Vesper

Sara Marini
Vesper

Keywords
esper, double mirror, shadow, twilight, blindness

The eighth issue of “Vesper” is dedicated to the theme Vesper, and therefore calls for a double mirror: one inherent in the figure of the number eight and the other found in the contents and the name of the volume that contains them. Vespers and the design of time, twilight, the duality of West and East, the double as a condition and as a strategy, Venus and Venice, the sunset as a propitious direction, the drawing of shadows, camouflage, Vesper Lynd and the Vesper cocktail (both inventions from the pen of Ian Fleming) are the constellation points that propagate from the term vesper and that “Vesper” 8 plans to illuminate.
Looking into the twilight is equivalent to dissolving obvious differences and distances, it confuses the boundaries of objects and tests the certainties of the gaze, immersing the latter in the darkening of the ‘contemporary’. Blindness is a necessary condition for understanding reality, as José Saramago has already suggested; Giorgio Agamben states that in order to live within one’s time it is necessary to construct a displacement, an anachronism: not to see the lights but to be able to detect the obscurities; Umberto Eco reminds us that considering the darkness it is possible to reconcile ‘an affectionate feel-ing for the concrete and a turmoil of sublime abstractions’.

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Dario Gentili
Adriatica

Keywords
Adriatic, sea, sunrise, 1968

Sunrise and sunset do not only characterise the two opposite coasts of the Italian peninsula: the Tyr-rhenian and the Adriatic. They can also represent a passage of an era, the one between the late 1970s and the 1980s: between the sunset of the ‘long Italian 68’ (1968-1977) and the sunrise of cultural, lifestyle, architectural experimentations of Italian postmodernism.

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Umberto Eco
Déja vu

Keywords
Eco, James Bond, déjà vu, Fleming

Short excerpt from Umberto Eco, The Narrative Structure in Fleming, in Oreste Del Buono, Idem (eds.), The Bond Affair, MacDonald, London 1966, pp. 67-68.

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Guido Boffi
Shadow, Casting Light. Lunario by Guido Guidi

Keywords
Guido Guidi, photography, image, shadow, double

Guido Guidi’s book Lunario (2019) collects about a hundred photographs taken between 1968 and 1999 dedicated to the theme of the moon. Moon photographed in its nocturnal appearance, as well as ‘imagined’ in the form of the apple or the face; metaphorized in the scythe, in the hole in the wall framed sideways, in the ball, in the slice of sky, in the crescents projected through a leaf onto the wall of the house during a partial eclipse of the sun. The essay focuses on the analysis of the photo-graph: Pinarella di Cervia (1980). In this Guidi’s photo, more than in others, there’s an identification process between the Earth and the moon. Guidi produces the figural double of the moon on the Earth: the Earth seen from the moon is ‘duplicated’ as the moon-Earth seen from the Earth-moon. Hence the issue, now emphasized by digital photography: can the subject produced (technical-ly) by the camera and (manually) by the photographer ever be a ‘double’ of things?

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Snežana Vesnić
Villa Pavlović and the Dissolution of Gold

Keywords
Villa Pavlović, form, morphogenesis, gold, dissolution

The paper offers a theoretical basis for understanding the design methodology of the Villa Pavlović project (by the Belgrade-based architecture studio NEO arhitekti). The theoretical analysis of the de-sign process focuses on the issue of form. The initial idea to build a 50-meter swim lane in the base-ment gave the house an elongated form, but was ultimately not realised. The moment the form lost its main function, its finitude became a problem that had to be overcome for the design process to contin-ue. By reflecting on the theoretical problems of teleology and time, the text indirectly explains the ap-plied methodology for the destabilisation of the created form. In that sense, a metaphor of dissolution of gold describes the design process, potentially understood as opposite to morphogenesis.

