This text is translated from the original Portuguese. It forms the first chapter of my master’s dissertation Villa Altíssimo: Circunstância e Projecto, available in full at the Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto.

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Scarpa? Today they’d put him in jail. Minissi? Against the wall! So much so that they dismantled Piazza Armerina. BBPR? In prison — never the Torre Velasca. Gardella? In the Piombi, not on the Zattere. And Michelangelo? Perhaps they’d only approve the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, but with infinite caveats. In a country suffocated by distrust in itself, the only possible culture is mummification.

Only a healthy and conscious libido saves men from conservative restoration and from Italia Nostra.

Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, 21.05.2021

[…]

This first chapter is structured around a reflection on a statement made by Manfredo Tafuri in an interview with Chiara Baglione and Bruno Pedretti, published in the collection Progetto del passato in 1997 by Mondadori. In that interview, the architect and professor of architectural history declared that “restoration and conservation are not comparable concepts,” and that architects today should not be permitted to do what Carlo Scarpa did in his project for the Castelvecchio museum in Verona. The historian acknowledged that Scarpa produced a work of exceptional qualitative importance — though he also attributed part of this to Scarpa’s collaboration with the prominent figure of Licisco Magagnato, the museum’s curator — but went on to say that such freedom should not be granted either to Scarpa’s imitators or to an ordinary professional. According to Tafuri, Scarpa “managed, even by massacring a monument, to give us a work of great validity; this happened by the grace of God, and not everyone has that grace.” In other words: where Scarpa had succeeded, no one else would.

Tafuri’s position is clear: restoration must be a discipline separate from architecture, and in sum, architects today should not touch the architectural heritage. Which raises the question: why?

To answer this, in this first chapter we wish to clarify our position on the questions of restoration, rehabilitation and conservation — to clear the table, so to speak, and establish an indispensable foundation from which to continue the discussion around the Hill of the Arts project. We intend to approach the project not as an action divided by the dualism between restoring the old and designing the new, but as a single act that involves every component and circumstance in the search for a unique and coherent solution to the problems at hand.

We feel this necessity because too often we are obliged to justify our actions as architects, arriving at uncomfortable elaborations about the how and why of certain choices — justifications that are often interesting at a theoretical level but do not always produce coherent works, and frequently bear little relation to the actual project. As an example, we invoke the recent intervention of architect Cucinella for the new Archaeological Museum of Milan. The project attempts to recreate in almost literal form the Etruscan spatiality to which the permanent exhibition is dedicated, drawing a parallel with its hypogean position. Yet this spatiality is achieved by cladding plinths and pillars — original and non-original alike — with plasterboard, losing sight of the Etruscan tectonics of the pseudo-cupolas, the true generators of these spaces. The work is rational and coherent at a theoretical level, but the result is characterised by an entirely superficial spatiality, which ultimately relegates the architectural project in the built heritage to mere theatricality.

Another side of the coin is the case of the restoration and expansion project for the exhibition spaces of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, blocked by the Minister of Cultural Heritage Alberto Bonisoli in the name of an alleged untouchability of historic architecture. The proposal was a pavilion that barely touched the venerable monument.

It is a fact that in historic architecture, the absence of intervention and the denial of use leads to neglect and abandonment, and consequently to ruin. If we consider the Vitruvian triad, what defines architecture is the non-hierarchical union of three values: Venustas, Firmitas, and Utilitas. If Utilitas is lacking, Firmitas will very quickly follow — and we will be left with beautiful ruins. Beautiful, yes, but essentially useless and destined to disappear: intervention is therefore a necessity if the aim is preservation.

In the practical history of restoration, we find many examples where different periods are in dialogue with one another — but this perspective begins to change from 1800 onwards. The discovery of almost intact ancient cities, complete with everyday objects and even the silhouettes of human bodies, resonated across Europe, marking the birth of Archaeology as we know it today. The same obsession with preserving antiquity led to a practice that aimed to divide architecture into two parts: the monument, worthy of preservation and cleansing of all “appendages,” and the vernacular building, often deemed unworthy of such treatment. One of the prevailing approaches was reconstruction in style — the dov’era com’era, “where it was as it was” — which often associated the idea of good architecture with mere apparent antiquity.

To the architect, “buildings that attempt to imitate appear to be impostors — and in reality they are.” Or, in Ruskin’s words:

The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), VI — “The Lamp of Memory”, p. 209

To broaden the horizons of this reflection and seek an answer to the problem of our relationship with the ancient, we invoke other art forms. The Japanese practice of Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joint”), for example, is based on an intervention in which the traces and marks of time are shown and exalted, rather than concealed in a “where it was as it was.” Buildings, of course, cannot be repaired like broken vases — but we share the conviction that this practice is full of suggestions, and that in a certain sense it recalls the Brandian restoration technique that makes itself visible, while going further still, transforming repair into value. A path indicated and prefigured by Scarpa, Albini, and Canali.

