Elements for a New Historical Project

Guido Beltramini Centro internazionale di studi di architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza Elements for a New Historical Project It s worth noting that in the late 1970s, when Post-Modernism had contributed to putting history back at the centre of architectural debate this was also the time when many architecture museums were being created something new was happening in the field of the history of architecture of the Renaissance, thanks to a younger generation of scholars (they were all in their forties), such as Manfredo Tafuri (University of Venice), Howard Burns (the Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Arnaldo Bruschi (University of Rome) and Christoph Frommel (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome). Although with very different backgrounds, interests and nationalities, they came together on the common ground of an interest in context and, most importantly, the key role of the architectural drawing in their studies. The forerunner of this interest in the architectural drawing as a key tool in historical enquiry was Geymuller s famous book on Bramante's drawings for the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, published in Wien in 1875. In the second post-war period, the elder statesman in this kind of architectural history was James Ackerman. In books such as The Cortile del Belvedere (1954) and The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), his studies of drawings were interwoven with historical and social aspects. The new architectural historians Tafuri, Burns and Frommel were united by a kind of generational pact to place the drawing at the centre of their approach to history. And first and foremost the drawings of Renaissance architects. Such drawings were no longer to be observed as an image (as the art historians had done) but to be interpreted as the instrument used by architects to conceive and develop their own projects, and communicate them to patrons, craftsmen and readers. This meant developing a new kind of scholarship able to interpret drawing, establish their autography, and describe their media and materials. Alongside the Renaissance drawings, the new generation of historians attached great importance to survey drawings, capable of providing an image not only of the form of a building, but also of its physical consistency, its materials, and its various constructional phases. They could thus establish how it developed over time: a thicker wall, for example, often indicated a pre-existing mediaeval building, which then conditioned the subsequent project. The interest in historic drawings and survey drawings was complemented by a completely new focus on drawings of reconstructions of unrealized projects, so that not only history as written by the victors, in the form of realized buildings, was studied. The recovery through drawings of unrealized projects marked a fundamental turning point, since it meant highlighting the creative personality of the architect rather than his works. The group of new historians set out to dismantle the grand overall interpretations made by the previous generation. In doing so, they rarely made use of monographs but published articles in academic journals dealing with specific aspects. Their 1

means of communication with the academic community and with the wider public, were architecture exhibitions and the related catalogues, which took on a new role. I believe that these kinds of catalogues would have been inconceivable without the great interest in drawings that emerged from the debate on Post-Modernism between practicing architects in those years. The workshop for preparing the new-style exhibitions was not in the museums themselves but in the Centro Palladio in Vicenza. All the members of the group were associated with this institution and it offered them a construction site for their approach to history. Curated by Howard Burns (in collaboration with Lynda Fairbairn and Bruce Boucher), the prototype for the new architecture exhibitions was Andrea Palladio 1508-1580. The Portico and the Farmyard, staged by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Centro Palladio at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1975. I think a very revealing comparison can be made between the monumentalism of the Palladio exhibition held two years earlier in the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, in 1973, and the London exhibition. In Vicenza, the exhibition was dominated by large models shown to visitors as representations of Palladio's Quattro Libri: they were independent forms with no reference to time or the place where the buildings had been constructed [fig-1]. Palladio emerged as the monumental hero of the neoclassical scholars, represented by his timeless forms a kind of God of architecture. In London, on the other hand, Howard Burns showed the models alongside drawings, fragments of ancient architecture, period paintings, the instruments of drawing, work tools, and coins [fig- 2]. When it to came discussing the merits of his exhibition choices, there was some tough opposition within the Arts Council to this combination of Palladian autograph drawings, photographs, Canaletto paintings from the Royal Collections and sixteenth-century tools, such as a swing plough, butter churn or sickle. Thanks to Burns for the first time Palladio ceased to be an architectural divinity and was once more an architect in his own age and in history. To fully understand the step forward made by the new historiography compared to other options at that time, we can compare the London Palladio exhibition with the Mostra critica delle opere di Michelangelo held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in spring 1964, curated by Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi [fig-3]. The curators deliberately chose not to show original works (Michelangelo's architectural drawings are kept in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence and they could easily have been obtained on loan). The photographs and models in the Rome exhibition were "interpretive" in the sense that at least in the curators intentions they were meant to offer a contemporary interpretation of Michelangelo's forms and spaces. As in the case of Palladio in the Vicenza exhibition, in this Rome exhibition, Michelangelo was placed outside history. The ingenuous approach of the Michelangelo exhibition for architects" highlights even further the difference with the three exhibitions in which the new architectural historians implemented their own methods: Raphael architetto in Rome in 1984, Giulio Romano in Mantua in 1989, and Francesco di Giorgio architetto in Siena in 1993. In each of the three exhibitions, the historical dimension was prevalent. The 2

