The Adversary

Sara Marini
The Adversary

Keywords
Adversary, conflict, time, enemy, threat

To oppose is to turn against someone or something (in a fight, in a game, in a discussion, in a trial…), but it is also to distance oneself from a position, from a theory as well as from a practice. The etymology of the adversary therefore implies a logic of confrontation: being turned against, however, paradoxically discloses the constitutive bond of the interaction between antagonists. This crossing of gazes makes conflictual interaction a privileged place for the production of masking, camouflage, but also parades, ostentation, threats, intimidation. The adversary takes shape both by relentlessly pursuing Eden projects, and by allowing immense miseries and shortcomings to thrive, shelving them in an elsewhere, which then returns. It is the (adversative) measure of the difficult search for a balance. The term recurs in countless biographies in the history of architecture, of the arts, of thought, of science, of politics, even though sometimes we see inversions: some well-known opponents then became followers and vice versa.

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Marguerite Duras
Sinking

Keywords
Abyss, home, excavation, concrete, Marguerite Duras

Short excerpt from Marguerite Duras, The Material Life. Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, Grove Weidenfeld, New York 1990, p. 60.

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Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
Adoration. Nothing Against

Keywords
Pauline Curnier Jardin, prison, public art, detention, social exclusion

A large wall drawing and an animated film transform the visiting room of a prison into a place of celebration. Adoration, this is the name of Pauline Curnier Jardin’s work realised for the Giudecca Women’s Prison, opens on 8 April 2022 in Venice. Then, it became permanent and for the exclusive use of the prison community. Behind and ahead of the project are reported by the curators, describing a form of art liturgy that addresses the dynamics of social inclusion/exclusion. Adoration is a public artwork closed to the general public; it was commissioned and realised by a group of female prisoners; it was inaugurated on the occasion of the Venice Biennale and its life is beyond the event. Beyond the time and space of art, beyond social masks, beyond cultural consumption.

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Katharina Hövelmann
Archive of an Adversary. On the Emergence of the Adolf Loos-Archive

Keywords
Adolf Loos, Albertina, Vienna, Ludwig Münz, Franz Glück

Adolf Loos, the adversary of Josef Hoffmann and the Secession, largely forgotten by the public until the 1960s, is today inseparable from Vienna’s architectural history. Loos positioned himself as an adversary of the contemporary architecture and thus reinforced his particularity as an architect. Loos had a wide network, including numerous students and friends who adored him. But how did his work actually come to be researched? The text traces the events that led to the establishment of an adversary’s archive, starting from the art historians Franz Glück and Ludwig Münz contribution after the Loss’ death in 1933, until the acquisition in the collections of the Albertina Museum in Wien.

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Roberto Esposito
The Adversary

Keywords
Genesis, Adversary, Jabbok, Jacob, angel

The subject of the writing revolves around what, in certain respects, is considered the archetype of all struggles. It is one of the most enigmatic passages in the Bible (Genesis 32:22-33), recounting Jacob’s encounter with an unknown being on the river Iabbòq, the outcome of which remains uncertain. The theme has been taken up repeatedly in theological, philosophical, literary, and pictorial culture, without fully grasping its entire meaning. In the author’s text, after describing the scene, three fundamental questions will be posed: 1. Is it truly a struggle (or a dream, a premonition, an embrace)? 2. Who is the adversary (a man, a god, an angel, oneself)? 3. Who emerges as the victor (or is the conflict devoid of any winner)?

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Lorenzo Mingardi
The Stadiums for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. Rituals, Disguises, and Antagonists

Keywords
Football stadiums, World Cup, Italia ’90, sport architecture, rivalry

The 1990 World Cup organised in Italy represents a unique case study in the field of sporting events: many were the subjects involved in the organization of the event and many were the repercussions on the economic, political, cultural and social scenario of the country. The essay analyses the stadiums built for Italia ’90, contextualising them within the global phenomenon of the World Cup. The new facilities are the result of numerous disguises and are characterised by their antagonistic nature toward the city. A peculiar aspect of Italia ’90 compared to previous World Cups concerned the organizational dynamics of the event, aimed at strengthening domestic economic policy and conveying Made in Italy in all possible declinations of design culture.

