Sky

Sara Marini
Sky 

Keywords
Project and sky, artifices, the vault of heaven, architecture and physics 

The text brings together and emphasises some useful experiences in looking at the sky as a space for architectural design between physics, art, philosophy and ecology. A place of concrete phantasmagorical designs, enacted by clouds and birds, and a space of inspiration for mystical-metaphysical dreams, the celestial dome is read in the work of architecture as a gravitational mass but also as an aspiration and a purpose. Defined as a “fifth prospect” it shares with the earth plots of pollution and regulatory perimeters. The sky is a right, often also a place of competition: colossi are erected to challenge its dimension. From the sky comes the flood, the apocalypse, in the sky we can be in orbit, referring to the sky we can design cosmogonies. Earthly architecture is not powerless against this infinity, we need only raise our heads to see artifices, measured and constructed architectures, structures that challenge the beauty of the mystery of the celestial vault, announced judgments or perspective illusions to propose depths not present. 

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Cedric Price
Flocks 

Keywords
Cedric Price, technology 

Excerpt from Cedric Price, Technology Is the Answer but What Was the Question? Prerecorded Talk, Pidgeon Audio Visual 1979, in Cedric Price Works 1952-2003, vol. 2, edited by Samantha Hardingham, Architectural Association-CCA, Montréal 2016, p. 329. 

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Mark Foster Gage
The Architecture of Ouranos 

Keywords
Earth, Ouranos, Greek antiquity, geothermal architecture, machine 

In Greek antiquity, the sky came third. First of the primordial deities to emerge from the spinning cauldron of chaos was Gaia, or Earth, who in the great world tradition of religious virgin births herself bore two sons with no father of which to speak, being Pontus, the sea, and Ouranos, the sky. Architecture is, as Greek antiquity reminds us, closely linked to the sky, and could even be defined as the sole human creation that takes place within it – striving to defy the gravity that keeps us all so unimaginatively earth-bound. Architecture, strangely enough, has no discourse of sky-ness, but instead a rather overwrought historical relationship with the ground plane. Geothermal Futures Lab project asked what an architecture of the sky might be like: massive machines, supported by the sky, hover above the earth’s surface, thereby producing no damage as they continually migrate to new global sources of geothermal energy. Hestia’s architecturally extracted heat is, in this future time, connected not to the ground plane at all but rather, once again, to the supporting embrace of her long-forgotten grandfather, Ouranos, god of the sky. 

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Sandro Marpillero, Patricia Dailey 
Terminal Iron Works: Skies in a Room 

Keywords
David Smith, upcycling, analogy, Alice, daydreaming 

The contribution is a reflection on the upcycling of American sculptor David Smith's Terminal Iron Works studio/workshop, built by him in three phases (1942, 1958, 1961) in Bolton Landing, New York, before family members pragmatically modified it (in 1974 and 1996) after his death.
The argument interpreting the 2014 project by Marpillero Pollak Architects is comprised of three parts: a critical text which first introduces the project and its poetic aims; then a dialogue between Marpillero and Dailey, which relates the new spatiality to Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Loking Glass by means of a personal association with the ‘infinite trees’ mentioned in a 1960s song by Gino Paoli Il cielo in una stanza (The Sky in a Room); finally, the third part is a daydream that explores the construction of the project’s environmental apparatus through three diagrams on the notions of orientation, sense, and paradox. The resulting integration, in analogical terms, of some more normative modes for representing the project, offers a mapping of the archaeological traces that resonate in Smith’s creative universe, allowing to draw in architectural terms the ‘skies in a room’ invoked by Smith himself with his totemic sculptures, ritualistically disposed in a clearing within the Adirondacks’ sublime nature. 

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Lina Malfona
A Mannerist Interior. Venice’s New Casino 

Keywords
Casino, Venice, Mannerism, bordering, introverted landscapes 

Built to be the ‘first American-style casino in Italy’ the extension to the Ca’ Noghera casino, designed by Enrico Dusi and Matteo Ghidoni together with the company Sinergo, is not part of an integrated system of amenities connected to the theme of gambling, but rather appears as an isolated and jarring object if compared to the surrounding landscape. The project proposal for the extension to the Venice casino was the result of constant negotiation – bordering on gambling – between architects and clients on the dimensions proposed by the tender, which was expanded several times in the course of the project to ensure different uses of the structure over a 24-hour period.
The notion of an interior as a parallel and continuous space – which had intrigued Robert Venturi so much and which can be considered as the most innovative achievement of Mannerism – is used here as a key to understanding the project. It is an introverted landscape, a world definitively trapped inside an interior, where every force appears subjected to a ruthless discipline, paralysed. If the ambiguous and allusive charm is what makes Mannerism a suprahistorical and still relevant condition today, the ambiguity of Dusi and Ghidoni’s work is instead what inextricably binds their project to the place and perhaps also to our time. 

