'Opinions', or from dialogue to conversation

Chapter 24 Opinions – or, from dialogue to conversation Teresa Stoppani Architectural discourse has often appropriated the dialogical construct to introduce and promote new ideas that would otherwise be uneasily accepted or polemically rejected. The dialectical dialogue is thus scripted – i.e. designed – from the onset, with a precise outcome in mind, as in a reverse whodunnit in which the reader/spectator always already knows who the culprit is. Part of the pleasure in the unfolding of the dialogue – often presented as a confrontation – is the witnessing of the dexterity (and triumph) of the argumentative mastermind that opposes the erring or architecturally mistaken one. In this narrative performance, the architect- writer is scriptwriter, editor, director, main actor, set designer, etc., and the proposed synthesis is already clear from the beginning. The pleasure lies in the argumentation, in the text, in the script and in the construction of the dialogue as “architectural project” – by definition unfinished and to be completed (and altered) only by inhabitation, use, weathering. So, perhaps, a dialogue in architecture is never resolutive, but it is used to open up and to inhabit contradiction. Only then can the audience/ witness-turned- (potential)- inhabitant enter the conversation. More recent forms of dialogue refuse a predefined oppositional scheme and take the form of the conversation, the interview, the debate, to produce a collaborative construction of ideas and positions. Here, authorship and originality dissipate – if the process of dissipation is associated to the etymology of dissipare, as the act of throwing widely apart, scattering. Authorship and originality are thus distributed. If we instead embrace the more recent meaning of the term, of dissipation as a disappearance, we could infer that the dissipation of authorship and originality is never fully achieved, 284 DOI: 10.4324/9781003118985-24 Opinions never complete. Things and ideas that dis- appear can, and indeed do, appear again. They re- surface – transformed perhaps, perhaps improved. Embedded authorship, in the sense of momentarily disappeared or concealed, is more complex, and perhaps more satisfying than a shared one: because its origins are present but no longer traceable, and something new becomes possible, perhaps unexpectedly. Oscillating between a distributed and a disguised authorship, the construction of a non- dialectical dialogue in architecture is itself a project: it negotiates and produces a project that does not aim to fulfil a predefined solution or to achieve a satisfactory synthesis. Its project opens up the possibility of the new as an “other” original that both embraces and negates the given one (the predefined solution) and preempts its own possibility to produce a synthesis. Like the contemporary architectural project, the conversation in architecture “makes space,” opening up and enacting relations with architecture’s pasts and presents. It becomes the locus of the project. In the more structured dialogical modality of the interview, it is usually the interviewer that puts forward topics and argument, plotting fixed points and parameters that are there to be adhered to, or transgressed. It is instead the “main character” – the interviewee – that, thanks to the asymmetry of the structured exchange, is offered the space to elaborate, indulge perhaps in details and in the anecdotal and even undo the thesis. This is skiing en piste. If the city better or otherwise reveals itself to the transversal transgressions of the skateboarder, as Ian Borden has shown us, and the risk of the project – urban, metropolitan, territorial – requires the dexterity of Rem Koolhaas’s surfer on the waves, able to turn external forces to his advantage, the dialogue as interview triggers elaboration and virtuosity, but only as long as one plays within the tracks of the pre- disposed piste. Further complications occur when voices multiply, and the dialogue becomes a con-versation (but not a convergence) of different interlocutors. No longer a dialectical exchange aimed at achieving a resolution or more often simply aimed at illustrating a resolution; no more the asymmetrical and “guided” argumentation of the interview; the conversation defines itself in its making. In architecture, the dialogue as conversation is in itself a project, independently of its topic, as a process that belongs to, and belongs with, the design process: conversation as con-vergence towards a centre that does not exist, or that, starting as a given, is taken apart and dis- located as the exchanges evolve, accumulate, dis- agree and trans- mutate. There is no intent to find or propose resolutions here; there is instead the momentary con-vergence and intersection of otherwise perhaps impossible encounters. Undone, the dialogue, now plural, is no longer a dialectical project. Open to, and opening up, possibilities, it can move on only as “project.” Here, there is a possible way of “making theory” in architecture – or, better, a theory from architecture, rather than of architecture. The form of the dialogue as a moment of dissipation – as both distribution and momentary disappearance – of opposing positions, enables the setting in motion of a more complex and ambiguous role- playing. Far from synthesis, the dialogue suspends to enable a new space. If synthesis there is here, it can only be the occasional and 285 Teresa Stoppani provisional one produced by the project and its representations. This suspension, far from failure or irresolution, is a way to open up to the possibility of change and innovation, or, as Sanford Kwinter puts it, the “novelty.” In Architectures of Time ( 2001), Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time, observing how ‘the demise of the concept of absolute time’ and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur have led to field theory.1 In the book, he discusses the shift occurred in the 20th century, and the difficulties of the modern mind with “time’s relentless fluidity [and] irreducible materiality, that the modern mind finds so impossible – or repellent – to think”. 