Gian Luigi Maffei. Specialized buildings: studies and projects

ISUF 2020: CITIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GIAN LUIGI MAFFEI. SPECIALIZED BUILDINGS: STUDIES AND PROJECTS Matteo Ieva, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy ABSTRACT Gian Luigi Maffei is a scholar of urban morphology who built an unconventional thought on architecture. If we have to admit an initial debt towards Gianfranco Caniggia, the subsequent development of his activity as a researcher of the Muratorian School was not limited to a mere application of the shared analysis procedures because he was able to critically construct his own personal path that allowed him to advance further hypotheses of method especially in the study of substrate types, at all scales. THOUGHT, RESEARCH AND WORKS OF G.L. MAFFEI I want to introduce Gian Luigi Maffei as a scholar of urban morphology who built an unconventional thought on architecture. Maffei's research horizon is evident from the written works from some projects and from the main publications, including the volume (co-signed by Mattia Maffei) on the reading of the special building, to which he worked intensively, after completing part of the writings that Caniggia had started with his participation. I will focus on this work after clarifying some aspects of its theoretical position within the method of the Muratorian-Caniggian School. If we have to admit an initial debt towards Gianfranco Caniggia, the subsequent development of his activity as a researcher of the Muratorian School was not limited to a mere application of the shared analysis procedures because he was able to critically construct his own personal path that allowed him to advance further hypotheses of method especially in the study of substrate types, at all scales. Reflections published in the written works with which he helped to grow the notoriety of the Italian School of Morpho-typology together with Giancarlo Cataldi and Giuseppe Strappa, also within the ISUF International organization itself. The nourished investigations launched on some constructed contexts, proposed with a "scientific" expectation tending to examine and grasp the concreteness of the existing, proving the temporal and spatial becoming, have allowed Maffei to approach a prediction of search for the "TRUTH" aimed at discovering the complex of “rules " grammatical and syntactic that govern and ORDER the structure of anthropic systems. That is, of the reversal of human-nature relations identifiable in defined "forms" (building, aggregative, urban, territorial), generating structural phenomenons that "denotatively" reveal their specific identification precisely in the laws that determined them and express their essence, of their being and of their way of manifesting themselves historically. Maffei confirms the perspective of the interpretation of the built space based on the undoubted assumption of the operating history, supported by the structural mechanics that reads the individuality of the phenomena as a result of distinct spatio-temporal conditions. In the cogitative practice of his reasoning there is the unconditional acceptance of G. B. Vico's thesis on history as a cyclical phenomenon that acts as a planning thought in current affairs and deeply nourishes the speculations of his theory. That is to say, conscious acquisition of the system that reads the flow of events as something that proceeds by sinusoids and never goes back to the initial positions, since time determines a rational forward movement that always finds, in different time stages, a new Start. This explains, for example, all those events that see the collapse of ideals and successes alternate with moments of great civil conquests. Through the idea that the phenomena of reality come true with a cyclic law, Maffei manages to clarify the alternating events of structural mutation of the urban contexts studied and interprets the variations that occur in fabrics and building types, always read with an expectation of recognition of spatial and temporal differences that is synchronic and diachronic. The study on the Roman form of the city urbis that he has patiently examined allows him to reflect on the constitutive link between history and crisis. In this way, it opens an interpretative horizon that allows him to expose with logical rigor, and scalarly, the typological dynamics often subordinated to phases of rapid development interspersed with stasis of decadence concomitantly with the moments in which civilizations have lost that sense of finiteness and awareness of the limits of one's reason. According to Maffei, the CRISIS, does not appear as an instant anomaly of the process but manifests itself as a constitutive element of the historical world. He extracts from the real any complexity it manifests only those "signs" that can be reconstructed logically and typologically, as an expression of human phenomena framed in the dialectic of the relationship with the urban space. From this point of view, it undoubtedly demonstrates a postHusserlian conception that looks with interest both at the Heideggerian approach of an analytical type which does not limit itself to