complete corpus of drawings by the architects analyzed was presented, projects were reconstructed by means of models, and the historical context was described through period images, such as paintings and portraits of patrons. So here we find a radical distance both from the exhibitions for architects and from Post-Modernism. In both of these cases history is simply seen as a stockroom or a catalogue from which to choose solutions for decorative or structural requirements. But this relationship with history cut away all the bonds between forms and time. The rigorous historical culture underlying the exhibitions of Tafuri and his colleagues, on the other hand, did not aim to provide solutions for the present but rather to highlight its distance from the past. What is the practice of a historian, if not the constant measurement of a distance? History does not tell us what we are, but rather tells us something of what we are not. It tells us in what way a given experience of space may correspond to a given experience of the world, to given social practices and to an albeit unconscious, but crucial given metaphysics. Saying that history is measuring distance does not mean, therefore, that history says nothing about the present. What history does do is cast light on the modes and deep structures shaping the life of individuals and societies in the past. In this way we can understand, almost as a recoil, that our experience of the world is not the experience of the world but one experience. It is the result of interweavings, thoughts, intuitions and prejudices and it is the task of critical thinking (and arguably also critical architecture) to explore them. In the case of the history of architecture, the discipline is called on to investigate the relations between spaces, buildings, urban geometries and real social practices and, therefore, the forms of life of which those spaces, those buildings and those geometries are the sedimentation. Like many historians in his generation, throughout his life Tafuri reflected on the Modern, on the concept that architecture that was an emancipation, liberation and transformation of the world. In a good deal of twentieth-century architectural thinking, the Modern age was seen as having begun with the Industrial Revolution, or at most with the Enlightenment. Tafuri s interest in the Renaissance, on the other hand, stemmed from the conviction that it was the Renaissance that marked the beginning of the Modern age: it saw the advent of the rise of subjectivity, since it was the age of the project, of the organized space that was designed from the point of view of the individual actor. In our age, when the present evolves so rapidly before our very eyes, history has perhaps never been so indispensable as the only way to give a critical dimensional to the present. Tafuri and his colleagues won their battle, and today it is clear that the Renaissance can only be studied through a rigorous historical approach. Yet, after Tafuri's death in 1994 the history of Renaissance architecture became closed off in its own field, and spoke to no one outside of it. It was if it had been fragmented into countless, meticulous but partial narratives. So what is the future today for the history of architecture of the distant past? Historiography inevitably reflects a project for the present and therefore: what project for the present can there be for the history of architecture? 3

