eight points of architettura povera
un - manifestos | provisionality by obra architects
process working methods time intuition borderlessness
The term Architettura Povera is transposed from the famous description of Arte Povera made by Germano Celant when writing about a group of young artists working in Italy in the late sixties. The group, more than working under the protective conceptual umbrella of any defined manifesto, shared a disposition of disdain towards preconceived artistic principles. They were not only weary of theoretical frameworks to define the art, but also of any defined artistic language, which was viewed by them as more of an impediment to become intimate with the things of the world than an aid, in that sense. They tended to use the simplest materials found in nature, for example, metal, dirt, water, rivers, land, snow, fire, glass, air, stone, leaves, newspaper, and also, light, weight, electricity, measurement, stress, people, time, smell and horses. The materials were invariably left uncovered and relied on the specificity of their material substance for their effect. Rather than an exhaustive review of the works of Arte Povera , we recall these artists for their willingness to attempt an erasure of distinction between doing art and living. We would like to offer a consideration of Arte Povera in relationship to architecture to provide a kind of sympathetic lens through which to look at our recent work. The term povera or poor coincides with a desire to avoid material gloss and to get as close as possible to the elemental being of the matter involved, but in this consideration and as employed by Celant has more to do more with a self-imposed limitation of choices and assumptions. Or, as Gide would have it, ‘Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better’. 1 We would like to provide eight principles, albeit somewhat un- Arte Povera to suggest such an ordering, and therefore we propose eight PROVISIONAL principles underlying the work.
1 We are doomed from the start ‘To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.’ — Beckett 2 We work to achieve certain mysterious moments of rare correspondence between an initial act of intuition and what would seem to be a real ideal object with a unique presence. Naturally, this kind of work is perpetually besieged by doubt. One aspect of the distinction between architecture and everyday lived reality that would be befitting to an Architettura Povera would be a treatment of the sense of time, analogous to the way we experience it in reality. How do you work in architecture with an idea of time that is different from the time of clocks and watches, the time of minutes and seconds, time chopped up and quantified, with rather time as it is felt, this chronological space that we’re in and we can’t escape from? It is both a reassuring and a terrifying predicament. For example, in our work, how do we achieve that sense of time about which Spinoza proclaimed, ‘We know and feel that we are eternal’. 3 How do you do something like that in architecture? From the outset we are doomed to failure. 2 To be honest with you, we always do the same thing We aspire to extend the intentions of our work from project to project, constantly looking for the possibility to address the same problems, leaving behind any orthodox notion of regionalism or site specificity. It is precisely because we always try to do the same thing that projects are very different from each other. The infinite variety of the nature of things is responsible for the difference between them. We might try to reinvent the wheel, but we always are trying to make the same wheel, it just comes out differently with each effort. 3 We are unable to ever finish anything If one behaves as human beings typically do, with an objective in mind, one wants to get somewhere, arrive at something, achieve certain goals. Then all things become objectified, everything becomes related to those goals, and time is flattened. But, as we’ve pointed at in our first principle, we have very slim chances of success anyway, so why not simply postpone the idea of achieving anything? Why not scrap all objectives? Or even better, why not make the effort of trying to do whatever there is to be done the objective in and of itself? As Borges said it, much more beautifully, ‘Every step you take is the goal you seek’. 4 So the work is never finished, or even better, it is always complete. Then the objective and the work of pursuit itself become one and the same; action and life become one, the work never finished, and reality infinite. Time is simply filled with a sequence of things that one does to perfect the work, forward and back, coinciding with the duration of natural lives.
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On Site review 23 Small Things
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