Miserabilia

Sara Marini
Miserabilia

Keywords
Misery, city, imagination, vagabonds, spectrum

Miserabilia focus on spaces and spectres of misery in imagination and reality. Two assumptions underlie it: the removal of the space of existence of misery in the concrete and immaterial context of the West in favour of ‘measurable conditions of poverty’, and the presence of buildings in cities as evidence of a past in which poverty was a ‘matter’ of governance and planning. Misery in the West is today unthinkable and unrepresentable, unspeakable and invisible, exiled to a historical, geographical, cultural elsewhere. Yet, in the past, misery took majestic forms in Italy, for instance, from the Great Schools of Venice to the almshouses for the poor. Monuments gave way to the anonymous architecture of service centres or temporary structures responding to emergency situations. If the monumentality of misery expressed an aesthetics, the architecture of poverty rejects it in the name of functionality: today the space of misery is emptied of phenomenology, evidence, quality, quantity, scale, extension, discourse.

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Georges Bataille
Dépense

Keywords
Georges Bataille, waste, abandonment, insubordination, materialism

Short excerpt from Georges Bataille, La notion de dépense (1930), in Idem, Œuvres complètes, Gallimard, Paris 1970, vol. I (Premiers Écrits, 1922-1940), pp. 302-320; En. tr. The Notion of Expenditure, in Idem, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited by A. Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1985, p. 128.

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Steven Holl with Diana Carta
The Other Parallax. The Needed Public Space

Keywords
Public space, urban design, city, community, void

The reflection on the city is a constant and consistent theme in the work of Steven Holl, witnessed in his numerous studies, writings and architectures presented in ‘Pamphlet Architecture’ series (1978-1997), in the well-known text Urbanisms. Working with Doubt, in Urban Hopes. Made in China by Steven Holl, up to his most recent urban projects and thinking on environmental issues. The discussion focuses on ideas of architecture and the city, and how these ideas are translated into practice. It examines the presence of public space both as a response to be declined case by case and as a constant element.

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Dario Gentili
Incompensable Misery

Keywords
Misery, Michel Foucault, labor, need, desire

In ancient Rome, three Latin terms articulated a condition that we today generically define as ‘poverty’: the miser was someone in a state of extreme poverty; the inops was one who was ‘without means’, both in the material sense and in the broader sense of ‘capacity’; and the pauper was someone who, although forced to live a very sober lifestyle, nevertheless retained a certain decorum and dignity. We are currently in an era where the incorporation of desire into work results in diminishing enjoyment and increasing psychic suffering. This situation has reached a nearly unsustainable point for individuals due to the frustration stemming from the lack of return on investment of desire in one’s work. This constitutes the most desperate form of misery today: misery without desire.

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Vinícius Nicastro Honesko
Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Obliviousness of History. The Misery and the Intellectual

Keywords
Intellectuals, witness, beggar, favelas, heresy

In 1970, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas, en route to Argentina to attend the screening of Medea at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, stopped in Brazil. Upon arrival at the airport in Recife, a coastal city in the northeast of the country, they were met with the sorrowful gaze of the airport workers.
Faced with the workers and travellers passing through that airport in a Third World city, bourgeois life, both his and Callas’s, seems to him to be covered in a grime that transforms the ‘few moments of happiness’ immediately into ‘memories’, with which bourgeois hearts are consoled, steeped in the miseries of another order, which seem to prevent them from fully experiencing the present.
Embracing the testimony of those who have fought against the decline of the world can open us up to the possibility of imagining alternative worlds, even if they seem impossible and beyond the capitalist realism proposed as the inexorable truth of the contemporary world. Reading with an interest that is not merely academic the testimony of Pasolini and that of so many others who have thrown themselves against the march of the world's deterioration, however, can be a good exercise in realising that, if there is a task for the committed intellectual, it is to confront this supposedly real truth.

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Andrea Alberto Dutto
Bread for the Poor. An Experiment in Rural Germany

Keywords
Community, loam, messianism, revolution, symbolism

Before it was called sustainable, it was called miserable. It was the architecture of those who could not afford more. Its imperative was to minimise costs, making do with what was at hand or readily available nearby. Such is the case with earth, the most abundant material that the inhabitants of planet Earth have always had at their disposal for building their homes. The current place of earth in sustainable architecture stems from a process of intensified technological and historical research initiated in the early 1980s by scholars and research groups driven by different ideological and economic motivations. Of these, the case of Germany is particularly complex. Here, land architecture emerged as a shared domain between university research groups, activist factions of the nascent Green Party and members of secular and missionary organisations. The essay proposes a reflection on the semiotics of rituals associated with Bodelschwingh’s use of the earthen bread process. Particular attention is paid to the bread as a symbol of reconciliation within the Dünne community.