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Francesca Belloni
Ceci n'est pas un escalier. Twiggy and the Surrealism of Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu

Keywords
Twiggy, Surrealism, Anticlassicism, figure

Starting from the physical and semantic oxymorons of Magritte’s Surrealism, we would like to reflect on the extent to which the production of the De Vylder Vinck Taillieu studio appears deeply imbued with an innate plurality, which expresses itself in spatial compositions and temporal constructions ca-pable of materialising the disorienting condition of the double (or multiple) and, at the same time, em-ploying it as design strategy.
Through an indirect contamination with art, advvt work on the double, on waste, on optical illusions, on nonmeaning to transform them into true elements of the project, to open up, through their interpre-tation, to parody, paraphrase and paradox. A sort of modern constructive surrealism all centred on the co-presence of opposites and their double or multiple mirroring.
In particular, Twiggy shop in Gent, opened in 2011, condenses and develops, stages and narrates these dynamics, building the material basis that makes their unfolding possible.

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Giorgio Azzariti
Guarding Dual Natures. The Synthes Headquarters by Studio Märkli

Keywords
Märkli, Synthes, tectonics, order, dual

In 2007, Peter Märkli is asked to design the headquarters of world-leading biomedical engineering company Synthes in Solothurn, Switzerland’s baroque jewel. He is asked not to confront this archi-tectural gem directly, but rather its contemporary counterpart: the periphery. Yet, the dual nature of the site's specifics and the broader city’s history – the anonymous modern expansion and the lush histori-cal pre-existence – becomes the starting point to design a building whose massive dimensions trans-cend the local scale, relating directly to Solothurn’s historical and natural landmarks, allowing it to conceal itself with the landscape. Its composing elements – columns, knots, beams – testify on how architectural models of times past can still have a vitality in the present, while the building’s overall gesture of tectonic prowess balances apparently opposite natures: baroque order and peripherical un-certainty, vastness and disguise, ancient times and present conditions.

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Massimiliano Ciammaichella
Blackout. Representations of Presences at the Border of Darkness

Keywords
Drawing, image, darkness, view, visual perception

The black of the night is the symbol colour of an obsession that has accompanied us since historical interpretations of the origins of the cosmos. With suspicion and a certain reluctance, even today, we try to approach what our eyes can hardly grasp, but this does not necessarily depend on our nycto-phobia and photophobias, if anything, it expands on the cultural legacies and symbologies that run through the very concept of darkness.
The essay investigates those liminal and objective forms of representation whose positioning oscillates between the last stages of shadow and darkness, moving in the hybrid territories of scientificity and narration, to investigate the theories, cultural factors and short-circuits that make blackout not only a metaphor for the inability to see and feel what cannot be seen, but also a widely documented condition of living.

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Jacques Lucan
Lessons of Venice

Keywords
Urban form, open form, project, modernity

In the 20th century, how did writers, historians and architects look at the shape of the city of Venice, how did they interpret it? And if we consider that Venice should not be regarded as a world to be pre-served ‘in vitro’, what lessons does the city’s knowledge bring for possible futures?
From Marcel Proust or Jean-Paul Sartre to Le Corbusier, from Saverio Muratori to Giuseppe Maz-zariol, without forgetting Vittorio Gregotti or Manfredo Tafuri, the urban form of historic Venice can be seen as a capillary, homogeneous and neutral network, entropic, with the organic growth of an open form. Is the idea of an open form a way of opposing the reality of a closed form, frozen in Vene-tianity? It gives a possibility to a new modernity that, however, goes off the beaten path of the ‘modern’.

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Stamatina Kousidi
Caves, Cavities and Clouds

Keywords
Dark cavity, architectural atmosphere, interiority, soil, embodied space

On the other side of the modernist fascination with transparent skins, ethereal volumes and a fluid continuity between inside and outside, an implicit yet striking preoccupation with the figure of the cavernous space was sustained. It drew upon non-mediated experiences of vernacular, naturally-formed artifacts and gave rise to alternative conceptualizations of the living space and the city in con-nection with the subterranean world. The architectural fantasy of the cavernous, dimly-lit, earthy space lives on to the present day. In a context that sees a growing design interest in matters connected with the ground, in search of novel means of expression and models of sustainable construction, this essay sets out to explore key moments in which architectural practice and thought intersected with the figure of the cave – of dark edges, vessels, recesses and cavities – as both skin and atmosphere, darkness and light, nature and artifice, earth and sky.

