Written Architecture: the Rise and Fall of the Ideal City

This is the English version of an article to be published in Humanize Magazine, a bilingual (Spanish/ English) magazine about the arts in general and indie arts in particular. Check out the website, it's awesome.

www.humanizemag.com

And here goes the article:

The exhibition hall at the Fine Arts Circle in Madrid was dark, and only the artifacts were well lit as if to put even more emphasis on something that stands out anyway. That something was mock ups of buildings and cities described in famous works of world literature, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the One Thousand and One Nights and Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, on to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and up to Clarín’s The Regent’s Wife, Emile Zola’s Travail, Kafka’s The Castle and Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles. Curated by Juan Calatrava from the Technical School of Architecture in Granada and by Winfried Nerdinger from the Technical University in Munich, the exhibition Written Architecture is visiting Spain after a very similar version, Architektur wie sie in Buche steht, was presented in Munich in 2006.

The project is a dialogue between text and matter, between books, quotes and architectural models. Each model is accompanied by an early edition of the book it refers to. In addition to that, the walls of the gallery are replete with quotes from some of those books, turning the visit into a holistic experience of reading ideas and descriptions and then seeing their material execution. As if to make matters even more complicated, each mock up was created by a different architect or student of architecture. The dialectic format and the fragmentary approach reveal great humbleness and thoughtfulness on the part of the curators. Had the exhibition consisted only of mock ups, its purpose would have been too wide. After all, how do you encompass almost three millennia worth of writing and simply exhibit the architecture described in it? And how do you cast a judgment or a conclusion in a project like this? The answer is: you can’t. And Written Architecture doesn’t do that. Written Architecture poses questions, brings the texts to life in a new light and lets the visitors decide what their take home messages are.

There is nothing new to the concept that literature has an influence on all areas of society; that it has initiated, altered and did away with doctrines and ideologies. After all, Sigmund Freud himself claimed that he got his early ideas about psychoanalysis from literature. However, Written Architecture displays a different sort of literary influence, because it departs from the text, filters it through another artists’ consciousness and then turns it into a palpable production. Thus, each architectural model is a work of art based on another work of art. And this is what I find so innovative about this exhibition. It creates a space that brings together literary and scientific (architectural) imagery, a stage where both literature and architecture are protagonists in an unresolved dialogue.

The thing that struck me the most was the divide between earlier architecture and what comes after the 16th and 17th centuries. Up until this time, most mock ups display carefully organized cities and structures, with radial or rectilinear streets and clear centers. These represent the architecture of power of the Antiquity and the ideal cities of the Renaissance, all panoptical structures in which the center controls and watches over the peripheries. These were cities with Christian, Mesopotamian or Greek gods watching over them. This is Plato’s Atlantis, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas solis (The City of the Sun) or Filarete’s ideal city, Sforzinda, described in his Treatise on Architecture (1463).

After the 16th-17th centuries, the age of Protestantism, what follows are godless cities and structures. Starting with the mock up of John Milton’s pandemonium from Paradise Lost (1667)- which was an obvious reference to Solomon’s temple and depicted the dangers of allowing the demons of knowledge to interfere with faith, to the model of Emile Zola’s desolate industrial city in Travail (1901) and the prison-cell representation of Umberto Eco’s abbey in The Name of the Rose (1980), modern literature inspired a dread of organization and hierarchy in architecture. Centers and grids become claustrophobic and life in such spaces is unbearable. The architecture of the past is now a utopia or a dystopia, subject of futuristic novels such as Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943), Ernst Jünger’s Heliopolis (1949) or Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions (1879).

So what about us, cosmopolites living in today’s major cities? What kind of a city is Madrid nowadays? Its imposing beauty and organized chaos is reminiscent of a different age, with an unquestionable god and a well defined hierarchy of powers. However, its new inhabitants turned religious buildings into art centers and built botanical gardens in train stations. I shall leave you with the question that crossed my mind upon leaving the exhibition. To what extent are we changing the old urban architecture and how much does it actually dictate how we live our modern lives?