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Guido Boffi
Powerless Forms-of-life?

Keywords
Giorgio Agamben, state of exception, homelessness, representation, inappropriable

Poverty immobilises; or it creates perpetual displacement, forcing one to wander. In the forms of life of the homeless, nomads, or refugees, fixity and dislocation lose their abstract opposition. Those stranded on street corners or sheltering under station porticos find themselves wandering perpetually, caught in a continuous cycle of doing and undoing, rest, abandonment, and illness; while, those striving to meet basic needs in the absence of a stable home – refugees or migrants forced to move aimlessly – experience a constant state of being nowhere, stuck in a place that is never truly theirs. A sort of halo seems to quiver around these two figures making them smudged, yet reflecting each in the other. Their features and con- tours are imbued with a shared, intense tremor. Perhaps only a presentation that, through the ruins of the represented, endeavours to remain aligned with poverty will be able to exorcise the risks of homogenisation and hierarchisation inherent in representing, illustrating, and narrativising. For, in truth, there is no ‘narrative’ to sell, nor identity to save.

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Andrea Ugolini, Monica Maioli
A Poor Architecture that Becomes a Place. The Swiss Italian Educational Centre in Rimini

Keywords
Space and society, shacks, education, Giancarlo De Carlo, Margherita Zoebeli

In a Rimini almost eighty-two per cent destroyed by bombing in November 1943 and September 1944, where misery and hunger marked the first years of the liberation, the Centro Educativo Italo Svizzero, Ceis, was founded on 1 May 1946. The Ceis and its architecture, although made up of shacks, became the object of study and visits in the 1960s by Italian and foreign pedagogues and architects, such as Carlo Doglio, Ludovico Quaroni, Giuseppe Gori, Lamberto Borghi and Ernesto Codignola. Lectures and seminars on Ceis and its architecture were held in various Italian universities, telling of what has been described as ‘space that educates’. Among these groups of teachers fascinated by the model of village organisation was Giancarlo De Carlo who, between 1959 and 1961, in the years when the Team 10 experience was being consolidated, built a building in brick and concrete slabs called La Betulla. The drawings accompanying this contribution are the result of the study, analysis and critical reinterpretation work conducted by The Formwork on the graphic, photographic and on-site survey materials relating to the project and the building site of the complex.

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Leah Modigliani
Spectre of the Future Accused

Keywords
Spectrum, William Arthur Pritchard, misery, Nuit Blanche Toronto

La Nuit Blanche was occupied by a ghostly presence on 30 September 2017. From dusk to dawn, a holographic video projection of Canadian socialist and publisher William Arthur Pritchard (1888-1981) appeared on the landing of the fire escape of the old carriage house (now the University of Toronto's Centre for Culture and Technology) to address the assembled Nuit Blanche audience below.
Pritchard's speech, projected into the space in front of the carriage house and into the adjacent car park through loudspeakers no longer one hundred per cent his own, was adapted from a transcript of the trial that saw him defend himself for 20 hours against federal charges of Seditious Conspiracy and Common Nuisance for conspiring in the organisation of the 1919 Winnipeg general strike. That year, Pritchard used his time before the jury as a ‘teachable moment’ to instruct the jurors, and by extension the Canadian public, on the global history of socialism and the ongoing struggles of the working class. His speech, like a meandering and intimate conversation, encompasses multiple references, including social and political history, philosophy, literature and law.

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Redazione Vesper
Monte di Pietà

Keywords
Fondazione Prada, Christoph Büchel, representation, Venice, exposition

Digital reconstruction of Ca’ Corner della Regina, the Venetian headquarters of Fondazione Prada, and photographs from the Monte di Pietà exhibition, project by Christoph Büchel, Fondazione Prada, Venice, 20/4-24/11/2024.