The history of ancient architecture is, on the other hand, full of examples where it is possible to read the history of buildings within their own walls. From the Royal Palace of Mantua to the Ducal Palace of Gubbio, from the Theatre of Marcellus to the Malatesta Temple, to certain projects of Schinkel — which are always, above all, reconstructions and adaptations. The debate over architectural intervention in heritage buildings is a relatively recent one.

[…]

The term patrimony derives from the union of two Latin words: pater, meaning father, and munus, meaning duty. Literally, patrimony is the “duty of the father,” and by extension represents all things left to his children. We note, therefore, that the concept of patrimony is in no way inherently associated with the concept of conservation. The latter is a shortsighted consequence arising from the fear of losing the past — so much so that we prefer to mummify it, relegating it to the status of monument.

Bernard of Chartres wrote: nos esse quasi nanos gigantum humeris insidientes — “we are dwarves seated on the shoulders of giants.” Contemporaries can see further than the ancients, only because they can climb to their height. This reading must not paralyse us: the giant of today is not a giant by birth, but because he is in turn a construction of dwarves. And returning to the question of patrimony: if today’s filius will be tomorrow’s father, as an integral part of the heritage legacy, would it not make more sense to continue rather than blindly to preserve?

Architecture, and by extension the architectural project, is by its very nature a “destructive” action — as explicitly stated by Francesco Venezia in his lecture “L’architettura del suolo” (2008). It is not possible to make architecture without transforming something. With this in mind, it is not difficult to imagine what intervening architecturally in heritage contexts means to the common imagination: total destruction of memory and its physical form.

And yet, an informed architectural action must be capable of understanding this “destructive” vocation and transforming it into an operational instrument. Still current is the obsession with the total preservation of memory as a fetish — one that ends up representing nothing more than a contemporary incapacity to create a dialogue with history for fear of forgetting it, ultimately excluding it entirely and relegating it to mere decoration. As occurs with most of the ruins that punctuate the contemporary fabric of Rome — above all the Augusteum in the Campo Marzio.

This type of approach originates in the conviction — erroneous, in our view — that architecture is a work of art comparable to a sculpture or a painting: an object with a fixed meaning whose fundamental nature must not be altered. One of the main differences that must be emphasised between architecture and the plastic arts is precisely its continuity over time.

No one today would think of adding a figure to the Sistine Chapel, and when we look at Michelangelo’s slaves still trapped in the rock, we do not wish for another sculptor to “complete” them. The same cannot be said of architecture, since one does not need to be an architect to understand that:

The original architect will finish the small building: for the great ones, the true ones, the final touch always belongs to posterity.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The city, for an obvious question of scale, cannot have a single author, just as it cannot be realised in a single epoch. This composition built from a systematic addition of pieces can be reduced in scale and transposed to the individual building. If we consider the building as a city — as opposed to Aldo Rossi’s vision of the city as architecture — it seems possible to affirm that we should not limit a building to a single epoch or a single author.

[…]

In order to understand the complexity of the relationship between the architectural project and history, we may use the words of Alejandro Aravena:

I always do my best to ensure that my works possess the dual value of mirror and mantle. A work of architecture must be an object capable of withstanding an attentive gaze — capable, if questioned as an artistic object, of responding coherently to the point of reflecting a moment in time, the level of development of a culture, a society, or a system of values.

Alejandro Aravena and Juan M. Otxotorena, Alejandro Aravena (Pamplona: T6, 2006)

In light of the themes discussed so far, it seems both opportune and necessary to establish the meaning of two words often used uncritically: Modern and Contemporary. By Modern we understand the set of ordering principles of the architecture we intend to create; Contemporary signifies the current historical time. One can consider an architecture Modern without it being contemporary, and vice versa. Yet the architect of today bears a strong responsibility in the way they relate to the architecture of the past — whether Modern or not. But how does contemporary architecture relate to the historic city in order to be Modern?

We believe that there exists, beyond collective memory, another type of memory: an instrumental and operative one, more akin to history. This is the memory the architect invokes when developing a project — an “intelligent memory” that conveys a message through a spatiality we conceive. The proportions of a room, the height of a ceiling, the material of a surface: these and others form part of a whole established through searching, in our memory, for specific sensations and reactions — “atmospheres,” to use a word dear to Peter Zumthor.

Memories like these contain the deepest architectural experience I know. They are the reservoirs of architectural atmospheres and images that I explore in my work as an architect. When I design a building, I find myself sinking often into old, half-forgotten memories, and I then try to remember what the remembered architectural situation was really like, what it meant to me at the time, and I try to think how it might be useful now.

Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 2nd ed. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), p. 8

History, in the same way, constitutes a large-scale catalogue of solutions to problems. It must not be understood merely as factual knowledge — it must be seen as a great ally of design: Historia magistra vitae est. An architect is not an archaeologist. History cannot be a catalogue from which one copies formal elements, but it can be a guide for the critical analysis of contemporary problems: an analysis of the reasons that led to the development of certain forms, and how those same reasons may sometimes generate new forms in the contemporary world.

Adolf Loos speaks of a master saddler who questioned himself about the modernity of his saddles. To answer his own question, he studied the drawings of students who had been asked to design modern saddles. In the end, he reached a simple conclusion: none of those students had ever seen a horse — otherwise they would never have invented those saddles. And he went back happily to designing saddles, as he had always done.

[…]

Anton Capitell uses the example of the Mosque of Córdoba to speak of the metamorphosis that monuments undergo over time as an almost necessary condition for the crystallisation of history in matter. It is possible to state without doubt that the “monument” would not be as it is — nor as important — if it did not present the continuous stratification of epochs, functions, styles and languages that truly constitute it. That continuity and that crystallisation are a good: the real value of the monument.

Ours is an era of paradoxes that has moved from blind destruction to the passive museification of entire parts of cities without understanding the significance of such radical gestures. “In Castelvecchio everything was false,” said Scarpa in a lecture given in Madrid in 1978, speaking of the castle’s façade — reconstructed in style in the 1920s and “abnormally” symmetrical.

The problem of historic materials, which we can never ignore but also cannot directly imitate, is a question that has always preoccupied me… They order that the style of old windows be imitated, forgetting that those windows were produced at different times by a different way of life. In any case, stupid imitations of that kind always seem petty.

Carlo Scarpa, in Richard Murphy, Margherita Bolla, Kenneth Frampton, Carlo Scarpa and Castelvecchio Revisited (Breakfast Mission Publishing, 2017), p. 14

But integrating the new with the old is not merely a question of materials and forms — one must know how to select the signals of history. It is a question of choosing, of constructing, and sometimes even of demolishing. Intervening in a historic building can mean removing as well as adding: not to recover a questionable original morphology, as Viollet-le-Duc and his followers claimed, but to give form to the project and effectiveness to the new function.

Scarpa’s Castelvecchio project — which transformed an ancient Scaligera fortress into a complex museum including the municipal art collections, the building itself, and an important part of the historic urban fabric of Verona — is a “masterpiece of demolition, almost a project in negative”: a skilful reading of contrasts between old and new.

In the city, the historic buildings that our society abandons due to advanced deterioration or cessation of activity occupy strategic parts of the urban fabric and can constitute true urban “hinges.” But they can no longer be called monuments — a definition that brings with it an insidious sense of passivity that rhymes with abandonment. They are living parts of the city, and contemporary architecture has the duty of grafting the functional strength of the new onto the old.

[…]

Wishing to express a final opinion on the attitude that must guide our work as architects in the presence of ancient artefacts, we cite a passage from the Scritti Scelti of Giorgio Grassi — an Italian architect who perhaps more than any other has had the opportunity to work on the built architectural heritage, and who remains one of the most eminent voices on the subject.

I will confine myself to speaking about the only thing that can reasonably be spoken of in operational terms with respect to these artefacts — that is, their reason for being as architecture — leaving aside other more general aspects such as the historical, cultural, artwork aspects, which have been abundantly discussed up to now.

I refer to that part of the architectural heritage that seems to have lost a recognisable role over time — a role lost due to historical events, damage, transformations, even restorations — which have falsified it, making it unrecognisable. In other words, I refer primarily to ruins, fragments, superimpositions, and to everything that presents itself as a problem open to different responses — to everything that, in order to be new, presupposes an architectural response, an architectural project.

Almost always in these cases the ancient artefact appears on the one hand as something lost, finished, fallen into ruin, isolated, now alien to daily life; on the other hand it allows the constructive wisdom, the coherence of means, techniques, materials, the mastery exercised, to appear clearly. In other words, it remains a lesson in architecture.

But there is a third aspect — for me the most important. The artefact that has fallen into ruin, reduced to fragments, shows precisely in this last phase a kind of recovered incompleteness, like a new will — that is, it causes the questions related to the generality of that response to reappear. […] Working on artefacts that find themselves in this state almost always means working on works that still appear, for some reason, incomplete — that have not exhausted their response — artefacts that still appear to us as projects. In these extraordinary cases, our work has the possibility of becoming part of a work that has already begun — older, more authoritative, and broader. […]

Giorgio Grassi, Giorgio Grassi: scritti scelti, 1965–1999 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2000)

This is why our work as architects must be capable of working on ancient structures, on ancient projects. And it is for this reason that an ancient artefact found in these conditions must not be artificially kept alive — conservation at all costs — but recovered, rediscovered in its reason for being as architecture: so that it becomes the very reason of our work on that same object, the reason for being of a project.