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Alberto Bertagna
The Evolutionary Bivouac

Keywords
Bivouac, evolution, shelter, Renzo Piano, interior geometries 

The text presents the project Bivouac Fanton by Demogo. A project in which everything is necessarily stationary, static, but which inevitably speaks for itself – and not only when compared with the dynamic system in which it is located – about evolution; and therefore demonstrates how much thinking about and making architecture means renouncing any semblance of fixity and any utopia of exactness, and how much the dimension of the story, of the images or of the irrational becomes essential material for any construction that seeks to be cultural – extending beyond its own borders – and not only objectual, or at the most contextual.
The essay will concentrate on three areas of the project: the inside, the outside, the elsewhere.
Inside, in the shelter of a volume scientifically anchored at 2667 metres above sea level, tailored to the need for a rest full of gratitude, safely in bunk beds after teetering ‘on the brink of catastrophe’, waking hours are spent investigating that which is protected by even more layers of the triple shell of the bivouac.
Outside, in the space of the tangible, Demogo’s Bivouac Fanton recalls Renzo Piano’s Evolutionary Home, even if by comparison it demonstrates greater determination, and this has consequences. And therefore, even their shared renunciation of the superfluous is for different reasons.
Elsewhere, in her early twenties, Francesca Woodman surrounds her photographs with rational questions, those found in the book on which she superimposes Some disordered Interior Geometries: the inside and the outside within the same pages. 

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Michelangelo Frammartino
The Hole 

Keywords
Falling, speleology, cinema 

Excerpt from the film The Hole; directed by Michelangelo Frammartino; Italy, Germany, France, 2021; running time 93 minutes. 

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Alessandro Calefati
The Expression of the Sky. Aesthetic Interfaces in Watsuji Tetsurō 

Keywords
Fūdo, atmospheres, interface, Watsuji Tetsurō 

The purpose of the essay is to find in the work of Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻 哲郎, 1889-1960), particularly from his Climate: Philosophico-Anthropological Reflections (風土: 人間学的考察, Fūdo: Ningengakuteki kōsatsu, 1935), the foundation of a possible philosophy of atmospheres, in order to deconstruct the optical and terrestrial aspects of the concept of panorama. It will allow to think of a tangible space as expression of an affective and climatic environment, starting from the notion of kūki (空気), which is composed of the characters of ‘sky’ (sora) and ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ (ki). Acknowledge the physical and local feature of a space, which could be both cultural-historical and natural, will allow to think the aesthetic interfaces of the sky as morphogenetic space. 

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Massimo Palma
Lenz and Lesabéndio. Design Against the Sky in Scheerbart and Celan 

Keywords
Abyss, glass, poetry, project, collective 

‘He only disliked not having the chance to walk upside down’.
In his Meridian speech (1960), Paul Celan comments a page in Georg Büchner’s Lenz. He says: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the one who walks upside down, he has the sky as an abyss below him’. Celan revindicates the poetical – and its obscurity – as an abyssal space where the poet stands ‘heading towards a meeting, which is made possible from a distance or an obscurity [he] maybe intended to plan’.
Forty years before Celan, Paul Scheerbart, the theorist of glass architecture, wrote an ‘asteroidal-novel’, illustrated by Alfred Kubin: Lesabéndio (1913) was the fantastic story of bizarre celestial people who wanted to unify the top and the bottom of the asteroid he lived in.
The contribution investigates the political dimension of this ‘anti-celestial project’ of two German-speaking authors, who look for the building materials on Earth while the sky is known as an abyss – the major frame of any human economy. 

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Giuseppe D'Acunto
Heaven on Earth: Artifice, Deception, and Perspective in Giovan Battista Gaulli’s Trionfo del Nome di Gesù 

Keywords
Baroque, spectacle, divine entity, celestial, heaven, perspective 

The essay propose a reflection on the perspective and pictorial technique adopted by Giovan Battista Gaulli in the Trionfo del nome di Gesù painted by the Genoese painter in Rome in 1672 and currently visible in the nave of the church of Gesù, Baroque artifice capable of involving the observer in a spectacle orchestrated in a continuous encroachment of the painted subjects within the inhabited space, and capable of generating an unprecedented dynamic of dialogue and overlapping between the plastic surfaces of the architectural artefact, the tangible volumetry of the statuary and the two-dimensional compromise of the painting. In this painting, the theme of the encounter with the divine, of the infinite being transformed in perspective into a secular object, of the physical or spiritual assumption towards the high/other, finds an iconographic solution in the representation of the light emitted by the divine entity. The straight lines, the physical representation of light, ‘break through’ the plane of the canvas and give that perspective depth necessary to emphasise the vertical axis that connects the mundane to the divine and that emulates the upward motion upwards, towards celestial glory, towards heaven in its meaning of paradise. 