2 For Kwinter: Time always expresses itself by producing, or more precisely, by drawing matter into a process of becoming- ever- different, and to the product of this becoming- ever- different – to this inbuilt wildness we have given the name novelty. 3 …novelty is simply a modality, a vehicle, by or through which something new appears in the world. It is that ever fresh endowment that affirms a radical incommensurability between what happens at any given instant and what follows. What has made it a problem for thought … is the way it is seen to introduce a corrupting element or impure principle into the pristine and already full world of “Creation”. The offending element here is no other than the principle of change…. All change is change over time; no novelty appears without becoming, and no becoming without novelty.4 Novelty as “corrupting element” and “principle of change” that triggers innovation and transformation is presented through a dialogue by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in his Opinions on Architecture (Parere sull’Architettura),5 published in 1765 and part of his composite rebuttal to philoellene critic Pierre Jean Mariette’s negative review of Piranesi’s works. The Parere (singular in the Italian title, to emphasise the argument expressed by the dialogue, but translated into English with the plural Opinions) is set to continue Piranesi’s defence of the superiority of Roman architectural “invention” over the architecture of ancient Greece, but it does much more. Structured as a dialogue between two fictional characters, Didascalo and Protopiro, who animatedly argue on the origin and primacy – Greek vs. Roman – of architecture, and illustrated with a series of cryptic architectural designs, Opinions discusses issues of originality, creativity, language and freedom in architecture. Through the words of the dialogue and the etchings of ornament- overloaded architectural proposals, Piranesi discusses the role of ornament in architecture and the problem of imitation as a creative act. Didascalo (Piranesi’s alter ego, but only apparently) propounds that all ornament in architecture should be recognised as independent of function and structure, and as a separate apparatus that satisfies the human desire for variety. In his argumentation, variety is linked to invention and innovation, and change is identified as an intrinsic quality of architecture, not restricted to the wearing and decay of the edifice, but as an operation that brings time 286 Opinions Figure 24.1 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Parere, Plate IX (untitled), 410 × 645 mm. From Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi sopra la lettre de M. Mariette…. E Parere su l’Architettura,…, Paris: Firmin Didot, 1835–1839. (1st ed. Rome: Piranesi, 1765). Courtesy of Ghent University Library, BHSL. RES.ACC.024064/07 [image – rug01:001634208]) into the very act of design, that is, in the project. Architecture, argues Piranesi through Didascalo, must be designed to change; otherwise, it can only repeat itself.6 Intrinsic to architecture are change and its possibility of variation. Without change, architecture would become “a low trade, in which one would do nothing but copy,” and architects would be “something less than masons.”7 In its very essence, architecture is only if it changes. The voice of Didascalo in the dialogue is usually recognised as representative of Piranesi’s position. But Piranesi’s mind is in fact in both characters, and his dialogue is already a conversation of (at least) three: we have Didascalo and Protopiro, but we also have Piranesi as he develops his argument, dodging obstacles and juggling the contradictions of the two. The dialogical construction allows Piranesi to move between positions, transgress, leap – like the skateboarder, like the surfer, like the skier – to weave his project. Difficult to read, often circuitous and ambiguous, Opinions makes sense only if it is contextualised: read not only as Piranesi’s response to his critics, but also as a development of Piranesi’s earlier works – graphic, architectural and written. Built on their grounds, Opinions becomes a retroactive prologue to the interventions that both precede and follow it. And because it is a dialogue on architecture and a conversation in architecture, it “works” only with its images: not illustrations that complement the words, but veritable projects that further develop the argument discussed in the text. 287 Teresa Stoppani In 1761, Piranesi had published Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’Romani, a book that, Rudolf Wittkower explains: contains his view on art in a polemical form directed against two works: an essay by an anonymous English writer published in 1755, and Les Ruines des plus beaux Monuments de la Grèce published in 1758 