The Italian Job (2003)

In the opening scenes of The Italian Job, the viewer is witness to a robbery being conducted by a cast of likable thieves- and like any good crime-caper film, a chase ensues! This chase however differs from the typical car chase found in many other films. This chase is a boat chase- and a boat chase through Venice! What lends excitement to these great sequences, beyond good editing and directing, is the depiction of the spatial characteristics of the canal city. As Handsome Rob (Jason Statham) escapes his pursuers via ultra-fast speedboat through an antiquated context, he is forced to weave and dodge through canal alleys to avoid many close calls. This avoidance of collision with the city does not only happen on one axis because Handsome Rob must also duck his head to escape decapitation while passing under small bridges. It becomes apparent that Venetian space operates at all of the Cartesian axes.

Light and dark seem to mimic extreme spatial variations as camera shots turn from lighted scenes upon the canal to extreme dark under bridges. Even before the chase begins, the viewer is presented to the scenario as the camera lens moves through floors and levels in the building where the robbery is first conducted. The viewer is also made aware of the greatest sub-level of the city underwater as it is revealed that this is where the real robbery is happening while the boat chase was a diversion all along.

Mass Absence

There is something unsettling in Giussepe Teragni’s photograph of a large demonstration in front of the Casa Del Fascio in 1936. In the initial moments of Mass Absence, Pope presents us with this observation.

What is disturbing about this photograph is how the building, being so elegantly hermetic, has come to function as an icon of the Fascist state. How can a self-referencing object, timeless in its fidelity to the art of discipline, be capable of addressing a specific place, time and political ideology?[1]

The unsettling feature is the presence of a modernist icon legitimizing a massive historical moment. The Casa Del Fascio – a building dripping in modernism- was never supposed to do this. Modernism was abstract, autonomous and for the new century, beyond any representation old world ideals- especially those in support of any political totalitarianism. Or is this true?

Pope reveals that prior to WWII, modernism was attached to political ideals- the new ideals that favored an empowered majority such as Socialism, Communism, and Fascism. Soon after however, the modernist project was rewritten and its representative functions and connections to collective movements cut (Fig .2) It was from then on to stand for autonomy, technicality, and art.

Original sketch, Fig. 2

Reyner Banham once remarked that the Second World War was fought to make the world safe for modernism. The sentiment has always rung true inasmuch as it also prompted its inverse: that modern architecture was ultimately made ‘safe’ for the post-war world.[2]

We are to believe that this shift toward the realm of autonomy and the apolitical has had its effects on modern city- filled with voids and empty of any meaning. Pope then tells us that this ‘shift’ away from representation was never a real decision at all, but the only move to make. Less of an evasive move away from representation, it was more of a commentary on the impossibility for architecture to participate in the post-war political world. This calculated withdrawal suggests not an absence of meaning but a potent silence.[3]

This potent silence in architecture reflects an unwilling subjectivity- a non-participatory mass. Urban planners have struggled in designing for an absent audience and have therefore our modern cities are ruled by formless primacies of space versus their traditional city of formed-defined space. Though modern cities are haunted with absence, Pope does not necessarily see this as a bad thing. Instead, reverting back to what modernism set out to do originally- modern cities are on the course to achieving a Malvichian dream; a tabula rasas- truly ‘free space.’[1]

Traditional urban space is defined by spaces bounded by walls and forms. An example of this would be Central Park in New York City. Modern urban space however is unbounded. In a traditional gridiron metropolis like New York City, the streets are open and extensible and public spaces are delineated. This is contrasted with the cul-de-sac megalopolis of modern space- where the streets are closed and exist with in an open field of space.

Hilberseimer redevelopment plan for Marquette Park, Fig. 3

The urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer explains the concept of the cul-de-sac megalopolis as a point-field. Spaces like the cul-de-sac act as spatial points that when amalgamated, give presence to a larger field of space (Fig. 3), ultimately ending in a tabula rasa space.

Pope argues that this modern spatial tabula rasa is necessary step toward reinvention- as it offered a release from the historical restraint of form.[1] At the same time however, it is still a site of utopian and dystopian promise and must be approached with an agnostic detachment. But when is this tabula rasa to be acted upon? Pope refers to this lack of action as a suspended revolution and quotes Henri Lefebvre from Production of Space:

A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses.[2]

The problem, for now is that modern space lacks a subjectivity- no mass subject has been realized to build for. Until the moment arrives, architecture can only anticipate their arrival and these words of Gilles Deleuze will remain true:

The people no longer exit, or not yet…the people are missing.[3]

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[1] Ibid., 66.

[2] Ibid., 70.

[3]

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[1] Hensel, Hight, and Menges, Space Reader 60.

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[1] Michael Hensel, Christopher Hight, and Achim Menges, Space Reader (New York: Wiley, John, & Sons, 2009), 54.

[2]Ibid., 55.

[3] Ibid., 58.

Valdrada

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes.

Valdrada's inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image, which possesses the special dignity of images, and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness. Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.

At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored. The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point. The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.[1]

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[1] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 53-55

Myth I

*Currently reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies. Barthes examines myth's presence among a wide range of topics in contemporary society. The first chapter gives a revealing and comical glimpse into the underlying mythology within the world of French pro-wrestling. The book is made up in two sections- the aforementioned chapters on random topics like French pro-wrestling and Myth Today, a discourse on what makes something a myth.

In Myth Today, in answering the question on what myth is- Barthes states “myth is a type of speech.”[1] He then goes on to make it clear that myth is a very particular type of speech- not any language can qualify- and that myth is a mode of signification, a form.

To understand what terms like signification or form referred to, a reading into Saussurean semiology was necessary. Saussure deconstructs language into its simplest module, the linguistic sign or the word. The word has a dyadic structure, meaning it is composed of two parts: the signified and the signifier. The signified refers to the concept or idea behind a word. The signifier then refers to the form that holds the signified.

For example, in reading this word:

D O G

In this case, the signifier is the letters D-O-G. Attached to these letters is the signified, which hopefully made you think of an image resembling a furry four-legged creature with a wagging tail. In making the word, or linguistic sign the signifier and signified come together through signification, giving meaning to the sign.

Fig. 1

It is interesting to note that signifiers have no value in themselves detached from their signifieds. Apart from the concept of a four-legged furry creature, the letters D-O-G have no value. These letters could very well be interchanged with the concept of a house, as Fig. 1 tries to explore- however, due to conventional attachment, this appears awkward at first glance. Progressive architecture has struggled with its own brand of semiology and especially throughout modernism has challenged architectural conventional signifiers (Fig. 2). This proves more difficult in the realm of building because architectural signifiers, unlike their linguistic counterparts, must be functional in the real. Though the concept of shelter can take on multitudinous varieties, it’s architectural signifier can only go so far.

Fig. 2

The creation of words demonstrates a first order language system. It is after the construction of this first order when myth can intervene. Once myth has acted upon the first order, it transforms the sign back into a signifier. Therefore, myth is composed of the first order language system and its own system (Fig. 3).

Barthes, Myhtologies, 115. Fig. 3

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[1] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 109.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog. I am a masters of architecture student undergoing my last year- for which I am working on a thesis project. As of now, I have no clue what my topic will be on but hopefully something will surface out of many random readings and writings (for now).

This image is a section of an orange I drew when, at one point I thought I knew where I was going with my thesis. I decided to keep working on it regardless if I wouldn't use it or not just for the sake of having an orange drawing.