Uto Adv The Cor Voi

Utopian Adventure:
The Corviale Void
Victoria Watson
Utopian Adventure:
The Corviale Void
But this is the reality of architecture, and this is what justifies or explains
the tension that, today in particular, dominates the debate on architectural
culture. On the other hand, this possibility of inserting a fragment of utopia
into reality is a privilege that architecture – compared with other systems of
visual communication – often manages to use to the very end.
Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture.

Granada, London, Toronto, Sydney, New York, 1980, 204.
Utopian Adventure:
The Corviale Void
Victoria Watson
© Victoria Watson 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Victoria Watson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-4405
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Watson, Victoria.
Utopian adventure : the Corviale Void.
1. Corviale (Rome, Italy) 2. Architecture, Italian.
3. Color in architecture--Italy--Rome. 4. Color--
Psychological aspects. 5. Urbanization--Italy.
6. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 1720-1778--Influence.
7. Klein, Yves, 1928-1962--Influence. 8. Schopenhauer,
Arthur, 1788-1860--Influence.
I. Title
729’.0945632-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watson, Victoria.
Utopian adventure : the Corviale void / by Victoria Watson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-0991-5 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-0992-2 (ebook)
1. Architecture and society--Italy--Rome. 2. Visionary architecture--Italy--Rome. 3.
Corviale (Rome, Italy) I. Title.
NA2543.S6W358 2011
720.1’0309456’2--dc23
2011030397
ISBN 9781409409915 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409409922 (ebk)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

MPG Books Group, UK.
Contents
List of Figures vii

List of Plates ix
Introduction1
1 The Origins of Architecture 5
2 The Origins of Air Grid 29
3 The Origins of Urban Design 49
4 Architecture and Non-sense 73
5 The Corviale Void 93
Index113
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Figures
Figure 1. Perspective: a pure form of space 9

Figure 2. The Primitive Hut: a system of space 12
Figure 3. The Grid Form: extremely precise and totally vague 13
Figure 4. After Le Roy’s Plate 1: column 1, primitive forms of the
family of Egyptian, Hebrew and Phoenician temples (left);
and column 2, primitive forms of the family of Greek and
Roman temples (right) 16
Figure 5. The Peristyle: principles of origin and development 19
Figure 6. Stone Wall: after Piranesi 22
Figure 7. Proposal for a demonstration of comparative size with Le
Roy’s single Plate 1 mapped left and Piranesi’s six plate
Ichnographia Campo Marzio mapped right 24
Figure 8. After Piranesi’s Ichnographia Campo Marzio: gemmation,
bi-lateral symmetry and ‘jamming’ 26
Figure 9. Proposed Corner Piece with Architecture de l’air (ANT 102) 32
Figure 10. Air Grid: approximating the size of a small human torso
(left) and hand-sized, four views (right) 36
Figure 11. Proposed Corner Piece with Kazimir Malevich’s
Suprematist nonobjective composition mapped left and
Yves Klein’s Untitled blue monochrome, IKB 42 mapped right 46
Utopian Adventure: The Corviale Void
Figure 12. After Quaroni’s Project for the CEP of S. Giuliano at

Mestre, Monuments in their bare form, top, view of the
largest from the medium-sized; bottom, view of the
smallest and medium-sized from the largest; including the
exceptional sketch (middle) 54
Figure 13. After Aldo Rossi’s Design for an Administrative Centre for
Turin60
Figure 14. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena: four views 66
Figure 15. The Cross-piece Window themed in Aldo Rossi’s built
work: top, Gallaratese Housing Block, Milan, 1969-73,
bottom, left, Casa Aurora Office Block, Turin, 1985, right,
Secondary School, Broni, 1979-81 69
Figure 16. Proposal for an exhibition of Piranesi’s engravings of the
temples at Paestum 84
Figure 17. Mario Fiorentino (project leader), Residential complex in
Corviale, Rome: four views 94
Figure 18. The Corviale Void: left, looking up, right, looking down 98
Figure 19. Linear and Diagonal Features: above, left, Corviale seen
in Google Earth, all other views, The Asse Studio’s model
of their Project for an Asse Attrezzato 101
Figure 20. Project for The Corviale Void: three views 105
Figure 21. Project for The Corviale Void: four views 106
Figure 22. Diagrammatic Drawings: above, the human eye, including
inset detail of the retina; below – left, the principle of
multi-layer reflection – right, the principle of refraction 110
List of Plates
Plate 1. Air Grid: Vampire

Plate 2. Project for The Corviale Void: view of the beetle mass
Plate 3. Ideal World in the Colour of Black
Plate 4. Ideal World in the Colour of Red
Plate 5. Ideal World in the Colour of Blue
Plate 6. Ideal World in the Colour of Yellow
Plate 7. Ideal World in the Colour of Green
Plate 8. Ideal World in the Colour of White
Introduction
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver and a bee
puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the
architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At
the end of every labour-process we get a result that already existed in the
imagination of the labourer at its commencement.1
Architecture, by virtue of what it is, involves moments of utopia; the

architect has an idea, which she must work upon if she wants to express it in
material form. In order to work the idea the architect must subordinate her
will to the production of the form. Under a capitalist mode of production
the factory, or site of production, aspires to regulate its processes with
scientific precision; but the site of architectural production is the city, not the
factory and the production of a new architectural form must presuppose an
idea of the city of which it aims to be a part.
Under Capitalism the engine that drives productive processes is
desire for surplus-profit, without surplus-profit all production is meaningless.
1 Karl Marx, ‘From Capital 1,’ in Jon Elster (ed.), Karl Marx A Reader, Cambridge
University Press, 1986, pp 62-78, 76.
In order they become valuable in the mode of surplus-profit, Capital must

transform the things it produces into commodities, i.e., into phantom-like
objects, or crystals of social substance, as Karl Marx sometimes refers to
them. One of the most important characteristics of commodities is that they
must be kept in a state of constant movement amongst themselves, if they
should ever pause, even for the briefest of moments, then there will be a
massive drop in accumulation, resulting in a catastrophic crash, if not a total
system failure.
In order to ensure the continuous flow of commodities the city of
Capital must be a free and formless space, which means that Modern
architecture, i.e., the architecture of Capital, insofar as it aspires to the
production of urban form, is caught in a profound contradiction. On the
one hand architecture, if it is to be of use to Capital, must acknowledge the
necessity for formlessness that characterises the Capitalist city but on the
other hand, in doing so, it must realise that there is nothing positive it can
contribute to that city! Faced with this paradox architecture can either seek
out ways and means by which to disguise its commitment to form, or else it
must find some other place in which to work.
2 The text recorded here is an attempt to find another site for
architectural work. It begins by looking at the machinery of architectural
production, i.e., to projective drawing and speculative writing and to the
way that early Modern architects, namely Julian-David Le Roy and Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, were able to use drawing as a means of generating
alternative sites in which to work. The text then leaps to the late 20th century
to focus upon a specific constellation of projects from the Italian discourse
of the 1950s and 60s. One utopian product of this discourse actually
materialised as urban form in the late 1970s, manifesting in the construction
of an enormous, one kilometre long housing development in the suburbs of
Rome and known as Corviale.
Alongside the narrative from within the History of Architecture, the
text simultaneously develops the theme of the Air Grid. Essentially a colour
form, Air Grid is pleasant to look at, even compelling, but what is especially
interesting about it is that it opens the way for thinking about the interplay
of sense and non-sense in human perception of form; in developing the Air
Grid theme the text draws upon the ideas of Yves Klein, Gaston Bachelard
and Arthur Schopenhauer, who all have interesting things to say about this
specific relationship. However, despite the necessary interest Air Grid takes
in the phenomenology of perception, the primary motivation for introducing
it to the subject of architecture is that it offers a new kind of machinery for
Introduction
the production of form. In offering a new means for the production of form
Air Grid also has the potential to generate a new site in which to explore
architectural ideas.
The conclusion of the text draws the two strands of inquiry together
in an Air Grid proposition for the void space that lies at the heart of the
Corviale development.
3
1
The Origins of
Architecture
As a young, undergraduate student, studying for the degree in Architecture,
I remember the occasion of the crit.1 I cannot recollect any one particular
crit; I am referring to my impression of crits as a repeating occurrence,
something that just kept on happening. What struck me at the time was
that the crit conversation had little, if any, bearing on the things I had been
thinking about when I was making the models and drawings that were,
supposedly, the triggers sparking the critical dialogue. For me, making
the models and drawings was an absorbing intellectual adventure; I was
fascinated by the way the lengths and thicknesses of the lines could be
arranged so as to look like ghost forms of imaginary buildings and how
these same drawings could be used to make models, as if these were the
small white shadows of the ghost forms implicated in the drawings. Most
1 A fundamental building block of architectural education, on the occasion of the crit the
student presents their design work to a panel of critics, consisting of tutors from the
school and invited guests, such as practising architects and tutors from other schools.
amazing of all was the way that the geometrical information in the models
and drawings could be subjected to projective manipulation and turned
into views, making it seem as if the body of the one who is looking has
been transposed into the empty world of the ghost buildings. Since the
architecture course did not include lectures in the science of representation
I had no idea that the amazing relationships I was discovering were already
implicated in the code of representation through which I was working.
The code in question, which will be referred to from now on by the term
perspective, was first formulated in the Italian Renaissance. Architecture,
by which I mean the disciplinary practice to which I had signed up as a
student, a practice concerned with the design of human environments,
had progressively assimilated perspective as its primary productive means
and by the late 20th century seemed to have become so habituated to the
code that it was neglecting to think about it and so to properly theorise all
aspects of the discipline’s productive means.
It is generally agreed that the Italian Renaissance discovered a new
means for representing space that, broadly speaking, goes under the
6 name of perspective. What is significant about perspective is that it unites
building, drawing and painting into a single system of ideas. The two most
influential theorists of perspective were Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo
Brunelleschi; in his book On Painting, which was first published in 1435,
Alberti gave a simple account of how to build a three-dimensional form into
a two-dimensional structure, based upon a foreshortened grid. Brunelleschi,
on the other hand, devised a means of demonstrating the structural
relationship between an actual view and its pictorial representation.
During the early 1960s an Italian art-historian named Alessandro
Parronchi reconstructed Brunelleschi’s demonstrations, which had been
performed in the piazzas of 15th-century Florence. One reason why it was
possible for Parronchi to do this is because the places where Brunelleschi
is said to have made his demonstrations remain remarkably unchanged,
even up to the present day. Parronchi based his reconstructions on the
narrative account that appears in The Life of Brunelleschi, written by the
mathematician Antonio di Tucci Manetti, which was first published shortly
after 1475. There is a well-known photograph that captures Parronchi
making Brunelleschi’s most famous demonstration; it shows a male figure in
T-shirt and jeans looking into a curious, somewhat bulky contraption that he
The Origins of Architecture
is holding in front of his head and torso.2 The contraption stages two panels,
one, pressed against the man’s head, is a painting and the other, held up
directly opposite, is a mirror.
In order to reconstruct Brunelleschi’s demonstration it is first
necessary to make a picture of the view of the Florentine baptistery, as
it would be seen by a person standing in the doorway of the cathedral
and looking out across the piazza. One way to make the picture for a
demonstration of this kind is to use the technique described in Alberti’s
book On Painting.3 Alberti advocates the use of a measured plan and
section of the scene to be depicted, the plan and section are a means of
reducing the scene to a pure form of space, a set of mutually conditioned
and conditioning relationships between points, lines and surfaces that can
be projected onto a grid, which can in turn be made to seem as if all the
grid lines emanate from a single point, known as the vanishing point. As
Alberti explains, there is much more to making a convincing painting than
merely projecting the pure form of space onto a flat surface; however, what
is significant about the pictorial art described by Alberti is that it institutes
perspective as a disciplinary principle. 7
In Brunelleschi’s demonstration, once having pictured the view by
means of painting, it is necessary to convert the vanishing point into a
small hole, drilled through the back of the panel that supports the painting.
The demonstrator looks through the back of the painted panel into the
vanishing point/small hole; they cannot see the picture of the baptistery
directly because it is on the other side of the panel. However, they can see
it indirectly because the panel they are holding in their other hand supports
a mirrored surface and it is reflecting an image of the painted view back
towards their eye.
But there is a second stage to the perspective demonstration.
When the mirror is taken away the very same view will appear, only now it
is a view of the building – rather than the painting – of the baptistery. No
doubt the view of the building will appear more vividly than the view of
the painting but the point of connection between the two is their identical
2 The photograph appears in numerous books, for example see, Eugenio Battisti, ‘I
Problemi Prospettici,’ Filippo Brunelleschi, Electa Editrice, Milan, 1976, 102-113, 109.
3 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, Cecil Grayson (trans.), Penguin Books, 1972.
spatial construct, the three-dimensional form built into the painted view is
identical to the three-dimensional form that is intuited in the actual view of
the building. Given the way the pure form of space is derived, the similarity
between the painted and the built view should come as no surprise and yet
perspective viewing was and indeed still tends to be regarded as a thing of
wonder.
The important thing to notice about perspective is not so much the
translation from the building to the painting but the prior act of cognition
in which a portion of the city is identified and conceived as the subject
matter of a view. Brunelleschi’s demonstration works in three stages, first
it is necessary to select a discrete portion of the city and to identify it as
subject matter, it is only after selecting the subject matter that it is possible
to reduce it to a pure form of space and subsequently to translate it into a
pictorial view. Because of the pure form of space that links the pictorial view
and the actual view it is plausible to suppose that the translation from actual
to pictorial viewing can work the other way i.e., that a pictorial view can
be translated by means of building and mapped into the city as a material
8 form. The idea that a pure form of space can be viewed by means of
pictures and translated into the city by means of building is, of course – as
every architecture student quickly learns – vital to the activity of architectural
design, as it is conceived in the modern world.
During the Renaissance architects became preoccupied with the pure
form of space as a means of modelling buildings by drawing them in plan,
section and elevation, meanwhile the possibilities of viewing were explored
and further theorised by painters. With the possibility of modelling buildings
through drawing came the opportunity to introduce fictional buildings into
architectural discourse as a means of disciplinary presentation. Thanks to
the pure form of space it became possible to include building as a figural
element in a theoretical text and as such building began to appear in
architectural theory in the manner of formal models. However, although
the formal models of proto-modern architectural theories were fictional
constructs, they were not entirely disconnected from actual places in cities.
In order to endow the formal model with authority many of its figural
parameters were derived from the direct observation of the remains of
ancient structures, which were especially evident and accessible in the city
of Rome.
9
Figure 1. Perspective: a pure form of space
Like perspective, the idea that a contemporary theory of architecture

might be formulated on the basis of the study of ancient ruins also
originates in the thinking of Alberti and Brunelleschi. From the 15th century
onwards the idea that there were fundamental principles of architecture,
somehow stored up in the ruins of Ancient Rome, was widely accepted.
Belief in ancient wisdom led to detailed surveillance of the Roman remains,
generating knowledge of the forms and details of ancient buildings, which
were measured, interpreted and recorded in drawings. The empirical
evidence of the ruins themselves could not provide sufficient information to
model the ancient buildings as complete forms, but there were also classical
texts available, especially Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, to guide
the work of interpretation. The theory of architecture and design that arose
in this humanist manner of working consisted in a repertoire of exemplary
models, represented through drawn and written exposition, called treatises,
which were collected in book form and used as rules, or principles, for
guiding actual occasions of building. Andrea Palladio, in The Four Books on

Architecture, first published in 1570, is presupposing this way of thinking
through the formal model when he writes of his own reconstructions of
ancient temples that they can be used as a source for new inventions:
They who shall read this book, and shall consider the designs in it
carefully, may be able to understand many places, which in Vitruvius
are reputed very difficult, and to direct their mind to the knowledge
of the beautiful and proportionable forms of temples, and to draw
from them various very noble inventions; making use of which in
proper time and place, they may shew, in their works how one may,
and ought to vary, without departing from the precepts of the art.4
The important point to notice is that Palladio wants his models to

demonstrate the fixed and unchanging principles of form, or precepts as he
calls them here. He is saying that one way to discover the eternal principles
of form is by attending carefully to the architecture of ancient buildings, in
10 this case to the architecture of Ancient Roman temples.
During the Enlightenment notable changes began to occur in
architecture’s attitude towards the formal model, the changes are very
much in evidence in the notorious Essay on Architecture by Marc-Antoine
Laugier, which was first published in 1755. The Essay on Architecture is
a story of origins and at the core is a fictional character, a primitive man;
the story begins when the primitive man, wandering alone in the natural
landscape, begins to feel tired and searches for a place to rest. He comes
across a grassy bank beside a quiet stream; he lies down beside the
stream but soon finds the heat of the sun intolerable and is forced to find
shelter in a nearby forest. Then the weather turns to rain and the man
once again begins to feel uncomfortable, he moves into a cave but in the
cave the air is stuffy and it is dark. The man leaves the cave and decides to
build a shelter, in order to do so he must work with the materials that lie
around him in the forest:
4 Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, Dover Publications, Inc., New York,
1965, 80.
Some fallen branches in the forest are the right material for his
purpose; he chooses four of the strongest, raises them upright
and arranges them in a square, across their top he lays four other
branches; on these he hoists from two sides yet another row of
branches which, inclining towards each other, meet at their highest
point. He then covers this kind of roof with leaves so closely packed
that neither sun nor rain can penetrate. Thus man is housed.
Admittedly the cold and heat will make him feel uncomfortable in
this house, which is open on all sides but soon he will fill in the space
between two posts and feel secure.5
Having lodged his man, Laugier then proceeds to translate the

building of his residence into a spatial system, in order to do so he
describes three elemental forms that are its constituent parts. The parts
of Laugier’s spatial system are: the column – appearing in the hut as four
upright branches, the entablature – appearing in the hut as four horizontal
branches and the pediment – appearing in the hut as those inclined pieces
that form the roof and to which the covering of leaves is fixed. However, 11
Laugier’s system is not made out of the elemental forms of the column, the
entablature and the pediment, it is made out of the spatial relationships
amongst them and by which they are mutually conditioned. The set of
mutually conditioning relationships that constitute Laugier’s system of the
primitive hut are as follows: column-to-column; entablature-to-entablature;
pediment-to-pediment; column-to-entablature; column-to-pediment;
entablature-to-pediment; column-to-entablature-to-pediment. This set
of seven relationships can be diagrammed in vector form, as shown in
the illustration below; notice how the complete set of relationships is a
hieroglyph of a house.
Because Laugier grounds his system of the primitive hut in a fiction
about origins and because the relationships it encapsulates seem to be
very obvious facts about building, the idea of the primitive hut can seem
like a formal model – all be it a very simple one – whereas in fact it is the
basic premise of a highly abstract manner of thinking about space. In this
5 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (trans.),

Hennessey & Ingells Inc., Los Angeles, 1977, 12.
12
Figure 2. The Primitive Hut: a system of space
respect it is interesting to replicate the basic spatial cell of Laugier’s system

and to add the replicants together, side-by-side, extending in all directions;
what results from this hypothetical exercise is a three-dimensional lattice, or
grid. One of the most paradoxical qualities of the grid is that it combines
extreme precision with extreme vagueness. In the case of the grid the basic
spatial cell and its means of replication and addition are logically defined,
however the configuration of an aggregated totality of spatial cells can only
be determined arbitrarily and is potentially without limits. There is a kind of
idealism associated with the grid, but it is a species of idealism devoid of
all the spiritual connotations of Platonic Ideas, which seem to have enjoyed
a magical and mysterious relationship to the formal models of a humanist
treatise such as Palladio’s.
Several years after the publication of Laugier’s Essay on Architecture
a new theoretical text appeared that pushed his thinking in a new direction.
Julien-David Le Roy’s highly influential book entitled The Ruins of the
13
Figure 3. The Grid Form: extremely precise and totally vague
Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece was first published in 1758 and then
republished in 1770 in a modified edition.6 Included in The Ruins of the
Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece is a new kind of drawing, which Le Roy
had invented as a means of communicating a new concept that he called a
history of architecture. In fact the drawing in question did not appear until the
second edition of the book, in 1770, where it is labelled Plate 1. Plate 1 is a
revised version of the comparative plans of temples and churches that Le Roy
had made for his Histoire de la disposition et des forms differentes que les
chrétiens ont données à leurs temples, which was published in 1764.7
6 For an account of the mutual exchange of ideas between Le Roy and Laugier; as
indeed between Le Roy and other contemporary theorists, see Robin Middleton,
‘Introduction,’ Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of
Greece, David Britt, (Trans.), Texts and Documents, The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles, 2004, 1-199.
7 The drawing, Plate 1, is reproduced on page 212 of: Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of
As the title suggests, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments

of Greece was inspired by the direct observation of a whole new set of
ancient buildings, these were the ruins of classical Greece. During the 18th
century very few Western Europeans had ever been to the Levant and
so, although the ruins of Ancient Rome had been subject to continuous
surveillance, those of Ancient Greece had not. After Constantinople fell to
the Turks in 1453, followed by the Turks subsequent conquest of Greece,
those parts of the Mediterranean were dangerous places, difficult to visit.
As a consequence of the inaccessibility of the Levant, the ruins of Ancient
Greek architecture were rarely seen by Westerners, certainly they were not
available to be surveyed and analysed in the way the ruins of Rome were.
This meant that from the 15th through to the 18th centuries knowledge of
classical Greece was based almost exclusively on Vitruvius, who frequently
refers to Greek practices and examples in the Ten Books On Architecture.
Only slowly did it become possible to envisage visiting the Levant. By the
mid-18th century, however, the journey had become feasible and Le Roy was
able to travel to the Levant and to experience the ruins of Ancient Greek
14 architecture for himself.
Le Roy was well aware of the power given to him by his justified claim
to have direct experience of the remains of Ancient Greek architecture,
to have collected empirical evidence about them and that in putting
together his book he was in a position to invent and to introduce a whole
new repertoire of formal models. In inventing the new models Le Roy must
have relied upon the humanist method of spatial construction, based upon
extrapolation from ruins. However, the way Le Roy chose to introduce the new
models is indicative of a new way of thinking about architecture; certainly the
formal models that feature in The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of
Greece do not presuppose the fixed and unchanging principles of form that
were so important to a humanist architect, such as Palladio.
What was new and innovative about Le Roy’s thinking is the way he
was able to bring the new models into a systematic relationship with the
older, humanist models, derived from Roman antiquity, but also with models
based upon recent Renaissance and Baroque buildings, in other words with
the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece, David Britt, (Trans.), Texts and Documents,
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2004.
models based upon buildings that had in turn been derived from models.
By including Renaissance and Baroque, as well as Antique examples, Le Roy
could incorporate a rich variety of models into an imaginative evolutionary
sequence, which is what he meant when he referred to this part of his text
as a history of architecture. The ambition of Le Roy’s history of architecture
was to show how ideas of buildings, when they are represented as formal
models, can be linked together in a chain of morphological development.
Just as biologists conceive of living organisms as having evolved from a
common ancestor – by attending to their body plan, or phylum – so Le Roy
arranged his models as evolutionary sequences, originating in a simple
ancestral form, a single cell building, i.e., a hut. Just as the evolution of life
forms tends to be explained in terms of an active force, or power, which we
call nature, so Le Roy accounted for the evolution of architecture in terms
of an active force, which he called taste. Le Roy seems to have understood
taste to be an intellectual activity of the mind, causing it to perceive those
things that are logically implicated in the formal model as more alluring
than those things that are not. In other words taste is the intuition of
an underlying spatial system, understood as the structural support of a 15
particular formal model.
In his Plate 1 Le Roy sets out three families of architecture, these are
arranged in vertical columns and the ancestral hut is at the head of the first
column, which is the family of Egyptian, Hebrew and Phoenician Temples. It
is important to notice that Le Roy’s ancestral hut is without columns, the hut
with columns comes later and is placed at the head of the second column,
which is the family of Greek and Roman Temples. As we shall see, Le Roy’s
account of how the hut with columns emerges, as and when it does, reveals
a distinct political attitude involved his thinking about architecture.
It was not only the novelty of Le Roy’s history of architecture that
charged The Ruins with revolutionary potential, there was another, equally
stimulating aspect to his thinking, which he termed a theory of architecture.
In his theory of architecture Le Roy concentrates on one particular spatial
system, which he calls the peristyle. He identifies the formal principle of
the peristyle as consisting in ‘rows of columns, together with the spaces
between them.’ 8 Le Roy proposes a mythological origin for the peristyle
8 Le Roy, ‘Essay on the Theory of Architecture,’ 2004, 368.