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Silvia Bodei, Adheema Davis
Geographies of the Divided City during Apartheid. The Case of Block AK in Durban

Keywords
Urban planning, architectural heritage, collective memory, apartheid, decolonization

Block AK, an area of about six hectares in Greyville, in the centre of Durban (South Africa), once home to a lively multicultural community, is today almost uninhabited, still marked by the apartheid segregations (1948-1994). Declared ‘Area for Whites’ in 1963, the forced removals of the inhabitants were carried out alongside its demolition (completed in 1980). Very little has remained of the life of that time: only a few photos and the voice of those who once lived there. The contribution, after an introduction on apartheid urban planning, traces the history of the place trying to determine its original configuration and possible future scenarios. Recovering the memory of Block AK is an urgent need, also in the light of other experiences in South Africa, such as in District Six (Cape Town) and South End (Gqeberha), where two museums, built next to areas demolished by the apartheid, testify to history. The original inhabitants, united in the Block AK Action Committee, demand compensation and reclaim their identity.

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Marco Mazzeo
The Adversary by Definition. The Case of Muhammad Ali

Keywords
Aggressiveness, shock, language, boxing, ritual

The essay examines a case that lies at the heart of the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. Muhammad Ali is not only a boxer: he is an orator, a poet, a political actor in the United States of the Vietnam War. The contribution analyses his conflicting characteristics: on the one hand, he is the adversary by definition because he seems to follow the cliché (boxer, black, histrionic); on the other hand, Muhammad is the one who redefines the very notion of adversary because he disrupts the categories of the time to which he belongs. He is a boxer who speaks; he is a black man who does not submit; he anticipates certain characteristics of the world and work typical of the 21st century.

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Jacopo Rasmi, Luca Vettori
Unfinishing the Game

Keywords
Athlete, performance, spectacle, hacking, game

The adversary is an issue discussed by two philosophical masks in dialogue: a spectator and an athlete. Together they perform a critique of sporting activity while renewing a desire for it. At the heart of this dialogue lays the idea of a game irreducible to the economy of attention and the capture of spectacle into which the athletic event tends to slip with the complicity of the media. Two perspectives are thus given in tension of the scenic and imaginative nature of sport. The exhaustion of the game as well as of the players within the competitive and mediatic machine is countered by a desire to free it by removing it from the alienation of purposes external to its enjoyment. Without staging a heroic, competitive battle, the two characters agree to occupy and deflect the field of the ‘adversary’ with hacking gestures.

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Francesco Trovò
Environment vs. Landscape. The Territory Divided between Urban Planning, Ecology and Landscape Protection

Keywords
Ecological transition, landscape, environment, renewable energy, green deal

Environment and landscape in Italy today are characterised by mutual conceptual and legal adversities, which are exacerbated by issues related to the ecological transition. Renewable energy plants may have positive effects on ecology and the environment, but they will potentially have a negative impact on landscape values. The issue may lead to a choice between relevant conflicting demands that will need to be balanced so that one does not preponderate over the other. The current view, according to which the protection of the landscape is autonomous with respect to that of the environment, is countered by another, according to which the territory must be understood holistically; the latter identifies precisely in the separation of competences one of the causes of the ineffectiveness of protection action and hopes for the formation of a single decision-making nucleus, in which antagonisms are systemised and resolved, also by elaborating cultural codes for the construction of new cohabitations.

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Benjamin Chavardès, Lorenzo Ciccarelli
The Perfect Antagonist

Keywords
Vittorio Gregotti, Paolo Portoghesi, modern, postmodern, intellectual architect

The contribution focuses on the figures of Vittorio Gregotti (1927-2020) and Paolo Portoghesi (1931-2023) presented by the historiography and by themselves as standard-bearers of alternative alignments: the modernity vs the postmodernity, the rule vs the exception, the rationalism vs the mannerism, the Neue Sachlichkeit vs the Art Nouveau, Leon Battista Alberti vs Francesco Borromini, Milan vs Rome, the 1976 Venice Biennale vs the 1980 Biennale. Being aware of the complexities of the two authors, their cultural nuances and their theoretical and figurative evolution, the ring isolates and discusses some fragments of the vast mosaic they wove to argue how, once the season of controversy has passed, two architects who were thought to be irreducibly distant can instead be interpreted as related when compared to the contemporary context.

