Crea Cappella del Paradiso

Sacro Monte di Ossuccio

Certaldo near San Giminiano

San Gimigniano• Some scholars

have argued that Kahn got his inspiration for the Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania from the Italian hill-town of San Gimignano

The New Jerusalem (Tapestry of the Apocalypse 14th century)

also called the tabernacle of God, holy city, city of God, celestial city, and heavenly

Jerusalem,

TheNew Jerusalem

is a literal or figurative city that is a physical

reconstruction, spiritual restoration, or divine

recreation of the city of Jerusalem

The Materiality of the new Jerusalem

The angel measures the New Jerusalem with the

rod or reed. Note the Lamb of God and the twelve sets of figures,

gates, and stones.Revelation 21:21—

The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each

gate being made from a single pearl.

Jacob's Ladder; from the Speculum Humanae

Salvationis, Augsburg 1477

Saint Aubert's third dream. Avranches, Bibliothtque Municipale

E. Le Hiricher, MS 210, fol. 4v

"By a dream in a vision by night, when deep sleep

falleth upon men, and they are sleeping in their beds:

then[God] openeth the ears of

men, and teaching instructeththem in what they are to learn" (Job 33:15-16).

Gunzo’s Dream

Thomas Cole's Medieval Imagination at Work in the Architect's Dream

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Cavalier view of castle during restoration in 1858

(aquarelle by Viollet-le-Duc)

William Morris (1834-1896)

•Jacobus de Voragine. Legenda Aurea.

• London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1512.

• William Morris's copy.

William Morris, "Brer Rabbit" block printed furnishing cotton, manufactured by Morris & Co., 1882, England.

Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1894

Ginevra Königin

by Walter Morris 1858

Billiard Room, Wightwick Manor, Staffordshire

Red House (Bexleyheath, Kent), 1860,

William Morris owner

Philip Webb Architect

A further historical background

• The Renaissance condemned Italy for having been too Gothic, modern scholarship has tended to fault it for not having been Gothic enough

• Italy was never really "Gothic" at all, never a colony of a Parisian architectural empire-the way it is commonly regarded-but an independent culture with an individual architecture that used Gothic for its own purposes.

• … but “ the nature of gothic”

John Ruskin’s Venice (1819-1900),

John Ruskin Self-Portrait, 1861

Manuscript leafs from Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice

Liberty London

Liberty Style in the Giudecca, Venice Palazzo called tre oci (three eyes) designed by

Mario de Maria 1910

Mulino Stucky Venice

Jappelli’s Caffe Pedrocchi & Pedrocchino Padova

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949) converted this grand Gothic palace which belonged to the Pesaro family into a comprehensive studio for painting,

photography, set design and the creation of fabrics.

Giuseppe Torres

Carlo Scarpa & Castelvecchioin Verona

a case

for Neomedievalism

Radical Orthodoxy as future

• Every neo-mediaeval architect is a radical orthodox

• Carlo Scarpa is a radical orthodox architect

When my time comes, cover me withthese words, because I am a man of

Byzantium who came to Venice by way ofGreece.'

Carlo Scarpa

The accidentally familial and Neo-gothic origin of Carlo Scarpa’s Architecture

in a Bassano Church (called Tempio Ossario) designed by Francesco Rinaldo (1906)

A necessary anti-Cartesian digression against the SEPARATION OF MIND AND BODY

FIVE SENSES

You cannot walk within the

buildings designed by Scarpa with

your hands in the pockets

(Arrigo Rudi in a seminar at UP)

Medieval representation of the senses

Drawings by blind children

Converging railrod tracts & a moving wheel

Brion’s Cemetery San Vito D’Altivole

Scarpa’s Neomedievalist setup

AD 1957An exhibition on

Medieval Veronese Artentitled

“Da Altichiero a Pisanello” is the beginning of Scarpa’s never

ending intervention on Castelvecchio

3 building campains ｬ Museo di Castelvecchio (1A phase)

1957-1964ｬ Museo di Castelvecchio (2A phase)

1968-1969ｬ Museo di Castelvecchio (3A phase)

1973-1975

However the idea goes back to Antonio Avena

Altichiero da Zevio (also called

Aldighieri da Zevio)

c. 1330 - c. 1390)

Pisanello (or Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto), or erroneously called Vittore Pisano

by Giorgio Vasari, (c. 1395- probably 1455)

Castelvecchio before WWI

The Restoration After WWI

Castelvecchio after the bombing of the WWII

Antonio Avena Medievalist Set up of Castelvecchio

House & Tomb

of Juliet

Cangrande della Scala

The importance of Cangrande

Peter Eisenmen's intervention

into Scarpa's Caselvecchio

STAIRS CASTELVECCHIO

Venetian Chimney The Palazzetto in Monselice

The nature of Neo-medievalism

• The ultimate truth of any real piece of architecture is not contained in embryo in an original inspiration; but after the first facture in any other instance of it it is continuously defined and redefined by a constantly evolving meaning that constructs itself in accordance to itself and in reaction to itself.

• Every building element in Scarpa’s neo-medieval architecture follows this process of configuration. There is no ultimate truth in his buildings but a reoccurrences of pieces elaborated in the same manner

The Neomedieval approach to Architecture is that built artifacts are not the result of vague or empirical

poetics, but of a philosophical investigation carried on in a parallel

way with the processes of architectural

formativity. The approach is by no means

normative and prescribes no method of procedure.

Habitus

Carlo Scarpa’s favorite maxim …

nullo dies sine linea (do not let a day pas by without line),

Is the statement of an habitus

==================

The sharpening of the pencil is a liturgy

Is the statement of an habitus

Turin a recently built Hotel by Gabetti & Isola

Gabetti & Isola

palazzo fidia by aldo andreani

The Habitus generates Tectonic Liturgies

It is a promise to good architecture

That is it folks a Neo-Medieval view of the

future of Architecture