16
Figure 4. After Le Roy’s Plate 1: column 1, primitive forms of the family of

Egyptian, Hebrew and Phoenician temples (left); and column 2, primitive
forms of the family of Greek and Roman temples (right)
in the fiction of a developing social group that needs to make its place
of collective assembly, a hut, much larger, so as to incorporate a greater
number of people. One way to increase the size of the hut is by increasing
the span of the ceiling timbers, thereby making it wider; the effect of
widening the hut is achieved by adding a ‘crosspiece held up by tree
trunks.’ 9 Le Roy’s political attitude is revealed in his suggestion that the
ancestral form of the ornate columns of the architectural orders is to be
found in this simple row of tree trunks, which have been incorporated into
a primitive hut due to a social pressure, triggering the necessity to make
it wider. Recollecting Laugier’s primitive hut, Le Roy’s wide hut is similar to
the primitive hut in that both entail the fiction of the tree trunk as the first,
9 Le Roy, ‘Essay on the History of Architecture,’ 214.

primitive, form of the column, but whereas Laugier’s columns are axiomatic,
with Le Roy the columns are utilitarian, they do not arise with the origins of
architecture but come at a later stage in its development, as it separates
into two distinct families. But what is especially important to notice about Le
Roy’s politics is that the peristyle, even if it does fictively arise as a practical
solution, immediately acquires an aesthetic dimension. Although born of
the practical necessity to build wider huts, Le Roy argues that the new form
stimulated the minds of its inventors and they began to experiment with
it, inventing new ways to deploy the peristyle motif in their buildings and
cities:
The novelty of the spectacle produced by these columns ranged

at equal intervals…seems to have caught the imagination of the
inventors of the peristyle; they soon built others along the external
elevations, and they or their successors eventually added porticoes of
larger columns to both the outside and inside...10
In order to grasp fully the significance of Le Roy’s peristyle it is 17

necessary to attend to another aspect of his theory of architecture, where he
argues that architecture reveals ideas that are also to be found in two other
art forms, these being poetry and painting:
On comparing architecture with these two arts we find that often, like
painting, it offers an image that does not change but sometimes, like
poetry, it offers a varied succession of images.11
In order to clarify what he means Le Roy invites his reader to consider

two facades, ‘one made up of columns that touch a wall, the other of columns
that stand some way clear of it to form a colonnade,’ in each case the columns
are the same, placed at equal centres and with identical decoration:
The latter facade will possess a real beauty that the other will lack,
namely, the varied and striking views that its columns present to the
10 Le Roy, ‘History,’ 218.

11 Le Roy, ‘Theory,’ 371.
spectator as they jut out from the back wall of the colonnade. This
property of multiplying, without enfeebling, the sensations that we
receive at the sight of a building is one more notable advantage
that is more evident in colonnades than in any other species of
decoration.12
It is not only the variety of the views that Le Roy is valuing here
but also the economy of the system that produces them. The variety is
produced within the same set of perceptual triggers; the diversity of the
views is due to a difference, induced in the perceiving subject, conceived as
an animated component of the totality of the spatial system.
Unlike Laugier’s spatial system, where the components are part-
to-part relationships amongst building elements, in Le Roy’s system the
components are relationships amongst building elements and relationships
among non-building elements, these being the people who move about
in the airspace in between: the beauty of the peristyle depends on its
being occupied by a person who moves around and within it. Based on
18 the presupposition that the beauty of any building depends upon the
‘pleasantness, strength and variety of the sensations’ 13 it conveys, Le Roy
argues that the best place to encounter a pleasing variety of sensations
is in the experience of the peristyle. In his theory of architecture Le Roy
was proposing the peristyle as a spatial system that includes the stream of
sensations, varying across time and informing the experience of the subject
who moves about within it. Since sensations can only inform experience
insofar as they are perceived, so the formal system of the peristyle must
be understood to include ideas of observation and sensitivity as essential
components of its spatial construction.
At this point it is worth recollecting the role of the pure form of
space in the structure of perspective: The important thing to notice about
perspective is not so much the translation from the building to the painting
but the prior act of cognition in which a portion of the city is identified and
conceived as the subject matter of a view. By including observation and
sensitivity in the spatial construct of the peristyle, Le Roy was indicating a

19
Figure 5. The Peristyle: principles of origin and development
revolutionary new way to think about architecture, conceiving of building as

a means of stimulating the perceptions of a subject who is in turn moved to
experience the city as a stream of changing views.
One person who was quick to respond to the new ideas about
architecture, as represented in the thinking of rationalists such as Laugier
and Le Roy was Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In his Opinions on Architecture,
published several years after Le Roy’s book, Piranesi launched a bold attack
on rationalism; one of his prime targets was the idea of the subject it entails.
Although Piranesi accepts the idea that building is a basis for originating a
subject, he understands the subject of architecture to be something other
than a subtly shifting stream of perceptions, Piranesi’s subject is extravagant
and arousing.
If you were to build according to the principles you have got into
your heads…you would have us all go back to living in huts? The
Scythians, the Goths, and other barbarous peoples, who all lived in
those rational buildings of yours, made war upon those who lived
in buildings that were designed more freely – or, as you would say,
capriciously – in order to get themselves into those buildings. You
can rest assured that no nation will ever go to war in order to occupy
rational buildings.14
So, whereas the rationalist’s conceived the subject of architecture as a

sequence of pleasing perceptions, Piranesi posited his own counter-subject as
rapacious and desiring, driven to the production of things worth fighting for!
Piranesi produced numerous texts about architecture but nowhere
is there evidence of a succinct theoretical statement such as to be found
in Le Roy’s history and theory; however, his work is riddled with statements
of a propositional nature. Piranesi acknowledged the importance of the
humanist tradition to his way of thinking, but at the same time he seems to
have felt a pressure that was excluding him from that tradition, in Part One
of Architecture and Perspectives, he wrote:
20 I will not tire you by telling you once again of the wonder I felt in
observing the Roman buildings up close, of the absolute perfection of
their architectonic parts, the rarity and the immeasurable quantity of
the marble to be found on all sides, or that vast space, once occupied
by the Circuses, the Forums and the Imperial Palaces: I will tell you
only that those living, speaking ruins filled my spirit with images such
as even the masterfully wrought drawings of the immortal Palladio,
which I kept before me at all times, could not arouse in me.15
Piranesi’s account of his first confrontation with the ruins of Ancient

Rome is permeated with a sense of urgency, he seems to have been deeply
14 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette with

Opinions on Architecture and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and
Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times, Caroline Beamish and David Britt,
(trans.), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2002, 106.
15 G.B. Piranesi, quoted in, Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect: Heterotopia and the
Voyage,’ The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to
the 1970’s, Pelegrino d’ Acierno & Robert Connolly, (trans.), The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, London, England, 1987, 25-54, 28.
moved by their direct, material presence. As he says, it is as if the ruins do

something that the formal models of Palladio’s drawings can never do, they
are alive and they speak to him. Finding himself overwhelmed by imagistic
desires, he writes as if he understands his own person to be the subject of
architecture, operating as a kind of interface between the ancient buildings
and the new things to be made of them. In fact Piranesi choose to draw
forth his images by making them into engravings on copper plates, which
he then printed as visual material in the books that he published and sold to
visitors to the city of Rome.
What is remarkable about Piranesi’s engravings is that he worked
on them rather in the way a painter works with canvas and paint, or a
sculptor with chisel and stone, with a view to endowing the finished plates
with a unique quality. The objects depicted in Piranesi’s engravings are
characterised by a feeling of vivid material presence, they look like textures
of tangible matter. It is as if Piranesi has derived his pictorial objects from
physical models, dressed in tight fitting costumes that have been woven
out of material lines, rather like the interlacing of threads in a fabric. The
Piranesian image looks as if it has been formally constructed out of a 21
carefully staged view, which features the dressed model in the same way
that human models are carefully dressed, poised and contextualised for a
photo shoot.
In creating his vivid imagery Piranesi explored a branch of perspective,
which had been developing since Brunelleschi’s early experiments, primarily
through the design of sets for the theatre. Piranesi’s early training was with
architects and painters who were experts in the field of theatrical design,
which meant that he was familiar with a repertoire of techniques that he
could rely upon for manipulating the pure form of space, as he translated
from his imagination to the engraved plate and so into print. The point about
theatrical perspective is that it regards the pure form of space as a useful
device for manipulating the subject it is trying to show, making it appear
as vividly as possible. In creating such a tangible and vivid imagery Piranesi
injects an element of drama into the subject of architecture and in doing so
he seems to have become personally caught up within that drama, as if to
engage with the subject of architecture is to fight for a heroic cause.
Piranesi argues that the urgency of the subject he is dealing with
leaves him with no option, forcing him to go beyond the limited scope of
22
Figure 6. Stone Wall: after Piranesi
building and to ‘explain his own ideas through drawing and in this way to
take away from Sculpture and Painting the advantage that…they have in
this respect over Architecture.’ 16 But it was not simply because of the highly
conditioned circumstances of building that Piranesi elected to stage the
drama of architecture, he also suggests that there is a political dimension
to his decision. By choosing to express his ideas in a manner of working
over which he has direct control Piranesi seems to have believed that he
16 G.B. Piranesi, Tafuri, ‘Wicked Architect,’1987, 25-54, 28.

could save the subject from the ‘abuse of those who have wealth, and who
make us believe that they themselves are able to control the operations
of Architecture.’ 17 It seems that Piranesi was driven to direct expression
because he wanted to make the point that it is he, who has the knowledge
and not they who have the wealth, who has the right to architecture.
The importance of Piranesi’s political attitude as a motive for turning
from building to more direct forms of expression should be understood as
something intrinsic to the special, vivid quality of his work. Bearing in mind
the importance Piranesi placed on the idea of the architect as a producer
of things that are worth fighting for and his observations on what kinds of
object will trigger covetous drives: ‘You can rest assured that no nation will
ever go to war in order to occupy rational buildings’ 18 it can be surmised
that Piranesian imagery was intended to arouse the subject and to do so by
posing a direct challenge to the restrained pleasures of rational architecture.
Probably, within the discipline of architecture, Piranesi’s most
influential work is the large, six-plate ensemble, which he produced around
1757, known as the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio. It is interesting to
compare this drawing with Le Roy’s Plate 1. In making the comparison it is 23
important to bear in mind the manner in which the reader engages with the
respective drawings. Le Roy’s Plate 1 appears as a single page of The Ruins,
it measures 38 x 60 centimetres. Piranesi’s Ichnographia, on the other hand,
is divided into a series of six plates, each one appearing as a single, foldout
page measuring 59 x 45 centimetres. The page sequence runs from plate V,
which is the top left hand corner, to plate X, which is the bottom right hand
corner
Le Roy’s Plate 1 is a compilation of formal models, systematically
organised so as to make it seem as if they are evolving as a sequence
and, as we have seen, Le Roy arranged his formal models into three
columns, representing the three families of architecture. The first column
represents Egyptian, Hebrew and Phoenician temples, the second Greek
and Roman temples and the third Christian temples. Each column consists
of a sequence of plans, sometimes including an elevation and in most
cases drawn to the same scale. From the top to the bottom the column
17 G.B. Piranesi, Tafuri, ‘Wicked Architect,’1987, 25-54, 28.

18 See Note 15, above.
24
Figure 7. Proposal for a demonstration of comparative size with Le Roy’s

single Plate 1 mapped left and Piranesi’s six plate Ichnographia Campo
Marzio mapped right
is arranged as a line of formal models tending to increase in size and

spatial complexity from top to bottom, but each one bears a more or less
distinct structural similarity to the one preceding it. Within each column
the sequence of models is intended to read as belonging to the same
spatial system, i.e., as tastefully related. In reading down the column the
formal models could seem as if they fall into a relationship of temporal
development, as if the one below has evolved out of the one above. Thus,
for example, in the first column, the model of the Temple at Edfu sequences
into the model of the Great Temple at Luxor. In the second column the
Model of the type of the Greek Prostyle Temple sequences into the model
of the type of the Greek Peripteral Temple.
Through the simultaneous presentation of an increasing spatial
complexity and a marked structural similarity that runs down the three
columns, Le Roy is able to represent a process of development. Of course
it is a process of development that belongs to the pure form of space, the
development of Plate 1 exists only amongst the models as they are laid
out there, it does not refer to any empirical facts about the actual buildings
from which the models are derived. The models in Plate 1 are drawn onto
a white ground, as such they are isolated, one from the other, by a field
of nothingness. The white ground of Le Roy’s Plate 1 is in sharp contrast
to the ground of the Ichnographia of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio. Although
it is drawn in plan projection, the Ichnographia is inhabited by the same
vivid materiality that haunts all Piranesi’s imagery; it looks like a texture of
tangible matter.
Presumably Piranesi intended that the Ichnographia should convey 25
those very same images that had come to him as he walked about amidst
the ruins of the ancient city, but now made to appear by means of a
single projection (the engraving is theatrically rendered as a fragment of
the ancient Severan marble plan of the city, known as the Forma Urbis).
In creating the Ichnographia Piranesi used the forms and locations of
existing ruins as a means of structuring the composition, but he seems
to have used them as structuring devices in two different senses. First,
Piranesi seems to have mapped the forms and locations of the existing
ruins onto the Ichnographia, rather in the way a geological survey maps
topographical elements of a natural terrain. Second, Piranesi seems to
have analysed the remains of ancient buildings so as to extract from them
principles for generating formal models, which have then been drawn into
the Ichnographia as sequences of rooms, bound together into discrete
configurations.
There appear to be two principles binding the rooms into sequences
and the sequences into larger configurations: gemmation and bi-lateral
symmetry. But neither of these binding principles seems to be capable of
organising the formal models into autonomous spatial forms; rather they
26
Figure 8. After Piranesi’s Ichnographia Campo Marzio: gemmation, bi-lateral

symmetry and ‘jamming’
seem to be engendering an endless cycle of reproduction, indicating a

theoretical continuity ad infinitum. As such these curious assemblies are
highly unsatisfactory when considered as relationships amongst formal
models, in the tasteful sense of Le Roy’s Plate 1. Rather, it is as if Piranesi
has linked together a mass of independent spatial units almost at random.
Each unit is an autonomous entity and yet at the same time it is bound to
those close by through the brutal fact of being skewered to a common axis.
Similarly, within the total configuration there is no coherent order, Piranesi’s
models appear as if bound to one another by nothing more than the fact of
their being jammed together into the same spatial field, each one appears
to be fighting with its immediate neighbours for adequate room.
The relationship between Le Roy’s Plate 1 and Piranesi’s Ichnographia
can be mapped out as a series of antagonisms: rational/material; system/
aggregate; animation/montage; analytic/visceral; nevertheless there is
one factor common to both and that is their mutual dependence upon
perspective. Both architects presuppose perspective as a means of
representing ideas about the subject of architecture. Leaving to one side
particular differences in their respective theories of the subject, what Le
Roy and Piranesi together demonstrate is that working with perspective
is a distinct way of thinking, what is demonstrated in either case is that
the pure form of space, discovered by means of perspective, opens to
further development: either as a spatial system, as is the case with Le Roy’s
restrained, peristyle architecture, or deployed as an operative device, as is
the case with Piranesi’s feisty, competing architecture. In either case it is the
intention of the architect to use perspective as a means of expressing a new
subject, namely, the disciplinary practice of architecture. 27
Insofar as the disciplinary origins of architecture coincides with
projects of the kind exemplified in the works of Le Roy and Piranesi then
architecture is an inherently theoretical activity – here theory is used in the
Ancient Greek sense of the word, which is derived from their expression to
view or to make a spectacle for the mind:
The word ‘theory’ derives from the Greek ‘theoria,’ which has the
same root as ‘theatre’, in a verb meaning ‘to view’ or ‘to make a
spectacle.’ This suggests that theory is to be regarded primarily as a
way of looking at the world through the mind, so that it is a form of
insight (and not a form of knowledge of what the world is).19
Once the theoretical nature of architecture is acknowledged then

the fact that the things it produces do not always correspond to buildings
as such should come as no surprise. The subject of architecture never was
the production of buildings; right from its point of origin architecture was
19 David Bohm, On Creativity, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, 52-53.
concerned with ideas and with devising means of representing theoretical

insights in material forms. Architectural knowledge never was and nor can
it ever be, a statement about the way the world actually is, it is this inherent
autonomy of architecture, locked into its machinery of production, which
both protects it from Capital whilst at the same time marginalising it.
28
2
The Origins of Air Grid
The spatial logic of perspective and its Enlightenment development is still
very much at work in the production of the built environment today and I
believe it is important for architecture to be aware of it and to engage with
it critically, right at the place where it operates, i.e. in the design process.
One way in which architecture might begin to engage critically with the
matter of perspective is by attending to those things that made their way
into Brunelleschi’s painted view, but by way of non-perspective procedures,
namely the sky and the clouds. In his Life of Brunelleschi Manetti explains
how Brunelleschi brought the sky and the clouds into his painting, not by
the device of spatial construction, but by means of mirror reflection:
And he placed burnished silver where the sky had to be represented,

that is to say, where the buildings of the painting were free in the air
so that the real air and atmosphere were reflected in it, and thus the
clouds seen in the silver are carried along by the wind as it blows.1
1 Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Bruelleschi, Catherine Enggass, (trans.), The
Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park and London, 1970, 44.
The reason Brunelleschi had to resort to mirror reflection as a means

of bringing the sky and the clouds into the painted view is because gaseous
forms, such as air and cloud, cannot be reduced to a pure form of space
and thus they cannot be bound to a point of view. At the turn of the century
I invented a new means of exploring the relationship between gaseous
forms and points of view, which I called Air Grid. Inspired by Yves Klein’s
project of The Architecture of the Air and as its name suggests, Air Grid was
conceived as a means of building with air.
Klein began work on his project in the late 1950s and continued
work on it until his untimely death in 1962. Deemed necessary as a step in
the direction of ‘immateriality in art,’ 2 Klein conceived the Architecture of
the Air as a means of overcoming, what seemed to him to be, an obstacle
that was getting in the way and impeding the development of a new
form of urban life. Rather than building out of traditional materials, such
as brick and stone, concrete, steel and glass the Architecture of the Air
was to be made out of fire, water and air. The most striking feature of the
Architecture of the Air was the proposal for an enormous roof, to be made
30 out of compressed air that could provide shelter across large tracts of
natural terrain. Sheltered by the invisible roofs, the citizens of this radically
new kind of urban environment would spend most of their time engaged
in non-productive work, sometimes referred to by Klein by the term leisure.
At an exhibition, staged in the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany,
in 1961, Klein was able to demonstrate some of the imagined key features
of the Architecture of the Air, including a fire column and a fire wall, but he
did not demonstrate the air roof and aside from this event the Architecture
of the Air remained a project on paper, recorded in drawings and texts and,
perhaps more significantly, in pigments.
Klein worked on the Architecture of the Air in collaboration with a
number of architects and engineers and so it is hard to be certain exactly
which items of project imagery were actually made by Klein himself.
However, there is one item that is known to have been authored exclusively
by Klein, it is a painted text with pictorial and written elements made with
2 Yves Klein, ‘It is by Staying in one’s Place that one can be Everywhere,’ Peter Noever,
François Perrin, (eds), Air Architecture, Yves Klein, Hatje Cantze Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit,
Germany, 2004, 30.
blue paint and charcoal on paper and on fabric, it is entitled Architecture

de l’air, (ANT 102) and, like the exhibition at the Haus Lange, it is dated
1961.3 The pictorial elements of the text consist in a number of iconic
forms, human and tree-like figures, possibly Palm trees and a mountainous
landscape in the background. The foreground terrain is marked by the
figure of a grid, it reads as if it were drawn onto the surface of the Earth.
The human figures appear as silhouettes, more like shadows than bodies,
Klein had painted them by spraying around a template – the foreground
figures are the negative imprint of actual, live, human beings, the figures in
the distance are the imprint of dolls, they all appear naked. In the space of
the sky and the clouds Klein has deferred to Brunelleschi, except instead
of a layer of burnished silver, he has inserted a block of writing in the place
where the depicted figures are free in the air. The content of Klein’s block
of writing confirms that he intended this text be read as a manifesto of
architecture:
Air conditioning on the surface of our globe…The technical and

