Language or Tradition?

Continuity
and Innovation in the Landscape of Ticino

David Mayernik(&)

School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

[email protected]

Abstract. Tradition is a problematic word for those of us who argue for con-
tinuity in the historic European context. Apart from surviving vernacular con-
struction, where tradition is both implicit and unselfconscious, architecture that
aspires to dialogue with the past must engage it via language. Only the concept
of an inherited architectural language—both a tradition and subject to constant
change and evolution—can offer a credible framework for building with con-
tinuity. But not all manner of building constitutes a language, which perforce
demands a degree of consensus and even codification in order to bind signified
and signifier. Consensus can come from two sources: either the constant practice
of a living tradition, or a canon of past achievements. In this paper I will
describe the ways in which the TASIS Lugano campus plan and buildings
operate with a classical notion of typology and language, informed by
Renaissance humanist notions of form and meaning.

Keywords: Classical language
Typology
Rhetoric
Ticino
Campus

1 Introduction

The word tradition is a problematic one for those of us who argue for continuity in the
historic European context. Modernism has existed for roughly a century, and it is
enough of a cultural habit as to be, practically speaking, a tradition itself; certainly, in
Ticino, it is the default condition for all manner of building. Therefore, apart from
surviving vernacular construction, where tradition is both implicit and unselfconscious
(but also vulnerable to cultural and economic forces that conspire to eliminate it, since
its only defense is inertia), architecture that aspires to dialogue with the past must engage
it via language. Only the concept of an inherited architectural language—both a tradition
and subject to constant change and evolution—can offer a credible framework for
building with continuity. But not all manner of building constitutes a language, which
perforce demands a degree of consensus and even codification in order to bind signified
and signifier. This does not imply a fully normalized dictionary and grammar—certainly
Gothic builders operated without treatises, and medieval poets wrote eloquently before
Dante’s de vulgari eloquentia—but it is true that it demands a degree of consensus,
which can come from two sources: either the constant practice of a living tradition, or a
canon of past achievements which serves as the equivalent of a “tradition” or
community.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018

G. Amoruso (ed.), Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design,
Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_115
1124 D. Mayernik

Of all the ways of building, perhaps only classical architecture qualifies in every
way as a language [1]—with different dialects, to be sure, and historical phases as
different as Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s English, but with enough correspondence
between form and meaning that it can be apprehended by non-natives. One can learn to
make sense with classical architecture, and enter into a dialogue with both the noble
architecture of the past and its humble vernacular sources. Encompassing at once a way
of making individual buildings but also organizing them urbanistically, classical
architecture is an articulate way of building communities in a living dialogue with both
past and future (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Articulate space: Duomo and Palazzo Piccolomini, Pienza; photograph © David
Mayernik

In so far as a tradition in architecture can be called classical, it must rest on two

analogies: of the building as a body, and of the design as a re-enactment of some
primitive—or if you would rather—of some archetypal action to which our procedure
might refer. From Vitruvius to Boullée, the texts suggest something of the kind, always
in different contexts, since such ideas do not contain, or even imply, the repertory of
norms and procedures which the constant alteration of circumstances forces you to
renew, to rethink and to alter ([5], p. 17) (Fig. 2).
In this paper I will describe the ways in which the TASIS campus plan and
buildings [2] operate with a classical idea of typology and language, informed by
Renaissance humanist notions of form and meaning. I will argue this is an approach
that itself has a long tradition, while it is also an alternative way of framing the
engagement with a cultural context: “tradition” and “traditional” are imprecise terms in
 Language or Tradition? Continuity and Innovation in the Landscape 1125

Fig. 2. Aerial view of the TASIS campus, Ticino, Switzerland; photograph © TASIS

a world where modernism has existed for roughly a century, becoming itself a kind of
tradition. The classical humanist idea of architecture as a kind of rhetoric, an articulate
way of building, implicitly establishes dialogue with the wider culture and the
immediate architectural context.
Surrounded by post-war sprawl of a generally modernist character, TASIS The
American School in Switzerland has, since its foundation in the 1950’s, restored old
buildings to provide a noble, “traditional” environment within which students from
more than 50 countries come to learn about European and American culture. The new
buildings over the last twenty years have added to the campus’, and its surroundings’,
historical fabric in ways that do not mimic the past, but engage in a fruitful, creative
dialogue with it. As a consequence, the campus operates as well as a critique of the
cultural devastation wrought by buildings indifferent to or even destructive of the
historical context: it is a model of what is possible, an alternative way of engaging with
the past while building community for today and tomorrow.
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the
immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition”
should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the
sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It
cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour [3].