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Michelangelo Pivetta
Cephalopod Paranoia. The Archaeology of West Star

Keywords
Bunker, OTAN, archaeology, war, musealisation

In 1964, an industrious multitude, like a collective of Hymenoptera secretly busy in the belly of Mount Moscal near Verona, built one of the world’s largest underground fortified systems: West Star. The military architectural device, far from housing any extravagant weaponry, was a special container for electronic contraptions, part of a network that governed OTAN activities until the early 2000s. Technically, it stands as a gigantic machine designed for anti-atomic survival, conceived as an orbital station or a submarine, nothing more than an immense pressurised cockpit capable of vanquishing the forces of nature, this time unleashed by the insane human tendency towards destruction. The recovery and musealisation project will make West Star both container and content, museum of itself and shell of a narrative apparatus centred on the Cold War intended for young people: a transitive process, from the monument itself, West Star, to the narrative of its purpose, and vice versa.

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Carlo Gandolfi
The Move of the Rook. A Graft on the Locatelli Tower by Mario Bacciocchi in Milan

Keywords
Mario Bacciocchi, Milanese Modern, urban conflict, tower, city

This is the story of a project made up of relationships, embedded in a system of cross-references ranging from the city to the languages that inhabit its architecture; from decisions, to measurements, to the scale of detail, that which allows architecture to be controlled and built. The aim is to tell how these relationships, alternating, take on the status of successive moves capable of shaping the urban scene, including conflicts and references. The story starts from a promenade that crosses Milan’s 20th century and stops at a house, a graft within the Locatelli Tower built to and design by Mario Bacciocchi in the 1930s. A place of suspended living, where the open and domestic space are immersed in the city thanks to a series of intersecting visual gazes. From this house it is possible to narrate the city; here one can live, dance, party and feel the wind that is never present in Milan, as if one were somewhere else, redolent and far from the – although close – antagonists.

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Lamia Hadda, Alberto Pireddu
The Art of War in the Late 12th Century Treatise by al-Tarsūsī’s for Saladdin

Keywords
Polyorcetic, Mardhī ibn Ali al-Tarsūsī, Saladin, war, military treaty

In the literary genre on polyorcetics, the Tabsirat arbāb al-albāb fī kayfiyyat an-najāt fi’l-hurūb min al-anwā’ wa nashr a’lām al-a’lām fi al-’udad wa al-’alāt al-mu’īnah ‘ala liqā’ al-a’dā’ written by Mardhī ibn Ali al-Tarsūsī in 1187, holds a position of the utmost importance, placing itself at the dawn of Arab treatises on the subject. The manuscript, stored within the MS Huntington Collection at the 264 Bodleian Library in Oxford, having been transcribed and translated only in part, still remains almost entirely unpublished. This contribution proposes the translation of an excerpt mainly dedicated to the description of mangles, whose meanings and different structures and constructions are explored. Therein, the comparison between the different technologies held by the enemies seemed significant in guiding the choice of those matter worth to be investigated: in fact, these pages attempt to define the adversaries’ skills and the more or less real possibilities to defeat them.

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Mardi ibn Ali al-Tarsūsī
Information for the Intelligent on How to Escape Injury in Combat and the Unfurling of the Banners of Instruction on Equipment and Engines which Assist in Encounters with Enemies

Keywords
Polyorcetic, Mardhī ibn Ali al-Tarsūsī, Saladin, war, military treaty

Translation by Lamia Hadda and Alberto Pireddu of an excerpt from Mardi ibn Ali al-Tarsūsī's treatise, Tabsirat arbāb al-albāb fī kayfiyyat an-najāt fi'l-hurūb min al-anwā' wa nashr a'lām al-a'lām fi al-'udad wa al-'alāt al-mu'īnah 'ala liqā' al-a'dā', 1187.

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Kengo Kuma with Marco Vanucci
Digital Crafts. The Other Modernity

Keywords
Kengo Kuma, modernity, craftsmanship, Japanese architecture, Hiroshi Hara

At the end of the 20th century, computation and digital production (CAD/CAM technologies) introduced a paradigm shift in technological development, supplanting serialized industrial production: mass customization at zero marginal cost made possible by digital machines opened up the way to a new form of production that combines the variability of craftsmanship and the efficiency of mechanical machines.
Kengo Kuma’s work, in line with the Japanese architectural tradition in which the building is made up of interchangeable parts, has gained international attention for having challenged the idea of ​​an architecture object in which the unity of the whole disregards the articulation of the individual parts. His architecture aims to re-establish a relationship with place and to experience space with all five senses. The interview traces his intellectual and professional career, highlighting the years of his training in Japan, between learning traditional craftsmanship and the experiments that projected him into the international avant-garde.

