Obra's first solo show entitled Architettura Povera opened in the BEB Gallery at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. The exhibition explored the guiding principles of experimentation unhindered by tradition, complete openness towards materials and processes, and the rejection of a defined style which characterized the "Arte Povera" movement of the late 60's and early 70's in Italy. The work is surrounded by an eight-foot Wall of Lessons constructed of 3/32" thick luan plywood interlocking units. Each unit is etched with a brief "lesson." In this manner the physical effort of assembling the wall, completed by a crew of 20 RISD students, is itself an educational experience. Architettura Povera seeks to shed light on the mysteries of perceived reality, lifting the veil of objectification that weighs on all things to reveal their substantial vitality. The work aspires to be an architecture that can bring "inert" things to life.
Presented in a lecture given at the Social XChange Symposium to accompany the opening of the Obra Architects exhibit, Architettura Povera, at the Rhode Island School of Design’s BEB Gallery in 2004. Also published in a special issue printing of Divisare Books, PABLO CASTRO THREE SHORT WRITINGS in February of 2017.
Architecture is and has always been a qualitative endeavor, crucially dependent on the refining of a vision which may provide to life moments of a human luxury that is both indispensable and totally unrelated to expense, and therefore potentially accessible to all. Architecture balances precariously between a temporal sequence of experienced moments and an overall “form” or containing order. The experience of architecture is found in the opaque field defined between these two, a field for which there are no maps and no definitive recipies, and one which the architect enters when embarking on the design of each new project, groping in the dark, stumbling upon blunt obstacles.
An Architettura Povera, inspired by the Arte Povera of the 60’s and 70’s, does not imply an impoverishment of ideas, resources or ambition, but quite the opposite. Architecture is related to disciplines that deal in the management of material resources; it is related to considerations of efficiency in the management of space when deployed at the service of specific functions or in considerations of advantageous transactions of material, labor and cost figuring into the construction and fabrication equations. There is also nothing we can do about experience and form being enlisted as the commercializing tools for the objectification of architecture. And yet, we feel that all this does not exhaust architecture, that experience and idea lie somehow outside of the material considerations of architecture and that they cannot be ignored if we are to have a future that includes the discipline as a culturally significant endeavor. This architectural “surplus”—something that can possibly be defined as whatever remains after we have done everything we have to do and are left then with what we want to do— is what Architettura Povera strives to bring to the forefront.
What we want to have and what we have to have are not in dialectical opposition, and neither one can survive in the absence of the other. Their relationship can be thought of as the “representational” intention in architecture. Architettura Povera proposes works that are not abstract in the modernist sense, but their representation oversteps the boundaries of demonstrating good construction and adaptation to use. We propose a “weakened” representation open to interpretation: enigmatic, poetic and disturbing.
Architettura Povera relies not on luxurious materials but rather on the experience of all materiality. As such it is also related to an economy, not that of the bean-counters, but that of the storytellers, those who omit all that is unnecessary to the work and who, in the spare presence of arranged matter, privilege the idea and the radiant beauty of authenticity. The proposed “poverty” is not one of lack of resources, but rather richness of imagination, drawing its luxe from the fact that architecture is always an instance of a singulars unrepeatable moment in space, and that the success of architecture depends on the respect of place as a unique moment on the surface of this earth.
EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF AN ARCHITETTURA POVERA
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 becoming intimate with the things of the world than an aid. They tended to use the simplest of 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 installations relied on the specificity of their material substance for their effect. 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."
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
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 befit 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 the case of the project of the Freedom Park Memorial, how do we achieve that sense of time about which Spinoza proclaimed, "We know and feel that we are eternal." How do you do something like that in architecture? From the outset we are doomed to failure.
2. Honestly, 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, and 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." 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.
4. Make sure to only talk about food and drink.
Kierkegaard said about his hero Socrates, that he always talked exclusively about food and drink, but really he was talking about the infinite, while the others spent all of the time talking about the infinite in the loudest voices, while they really were only talking about food and drink. We believe that there is a deep sense of practicality that pervades the best architecture and that, well understood, summons that vertigo of the infinite much better than anything else. The infinite, as we know, can be infinitely large or infinitely small, and as such it is present in everything. Nothing converges to the essence of architecture as the potential clarified by the inhabitation it may suggest.
5. Our designs will be bettered by others.
One important aspect of a "povera" outlook is an interest for the living things of the world. The artists became interested in animals, plants, and even in the apparently dormant vitality of rocks and minerals, and of course in themselves and others. In that light a project must be left "open" to that vitality which then will have an opportunity to manifest itself by changing the architecture in both reversible and irreversible ways as time passes. When such openness is of a reversible nature, it may simply have to do with appropriately staging the potential of inhabitation. In the case of irreversible change, it has more to do with growth as analogous to biological growth, that is, not by "fragments," which beget monstrosity and deformity, but rather by "moments" in a process of continuous transformation.
6. Maybe it is good not to be understood.
The Povera artist chooses the hard life of living amongst things, aspiring everyday to travel the distance that separates our knowledge from the essence of things. This is a trip undertaken in solitude. Every thing which exists, once known, can perform a function of communication; it has the potential to be conceptually understood and also bears with it the potential to become a sign. That sign is one more obstacle in the search for the true knowledge of things; that sign is one more enemy in the effort to attain an understanding of essences. In the 1930s, Ortega y Gasset spoke of the megaphone and the radio as the new enemies of man. Unrecognizable things—obscurity—point our consciousness in unknown directions, expanding the horizon of experience away from the familiar. Or, as Germano Celant, considering the alternative, put it, "Moving within linguistic systems to remain language translates into a form of cultural kleptomania that stifles the vitality of real daily life."
7. If you want to do good architecture you have to be gullible.
St. Augustine said, "Faith is believing what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you believe." It is well known that the worst enemies of faith are the same as the worst enemies of art: skepticism and relativism. Skepticism suspects that nothing is true; relativism claims that everything can be true. They are both false. The belief in the effective existence of the object of perception or imagination is an aspect of their essence and the foundation of everything for us.
8. If you can’t come up with anything, you are probably thinking too much.
Embodiments of energy and the vital essence of all things were cornerstones of the works of Arte Povera, centering on an interest for the lives of animals and their existence directed by instinct as non-conceptual yet marvelous adaptation to vital problems. Intuition as a method of essential inquiry is related to the idea of instinct. Thought deals with things that have already happened, things executed and completed. If I move my arm, and I think about it, I break it up into moments of that movement. Intuition, instead, happens simultaneously with the moment lived, and thus it is aware of processes in their very unfolding.
END NOTES:
"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
André Gide (1869-1951)
"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail…"
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, "Three Dialogues," in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965) 21.
"Yet it is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our body, for our body can bear no trace of such existence, neither can eternity be defined in terms of time, or have any relation to time. But, notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal."
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
Benedict de Spinoza, "Part V, On the Power of the Understanding, or of Human Freedom," in Ethics, trans. by R.H.M. Elwes (1883), MTSU Philosophy WebWorks Hypertext Edition, 1997.
"Every step you take is the goal you seek."
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999) 504-507. For the original Spanish version, “La rosa de Paracelso,” see Borges, Obras Completas, Tomo III (Emecé, 1996) 387-390.
"Faith is believing what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you believe."
Saint Augustine (354-430)
Saint Augustine, Sermons, 43, 1.
