Magic

Sara Marini
Magic

The real world lives and coexists with the oneiric, the surreal, with dreams, symbols, myths, fairy tales, magic. If that which is concrete can appear clear, measurable, objective, and rational, there is something, however, that sometimes escapes us. A vast bibliography and an immensity of works have for centuries been chasing that fleeting something, that trail, that intangible element that can alter reality. Rites of crossing space; mysteries that yield inalienable temporal depths to scenes; architectures tattooed with symbols or based on figures and forms capable of building connections; cities whose meaning and significance are not limited to the realm of objectivity: magic is the impalpable connection between reality and something other, it is the search for a possibility in the existing.

Download the contribution in open access


Franco Purini
Awaiting for a magic

The word ‘magic’ has more than one meaning. Within an approximate and limited list it defines something impossible and extraordinarily surprising that comes to pass; the transformation of an unlikely potential into an action; a mystery that has been haunting us over time which suddenly becomes clear; a fabled world we have dreamed of and desired that physically manifests itself, like the magic realism of Massimo Bontempelli.
As far as I am concerned, I see the strongest, most lasting and therefore decisive embodiment of magic in metamorphosis, that is, in the relentless mutations of both living and non-living entities, the latter seemingly unchangeable. Ovid’s greatest work reveals precisely that the constant change in all aspects of the world, including the human aspects, is the principle that allows the world to express itself in time. Or better still, that which we call time is indeed the metamorphosis, an ideal but also concrete succession of transformations that make life an immeasurable and multidimensional intersection of events and successive changes that make all and each one of us into as many animated labyrinths. Mobile labyrinths moving within a series of stable labyrinths, ever larger, on a boundless journey, fascinated by that which is unfinished.

Download the contribution in open access

Luigi Ghirri
The Land of Toys

A Brief extract from Luigi Ghirri, The Land of Toys (1979), in Idem, Luigi Ghirri. The Complete Essays 1973-1991, edited by F. Zanot, MACK, London 2017, p. 47.

Download the contribution in open access

Cherubino Gambardella
The Magic House

There are many reasons for creating architecture that occupies a ​​magic space if we remove the burden of being responsible for greater amounts of carbon dioxide in the air, increases in manufacturing waste, and huge downstream waste production from demolition processes in the creation of new cubic volumes.
The magical sea, the internal pool of simultaneous events that took place without a murmur, is the conceptual place where we can draw on timeless shapes, intense and popular forms, which lead us to bounce among the mysterious forces of a unique and immense liquid mirror. Braudel describes it to us as sad and full of traffic, Eliot as painful and contemporary with the drowning of Phleba the Phoenician, Matvejević as dense as an egg, Pamuk as endless as the labyrinthine unravelling of his Istanbul. This fantastic salt lake has a life too well known not to refer to those architects of the ‘eternal present’ that I have so far evoked as if in a séance.

Download the contribution in open access


Carlos Casas
Chid/Avalanche. Vernacular Domestic Architecture in the Pamirs, its Cosmological and Magical Dimensions and its Transposition into an Audiovisual Project

Avalanche is a long-term commitment project dedicated to Hichigh, one of the highest inhabited villages in the Pamirs, Badakshan, Tadjikistan. Starting from the cosmogony of local traditions and its music, it is an audio-visual installation and also an architectural project that mirrors, transposes, and distils the concepts of the traditional Pamiri house or Chid. It is a multi-format work, an expanded ethnographic research and film, based and inspired on the millenary spiritual richness of the region and its human and geographical ecology. An audio-visual meditation on disappearance and the passing of time as well as the unstoppable avalanche of civilization. The project aims to transform the spatial and cosmic setting of a Pamiri house, a space that can be transformed from its ritualistic function into contemporary means of ritual exchange, using projections, sounds, light, heat, temperature, smoke, smell, and other possible architectural and sculptural expressions. Avalanche wants to deal with the physical and spiritual dimensions of sound, through traditional music, but also and especially with how contemporary practices embody traditional ways and traditional music to channel new healing and, sometimes, more esoteric practices.