scientific conclusion of our civilization is buried in the depths of the 31
earth and ensures the absolute control of the Climate on the surface of
all the continents which have become vast communal living rooms…
It is a sort of return to the garden of Eden of the legend (1951)…The
advent of a new society destined to undergo deep transformations in
its very condition itself. Intimacy, both personal and in the family will
disappear. An impersonal ontology will be developed. The willpower
of Man will at last regulate life on a constantly ‘wonderful’ level. Man
is so free he can levitate! His occupation: leisure. The obstacles that
traditional architecture used to put up with will be eliminated. 4
3 There are numerous monographs and catalogues of Klein’s work in which Architecture
de l’air, (ANT 102) is reproduced, see, for example: Rice University, Yves Klein 1928-
1962, A Retrospective, Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston in association with,
The Arts Publisher, Inc., New York, 1982, Plate 63, 181. Nicolas Charlet, ‘A Blueprint
for a Political Philosophy,’ Yves Klein, Vilo, Adam Biro, Paris, 2000, 125-130, 126. Peter
Noever and François Perrin (eds), Air Architecture, Yves Klein, MAK Centre for Art &
Architecture, Los Angeles and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, 84.
4 Yves Klein, ‘Architecture de l’ air, (Ant 102),’ Peter Noever, François Perrin, (eds), Air
Architecture, Yves Klein, Hatje Cantze Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2004, 84-85.
32
Figure 9. Proposed Corner Piece with Architecture de l’air (ANT 102)
Klein’s speculations about building with air were only a small portion
of a much larger project, which the notion of an impersonal ontology hints
at in Architecture de l’air, (ANT 102) and it is necessary to take the entire
project into account if his manifesto is to be understood as contributing to a
theory of architecture.
Throughout the 1950s and up until his death in 1962, Klein
constantly made and remade his project of impersonal ontology, in doing
so he developed a succinct menu of colour material. Klein’s best-known
colour material is a kind of paint he invented, called International Klein
Blue (IKB), it is the same blue that features in Architecture de l’air, (ANT
102). Today, Klein is probably best known for his blue monochrome
paintings but in fact IKB has a sister, namely International Klein Pink (IKP)
and the pair of them have a metallic triplet: International Klein Gold (IKG)
and all three of them feature in Klein’s repertoire of monochrome painting.
There are two additional colour materials in Klein’s world of impersonal
ontology, these being International Klein Immaterial (IKI), or Void as he
sometimes referred to it and International Klein Nothingness (IKN). Klein
pictures Void and Nothingness by means of the achromatic colours, white
and black respectively. Even in the fire-paintings, which he only began
to make toward the end of his life, Klein was still working with the entire
repertoire of colour materials; at no point did he abandon white, black,
pink and gold in favour of blue. In Klein’s project of impersonal ontology
the three colours are inextricably bound together and although blue is the
dominant theme it is inconceivable in isolation from all the rest.
Klein discovered his colours long before he began to appropriate
ideas from his reading of Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of matter
and imagination, nevertheless the fact that Klein so often refers to 33
Bachelard says something about the sensibility that drew him to his
world of colour. Chapter 4 of Bachelard’s Air and Dreams, An Essay On
the Imagination of Movement is about the work of Robert Desoilles, a
psychotherapist who became known for his use of directed daydreaming
as a means of gaining access to that part of the human mind that is not
exclusively governed by instinct. In a relaxed setting, lying on a couch with
closed eyes, the subject is encouraged to imagine a spatial scenario, its
affective qualities triggered by suggestions of ascending and descending.
At one point in his account of Desoille’s methods Bachelard discusses a
specific aspect of directed dreaming, which he refers to as ‘ascension in
colour:’
The dreamer, as he is living this imaginary ascent, will reach a

luminous place where he perceives light in a substantial form.
Luminous air and aerial light, in a reversal from substantive to
adjective, are joined in one matter. The dreamer has the impression
of bathing in a light that carries him. He actualises the synthesis of
lightness and clarity. He is conscious of being freed both from the

weight and the darkness of his flesh.5
Bachelard describes the perception of light in substantial form as

colourful, voluminous and pervaded by happiness. It is a feeling of light
that spreads into the imagination of the daydreamer, an ‘emerging light,
an early morning light where blue, pink and gold mingle. Nothing garish.
Nothing vivid. Here is a beautiful synthesis, round and diaphanous, pale
alabaster lighted by the sun!’6 In Klein’s work the triad of ascensional colours
is expressed in monochrome form, but it is by no means limited to that
mode of expression. Many of Klein’s anthropometries are tinted in pink and
gold and there are sponge relief sculptures in all three colours. The series of
three obelisks in blue, gold and pink are a succinct statement of the Kleinian
colour code, as are the pigments and gold leaf in the small transparent box
that Klein dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia.7
Klein’s triad of blue, pink and gold and the opponent pair black and
white generate a stunning colour space, which brings to the work a strong
34 formal coherence: the metallic colour gold is warm, whereas the pigment
colours, blue and pink, are cool. Whilst blue is a colour that human vision
will experience as a unique hue, pink is not. A pink is always experienced
as a mixture of de-saturated red and blue. The only way Klein could have
avoided his pink being impregnated with blue is if he had made it red – in
which case it would not have been pink. International Klein Pink is a very
carefully composed colour; poised between International Klein Blue and a
more general idea of red, it is analogous to the lack of warmth associated
with the experience of early morning light, as the gold Sun begins to climb
slowly up from behind the horizon and into the sky.
5 Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Works of Robert Desoille,’ Air and Dreams, An Essay on the
Imagination of Movement, The Bachelard Translations, Dallas Institute, Dallas, 1988,
111-126, 118.
6 Bachelard, ‘Desoille,’ 119.
7 Both items are illustrated in: Jean-Paul Leder, Yves Klein, Descriptive Catalogue of
Editions and Sculptures, Editions Guy Pieters, 2000, 160 (S33, S34, S35, The Three
Obelisks – 1960), and 82-83 (Ex-voto by Yves Klein for the Sanctuary of St. Rita of
Cascia – Italy – 1961 – Front, Ex-voto by Yves Klein for the Sanctuary of St. Rita of
Cascia – Italy – 1961 – Back).
Attempting to simulate aerial colour in an artificial space, I began

to experiment with three-dimensional lattice structures made of coloured
vectors, in this way I invented a new colour form, which came to be called
by the generic term Air Grid. An Air Grid structure can be visualised by
two means, first it can be made as an electronic model in the virtual space
available inside a computer and second it can be made as a physical model,
rather like the device that Brunelleschi built to demonstrate the spatial
logic of perspective, but with important differences. The Air Grid model is
like Brunelleschi’s device insofar as it relies on parallel surfaces facing one
another across an empty space. However, whereas Brunelleschi’s device
deploys only one pair of parallel surfaces, establishing an axis between
the vanishing point and the point of view, the Air Grid deploys three pairs
of parallel panels and so establishes three axis: front-to-back, right-to-left,
top-to-bottom. The other important difference is that between the parallel
panels of the Air Grid there is no vanishing point and no point of view.
Each panel has an array of points punched into it and these are mirrored
in its parallel twin, the points are organised in the pattern of a grid and
each point maps directly onto the one opposite, this mapping is literally 35
embodied in lines of dressmaker’s thread, forming a colourful lattice inside
the structure of paired panels. The grid involved in the perspective device is
instrumental, it does not appear as such in the painted view but is used to
assist in simulating the foreshortening of pictorial objects. With the Air Grid
lattice on the other hand the grid is an actual colour form and it simulates
nothing. Unlike the perspective device, which looks into a fictional space,
the inside of the Air Grid is perceived as being continuous with the airspace
outside. There is no preferred point of view from which to look into an Air
Grid, looking inside is like looking into any other, partial enclosure of a
similar size. The Air Grid form ranges in size from those that can be held in
the hand to those that approach the dimensions of a small human torso.
Just as Brunelleschi’s demonstration belonged to a cultural ambition,
which was to originate a disciplinary practice concerned with the production
of knowledge about building and the city, so too I began to think of the
Air Grid as charged with a similarly ambitious task. It seemed to me that
the significant difference between the ambition of Brunelleschi’s project
and that of my own lay in the nature of the object we were trying to frame.
As we have seen, in Brunelleschi’s demonstration the grid is deployed as
Figure 10. Air Grid: approximating the size of a small human torso (left)
and hand-sized, four views (right)
a conceptual device and its role in translating from the built view to the
painted view is strictly instrumental. In the case of the Air Grid there is no
translation and the grid is present both in principal and as material fact, Air
Grid is actualised in the perception of a colour form and in so doing it elicits
a concern with the nature of perception itself, its subject is more accurately
conceived as a source of shape and colour than as a point of view.
If the underlying intention of Brunelleschi’s demonstration was
to initiate a theory of architecture based upon the visual recording and
projection of the subject conceived as a position in space then, in the case
of Air Grid, the ambition was to initiate a theory of architecture based upon
the subject conceived as a region of sensibility. For this reason it seemed to
me that the development of the Air Grid was heading away from the subject
of space and moving towards the subject of sensibility.
In Klein’s Architecture of the Air the idea of sensibility plays a key role,
not that there is to be absolutely no spatial positioning in Klein’s theoretical
return to the garden of Eden, but the social dynamics of the return is one
of fusion and the subject of architecture is no longer differentiated into
discrete individualities. Having ascended to a higher level of sensibility 37
the citizenry of the Architecture of the Air is able to communicate directly,
without knowledge of position, because now its mental functioning is
becoming more compact and intimately connected:
At that stage, our sensibility will be developed to such a degree that

it will become possible to envisage each other’s deepest thoughts;
these thoughts will not be read or perceived intellectually; they will
be ‘grasped’ through a process of impregnation with ‘sensibility’
rather than through psychic penetration since, by then, psychology
will have disappeared almost completely.8
Although the Kleinian ontology can often seem more mystical,

entertaining or even irresponsible,9 than it is philosophical there is a simple
8 Yves Klein, ‘The Thieves of Ideas,’ Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves
Klein, Klaus Ottmann (trans.), Spring Publications, Putnam, Conn., 2007, 108-111, 108.
9 See, for example, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Plenty or Nothing: From Yves Klein’s La Vide
to Arman’s Le Plein (1998),’ Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, Essays on European
structural principle that underpins his thinking and that can be clarified by
attending to his notion of sensibility.
In his project Dimanche, The Newspaper of a Single Day, Klein
recounts an idea he has had for a kind of theatrical performance entailing
a staging of Nothingness and the Void, it would be a performance in
IKN (Black) and IKI (White). The action begins with the audience, who are
assembled in an auditorium and then chained to their seats and gagged.
First the auditorium is reduced to Nothing i.e., darkness, then, within the
darkness ‘the curtain rises accompanied by a continuous fizzing sound,
similar to that made by freshly opened carbonated water, but prodigiously
amplified.’ As the curtain rises the stage is to appear, ‘a white empty
space, very white, with curved corners,’ the fizzing sound will continue
but will be made to gradually fade away, leaving the spectators in total
silence but facing the ‘empty, white, and brilliantly illuminated stage.’10
The point Klein is trying to make with his idea for a theatrical performance
of Nothing and the Void is that in order to experience sensibility in its
pure form the subject of experience must assume relationships with an
38 environment with little, if any perceptual triggers. Klein assumes that one
way to achieve this is to deprive the subject of sensory stimulation. Klein
would seem to be positing the condition of pure sensibility as entailing
the subject leaving the clear world of sense perception and entering
another world, a world in which perception, if there is any, is without
sense. In his notion of the Architecture of the Air Klein is suggesting
that just as there is a discipline of architecture that is concerned with
the senses and with the subject conceived as a point of view, so there
is another one, which is concerned with non-sense and with the subject
conceived as a diffuse sensibility. This other architecture does not add to
the environment by means of sensuously apprehensible constructions in
positioned relationships, but reflects the environment by making what is
perceptually transparent silently appear.
and American Art from 1955 to 1975, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
London, England, 2000, 257-286; Yves Alain Blois, ‘Klein’s Relevance for Today,’
October 119, Winter, 2007, 75-93.
10 Yves Klein, ‘Pure Sensibility,’ Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves
Klein, Klaus Ottmann (trans.), Spring Publications, Putnam, Conn., 2007, 106-107.
It is perhaps unfortunate – because it leads to misunderstanding –

that Klein so often refers to his concept of pure sensibility as a matter of
the subject ‘becoming one with space’ and claiming that through colour he
himself is able to enjoy the feeling of ‘complete identification with space.’
However, Klein’s confusion of the idea of sensibility with the notion of space
is usually clarified by the context in which he uses the term, making it clear
that for Klein space is synonymous with sensibility, and that sensibility
is something very different from the intuited pure form of space that is
involved in perspective construction.
In a short text entitled The Monochrome Adventure Klein writes
about an ineffable, voiceless conversation between his, personal,
sensibility and the sensibility that permeates the cosmos more generally
and can be detected in ‘other sympathetic states, a real or an imaginary
landscape, an object, a person, or quite simply a cloud.’ 11 For Klein colour
is the closest perceivable thing to pure sensibility and like sensibility it
is diffused throughout the cosmos; however unlike sensibility, which is
strictly virtual, colour is partly real, for Klein colour is sensibility become
one with flesh. For this reason, argues Klein, it is wrong to make paintings 39
that are compositions of colour because to do so is to set the colours
into conflicting, positioned relationships, whereas the true painter aims to
stabilise the colour, thus revealing it as a field of sensibility:
When there are two colours in a painting, a struggle is engaged; the

viewer may extract a refined pleasure from the permanent spectacle
of the struggle between two colours in the psychological and
emotional realm and perhaps extract a refined pleasure, but it is one
that is no less morbid from a pure philosophical and human vantage
point.12
For Klein the spectacle of colours, struggling in a painterly

composition, is but one example of a more general tendency towards
11 Yves Klein, ‘The Monochrome Adventure, The Monochrome Epic,’ Overcoming

the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Klaus Ottmann (trans.), Spring
Publications, Putnam, Conn., 2007, 137-173,140.
12 Yves Klein, ‘Monochrome Adventure’, 2007, 140.
violence that runs throughout the entire human world and that is especially
apparent in what he calls psychology. Just as Klein regards colour to be
the incarnation of sensibility so he regards line to be the prison bars of an
incarcerating psychology:
The lines, bars of a psychological prison, as I see it, are certainly

in ourselves and in nature, but they are our chains; they are the
concretization of our mortal state our sentimentality, our intellect,
limiting our spiritual realm…Colour, on the contrary, on a human and
natural scale is that which is most immersed in cosmic sensibility.
Sensibility has no crannies; it is like humidity in the air.13
For myself, despite a formal training in architecture and years of work

in architectural practice, I was initially fascinated by the structure of the
Kleinian ontology and used it as a means of developing the project of the
Air Grid. Working with structure, rather than belief, it seemed unnecessary
to take a position on the metaphorical battle between line and colour. What
40 seemed positive and interesting in the early days of Air Grid work was the
way that colour enters into the Air Grid form as line and in so doing has the
potential to subvert the classical opposition of line and colour.
Air Grid in Physical Form

Air Grid is a colour form made from dressmaker’s threads that have been
organised as a three-dimensional lattice structure, or grid and suspended
in a lightweight frame. In turn the frame is designed to hold the grid and
to keep it in shape. The grid form is, perhaps, the most universal of all pure
forms of space and its power lies in the fact it combines superb definition
with unlimited vagueness. In principle a grid can be imagined to be
determined by two factors, the first is the module, an identical measure that
can be multiplied endlessly and the second is a single rule of relationship
between the modules. However, in the case of the Air Grid there is little
sense of the grid principle, an Air Grid is always a particular form, limited
and bounded within the support armature, which is an inherent part of it.
The relationship of the soft body of colour threads to the support armature

is analogous to that of a creature to its shell and even though it is not

unusual to find shells that have become separated from their creatures it is
inconceivable that the formal development of the shell can have occurred
independently of the formal development of the creature. Although an Air
Grid is not a living creature, nevertheless it is quite simply the case that the
support armature of any one Air Grid in particular cannot be conceived in
isolation from the lattice body with which it is contiguous and for this reason
the universality of the Air Grid is only partial, rather as Klein conceived of
the monochrome painting as poised on the threshold of sensibility and
flesh, so too is the Air Grid similarly poised.
However, because the Air Grid does implicate the grid principle it
will always appear as an animated form, this is because the body of taut
threads, constituting the colour material inside, cries out to the eye for
movement across time. It is impossible to look into an Air Grid without
making the colour material appear to move. But the kind of movement
characteristic of the Air Grid is of a very particular kind, not a smooth
movement but a flicker; there are gaps, as if the colour material were
switching on and off. Air Grid colour material is a division of the airspace 41
inside the frame, in fact Air Grid colour material is more air than it is thread,
but the taut threads divide the air into modular portions that are all the
same: discrete blocks of air measuring 3/8 of a cubic inch. On looking into
an Air Grid what is seen is composed out of many of these blocks of air,
but condensed into one, single, moment of perception, certainly it is never
possible to see just one of them. What is inferred from the single moment
however is the conformity of the entire assemblage to a single colour form.
Air Grid can be understood as an amalgamation of blocks of air, divided
by coloured lines, the blocks of air are copies without an origin and in any
single moment of perception that is something that the eye will see.
The reason the eye will notice the replication within the Air Grid is
because eyes are not like cameras, ‘the retina is, in fact, a bit of extruded
brain.’14 The brain wants to explore the Air Grid and so it tries to move
around inside. As the brain moves around inside, not only will it see the
colour material from diverse points of view, but it will intuit that in each
14 C.L. Harding, Color for Philosophers, Unweaving the Rainbow, Hackett Publishing
Company, Indianapolis, Cambridge, 1988, 10.
case the view entails the same grid principle. Knowing full well that it is
witnessing an unchanging principle, nevertheless the brain cannot but see
that the immediate image is always just a little different to the one that
came before. It is the little jump, from view to view, which causes the colour
material to appear to move. The factor of temporal change, generated
within the perception of any Air Grid produces an aesthetic experience
of a very particular kind: the beauty of animation. Because it is perceived
as animated, the feeling of looking into an Air Grid is very different to
the feeling of looking into a monochrome painting; and yet the Kleinian
sense of colour, as being somehow alive, is very much involved in Air Grid
experience.
A Grid in Digital Form

As well as its actualisation in physical form, an Air Grid can be made digitally
by modelling it using a computer. Insofar as an Air Grid can be reduced
to systematic relationships, so it is possible to translate it into computer
language. The relationship between the Air Grid that is made out of threads
42 and the Air Grid that is made in the computer is similar to the relationship
between the actual, painted and built views of perspective and the pure
form of space that forges the link between them. The Air Grid captured by
the computer as a pure form of space has no material qualities, however
inside the computer it can be projected onto a screen, where it appears
as a substantial body made out of coloured vectors, rather than coloured
thread. One of the most exhilarating aspects of working with Air Grid
modelled in a computer is that in there it is exempt from the force of gravity.
In digital space the Air Grid is built by the mind alone, working without the
advantages and constraints of material handwork, it embodies the same
principle as the Air Grid that is made from colour threads, but now it is
mediated by means of colour vectors. This means that the colour medium
does not need a support armature to resist the force of gravity; in fact no
effort whatsoever is needed for the colour form to maintain its shape.
Just as Brunelleschi’s demonstration of perspective obliged him
to identify a point of view, so in order to project the digital Air Grid onto
the screen it is necessary to choose a point of view. However, there is an
important difference to bear in mind, unlike Brunelleschi’s point of view,
which was selected from moments of embodied experience in actual places
in the city, the point of view of Air Grid projection in digital space is selected
from out of nowhere, in this respect the making of an Air Grid projection
is rather like Klein’s performance of the Void, involving extreme sensory
deprivation and heightened sensibility. Once projected out of nowhere
the view can be captured and translated onto a transparent ground. The
number of viewpoints from which to look at the digital model is infinite, but
if a careful selection is made it is possible to capture and compile the views
as a series of layers, one on top of the other and then to merge them onto a
single opaque ground. The picture of the lattice compiled in this way has a
kind of volumetric presence that appears to hover, just behind the computer
screen, like a holographic image. When it is projected and processed in this
way the Air Grid model appears as a loosely bound volume, a meshwork of
coloured lines, whose substance appears, falling somewhere between gas
and engraving, to be emerging out of a dark, Kleinian Nothingness.
In Klein’s ontology Nothing is of a very different kind to the species
of Nothing that made its way into twentieth century painting by means
of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism. In The Monochrome Adventure Klein
is very careful to distinguish his own monochrome works from those of 43
Malevich. Klein argues that whereas Malevich arrived at monochrome
painting out of a strongly felt exasperation with form, in his own case the
journey to the monochrome had been by way of his strongly felt affinity
toward colour. Klein tries to clarify what he is driving at by drawing attention
to the material properties of the kind of paint he uses, which he prepares
himself, especially for the purpose of producing monochrome forms.
Klein stresses the difference between his kind of paint and the oil paints
that artists more conventionally work with and that were certainly used by
Malevich in his Suprematist paintings:
In my paintings, I have always sought to preserve each grain of

powder pigment that dazzled me in the radiance of its natural state
from any alteration whatsoever by mixing it with a fixative. Oil kills the
brilliance of pure pigment; my fixative does not kill it or anyway much
less so.15