using concepts already given as pure practical indices of themes that are discovered intuitively through the eidetic analysis (epochè phenomenological), both to the hermeneutic methodological technique, as a nucleus of reflection through which to propose, precisely, a verifiable exegesis of architecture. An analysis, therefore, that looks at things as they are given over time and as they enter into a cognitive relationship with us who seek their existence, interested in grasping the essence of their being entities-objects perceived through an interpretation built on the concept of "pure consciousness", meaning that behavior according to which everyone would have the same specific point of view with respect to the thing. A rigorous orientation that aspires to knowledge and seeks evidence of what is thought, but which, however, is not univocally determined as it is inclined to selectively and critically seek together with essential differences the laws for determining these differences. We come to the text on special buildings. I would say that his introduction to the topic clarifies the purpose of the work and the expectations that distinguish it from the sought postulates of other disciplines or scholars who deal with the study of anthropic phenomena from a historical perspective. Speaking of the perspective with which the reading is proposed, he writes: “We are merely attempting to draft a manual that will HELP others understand specialised buildings using the method of project-based typology, the science of construction, which we believe must be an exploratory basis when working in architecture and designing new buildings in a harmonious way and in keeping with what has been done by the generations who preceded us, in a spirit of continuity. Just as the study of history’s raison d’etre lies in avoiding repeating the errors of the past, studies in typology can provide the tools for improving the yield of new construction work.” Going more into the merits of the work, one can notice the attempt to clarify the numerous aspects concerning the formation of a special type, starting from its budding from basic building (because it reinterprets the birth of the type in its initial phase always in relationship to a residential building), to its progressive maturation as an identified typological streak which generates, in turn, other subspecializations. He also grasps, of the special building, its dependence on an "intentionality" unknown to the world of the residence and tries to decode it in a procedural way. At the same time, it combines this with the possibility of reading the author's contribution, which is also the progress of shared critical acts that change over time. All this in relation to a linguistic effect that is distinguished in different cultures, linguistic precisely, with the caveat that special organisms, unlike 2 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century the basic ones, are subject to a greater phenomenon of import and export of models. An ancient temple, he notes, is imported from a culture along with its divinity. With regard to autochthony, which is also evident in the field of special construction, the manual highlights that, since these buildings by their very nature represent widespread needs in cultural contexts even very geographically distant, they are widely used simultaneously in several places, also resembling in language. This, although the residence, specific to each area, shows very different characters. This means that the Diatopic differences are, in many cases, non-existent. Note, for example, the case of the railway stations or, in general, of all those buildings that appeared in the neoclassical period. The careful typological distinction made by layers, which distinguish serial buildings from nodal and polar ones, read on the basis of typical characters, leads Maffei to think about the problem of the relationship with the fabric in which they participate. The relationship that is established with the basic fabric - he observes - changes in relation to the type of specialization, its hierarchical importance, and its location within the urban organism. A large church, representative of something that goes beyond mere dimensional data or worship (see Notre Dame in Paris, St. Peter in Rome), generates a series of transformations of the fabric that allow to recognize the symbolic role, often, not referable only to the urban scale. Maffei studies the readability of these special organisms, recognizing their typical attributes, but also the substantial differences that can be grasped with the critical contribution of the designer. Hence the intuition that the static-constructive system and the functional distribution system offer themselves as a synthesis in the articulation of the façade, sometimes showing components attributable to the author who "speaks" a common language and shared by others who operate at the same time. A look at the main types developed in the process up to modernity, allows Maffei to elaborate a succession of typological schemes in progress of organicity that he reports in the cards attached to the volume. I think it is important to point