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Jacopo Galli
Towards the Construction of a Reasoned Atlas of Destruction

Keywords
Destruction, urbicide, catastrophe, reconstruction, atlas

‘Destruction’ is today a central term in the vocabulary of architecture and indicates the great adversary of the continuous process of modification of the natural environment for anthropic needs. The tutorial intends to understand how destruction, its threat but also its tragic implementation, has been in the recent past, and can become, an active engine for the rethinking of urban spaces and territorial structures in the imminent future. Building an atlas of urban destruction makes it possible to provide oneself with a fundamental tool not so much for understanding a past (in any case little explored), but mainly for planning a future in which significant destruction of urban fragments will become the norm rather than the exception. The contribution identifies a number of design tools capable of orienting navigation in past and future destructions in order to be able to effectively face the great adversary.

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James Carpenter
Ecologies of Light. Ground Zero

Keywords
JCDA, Ground Zero, New York, 11 september, James Carpenter

Sometimes the adversary becomes the enemy; it enters the city and destroys its symbols and securities. This violence can be answered to either with closure or by repurposing the city as a place which is open to the world. James Carpenter’s (JCDA) contribution reflects on the design of the 7WTC, the first building erected at Ground Zero after 9/11. In the project, the attention to construction details, the sizing of the elements, the study of colour and of the refraction of light become tools to offer a new ecology of place, a cure for bodies and minds wounded by the incursion of the enemy. The text is illustrated by detail drawings curated by The Formwork team. By critically re-elaborating executive drawings, project variants, photographs and mockups, these drawings document the delicate balance between security imperatives, technological requirements and aesthetic ambitions which JCDA has been able to create to respond to the programmatic objectives of their ethical and creative endeavour.

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Fabrizio Marzilli
Douglas Darden and the Allegory of the Adversary

Keywords
Douglas Darden, Condemned, Loss, Underbelly, Limit

American architect Douglas Darden identifies the diptych of theory and design as an antagonistic pair. Through design practice, he identifies the rival as a constructive loss to a given idea of architecture by favouring another, understood as a ‘critical mediation on finitude and failure’. This controversy underscores an intrinsic theme of architecture, namely the relationship between construction and destruction, between positive and negative. Every act of architecture becomes a dialogue between these fundamental pairs, where the potential of architecture lies in the ‘recognition of this reciprocal condition’ and the centuries-old ability of architectural canons to be overturned. Through Darden’s figure and work, the text engages with the theme of the adversary as an attitude for a re-signification of architecture through the investigation of what lies behind, what is hidden, toward that limit that the architect identifies in architecture itself.

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Paolo Bosca
Synchysis. The Path of Fluid Knowledge

Keywords
Synchysis, Michel Serres, mixing, aesthetics of taste, epistemology

Synchysis is a word usually used in rhetoric and medicine and indicates, in general, confusion and chaos. Michel Serres, in his The five senses, rehabilitates this term to suggest a precise type of conjunction: the word named the act of conveying two fluids together and can help to think about the mingle of things overcoming the difficulties that usually lead only to chaos. Synchysis seems the perfect adversary of the linearity that modern thought chases after. As soon as the gaze moves beyond the pretensions of analytical purity, one realizes that in fact synchysis indicates a play of forces made up of mutual thrusts and involvements completely bound up with the flow where they occur. Synchysis, in the sense suggested by Serres, configures a mingled interaction that is free and repulsive with respect to the tools of objectification.

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Kris Pint
Reparative Architecture

Keywords
Alienation, modernism, object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis, reparative reading

By considering the architectural object as a non-relational and non-human adversary, its reparative function is paradoxically revealed. Reparative is understood here in the sense Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gave to it, as the possibility to use cultural artefacts in a creative, transformative way to deal with inner conflicts and negative affects. Reparative architecture is thus not only related to well-being and the improvement of the built environment. Architecture can also become reparative when it functions as a projection screen on which feelings of frustration, melancholy and unhomeliness can find an external form. Precisely because it wants to think beyond the human, object-oriented architectural theory allows us to examine this aspect of the architectural object as an antagonistic force. Two cases will briefly illustrate this: the melancholic geometry of Marianne Brandt’s Bauhaus teapot (1924) and the sublime indifference of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s cenotaph for Isaac Newton (1784).