Klein resorted to mixing his own paints because he wanted to

preserve the dry chromatic brilliance of pigments, which become viscous
and sticky when they are mixed with oil and reduced to a composite paste.
Unlike Malevich, who painted with oil paints on canvas, Klein painted in
dry pigments, mixed in synthetic resin, on fabric, on board. The effect of
painting in this way brings to the finished work a unique quality, the surface
of a Klein monochrome looks like velvet, it is power dry, as if the pigments
are held in place by a soft electromagnetic charge, rather than glued on by
the stickiness of the paint.
Although Air Grid does not rely on paint for its colour there is an
analogy to Klein’s use of pigments in several respects, most obviously,
because it originates in the material of the thread, or vector, lattice, Air
Grid colour is dry. However, there is a further, more important aspect to the
analogy and in order to understand this aspect it is first necessary to identify
the basic colour unit of the Air Grid. The lines of thread that constitute
the colour material of an Air Grid are not in fact linear, each line changes
direction eight times as it weaves its way into and out of the airspace by
44 means of the support frame. It is these directed colour beams that are the
basic colour unit of any Air Grid composition and each one is separated
from all the rest, appearing as an individuated member with its own unique
location in the totality of the colour form. Rather in the way that Klein
sought to preserve the individuality of each one of the grains of pigment
that contributed to the monochrome surface so the Air Grid preserves the
individuality of its members. However, just as it is impossible for the human
eye to discern the pigments of the Kleinian monochrome as individual
grains of powder, perceiving instead the texture of an all-pervasive
powderiness, so too in the perception of an Air Grid it is impossible to see
the directed colour beams as individuals, even in a small and relatively
simple Air Grid what appears in perception is a tapestry of switching
colours, suspended in an invariant form.
Aside from the different properties generated by the materiality of
the paint, another important difference between Klein and Malevich’s kinds
of monochrome painting is that Malevich’s always figure as a colour shape
on a white ground – a black square, a red cross, a black circle, or a flotilla of
coloured shapes. Even the notorious White on White reads as a figure – a
white square – on a ground (the white of the ground is minimally different
to the white of the square). Klein’s monochrome paintings cannot be read

as figure/ground compositions, the entire surface is a homogenous layer
of paint. In the case of Malevich’s figure/ground compositions, the pictorial
elements have no resemblance to things of the everyday world and there
is no sense at all of a perspective construct supporting the composition,
instead it is as if Malevich is trying to paint a pure form of space as the
subject matter of a view. Confirmation that it was a fascination with the
pure form of space that drove him to invent Suprematism appears in
Malevich’s memoirs, which he wrote in the 1930s. Here is Malevich trying
to understand what are the essential ingredients of a painting, he identifies
two and explains which one he finds most intriguing:
The first is pure…pure artistic form; the other part consists of a

figurative theme referred to as content. Together they constituted
an eclectic art, a mélange of painting and non-painting. When I
analyzed my own behaviour, I noticed that, properly speaking, the
work was on the releasing of the artistic element from the contours of
natural phenomena, and the liberation of my artistic psyche from the 45
object…In no way did I want to make painting a means, but only self-
sufficient content.16
Malevich’s Nothing is the space that emerges when painting is

released from its obligation to a figurative theme, but it is by no means
a release from perspective. As Brunelleschi’s demonstrations make clear,
perspective is a means of projecting the contours of three-dimensional
objects onto the surface of a picture, Brunelleschi derived his three-
dimensional objects from the observation of built places in his home city,
namely Florence, but there is nothing in the principles of perspective that
says the contours need be derived from views of actual buildings. In the
Suprematist painting Malevich uses colour as a means of picturing contours,
they are the contours of pure forms of space, which can be imagined to
16 Kazimir Malevich, quoted in, Irina Vakir, ‘Malevich & Ortega-Y-Gasset,’ Charlotte
Douglas and Christina Lodder, (eds), Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference
in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, The Pindar Press,
2007, 161-171, 165-166.
46
Figure 11. Proposed Corner Piece with Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist

nonobjective composition mapped left and Yves Klein’s Untitled blue
monochrome, IKB 42 mapped right
hang together in a void, rather like the planets, moons and asteroids that
are bound together in the void of outer space. On the other hand Klein’s
monochrome paintings do not picture anything and it is wrong to think
of them as being in anyway concerned with the pure form of space, they
are the traces of sensibility that have become incarnate in colour material.
Kleinian Nothingness appears in the monochrome painting as a component
of colour form; it is the in-between, which is keeping the grains of pigment

individual. This in-between type of Nothingness is an alternative kind of
separation, it is a separation-without-contours, which can be recognised in
the monochrome painting thanks to its soft, dry, powdery texture.
Air Grid too is without contours; it is a colour material that begins
and ends at the tips of the directed thread, or vector beams, out of which
it is made, which means that an Air Grid cannot be reduced to a pure form
of space and subject to perspective representation. Like a monochrome
painting the Air Grid is a colour form whose mode of being is ‘colour for
itself.’17 However, whereas monochrome practice discovers colour for itself
through acts of painting Air Grid practice discovers colour for itself through
acts of building. Through such acts of painting and building it is possible to
capture poetic moments, but in order to seize the moment it is necessary
to invent a pretext for the work. Such pretexts, as Klein explains, are the
‘personalities, objects, landscapes’18 of the times in which the painter or
builder lives and which they know must be reflected in the work if it is to
merit social recognition. As Klein’s work shows, the forging of a socially
recognisable theme need not be detrimental to the act of poetic seizure. 47
For example, Klein’s project of The Architecture of the Air reflected a
general interest in urban development, which was prevalent in the 1950s
and 1960s and that prompted a great deal of thinking about the possibilities
for a global restructuring of the built environment.

3
The Origins of
Urban Design
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s the discourse of architecture
was preoccupied with the same questions of urban restructuring that had
prompted Yves Klein to speculate about the possibilities for new forms of
urban living. However, from inside the institution the questions and their
solutions appeared somewhat differently to the way they were seen by
Klein. As architects saw it, the facts of rapid economic development and
urban expansion posed a problem for design, challenging the ways of
thinking about building and city planning that had been prevalent since
the discipline’s point of origin. The themes of the architectural debates of
the 1950s and 60s have been broadly outlined in the second volume of
Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co’s History of Modern Architecture, in
a chapter entitled ‘The International Concept of Utopia,’ where they are
referred to by the rubric of the new dimension. Tafuri and Dal Co’s History of
Modern Architecture was first published in 1976, at a time when the themes
in question had only just begun to recede.
In ‘The International Concept of Utopia’ Tafuri and Dal Co suggest

that the underlying idea of a new dimension for architectural design is
nothing new. According to these historians what underpins architecture’s
interest in the new dimension is a concern with the problem of how to
control the dynamics of urban development, an issue that had already been
posited as a problem for architecture in the 1920s and 30s. However, unlike
the proposed solutions of the earlier years, where the problem had been
approached from a political perspective, Tafuri and Dal Co suggest that the
revival of the 1950s and 60s had addressed the problem from a perspective
that was purely formal. Since the Second World War architects had become
increasingly preoccupied with the production of a pure form of space,
proposing gargantuan, structures, imagined in fantasy as accommodation
for an entire city quarter, or even an entire city. According to Tafuri and Dal
Co, what was especially alarming about these monstrous proposals was
their authors apparent belief that in simply drawing them they were taking
architecture beyond the traditional methods for theorising thinking about
building and were working with an entirely new concept of architecture.
50 Judging by the illustrations in ‘The International Concept of Utopia’ it seems
that in order to visualise the new dimension architects were still reliant upon
the traditional techniques of architectural design, i.e., constructing formal
models and perspective views, but now these were being deployed to
produce an imaginary world consisting of large, predominantly grid-type
structures, justified as responsive to the perceived dynamics of contemporary
life, namely flexibility, movement and change. In ‘The International Concept
of Utopia’ Tafuri and Dal Co present the architects speculations upon the
theme of the new dimension as, inevitably, disappointing. This is because the
architects, rather than challenging the disciplinary basis of architecture, were
simply assuming architecture as a solid foundation upon which to base new
thinking about building. More specifically, Tafuri and Dal Co suggest that the
failure of the new dimension can be attributed to the terms in which socio-
economic changes were understood within the institution of architecture,
which tended to oscillate between two extremes. On the one hand producing
lucid forecasts based upon the idea of planning, conceived as a science
of number, measurement and statistical analysis but on the other hand
producing a mass of utopian imagery, tending to represent the cities of the
new dimension as extended grid forms.
The Origins of Urban Design
In ‘The International Concept of Utopia’ Tafuri and Dal Co do,

however, present one project with a certain degree of approbation; this
is a proposal for the urbanisation of the Barene di San Giuliano at Mestre
by a team of architects lead by Ludovico Quaroni. The scheme is said to
have ‘offered a thoroughly worked-out methodological proposal in which
the entire idea of a quarter or neighbourhood…was once and for all left
behind.’ 1 In his later, single authored, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-
1985; Tafuri is more explicit about Quaroni’s proposal. The project had
originated in a competition of 1959 and the reason Tafuri finds it interesting
is because it ‘signalled a decisive stage in the development of international
architecture culture.’ 2 The competition brief asked for proposals for a
new satellite city for Venice, to be built on the mainland, facing across
the lagoon towards the historic city. Tafuri argues that Quaroni’s proposal
represented an interesting alternative to the other proposals, most of which
suggested the satellite city be composed of linear blocks laid out in a park.
It seemed to Tafuri that Quaroni was proposing something entirely different,
he was suggesting that it is possible to develop a contemporary language
of building that could achieve a new kind of monumental complexity. What 51
Tafuri thinks was important about Quaroni’s proposal is that it established
the basis for a new way of structuring relationships between thinking and
building as key factors in the conception of an urban design. According to
Tafuri the pressing problem to which Quaroni’s proposal seemed to offer a
positive solution was the question of how to formulate the design of a town
without presupposing a fixed set of economic and social relationships upon
which to think through the models for potential buildable forms.
At the time of the competition Quaroni’s proposal was reported
in various architectural magazines and so it is possible to revisit the text
of the project today.3 In doing so we immediately see that the key to the
urban design consists in a number of large, cylindrical forms, incomplete
1 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, ‘The International Concept of Utopia,’ Modern
Architecture/2, Faber & Faber, Electa, 1976, 357-363, 360.
2 Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985, Jessica Levine (trans.), The
MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London, England, 1989, 73.
3 The Competition was reported in Casabella Continuità, 1960, v242, & Architettura,
Cronache e Storia,1960, n57.
and facing out towards the lagoon. In his written account Quaroni refers
to these as ‘monuments’ and he is very precise about their size, there are
three of them. The largest is to have a diameter of 400 metres and will rise
to a height of nine storeys, the middle-sized one is to be 260 metres in
diameter and will rise to a height of 13 storeys and the smallest is to have
had a diameter of 160 metres and will rise to six storeys. The monumental
cylinders are endowed with a distinctly horizontal emphasis, not unlike
the linear blocks that feature in many of the designs proposed by other
architects who entered the competition, where floor plates are emphasised
as characteristic features. In terms of function the stacks of storey-height
floor-plates are designated to serve as accommodation for offices. Quaroni
writes that the detail design of each of the monumental office cylinders is to
be allocated to a different architect, in the expectation that each designer
will be able to express the general idea of the office in their own unique
way, thereby introducing an element of formal variety into the repetitive
storey-height stacks. In the general layout drawings the open areas
circumscribed by the monumental cylinders are shown to contain smaller
52 structures and these are labelled so as to designate general civic functions,
such as a market, a church a nursery and a school.
In a prime location established by the geometrical relationships
between the three cylindrical monuments there is a much lower building,
figured as two intersecting circular forms, one a dish in the ground the
other a low but slightly raised figure and these are to serve as an arena for
significant collective events. Radiating out from the monuments and back
into the hinterland is an elaborate system of residential accommodation,
including a system of roads. But again the proposal stops short at the point
of designating fixed forms for the buildings, or indeed for the grouping of
buildings. Again the intention of the proposal is that the detail design of
the housing will be allocated to different architects as a means of ensuring
formal variety into the repetitive housing typology. At the edge of the
zone of residential accommodation there are a number of tower structures,
located at fairly regular intervals along a road that circumscribes the entire
satellite city.
Although Quaroni is very precise about the geometrical relationships
and over-all dimensions of the monumental cylinders he gives no indication
of their detail design, but with one, important, exception, a sketch, entitled
‘Scorcio de Centro Direzionale e Alberghiero.’ Generally the monuments

are drawn as bare forms with just a tiny hint of horizontal stratification
into storey heights, however, in the exceptional sketch one of them is
drawn in greater detail, offering a glimpse of how Quaroni envisioned
the characteristics of its detail design. Aside from hinting at the design
details of the monumental buildings what is especially interesting about
Quaroni’s sketch is that it shows another kind of detailing that is implicated
in the urban design. Quite aside from the monuments, which anyway seem
to recede into the background, the sketch depicts an animated scene,
inhabited by numerous human figures. The human figures seem to be
preoccupied with all sorts of activities, some of them are simply strolling
about the urban design, presumably enjoying the maritime setting, whilst
others are seated at tables, maybe reading or conversing. There appears to
be a great deal of signage involved in the urban design, indicating further
kinds of human activity, such as shopping, dining in restaurants and bars
and riding in boats. In order to encourage the flow of bodies moving about
the urban design Quaroni explains that the monuments are to be raised up
off the ground, leaving a clear open space below so it will be possible to 53
pass underneath them.
It seems that what Quaroni was trying to articulate in his urban design
for the Barene di San Giuliano at Mestre is the idea of a town, imagined as
an eclectic mix of built forms and open events. The novelty of Quaroni’s way
of thinking depended upon the idea of the urban design as consisting in a
network of multivalent structures in which not only the bodies but also the
perceived life-style and activity of the population are essential ingredients of
the proposed formal model.
Quaroni’s idea for a new way of thinking about building is formally
very remote from the vast urban living rooms envisioned by Yves Klein in
his Architecture of the Air; and yet there is a point of similarity between
the two. Klein said that he had arrived at the idea of the Architecture of
the Air from his work on pictorial sensibility, which he believed could be
materialised in a place of display, such as a gallery, as a felt but invisible
presence. Klein conceived pictorial sensibility to be an atmosphere, a non-
sensuous perception, something to be felt, rather than sensed as it usually
is with a painting by appreciation of the composition of lines, contours and
colours. In 1958 Klein had staged a showing of pictorial sensibility at the
54
Figure 12. After Quaroni’s Project for the CEP of S. Giuliano at Mestre,
Monuments in their bare form, top, view of the largest from the medium-
sized; bottom, view of the smallest and medium-sized from the largest;
including the exceptional sketch (middle)
Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, the primary attraction of the show was the empty,
white-walled gallery space itself. Klein had painted the gallery space 48
hours before the opening of the show and he said that his purpose in doing
so was to create and to stabilise a climate:
While not playing the role of a house painter, which is to say, allowing
myself to proceed at my own pace and in my own manner of painting,
free and perhaps slightly distorted by my sensual nature, I believe
that the pictorial space that I had succeeded to stabilise previously
in front of and around my monochrome paintings will thenceforth be
Plate 1. Air Grid: Vampire
Plate 2. Project for The Corviale Void: view of the beetle mass
Plate 3. Ideal World in the Colour of Black
Plate 4. Ideal World in the Colour of Red
Plate 5. Ideal World in the Colour of Blue
Plate 6. Ideal World in the Colour of Yellow
Plate 7. Ideal World in the Colour of Green
Plate 8. Ideal World in the Colour of White
well established in the space of the gallery. My active presence during

the execution in the gallery space will create the climate and the
radiating pictorial environment that habitually permeates the studio
of the artist endowed with a true power; a sensuous density, abstract
yet real, existing and living, by itself and for itself.4
The idea of stabilising a climate, rather than painting a composition,

is not so far removed from the theory of painting that was implicated in
Brunelleschi’s demonstration of perspective back in Renaissance Florence.
It can be traced to the other, non-perspectival procedure whereby the sky
and the clouds made their way into the constructed view. In Brunelleschi’s
demonstration it is an image of the sky as a fluid, changing form that is
stabilised; as we have seen, Brunelleschi was able to capture the image of
a continuously changing sky through reflection, which is brought into the
view by means of a veneer of burnished silver that is placed there, ‘where
buildings of the painting were free in the air.’ 5 In Quaroni’s proposal for the
Barene di San Giuliano at Mestre the monumental cylindrical forms should
be understood as playing a similarly stabilising role. They are envisioned as 55
support devices, like Klein’s coating of white paint that stabilises the gallery,
ready for the show, or the mirrored surface that reflects the sky and the clouds
in Brunelleschi’s painted panel. In Quaroni’s satellite city the buildings are
no longer conceived as things to be looked at, i.e. as the subject matter of a
view, rather they are conceived as a necessary support for the urban design
that is now deemed the appropriate subject matter of architecture.
Quaroni’s architectural practice was based in Rome and so he would
have been more than familiar with the idea of the open cylindrical form as
a means of stabilising an environment. The most obvious example is Saint
Peters Square, built by Gian Lorenzo Bernini between 1657 and 1667.
The environment in front of Saint Peters is stabilised by two enormous
4 Yves Klein, ‘Preparation and Presentation of the Exhibition on 28 April 1958 at Galerie
Iris Clert, 3 Rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris ‘The Refinement of Sensibility in the First Material
State into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility,’ The Pneumatic Period,’ Klaus Ottmann (trans.),
Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Spring Publications,
Putnam, Conn., 2007, 48-56, 51.
5 Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Bruelleschi, Catherine Enggass, (trans.), The
Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park and London, 1970, 44.
colonnades, laid out on a semi-circular geometry and mirroring one another

across a dished, oval surface. Bernini’s colonnades are, of course, a species
of peristyle and in fact Le Roy makes mention of St Peters Square in his
evolutionary history of architecture, where it is illustrated in Plate 1. The
analogy between the colonnades of Saint Peters and Quaroni’s monumental
cylinders is interesting as it highlights the peristyle ancestry of the new kind
of monument, envisioned in the spirit of the new dimension. In Le Roy’s
terms the colonnades of Saint Peters are spatial devices whose purpose is
to stimulate the perceptions of the people, congregating in the piazza and
moving about in and around the colonnades; however, Le Roy would never
have imagined the aggregation of a sundry population of moving bodies as
the purpose of an architectural design.
On the occasion of the Parisian exhibition Klein actually did much
more to prepare for the showing of pictorial sensibility than merely
painting the gallery white. He organised a whole array of support features,
including the idea of a ‘free admissions ticket,’6 which was sent out with the
invitations. The free ticket carried a short message explaining that anyone
56 who did not possess a ticket would have to pay a 1,500 franc entrance fee
to get into the show. Klein justified the exorbitant fee on the grounds that
pictorial sensibility was something that could suffuse into the bodies of
receptive visitors and so run the risk of being taken away, or even stolen,
from the show, thus diminishing the intensity of the atmosphere. In a similar
manner Quaroni proposes the new urban environment is not to depend
solely on the climatic stability generated by the monumental cylinders. As
his written account indicates and the exceptional sketch, discussed above,
confirms, the stabilisation of the urban climate was to include all kinds of
supporting features, such as signs and lights and shops and restaurants and
bars and boat-rides, not to mention the significant events that were to be
staged in the arena.
The similarities between Klein and Quaroni’s tactics for climatic
stabilisation are however underscored by a significant difference, one that
goes far beyond the differences of their respective means of expression. In
the urban living rooms of his architecture made from air, Klein envisions the
citizens as being totally absorbed in the pursuit of freedom – he makes this
6 Klein, ‘Preparation & Presentation,’ 49.

clear in his concept of impersonal ontology. In the monumental forms of his

architecture made from storey-height floor-slabs, Quaroni too is envisioning
the citizens as being already occupied. Although the prime-matter out of
which the monuments are to be made certainly includes a fair amount of air,
unlike Klein’s air, which is impregnated with pictorial sensibility, Quaroni’s
air is impregnated with a specific economic idea: white-collar work. This
means that the citizens, envisioned as occupying the satellite city, for all
they are free to pursue the delights of the new environment outside of work
will find that in doing so they are becoming ever more obligated to the
socio-economic idea that is presupposed in Quaroni’s urban design, i.e., to
white-collar work.
In his Architecture of the Air Klein was proposing an entirely different
notion of citizenship to the white-collar workers of Quaroni’s satellite city.
In order to picture the notion of citizenship that underpins the Architecture
of the Air Klein drew an analogy between the structure of painting and the
structure of a socio-economic system. In Klein’s analogy the fixative medium
of a painting is likened to the means of exchange of socio-economic activity,
in other words to money. Whereas traditionally paintings are valued if bound 57
together by oils, Klein, as we have seen, invented a special fixative medium
for his monochrome paintings that does not deprive the colour pigments
‘of their won capacities to radiate.’ 7 In the socio-economic structure that
grounds the Architecture of the Air the medium of exchange is sensibility,
rather than money. Arguing that it is only by means of sensibility that human
beings could actually obtain life, Klein envisions the main activity of the
Architecture of the Air to be reverie and contemplation. Rather than being
immersed in a pattern of life structured as indoor office work as opposed to
leisure activities outside, the citizens of the Architecture of the Air will work
outside, spending most of their time levitating in the stabilised climates
of the urban living rooms. They will do this in order to acquire sensibility
for life itself and not merely as a means of earning money to spend on
commodities.
7 Yves Klein, ‘The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial,’ Peter Noever and François
Perrin, (eds), Air Architecture, Yves Klein, Hatje Cantze Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany,
2004, 35-76, 43.
Klein’s Architecture of the Air proposes a fascinating alternative to