out that these are themes already developed by Gianfranco Caniggia with the research carried out in the 1980s, subsequently deepened by Giuseppe Strappa with his work: Unity of the architectural organism. Let’s do now a brief consideration on the project practiced by Maffei especially with teaching. How HE finalize the analytical investigation that precedes the critical action of the project? And like the past, does history participate dialectically with the hypothesis of a needed future? The past enters the project as a prerogative of persistence / stability / constancy / extension / succession of (linguistic) characters, in its nature as in becoming process which brings with it the concept of a type in continuous transformation, permanently sought as a historical "judgment". From this point of view, his being alternative to very fertile currents of thought IS revealed in the research proposed between the 80s and 90s a kind of research that consider the past as something to be evoked or considered for temporal jumps, determining an action based on a idea-cogito that leads, for example, to build the "form" using an a-historical principle. What leads to take refuge in a vision that, reducing the identity differences (characteristics of a doing based on the space / time assumption), allows to base the reflection on the concept of "model", that is of that abstract entity, sometimes metaphysical, extracted from history as an analog or equivalent "paradigm" capable of determining (in the thinking of the person proposing it) a congruent result, and at the same time, pregnant with positive effects. 3 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century It is the acceptance of the analogical link between language and architecture that allows him, as Caniggia had already done, to found a theory based on the "absolute" datum of architecture as a "community" device, fully participating in the complex of "historical-natural" lexicological systems, differentiated in terms of area, from whose principle it proposes (adhering to De Saussure's affirmations) the hypothesis of the search for a collective "talk" and a "written" architectural, that is general and procedural, inspired by a postulate of constant revision / updating, considering that, by structural vocation, it is a dynamic system in constant evolution. The project is therefore the final stage of an ongoing process which aims to "launch" an idea into the future (in the sense of the Heideggerian Machenshaft). Hence, the interest in studying the existing, in understanding its problems, so that the hypothesis of mutation can be congruent with what has already been conquered by the culture of that place and the authorial component does not parasitically prevail. CONCLUSIONS I would like to conclude these brief observations, quoting a reflection by L. Mies van der Rohe, which I believe can be considered proper to the thought of Gian Luigi, who belongs to the Italian School which has spent itself with critical judgment and passion in the field of morphological study and design. In an interview with Franz Schultz, Mies declares: "In architecture, problems are faced and solutions are found. The best architecture is the clearest and most direct solution to a problem"… "Architecture has nothing to do with self-expression. You have to express something other than "yourself", if you really have to express something. This something else is the essence, the spirit of civilization that architecture represents. That is what big buildings did. They said something about an era, not about a man. If a man has to express himself, let him be a painter". Here, all this - I think - is the critical lead of Gian Luigi Maffei's work and in particular of his latest work on the reading of Special Buildings Figure 1. Interpreting basic buildings 4 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century Figure 2. Interpreting specialised buildings REFERENCES Caniggia, G. and Maffei, G. C. (2017) Architectural composition and building typology: interpreting basic building (AltraAlinea Edizioni, Milano). Caniggia, G. and Maffei, G. C. (1984) Il progetto nell’edilizia di base (Marsilio Edizioni, Venezia). Maffei, G. L. and Maffei, M. (2018) Interpreting specialised buildings (AltraAlinea Edizioni, Milano). Kropf, K. Roger Evans Associati (2003) ‘M.R.G. Conzen, Gianfranco Caniggia: fashions and mysteries’, Gianfranco Caniggia. Dalla lettura di Como all’interpretazione tipologica della città, Quaderni ICAR/3 (Mario Adda Editore, Bari). Scheer, B. C. (2015) ‘The epistemology of urban morphology’, Urban Morphology 20.1, 1-13. Whitehand, J. W. R. (2003) ‘Gianfranco Caniggia e M.R.G. Conzen: remarkable parallels’, Gianfranco Caniggia. Dalla lettura di Como all’interpretazione tipologica della città, Quaderni ICAR/3 (Mario Adda Editore, Bari) CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Matteo Ieva, Associate Professor in Architectural and Urban Design, Department DICAR, Polytechnic University of Bari, via Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy. [email protected]; [email protected]. 5 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century 