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Luca Lanini
eyond the Sky. Georgy Krutikov and Cosmism in the Soviet Avant-garde 

Keywords
Georghij Krutikov, Soviet avant-garde, constructivism, cosmonautics 

In 1928 Georghij Krutikov, a student at VKhUTEMAS in Moscow, graduated with a thesis on a Flying City, an urban agglomeration in geostationary orbit connected to the Earth and other similar cities by single-seater capsules. The Flying Cityis one of the most famous and controversial projects of that extraordinary avant-garde season which, far from being a mere graphic exercise of sci-fi imaginary, has all the features of an ideal city. And like every ideal city it is the deduction on earth of one of the many celestial Jerusalems imagined by every apocalyptic-millennialist utopia. The letaiušhij gorod designed by Krutikov does not escape this destiny, which contains both the fragments of a saving utopia and – inevitably – the germ of its tragic failure. But like all celestial Jerusalems, it wants to carry out the transmutation of an ideal design in the concrete world of the city, to become the realization of an idea of ​​the universe, of a cosmological project translated onto the plan of History. 

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Ludovico Centis
Life and Death in the Clouds. Design and the Meteorological Obsession 

Keywords
Clouds, environment, biosphere, radioactivity, nuclear energy 

A curious coincidence lies in the fact that Gilles Clément and Junya Ishigami, the landscape designer and architect who have most courageously investigated the limits of their respective disciplines in recent decades, have both become interested in clouds and have placed them at the center of their discourse as fundamental design metaphors. Clément published in 2005 Nuages (Clouds), a logbook of an Atlantic crossing aboard a cargo, Ishigami in 2010 published Another scale of architecture, a book-manifesto for an architecture understood as environment.
Clouds indeed embody a duality: on one side, as a kind of meteorological shield, they protect life on earth and maintain a mild temperature that allowed humankind to live in nearly every area of the planet; on the other they recall us how over the course of the Twentieth century we have been led to question the man’s existence as a Being in ‘breathable’ space due first to poisonous gas and then to atomic bombs and radioactive clouds. 

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Manuel Orazi
Celestial Resistance. A Provincial Monument and its ‘Open Form’ in the Era of Spatial Relations 

Keywords
Brutalism, Gruppo Marche, monument, lunar architecture 

Since the 1960s the international spread of Brutalism, especially in countries led by social democratic or communist governments, replaced classicist monumentalism, which had also been an international phenomenon since the 1930s. From the England of Alison and Peter Smithson (and Reyner Banham), passing through non-aligned countries such as Yugoslavia to reach Russia during de-Stalinisation, Brutalism became one of the many neo-avant-gardes that arose in that period. In Italy, there was always a resistance to international trends, indeed more than one: on the one hand the Neo-Liberty movement in Lombardy and Piedmont, and on the other the Wrightian organicism circling around the two hubs where Bruno Zevi then operated, in Rome and the triveneto.
In the meantime, in the Marche region, far away from everything and therefore an ideal experimentation ground, the architects Paolo Castelli and Luigi Cristini, at the end of the 1960s, set out ‘on a journey towards the Brutalist language’, a sort of international lingua franca. The Monument to the Resistance in Macerata, designed in 1967 and inaugurated in 1969 a few months after the first moon landing, was therefore the cohesive moment for the constitution of this new design group, while the all-encompassing use of reinforced concrete expressed its values: the ‘social function’ of architecture and urban planning. 

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Marzia Marandola
Building a Tent under the Sky 