the architecture of urban design, however, at the time he proposed the
Architecture of the Air it seems to have been very difficult to imagine, at
least it was difficult to imagine without at the same time regarding the idea
as absurd, or even preposterous. Perhaps this is why the Architecture of the
Air is not included in ‘The International Concept of Utopia’ and why Tafuri
dismissively refers to Klein in his later book, The Sphere and the Labyrinth
as suffering from ‘neo-avant-garde hallucinations.’ 8 On the other hand, in
his History of Italian Architecture Tafuri actively promotes Quaroni’s project,
presenting it as a significant moment in the History of Modern Architecture.
If Tafuri is correct then Quaroni’s project set ‘the groundwork for the new
climate of the sixties,’ appearing at a time when ‘Italian intellectuals were
becoming aware of a new reality: convulsive urbanisation and the diffusion of
mass communication had effected profound transformations in society and
individual behaviour.’ 9
One intellectual who seems to have been struck by the new peristyle
idea made manifest in Quaroni’s urban design was the architect Aldo
58 Rossi, who was to subject the idea to some interesting developments. In
his competition entry of 1962, for an Administrative Centre for the city of
Turin, which he worked on with Luca Meda and Gianugo Polesello, Rossi
proposed a monumental form of the new type. A cubic figure, twice as
broad as it was high with an enormous open space inside. Like Quaroni’s
cylindrical monuments, Rossi’s cube conformed to the type of the peristyle
and it was impregnated with the idea of white-collar work. With Rossi’s
monument however, the prime-matter of the new peristyle type was to be
formed into a stack of storey heights in three bands of eight, one above
the other, separated by a double height articulation and raised up above
the datum of the city by somewhere in the order of 35 metres. The raising
of the storey heights was to be by means of 12 enormous columns, one on
each corner and two on each side. The overall size of Rossi’s monument
8 Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Stage as ‘Virtual City’: From Fuchs to the Totaltheatre,’ The
Sphere and the Labyrinthe, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the
1970’s,’ Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly, (trans.), MIT Press, Cambridge
Massachusetts & London England, 1980, 95-112, 98.
9 Tafuri, 1989, 74.
was in the order of 165 metres high by 320 metres in width and depth. This
means that although its plan footprint is comparable in size to the largest
of Quaroni’s cylinders it would have towered above it by something in the
order of one-to-five!
Inside the monumental courtyard, stabilised by the stacked bands of
storey heights, was to have been a system for organising the flows of traffic
bringing citizens to and from the place of work. The traffic system would
consist in a network of roads and turning circles, underground parking for
cars, bus stops and pedestrian walkways and plazas. As well as traffic the
courtyard was to have a street of shops, cinemas, theatre and a congress
hall. Aside from the roads, walkways and plaza the congress hall would be
the only non-office facility expressed as a unique form; a metallic domed
structure in the order of 50 metres in diameter. On the tops of the stacked
bands of storey heights would be accommodation for nightlife, such as
clubs and bars.
Rossi’s proposal for an administrative centre makes an interesting
comparison with Quaroni’s satellite city because both of them are based
on the same underlying presupposition, fuelled by the perception of 59
new patterns of socio-economic development. Both architects adopted
the organisational principle of stacked bands of storey heights, but with
exceptional formal discrepancies, which in the end, made all the difference
to the way their respective proposals were understood and judged by their
contemporaries. As we have seen, in Quaroni’s case the bands of storey
heights were to be formed into enormous, open cylinders of differing heights
and diameters and laid out side by side, in an irregular off-set pattern and
the places in-between were to be animated by the aggregate body of its
citizens moving at their leisure. In Rossi’s case the bands of storey heights
were to be formed into closed figures of equal size and stacked, one above
the other, to make an enormous towering edifice. The square in the middle
would be patterned primarily by flows of traffic, but it would also provide
accommodation for various leisure activities, such as shopping and cinema
and of course there would be the nightlife up in the attic.
It might seem that the formal choices made by Quaroni and Rossi
are of little consequence and that what really informs the architecture of
their respective satellite city and administrative centre is the presupposition
of an underlying convulsive urbanism. However, if this were so then there
60
Figure 13. After Aldo Rossi’s Design for an Administrative Centre for Turin
could be no possible explanation for the favourable reception of Quaroni’s

proposal and the tone of disapproval directed towards Rossi’s. According to
Rossi’s partner in the project, Polesello, the judges of the Turin competition
rejected their proposal on the grounds it was reactionary, associating the
closed peristyle form with notions of totalitarianism, suggesting it could be
envisioned as a place of mass execution, rather than an urban design.
To appreciate the jury’s reaction to the respective proposals of
Quaroni and Rossi it is important to bear in mind that in either case the
response must have been based primarily upon their engagement with
a text, i.e. with a set of drawings and a written report. Quaroni’s satellite
city and Rossi’s administrative centre are theoretical propositions, stated,
primarily, by means of architectural drawings and models, each proposal
offers a way of thinking about building but neither claims to reveal the way
things actually are, or indeed to state how things ought to be. The fact
that Quaroni’s proposal was favourably received and Rossi’s was not can
only have been because, at the time, it must have seemed to clarify the
problems that were on the minds of the competition jury whilst, presumably,
Rossi’s did not.
One problem that was not far from the surface of Italian architectural
competitions at the time and might have played a significant part in
the rejection of Rossi, Polesello and Meda’s design was the need to
break with the architecture of the Fascist regime, which had dominated
Italian society since the late 1920s and up to end of the Second World
War. There is a distinct manner of expression associated with Fascist
architecture, which tends to favour over-scaled neoclassical forms, not
unlike the monumental peristyle Rossi & Polesello were proposing for the
administrative centre. But Fascist architecture is also similar in style to the
rationalist architecture that developed from the thinking of Enlightenment
architects such as Le Roy. In this respect it is interesting to make a formal
comparison between the pair of projects Quaroni’s satellite city/Rossi’s
administrative centre and the pair of projects Piranesi’s Campo Marzio/
Le Roys’ Plate 1. Like the Campo Marzio, Quaroni’s satellite city uses the
forms of existing topographical features as a means of structuring the 61
composition, in particular the lagoon and the location of the existing
city of Venice are important structural components and just as Piranesi
seems to have wanted to spoil his architectural models by denying them
formal autonomy, so too Quaroni’s vagueness about the form and detail
design of particular buildings means the proposal is highly unsatisfactory
if considered as a source of formal models. Rossi’s administration centre,
on the other hand, is drawn with all the abstract clarity of Le Roy’s
Plate 1. Especially telling in this respect is the omission of perspective
sketches and views and, generally, of a feeling of inhabitation and use.
The drawings are a dry and analytical study of the administrative centre,
viewed almost as if it were a formal model that has been prized out of the
empty space of Le Roy’s Plate 1 and dropped onto a carefully prepared
ground, detached from the urban and other topographical features of the
environing context.
Not long after the Turin competition, in 1966, Rossi’s book The
Architecture of the City was published, this book is still in print today. In The
Architecture of the City Rossi devotes a considerable portion of the text to
a discussion of monuments and their relation to the urban environment.
In studying The Architecture of the City what becomes clear is that the
text is a criticism of urban design, but so too was Rossi’s proposal for the
administrative centre for Turin. Rossi argues that monuments constitute
exceptional places within the city and that they are able to do so because
of the clarity and persistence of their form. In making his argument Rossi
draws attention to the fact that the form of a monument prevails, long after
the efficacy of the political and economic forces that initially brought it into
the city have faded into cultural memory. Rossi points out that even if these
dead forms are accessible to historical study, there is no longer an organic
link between those forms and the life that now inhabits them. To make
his point Rossi gives a number of striking examples; they all involve the
typology of the Ancient Roman amphitheatre and to begin with he recounts
the story of the amphitheatre at Nimes. At the end of the Pax Romana
the amphitheatre was transformed by the Visigoths into a fortified city of
‘two thousand inhabitants; four gates corresponding to the four cardinal
directions gave access to the city, and inside there were two churches.’10
On the one hand Rossi stresses the initial condition of the amphitheatre,
62 as a structure demonstrating an unequivocal relationship between form,
symbolic meaning and function. On the other hand, he points out how,
due to the succession of dramatic historical events, the unequivocal
relation of form and meaning changed and the same form eventually
became something it was never intended to be, a city in the form of an
amphitheatre. Rossi also gives the example of the ruins of the Coliseum
in Rome and the proposal by Pope Sixtus V to expropriate it for economic
purposes and transform it into a wool mill. Rossi is fascinated by cases
of expropriation such as these and he believes that they offer important
insights into why it is a mistake to think of the architecture of the city as an
organic fusion of socio-economic factors and built form.
Rossi’s interest in expropriation was informed by his reading of the
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that expropriation is a general
principle of urban change. According to Halbwachs expropriation should be
understood as a general principle arising from the force of socio-economic
development, whose effects entail the tearing-down and/or the building-up
10 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and
London England, 1982, 87.
of the constructed mass of the urban environment. However, in order for

the principle of expropriation to become effective in any particular set of
circumstances it is necessary that the need for socio-economic development
be consciously perceived as a collective need. Once socio-economic
forces becomes manifest as a perceived need of the collective then it
becomes possible to initiate action. As a recent case of expropriation Rossi
gives the example of the privatisation of land under the socio-economic
forces of a bourgeois national state, arguing that every bourgeois state
is, invariably, subject to privatisation, which is a general condition that has
to be worked through. However, Rossi explains, the activity of working
through the general condition can only occur in specific contexts with their
own specific historical and political determinations. It is only in the context
of specific historical and political circumstances that the general effects of
expropriation come to be invested with a precise, material form. In The
Architecture of the City Rossi argues that because acts of expropriation are
always channelled through specific historical and political circumstances so
their effects tend to be heterogeneous, not homogenous, as they would
be if expropriation was a general principle that could be applied uniformly, 63
irrespective of circumstance.
So, for Rossi, this means there is a precise role for architectural
design in the network of forces and facts linking expropriation and material
form and that is the role of mediation. Rossi believed that the point at
which architectural design can inform the architecture of the city is in the
formation of perceived collective needs, or collective consciousness as he
calls it. Along with the concept of expropriation, Rossi takes his concept of
collective consciousness from Halbwachs, there is nothing sentimental or
romantic about Rossi’s notion of collective consciousness, certainly he was
not suggesting that by satisfying a perceived collective need bad decisions
could be avoided:
Obviously the collective consciousness can be mistaken; the city can

be induced to urbanize lands where there is no tendency to expand
or to build streets where none are really needed, and such hastily
created streets can remain deserted.11
11 Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City, 143.

On the basis of Rossi’s thinking about expropriation, perceived

collective needs and the material form of the city it becomes apparent
why he was so insistent about the idea of theory as a key component of
architectural design and why he placed as much value on un-built projects
as he did on realised designs. Rossi argued that projects such as his own
proposal for the administrative centre or Quaroni’s satellite city, insofar as
they mirror complex ideas in clear and unequivocal forms, are of great value
to the collective because they offer it something tangible, a virtual form by
means of which it is possible to begin to imaginatively construct an image
of the city it is trying to be. It is for this reason that Rossi was so insistent
on the link between theory and politics as a key ingredient in the study and
practice of architecture.
One other important point to note about Rossi’s thinking about
architecture is the distinction he makes between method and theory, for
him method, even if it is accompanied by artistic enthusiasm is symptomatic
of a frame of mind that approaches design in a piecemeal fashion, looking
upon the act of designing as a matter of solving problems as they arise. Rossi
64 thought that problem solving of this kind has a limited place in architectural
practice and is reflected in the idea that an architect should go about their
work in a professional manner. However, there is nothing propositional about
working by problem solving alone, the method does not, in itself, involve
theory and so it should not, strictly speaking, be thought of as architecture. At
this point it is perhaps worth recollecting the reasons Piranesi gave for his turn
from building to a more direct means of expressing architectural ideas. For
Rossi and for Piranesi theoretical work requires a direct confrontation with the
very idea of design and it acknowledges the need to commit to a social and
political theme, which should be pursued insistently, to its logical conclusion
and stated in the formulation of an architectural proposition.12
The Blue of the Sky

One of Rossi’s first theoretical designs to result in a commission to build
was a proposal for the extension to the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena,
12 Aldo Rossi, ‘Architettura per i musei,’ Rosaldo Bonicalzi (ed.), Aldo Rossi, Scritti scelti
sull’ architettura e la città, 1956-1972, clup (cooperativa libraria universitaria del
politecnico), Milan, 1975.
which Rossi worked on with Gianni Braghieri; their design was placed first
in a competition held in 1971. One of the most striking features of Rossi’s
cemetery design, which remains unfinished to this day, is the colour of
the roofs, which are sky blue. One day I found myself driving past the San
Cataldo cemetery and thinking to myself ‘what is the relation between the
blue of the roofs and the theory stated here?’ From my recollections of the
various textual materials I had seen I was certain that in the early sketches
and drawings of the proposal there had been no indication of an intention
to colour the roofs blue, nevertheless, I did have a distinct feeling of a
strong sky blue presence evident even in the early work on the design. On
revisiting the project material today Rossi’s insistence upon the presence
of the clear blue sky is apparent, not only do the many drawings he made
whilst working on the development of the design evoke a clear blue sky but
he also chose to adopt the competition slogan as the title for the written
statement, which he entitled The Blue of the Sky.13
At the same time as he was working on the cemetery competition
Rossi began to work on the collection of notes that were to be published
ten years later, in 1981, under the title A Scientific Autobiography, where 65
he makes a number of references to the cemetery design. It seems that
just before beginning work on the competition Rossi had spent several
months in hospital, having been involved in a car accident on his way to
Istanbul. Rossi’s notes seem to capture his first ideas for the cemetery
design, recounting the way the project theme was ‘born in the little
hospital of Slawonski Brod,’ where Rossi lay in a small room on the ground
floor, near a window that looked out onto a small garden. The notes
record Rossi as remembering having spent much of his convalescence
merely gazing out of the window ‘at the trees and the sky,’ 14 but at the
same time they record how painfully aware he was of the fractured bones
in his body. The notes recount how later, having finished work on the
competition, Rossi once again drove to Istanbul. On his second visit Rossi
13 Aldo Rossi, ‘L’azzurro del cielo,’ Casabella Continuità, 1972, December, v36, n372,
21-22. For an English translation see, Oppositions, 1976, summer, v5, 1-54, reprinted
in, John O’ Regan et al. (eds), Aldo Rossi, Selected Writings & Projects, Architectural
Design, London Gandon Editions, Dublin, 40-47.
14 Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, Lawrence Venuti (trans.), The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1981, 11.
Figure 14. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena: four views
visited the Green Mosque of Bursa and he associates this visit with the
remembrance of feeling himself become invisible, as if he was in some
sense ‘on the other side of the spectacle.’
It is worth pausing here to allow the remembrances in Rossi’s notes
to sink into our own preoccupations with the blue roofs of the San Cataldo
cemetery. For me, the other side of the spectacle would seem to be related
in some way to the silver surface that Brunelleschi put onto his painting in
order to reflect the sky and the clouds, but it is a surface that mirrors without
reflecting. Rossi’s notes record a certain difficulty he has in remembering the
two visits that bracket the work on the cemetery competition. In recording
the difficulty the notes indicate a merging of Rossi’s feeling of looking out at
the sky from his hospital bed with the feeling of being on the other side of
the spectacle. In blurring his remembrances as he does, Rossi was trying to
form an image of a very particular kind.
There is a distinct resonance between the blue-sky image evoked
in Rossi’s notes and a text by Gaston Bachelard entitled The Blue Sky; it is
a text that Yves Klein was familiar with too and one that he liked to quote
when he was trying to formulate the theoretical basis of his own work: 67
In the realm of blue air more than elsewhere, we feel that the world
may be permeated by the most indeterminate reverie. This is when
reverie really has depth. The blue sky opens up in depth beneath
the dream. Then dreams are not limited to one-dimensional images.
Paradoxically, the aerial dream soon has only a depth dimension. The
other two dimensions, in which picturesque, coloured reverie plays
its games lose all their oneiric interest. The world is then truly on the
other side of the unsilvered mirror. There is an imaginary beyond, a
pure beyond, one without a within. First there is nothing, then there is
a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.15
15 Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Blue Sky,’ Air and Dreams, An Essay on the Imagination of
Movement, E.R. and C.F. Farrell (trans.), The Bachelard Translations, The Dallas Institute
Publications, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Dallas, 1988, 161-174,
167-168; quoted in, Yves Klein, ‘The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial, Lecture at
the Sorbonne, 3 June, 1959,’ Klaus Ottmann (trans.), Overcoming the Problematics of
Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Spring Publications, Putnam, Conn., 2007, 71-98, 86.
In his development of the poetics of the blue sky Bachelard cites

a passage from Émile Zola’s La Faute de L’ Abbe Mouret (Abbe Mouret’s
Transgression) in which the hero is reborn to life after a dangerous illness. In
returning from his illness Abbe Mouret seems to have experienced the exact
same imagery of convalesce recorded in Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography.
The Abbe is gazing out of a window:
In front of him there was a broad expanse of sky, nothing but blue, an
infinite blue. In it he bathed his pain and abandoned himself as if to a
gentle cradling: from it he drank in sweetness, purity and youth. Only
a branch, whose shadow he had seen stuck out past the window and
made a bold spot on the blue sea. And that was already too much for
his delicate condition, as a sick man who was wounded by the dirty
spots that swallows, flying on the horizon make.16
Bachelard’s point in quoting Zola is to demonstrate to his reader

a poetic metaphor that is only partially aerial, the blue sky involved in
68 Abbe Mouret’s recuperation is spoiled by being partially occluded by the
silhouettes of the objects that are outlined against it: ‘The branch, the bird
passing by, the overly sharp cross-piece of the window, all disturb aerial
reverie and hinder the fusion of being in this universal, incorruptible blue.’
The window crosspiece is a well-known trope of Rossi’s formal vocabulary,
most famous for its appearance at the Gallaratese Housing Block in Milan
but appearing recurrently in other projects.
For Bachelard a poetic metaphor that is truly aerial will imagine the
blue sky as ‘an elemental image,’ 17 the truly aerial image is a blue without
colour, an infinite transparency that has ‘no incident, no shock, no history.’18
Bachelard develops his theory of the blue-sky image with a quotation
from the book Donner a Voir by the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. The subject
matter of Donner a Voir is primarily a concern with the evolution of poetic
sensibility, starting with the dream narratives of ‘Les Dessous d’une Vie ou
La Pyramide Humaine’ (The Underside of Life or The Human Pyramide), in
16 Émile Zola, La Faute de L’ Abbe Mouret, quoted in Bachelard, Air & Dreams, 164.
17 Bachelard, Air & Dreams, 164.
Figure 15. The Cross-piece Window themed in Aldo Rossi’s built work: top, Gallaratese
Housing Block, Milan, 1969-73, bottom, left, Casa Aurora Office Block, Turin, 1985,
right, Secondary School, Broni, 1979-81
which the poet writes of having been tempted by a mystery ‘in which forms
play no part. Curious about a colourless sky from which birds and clouds
had been banished, I became a slave to my unreal and innocent eyes, eyes
ignorant of the world and of themselves. Peaceful power. I suppressed the
visible and the invisible, I lost myself in an unsilvered mirror.’ 19 Eluard’s verse
merges Bachelard’s poetic metaphor of a colourless blue with the idea a
quasi-conscious condition that is a kind of mirroring without reflection, it
is the condition of a very faint ego, one that is almost lost to the world.
Bachelard picks up Eluard’s peculiar conflation of the unsilvered mirror
with a colourless sky, surmising that it symbolises ‘an object sufficient for a
dreaming subject.’ 20
Bachelard uses Eluard’s evocation of the aerial image as a means of
evoking a kind of minimal object. The minimal object is sufficient to prompt
the primal condition of consciousness, which Bachelard likes to refer to as a
kind of dream state, prior to representation, most often Bachelard refers to
this primal condition by the term reverie:
70 Here reverie is integrated into its rightful place, i.e., before

representation. There, the imagined world takes its rightful place
before the represented world; the universe takes its rightful place
before the object. As is only right, the poetic knowledge of the
world precedes rational knowledge of objects. The world is beautiful
before being true. The world is admired before being verified. Every
primitive condition is pure oneirism.21
Having stated the symbolic import of the blue-sky image Bachelard

gives a brief indication of its ontological significance, arguing that if
the world were not given first in reverie then being in the world would
consist in an existence that is exclusively bound up inside a web of
representations. But representations, argues Bachelard, are always
contemporaneous and slave to sensation, thus in order to explain the
fact that consciousness has a certain awareness of its own participation

in the formation of representations it is a necessary condition of being

in the world that it incorporates moments that are outside, or beyond,
representation.
In Rossi’s account of the evolution of the San Cataldo Cemetery
project his first blue-sky image, which is a memory of looking out into the
hospital garden, is only partly aerial, it is contaminated by the figures of the
trees and the window bars, here the sky is pictured as blue. His next aerial
image, which he recounts without mention of blueness or of sky, is of the
perfect kind and it repeats Eluard’s primal condition of poetic sensibility as
being like losing oneself in an unsilvered mirror:
Having finished this project, I returned to Istanbul by car in

the month of November. These two trips to Istanbul are like a
continuation of the same project, and I often confuse the places. It
is a matter of an interrupted journey. The principal place, I believe,
consists of the Green Mosque of Bursa, where I again felt a great
passion for architecture, an interest which I rarely feel so strongly. In
the mosque, I re-experienced a sensation which I had not felt since 71
childhood: that of being invisible, of being on the other side of the
spectacle.22
Presumably, when he wrote his autobiographical notes Rossi was well

aware of the cultural references he was making, in which case his musings
over the blue-sky image can be taken as evidence of a concern to take his
theory of architecture beyond representation and into the primal conditions
of non-sensuous perception.
The person who first formulated the idea of non-sensuous perception,
as part of a fully worked out philosophy, was Arthur Schopenhauer, although
he did not call it by that term, referring instead to a pre-conceptual
knowledge of Ideas. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is based on an ontology
that posits a metaphysical entity that is beyond representation, which he
calls the Will. But what is interesting about Schopenhauer is that he showed
how the Will, even if it eludes representation, could be felt as an active
presence in the lived world.
22 Aldo Rossi, Scientific Autobiography, 12.