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk ISUF 2020: CITIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY brought to you by CORE provided by University of Utah E Publications GIAN LUIGI MAFFEI. SPECIALIZED BUILDINGS: STUDIES AND PROJECTS Matteo Ieva, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy ABSTRACT Gian Luigi Maffei is a scholar of urban morphology who built an unconventional thought on architecture. If we have to admit an initial debt towards Gianfranco Caniggia, the subsequent development of his activity as a researcher of the Muratorian School was not limited to a mere application of the shared analysis procedures because he was able to critically construct his own personal path that allowed him to advance further hypotheses of method especially in the study of substrate types, at all scales. THOUGHT, RESEARCH AND WORKS OF G.L. MAFFEI I want to introduce Gian Luigi Maffei as a scholar of urban morphology who built an unconventional thought on architecture. Maffei's research horizon is evident from the written works from some projects and from the main publications, including the volume (co-signed by Mattia Maffei) on the reading of the special building, to which he worked intensively, after completing part of the writings that Caniggia had started with his participation. I will focus on this work after clarifying some aspects of its theoretical position within the method of the Muratorian-Caniggian School. If we have to admit an initial debt towards Gianfranco Caniggia, the subsequent development of his activity as a researcher of the Muratorian School was not limited to a mere application of the shared analysis procedures because he was able to critically construct his own personal path that allowed him to advance further hypotheses of method especially in the study of substrate types, at all scales. Reflections published in the written works with which he helped to grow the notoriety of the Italian School of Morpho-typology together with Giancarlo Cataldi and Giuseppe Strappa, also within the ISUF International organization itself. The nourished investigations launched on some constructed contexts, proposed with a "scientific" expectation tending to examine and grasp the concreteness of the existing, proving the temporal and spatial becoming, have allowed Maffei to approach a prediction of search for the "TRUTH" aimed at discovering the complex of “rules " grammatical and syntactic that govern and ORDER the structure of anthropic systems. That is, of the reversal of human-nature relations identifiable in defined "forms" (building, aggregative, urban, territorial), generating structural phenomenons that "denotatively" reveal their specific identification precisely in the laws that determined them and express their essence, of their being and of their way of manifesting themselves historically. Maffei confirms the perspective of the interpretation of the built space based on the undoubted assumption of the operating history, supported by the structural mechanics that reads the individuality of the phenomena as a result of distinct spatio-temporal conditions. In the cogitative practice of his reasoning there is the unconditional acceptance of G. B. Vico's thesis on history as a cyclical phenomenon that acts as a planning thought in current affairs and deeply nourishes the speculations of his theory. That is to say, conscious acquisition of the system that reads the flow of events as something that proceeds by sinusoids and never goes back to the initial positions, since time determines a rational forward movement that always finds, in different time stages, a new Start. This explains, for example, all those events that see the collapse of ideals and successes alternate with moments of great civil conquests. Through the idea that the phenomena of reality come true with a cyclic law, Maffei manages to clarify the alternating events of structural mutation of the urban contexts studied and interprets the variations that occur in fabrics and building types, always read with an expectation of recognition of spatial and temporal differences that is synchronic and diachronic. The study on the Roman form of the city urbis that he has patiently examined allows him to reflect on the constitutive link between history and crisis. In this way, it opens an interpretative horizon that allows him to expose with logical rigor, and scalarly, the typological dynamics often subordinated to phases of rapid development interspersed with stasis of decadence concomitantly with the moments in which civilizations have lost that sense of finiteness and awareness of the limits of one's reason. According to Maffei, the CRISIS, does not appear as an instant anomaly of the process but manifests itself as a constitutive element of the historical world. He extracts from the real any complexity it manifests only those "signs" that can be reconstructed logically and typologically, as an expression of human phenomena framed in the dialectic of the relationship with the urban space. From this point of view, it undoubtedly demonstrates a postHusserlian conception that looks with interest both at the Heideggerian approach of an analytical