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Jacopo Cantalini, Federico Della Sala
The Shield and the Bandit. City, Conflict and Escape Routes between Loraux and Lorenzetti

Keywords
Stasis, antagonism, city, civil war, desertion

The contribution aims to offer an essay based on the renowned book by French historian Nicole Loraux, La Cité divisée. L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes, published for the first time in 1997. Now a classic textbook for those seeking to deepen the understanding of the complex phenomenon of the city, Loraux’s inquiries focus on how the Classical Athens of the Fifth century BC made use of public discourse and representation as a mean to suppress a particular and fundamental institution of the polis: stasis, that could be roughly translated as ‘civil war’. Loraux reflections on the cradle of democracy in the moment of its making can help us think civil war and antagonism as deeply rooted mechanisms in contemporary urban and political experience, thus revealing decisive and urgent trajectories, unprecedented crossroads and escape routes to think, envision and act conflict politically otherwise than the metropolis.

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Fabio Salomoni
The Football Supporter's 'Work'. Football, Adversaries, War Rituals

Keywords
Supporter, rites, adversary, conflict, pacification

In the contemporary imaginary the ‘profession’ of the football fan is intrinsically linked to the presence of an adversary and the need to stage a collective symbolic battle with him based on the amicus/hostis antinomy in a particular space, the stadium. This ritualisation of the battle has a predominantly symbolic and metaphorical dimension, often even when it includes manifestations of aggression and physical violence. These weekly rituals have long been reduced to momentary loss of control and substantially tolerated. For a couple of decades now, the fan and his warlike rituals have instead been transformed into social alarm and have legitimised a series of coercive and control measures. In the discomfort of tolerating symbolic expressions of carnivalesque enmity and subversion and in the will to produce a hyper-pacified social world, contemporary societies reveal the isolation and insecurity on which they are founded.

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Marcos Amado Petroli
The Mechanization of the Sacred Grotto

Keywords
Cave, architectural theory, primitive architecture, ancestral architecture, myth

The notion of ‘grotto’, one of the most ancient and mythical architectural templates, is currently in tension with the mechanised ethos of the time. Its cave-like aspect and uterine space historically gave rise to extraordinary and fundamental allegorical and metaphysical meanings. Yet, it recently came to be at odds with the quantifiable social reality of technological societies. Grotto, therefore, is revisited through theoretical discourses that highlight its transfiguration throughout time; and through comparative research, exposing how the well-established ‘primitive hut’ challenged its autonomy as a primary system of territorialisation of human culture.

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Gianpaolo Cacciottolo
Chronicle of a Duel. Bonito Oliva vs. Celant

Keywords
Contemporary art, curatorial practice, Germano Celant, Bonito Oliva, exhibition

This paper aims at reconstructing and examining the main stages of the competition between two nodal figures of the art scene in Italy: Achille Bonito Oliva and Germano Celant. Since the Seventies to the present day the rivalry between the two has flared up in the elastic spaces of criticism and exhibitions, spaces which this same rivalry has galvanised in a decisive way. Two different models of criticism, but also of curating, that have marked the recent history of contemporary art in Italy and beyond. Retracing the stages of the cultural competition between Achille Bonito Oliva and Germano Celant means identifying the critical junctures that have marked the Italian and international art scene over the last fifty years: the position and function of the critic, the value of writing (critical and curatorial), the exhibition as a space for verification and experimentation, the affirmation of the curator to the detriment of the critic in a now global dimension, the importance of documents and of the archive in critical and curatorial practices, the relationship with institutions.

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Philip Goldswain
Adversarial Urbanism. Mining and Settlement in the Western Australian Goldfields, 1897-1905

Keywords
Boomtown, mining, urban morphology, urbanization, maps

In 1901, less than a decade after the discovery of gold, Kalgoorlie, Boulder and the East Coolgardie Goldfield (Western Australia) was depicted in a number of elaborately coloured and detailed maps which illustrated the spatial, legal and territorial complexity of the significant, and rapidly developing, urban industrial conurbation. The contribution reflects on the interactions, tensions and conflicts between the different land uses that constituted this settlement to explore the ‘adversarial urbanism’ that resulted from the speed of its growth. Through the visual analysis of maps and the identification of formally distinct morphological actors almost eighty aberrations in the cadastral grid of the town are identified. Each of these has their own distinctive process, temporality, and imprint on the boomtown. An understanding of this period of contestation, with its arbitrary urban forms determined by the negotiations between geological and metropolitan forces, complexifies urban history.

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