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Alberto Sdegno
Esper. Blade Runner among New Technologies and Artificial Intelligences

Keywords
Artificial intelligence, new technologies, digital elaboration, image, 3D model

The essay analyses a specific sequence from the film Blade Runner, the one in which a computer – the Esper system – is used to explore a three-dimensional space through a two-dimensional image. This series of stills – of extraordinary importance to the film because it reveals a clue that will enable the android hunter Rick Deckard to carry out his mission – anticipates some of the technologies in use today and, indirectly, allows for a confrontation with issues of stringent topi-cality, such as the management of 3D models of a certain complexity, the use of artificial intelligence in everyday life, and the relationship between reality and fiction in set design and narrative plot. The edition of Philip Dick’s book, from which the screenplay was taken, is also compared with Ridley Scott’s filmic edition, including by comparing the unused scenes available in the Ultimate Col-lector's Edition.

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Bernhard Rüdiger
The Hammer Blow

Keywords
Hammer, obsession, weeds, reunion, pressure

The series entitled Weeds from la Réunion (2019) is the result of obsessive hammer blows. Arousing obsessive attention, however, is not that simple. Obsession is not an object, a prob-lem, a thing that can be named. Obsession requires an object in order to exist, yet this object, even if it were a white whale, is not the Object, that Jacques Lacan wrote with a capital O. The object that holds our attention is a screen that, through its concealing, allows us to catch glimpses of our true obsession. The screen is necessary because is a call to eliminate it. Without the screen, nothing can be moved, questioned, reinvented. The screen must sound out with hammer blows so that the Object can appear behind the materiality of what remains. What I take from this idea of the hammer blow is that, first of all, it serves to make what is hollow resonate. It is a creative process that recognises the negative, that is able to catch the pressure of an object, its resonance, its hollowness.

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Paolo Foraboschi
Suggestions for a New Epistemology of Structural Engineering

Keywords
fake certainties, Italian engineering, limits of science, song of sirens, software unsustainable emptiness

The tutorial makes a parallelism between structural engineering of today and in the past. First, the arti-cle analyzes how the most important principles that have characterized modern physics affect structur-al engineering. Then, the author questions how the great structural engineers would be if they lived and worked now and attempts at offering an answer. Finally, the author gives his suggestion about what changes must be made in the relationship between society and engineers of today in order for the latter to have the same tremendous impact on the world as they did in the past.

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Malvina Borgherini
About a Vespertilian Man. Or about Leigong and Batman, between Chinese Mythology and Comic Strips of the American Golden Age

Keywords
Bat, hybrid, animal, Lucifer, demons-tuon

The Vespertilio (a term derived from Latin and already in use in the ancient literary language with the generic meaning of bat), a kind of flying mouse that lives mainly at night, has become, in the eyes of the common imagination, the animal that more than any other symbolises the world of darkness and our deepest fears.
The article considers examples of human-animal hybridisation spanning cultures and eras as far apart as the ancient Mediterranean, Taoist China and the Christian West in the Middle Ages, and Wasp America in the first decades of the 20th century, highlighting their affinities and distances.

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Davide Deriu
Travelling to Ankara: Western Perspectives of the Modern Capital

Keywords
Ankara (Angora), Istanbul (Costantinopoli), Occident, Orient, Turkey

The centenary of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923, prompts us to to revisit a historical mo-ment in which the European perception of the Orient changed unexpectedly. As if in a play of mirrors, the perceived “decline of the West” that was evoked in Europe was countered by the dawn of Turkey, the nation state based on a reformist and secular ideology. Architecture played a fundamental role in its construction: during the 1920s and 1930s, the ancient town of Angora (Ankara) was transformed by European architects who were drafted in to design a modern capital. The town under construction redefined the journey to the East, shifting its desination from Constantinopole – eulogised by Europe-an writers between the mid-19th and the early-20th centuries – to the heart of Anatolia. After travers-ing the steppe, European travellers were struck by a place loaded with promises and contradictions. From the travelogues of the early-Republican period, there emerges the bewilderment of the West vis-à-vis a process of change that subverted the very principles of orientalist culture.

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Marco Toffanello
The Ark

Keywords
Pasquale Rotondi, saving, artworks, ark, archive

Rewriting of the Pasquale Rotondi’s diary, who saved ten thousand artworks during the Second World War. This narrative, which preserves the linear and fragmentary structure typical of the diary, proposes a series of photographic checks between the caption and the image, the practical list and the poetic list, documentary photography and author photography. Everything, in this diary, is extrapolat-ed from the original, the relocation of its elements generates an ambiguous but real, rereading of the tale.