type which does not limit itself to using concepts already given as pure practical indices of themes that are discovered intuitively through the eidetic analysis (epochè phenomenological), both to the hermeneutic methodological technique, as a nucleus of reflection through which to propose, precisely, a verifiable exegesis of architecture. An analysis, therefore, that looks at things as they are given over time and as they enter into a cognitive relationship with us who seek their existence, interested in grasping the essence of their being entities-objects perceived through an interpretation built on the concept of "pure consciousness", meaning that behavior according to which everyone would have the same specific point of view with respect to the thing. A rigorous orientation that aspires to knowledge and seeks evidence of what is thought, but which, however, is not univocally determined as it is inclined to selectively and critically seek together with essential differences the laws for determining these differences. We come to the text on special buildings. I would say that his introduction to the topic clarifies the purpose of the work and the expectations that distinguish it from the sought postulates of other disciplines or scholars who deal with the study of anthropic phenomena from a historical perspective. Speaking of the perspective with which the reading is proposed, he writes: “We are merely attempting to draft a manual that will HELP others understand specialised buildings using the method of project-based typology, the science of construction, which we believe must be an exploratory basis when working in architecture and designing new buildings in a harmonious way and in keeping with what has been done by the generations who preceded us, in a spirit of continuity. Just as the study of history’s raison d’etre lies in avoiding repeating the errors of the past, studies in typology can provide the tools for improving the yield of new construction work.” Going more into the merits of the work, one can notice the attempt to clarify the numerous aspects concerning the formation of a special type, starting from its budding from basic building (because it reinterprets the birth of the type in its initial phase always in relationship to a residential building), to its progressive maturation as an identified typological streak which generates, in turn, other subspecializations. He also grasps, of the special building, its dependence on an "intentionality" unknown to the world of the residence and tries to decode it in a procedural way. At the same time, it combines this with the possibility of reading the author's contribution, which is also the progress of shared critical acts that change over time. All this in relation to a linguistic effect that is distinguished in different cultures, linguistic precisely, with the caveat that special organisms, unlike 2 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century the basic ones, are subject to a greater phenomenon of import and export of models. An ancient temple, he notes, is imported from a culture along with its divinity. With regard to autochthony, which is also evident in the field of special construction, the manual highlights that, since these buildings by their very nature represent widespread needs in cultural contexts even very geographically distant, they are widely used simultaneously in several places, also resembling in language. This, although the residence, specific to each area, shows very different characters. This means that the Diatopic differences are, in many cases, non-existent. Note, for example, the case of the railway stations or, in general, of all those buildings that appeared in the neoclassical period. The careful typological distinction made by layers, which distinguish serial buildings from nodal and polar ones, read on the basis of typical characters, leads Maffei to think about the problem of the relationship with the fabric in which they participate. The relationship that is established with the basic fabric - he observes - changes in relation to the type of specialization, its hierarchical importance, and its location within the urban organism. A large church, representative of something that goes beyond mere dimensional data or worship (see Notre Dame in Paris, St. Peter in Rome), generates a series of transformations of the fabric that allow to recognize the symbolic role, often, not referable only to the urban scale. Maffei studies the readability of these special organisms, recognizing their typical attributes, but also the substantial differences that can be grasped with the critical contribution of the designer. Hence the intuition that the static-constructive system and the functional distribution system offer themselves as a synthesis in the articulation of the façade, sometimes showing components attributable to the author who "speaks" a common language and shared by others who operate at the same time. A look at the main types developed in the process up to modernity, allows Maffei to elaborate a succession of typological schemes in progress of organicity that he reports in the cards attached to the