Keywords
Giovanni Michelucci, acrobatic, roof, concrete, marvellous undulations 

The church of San Giovanni Battista ‘dell’autostrada’ (1960-1964) in Campi Bisenzio, Florence, is certainly one of the most studied and well-known masterpieces of Giovanni Michelucci’s long and prolific architectural production. The different phases in the conception and design of this celebrated work are known thanks to the wealth of amazing sketches and documentary materials preserved in the Archive of the Giovanni Michelucci Foundation in Fiesole and the Giovanni Michelucci Documentation Centre in Pistoia; conversely, it is still possible to find some largely unexamined material concerning the acrobatic and experimental construction phases.
During his professional experience, Michelucci remained faithful to his desire to free himself from the seduction of form as well as from typological canons: always a master in composing planimetric distributions, he reached the apex of compositional freedom in the church ‘dell’autostrada’, where the hierarchical sequence of prospectuses disappears in the indistinguishable fusion with the roof. The experience and skills gained by Michelucci over the years of the complex construction of the church revealed to him the great potentials of concrete, opening up new horizons on the construction techniques that enabled the creation of different effects for this material in terms of surface, colour and texture. Both a point of arrival and a turning point, its construction marked for the architect the moment when he abandoned the shapes dictated by the geometric grid of the wall structure to draw on the marvellous undulations of concrete roofing, which annihilate the conventional geometries and the hierarchy of the fronts, merged with and indistinguishable from the supple cover. 

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Roberto Conte
The Sky at the Edge of Space 

Keywords
Sky, photography, James Turrell, Gestalt, perception 

‘The sky is no longer out there, but it is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you’, declared James Turrell, whose works often present a direct and essential dialogue with the sky. The artist places particular emphasis on the limits of the space in which the person is and where the sky itself is positioned almost ‘next’ to the subject.
This phenomenon is in fact perceptible on different scales: the impulse that pushes architecture to detach itself from the ground and defy gravity by rising upwards leads to designing geometric forms that intersect in the sky and interact with it. In those who are physically in these spaces, a process known in Gestalt psychology as the figure-ground principle is activated, whereby the observer perceives the objects of the world against a background on which they stand out, always keeping one element in the foreground and another in the background. It is interesting to observe how architecture, delimiting portions of the sky in unexpected and sometimes surprising ways, at times prompts a significant perceptual inversion, so that it is the sky itself that stands out against an architectural background, while in some cases a rather significant visual ambiguity is created. 

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Michael Hirschbichler
Dissolves (Sky Pieces) 

Keywords
Sky, dissolve, superposition, ideal, real 

The term ‘dissolve’ – taken from the context of film editing – describes a transition between two shots, where the first shot dissolves while the second one appears. The images of both shots are thus briefly superimposed, whereby separate spatial and temporal realms as well as different narrative structures merge into one during the transition. The work There Is No There There presents an inventory of typical architectural fragments taken from existing situations in urban agglomerations. These omnipresent fragments of ordinariness and insignificance are captured through the medium of architectural model sculptures, photographed in peripheral urban environments. As models of everyday banality, they turn into instruments of investigation of basic principles, problems and qualities of our built environment. Presented in such a way the banal gains significance and dissolves revealing an ambiguity that is hidden behind its familiarity. 

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Micol Roversi Monaco
‘Right of the Sky’: Air Law in France 

Keywords
Sky, airspace, law, air navigation, France 

The ‘law of the sky’, i.e. air navigation law, is now a well-defined branch of law, internationally and nationally. The French discipline, the first nation to take an interest in the subject, is paradigmatic. This contribution outlines its main aspects, which deal with in-flight safety but also with the legal positions of the inhabitants of the territory. 

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République française
Transports Code and Civil Aviation Code 

Keywords
Sky, airspace, law, air navigation, France 

Translation edited by Micol Roversi Monaco of some articles of the Transports Code and of the Civil Aviation Code of the French Republic, version in force on July 20, 2022. 

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Fred Scharmen
Space

Keywords
Space architecture, capsules, material, sublime, extreme environment

We often imagine space as a neutral thing. In architecture, we specify the location and nature of solids and surfaces, we arrange things and objects so that that it is possible to move through and around them. Space, in one sense, is simply what is left over after these configurations have played out. But this is an incomplete understanding of the nature of space. Space is not just the passive result of form’s active manipulation. The product of all this work with solids and material is space itself, that is what is being shaped. And like any medium, space has its own tendencies and resistances. Space is actively made, and, on Earth and off of it, also acts on its own terms, sometimes with deadly consequences.

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Ettore Rocca
Timaeus

Keywords
Plato, philosophy of architecture, philosophy of nature, harmony, space

Plato’s Timaeus is not only one of the fundamental Western texts on the philosophy of nature. It must also be considered the first and fundamental text of Western philosophy of architecture: it tells of how a divine architect, the demiurge, designed the cosmos. The composition of the universe is a model for every human architectural composition.
This is the first teaching, which still holds true today, that the Timaeus offers us: every philosophy of nature, as a philosophy of the construction of nature, is a philosophy of architecture. Conversely, every philosophy of architecture, as a philosophy of constructing that which is consigned to nature right from the start, is a philosophy of nature.
What is surprising, however, is that the Timaeus contains not one but two philosophies of nature, and consequently two philosophies of architecture. We may define the first philosophy of nature/architecture a philosophy of the heaven, and the second a philosophy of that which is before the heaven: space.