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Luca Porqueddu
Rome Misery Mercy

Keywords
Power, ceremony, mount of piety, Refugium peccatorum, transfiguration

The greatness of Rome transformed the misery of humanity into a work of mercy. Architecture, epigraphs, statues, canvases, coats of arms cemented the precarious existence of the last in the history of a city steeped in pietas, shaped by the spiritual and temporal power of the Church as a place of expiation and ecumenical consolation the lowest rung of a defenceless and needy humanity, the one populated by the humble, the deviant, the lonely, elevated the deplorable and admonishing condition of misery to an alchemical occasion of conversion. Two textual fragments, the Bulla Pauli Papæ Tertij confirmationes eretionis sacru Montis Pietatis in Vrbe Roma (1539) and Le istituzioni di Pietà che si esercitano in Roma (1825) layer their plot on a sequence of images that focus on specific places of mercy: some dead, some dying, some living from other lives, some sensitively adapted to the renewed poverty of Rome.

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Fabrizia Berlingieri, Cassandra Cozza
Pono Colony. Overexposing Marginalities

Keywords
Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, catastrophe, humanitarian architecture, ecological justice, Yasmeen Lari

Since 2004, thanks to her work with the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, architect Yasmeen Lari’s work has been a tool to promote self-sufficiency and emancipation for, and with, the poorest and most vulnerable communities in Pakistan, a country cyclically subject to devastating earthquakes and floods where most of the population lives below the poverty line. Pono Colony is the pilot project of a vast aid plan for the reconstruction of flooded villages in the Sindh province, south of Pakistan, which aims not only at the physical reconstruction of places, but at empowerment and awareness of a new, and more unstable, way of living in the face of ongoing climate change and for communities historically on the margins of the global scene.

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Giuliano Sergio
Reversing the Eye. Photography, Film and Video in the Years of Arte Povera

Keywords
Arte povera, Jeu de Paume, Germano Celant, avant-garde, Triennale di Milano

A retrospective exhibition is an architecture of visual references between works and documents that inevitably exceeds the intentions that designed it. This dimension is only revealed by the spatial organisation of the works even if it does not affect the formal quality of the exhibition design. Surplus is the aspect that makes the art exhibition an aesthetic and cultural experience that differs from what scientific literature can offer. The contribution discusses the two exhibitions ‘Renverser ses yeux. Autour de l'arte povera 1960-1975: Photographie, film, vidéo’ (Paris 2022); ‘Reversing the Eye. Fotografia, film e video negli anni dell’arte povera’ (Milan 2023) dedicated to Arte Povera, and to its ability to make, even today, the contemporary city.

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Massimiliano Giberti
The Confined Body. Cell vs. Capsule

Keywords
Prison, panopticon, Kisho Kurokawa, surveillance, existenzminimum

In the six years between the publication of the Capsule Declaration (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975), the ideological conflict between critiques of the modern condition of the body from two different perspectives points to the cell object as a paradigm of intrinsic contradiction. The minimal and segregated space, synonymous with deprivation of freedom and symbolising the transformation of the body into a political subject, is reflected in the capsule as a protective casing for the living organism, an object of mobility and social freedom, a mechanism fostering individuality and cultural diversity. It represents the creation of alternative family systems based on the individual, a private enclosure shielding against unwanted information, and a tool against homologation.

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Francesco Marullo
All Magnificent and Wild

Keywords
Chicago, hobo, vagabonds, Skid Row, Single Room Occupancy Hotel

The hobo – the itinerant independent worker: a quintessential figure in the construction of the American Midwest and a product of the rampant modern capitalism. This particular labourer of no fixed abode emerged after the Civil War and the first major economic depressions of 1873 and 1893, hopping freight cars and moving from job to job, from farms to steel mills, from docks to lumberyards, from sweatshops to stockyards, from factories to building sites3. Houseless but not homeless, hoboes lived constantly on the edge of misery, deliberately choosing a condition of free wandering and precariousness to the slavery of salary and steady employment.

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Armando Dal Fabbro
Architecture and Salvation. La Cité de Refuge, Paris 1929-1933

Keywords
Armée du Salut, Le Corbusier, Asile flottant, clochards, Palais du Peuple

After completing the extension of the Palais du Peuple project (1926-1928), which was almost entirely funded by Winnaretta Singer, in 1929 Le Corbusier was involved in the interior design of the Asile flottant and the Cité de Refuge project, a tangible manifesto that the Salvation Army managed to realize as a modern conception of social and urban community. Le Corbusier fully grasped the value of the work he was creating, recognizing the urban and social role that such an ideological project could convey beyond the unique aesthetic that still distinguishes it within the Parisian urban fabric. This was not only a morphological synthesis between architecture, site, and city but also a cultural project. Through a critical reading of archival documents, this contribution delves into Le Corbusier's project, revealing its design, contradictions, and life following its completion.

