Davide Deriu
Adventures in Scale
Architectural model making is a field of ceaseless enquiries. While the scale model is designed to be apprehended in the round, its materiality has been radically altered in the age of mechanical reproducibility. Over the 20th century, new visualisation techniques and practices fuelled a relentless quest for realism, as the perception of miniature was reconfigured through the camera lens. Further experiments with model-video simulation addressed the discrepancy between human and model scales that is known as Gulliver Gap. The recurring references to Jonathan Swift’s novel in the discourse on model making attest to the allure of scale narratives within architectural culture. This is corroborated by the work of contemporary photographers, such as Naoya Hatakeyama, who have explored the uncanny space we imaginatively inhabit when moving between scales. Weaving together theories, experiments, and narratives, the essay traces how adventures in scale are embedded in the architectural imagination.
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Massimo Rossetti
It's moving! It's alive! Birth, Evolution, Migration and Death of Technologies
It took almost seventy years to see the Italian translation of Science: The Endless Frontier, a report written by the American engineer and mathematician Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and made public in July 1945. In June 1940, Vannevar Bush met the then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and presented his programme for the involvement of the scientific community in the national military security system. In November 1944 Roosevelt sent a short letter to Bush asking four questions on how the US government could contribute to scientific development once the war was over, using the enormous amount of knowledge accumulated during the conflict. Published in Italy in 2013, the Bush Report remains a reference work on the topic of scientific innovation and technology transfer, emphasising how technologies should not be wasted, nor confined to the original ‘horizon’ for which they were conceived, but rather be disseminated and adapted, even to fields that may be very different, so that they can benefit an increasingly wider community. The sheer number of technologies that have migrated from a sector to another suggests that the phenomenon cannot be considered limited or isolated, but rather structured and endowed with its own nature. History is full of ‘technologies that have not made it’, which for various reasons – despite a sound conception and sometimes an even better performance than that of the technologies by which they were defeated – failed to establish themselves on the market. Hence, technologies come into being, evolve, migrate, and die.
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Felice Cimatti
Becoming a Cockroach. Error and Enjoyment
In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion according to G.H., the narrator ventures, hesitantly at first and then dizzyingly, beyond herself, beyond her own humanity. It all begins, and therefore ends, with an encounter with a cockroach. G.H. discovers in the insect a way of escape, that is, she discovers for herself a possibility of being in the world that had always been there, but which she had never allowed herself to imagine. The cockroach is a mistake, as it was never meant to be encountered, but it is also an opportunity. G.H. finds something of herself in the cockroach, and thus finds that the cockroach is not out there: the cockroach is inside, has always been inside. At the end of the novel G.H. will find herself neither outside nor inside. She has herself become a porous surface, between human and insect, between inside and outside, between thought and mouth. The cockroach is an exemplary case of an experience that always arises from an error, from an encounter with the real.
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Paolo Garbolino
Traces and Evidence
For thousands of years, hunters, doctors, alchemists, and judges had been able to discover signs in things that were used to make conjectures. However, the difference between signs in things and signs in written texts and, with it, the modern concept of evidence, only matured in the 17th century, within a new visual culture whose protagonists were collectors of antiquities, natural curiosities, and modern paintings, scholars, travellers, and naturalists. Around the same time, rare and unusual phenomena ceased to be signs of supernatural beings and became the effects of natural causes that produced them more or less frequently. In the mid-17th century, a mathematical theory of artificial random processes that had existed for millennia, i.e. gambling, was formulated, and a science of conjecture became conceivable that would also apply to natural phenomena and allows doctors, judges, and natural philosophers, to measure the strength of evidence on the basis of the frequency of the signs observed.
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Caterina Padoa Schioppa
"Simple, very serious games"
Are we sure that in the process of procedural simplification – as an unpremeditated side-effect of today’s pandemic – we are not drastically abdicating the search in the Deleuzian concept of ‘virtual reality’ for that problematic, intensive dimension of the project, through which we are able to expand the creative process, indulge the principles of insurgence, and demolish or construct new formal categorisations? Can the current radical virtualisation of relationships become an opportunity for the project? In order to try to give these questions food for thought, let us reread the frontier research (also straddling disciplines) of some of the protagonists of Made in Italy – Munari, Musmeci, Leonardi, Mari, Dardi – who, with their ‘serial structuring’ and repetitive games (understood as a symbolic practice) conceived the project in a didactic sense, as a place to experiment with the art of yielding.
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