ZERO
PIRANESI
SAC
JOURNAL
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CONTENTS
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EDITORIAL
ZERO PIRANESI
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INTRODUCTION PETER TRUMMER
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ESSAY PETER TRUMMER
ZERO ARCHITECTURE
A NEO-REALIST APPROACH TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY
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PORTFOLIO PETER EISENMAN
FIELD OF DIAGRAMS
THE PROJECT OF CAMPO MARZIO
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ESSAY-PORTFOLIO STEPHEN TURK
MARTIAN FIELDS
INTRODUCTION TO A FIELD OF DREAMS
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ESSAY-PORTFOLIO JEFFREY KIPNIS
CAMPO MARZIO REDUX A FIELD OF DREAMS
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ESSAY MICHAEL YOUNG
THE PARADIGM OF PIRANESI’S CAMPO
MARZIO ICHNOGRAPHIA
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ESSAY GIACOMO PALA
PARACHRONISM THE PARADIGM OF TIME
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ESSAY PARSA KHALILI
CAMPUS MARTIUS EAST
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ESSAY MARRIKKA TROTTER
FLAT, HETEROGENEOUS, AND LIVELY
PIRANESI’S DIVERSE MANIERE D’ADORNARE
I CAMMINI
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ESSAY PETER TRUMMER
ZERO PIRANESI
TOWARDS A NEW DEVICE OF OBJECT PLANS
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INTRODUCTION
THE AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2017 & 2018
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AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2017
MIN JEONGSUN
DISPERSED FAMILY PARADISE
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AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2017
VIVIANE EL KMATI
LOCAL ECHOES
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AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2017
LIDA BADAFAREH
SCIENCE CITY
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AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2018
NATALY VOINOVA
GOOGLE EARTH
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AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2018 HONOURABLE MENTION
ANNA ARLYAPOVA
AUTHOR, READER AND A SEARCH FOR
THE NEW
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AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2018 HONOURABLE MENTION
SHURUQ TRAMONTINI
THE POETIC JUSTICE OF POOR OBJS
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PROJECT AND IMAGE CREDITS
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COLOPHON
EDITORIAL
Once in a while the history of architecture is opened like a treasure trove with a cornucopia of opportunities for our speculative indulgence. Sometimes these excursions into the recent or distant past serve to expand existing or introduce new ideas and paradigms. Sometimes history is revised or altogether re-written; sometimes these excursions fuel the discipline’s productive momentum with conjectural theories and speculative design. This issue, guest edited by Peter Trummer, does the latter.
Based on his passionate explorations of architecture in relation to the city, Trummer turns to the 18th century architect and artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Piranesi is known for his etchings of Rome and imaginary prison scenes, and his work has been frequently the subject of analyses and ruminations about architecture and the city. Time and again Piranesi’s work has stimulated the imagination of architects and artists as well as writers. So is also the case for Trummer. His fascination with Piranesi centres on the etchings of Campo Marzio in Rome and, specifically, the print with the plan. Or, more correctly stated, Trummer’s interest is not only this specific plan by Piranesi but the entire and specific disciplinary history that has unfolded in its wake.
This history is vast, and on the modest number of pages
that follow, only so much of it fits. Trummer has invited a few
contributions that date some years back but that are seminal
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to the recent and contemporary discourse on architecture and the city. Other contributions to this issue are original. Echoing how Piranesi’s work on Campo Marzio has been read and inter-
preted over time, the sum of contributions herein make up
a minuscule, kaleidoscopic view on Piranesi’s Campo Marzio and the opportunities it still might offer architecture today.
Trummer’s theoretical musings and practical design speculations reflect this history in its own way. Assimilating a number of paradigmatic positions relative to Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, including two presented in this issue, Trummer rigor-
ously collapses select strains of other architects’ readings of Piranesi’s project to produce what he names a Zero Piranesi. The ‘zero’ in this, to quote Trummer, ‘refers to a realist ap-
proach to architecture, which suggests that we will never know what the truth of a project is.’ In turn, Zero Piranesi sets forth an architectural methodology based on a theory of replace-
ment and aesthetic drift - that is, a loosening and exchange of aesthetic features between objects which also leads to the emergence of new sets of qualities. With it, Piranesi’s plan of Rome is transformed into Trummer’s Object Plan - a plan where multiple authors’ various positions are absorbed. The Object Plan contains multifarious ideas which form a crust of architectural speculations accumulated from within.