Download the contribution in open access


Michel Carlana
Wunderkammer. A Room and Some Real Illusions

Wunderkammer, literally ‘room of wonders’ or ‘cabinet of curiosities’, is a term usually used to indicate the space in a residence dedicated to the collection of artifacts and rare specimens. Wunderkammer is, first of all, a concept of place. A vast and articulated device to understand and exhibit reality and, last but not least, to enchant the observing public.
The transposition of the meaning of the term Wunderkammer, a ‘domestic’ term to a certain extent, if amplified in meaning and applied to a different context, transforms what is usually ordinary into what is not: a small and pleasing prestigious item; a game, a kind of theatrical enchantment by a magician
The Music School of Bressanone is more of an urban than architectural project, it is a work that tries to deepen the meanings of the words ‘room’ and ‘void’ and tries to rewrite the way in which we observe our surroundings. Wunderkammer is, in this school, a moment of abstraction (and, in some cases, of estrangement) granted to those who walk around the city and revealed to those who look out from the many gates – air-conditioned or not – of the building. A different way of looking at our surroundings, a small and childlike illusion.

Download the contribution in open access


Petr Stolín, Alena Mičeková, Filip Senk
Blur

Designed as a complex architectural event, the Nová Ruda Kindergarten building emphasises the dynamic role of living. The building is an intense microcosm that restrains itself and remains sober in form and colour to give the children who live in it and walk through it the space to explore the potential of imagination, building new and unexpected relationships. Thanks to its outer veil, the project plays with different devices that continue to enhance the spatial experience, offering large open views, high ceilings, but also smaller rooms and hiding places. It is not only the act of blurring itself that is stimulating. These relationships are the means to enchant the world, because they manage to transform meaningless distances into something personal and existential. There is also an intimacy that comes from the individual experience of choosing how to move around in the interior spaces. Therein lies the magic: perceiving space in a place that is delicate enough to contain such powerful movement.

Download the contribution in open access

Redazione Vesper
A Path of Shadow and a Burning Altar. Steilneset Memorial by Peter Zumthor and Louise Bourgeois

Tale of the Steilneset Memorial to the victims of the witch trails designed by architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois in the Finnmark, Vardø, Norway, 2001-2011.

Download the contribution in open access


Luca Porqueddu
Beyond the Mainland of Reason

Crossing the Tyrrhenian Sea, beyond the mainland, one can envisage a journey along the coastline and into the hinterland of Sardinia. From the chance encounter with places, architectures, rituals, objects, and situations, the human and natural enigma invites travellers to abandon their empty categories of reasoning and to be once again ‘dominated by illusions’.

Download the contribution in open access


Massimo Crispi
Sentimental Interview

In a frozen winter park, the protagonist of the story finds himself unwittingly listening in the fog to a strange conversation of sentimental and other memories. But those who dialogue are not flesh and blood people. The magical, grotesque atmosphere is suddenly interrupted by an awareness on his part.

Download the contribution in open access


Adelita Husni-Bey
The Reading

Excerpt of Adelita Husni-Bey, THE READING, 2017, installation at Padiglione Italia Il mondo magico, edited by Cecilia Alemani, 57. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia 2017.

Download the contribution in open access

Andrea Gritti
From Florence to "Psicon". Chronicles of a Journey within and around Architecture

The nine issues and the two notebooks published in Florence by the international architecture magazine “Psicon” are the main evidence of a cultural enterprise that was suspended in circumstances similar to those that had fostered it. Between the end of the 1960s and the second half of the 1970s, the Faculty of Architecture of Florence found itself at the centre of an impassioned movement of college professors, who, during the student protests, had initiated experimental research or, on the contrary, had been forced to stop. Among the professors, rescued from the didactic paralysis of the Faculty of Architecture of Milan Polytechnic and recruited by the Florentine university, were Eugenio Battisti and Marcello Fagiolo, who, in the summer of 1974, joined Marco Dezzi Bardeschi to start an ‘ingenious’ and ‘fruitful’ editorial project. Stimulated by singular and fortunate circumstances, the three founded the “Psicon” cooperative and the Ouroboros study centre. The emblem they chose to seal their partnership was the Piranesian version of the ‘snake king’, in which the reptile biting its tail crosses the tools of the artist: a compass, some charcoal, a quill, and a paintbrush.

Download the contribution in open access


Emanuele Garbin
Promontorium somnii: The Invisible Border of Architecture

The architectural drawing has always been mostly a drawing of contours, where every contour is a limit between what is seen and what is not seen: insofar as such drawing necessarily partakes of what is visible and what is invisible. In the contour, what is apparent is what is visible – not always all that is visible, and not the same each time – but that edge is also the place from where one can imagine and ‘see’ what is invisible and incomprehensible. What is invisible presses upon the drawing from the inside – in which case what is pressing is what one does not see within and under the closed contours – and from the outside, in which case what presses is what one does not see behind or in front of the drawing and on the plane upon which the image composes itself. There is an invisible that sits just inside or just outside the frame of the drawing: what is outside is excluded by the intention that frames the object, what is inside is hidden by the attention and by the very evidence of the object. Finally, there is the extreme limit of the visible and comprehensible, that is, the circle of the horizon having its centre in the object and the subject of the representation, and of that portion of the world which contains them both.