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Sara Buoso
Universe

Keywords
Universe, Cosmology, Frames of References, Entanglement, Continuum

Etymologically, the term ‘universe’ defines the assemblage of matters constituting cosmic space beyond infinity. Modern scientific discoveries conducted both in the field of physics and social sciences in the twentieth century oppose the traditional metaphysical and abstract assumption of this term, suggesting experimental and innovative systems of configurations of the image of universe. The dictionary entry examines in particular, the contributions that Theories of Relativity and Quantum Theories have addressed to the modern representation, morphology, and material unfolding of the universe in relation to human and non-human agencies. In highlighting the incongruences between classical models of inquiry and relativistic and quantum ones, this paper discusses the paradigmatic shifts that affect the configuration of events, experiences, and relations in the universe. Ultimately, by dwelling on the difference that connotates cosmic space and the notion of the infinite universe, this paper suggests the emergence of new area of investigation which lies in the alliance between arts and science.

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Federico Deambrosis
Australe

Keywords
Buenos Aires, Le Corbusier, journey

The mapping of the celestial vault south of the equator has been common ground for generations of European navigators since the Renaissance. At the end of the 1920s, another European turned his gaze to a starry sky unprecedented for him: he was Le Corbusier who, invited to give a series of lectures in the city, entered the port of Buenos Aires aboard the transatlantic liner Massilia on the night of 28 September 1929.
Almost as if it were a founding act for modern architecture on the continent, Le Corbusier's South American voyage, visiting not only Argentina but also Uruguay, Brazil and Paraguay, has acted – ever since historiographical frameworks that have become classics and then again in more recent works – as the first chronological term for observations conducted both from inside and outside South America. But reversing the perspective, the journey can be interpreted as a turning point in the Swiss architect's urbanistic discourse. Among the visions elaborated in 1929 and later collected in Précisions, the one for Buenos Aires is undoubtedly the most attentive to grasping the characteristics and opportunities of the existing city. Years later, Le Corbusier's attention was drawn back to the outlined and perhaps forgotten schemes by the arrival at 25 rue de Sèvres of two young Argentine architects, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, who would undertake the development of the hypotheses formulated in 1929 under the supervision of the ‘master’. Ferrari and Kurchan, together with Antoni Bonet, returned to Buenos Aires in 1938 with the task of obtaining the commission to draw up the plan. From their joint initiative germinates a group, called Austral, whose aim is to ‘movilizar la sociedad’: a purpose certainly congruent, if not exactly coincident, with the realisation of the plan.

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Claudia Pirina
Boreale

Keywords
Oculus, light, shadows, Pantheon, St Christine’s Well

From the incessant study of the shape and motion of the earth and the celestial bodies that influence human life comes a gaze towards the heavens that stems from an interest in understanding and describing natural phenomena scientifically determined by astronomical and astrophysical characteristics that mark the passing of time and seasons. The ancient mystery linked to astronomical phenomena, and which has always been associated with the relationship with the sacred and the divinity, is investigated in those sophisticated architectural devices capable of establishing a direct relationship between earth and sky. The symbolic form of architecture and the control of its relationship with the stars constitute the center of interest of the great architects who recognise the character and spirit of an architecture in the capacity of its space to establish relationships between dimension, structure and light.

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Silvia Dalzero
< strong>Città (volanti)

Keywords
Unknown, anticipatory, future, suspension, Carsten Höller

The voyage of discovery of “(flying) cities” could be understood as a marked aspiration to progress. Given with their ideal component, their anticipatory attitude of the times, having as their ultimate aim that of prefiguring imaginative realities, the architecture of the cities evoked here is used in its languages, its limits and its possibilities for the future.
The sampling of examples that will be evoked in this journey through flying cities, suggests multiple architectures, always ready to reactivate a sinister, even sci-fi image of structures and forms suspended from the ground, raised into the sky and traversed by air and light: from Hayao Miyazaki's flying urban reality with his fortress-city of Laputa, to Buckminster Fuller's Cloud 9 project, from Tatlin's flying machine to El Lissitzky's Iron Cloud, to the flying city designed by the Soviet artist-architect Krutikov in 1928 and today reassembled by Carsten Höller and Yona Friedman's villes spatiales floating in the air. In this heteroclitic journey, we will find ourselves catapulted into a reality that is past and present but also ready to challenge the unknown and envisage future flying cities, projected into an elsewhere yet to be conquered and inhabited.

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