by the Frenchman Le Roy. The latter was much the more important adversary, for he was the first to bring home to the West the Greek architecture of Athens, an event of far-reaching effect. In the text accompanying his engravings Le Roy explains that architecture is a Greek creation, from which all Roman buildings derive. As the Romans are only copyists, their architecture is decadent compared with that of the Greeks.8 In 1764, Pierre Jean Mariette published a letter against Piranesi in the Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe. “Piranesi, in a fury, prepared an answer at once. It appeared in 1765 and consisted of a title- page, 23 pages of text and 9 plates. The actual title- page already contains a programme and an attack,”9 Wittkower observes. Piranesi’s Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette are immediately followed by Opinions on Architecture (Parere sull’architettura), in which the ‘ fury’ of the immediate response is diffused into the articulation of the voices of the dialogue. In Opinions, Protopiro is the rigorist, critical of Piranesi’s designs because ‘they are overloaded with ornament.’ Protopiro “condemns Piranesi as illogical, for in Della Magnificenza, he was against ornament. And he concludes that, with these inventions, Piranesi ‘si è dato a quella pazza libertà di lavorare a capriccio….’”10 But Piranesi’s contradictions are only the preparation for his double attack in the dialogue: first, he dismisses the purity of the Greek architecture of the origins in favour of Roman hybridisation; then he also takes licence from Roman authority with the “capricious inventions” of his own designs. Didascalo, ‘Piranesi’s man,’ according to Wittkower: defends his designs with unexpected arguments. He denies that severity, reason and adherence to rules are to be pursued for their own sakes. Not only Greek architecture, but also the rules of Vitruvius and the classicism of Palladio are rejected.11 This step is crucial, as Didascalo here opens the space for architecture to be no longer Greek or Roman, or even Etruscan or Egyptian, but to be all of them at once and ultimately none: to be Piranesi. This betrayal is necessary to architecture. As Didascalo argues in the dialogue, “If one carries the principles of Vitruvius to their logical conclusion the result will be a primitive hut.”12 “Without variation art is reduced to the mason’s craft,”13 and there is no architecture without hybridisation, transformations, betrayals and freedom to design. Wittkower very clearly marks this shift, observing that the decisive break between his ideas in Della Magnificenza of 1761 and those expressed in the Parere of 1765 cannot be overlooked. In the earlier 288 Opinions book Vitruvius enjoys unchallenged authority, in the later the ancient author is rigorously criticized. Though Piranesi tries to find a way out by sophistry, he now recommends as indispensable those ornaments which he condemned before.14 But does Piranesi really recommend ornamentation as “indispensable”? Wittkower continues: The anti-Vitruvian, anticlassical theory expressed in the Parere is now not only in keeping with the character of much of the architecture which Piranesi had previously engraved, but coincides with his own pictorial interpretation of the[se] monuments [he had previously engraved]. His new views on architecture no longer permit him to illustrate them with engravings of ancient buildings, but he uses designs of his own invention which are now in complete accordance with his theory. … He shows how the whole heritage of antiquity can be used to develop new variations and to promote creative forces.15 The dialogue is accompanied by plates of architectures of Piranesian invention. Crucially, four of them bear inscriptions that further the position Didascalo defines in words, and push beyond it. Plate V bears a quotation from Terence’s Eunuch: “It is reasonable to know yourself, and not to search into what the ancients have made if the moderns can make it.” In plate VII, Piranesi inscribes on the façade of the building a verse from Ovid’s Metamorphoses ( XV): Rerumque novatrix Ex aliis alias reddit natura figuras (Nature renews herself constantly to create the new).16 In plate VIII is a sentence from Le Roy: Pour ne pas fair de cet art sublime un vil métier où l’on ne ferait que copier AU: Please check the quotes usage and provide opening single quote in sentence ‘ They despise my recent nobility…’ of endnote 17. sans choix. Last, in plate IX, borrowing from Sallust, Piranesi himself utters on stone: Novitatem meam contemnunt, ego illorum ignaviam ( They despise my novelty, I their timidity).17 We have come full circle. The dialogue stages the two voices of Protopiro – tradition – and Didascalo – innovation – to let the third and multifaceted voice of Piranesi emerge through the illustrations and the short texts emblazoned on the buildings (or illusions thereof) that they represent. But the voice of Piranesi is also in the structuring of the exchanges of his two characters. Far from opposition, which is only apparent, and remains crucially unresolved and ambiguous, the merit of this dialogue cum figuris is to set the ground (a very treacherous one) for change in architecture, for Piranesi himself, and well beyond him. This is only a restart, a new beginning – as there had been many before, Piranesi intimates – for the true dialogue as conversation (architectural conversation) to develop, through many voices, across different times, and