4
Architecture and
Non-sense
Arthur Schopenhauer conceived his major text, The World as Will and
Representation, in the early 19th century – it was first published in 1819, but
it was not until the later half of the 19th century that his thinking became
popular and influential. In 1844 Schopenhauer had reconceived the work
and published it in two volumes, the first was essentially a reprint of the
1819 edition; the second was a supplementary discussion on the themes
of the first. But like the first edition the second edition of the work evoked
little response and it was not until after the publication of his second and
last major work, the two-volume Parerga and Paralipomena, in 1851, that
interest in his earlier work began to awaken and stimulated the demand for
a new edition. In 1959, some 40 years after he had conceived of his system,
The World as Will and as Representation was published in a third edition
and Schopenhauer’s philosophy began to be widely read and to have
effects in many fields of knowledge, including architecture.
Although some regarded Schopenhauer to be teaching a ‘repulsive’
doctrine, nevertheless it was possible to see in his ontology a refreshing
alternative to liberal idealism and the generally optimistic outlook it

encouraged, which was by then beginning to seem somewhat naive:1
While Schopenhauer’s teaching is the most genial, the most

ingenious, and – we would add – the most amusing that can be
imagined, the doctrine taught is the most disheartening, the most
repulsive, the most opposed to the aspirations of the present world…
All that the liberal mind looks forward to with hope, if not confidence
– the extension of political rights, the spread of education, the
brotherhood of nations, the discovery of new means of subduing
stubborn nature – must be given up as a vain dream, if ever
Schopenhauer’s doctrine be accepted.2
The reason why Schopenhauer’s thought is unacceptable to liberal

idealism is because it is grounded in a rejection of the idea that animals,
including those of a human kind, are, by right of nature, born to be free.
Quite to the contrary, argues Schopenhauer, there is no freedom for any
74 species of living being grounded in nature, if the species man has any
hope of becoming free then it must first stop believing that nature is made
according to a plan and secondly it must accept that the artefacts and tools
that it makes are theoretical and so are of an entirely different order to the
creations of nature.
As Schopenhauer’s critic observed, his style of argument is genial,
ingenious and amusing and for this reason it is worth calling upon
Schopenhauer himself to set forth the basic premise of his metaphysical
system:
The intellect is only known to us in animal nature, consequently as

an absolutely secondary and subordinate principle in the world,
a product of the latest origin; it can never therefore have been
1 For an account of Schopenhauer’s rise to fame see Brian Magee, ‘Schopenhauer’s

Reputation in its Changing Historical Context,’ The Philosophy of Schopenhauer,
Claredon Press, Oxford, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, 418-439.
2 The Westminster Review, 1853 (Vol LIX. No. CXVI) ‘Iconoclasm in German Philosophy’,
reprinted in Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, The Posthumous 1867 Edition,
Appendix B, Living Time® Media International, 2005, 170.
Architecture and Non-sense
the condition of the existence of the world. Nor can a ‘mundus

intelligibilis’ precede a ‘mundus sensibilis’; since it receives its
material from the latter alone. It is not an intellect which has brought
forth Nature; it is on the contrary, Nature which has brought forth
the intellect. Now the will on the contrary being that which fills every
thing and manifests itself immediately in each – thus showing each
thing to be its phenomenon – appears everywhere as that which is
primary. It is just for this reason, that the explanation of all teleological
facts is to be found in the will of the being itself, in which they are
observed.3
It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that Schopenhauer, as

a young man, had spent a considerable amount of time conversing with
J.W. Goethe about the latter’s experiments with colour phenomena and
had even been lent the necessary equipment to perform some of the
experiments for himself. The idea that the explanation of teleological fact
is to be found in the activity of the phenomenon itself is an important
principle of Goethe’s science, thus, for example, Goethe believed that the 75
blue of the sky was a law of chromatics and not, as we would think today,
a consequence of the way in which light from the atmosphere interacts
with the human eye. Although Schopenhauer was impressed by Goethe’s
systematic presentation of colour phenomena he was critical of the idea
that it amounted to a theory, suggesting that what Goethe had produced
was data for a theory of colour, rather than what one would expect from
a proper theory of colour. Schopenhauer actually worked out a theory of
colour himself and published it in essay form. In the introduction to his
theory of colour he explains what he means by theory and how theory is
related to facts:
If theory is not universally supported and founded on facts, then it is

an empty chimera, and even each single, frayed-but-true experience
has much more value. On the other hand, however, all the isolated
facts from a definite realm of the field of experience, even when
3 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, The Posthumous 1867 Edition, Living Time®
Media International, 2005, 37.
they are completely comprised, do not constitute a science until the

knowledge of their innermost nature has united them under one
common conception, that comprises and contains all that can be
found only in those facts and to which again other conceptions are
subordinated, by means of whose intervention we can arrive at the
knowledge and definition of each individual fact at once.4
In his major work, The World as Will and Representation,

Schopenhauer attempted to formulate a theory of the world; the data
upon which he based his theory was derived from paying careful attention
to the activity of the world, including the activity of the theorist himself,
Schopenhauer, who is, of course, a part of the world. If, as Schopenhauer
says, it is the most primary and sensible region of the world that brings forth
the intellect then, logically, there must be, within that primal region, not
only the first means of sensibility but also the first means of intellection, the
elementary Ideas of a substance that is making sense of itself.
Schopenhauer was greatly influenced by the philosophy of
76 Immanuel Kant, regarding his philosophy as picking up where Kant’s ideas
seemed to be failing; he makes this clear on the first page of the first book
of The World as Will and Representation and he devotes a whole appendix
at the back of the first volume to a ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy.’
Kant’s great merit, explains Schopenhauer, is his doctrine of ‘the complete
diversity of the ideal from the real,’ 5 however Kant’s greatest mistake,
he continues, was to have ‘nowhere clearly distinguished knowledge of
perception from abstract knowledge.’ 6 This mistake, argues Schopenhauer,
led Kant to suppose that all true knowledge lies in the region of abstract
concepts and so, as the foundation of his philosophy, Kant produces a
‘logical table of judgements’, which Schopenhauer unflatteringly refers to
as:
4 Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On Vision and Colour,’ George Stahl (trans.), On Vision and
Colour by Arthur Schopenhauer and Color Sphere by Philipp Otto Runge, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York, 2010, 35-119, 44.
5 Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,’ The World as Will and
Representation, Volume I, E.F.J. Payne (trans.), Dover Publications, Inc., New York,
1969, 413-534, 418.
6 Schopenhauer, ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,’ WWR, v1, 1969, 431.
The Procrustean bed onto which he violently forces all things in the
world and everything that occurs in man, merely to be able to repeat
everywhere the symmetry of that table.7
Schopenhauer thought that if Kant had sufficiently examined the

question of what a concept actually is then he would have seen the
problematic relationship between concepts and the ‘representations of
perception in which the world exists.’ If Kant had followed this line of
enquiry, argues Schopenhauer, then he would have realised there must be
a non-sensuous, non-rational component to perception. Schopenhauer
describes the process of perception as entailing a traffic of informative
impressions that affect the sense organs of the perceiving body, however
the sense organs are not simply bare receptors that send stimulation to
the brain, they are perceptual systems, in other words they are already
interfaced with the brain and so furnished with intellect. Today the term we
would give to the way Schopenhauer conceives the structure of impression
and sense is network. A creature is not an isolated, autonomous individual,
immersed in an environment, it is rather a locus of perceptions that produce 77
and are produced by an environment. We are all accustomed to thinking
of our own experience of the perceptual network as the relationship of a
subject to an object, which we tend to presuppose is evidence of an interior
‘I’ and an exterior ‘thing out there.’
If, as Kant’s thinking seemed to imply, the capacity to perceive a
world depends on stimuli being sent to the brain for decoding by means
of abstract concepts then how is it possible for those creatures that don’t
seem to have concepts to form a meaningful picture of their world? As
Schopenhauer points out, the capacity to form a meaningful world is vital to
all living creatures and not only to those that are highly intelligent:
All animals, even down to the very lowest, must have Understanding…
although they have it in very different degrees of delicacy and of
clearness; at any rate they must have as much of it as is required for
7 Schopenhauer, ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,’ WWR, v1, 1969, 430.

perception by their senses; for sensation without Understanding would

not only be a useless, but a cruel gift of Nature.8
If experience is conceived as entailing structures of thought (self-

conscious intellection) working over impressions of sense then the fact that
all creatures, including rocks and plants, are able to respond to changes in
their environment becomes something of a mystery. Schopenhauer draws
attention to the fact that if they are to survive then all living creatures must
be able to form an active picture of their world. In other words a picture that
is not ‘strange and meaningless’ 9 but speaks directly to the creature and
acquires an interest that constitutes a field of activity.
For Schopenhauer the behaviour of animals seemed to confirm his
hypothesis of the non-sensory aspect of perception, but it also led him to
suppose there must be some invisible force that binds the creature to its
own particular field of activity, this force he understood as the expression
of an occult power, which he called Will. It might be supposed that
Schopenhauer’s ontology looks upon Will as a divine entity, but this is far
78 from the case. Schopenhauer looks upon the Will with a cool, objective
gaze, studying it critically, if indirectly, through observation of phenomena,
but he regards the Will to be fundamentally contemptible, certainly not
worth living for.
In order to demonstrate how bloody and uncaring the Will is
Schopenhauer recounts a tale, told by a traveller who had journeyed
through the dense jungles of Java. The traveller had noticed a White
squirrel, frisking about amidst the branches of a tree and moving between
its nest and a cavity in the trunk higher up, perhaps a storehouse of fruit
and nuts. All of a sudden the creature seemed to be seized with terror, its
movements becoming erratic and irregular until finally it crouched down
and lay motionless between a fork in the branches of the tree. The traveller
guessed that the squirrel must be in some kind of danger; he approached
the scene and saw in the hollow of the tree trunk a ribbon snake with its
eyes fixed in the direction of the squirrel. Unfortunately for the squirrel
8 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Karl Hillebrand (trans.),

Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2006, 89.
9 Schopenhauer, WWR, v1, 95.
‘science was stronger than pity’ and rather then seeing the snake off the
traveller decided to wait and see how the drama would pan out. ‘The
outcome was tragic,’ the squirrel, ‘attracted by an invisible power and seized
as it were by dizziness, rushed headlong into the jaws of the snake, which
were suddenly opened as wide as possible in order to receive it.’ The snake,
having waited patiently up until that moment, suddenly became quite
active, uncoiling, ‘in an instant,’ it rushed upwards to the top of the tree
‘where no doubt it digested its prey and went to sleep.’10
Today, in the early 21st century, there is no need to travel all the way
to the jungles of Java to study the Will in operation because its various
activities in the field of animal life is brought to us indirectly by means of
documentary film, for example in the series Life, produced by The British
Broadcasting Corporation and first broadcast in 2009. The Life series
demonstrates all kinds of activity of the Will, ranging from extraordinary
courtship procedures amongst birds to the quite unpleasant behaviour
involved in dramas of predator and prey. In the episode on reptiles, for
example, the viewer is captured in a bubble of filmic time – two weeks in
actual life – whilst a pack of 10 Komodo Dragons patiently stalk their prey – 79
a buffalo, which one of the dragons has already venomously bitten – waiting
as the animal wastes away and eventually dies.11
But the activity of the Will is even more immediately available for
our attention, for it is at work within every one of us, where it can be
experienced even more directly through introspection:
Introspection always shows us to ourselves as willing. In this willing,

however, there are numerous degrees, from the faintest wish to
passion, and I have often shown that not only all our emotions, but
even all those movements of our inner man, which are subsumed
under the wide concept of feeling, are states of the will.12
10 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2, E.F.J. Payne
(trans.), Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1958, 356.
11 BBC, ‘Reptiles and Amphibians,’ Life, BBC Natural History Unit, 2009.
12 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, 2006, 168-169.
Schopenhauer portrays Will as a disturbed and disturbing power

whose acts are unpremeditated; this means that although the human
creature consummated by Will is aware of itself as acting it can have little,
if any, control over the actions that it performs. Schopenhauer likens the
human awareness of Will to the experience of being in a theatre in which
you are watching actions upon the stage whilst at the same time know
yourself to be the very same creature you are watching. You see yourself
acting upon the stage but have no idea of why it is you act as you do. It
is easy to imagine how anybody would respond to the combined effect
of knowing they are acting but at the same time of not knowing why;
they would be caught in a constant state of anxiety, stressed out by the
uncertainty of not knowing what it is they are going to do next!
Although Schopenhauer’s ontology is essentially negative there is
one aspect of his world-view that is highly positive. Kant had thought that
the metaphysical substratum of existence is beyond the context of sense
and reason, lying in an unknowable, noumenal realm, but Schopenhauer
thought otherwise. By conceiving of the metaphysical substratum as
80 embodied in the actions of living creatures and other natural forms, such as
rocks, minerals and plants – in other words as being active everywhere in
the world – Schopenhauer forges a plausible link between the sensuously
perceptible world and its metaphysical base. This means that although it is
impossible to know Will directly it is possible to know it indirectly by paying
careful attention to the way it acts. Schopenhauer even thought it was
possible to control and modify the activity of Will by channelling its energy
into forms of aesthetic experience.
Schopenhauer thought that some human creatures were endowed
with sufficient perceptive acuity that they could break with their habitual
attachment to objects and focus instead on Ideas, thus denying the moment
of satisfaction so essential to the cycle of willed activity. Of course, given
the logic of the subject/object relationship, in successfully denying the
object, the subject would also be denying its own existence; however, he
believed that the fact of aesthetic experience furnished proof that such
forms of denial were possible. In denying Will and focusing on aesthetic
experience instead Schopenhauer believed it was possible to gain insights
into an otherwise unknowable aspect of the way the world actually is; it was
to insights of this kind that he refers with the term Idea. In Schopenhauer’s
world of Will and representation then, there is a third place, an irrational,

non-sensuous in-between place where otherwise invisible elements of the
perceptive network, the Ideas, are made to appear.
One thing that is especially interesting about Schopenhauer’s non-
sensuous in-between place is that it has a remarkable affinity with Gaston
Bachelard’s poetic metaphor of the blue sky and the role that image is
thought to play in memory and imagination. Although Schopenhauer’s Ideas
are non-objective, just like Bachelard’s blue sky, they are, nevertheless,
objective in the sense that they are the same for everybody, i.e., they are
impersonal. But at the same time as they are impersonal the Ideas – as
indeed Bachelard’s blue sky – have no existence outside of the persons who
experience them.
One place where the novelty of Schopenhauer’s thinking about Ideas
is made most explicit is in his discussion of architecture, which can be found
in section 43 of Volume One and in the chapter entitled ‘On the Aesthetics
of Architecture,’ in Volume Two of The World as Will and Representation. In
Volume One Schopenhauer writes:
81
To have an aesthetic effect, works of architecture must throughout
be of considerable size; indeed they can never be too large, but they
can easily be too small. In fact, ceteris paribus, the aesthetic effect is
in direct proportion to the size of the buildings, because only great
masses make the effectiveness of gravitation apparent and impressive
in a high degree.13
Schopenhauer’s use of the ceteris paribus clause (all things being

equal) is crucial to making sense of his thinking about architecture, which
he is considering only insofar as it is a fine art, exempt from the provision
of useful purposes. For Schopenhauer architecture is a feeling and it can
be experienced only by means of the interaction of impression and sense
to bring about an awareness of a specific natural force, namely gravity.
Schopenhauer argues that architecture reveals the Idea of gravity in the
antagonist relation of support and load, which is controlled and calmly
expressed in the poised equilibrium of a structure built out of stone.

In conceiving of architecture as a feeling Schopenhauer is linking

it to the biology of the human body and in conceiving it in terms of the
antagonist system of support and load he is suggesting that architecture is
implicated in a networked interaction between the stone and the environing
context. The viewer is able to experience the feeling of architecture in
the stone because their body too is in a networked relationship with the
environing context: the living body of any animal maintains its equilibrium
by adapting to changes in their environmental context and such processes
of adaptation are made possible by the antagonist systems that are
vital components of the animal body. However, in the special case of
human bodies, gifted as these are with greater intelligence, there is an
additional non-sensuous aspect to the way they are able to engage with
their environment. Human creatures have the capacity to contemplate
and to imagine, which means they can abstract from what is immediately
given. In being able to withdraw in this way the human creature is able to
experience its non-sensuous perceptions as aesthetic images, this is why the
human creature is able to understand the architecture of the stone as the
82 expression of an Idea.
As Schopenhauer explains, the revelation of the Idea of gravity in a
material structure made of stone can only be brought about by a series of
compulsory deviations away from the inherent tendency of the material,
which is to fall into a heap upon the ground:
The joists and beams, for example, can press the earth only by means
of the column; the arch must support itself, and only through the
medium of the pillars can it satisfy its tendency towards the earth, and
so on. By just these enforced digressions, by these very hindrances,
those forces inherent in the crude mass of stone unfold themselves in
the most distinct and varied manner.14
In order that the stone structure can express the Idea of gravity in the
human mind it is necessary that each of the component pieces can be seen to
perform clearly within the theme of the opposing actions of support and load.
Schopenhauer deduces the most perfect means of executing the architectural

theme is through the combination of the column and the entablature:
In column and entablature, support and load are completely

separated, and in this way the reciprocal effect of the two and their
relation to each other become apparent. For even every plain and
simple wall certainly contains support and load, but there the two are
still amalgamated.15
Schopenhauer never attempted to give graphic expression to his

ideal architectural form, but there is a series of engravings by Piranesi
that go some way to show what he had in mind. In 1777 Piranesi had
visited the archaeological site at Paestum, where he studied the remains
of ‘the three great edifices that still exist at the centre of the ancient
city.’16 As one critic argues ‘Piranesi was not interested in giving an exact
idea of each building as much as in rendering and investigating the
impressive architectural language employed in them.’17 It is the skill with
which Piranesi was able to render an architectural language that make
his engravings suitable for communicating the novelty of Schopenhauer’s 83
thinking about architecture.
The buildings Piranesi studied at Paestum were the remains of Greek
Doric temples and, as is the case with many of his engravings, Piranesi
chose to represent them in their ruined condition. Because the ruins do not
show a unified form, constituted by a finite set of relationships amongst
their parts, so they cannot serve as formal models. Piranesi’s drawings
make the buildings look like an assembly of columns and beams whose
spatial extent has no distinct limitation, ‘His plates show rows of columns
and architraves crossing and intersecting each other’18 Piranesi seems to
have been uninterested in showing the temples as individual buildings

16 Luigi Ficacci, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma, ‘Different Views of Paestum,’
Piranesi, The Complete Etchings, Taschen, Köln, London, Madrid, New York, Paris,
Tokyo, 2000, 664-761, 664.
17 Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, Piranesi as Interpreter of Roman Architecture and the Origins of his
Intellectual World, Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2006, 268.
18 Kantor-Kazovsky, 2006, 269.
Figure 16. Proposal for an exhibition of Piranesi’s engravings
of the temples at Paestum
and the extent and limitation of the crossing and intersecting of columns
and architraves is left somewhat vague. However, what the engravings do
attempt to convey is the poetics of building in stone, Piranesi confirms this
intention when he writes in the caption to one of the plates:
Here the intention was to demonstrate that since these kinds of

structures are built in solid matter, it would be in the true principles of
art not to alter its nature too much and that a building that is entirely
of stone must keep an air of strength and solidity.19
Schopenhauer does actually refer to the temples at Paestum in his

discussion of architecture, using them as a means to certify the idea that
a column should exhibit a ‘slight swelling’ at the point where it begins to
taper off ‘from the first third of its height upwards,’ 20 certainly the columns
in Piranesi’s engravings do this. But what is perhaps more interesting is that
Schopenhauer too is interested in the case of ruins and he uses the idea of
the ruin in order to make the point that architecture is an art of Ideas and
not an art of space. Architecture, he writes, effects us ‘not mathematically 85
but dynamically’ and what ‘speaks to us through’ architecture ‘is not mere
form and symmetry, but rather those fundamental forces of nature, those
primary Ideas, those lowest grades of the wills’ objectivity.’ 21 Schopenhauer
argues that although each member of a building is adapted to the
stability of the whole, nevertheless, it is not through the comprehension of
wholeness that architecture gives pleasure:
For architecture…gravity, rigidity and cohesion, are the proper

theme, but not, as has been assumed hitherto, merely regular form,
proportion and symmetry. These are something purely geometrical,
properties of space, not Ideas; therefore they cannot be the theme of
a fine art.22
19 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Views of Paestum, text to Plate X, quoted in, Kantor-Kazovsky,
2006, 270.
20 Schopenhauer, WWR v2, 413.
Although he thinks that regular form proportion and symmetry are

not essential to architectural works Schopenhauer suggests that there is a
good, practical reason for making buildings conform to regular geometrical
schema, displaying symmetry and rational proportions and that is in order
that they be easy to perceive:
For architecture has its existence primarily in our spatial perception,

and accordingly appeals to our a priori faculty for this. This
comprehensibility, however always results from the greatest regularity
of the forms and the rationality of the proportions. Accordingly,
beautiful architecture selects nothing but regular figures, made from
straight lines or regular curves, and likewise bodies that result from
these, such as cubes, parallelepipeds, cylinders, spheres pyramids
and cones.23
Schopenhauer is suggesting that regular form and rational

proportions are necessary if a building is to be easily perceived, but it is
86 not the clarity of its spatial composition that marks a building as a work of
architecture. What makes it a work of architecture is that it expresses Ideas:
the non-sensuous perception of gravity is brought theatrically into view by
being animated and poised in the material form of a structure made from
stone.
There is a moment in his discussion of architecture where
Schopenhauer leaves the main argument to make an interesting prediction:
I am of the opinion that architecture is destined to reveal not only

gravity and rigidity, but at the same time the nature of light, which is
their opposite. The light is intercepted, impeded, and reflected by
the large, opaque, sharply contoured and variously formed masses
of stone, and thus unfolds its nature and qualities in the purest and
clearest way, to the great delight of the beholder; for light is the most
agreeable of things and objective correlate of the most perfect kind
of knowledge through perception.24
23 Schopenhauer, WWR v2, 414-415.

Schopenhauer thinks of light as another kind of Idea and of course,

given his preoccupation with Goethe’s colour experiments, we know he was
well aware of the correlation between colour phenomena and light. In his
writing Schopenhauer consistently complains about contemporary thinkers
for their mistaken presuppositions about the nature of colour, grounded,
as Schopenhauer sees them, in a ‘crude materialism’ and attributing colour
perception to the undulations of a hypothetical substance called ether:
According to it (crude materialism), even light is supposed to be the

mechanical vibration or undulation of an imaginary ether…When this
ether reaches the retina, it beats on it and, for example, four hundred
and eighty-three thousand million beats a second give red, seven
hundred and twenty-seven thousand million beats give violet and so
on. So those who are colour blind cannot count the beats I suppose!25
The notion of ether that Schopenhauer is attacking here was

thought necessary by the science of his day in order to conceptualise the
transmission of light. Even though he had no alternative concept to offer, 87
Schopenhauer was highly disparaging of the notion of ether and he thought
that theories about colour and light that depended on it were so bad that
they were actually obstructing attempts to formulate a more credible way of
thinking about light:
The nature of light is certainly a mystery, but it is better to confess this

than to bar the way to future knowledge by bad theories. That light
is something quite different from a merely mechanical movement,
undulation or vibration and tremor, indeed that it is material, is shown
by its chemical effects, a beautiful series of which was recently laid
before the Académie des Sciences by Chevreul, who caused sunlight
to act on materials of different colours. The most beautiful thing here
is that a roll of paper which has been exposed to sunlight produces
the same effects, in fact does so even after six months, if during this

time it has been kept in a firmly closed metal tube. Has the tremor
then paused for six months and does it join in again a tempo?26
Today, of course, thanks to the Quantum Electro-dynamic theory of

light and matter, or more specifically of photons and electrons, there is no
great difficulty in thinking about light as the cause of physical reactions that
can change the colour of materials.27
Schopenhauer’s criticism of the science of colour and light typical
of his day is part of a more general objection that appears throughout
his thinking and complains about a crude materialist conception, which
understands reality as ‘a fabulous matter devoid of all qualities, a matter
that would thus be an absolute object,’ which, taken to its logical conclusion
would reduce the world to ‘a mechanical conjuring trick, like the toys driven
by levers, wheels and sand, which represent a mine or the work on a farm.’ 28
Throughout the 20th century there have been considerable efforts –
and not only within architecture – to transcend the kind of materialism that
so frustrated Schopenhauer; but architecture’s attempts to break away from
88 materialistic thinking have tended toward the formulation of a new concept
of space. What is important about Schopenhauer for contemporary practice
is that he is suggesting an alternative way of thinking about matter, he is
not interested in space. Schopenhauer’s thinking suggests that light, like
gravity, can be thought of as a kind of non-sensuous material and this is a
fascinating prospect for architectural thinking. In the case of architectural
thinking expressed through the idea of building with stone the Idea of light
can be conceptually grasped in the antagonism solid/shade; but what about
architectural thinking expressed in colour forms, as is the case with so many
of Aldo Rossi’s projects, or architectural thinking that is expressed through
the idea of building with air, as in Yves Klein’s Architecture of the Air. Indeed,
taking Schopenhauer’s thinking a little further we might even go so far as to
ask what are the antagonisms of light expressed in an architecture that wants
to be thought in terms of soft coloured vectors, as is the case with Air Grid?
26 Schopenhauer, WWR v2 315.