Not all manner of building constitutes a language, which perforce demands a

degree of consensus and even codification in order to bind signified and signifier. This
does not imply a fully normalized dictionary and grammar—certainly Gothic builders
operated without treatises, and medieval poets wrote eloquently before Dante’s de
vulgari eloquentia—but it is true that it demands a degree of consensus, which can
come from two sources: either the constant practice of a living tradition, or a canon of
past achievements which serves as the equivalent of a “tradition” or community.
1126 D. Mayernik

Everyone relies on the city and all the public services that it contains. If we have concluded
rightly, from what the philosophers say, that cities owe their origin and their existence to their
enabling their inhabitants to enjoy a peaceful life, as free from any inconvenience or harm as
possible, then surely the most thorough consideration should be given to the city’s layout, site,
and outline ([1], p. 95).

Before 1996, the TASIS campus grew incrementally by the acquisition of con-
tiguous properties climbing the hillside and a nineteenth-century villa across the main
road, the via Collina d’Oro. While the campus’ original building is a rather grand
seventeenth-century villa appended onto the small village of Certenago, the land
around it had historically been agricultural, developed in the decades before World
War II with smaller suburban villas with modest land, much of it terraced hillside.
Since the war, and particularly in the last four or five decades, the land of the sur-
rounding modest villas was subdivided for the building of both single-family resi-
dences and small apartment blocks, subject to a Piano Regolatore that stipulated 4 m
property line setbacks (meaning a minimum of 8 m between one new building and
another). On the campus, instead, the school renovated its older buildings for academic
and dormitory uses, and built temporary structures for both classrooms and a palestra.
Apart from additions, the sole permanent free-standing building in those first decades
of the school’s history was a multi-use structure at the foot of the hillside, roughly in
the middle of a strip of land that climbed the hill.
Historically, villages like Certanago grew up with little planning, but acquired
coherent form by building contiguously for reasons of security as much as conve-
nience, and building with bearing wall construction. Since World War II at least, and
even before, those intuitive approaches to urban settlement in the rural landscape gave
way to deliberate planning of a modernist kind, which advocated discrete buildings
surrounded by green space (even if in modest amounts). In effect, the piani regolatori
in all but the existing boundaries of urban settlements advocated a kind of medium to
low-density suburban development, which at one level rejected the morphologies of
traditional settlements but also reduced the amount of open space by dispersing
buildings. In other words, apart from the case of wealthy clients who could acquire
enough land to build a villa with sufficient land around it to evoke older rural patterns,
the piani regolatori rejected, and largely eliminated, the density and morphology of
both the town and the villa. Without the will, or means, to resist the economic pressures
of rising property values, the Comune of the Collina d’Oro acquiesced to the subdi-
viding of small rural properties into smaller and smaller suburban units (Fig. 3).
The first challenge of the TASIS master plan [3], then, was the development of a
way of organizing buildings to preserve the maximum amount of open green space,
especially the flat land best adapted to recreation and sports. A campus (whose origins
are in Europe and England, but developed comprehensively in America) is generally of
one of two types—the village or the monastery. While the latter has its roots in Oxford
and Cambridge’s colleges, the former is tied to the earliest towns and settlements in
America. By village I mean a collection of independent, if coordinated, buildings, as
opposed to the monastic grouping around a common courtyard. While the campus as a
type is related to urban settlement patterns, it is distinct enough to have its own
particular characteristics; for the village type it is the arrangement of typologically
 Language or Tradition? Continuity and Innovation in the Landscape 1127

Fig. 3. TASIS Campus Master Plan 2015, David Mayernik Ltd.

distinct buildings—gymnasia, classrooms, libraries, dormitories—that become legible

signs of their functions and place in the community.
I should clarify my use of the words type and typology, as distinct from morph and
morphology. Morphology is the study of form or shape; typology is the study of form
allied to use. A bar-shaped building is a morph, a hall library is a type. In the urban
realm streets and piazzas are types, not morphs, since they come in many different
shapes and sizes, but are distinguished by their combination of form and use—linear
streets for circulation, rectangular piazzas for gathering.
Applying the campus village typology to the Collina d’Oro meant responding to the
terrain, and the limitations of the site, while the density of the adjacent village of
Certenago meant deploying these legible building typologies in close proximity.
Moreover, an urban intention to generate positive public space generated by proximity
and response to the terrain sponsored a series of urban spaces—piazze, strade pedonali,
scalinate—that are as important to the campus as the buildings themselves.
All concordance is made up of differences ([6], p. 6).