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Đorđe Bulajić, Stavros Kousoulas
Prisons without Prisoners, or Can a Scorpion Refuse to Sting?

KeywordsPanopticon, Jeremy Bentham, prison, control, solitary confinement

The contribution proposes a de-essentialisation of the ‘abstract’ concept of the Panopticon and its penal applications, dislodging it from its fate and rather examining it as a technology for observing and controlling flows: from Foucault’s disciplinary society to the Deleuzian society of control and Byung-Chul Han’s society of transparency. The flow-control shifts in diverse power mechanisms, from the early roots of proto-capitalist paradigms to contemporary surveillance capitalism, diverging from the 19th century with a distinct emphasis on the shift from the body (disciplinary regime) to the psyche (information regime); from isolated cells to open communication networks, not through isolation but through interconnection; and, finally, delving into the shifts of the politics of (in)visibility.

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Camillo Boano, Antonio Stopani
The Ghetto of Labour. Political Unforeseen and Misery of Imagination

Keywords
Borgo Mezzanone, refuge town, camp, Capitanata, farm labourers

Ghettoes are perceived as sites of crisis from the per¬spective of planning rationality or of logistics envisaged by European regulations on migration. However, from the standpoint of productive and agro-entrepreneurial logic, they function as repositories of low-cost labour. Borgo Mezzanone, Rignano, Borgo Tre Titoli, and all the smaller, less visible, interstitial settlements inhabited by migrants in Puglia are outcomes of extractive and aggregation logics, of resistance strategies through community networks that foster self-sufficiency, informal economies, mobility across multiple locations, and civic solidarity. The concept of ‘overcoming’ this and other settlements of the same kind is ushering in a new phase of conflicts between planning ideals and the future of urban and rural areas. This report aims to be a part of and contribute to this dialogue by questioning whether and how it is possible to escape the cycle of inclusive exclusions that ghettoes represent.

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Alberto Bertagna
You Have to Pay for the Misery of Fixity

Keywords
Charles Moore, territorialisation, Disneyland, heterotopias, monumentality

Read today, You Have to Pay for the Public Life (1965) by Charles Moore appears to predict the deterioration of the ‘(no longer) city’: it anticipates a world in which the relationship and social contract between individuals, and thus urbanity, are substantially, brutally impoverished even as resources and investments grow. The spectacularisation of the self, of spaces, and even of relationships is part of a new global scheme, a devolutionary strategy that flattens what should be distinct, and disperses what should be participatory by making it hostile. Misery is something that affects or may affect everyone, as it is not tied to a specific location, to being peripheral, or lacking proximity to important areas, but rather to the inability to move, an impasse perhaps shaped by one’s self-conception compared to the perceived other.

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Charles W. Moore
You Have to Pay for Public Life

Keywords
Disneyland, California, public space, Perspecta, monumentality

Translation edited by Alberto Bertagna of some excerpts from the essay originally published in C.W. Moore, You Have to Pay for the Public Life, in “Perspecta”, nos. 9/10, 1965, pp. 57-97.

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Cherubino Gambardella
The Unexpected Power of Miserable Architecture

Keywords
Joseph Beuys, aesthetics, redemption, wonder, poverty

This text is a stream of consciousness on the theme of misery, as there is nothing else to discuss except its formal aspects, the only ones with which I have any experience beyond the private realm. The series of initial definitions may seem daunting at first glance as they refer to a state of mind that every¬one has experienced at least once in their life. Probably for this very reason, it presents a catastrophic dimension – the sense of a bitter destiny, the anxiety of a possible revolt of Lady Luck. Accompanying the text, the pictures of the great shaman Joseph Beuys, in his fight with the coyote in I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), affirms that even a peasant’s dress is worthy of being in a royal palace, sanctioning the marvellous royalty contained in the mere existence of every man.

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Alper Metin
Against the Hunger, Affirming the Power. An Attempt of Contextualisation of the 18th-century Ottoman Soup Kitchens

Keywords
Monumentality, social assistence, Ottoman architecture, public canteen, imāret-ḫāne

The growing literature on food history reveals that, in addition to eco¬nomic aspects related to provision, it is equally important to consid¬er the sociocultural dimensions of how food was perceived, displayed, consumed, shared within society, and distributed to the needy. However, this topic rarely appears within the realm of architectural history, except in cases such as the Ottoman context, where a distinct type of public soup kitchen developed over the centu¬ries. Known as ‘imāret-ḫāne (or simply ‘imāret), these kitchens exemplify the extraordinary attention Ottoman benefactors dedicated to food dis¬tribution, serving as a method of both poor relief and self-affirmation.