27 For a simple and clear account of Quantum Electro Dynamics see: Richard Feynman,
QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.
Any Air Grid artefact expressed in physical form is soft, it holds its
shape because the organisation of the threads within the support frame puts
them into tension; in the case of the physical Air Grid the Idea of gravity can
be conceptually grasped in the antagonism soft/tense. However, so far as
the Idea of light is concerned the Air Grid shows colour, not the hard colour
of Rossi’s solid forms but the interactions of colour vectors, as they unfold in
the airspace of the lattice structure that is caught within the support frame,
the Idea of light at play in the architectural thinking of the physical Air Grid
form can be conceptualised in the antagonism air/colour.
Although Schopenhauer does not directly refer to the antagonism of
colour and air he does seem to be quite attracted to a specific colour/air
phenomenon, which is the rainbow. Notice, observes Schopenhauer, how,
amidst the ‘violently agitated drops of the waterfall,’ a rainbow will often
appear and it will look as if it is ‘silently resting on this raging torrent.’ 29
One reason why Schopenhauer seems to take so much pleasure from the
relationship between the waterfall and the rainbow is because it seems
analogous to the relationship between Will and Ideas. Although the rainbow
is networked to the waterfall it does, nonetheless, enjoy a certain degree 89
of autonomy and this is because the Ideas that are involved in the rainbow
are in a different material register to the Ideas involved in the waterfall. But
there is perhaps another analogy to be made between the waterfall and
the rainbow, this time to the structure of representation that Brunelleschi
demonstrated with his panels. What is especially interesting about the
phenomenon of the rainbow is that it draws attention to a material form that
is of a similar kind to those elements of Brunelleschi’s demonstration that
were brought in by non-perspective means: just like the sky and the clouds,
so a rainbow is perceived as a gaseous feeling of colour. The waterfall, on
the other hand, is more like the buildings of the painting, although it is
perceived as a fluid, rather than a solid, feeling of mass.
Although Schopenhauer insists that architecture can only be thought
in stone he does suggest that architecture has a sister art, where stone is
replaced by water as the medium of expression and where the feeling of
fluidity, rather than stability, characterises its reception in non-sensuous
perception. Perhaps it was because his feeling for the material Idea of light
29 Schopenhauer, WWR v1, 1969, 185.

was only partly formed that it never occurred to Schopenhauer to look

for an alternative family of architectures; however, in his theory of colour
Schopenhauer did go some way towards identifying some of the structural
principles that would determine the characteristics of the other family and
its species.
Since Schopenhauer wrote about architecture in The World as Will
and Representation his thinking has exerted considerable influence amongst
architectural historians and designers. For example, Heinrich Wölfflin’s
Renaissance and Baroque is based on the principles of stability and fluidity
that Schopenhauer identifies as sibling architectures of the Idea of gravity.
The steel and glass buildings of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe can be read
as a highly evolved species of Schopenhauerean architecture, where the
Idea of gravity is expressed in material forms that quiver ambiguously
between fluid and stable states. However, for all Schopenhauer’s thinking
about architecture has been widely influential little attention at all has been
given to his theory of colour.30 Leaving to one side the reasons for this
lack of attention, what is remarkable about Schopenhauer’s colour theory
90 is that it proposes a structure for thinking about colour that is in line with
contemporary colour theory, even if his knowledge of the biology and
physics of vision has since been superseded.
There are certain key aspects of Schopenhauer’s thinking about colour
that have been incorporated into our work on developing the Air Grid as a
kind of architectural thinking. First, the idea that colour is produced when
light energy is translated into nerve energy by the activity of the eye and,
second that there are three antagonist pairs involved in human colour
perception. The first is an achromatic opposition, black/white, these colours
with zero hue establish the limits of colour, rather in the way that zero is a
number in a limiting sense. In addition to the zero hue, limit case, there are
two colour pairs of non-zero hue; these are the chromatic opponents; red/
green and blue/yellow. As Schopenhauer explains each component of the
chromatic pair is like a shadow of its other half, they are contrasting colours
and the two of them can never mix.
30 The first English translation of the text has recently been published, see, Georg Stahl
(trans.,) On Vision and Colors by Arthur Schopenhauer and Colour Sphere by Philipp
Otto Runge, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2010.
One way in which the opponent pair system of colour can be

incorporated into an architecture of the Air Grid is to map each of the
three colour pairs onto each of the three axis of the Air Grid form, thus up/
down is mapped onto black/white, right/left is mapped onto red/green and
front/back is mapped onto blue/yellow. According to the logic of the map,
there is a limit of eight possible colour combinations; these can be taken as
axiomatic for architectural thinking in the language of the Air Grid, but they
do not constitute a proposition. In order to move from the axiomatic forms
of Air Grid architecture to the formulation of a theory it is necessary to do
as Rossi says and to identify a theme, to follow it insistently to its logical
conclusion and to state it in the form of an architectural proposition. Or, as
Klein would put it, in order to make an Air Grid proposition it is necessary
to find a pretext, some personalities, objects, landscapes that merit social
recognition.
91
5
The Corviale Void
Returning to Tafuri and Dal Co’s History of Modern Architecture and to
the chapter on ‘The International Concept of Utopia.’ Included in the
discussion are a number of actual, built works – or projects that were under
construction at the time of writing, one of these is a housing development
called Corviale, which is in the city territory of Rome. In the 1970s the
Instituto Autonomo per le Case Populari sponsored a number of housing
projects to be built in the outskirts of Rome, the initiative to do so was
generated by the 1964 regional plan, which aimed to alleviate crowding
in the city. The Corviale development is one such project; it is in the
Southwestern sector of the city and to this day remains very much on the
edge, where it is surrounded by rolling farmland.
Amongst the people of Rome the Corviale development tends
to be looked upon with contempt, its inhabitants especially finding it
objectionable, but despite its infamy Corviale is not well known outside
of Italy, certainly it does not feature much in British architecture culture. I
first became interested in the Corviale development whilst planning a field
trip for undergraduate students, pouring over the maps at the back of my
Figure 17. Mario Fiorentino (project leader), Residential complex in Corviale, Rome:
four views
The Corviale Void
guide to the modern architecture of Rome,1 I was struck by its extraordinary

simplicity and size and decided to take the students out there to explore.
We caught the bus from Piazza Pasquale and after 30 or so minutes we were
dropped off at the end of the route, where the bus makes a circuit in front
of the enormous, kilometre-long building that is the primary feature of the
Corviale development. Somewhat daunted by the feeling one has when
one is in a place one does not know and that is not especially welcoming,
we walked the length of the building and passed through one of the entry
portals across to the other side, but on that occasion we hardly dared
venture inside.
Since then Corviale has begun to appear in the international
architecture press. What seems to have happened is that the development,
although it fails in relation to the aspirations of the program that initiated it
can, if measured according to other criteria, appear as a valid contribution
to the architecture of the city. For example, in 2003 Lorenzo Benedetti
wrote a short piece about Corviale for the magazine Archis. In his article
Benedetti argues that the failure of the project to deliver the array of
social spaces promised in the initial design has actually produced an 95
unexpected benefit. Because the Corviale development fails to provide a
satisfactory environment in which to live its inhabitants have had to find out
for themselves how to make the buildings liveable. Benedetti argues that
through the process of finding out for themselves the inhabitants have all
become artists of a kind. This is because the inhabitants, in order to deal
with the inadequate living conditions within the development, have had to
take the initiative and learn how to build for themselves, in doing so they
have discovered a new architectural aesthetic:
Corviale has undoubtedly failed to meet the challenge of the social

space defined in the utopian project, but it has acquired another
important value, that of the active participation of the occupant
in the construction of the building. In this way the monolithic
dinosaur of concrete has been broken down to make room for
a random aesthetics that is open to serendipity and to a more
1 Piero Ostilio Rossi, Roma, Guida all’ Architettura Moderna, 1909-1991, editori Laterza,
1991.
natural structure…Despite all its negative aspects, the unauthorised

work carried out inside Corviale acts as a palliative, sustaining an
unexpected form of fantasy and imagination within the architecture.2
Two years later an article appeared in A&U reporting on the activities

of the art/architecture group Osservatorio Nomade/ Stalker, who spent a
year working in the building, from April 2004 to April 2005, collaborating
with residents and public administrators to imagine new ways of using the
building’s common spaces. The most successful aspect of their work seems
to haven been The Corviale Network, an experimental TV station for the
neighbourhood. Stalker value their television station because they believe
it ‘mocks and democratises the dynamics of mainstream TV,’ 3 however, they
offer little insight into what the value of the Corviale Network might be to
the residents of the building.
More recently, in 2008, a lengthy article has appeared in Log in which
the author, John David Rhodes, draws a parallel between the architecture of
Corviale and Italian Realist cinema. Rhodes suggests that there is something
96 positive about Corviale, not so much despite the failure of its ideological
premise but because of it:
Italian modernism remains conditioned, profoundly, by realism’s

attachment to mimetic reference and to material reality. This same
realism may open, however, onto a practice of literalism, which is to
say the refusal of metaphor and even, eventually, of mimesis. The
literal enactment of an aesthetic project will supersede the mimesis
that inheres in realism. Representation gives way to presentation. And
so with Corviale: if the spirit of the times calls for collectivity, then
literally collect as many people as possible and have them live all
together in the same architectural form.4
2 Lorenzo Benedetti, ‘The Usurped Ideal, Corviale in Rome,’ Archis 195, 3, 2003, 32-33, 33.
3 Osservatorio Nomade/ Stalker, ‘Immaginare Corviale, Rome, Italy, 2004-2005,’ A&U,
420, 9, 2005, 118-121, 119.
4 John David Rhodes, ‘Collective Anxiety: Corviale, Rome, and the Legacy of ’68,’ Log
13/14, fall 2008, 75-86, 84.
The Corviale Void
Notwithstanding these interesting interpretations of the Corviale

development, which does, indeed, seem to embody a number of
contemporary cultural themes, it seems to me that there is one thing that is
being over-looked and that is the enormous void that runs the entire length
of the main block, plunging from the roof right down to the ground and
slicing the building in two.5
What is striking about the Corviale complex and the dominant
feature of its composition, is a single, linear block housing a monumental
void space, a bizarre typological hybrid, open to the sky, a cross
between a gallery and an atrium, the Corviale Void is in the order of one
kilometre in length. Although the design of the main block introduces a
number of formal breaks and fractures, which interrupt the void, these
are little more than superficial incidents. The main block is dominated
by an underlying order that draws the void and all its incidents together
into a pure form of space: a system generated out of a single cross-
wall figure, which is replicated at six metre intervals and made to march
the entire length of the block. The cross-wall assembly is shaped and
organised so as to hold the void, an immaterial prism or volume of air, 97
suspended within a material form. Residents and visitors to Corviale
can look into the void and they can walk around it on balconies, but
there is no possibility of going inside; at ground floor level the void
is sealed off from the rest of the building by high concrete walls. The
inaccessibility of the void makes little sense, for surely, in terms of the
poetics of the development, it is meant to symbolise the idea of the road
that leads home, in which case why is it expressed as such a remote and
inhospitable place? As it is, the Corviale Void does not make any sense
and in this failure to make sense there is something that is crying out for
architectural inquiry. The question is how, if at all, can the non-sense of
the Corviale Void be given theoretical expression.
5 Since my initial visit to Corviale I have been privileged to visit it with a number
of scholars from the British School at Rome, Amy Russell and Clare Rowan are
archaeologists and Catherine Fletcher is an architectural historian, for them this was
a first encounter with a new urban artefact. Combining intuition with objectivity in
their approach, we roamed the building for several hours, counting and measuring its
various parts and speculating about underlying organisational schemata and symbolic
meanings.
Figure 18. The Corviale Void: left, looking up, right, looking down
The Corviale Void
Notwithstanding the various attempts to read Corviale in the light of

contemporary cultural themes, it remains what it is, a block of housing that
no one wants to live in. Recently there have been a number of proposals
to expropriate Corviale, converting the apartments into units that fit more
comfortably within the cross-wall system.6 At present the apartments are
arranged either side of the void and their views are mono-directional.
On the eastern side all the rooms in the apartment look out towards the
city, on the western side towards the countryside. In the new, proposed,
arrangement the void will disappear and the apartments will run between
the cross-walls, from east to west, each one enjoying double aspect views.
Effectively the new arrangement will eradicate the Corviale Void, leaving
little, if any trace of its form. In the light of Aldo Rossi’s arguments about the
important role of monuments in the shaping of the city it seems somehow
wrong to totally eradicate the Corviale Void, even if it does not make sense,
nevertheless what is striking about it is that it is trying to express an idea for
a new kind of public place. But the question of how to theorise this failure of
expression is a difficult one. One way to begin is by looking at the history of
the Corviale design, which offers some interesting insights into the curious, 99
nonsensical character of the development. The Corviale Void belongs to
the same culture of urban design that was the theme of Ludovico Quaroni’s
satellite city, of Rossi’s administrative centre and Yves Klein’s Architecture of
the Air.
During the 1960s the lead architect of the team responsible for the
design of Corviale, Mario Fiorentino, had been involved in a speculative
project for the development of an enormous new urban quarter in the
eastern sector of Rome. Responding to an idea embedded in the City Plan
for Rome, which had been approved in 1962, a number of leading Roman
architects, including Quaroni and Fiorentino formed an association, naming
themselves after the project they were working on, which was the design of
an Asse Attrezzato or equipped axis, as it translates into English. The group
called themselves The Asse Studio. The basic idea for the Asse Attrezzato
was to link the superhighways coming towards Rome from the north and
6 See, for example, Benedetto Todaro, ‘Corviale: Back to the Future, City of the living-
city of the dead’ and Enrico Puccini, ‘Intervention idea for body structure 1, Typological
revolution,’ Corvialedertramonto, Metamorfosi, 67, July/August, 2007, 26-31; 32-35.
the south, but its ambitions went further. The aspirations for the Asse
Attrezzato were threefold, to save the historic city centre, to set in motion
a process of renovation and to give the city an organic and modern image.
Working for free and with the objective of demonstrating the feasibility
of their theoretical idea, the Asse Studio developed a design proposal
that was much more than simply a throughway linking superhighways,
but was conceived as a new city in its own right. The new city included
accommodation for business activities, cultural, recreational and residential
facilities, with fast transit connections to the historical city centre. What was
radical about the Asse Studio’s project is that it proposed to merge roads
and buildings into a single megastructure form. As one group of critics
have recently explained, the Asse Studio were proposing a new relationship
‘between object and infrastructure by making the infrastructure part of its
metabolism, in a literal inversion of the mechanism of the traditional city.’ 7
Studying the drawings of the Asse Studio’s proposition it becomes
clear that the form of the megastructure, although directed by a strong linear
North-South tendency, was to branch out into the environing landscape
100 on diagonal trajectories and that the building it entails was conceived as a
continuous structure rather than discrete objects connected by roads. On
the various models and drawings of the design it is hard to distinguish the
system of the roads from the system of building, the entire assembly appears
as a fused composition of linear, circular and diagonal elements that float
above a ground datum. The imagery of the Asse Studio’s project is curiously
reminiscent of a Suprematist painting, or indeed of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio,
the triangles, circles and linear elements are joined together by simple axial
relationships and the entire aggregate appears as if jammed into a single field
and bound together by some invisible force. Ugly although it is, the repertoire
of shapes and relationships appearing in the Asse Studio’s proposition is
interesting because it hints at the ancestry of the linear and diagonal features
that now characterise the Corviale development and can be seen from a
satellite view in Google Earth, or from an airplane flying into the city.
7 Pier Vittorio Aureli, Guillermo Delgado Casteneda, Maria S. Giudici, Suchada

Kasemsap, Gabriele Mastrigli, Martino Tattara, Ionnna Volaki, Wei Wang and Jiong
Wu, Rome, The Centre(s) Elsewhere, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam; Skira Editore, Milan,
2010, 48.
Figure 19. Linear and Diagonal Features:
above, left, Corviale seen in Google Earth, all other views, The Asse Studio’s model of
their Project for an Asse Attrezzato
Perhaps because it is impossible to get much of an idea from their

models and drawings, the question of what it would have been like to
move about amidst the continuous buildings and throughways of the Asse
Studio’s proposition is provocative. There is a description by the architects
that offers some interesting insights into their thinking about the qualities
of the environment implicated in their design. In their description the
architects ask that the proposed megastructure be imagined as a large
promenade architectural, rich with greenery and dense with pathways on a
variety of levels. The description gives four differing types of pathway, which
are classified according to the degree to which they are sealed off from the
surrounding environment. At one extreme there are pathways that are all-
outdoors at the other there are those that are all-indoors. In between there
are two hybrid types, pathways that are outdoors but shaded and pathways
that are outdoors-indoors.8 The last of these, pathways that are outdoors-
indoors, is immediately recognisable as the prototype of the Corviale Void.
Seen in the light of the Asse Studio’s proposition, the Corviale
development can be understood as a tiny fragment of a much larger
102 proposition, which is symptomatic of the more general theme of urban
design that was so important to the culture of architecture in the 1960s.
However, whereas the Asse Studio’s proposition remains a theoretical
design, existing only in the drawings and models and publications produced
by its architects, the design of Corviale has become an actual fact of the
contemporary city. This means that although in theory the Corviale Void
belongs to the Asse Studio’s idea of fusing outdoor and indoor space into
a continuous urban structure, in actual fact it is nothing of the kind. As we
have already noted, the Corviale development is an isolated building sitting
in a field and the void running up the middle is inextricably bound to that
isolation, it is not fused with a network of pathways, as it would need to
be if its theoretical meaning were to match its form. Unlike the example of
expropriation given by Rossi, where it is historical change that loosens the
original good fit between form and function, in the case of the Corviale Void
there never was a good fit between form and function; and yet the void is
8 Editorial, L’architettura, Cronache e Storia, vol. 21, n. 4-5, August- September 1975,
197-199.
The Corviale Void
not without meaning, it is simply that its meaning is rather remote from the
everyday lives of the people who live there.
In formulating a project of the Corviale Void our first suggestion is
to remove the residents (obviously this would be a theoretical removal,
our project having no authority to actually initiate a process of relocation).
Theoretically, the residents of Corviale could be re-housed in one of the
new, paradigmatic megastructure units that have recently been proposed as
part of a theoretical design for the city territory of Rome.9 As well as offering
an idea for improving the system of public transport within the city territory
the theoretical design proposes six new settlement principles, each one
corresponding to a particular consular road. The road nearest to Corviale is
the via Ostiense and as part of our proposal we are suggesting that most
of the Corviale residents could, theoretically, be re-housed in the first of the
five garden/megastructure units proposed for that road. The megastructure
in question is, theoretically, located very close by the Corviale development,
at the spot where the river Tiber comes in close proximity to the consular
road and to the proposed new railway.10
One of the major problems to address in the formulation of a 103
theoretical design for the void is how to negotiate between its actual and
its virtual form. The Corviale Void is interrupted by a number of breaks and
fractures that compromise the purity of the form, these occur at regular
intervals along its length and they are associated with a particular function,
serving as circulation in the manner of vertical cores and horizontal bridges,
linking the two sides of the void. With the residents removed, there is
no longer any need for these circulation elements and so our second
suggestion in formulating a proposal for the Corviale Void is to remove
these compromising features. Having emptied Corviale of its residents
and stripped it of its circulation our next suggestion is that the system of
cladding panels be removed from the external face of the building and from
the balcony fronts facing into the void.
9 Pier Vittorio Aureli, Guillermo Delgado Casteneda, Maria S. Giudici, Suchada

