The archaeology of light: grafts and sections
Moneo teaches us that interventions in archaeological areas place the focus back on a complex idea of city, of physical and social, constructive and material relations. The main theme becomes light as a rebirth, to bring a monument-document back to life that was hidden under a mantle of earth.
Light and gravity, and the weight of the architecture as a process of excavation and investigation have become essential elements of a new way of analysing archaeological remains. Moneo’s museum cannot, therefore, have a direct relationship with light, but everything is experienced internally like indirect action, with mechanisms suitable to make light penetrate and steer it into dilated spaces, which remind us that the museum, as such, is not only a place to conserve and display finds, but also a complex space in which architecture communicates an involving, emotional experience aimed at discovery.
Everything has its origin in the past, when the Romans created great structures: we are thinking of the Pantheon, in which an oculus projected light inwards. With its gradations it calibrated the body weights of the great masses that slid from the dome down to the precious marble floors. Light creates continuous variations in the different periods of the year, but above all generates an intimate space in which man perceives a sense of greatness linked with the substantial dilation of the space.
This was a lesson on light, the mass and the weight of architecture that was the engine for many architects who espoused this relation with light and gravity in a different way. Suffice it to think of the work of Louis Kahn, who discovered on his second journey to Italy the weight of the mighty walls and, above all, the light that gave sense to space, made it vibrant and alive. When we look at his production we discover a change in route from the projects of the Fifties, when he was in contact with Richard Buckminster Fuller’s research and produced experiments on reticular structures, to those following his journey to Rome, where he lived at the American Academy between 1950 and 1951. The architect of Estonian origin understood that geometry is a vehicle to incorporate time, that it is not enough as a matrix of space, and that it needs a thick wall to make architecture still a mystery that speaks to man and his institutions.
In the period spent in Rome he visited Villa Adriana, the Terme di Caracalla and the Pantheon, and was fascinated by the mysterious light of its ruinsf.
This theme became an important engine in reviewing the present, in that ruins enable us to transcribe and rewrite the spatial experiences on which architectural thought is founded. We know that Kahn achieved this contact with history not just by spontaneous reading and his splendid coloured drawings full of emotions, but also, and above all, through visionary literature. I am referring to his intellectual relation with the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi g, who became a reference point for his anti-perspective gaze on the world. In his works like Invenzioni Capric [ciose] di Carceri [Capricious Inventions of Prisons], developed between 1745 and 1750 and revisited in the 1761 edition (Carceri di invenzione [Imaginary Prisons]), there is no longer the stability of the objective space of Renaissance perspective, but one that dilates and accelerates outwards, beyond the confines of the picture and the frame itself: dynamic, interwoven spaceh. Piranesi had understood that the past and ruins could still speak to the present, in the sense that time – atmospheric, existential and mental – had regained possession of its matter. It was a context in which rationality and instinct coexisted; the ideas of Apollo and Dionysus together. Time, combined with space, became the deus ex machina of this architecture.
What did Louis Kahn retrieve from this lesson?
On the occasion of the Salk Institute project, Kahn developed drawings based on the 1762 Plan drawn up by Piranesi for the Campo Marzio, inspired by the plan of ancient Rome. Kahn was able to reread Piranesi’s incisions, those of Villa Adriana, which he had developed in different phases of his life up until he died in 1778. From these the American architect grasped the meaning of time, memory and of transformation. The partially collapsed vaults offered, in these gaps, the vital space for rewriting memoriesi. Here nature was not a place already given, but an interpretative matrix of what man’s destiny could be in relation to time. Kahn was attractive because of his scarred face, his mysterious humanity and the complicated life he had lived. History for him was never a linear journey but always diagonal, like an arrow that encounters different moments of history and condenses them. We understand this indirect dimension with the past, and this need to pass through the metaphor, to the point of including the visionary world of John Soane in his interests.
An architect and collector, he was a complex figure who worked as a superintendent of the Bank of England from 1788 to 1833. When he thought of his work, he developed it from the inside, modelling it like a dream of a golden past. In an incision by Joseph Gandi (1830) the Bank translates into a great excavation: a ruin, of which time has taken back the walled structures to the point of revealing its archaeological soul, its intimate disposition. Kahn grasps the sense of time and of structures that, losing their trimmings, titanically remain on their feet, like a foundation.
John Soane left us another archaeological document of his house, now a museum, situated in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, where he lived from 1813 till 1837, the year of his death. In the rooms full of exhibits the past lives again one next to the other to generate memory as an infinite stratigraphy. But above all he excavated his house in profile, with mobile panels able to show the space beyond the stage.
This dimension of the excavation, the section, the internal light raining from above, is an integral part of the world of Louis Kahn. In light the architect seeks the dimension of time and man together, like an act of hope. Light and silence were to be the two kinds of matter that he would seek indefatigably for the rest of his life. In this interval, as if between two vital fires, architecture takes place, as he recalled in 1968 during a conference held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York: “I consider light the source of every presence and matter is worn-out light. What light creates, projects a shade and the shadow belongs to light. I perceive the presence of a threshold, which separates light from silence, and leads silence to light, immersed in an inspired atmosphere, where the desire to be and to express encounters the possible”j.
Light, the section and the visionary world of John Soane come down to our times, to demonstrate that design culture seeks something deeper than facile citation, or the paradox of the analogous. It was Juan Navarro Baldeweg who led us inside this tension between modernity that never ended and a vast time, rich in history but never nostalgic, purified of mimicry and in search of new definitions, like patterns that clean up trimmings in a Kahnian manner. In Rome he created the Biblioteca Hertziana in 2012. The eternal city is the place of memory par excellence and the building belongs to the Palazzo Zuccari, once the home of the artist Federico Zuccari, who had built it in 1590 on a wedge-shaped piece of land in the area of Trinità dei Montik. The dwelling was built on the remains of the Roman villa and the gardens of Lucullo, arranged in terraces, following the orography of the site. Navarro Baldeweg speaks of an identity between permanence and transformation. For the Biblioteca Hertziana project the Spanish Master recuperated the terrace arrangement of Villa di Lucullo. It was an intervention that revealed itself in the profile; in a sketch his work is understood, that of creating internal space through light. A large basin of light pushes the internal masses, like terraces in a dialogue with the scenographic void obtained. It is a work carried out following a diagram that retrieves from history the sense of the place, translated into a large space of light. Navarro Baldeweg works to make the space the narrative matter, while the various levels are laid out to accommodate the reading-tables and bookshelves. To work on a historic palace of such great importance means, in the first instance, to understand the building, its internal rationality and constructive logics, but above all to prompt a new identity. The section thus becomes, together with light, the instrument that enables excavation, and modelling of the interior like archeological actionl.
Navarro Baldeweg, like Louis Kahn before him, teaches us to look at history with a careful gaze, always ready to redefine the confines of disciplinary practice, making the wealth of the past converse as much as the abstract force of modern ideas.