Thus, practically speaking, Trummer’s approach sets adrift readings, qualities and eventually propositions that belong
perhaps to Piranesi, perhaps to what his Campo Marzio has inspired. Regardless where they specifically belong, they make up the accrued and transformational history of the discipline anchored in Piranesi’s project. To begin with, this was the rendering of Rome’s history, but presumably a dubious and speculative version of that.
It is precisely this cornucopia of speculations based on Piranesi’s Campo Marzio that Trummer revels in and this issue celebrates. The speculations are theoretical and practical and a tribute to architecture and architectural design as a discipline. Trummer’s issue of the SAC Journal celebrates Piranesi’s vision of ancient Rome and the disciplinary search and exploitation of the endless realities within his Campo Marzio plan.
As has become tradition, this fifth issue of the SAC Journal also includes a selection of the best projects produced recently by students in SAC’s postgraduate master programme.
The six selected projects, three from 2017 and three from 2018, were the award winning projects of the annual AIV
Master Thesis Prize, which is generously made possible by the association Architekten- und Ingenieur Verein - Frankfurt (AIV) and their members. Meanwhile, only the economy of pub-
lishing in this given format prohibits making public the many impressive projects nominated for the prize and that were not awarded.
However, the occasion to publish the award winning projects is important both in terms of docu-mentation and dissemination of what is explored and produced within SAC’s programme. The projects clearly reflect SAC’s academic and disciplinary aspirations, but they also set out their own spec-
ulations on the trajectory of contemporary architecture and how we can imagine and design it.
The award winning projects are chosen by a small jury comprised of by members of AIV. Over the years, it has become clearly evident that their choices largely reflect how the End-of-Year jury panels have assessed the thesis projects at the close of the academic year. However, the AIV jury makes its decisions not knowing the outcome of the prior End-of-Year assessment. This fact serves as confirmation of architecture as a discipline beyond forms of subjectivity. In and of itself it should be celebrated as yet another affirmation of contemporary disciplinary concerns - this time concerning a consensus about qualities.
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PETER TRUMMER
INTRODUCTION
Il Campo Marzio Dell’ Antica Roma (1762) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi is a unique document to the discipline of architecture. Its importance in the discipline parallels that of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) to the arts or, perhaps, Haydn’s (1732-1809) sonatas to music. The centrepiece of Piranesi’s Campi Martiii volume is the famous Ichnographiam Campi Martii Antiquae Urbis or plan-map of the Campus Marzio, the low-lying, ancient Roman district around which the Tiber River twists and turns. The first version of the Ichnographia dates to 1757. With its subsequent inclusion in Piranesi’s book on Rome, it has become widely known and referred to in architecture.
Given Piranesi’s careful measurements and documen-
tation of Rome, his Campo Mar-zio has been understood, amongst other, as an archeological project, his contribution
to the contemporaneous discourse on architecture, as much
as a wild speculation on the condition and future of architec-
ture and the city. The interpretations are too numerous and varied to fully account for. This, however, is merely a symp-
tom for how the portfolio of etchings gradually has become so central to the discipline. Ideas and projects revolve around it like planets around the sun. With time, Piranesi’s plan of Campo Marzio has become our law, testament, command-
ment, or oracle. It is also simply one of the most beautiful drawings we know. This plan by one of the greatest architects and artist of the 18th century has become the most known,
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thought about, debated, researched and copied project in the discipline. Any architect who ever wanted to say something about architecture, has used Piranesi’s plan as her or his inspiration or sparring partner - or just as an excuse to test own ideas.
Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma contained forty-eight plates. However, the plan drawing, Ichnographiam Campi Martii Antiquae Urbis, was never conventional plan. Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, the short name for the drawing, is not a conventional archeological representation of Rome, nor is it a representation of Piranesi’s contemporaneous Rome. It presents a city without streets or infrastructure, a city only of architecture. Buildings butt against buildings, architectural elements are strewn like densely grown wildflowers in a field, emergent spatial organisations overlap and penetrate one another. It may present an image of an imagined city; it may also be his defence of Roman architecture against Greek which some of his contemporaries advocated as a superior reference. The Campo Marzio may also be a critique of the political idea embedded within Giovanni Battista Nolli’s map of Rome from 1748, the so-called Nolli Map, which divides the city into a space of architecture and a space of the urban. In Piranesi’s Campo Marzio there is no distinction between the two, no distinction between architecture and the urban The space of the drawing has no ground and no infrastructure other than that echoing the blankness of the tablet on which the architectural figures were etched.
With Campo MarzioPiranesi’s project emerges with capital “P” - an architectural “Project“ that is in opposition to practice where the world external to the discipline and thus the client define architecture. With Piranesi the architect imagines and defines the world.
For this reason and since the Enlightenment, architects - generation after generation, over and over again - have an-
nounced their position, thesis or their own “Project” by drawing ideas, rules and formulas from Piranesi’s Campo Marzio. Every idea that has been thrown onto it, has been simultaneously absorbed and rebuffed. It has generated a history made by architects through architecture. It has also made architects as much as architecture. Piranesi’s plan emerges as a Hyperobject- what the philosopher Timothy Morton has described as ‘objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity.’ I imagine it like a black hole, something that contains all, from which we all emerge, and eventually all return to - except, this is not about the limits of astrophysics; it is architecture.
To reveal this so-to-speak universe within Piranesi’s Campo Marzioand the history that it has generated, what follows is an attempt to stake out the “zero-ness” of this plan: the endless disciplinary search of the architecture that is embedded in
and generated from it. However, any attempt at capturing an essence in the object of interest is bound to fail. Campo Marzio
eludes all attempts at access and being fully revealed. Yet, it is nevertheless a project.
The project, which this publication is a part of, also suggests a pedagogy. While celebrating the moment in architectural history that Piranesi’s work and especially his Campo Marzioplan manifest, there emerges an interest in how architecture is rendered and cities are planned through a particular form of analytical drawing. That is not to say that there will be a singular mode of drawing - as some of the contributions herein testify to - yet there are modes of thinking and operating through drawing that surpass the more immediate consumption of images. It is also an unrepentant affirmation of the discipline of architecture. Hence, regardless of representational form, the pedagogy arises from the specifics of projects and - to borrow the idea of a project with capital “P” - from the discipline of “Architecture.”
The issue that I have put together include two contributions that were exhibited at the Venice Ar-chitecture Biennale in 2012. These are respectively the seminal projects by Peter Eisenman and by Jeffrey Kipnis with Stephen Turk and José Oubrerie, ex-
hibited as part of The Piranesi Variationsthat Eisenman curated
in response to an invitation by David Chipperfield, the director
of the Biennale with the overall theme of Common Ground. In
fact, Eisenman delivered two projects for The Piranesi Varia-
tions, one conducted with students at Yale School of Architec-
ture and one produced in his office. The former, The Project of
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Campo Marzio, comprised of a large golden model of Campo Marzio which was developed on the basis of Piranesi’s Ichnographia. The other project, Field of Diagrams, entailed Eisenman and colleagues imbuing Piranesi’s Campo Marzio with an organisation produced by a set of diagrams. Specifically, a four-square diagram was divided into a subset of nine-square diagrams and deployed both horizontally and vertically onto Piranesi’s drawing through series of transformational operations. The two projects led by Eisenman are presented herein in a common portfolio consisting of drawings and photographs of the models. Especially the Field of Diagrams is of interest here. Eisenman suggests that Piranesi’s Campo Marzio does not have a diagram and that ‘a proliferation of diagrams over the entire site at various scales’ thus lends the space ‘a potential organisation.’