There are no universally valid solutions, but I shall try to reflect on them with you, on the basis of my own experience in creating a museum dedicated to Palladio in Vicenza [fig. 4-5]. I developed the concept of the Palladio Museum as a research workshop open to the public with the architect Alessandro Scandurra, who was also responsible for the graphic design and exhibition layout. The aim of the curatorial project was to work on ways of communicating complex research ideas to a wider public. Scandurra s exhibition design organized and structured the contents by showcasing them in a temporary way with a flexible backstage. This is also based on a dynamic classification and archiving of experiences, the use of social media and of captions annotating all the material in the museum, from the drawings and models to the building itself. The origins of the project for the Palladio Museum go back to 1958, when Antony Blunt, André Chastel, Ludwig Heydenreich, Rodolfo Pallucchini and Rudolf Wittkower founded the Andrea Palladio International Centre for Studies on Architecture in Vicenza. Just over a decade after the end of the war in Europe, there was a shared desire to create a research centre for the history of architecture in which an international community of scholars could meet and work together. They aimed to construct a discipline able to establish its own status that was independent from the history of art and went beyond the national schools. In the following decades, with the arrival of scholars like James Ackerman, Arnaldo Bruschi and Manfredo Tafuri, the focus on Palladio was extended and integrated into the whole Renaissance, and then gradually also into the history of architecture of all ages. In the Palladio Museum, the scholars in the Palladio Centre illustrate their research and studies to a wider public as their work progresses. This is rather similar to the Page Museum at La Brea, Los Angeles, where visitors can see paleontologists analyzing fragments of dinosaurs extracted from adjoining tar pits. Groups of experts work on research projects that become the themes in the museum rooms. At present the exhibition itinerary goes through five rooms. It begins in the Book Room with the story of the incredible publishing success of Palladio's Four Books. Next is the Stone Room, dedicated to the technologies that Palladio developed. The Silk Room, on the other hand, is dedicated to Vicenza and its production and international trading of silk, which created the cosmopolitan outlook required for Vicentines to understand Palladio's revolutionary architecture and to provide the resources to construct his buildings. At the center of the room is a showcase with live silkworms, feeding on the leaves from a specially planted mulberry tree in the courtyard. The Grain and Glory Room is dedicated to the great villas and the story of land reclamation which transformed sixteenth-century Veneto. The word glory refers to the aspirations of Palladio's patrons, reflected in decorations dedicated to the feats of Scipio and Hannibal. The itinerary ends in the Venice Room. The stories in the rooms are narrated in first person by some leading Palladio scholars. Their images appear projected on the walls of the palace like genies from some Aladdin's lamp. But how do we describe Palladio's mind as he designed the present (and the future) 4

of the world around him? Firstly, through the autograph drawings, in permanent display albeit rotated for conservation reasons. After being kept in London for almost 400 years, the drawings are gradually returning to Italy for study purposes and to be shown to the visitors, thanks to the Royal Institute of British Architects; 33 drawings are also conserved in the collections of the Palladio Museum. Each of the drawings selected annually is an aid to exploring the themes in the rooms. To attract the interest of a broader public to the specific features of architecture, the museum makes use of physical and digital models, photographs, videos, and images projected on the walls of the rooms. Filippo Romano was specially commissioned to make films reporting on Palladio s buildings in the Veneto today. The Palladio Museum is housed in one of Palladio s autograph works, the Palazzo Barbarano. The palace itself is the first work on show in the museum. All the significant parts of the building can be visited thanks to a stage design approach to showing the building. So, for the first time, visitors can go out by the rear entrance to admire the powerful mediaeval wall of the original Barbarano residence that Palladio had to modify. More in general, visitors can see the palace through fresh eyes thanks to a series of annotations displayed at key points in the building. To represent other aspects of architectural culture, one wing of the Palladio Museum hosts temporary exhibitions. The principal information resource in the Palladio Museum is the Palladio Library, a database that brings together and links up all the material accumulated in years of research by the Palladio Centre: drawings, the photo library on Palladio architecture, surveys conducted over fifty years in campaigns to measure Palladio's buildings, rare books, and a series of multimedia and virtual models organized in a geodatabase. Information in the library can be accessed from several areas in the Palladio Museum. The Palladio Museum is a place in which thinking about architecture is fostered. It s a place for working on Palladio, without modernizing him and even less without suggesting him as a formal model for today. It explores the past using the tools of accurate historical reconstruction with special care being taken over context, which is indispensable in trying to understand a world that is distant and faded but also close and very concrete, every time that we walk among palaces, pillars and churches built centuries ago. The Palladio Museum s mission is to explore the origins of themes and concepts also found in the architecture of today by describing and discussing them with a view to creating a cultural platform for the architecture of tomorrow. So far the research projects have dealt with communication, technology, the relationship between economy and landscape, and the design of complex organisms. These were key topics for Palladio and they informed his vision in the Quattro Libri and in his urban projects, country villas and Venetian churches. And I believe that these themes also feature on the contemporary agenda. 5

Fig. 1. Mostra del Palladio, Centro Palladio in Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza, 1973 Fig. 2. Andrea Palladio 1508-1580. The Portico and the Farmyard Arts Council of Great Britain and the Centro Palladio at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1975 6

Fig. 3. Mostra critica delle opere di Michelangelo held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in spring 1964 Fig. 4. The Palladio Museum (photo Filippo Romano) 7

Fig. 5. The Palladio Museum (photo Filippo Romano) 8