To render the campus articulate of the school’s ethos and academic life, each building
presents a form proper to its type, thus distinguishing them, while relying on a modest
repertoire of materials and levels of articulation to both distinguish and unify the
buildings into an ensemble. The Renaissance definition of harmony as concordia
discors means that variety is a deliberate, essential aspect of composition; indeed,
harmony without discord is monotony. This kind of variety is not the accidental variety
of historical chance, but the deliberate, rational compositional variety of the rhetorician.

2 Language and Dialect

What are the inflections of language that can make buildings speak in a local dialect?
For the TASIS campus it is a combination of vernacular construction and details as
rhetorical elements—the small roofs over the doors of the gymnasium, the truss
framing of the theater auditorium—and a Lombard austerity of articulation. The
1128 D. Mayernik

vernacular, constructive elements also establish hierarchy and decorum: the Palestra
depends on them, since its focus on the development of the body is secondary to the
academic development of the mind. The Library, instead, is the only building that uses
a colossal order, albeit of an abstracted Composite type. The Theater’s portico with
engaged Doric columns establishes it as a public building, while its rustic aspects speak
to the balancing of the dignity of attending a performance with the hard work of
preparing the performance [4]. The Science building’s Ionic portico depends for its
capitals on the order of the Roman Colosseum, since it looks out over the future sports
field (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Theater, Palestra and Library; photograph © Lorenzo Mussi

At the same time, architecture is limited in its ability to be specifically meaningful.

It can express aspects of decorum and hierarchy, but it cannot convey specific mes-
sages. For this, classical architecture has always depended on the visual arts: painting,
sculpture, mosaic, etc. So, the TASIS buildings also integrate the visual arts, primarily
through the medium of buon fresco. At the Palestra, grisaille medallions illustrate a
mythical evolution of sport into art; at the top of the scalinata adjacent to the building,
a loggia contains a fresco of the Choice of Hercules, which turns the climb of the
stairway into an allegory of Virtue. At the Library, figures of Ars and Scientia describe
the two branches of knowledge which organize the book collection. At the Arts
building, the motto Nulla Dies Sine Linea forms part of the painted school crest in the
tympanum. At the top of the hill, the residential building framing an arched stair
passage is painted with cornucopia which spill out the bounty of rewards for climbing
the hillside, and over a side door the school crest includes the title of Petrarch’s letter
describing his ascent of Mont Ventoux. The Theater has the most explicit relationship
of architectural form and fresco: in the pediment, the school crest includes the line from
Shakespeare’s Henry Vi, O for a Muse of Fire; in the frieze cherubs playing musical
instruments hold a banner declaiming Concordia Discors Harmonia Est; this
 Language or Tradition? Continuity and Innovation in the Landscape 1129

concordant discord in the building is represented by the juxtaposition of elegant entry

hall with rustic auditorium; on the exterior wall of the auditorium, two frescoes inte-
grate discordant arts in the form of paired allegorical figures: Tragicomedia and
Lyricastoria (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Fresco on the façade of the Theater, David Mayernik

The rhetorical function is what distinguishes architecture from building. In the

TASIS’ campus deployment of legibly distinct typologies—palestra, library, theater,
etc.—in a way that creates an urban environment juxtaposed to open green space,
combined with an approach to architectural language that allows architecture to speak
about its place in a community and a culture, a model of a way forward that builds on
the past is also a reminder of what has made an architecture rooted in tradition a
positive contribution to the built environment. In a world where communities struggle
to define shared values, a school can be a model of urban development and articulate
architecture because it has an explicit ethos, and is oriented toward a noble end, the
forming of students in knowledge toward the acquisition of wisdom. The nature of the
physical community, the campus-village, is both a model of a framework for the
formation of citizens—in TASIS’ case for citizens of the world. The buildings that
1130 D. Mayernik

compose that academic village are articulate, rhetorical devices for spelling out the
school’s curriculum and its integration of mind and body formation. But it is the fact
that these discrete, articulate buildings also defer to and shape positive space that
speaks most eloquently to what we have lost of the old way of building on the land,
privileging shared public space as a common good, a place of interaction, a manifes-
tation of community. In this way, the TASIS campus engages with the past while
offering a new model of how to solve the modern problems of sprawl, object-oriented
architecture, and a lack of meaningful environments. That is T.S. Eliot’s hard-won
tradition, not inherited but earned, and worth passing on (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. The M C Fleming Library Piazza; photograph © Michele Kestenholz

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