Download the contribution in open access


Ilaria Bussoni
Understanding without Knowing. The Aesthetic Construction Site of World-Making

Re-enchantment seems to be the contemporary premise of any emancipation thought. In the past, criticism against a state of things had to be based on causality, or on numbers and measurements; the social theory of change was conceived as an analogy of the engine, and the predictability of salvation and damnation was calculable; today, reactions to the present seem to require an altogether different beginning. It is not surprising that sensible reality is the prime framework inside which one can recognise the experience of the outside, practices symbolising the forming of new alliances with living or even inorganic things: overlapping, mixed alternatives to the prevailing ontology. Radical, but not all-consuming alterities. It is also not a coincidence that aesthetic judgment – precisely because it establishes relationships in the effort to know – results in a reversal of the prevalent canon and in the overcoming of convention. Among gardening techniques, re-enchantment will flourish not for the ecstasy of perfumes or for the impact of the colours of flowers, but for the ability to make a world taking as a starting point the sensory perception of being part of the very same life force.

Download the contribution in open access


Luka Skansi
Space, Magic, and Remembrance. Genealogy of an Initiation to Contemplation

The great architects of the anti-fascist and war monuments and memorials in Yugoslavia – Bogdan Bogdanović, Zdenko Kolacio, and Edvard Ravnikar –, dedicate to the relationship between ‘primitivism’, abstraction, and spatial relationism, a substantial part of their career, both professional and theoretical.
Kolacio dedicates theoretical studies to Stonehenge, to the tradition of the dolmens and menhirs, subsequently interpreting them in his works in a contemporary key. Ravnikar try to merge in his monuments the Neolithic art of the Balkan civilisations with oriental art and that of Max Bill and Henry Moore, working on highly refined spatial tensions between objects, paths, and places. Bogdanović, who focuses all his creativity on the search for mythologems, figures, forms, and archetypal languages, capable of creating the first elements of the new Yugoslav revolutionary culture, will look at the tradition of the Neolithic and Etruscan necropolises as with Sumerian, Hittite, and Egyptian sculpture.
In this context, Zdenko Sila’s memorial dedicated to twenty-six frozen partisans and the memorial of Tićan were designed to incite ‘magic of a secular ecstasy’, through this particular symbolic and spatial link with nature (the eternal), and with the experience of the meaning of death (memory).

Download the contribution in open access

Luca Galofaro
The Serpent Ritual. Superstudio and The Twelve Ideal Cities

The Twelve Ideal Cities seem to be the result of a ritual that has taken a long time, fifty years, to be finally decoded and appear before readers and onlookers as a prophecy about the forms of contemporary cities.
Superstudio produces two contrasting images for each of the twelve cities. The first is an image, developed through storytelling, in which space and desire, architecture and ritual, exchange and death, vision and form in its becoming act hand in hand. All this is figurative, made legible through language itself, with a superb evocation that defines the organic quality of a threshold as an essential condition of the space to be inhabited. The cities described are actually what Benjamin defines as rites of passage, ceremonies connected to death, birth, marriage and becoming an adult, fundamental issues in the research of the Florentine group. In modern life these passages have become increasingly undetectable and imperceptible and thus need to be reinvented through the space of the city.
The second image is pure form and visually defines the space depicted in words. This image also captures all the layers of humanity’s involuntary memory; it is both powerful and frail as it is the result of the synthesis of a single individual, the designer. Magic is the outcome of the collision of these images that become symbols.

Download the contribution in open access

Michela Bassanelli
Interiors as Magical Boxes: from Carlo Mollino’s Domestic Settings to Lutrario Ballroom

Carlo Mollino, a shaman architect, creates interiors like magic boxes. The dichotomy between everything outside and the complexity of the interior space generates perceptive leaps, surprises, and mystery. Through a path that moves from his training, cultural milieu, and relationship with Italo Cremona, the essay investigates some aspects characterizing his poetics, always searching for a spatial continuity obtained not only from a geometric point of view but also by choice of materials, coverings, colors, and lights. The article focuses on the unveiling and narration by single parts of the Lutrario Ballroom (Turin 1959), which is the synthesis of the research carried out by the author in the domestic sphere. The interior becomes another space, made up of contrasting emotions; a machine célibataire composed of diaphragms of different thicknesses and consistencies, colors, and symbolism.