Kasemsap, Gabriele Mastrigli, Martino Tattara, Ionnna Volaki, Wei Wang and Jiong
Wu, ‘A Strategic Plan for Rome,’ Rome, The Centre(s) Elsewhere, Berlage Institute,
Rotterdam; Skira Editore, Milan, 2010, 63-127.
10 Aureli et al, ‘Via Ostiense, Project by Ioanna Volaki,’ 2010, 96-103.
On the basis of the three types of removal we are suggesting:

residents, circulation and cladding what remains of Corviale is a bare
carcass, consisting in a material grid of vertical cross-walls and horizontal
floor-plates. The void now appears as a missing part, belonging to the
system of the grid but subtracted from its material form. Although it is
tempting to think of this subtracted grid as a fourth kind of removal to do so
would be a mistake, the removal of the void is not a theoretical proposition
like all the rest but a feature of the formal model that inheres in the Corviale
design.
Our fourth suggestion for the Corviale Void is that the large walls,
which currently prohibit ground level access to the void, be removed and
an electric railway, or tram, be installed inside the void at ground level. The
tram will shuttle visitors in open-top carriages from one end of the void to the
other, stopping and turning around at the far, Southern, end but connected
back into the territorial infrastructure of Rome at the Northern end. Although
the existing gateways to the main building will be taken away at the first,
circulation, stage of the proposed removals the rhythm of their spatial
104 location will be retained and they will be replaced by five small stations,
where people can buy tickets and the tram can stop to set down passengers.
As well as ticketing facilities, a platform and a place for the retailing of
light refreshments, the stations will each be equipped with a glass elevator.
The elevators, of quite considerable size, will provide the means of public
circulation vertically, up into the material remains of the Corviale design.
The final suggestion, which is key to the entire proposal, is that the
Corviale Void becomes a home for hundreds and thousands, if not millions of
artificial life forms. The life forms in question are specific to the culture of the
Air Grid, they are called Agonising Robot Beetles (AR beetles) and, as their
name suggests, they are tiny robots, the size of a very small beetle, almost
too small for detection by the human eye. Although they are almost too
small to be seen as individuals, the AR beetles do become visible to human
eyes when they are seen en-masse. As a mass the AR beetles will appear as
a swarm of coloured particles, almost like a cloud of coloured gas and, since
AR beetles only ever exist as a mass, their introduction into the Corviale Void
will have the effect of turning it from an inaccessible airspace, albeit one that
is meaningful in relation to the History of Architecture, into a vibrant colour
form.
Figure 20. Project for The Corviale Void: three views
Figure 21. Project for The Corviale Void: four views
The Corviale Void
As yet the technology to produce AR beetles is still developing,

but it is at a very promising stage. Research and development in the
field of micro-robotics has already produced artificial insect forms with
some intelligence. One example is the Entomopter, a ‘multimode (flying/
crawling) insect-like robot,’ developed by a design team from the Georgia
Tech Research Institute and the University of Cambridge, England. As the
etymology of its name suggests, the key feature of the Entomopter is its
wing; an Entomopter is propelled by a pair of flapping wings that are driven
by a Reciprocating Chemical Muscle (RCM), which is powered by a chemical
energy source. The Entomopter can navigate its way around a building,
traversing hallways and ventilation shafts and it can even crawl under doors.
Although the Entomopter is a good starting point for modelling the AR
beetle it is limited because its wing-span is far too large, measuring 15-18
centimetres from tip to tip. As we shall see, if it is to produce the desired
affective response the AR beetle needs to have a wing-span of less than a
centimetre. Another limitation of current Entomopter research is that the
scientists do not factor in considerations of what it is actually like to see
an Entomopter; and so their interest in the perceived materiality of the 107
robots is strictly pragmatic, concerned with weight durability and ease of
manufacture, rather than Ideas.
The intention of the Corviale proposal is to deploy the AR beetles
as a means of translating the obscure void into a vibrant colour form, for
this reason it is necessary to take two things into account: first we must
bear in mind the fact that colour is not a property of light but of the way it
is received by the visual system of a specific species of animal, thus human
colour vision is unique to the species; second we must bear in mind the
specific way in which natural beetle bodies produce colour affects, as
perceived by human eyes.
Human Eyes
The basis of photosensitivity in all animals is a family of pigments called
rhodopsins, which are able to absorb photons of light and in doing so
to undergo a change of conformation and thereby to induce a cellular
response. Rhodopsins are best understood as consisting in two elements,
an opsin (protein) and a chromophore. Rhodopsins are located in
photoreceptor cells in the eye, most vertebrate eyes, including the human
eye contain two types of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. It is the cone
cells that trigger the signal for coloured light. The human eye has three
different types of cone cells, each one consisting in a different isomer of
opsin, although all three have the same chromophore. Each of the different
opsin isomers corresponds to a specific spectral sensitivity thus, one opsin
results in cone cells with a spectral sensitivity toward light of a shorter
wavelength (peak 425nm); another toward light of a medium wavelength
(peak 530nm) and another of a longer wavelength (peak 560nm). Human
vision begins when a ray of light strikes the cornea (the outer surface of
the eye), next the ray strikes the lens, its path is bent and the ray of light is
focused to the retina at the back of the eyeball where it may be absorbed
by a cone cell and thus trigger a signal to the visual cortex region of the
brain, this is where images are constructed and it is here, in the visual
cortex, that colour can be said to exist. Thus, in order to convert the
Corviale Void into a colour form it is first of all necessary to ensure that there
are rays of light of the right kind of wavelength to trigger a response in the
human eye.
108
Beetle Bodies
The hard, protective outer layer of the natural beetle body is a complex
structure, it is by no means the same for all beetles but it can, in many
species, interact with light to produce iridescent colour effects. There are
three major types of iridescent, colour producing, structure to be found
in the beetle integument: multi-layer reflection, diffraction and photonic
crystallography.
a. Multi-layer reflection. When light passes through a semi-

transparent medium, a thin film (by which we refer to dimensions in the
order of the wavelength of visible light), such as glass, water or chitin, it
produces an effect as if it had been partially reflected off the front and back
surfaces of the film; this phenomenon is called partial reflection and it is due
to the difference in speed with which light passes through different media.
When light composed of a number of different wavelengths is introduced
to a change in medium the different wavelengths will travel in different
directions, i.e. light is split, in the same way as when it passes through a
prism. When reflected rays of a specific wavelength are out of phase they
The Corviale Void
will cancel one another out; however, when they are in phase they will
reinforce one another, superimposing to produce an intense beam travelling
in a single direction. Where a light-sensitive device, such as the human eye,
is placed so as to intercept the direction of the beam it will see colour of an
intensity eight times greater than that of pigment reflection. Many species
of beetle have an integument that is possessed of a layer, or layers, of thin
film sufficient to generate such an effect.
b. Diffraction. When light passes through a medium containing small,

microscopic obstructions (small in comparison to the wavelength of light)
then some random scattering of light will occur. In those cases where the
order of the light-obstructing element is periodic then the scattering of light
will be discrete and directional, a structure that functions in this way is called
a diffraction grating. When a composite beam of light meets a diffraction
grating the different wavelengths constituting the light will be reflected,
not equally, but discretely, again, as with multi-layer reflection, producing
a spectrum. The discovery of naturally occurring diffraction gratings had to
wait until the 1990s, but by now they are known to exist in abundance and 109
are to be found, amongst other places, in the integuments of beetles. The
easiest way to conceptualise the diffraction grating of a beetle integument
is as an array of parallel, microscopically fine corrugations, where an
equal distance, approaching the wavelength of visible light, separates the
neighbouring ridges.
c. Photonic crystallography. A photonic crystal is a two or three-

dimensionally ordered micro-lattice whose dimensions relate to the
wavelength of visible light. What is particularly interesting about photonic
crystals is that they can control the propagation of light, acting in rather
the same way as atomic crystals, which control electrons. Through the
rigorous application of electromagnetic scattering theory it is possible
to identify any specific photonic structure with a band gap, this having
the effect of negating the passage of light of a specific wavelength. The
discovery of naturally occurring photonic crystals included work on the
beetles of the Curculionidea family (weevil). Researchers noticed that the
metallic blue-green patches of the Pachyrhynchus weevil are unlike the
customary iridescence of beetles in that the colour appears the same from
110
Figure 22. Diagrammatic Drawings: above, the human eye, including inset
detail of the retina; below – left, the principle of multi-layer reflection –
right, the principle of refraction
every direction. In the case of the Pachyrhynchus weevil it appears that

blue light is forbidden from being absorbed in specific areas of the beetles
shell: such a firm ability to control light is evidence of a photonic crystalline
structure embedded in the beetles integument. Sure enough, pictures of
the Pachyrhynchus taken with an electron microscope reveal the presence
of a photonic crystalline structure, analogous to opal, in which tiny spheres,
of half a wavelength in size, are tightly packed within the beetle’s otherwise
hollow scale.
One of the most exciting things about finding sources of structural
colour in animal bodies is that it offers a way of bridging the conceptual
divide between organic and inorganic nature. One cannot help but wonder
how Schopenhauer would have responded to the explanation for these
kinds of colours in beetles; surely it would have impacted on his thinking
The Corviale Void
about architecture, perhaps expanding the concept to include a new Idea

wherein colour is the expression of the force of light, as it is played out in
structures made of film, microscopic gratings and photonic crystals?
There is another, important layer of research involved in the
development of the AR beetle and this is the principle of populous
architecture, as it is currently being studied within the aerospace industry.
In order to grasp the relevance of populous architecture to the project
of the void it is useful to think of the AR beetle as a tiny flying computer,
which can be programmed to respond to certain perceived qualities of the
immediate environment; including the photonic messages, radiating from
the bodies of other AR beetles close by. The activity of any one AR beetle
is the expression of its relationship to all the other members of the beetle
population, including their relationships to one another. This means that the
AR beetle population, although it is made up of millions of individuals, has a
single identity: the identity of any one single AR beetle is subsumed within
the identity of the population.
The AR beetle is programmed to act as an individual with low-level
stimulus orientated act/react activity, but because the beetles taken en- 111
masse are mutually stimulating so they form a population network with
emergent behaviour. Even though no single beetle has any idea of what
the group is trying to accomplish the population will work together to
form simple structures that the visitors to the Corviale Void will see as a
changing colour form. The basic principle of the AR beetle program is to
map the three axis of the beetle’s body orientation onto the same opponent
pair system of colour that was incorporated into the development of the
Air Grid form. The AR beetle body is conceived as the interface of three
colour/coordinate channels: up/down-black/white; right/left-red/green;
front/back-blue/yellow. The simple rule that governs the interactions of
the beetle is the avoidance of colour contrast. For example, a beetle flying
blackly upwards will switch colour-direction in order to avoid a beetle flying
whitely downwards. The beetle’s ability to assess contrast risk is limited to
the immediate proximity of its body, which they measure in terms of body
lengths. Beetles are aware of other members of the population within
a radius of one and a half beetle bodies. Any beetle falling outside the
measure of their local space can only be known indirectly, through the
influence they exert on beetles falling in-between. A beetle is programmed
with switching preferences and will always change into a different colour
coordinate channel before it will reverse colour-direction. In the scenario
given above, in order to decide which one is going to switch the beetles
will weigh up the options jointly available to them and decide between
them what is for the best. If, for example, the blackly downward is blocked
from switching because to do so would provoke contrast collisions in other
channels then the whitely upward will switch channels in order to avoid
the impending collision in white and black. Where beetles from different
colour channels cross paths there is no danger of colour contrast and they
will momentarily merge. The strict rules of contrast that control the beetle’s
passageway through space and time can be represented as a number of
ideal colour worlds, six in fact, black, white, red, green, blue and yellow.
These worlds are transcendental; they are beyond the mere difference and
advantage that governs the beetle population. Although beyond reach
of the human senses, the non-sensual world of the mass beetle body is
collectively available to the mind and imagination.11
The ideal colour worlds are like Schopenhauer’s Ideas, they do not
112 appear as such but can be perceived as a realm of non-sense, implicated
in the totality of the beetle population as it switches and fuses across the
continuum of space and time, producing novel colour effects. The visitors
to the Corviale Void will experience the colour effects en masse, as a
unified subjective form, woven into a whole, rather than as an aggregate
of individual moments. Sometimes the subjective form will be composed
of moments that inhibit one another, but sometimes the moments will
reinforce one another. When the moments are mutually reinforcing then
the resultant subjective form will be a feeling of intense aesthetic pleasure,
or bliss, as if the beetle population has spontaneously touched upon the
intimate and absolute harmony of the cosmos.
11 I have prepared a series of short animations related to the project for the Corviale Void,
they can be viewed at Doctor Watson on Vimeo (vimeo.com/user7819522).
Index
Note: page references in bold refer to Figures
Air grid 2-3, 29-47 Alberti, Leon Battista

amalgamation of blocks of air 41 perspective, on 6,7
animated form, as 41 Ancient Rome
approximating size of small human fundamental principles of
torso 36 architecture, and 9
basic colour unit 44 AR beetles 104-7
brain, and 42 avoidance of colour contrast 111-12
colour for itself 47 Corviale Void, and 104-5
digital form 42-7 populous architecture, principle of 111
directed colour beams 44 p rogramming 111-12
electronic model 35 Architecture
mapping of colour pairs 91 moments of utopia, and 1
m odules 40 Architecture of the Air 30-31
o rigins 29-47 Asse Studio 99-100
parallel panels 35 Project for an Asse AHrezzato 101
p erception 41-2 types of pathway 102
physical form 40-42
physical model 35 Bachelard, Gaston
poetic movements 47 blue sky, on 68-70
point of view 42-3 perception of light 34
sensibility, and 37 phenomenology of matter and
translation into computer language 42 imagination 33
reverie, on 70 Desoille, Robert

Beetle bodies 108-12 directed daydreaming 33-4
diffraction 109 Diffraction 109
multi-layer reflection 108-9 Disciplinary origins of architecture 27
photonic crystallography 109-10
Benedetti, Lorenzo Eluard, Paul
Corviale, on 95 Donner a Voir 68-70
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Entomopter 107
Saint Peters Square 55-6 Reciprocating Chemical Muscle
Brunelleschi, Filippo (RCM) 107
image of sky 55 Expropriation 62-3
mirror reflection 29-30
perspective, on 6-8 Fascist architecture 61
three-dimensional objects 4 Fiorentino, Mario
City Plan for Rome 99-100
Capital residential complex in Corviale 94
architecture of 2
Capitalism Goethe, J.W.
surplus-profit, and 1-2 colour phenomena, experiments
Collective consciousness 63 with 75
114 Commodities Grid Form
characteristics 2 extremely precise and totally vague
Comparative size 13
proposal for demonstration of 24
Corviale 93-112 Halbwachs, Maurice
Google Earth, seen in 101 collective consciousness, on 63
Italian realist cinema, and 96 expropriation, on 62-3
participation of occupants, 95-6 Human eye 107-8
Corviale Network 96 inset detail of retina 110
Coviale Void 97-112
AR beetles 104-7 International Klein Blue 32-3, 34
inaccessibility 97 International Klein Gold 33
project for 105, 106 International Klein Immaterial 33
proposal for removal of residents International Klein Nothingness 33
103 International Klein Pink 33, 34
proposal to eradicate 99 Italian realist cinema
removal of cladding panels 103 Corviale, and 96
removal of walls prohibiting access Italian Renaissance 6
to 104 perspective, and 6
Crit 5 pure form of space, and 8
Index
Klein, Yves odels as evolutionary sequences 15

m
blue sky, on 67 peristyle, experience of 18
building with air 30-32 Piranesi, and 27
colours 32-3 P late 1 16
concept of pure sensibility 39 political attitude 16-17
diffuse sensibility 38 process of development,
Dimanche, The Newspaper of a representation of 25
Single Day 38 pure form of space, and 18-19
fixative medium for monochrome theory of architecture 15-16
paintings 57 The Ruins of the Most Beautiful
free admission ticket for Parisian Moments of Greece 12-13
exhibition 56 three families of architecture 15
impersonal ontology 31-2 utilitarian columns 17
lines as bars of psychological prison Light
40 nature of 87-8
manifesto of architecture 31
monochrome painting 44-5 Malevich, Kazimir
mystical ontology 37-8 essential ingredients of painting, on
‘neo-avant-garde hallucinations’ 58 45
Nothing and the Void 38 monochrome painting 44-5
paint, use of 43-4 Suprematism 43 115
pictorial sensibility, on 53-4 White on White 44
Quaroni, and 53-4 Manetti, Antonio di Tuccio
sensibility, and 37 Life of Brunelleschi 29
socio-economic structure, and 57 Multi-layer reflection 108-9
spectacle of colours, on 39-40 p rinciple of 110
tactics for climatic stabilisation 56-7
The Architecture of the Air 30 Nimes
The Monochrome Adventure 39 amphitheatre at 62
Laugier, Marc-Antoine Origins of architecture 5-28

Essay on Architecture 10-11
spatial system 11 Pachyrhynchus weevil 109-10
Le Roy, Julien-David Palladio, Andrea
Ancient Greek architecture, and 13- The Four Books on Architecture 10
14 Parronchi, Alessandro
columns of formal models 23-5 reconstruction of Brunelleschi’s
comparison of architecture with demonstrations 6-7
poetry and painting 17-18 Peristyle
humanist method of spatial principles of origin and development
construction 14 19
Perspective cylindrical forms as stabilising

Italian Renaissance,and 6 role 55
pure form of space 9 forms 51-2
use of 27 human figures 53
Photonic crystallography 109-10 monumental office cylinders 52-3
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista residential accommodation 52
attack on rationalism 19 urban design as network of
drama of architecture, and 22 multivalent structures 53
e ngravings 21 Project for the CEP of S. Giuliano at
forms and locations of existing ruins, Mestre 54
and 25 Rossi, comparison with 59
Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio Scorcio de Centro Direzionale e
23 Alberghiero 53
gemmation, bi-lateral symmetry stacked bands of storey heights 59
and jamming 26 tactics for climatic stabilisation 56-7
Le Roy, and 27 white-collar work 57
linking of mass of independent
spatial units 26 Rainbow 89
Opinions on Architecture 19 Refraction
Paestrum, and 83-5 p rinciple of 110
116 political attitude 23 Reverie
proposal for exhibition of engravings integration of 70
84 Rhodes, John David
ruins of Ancient Rome, on 20-21 Corviale, on 96
theatrical design, and 21 Rhodopsins 107-8
Primitive hut Rossi, Aldo
system of space 12 Administrative Centre for Turin 58
Privatisation 63 A Scientific Autobiography 65
artistic enthusiasm 64
Proposed corner piece blue-sky image 71
Klein’s Untitled blue monochrome 46 collective consciousness, and 63-4
Malevich’s Suprematist non-objective convulsive urbanism 59-60
composition 46 c ross-piece window 69
with Architecture de l’air 32 cubic figure 58
Pure form of space 7-8 Design for an Administrative Centre
for Turin 60
Quaroni, Ludovico expropriation, on 62-3
convulsive urbanism 59-60 method and theory, on 64
existing topographical forms, and 61 monumental courtyard 58-9
Klein, and 53-4 Nimes, amphitheatre at, and 62
proposal for urbanisation of Barene privatisation, on 63
di San Giuliano 51
Index
Quaroni’s satellite city, comparison arerga and Paralipomena 73

P
with 59 perception, on 77
rejection of proposal 60 rainbow, on 89
San Cataldo cemetery 64-7 subject/object relationship, on 80
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena 66 The World as Will and
stacked bands of storey heights 59 Representation 73
The Architecture of the City 61-2 theory of colour 75-6
The Blue of the Sky 65 theory of the world 76
theory as key component of Will, on 78-80
architecture design 64 Stone wall
Saint Peters Square 55-6 a fter Piranesi 22
San Cataldo cemetery 64-7
Schopenhauer, Arthur Tafuri and Dal Co
Air Grid, and 90 critisims of Yves Klein 58
architecture on 81-2 dynamics of urban development, on
capacity to form meaningful world, 50
on 77-8 failure of new dimension, on 50-51
crude materialism 87 Ludovico Quaroni, on 51
effect of architecture, on 85 socio-economic charges, on 50
freedom, on 74 The International Concept of Utopia
Goethe, and 75 50 117
gravity, on 82-3 Theory
Immanuel Kant, and 76-7 nature of 27
importance for contemporary
practice 88 Urban design 49-71
influence of 90 rapid economic development, and
introspection, on 79-80 49
knowledge of ideas 71 urban expansion, and 49
metaphysical substratum, on 80
metaphysical system 74-5 Vitruvius
nature of light, on 86-7 Ten Books on Architecture 9
non-sensory aspect of perception,
on 77-8 Zola, Emile
Paestum, temples at 85 Abbe Mouret’s Transgression 68

Uto Adv The Cor Voi

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Uto Adv The Cor Voi

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Utopian Adventure:

The Corviale Void

Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

List of Figures vii

1 The Origins of Architecture 5

2 The Origins of Air Grid 29

3 The Origins of Urban Design 49

4 Architecture and Non-sense 73

5 The Corviale Void 93

Figure 1. Perspective: a pure form of space 9

Figure 12. After Quaroni’s Project for the CEP of S. Giuliano at

Plate 1. Air Grid: Vampire

Architecture, by virtue of what it is, involves moments of utopia; the

In order they become valuable in the mode of surplus-profit, Capital must

Like perspective, the idea that a contemporary theory of architecture

guiding actual occasions of building. Andrea Palladio, in The Four Books on

The important point to notice is that Palladio wants his models to

Having lodged his man, Laugier then proceeds to translate the

5 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (trans.),

Figure 2. The Primitive Hut: a system of space

respect it is interesting to replicate the basic spatial cell of Laugier’s system

Figure 3. The Grid Form: extremely precise and totally vague

As the title suggests, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments

8 Le Roy, ‘Essay on the Theory of Architecture,’ 2004, 368.

Figure 4. After Le Roy’s Plate 1: column 1, primitive forms of the family of

9 Le Roy, ‘Essay on the History of Architecture,’ 214.

The novelty of the spectacle produced by these columns ranged

In order to grasp fully the significance of Le Roy’s peristyle it is 17

In order to clarify what he means Le Roy invites his reader to consider

10 Le Roy, ‘History,’ 218.

12 Le Roy, ‘Theory,’ 371.

revolutionary new way to think about architecture, conceiving of building as

So, whereas the rationalist’s conceived the subject of architecture as a

Piranesi’s account of his first confrontation with the ruins of Ancient

14 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette with

moved by their direct, material presence. As he says, it is as if the ruins do

Figure 6. Stone Wall: after Piranesi

16 G.B. Piranesi, Tafuri, ‘Wicked Architect,’1987, 25-54, 28.

17 G.B. Piranesi, Tafuri, ‘Wicked Architect,’1987, 25-54, 28.

Figure 7. Proposal for a demonstration of comparative size with Le Roy’s

is arranged as a line of formal models tending to increase in size and

Figure 8. After Piranesi’s Ichnographia Campo Marzio: gemmation, bi-lateral

seem to be engendering an endless cycle of reproduction, indicating a

Once the theoretical nature of architecture is acknowledged then

concerned with ideas and with devising means of representing theoretical

And he placed burnished silver where the sky had to be represented,

The reason Brunelleschi had to resort to mirror reflection as a means

blue paint and charcoal on paper and on fabric, it is entitled Architecture

Air conditioning on the surface of our globe…The technical and

Figure 9. Proposed Corner Piece with Architecture de l’air (ANT 102)

The dreamer, as he is living this imaginary ascent, will reach a

lightness and clarity. He is conscious of being freed both from the

Bachelard describes the perception of light in substantial form as

Attempting to simulate aerial colour in an artificial space, I began

At that stage, our sensibility will be developed to such a degree that

Although the Kleinian ontology can often seem more mystical,

It is perhaps unfortunate – because it leads to misunderstanding –

When there are two colours in a painting, a struggle is engaged; the

For Klein the spectacle of colours, struggling in a painterly

List of Figures vii

1 The Origins of Architecture 5

2 The Origins of Air Grid 29

3 The Origins of Urban Design 49

4 Architecture and Non-sense 73

5 The Corviale Void 93

Figure 1. Perspective: a pure form of space 9