Kipnis and colleagues worked with students at the Ohio State University to deliver A Field of Dreams for The Piranesi Variations. The project was subtitled An Architectural Allegory ‘wherein,’ as Kipnis puts it, ‘the erotics, the passions, perversions, and spectacles of ancient Rome so perfectly frozen by Piranesi’s etchings are reanimated as a morality play for contemporary archi-tecture.’ The playful and saturated design of the project explored on one hand the ‘“groundlessness” of contemporary global culture’ based on Piranesi’s des-tabilisation of the historic legacy and status of the ground in his Campo Marzio. On the other hand, the project staged a ‘fictional tableau’ with a select, speculative roster of architectural figures, players and characters. The latter was inspired by and made in recognition of John Hejduk’s project Victims (1984). The players were in part designed with reference to Piranesi’s architectural elements in the Campo Marzio plan, in part to recent and historical projects by other architects.
The presentation of A Field of Dreams herein does not do justice to the extended research for the project, nor its richness in detail and design intricacy. Moreover, the interests herein is principally in the figures, players and characters. The visual material is accompanied by Turk’s introduction to the project and a shorter text by Kipnis that outlines his idea of how ground is transformed into land, then datum, before it becomes a series of fields, each stage historically produced through transformational political forces. All the material presented has been extracted from a booklet that more fully describes the impressive project. However, while the presentation herein is in no measure complete, the importance of the project becomes clear, both for its speculative take on Piranesi’s work as well as its contemporary value - almost eight years after it was shown in Venice.
Examining Piranesi’s Campo Marzio in graphic detail,
Michael Young’s essay lends a further argument for under-
standing the 18th century set of etchings as ‘a speculation on
architecture in relation to architecture’ - that is, above all
else as a disciplinary concern. In The Paradigm of Piranesi’s
Campo Marzio Ichnographia, Young examines how the work
destabilises conventional phenomena and elements in ar-
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chitectural representation. Through comparative analyses where he references, amongst other, the Nolli Map of Rome as well as latter-day projects by contemporary architects, Young assesses graphical poché and entourage, architectural elements’ relation to the ground as much as to each other in Piranesi’s vision of ancient Rome. Eventually he argues that Piranesi’s Campo Marzio may be understood as ‘a critical statement regarding architecture and the city’ through which a paradigm shift opens and aligns itself with a parafictional reading of reality.
Another text contribution, Parachronism, is by Giacomo Pala. Based on what he argues is Piranesi’s own speculative and conjectural use of history, Pala attempts to construct a new historical paradigm, a parachronistic use of the past. Pala’s parachronism centres on how history, the way that we read the past, is always a construction in the present given the needs and ambitions of its authors. This cannot be reduced to relativism since it engages with the past. Pala uses Piranesi’s Campo Marzio as well as Piranesi’s work as a restorer and dealer of antiquities to build his case. History is not a firm and stable entity, and in relating to and using it, architecture emerges not merely concerned with the design of form and space but also the design of time.
Parsa Khalili’s Campus Martius East provides a comparative case for Piranesi’s treatment of Rome by analysing Rome’s historical, alternate and eastern capital, Constantinople, and transferring features of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio to this city. Khalili’s project is documented in text and drawings and focuses on Constantinople’s different, ‘introverted definition of monumental-ity’ and the concomitant urban fabric. The analysis goes through detailed historical differences between the cities, reflecting both political and cultural conditions. Thus, on one hand, the project sorts eastern and western traditions from one another. However, it also renders the formal differences in architectural and urban terms between two historically and geographically close locations. Eventually, Khalili argues, his project is ‘projective’ and revolves around the development of representational techniques appropriate to its location. In this manner it makes a case for contemporary practice beyond the textual discursive.