Download the contribution in open access

Stefano Pifferi
‘Lo Stradone’ to ‘Remoria’. A Historical-Esoteric-Visionary Re-reading of Rome

Mythical place since its foundation, "new Jerusalem" and celestial city, glory and glory of creation but also open-air museum and a bridge between classicism and modernity, over the centuries Rome, with its ability to attract irresistibly an enormous and diverse range of travellers, has always represented a unicum among its brethren other cities and / or capitals. And the gaze of those travelers highlighted the otherness and the stratification and mixture of high and low, divine and human, real and metaphysical, legend and everyday life. In a heretical interpretation, which denounces the absence of any "great beauty" and certifies the omnipresence of the third landscape Clémentian present everywhere to devastate the idea of ​​Latin classicism or that of an en plain air museum, I will cross two texts different but interrelated by "sedentary" authors: Lo Stradone, a novel by Francesco Pecoraro, and Remoria, a visionary essay / grimoire by Valerio Mattioli, for a historical, esoteric, visionary rereading of Rome that persists and resists constructive stratifications as well as the constitutive ones, showing at every turn, both street and authorial, surprises and new encodings.

Download the contribution in open access


Milo Adami
Diaporama. Journey into the Obsolescence of a Device

A journey through the history of an obsolescent device, the diaporama or audiovisivo, a particular kind of documentary, written, conceived, and edited in a sequence of slides projected on a screen or wall, complemented by a musical and sound score on vinyl or audiocassette diaporama, with its elementary, almost inescapable dramaturgical structure and its magical or phantasmagorical apparatus, once again poses questions in this digital age of accelerated images. Unfolding its narrative in a sequence of 80/140 fixed images installed on the screen like a rock engraving, the present-day diaporama brings us back to the magical and hypnotic character of images, endowing each one with a specific weight. What is covered here is a journey of discovery rather than an all-encompassing essay, the beginning of a process of reappraisal in the course of development, study and growth.

Download the contribution in open access

Angela Squassina
The Arcane Language of the Material Trace. A Temporal Exploration of Architecture through Stratigraphy

In Notre-Dame de Paris Victor Hugo defined architecture as the greatest stone book ever wrote, whose shapes and symbols melt knowledge and education.
Alongside this iconic and intentional language – either refined or popular, essoteric or esoteric, as much differentiated as anyway shared and culturally mediated – buildings offer us a further hieroglyphic key to understanding, namely through the material signs stratifying over time.
Thus architectural stratigraphy, rather than a simple archaeologic technique, can be regarded as a peculiar gaze focussing on the matter of buildings and allowing a temporal exploration of ancient architectures, both through a diachronic and synchronic approach.
Applying both to reason and to perception and to emotion either, stratigraphy, while suggesting a taking-care approach to heritage, stirs a reflection beyond the technical and about the cultural meaning of the preservation project.

Download the contribution in open access

Kevin Benham
Power

On a warm, sunny afternoon in the Flint Hills of Kansas on August 29, 2019, a group of firefighters joined with the National Park Service and the United States Department of the Interior at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve to ignite a fire along a mile-long stretch of Highway 177 in Strong City, Kansas. The measure of the mile had been carefully chosen in advance for a land art piece titled Mile Long Burn with the intent of creating a large-scale temporal land art intervention, reinvigorating the growth of prairie plants, and keeping invasive species at bay.
The power of the fire that day was magical. This powerful transformation of the vegetation from a crisp brown wave into an elemental source of carbon is a critical component of the ecology of grasslands. The power of fire is intrinsically tied to the origin of plants in that plants are responsible for two of the three elements essential to the existence of fire: oxygen and fuel.
The power and magic of the Mile Long Burn that warm day in August 2019 will continue to nourish the prairie for years to come and will contribute to the biodiversity of the dwindling tallgrass prairies.