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Giovanni La Varra, Alberto Cervesato
Poor but Old. Architecture and Demographics

Keywords
Ageing, demography, depopulation, silver society, demographic decline

The Old Continent is becoming the continent of the elderly. Demographics and age of the building stock are advancing as one. The scenario facing us in the 21st century is that of a network of old cities with limited infrastruc¬tural development, large wild land areas, a small number of UNESCO cit¬ies and territories committed to defending themselves against the invasion of tourists, and a small number of vibrant, rich, and bustling cities inter¬connected with the world. In some ways – even in this overly simplistic vision – this is a narrative that takes us back to a pre-modern Europe: a sort of reinterpretation of medieval times where tourists are the new pilgrims, today’s dynamic cities are the 12th and 13th century network of centres of power and knowledge, isolated monasteries are remote attractions over five-six hundred metres above sea level that still draw in tourists, and old poor people are the pestilent wanderers banished from the cities.

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Mane Mkrtchyan
The Courage to be Vulnerable: Egon Schiele’s Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing

Keywords
Nudity, body, deformation, self-portrait, expressionism

The text analyses the dialogue between the individual and society through Egon Schiele’s portraits and self-portraits, highlighting how the Austrian artist used his own image to explore emotions and social norms. In the work Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing, Schiele employs awkward poses, physical distortions and expressive lines to portray anguish and psychological introspection. His self-portraits, devoid of background and characterised by stark nudity, confront the viewer with uncomfortable truths, challenging traditional aesthetics. The portrait is a poignant exploration of suffering and pain, but at the same time speaks of courage. This courage is evident in the artist's willingness to vulnerably expose herself to the viewer, forcing the audience to confront her pain and truth.

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Luca Zecchin
Latrine

Keywords
City, urban justice, spectre, hygiene, public toilet

The contribution explores the importance of public latrines within cities, highlighting how they represent essential spaces for dignity and collective well-being. Analysing the history and evolution of these places, the text highlights their crucial role in the structure of the city and how they reflect power dynamics and social inequalities. Public latrines, long neglected, are presented not only as functional infrastructures but also as symbols of public health and social justice. The essay discusses the increasing privatisation of these spaces and the implications for access to basic services, especially for vulnerable groups such as women, children and people with disabilities, proposing the reintroduction of the latrine into the contemporary urban imagination.

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Giulia Conti
Biopolis and Hydrobiopolis. Dwelling Hills by Enrico Hartsuyker and Luzia Hartsuyker-Curjel

Keywords
Utopia, nomadism, social housing, necessity, Rotterdam

Reinder Blijstra's work, We Live | Do We Live?, published in 1967, explores urban design opportunities in the Netherlands, emphasising a nomadic housing model as a response to precarious living conditions. Through theoretical investigation and concrete projects, Blijstra places the concept of shared housing in the context of 20th century Dutch social and architectural restructuring, examining the evolution of housing needs since the end of the 19th century. The work of architects such as Enrico Hartsuyker and Luzia Hartsuyker-Curjel aims to realise accessible housing solutions, addressing the growing demand for recreational spaces. Their projects, Biopolis and Hydrobiopolis are proposed as models for integrating work and leisure, responding to socio-economic changes and automation. These utopian visions, while anchored in ideals of humanity and community, confront practical challenges and uncertainties in realisation, reflecting the tensions between theory and application in contemporary architecture.

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Edoardo Fabbri
Poverty and Project

Keywords
Salvation, pauperism, St. Francis, minor, scarcity

The idea of poverty is frequently interpreted in quantitative terms, associated with scarcity and misery. However, there is a conception of poverty, especially in the Christian context, that links it to salvation, presenting it as a necessary condition for access to the Kingdom of Heaven. Through the study of the Franciscan Order, which has embraced a radical interpretation of poverty, a separation between property and use is outlined. This form of poverty is not deprivation, but a non-proprietary relationship with the world. It implies an anthropological and architectural change, in which the renunciation of ownership leads to a new quality of relationship between human beings and the environment. Architectural design, therefore, should reflect this conception of poverty, emphasising relationships and the potential for co-creation rather than self-referentiality. A design approach inspired by poverty implies the acceptance of scarcity as an opportunity to generate creative variations, promoting relationships and practices that transcend the traditional boundaries of architecture.

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