in many projects. According to the inscriptions in the plates of the Opinions – which offer yet another dialogue, on stone on paper – nature remains a model for architecture only because it performs a constant renewal, and literal copying of ancient models is discouraged, in favour of a free combinatory work of contaminations. An architecture that does not imitate nature or architecture is called to reinvent itself. How? In Opinions 289 Teresa Stoppani Piranesi offers the congestion of his images, and in the most famous plate, the ninth, he challenges: “They despise my novelty, I their timidity.” As Wittkower observes, “Archeological material now becomes a weapon in the hands of a revolutionary modernist.”18 But the task at hand must go on, and will go on, well beyond archaeological materials and well beyond Piranesi. Materials will in the longer run be stripped, discarded and transformed by newly available technologies, and the experimentation will involve many architects. In words and graphic provocation, Piranesi’s dialogue establishes the autonomy of architecture. The excessive use of ornamentation proclaims a non- referentiality that dismisses a source, an external referent and a sole origin. As operation of manipulation of itself and on itself, architecture becomes autonomous. The congestion that clutters, structures, de- structures and re- structures his designs is ultimately selfeffacing: by saturating architecture and its image, Piranesi erases all established orders, making room for a new language to come.19 Referentiality is undone by excess, and his “too much” produces a critical mass that devours the existing orders and prepares the ground for the excess of its erasure and disappearance. The systematic congestion and manipulation of architectural orders, in fact, open the possibility of other orders, and trigger an unstoppable process that will eventually produce a naked architecture.20 For Wittkower, Piranesi is able to claim the right of invention because of “his intensity of purpose and his singularly sanguine fervour.”21 He argues that Piranesi “unconsciously hit upon a method which is deeply rooted in the Italian mentality,”22 a systematic transgression and free play with given rules that he sees as continuity with “a tradition [16th century Manner] which has been taken by more than one independent artist since Michelangelo’s days.”23 The ‘ fury’ of Piranesi’s ‘Italian mentality’ is clear as he concludes his dialogue, by directly addressing Mariette: Now, what do you make of all this chatter, Signor Mariette? …. Demonstrate that without straying from beautiful and noble simplicity or without adopting a ridiculous and barbaric manner, and yet not wanting to reduce architecture to a low trade, in which one would do nothing but copy, there is nevertheless all possible scope for variation and for multiplying inventions. …. As for the difference of opinion between yourself and Piranesi, the matter is by no means closed. Listen to what he is preparing for you to review, in addition to the drawings mentioned in the debate: a treatise, of greater length than Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ romani, …24 As we know, the announced treatise On the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times will never come into being beyond its preface, which Piranesi appends to Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette and Opinions on Architecture. But the dialogue staged by Piranesi continues as a remote conversation beyond Didascalo- Protopiro and Piranesi- Mariette, bringing in – in the order Wittkover refers to them in his 1938 essay on Opinions: Goguet, Caylus, Thomas Dempster, A.F. Gori, G.B. Passeri, M. Guarnacci, William Chambers, Abbé Laugier, Cordemoy, padre Lodoli, 290 Opinions Francesco Milizia, Andrea Memmo, J.F. Blondel, D’Hancarville, Winckelmann, Robert Adam, Bottari and also Ovid, Terence, Sallust. And then, later, we can add Wittkover himself, John Wilton- Ely and Manfredo Tafuri; and it still puzzles us. Yet, the crucial space opened by the Opinions and its images is best occupied by the projects and buildings of those architects of the French Enlightenment that Emil Kaufmann has called “revolutionary.”25 Twenty years after Piranesi’s dialogue, ClaudeNicolas Ledoux and Étienne- Louis Boullée will continue the stripping of ornaments that Piranesi had only timidly hinted at in Santa Maria del Priorato in Rome,26 when he removed (omitted) mouldings from the back of the main altar he had designed for the renovation of the church, one of his few built works. According to Kaufmann, the works of Ledoux and Boullée marked only the beginning of an architectural revolution. And this stripping of architecture will not be skin deep: with the rich ornamentation will go also the possibility to rely on a fixed set of rules, on a universal language of orders and order, and architecture will need to learn to “speak” in other ways.27 In 1933, with his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier,28 Kaufmann had already indicated the direction of travel, suggesting a continuity from Ledoux’s revolution to Le Corbusier’s new architecture. Yet, Piranesi’s dialogue, with a complexity that reaches beyond dialectical opposition, and with the “monstrousness of his [architectural] contaminations,”29 opened up for architecture a space of questioning and contradiction, from which many and other possible directions could be taken – still. Notes 1 “In physics, the demise of absolute time is shown to give way to a theory of the ‘field,’ effectively superseding the classical notion of space as a substratum against which things occur, and consequently giving rise to a physics of the ‘event’.” Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time. Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, ix. 2 Kwinter, 4. 3 Kwinter, 5. 4 Kwinter, 5. 5 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette: With Opinions on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times (John Wilton-Ely, ed.), Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2002. [Osservazioni di Gio. Batista Piranesi sopra la Lettre de M. Mariette aux Auteurs de la Gazette de l’Europe: inserita nel supplemento dell’istessa gazzetta stampata Dimanche 4, Novembre MDCCLXIV & Parere su l’architettura, con una prefazione ad un nuovo Trattato della introduzione e del progresso delle belle arti in Europa ne’ tempi antichi]. 6 ‘Let us imagine the impossible: let us imagine the world – sickened though it is by everything that does not change day to day – very gracefully to accept your monotony; what would architecture become? A LOW TRADE, IN WHICH ONE WOULD DO NOTHING BUT COPY, as a certain gentleman has said. So that not only would you and your colleagues become extremely ordinary architects, as I said before, but further you would be something less than masons. By constant repetition, they learn to work by rote; and they have the advantage over you because they have the mechanical skill. You would ultimately cease to be architects at all because clients would be foolish to use an architect to get a work that could be done far more cheaply by a mason.’ And so Didascalo advocates: ‘I ask only this: by all means treasure the rationality that you proclaim, but at the same time respect the freedom of architectural creation that sustains it.’ Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette: with Opinions on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times (John Wilton-Ely, ed.), Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2002, 110–111. 7 Piranesi, Opinions on Architecture, in Observations…. 2002, 110–111. 8 Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Piranesi’s “Parere su L’Architettura”’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, No. 2 (October 1938), pp. 147–158. Quote from page 147. 291 Teresa Stoppani 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 292 Wittkower, ‘Piranesi’s “Parere su L’Architettura”’, 150–151. Wittkower, 152. Wittkower, 152. Wittkower, 152. Wittkower, 152. Wittkower, 152. Wittkower, 154. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Metamorphoses, 15.253.253. In Bellum Jugurthinum, Sallust writes, ‘Contemnunt novitatem meam, ego illorum ignaviam, mihi fortuna, illis probra obiectantur’ [85,14]. They despise my recent nobility, I their ineptitude. I am reproached for my fortune, they for their shameful actions.’ J.C. Rolfe translates this passage with ‘They scorn my lack of pedigree [as a ‘new man’], I their [of the arrogant nobles] worthlessness; I am reproached with my lot in life, they with their scandals.’ Sallust, The War with Catiline. The War with Jugurtha, transl. by John Carew Rolfe, revised by John T. Ramsey, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Available online at DOI: 10.4159/DLCL.sallust-war_jugurtha.2013. This contextualised translation perhaps better explains Piranesi’s appropriation of Sallust’s words. While here he is illustrating the dialogue in which he argues his position, the truly innovative power of his works resides in his architectures, imagined or built. Wittkower, 155. I have discussed the process of erasure in the graphic works of Piranesi in Teresa Stoppani ‘Material and Critical: Piranesi’s Erasures’, in Ivana Wingham (ed.), Mobility of the Line. Art, Architecture, Design, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2013, 234–246. For Manfredo Tafuri, with the ‘discovery of the principle of contradiction’ in the San Basilio altar and with the unresolved confrontations of Opinions Piranesi demonstrates ‘that the silence of architecture, the reduction to zero of its symbolic and communicative attributes, is the inevitable consequence of the “constraint” [“costrizione,” as imperative] to variation…’ Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, 49. My note. Wittkower, 156. Wittkower, 156. Wittkower, 156. Piranesi, Opinions on Architecture, in Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette …. (John Wilton-Ely, ed.), 2002, 113–114. Emil Kaufmann, Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1953. The Church of St. Mary of the Priory (Chiesa di Santa Maria del Priorato) on the Aventine in Rome was renovated in 1764–1766 according to Piranesi’s designs. Manfredo Tafuri discusses the project, and the altar’s detail as an important clue of Piranesi’s modernity in Manfredo Tafuri, ‘“L’architetto scellerato”: G.B. Piranesi, l’eterotopia e il viaggio’, in La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70, Turin: Einaudi, 1980, 33–74; English translation, ‘“The Wicked Architect”: G.B. Piranesi, Heterotopia, and the Voyage’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, 25. The French term architecture parlante, first used in an anonymous review of C.-N. Ledoux’s work, was adopted by Emil Kaufmann in his work on Ledoux in Three Revolutionary Architects. Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architektur, Vienna: Rolf Passer, 1933. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 47.