volume. I think it is important to point out that these are themes already developed by Gianfranco Caniggia with the research carried out in the 1980s, subsequently deepened by Giuseppe Strappa with his work: Unity of the architectural organism. Let’s do now a brief consideration on the project practiced by Maffei especially with teaching. How HE finalize the analytical investigation that precedes the critical action of the project? And like the past, does history participate dialectically with the hypothesis of a needed future? The past enters the project as a prerogative of persistence / stability / constancy / extension / succession of (linguistic) characters, in its nature as in becoming process which brings with it the concept of a type in continuous transformation, permanently sought as a historical "judgment". From this point of view, his being alternative to very fertile currents of thought IS revealed in the research proposed between the 80s and 90s a kind of research that consider the past as something to be evoked or considered for temporal jumps, determining an action based on a idea-cogito that leads, for example, to build the "form" using an a-historical principle. What leads to take refuge in a vision that, reducing the identity differences (characteristics of a doing based on the space / time assumption), allows to base the reflection on the concept of "model", that is of that abstract entity, sometimes metaphysical, extracted from history as an analog or equivalent "paradigm" capable of determining (in the thinking of the person proposing it) a congruent result, and at the same time, pregnant with positive effects. 3 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century It is the acceptance of the analogical link between language and architecture that allows him, as Caniggia had already done, to found a theory based on the "absolute" datum of architecture as a "community" device, fully participating in the complex of "historical-natural" lexicological systems, differentiated in terms of area, from whose principle it proposes (adhering to De Saussure's affirmations) the hypothesis of the search for a collective "talk" and a "written" architectural, that is general and procedural, inspired by a postulate of constant revision / updating, considering that, by structural vocation, it is a dynamic system in constant evolution. The project is therefore the final stage of an ongoing process which aims to "launch" an idea into the future (in the sense of the Heideggerian Machenshaft). Hence, the interest in studying the existing, in understanding its problems, so that the hypothesis of mutation can be congruent with what has already been conquered by the culture of that place and the authorial component does not parasitically prevail. CONCLUSIONS I would like to conclude these brief observations, quoting a reflection by L. Mies van der Rohe, which I believe can be considered proper to the thought of Gian Luigi, who belongs to the Italian School which has spent itself with critical judgment and passion in the field of morphological study and design. In an interview with Franz Schultz, Mies declares: "In architecture, problems are faced and solutions are found. The best architecture is the clearest and most direct solution to a problem"… "Architecture has nothing to do with self-expression. You have to express something other than "yourself", if you really have to express something. This something else is the essence, the spirit of civilization that architecture represents. That is what big buildings did. They said something about an era, not about a man. If a man has to express himself, let him be a painter". Here, all this - I think - is the critical lead of Gian Luigi Maffei's work and in particular of his latest work on the reading of Special Buildings Figure 1. Interpreting basic buildings 4 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century Figure 2. Interpreting specialised buildings REFERENCES Caniggia, G. and Maffei, G. C. (2017) Architectural composition and building typology: interpreting basic building (AltraAlinea Edizioni, Milano). Caniggia, G. and Maffei, G. C. (1984) Il progetto nell’edilizia di base (Marsilio Edizioni, Venezia). Maffei, G. L. and Maffei, M. (2018) Interpreting specialised buildings (AltraAlinea Edizioni, Milano). Kropf, K. Roger Evans Associati (2003) ‘M.R.G. Conzen, Gianfranco Caniggia: fashions and mysteries’, Gianfranco Caniggia. Dalla lettura di Como all’interpretazione tipologica della città, Quaderni ICAR/3 (Mario Adda Editore, Bari). Scheer, B. C. (2015) ‘The epistemology of urban morphology’, Urban Morphology 20.1, 1-13. Whitehand, J. W. R. (2003) ‘Gianfranco Caniggia e M.R.G. Conzen: remarkable parallels’, Gianfranco Caniggia. Dalla lettura di Como all’interpretazione tipologica della città, Quaderni ICAR/3 (Mario Adda Editore, Bari) CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Matteo Ieva, Associate Professor in Architectural and Urban Design, Department DICAR, Polytechnic University of Bari, via Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy. [email protected]; [email protected]. 5 ISUF 2020 Cities in the Twenty-first Century