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Vesper Editorial Board
Loos vs Los

Keywords
Adolf Loos, Copy, Kärtner Bar, Axonometry, Ring

Four interpretative drawings of four architectures that reinterpret the Kärtner Bar designed by Adolf Loos in Wien in 1908 by staging a ring between the original and its copies.

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Fabio Gigone
The Balustrade of Louis XIV’s Chambre du Roi: the Architecture of the Ban

Keywords
Louis XIV, Versailles, Balustrade, Ban, Sovereignty

The paper examines the French monarch’s double nature in the 17th century in relation to the evolu-tion of the sovereign’s architectural expressions.
Born from the superimposition of theological and political aspects, the double nature of the French king manifested in iconographic formulas, legal apparatuses, linguistic mechanisms, and architectural devices.
Among the latter, Louis XIV’s Chambre du Roi in Versailles and its gilded balustraded represented the threshold between the natural and the mystical bodies.
The paper detects the activation of the ban – embedded in Louis XIV’s balustrade – as a juridical and political device that governs and manifests the French king’s sovereign power, and it re-veals its doubling.

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Cristina Moraru
Vagabond

Keywords
Vagabond, tourist, liquid modernity, Vesper times, agonism

In our times of Vesper, the polarized condition of our humanity differentiates between vagabond and tourist, wealthy and underprivileged, liquid elite and criminalized poor. While the condition of vaga-bond is associated with criminality, the idea of a tourist is associated with consumption. Between con-sumption and criminality, a wide range of approaches and attitudes towards the capital are structuring identities. Our liquid modernity is constantly challenging the processes of constituting identity, testing our capacity to adapt and differentiating us based on our mobility. Therefore we should consider how are we conditioned to move, how do we approach distances − as tourists or as vagabonds?

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Gavin Keeney, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Veronese

Keywords
Preposterous presentism, architectural parallax, time-traveling, Venetian Renaissance

Veronese is an unorthodox re-reading of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Ve-ronese at the Palladian Refectory at San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. The premise is that perspective is not always rational and often includes vanishing points as red herrings. While the room and painting are connected visually, by the perspectival magic of room and painting, the conceptual entrance to the painting (and the hypothetical entrance to the room from the painting) is actually situated in the shad-owy top-right corner and requires a ladder. As much goes unseen as is seen. In this sense, the event of The Agony in the Garden is hidden in the event of The Wedding at Cana.

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Guglielmo Bottin
Vespertine

Keywords
Björk, popular music, crepuscule, Vespertine, electronic

Taking its cue from the lemma ‘vespertine’, this contribution analyses the crepuscular characteristics and the many antinomies in Björk's eponymous work. The 2001 album - recently adapted for music-theatre - deals with the theme of sensuality in its multiple aspects, with narrative and sound modalities that range from the celestial to earthly carnality, to a bewildering intimacy that opens to the uncanny. Between declamatory singing and an instinctive, suffocated vocal persona, Bjork alternates triumphant atmospheres with hypnagogic soundscapes, authorship with appropriation, disjointed electronic rhythms with thick and uniform layers of strings and choirs, paroxysmal performativity with a sense of isolation in private, recondite spaces where physical and immaterial worlds merge. These sound and narrative juxtapositions present a double reflection that, like the threshold of twilight, alternately opens up to light or darkness.

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Francesca Cremasco
Visibility

Keywords
Light, shadow, transparency, opacity, twilight vision

Visibility implies the ability to see of the subject who observes, as well as the ability to be seen. Visi-bility, strictly determined by light, involves four aspects: of geometry/space, of matter/surface and the conditions, of field and subject. The first aspects have physical-objective characteristics with a certain intrinsic stability, while the latter represent more unstable conditions, with phenomenological and physiological nature. In architecture, the primordial binomial referring to visual perception is the cou-ple transparency/opacity, which can be correlated to the binomials void/solid and light/shadow. Trans-parency, among all the optical characteristics of the material, has contributed to the perceptual turning point of an architecture that overturns relationships and meanings flowing from day to night, a pas-sage marked by twilight vision. It is in the heure bleue that our most stimulated cognitive apparatus is amplified, revealing a short circuit of meanings.