Download the contribution in open access


Demetra Vogiatzaki
Quō

In 1499, the editio princeps of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or, Poliphilo’s Strife for Love in a Dream, made its enigmatic appearance in the renowned press of Aldus Manutius in Venice. Poliphilo was a lover of architecture and, above all, a heartbroken man who fell asleep and dreamed. He dreamed of a magic world made up of dense forests, heavenly islands, and countless outlandish monuments populated by promiscuous nymphs and sinister dragons. Perhaps the most curious, and as a consequence, the most scrutinised objects produced by Poliphilo’s prolific imagination are the marvelous architectural projects that populate this dreamworld; monuments impossible in both conception and execution that forge fragments of classical architecture into excessive (in scale), obsessive (in detail), and unlikely (licentious) combinations. Amplified by its enigmatic authorship, the elaborate continuum of architecture and dreams staged by Hypnerotomachia put significant pressure on the status quo of architecture, right at the moment of its definition as a reborn, rational discipline.

Download the contribution in open access


Sonia D'Alto
Release

Magic is a speculative practice and strategy to release marginalised memories and knowledge. In artistic practices – as well as in rebellious lives – allows insurgent alliances working through different temporalities and subjectives, free movements from the power systems and allowing the becoming of a metaphysical tool of resistance. By releasing an interruptive movement, the haunting insinuates to embrace and embody a plurality of temporalities, a continuous montage and de-montage through multilayered historical frames.
In this regard, the performative practice of the artist Chiara Fumai is more than indicative as it was literally visited by spirits. Her body through multiple possessions became a political body able to articulate alliances with feminist struggles and social issues. Another struggle with the present – a present haunted by historical echoes was released by Le Nemesiache, a group and a political reality who embedded mythological methodologies in feminism. They affirmed the need for feminist groups not to be overcome by fear, isolation, competition. Demonstrating that time and space are cultural barriers and that there is a need to overcome them.

Download the contribution in open access


Damiano Di Mele
Destino

The concept of destiny operates in various fields that range from religion, through mythical representations, to the most discrepant modern philosophical positions. The term fatum is replaced by that of destiny: while fate cannot be changed and follows an ‘unchangeable’ order – imposed by the divine –, the term destiny, today, can be manipulated because it belongs to human characteristics. It is subordinate to that free will which opposes any predestination. Such an opposition is interpreted by architect Fernando Higueras (1930-2008) in the project for his house-studio called Rascainfiernos. The magical, mysterious, and surreal home, built in the Chamartín district of Madrid. A refuge for the mind and body, which welcomes and summarizes the contemporary idea of ​​destiny in which man is the master of his own actions. His friend Francisco Nieva, reading the tarot to him, sees him in the space of three years underground. To exorcise destiny, the architect thus decides to build an artificial cave, dug with his ‘bare hands’, capable of evoking an imaginary that refers to that dark universe of enchantment, of magic, where he will live for another thirty years.

Download the contribution in open access


Giuseppe Caldarola
Evocazione

Evocation is, broadly speaking, the summoning of mysterious or latent entities until they make themselves visible. It is a solicitation to establish contact between different worlds; it is a rite intended to invoke, by magical virtue, a soul from the underworld as well as a divinity from its usual seat through practices that make use of gestures and formulas capable of establishing relations and of prompting encounters. Architects practise evocation – becoming evokers themselves – because they are the custodians of the knowledge of the elements that are to be evoked; they then proceed in the composition of a project by means of ‘gestures’ and ‘forms’, almost enacting a ritual.
As part of Italian Eclecticism, those architects who were active in the debate on the national style offer some theoretical references on the visual power of forms, stylistic lemmas, sign systems, and languages. Ettore Bernich (1850-1914), a Rome-based architect, is a prominent representative of these trends, where evocation becomes a monumentalised reminder of more or less recent pasts.

Download the contribution in open access


Esther Giani
Fantasia

Fantasy feeds the transformative power of imagination. It is an ‘other’ interpretative system; it refers to an altered, critical, disordered vision of reality; it paves the way for a free narrative, hinged on its own rules of internal rationality. The fantastical is a crisis, an interruption through which a secret order can be deciphered or proposed as an alternative.
Several studies, originating from different disciplinary positions, meet at a core that is linked to the possibility of making use of fantasy, understood as a powerful drive. Research is carried out in various domains such as, for instance, artistic creation, but also scientific production, communication, and politics in the broadest sense. The secret mechanisms of the imagination have been examined from opposing angles, both by neuroscience and by art criticism. The different manifestations of fantasy that come to the fore set out distances from reality, but also interpretations of the world that are built up through autarkic, subjective, even collective mental structures.

Download the contribution in open access