Lastly, Marikka Trotter presents her Flat, Heterogenous, and Lively: Piranesi’s Diverse Maniere D’Adornare I Cammini. The “site” of her analysis is explained by the direct translation of the title of Piranesi’s publication, Diverse Manners of Orna-
menting Chimneys, a book from which Trotter addresses three plates with renditions of respective etchings by the artist. At first, we might think we are far re-moved from Piranesi’s vision of ancient Rome. However, as Trotter examines the plates with scrutinising attention to detail, it gradually becomes clear that how Piranesi addressed architectural interiors and ornamentation is closely related to how he presented his vision of Rome. Trotter comes away from her attentive analysis and description with an affirmative take on our contemporary con-
PETER TRUMMER INTRODUCTION
dition; she celebrates the saturated and vibrant multiplicity of objects and realities to which we belong. Trotter describes this in terms of ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘flat ontology,’ two terms that apply equally well to Piranesi’s advice on interior decoration as to his renderings of ancient Rome. They also apply to our present-day culture and frame theoretical and conceptual currents within the discipline.
This issue attempts to report from these worlds of mul-
tiplicity. What is at stake is the collapse of objects and forms without undoing but celebrating their differences. Histories and “grounds” against which things are read are destabilised. Yet, it is nevertheless possible to inhabit these worlds by im-
pregnating them with an organisation through reading and drawing. Piranesi offers a ground zero for this endeavour. In particular his Campo Marzio is a case in point of what it means to erase, assimilate and construct at one and the same time. The locus of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio is twofold. First it is Rome and this city’s particular history. With his Campo Marzio it opens up to novelty. The many readings of his project attest to this. However and second, the interiority thus constructed is returned to architecture and becomes an attractor for all kinds of speculations. In other words, there in no longer such thing as Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, there is only an increasing aggregation of readings, decodings and speculations that tangentially relate to what Piranesi may have intended. This is what I have termed Zero Architecture and here, specifically, Zero Piranesi.
I make two attempts at approaching and defining this herein. One is in the form of the essay called Zero Architecture. With it I propose a neo-realist approach to the contemporary city. The second is the concluding essay, Zero Piranesi, which also reports on the ongoing research project with the same name. Here I present an architectural pedagogy comprising of exchanging aesthetic qualities of plans with qualities of other objects. To this end, I frivolously make use of all kind of plans emanating from Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, including the two projects presented after this introduction. With such an appropriation I produce what I call an Object Plan believing - as it were - that I do so in the spirit of Piranesi. However, as they say and what the history of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio suggests, only time will tell.
NOTES
1) This text was first published in LOG 31, Spring/Summer 2014.
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PETER TRUMMER INTRODUCTION
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PETER TRUMMER is an architect and educator whose research revolves around the idea of “the city as architecture” and “architecture as the city.” He is professor and Head of the Institute for Urban Design & Planning at the University of Innsbruck. Trummer is also the Heinz und Gisela Friedrich Stiftungs Guest Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he leads the design research programme in the studio Architecture and Urban Design, and visiting professor at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He was Head of the Associative Design Program at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2004 to 2010. Trummer practiced architecture with UN Studio from 1996 till 2001, and his work has been exhibited, amongst other places, at the Venice Biennale in 2006 and 2012.
PETER TRUMMER
ZERO ARCHITECTURE
A NEO-REALIST APPROACH
TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF
THE CITY
The city is the largest human artefact we know. The city remains man’s greatest work of art.1 The city can be seen as the last stage of Gilbert Simondon’s fourfold process of the individuation of the world: “the physical,” “the biological,” “the psychic” and “the collective.”2 First our planet emerged as a physical entity within our solar system. On top of the physical world arose the biological world with its fauna and flora. Out of the biological world emerged the psychic world with the emergence of the human species. The last stage of the fourfold process of individuation is the emergence of collectives, or, as Manuel De Landa calls it, assemblages3 of populations of people, networks, and organisations which give rise to infrastructures of buildings, streets, and various conduits for the circulation of matter - namely, our cities.
THE CITY AS A HYPEROBJECT
The city is not only made by humans, it also made us. Aristotle says so in his well-known passage on Greek civilisa-
tion’s invention of the city-state: ‘Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a polit-
ical animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is
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