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Stefano Tomassini
Wait

Keywords
Wait, crepuscular, body, future, waste

In this item the wait is the first barrier humankind can pose at vespers against the impeding night of horrors: despite Martin Heidegger’s admonishment, waiting is not an epitome of knowledge. Thus, the wait is a practice that has nothingness as its object – the nothingness that already exists and is al-ready here. Moreover, in the wait, we should be able to waste time, miss the point, get rid of the logic of productivity associated to a goal/an objective/a result, and expose, within the constant demand for an acceleration of our doing (as producers or consumers), the alienating traps of our late modernity. Then, it’s necessary to rethink the body as a site of the wait, the wait for the realization of life, never of death – towards the vespers, never to the dark night. At the crepuscule, in conclusion, the last ac-tion of the wait is similar to the powerlessness of the trash – matter of the ending, compost in its po-tentiality.

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Tania Garribba, Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, Maddalena Parise
X

Keywords
Organism, zone, boundary, double, source

X is the unknown, the X marked on the map, the hypothesis; X also defines – in Jeff VandeMeer's novel (2014) – an area in the centre of the Earth where an anomaly has occurred. An area in perpetual mutation that alters creatures and the passage of time, an extended, sentient organism, radically non-human in nature. A modified and alien zone where traces of our world are integrated into an ecological system that synthesises new life forms, only apparently resembling the known ones. In Area X there is something familiar in the vegetation, in the birdsong, in the small animals, but something is not quite as it should be. The traveller to Area X returns, if he returns at all, in the form of a mutated original or copy. Area X spirals out of control, spreading like a generative, multiplying infection; new life forms add to or replace the known ones, indicating the possibility that the world will survive us or simply continue to exist without us.

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Simone Ferracina
Yet

Keywords
Utilization, pollution, disposition, turning, repurposing

The paper takes the adverb yet and its semantic fluctuations (repetition and continuation; contrast; ex-pectation and possibility), as well as its woven temporalities (continuation of the past; prolongation of the present; projection into the future) as figures that complicate a simple understanding of repurpos-ing as a change in the function or use of building materials and components, negotiating overlaps be-tween the transformation (and yet) and perpetuation (yet again) of that which exists. As tools for pro-tecting the distance between what something is and what something is for, they also prompt a distinc-tion between the actual and dispositional properties of objects.

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Evelina Praino, Camillo Boano
Zoé

Keywords
Zoe, forest, Agamben, polis

The contribution considers the relationship between zoé, the natural and unqualified life, and bíos, po-litical and qualified one, already a form of life, in order to situate it spatially and, finally, to suggest an indetermination of the two poles in order to guarante the politicalness of existence. From Uexküll's perspective, we imagine the objective and unitary world in which the living moves (Umgebung) as a construction that takes place from the presupposition of several singular and animal perceptual perspectives, (Umwelt) in combination. Similarly, the agora, the political place par excellence, addresses a bíos that immediately implies a zoé, insofar as there is no political that can be divorced from existing corporeality. Assuming zoé as the hidden, yet ever-present presupposition of bíos, a theory of the project aware of the fecundity that hides its shadow, between Umgebung and Umwelt, will then turn to the Umweg, the devi-ant and insurgent path, the final space in which every polarity collapses.

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Ettore Rocca
Zimzum

Keywords
Zimzum, withdrawal, self-limitation, freedom, impotence

צמצום, Zimzum (maintaining the Latin transcription, even if it is commonly transcribed in English as Tsimtsum), is a theological concept that could be of great relevance to architectural thought. Its author was the 16th-century kabbalist and mystic Isaak Luria. According to Luria, for creation to take place, the Infinite, God, must first make space for the world. It does so with a double movement, first of contraction to a point, then of retraction, moving away from its centre. This empty and dark centre (called tehiru) will be the place for the universe. If the account of creation is the account of the architectural composition of the universe, it should be possible to secularize the mystical concept of zimzum and see its potential for architectural thought. I suggest four lines of thought: with-drawal, self-limitation, giving freedom, impotence. Architecture must begin with retraction; the archi-tectural act is all the more powerful when it is an act of self-limitation; architecture works to establish free relationships; the power of the architectural act is a confession of impotence.

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