Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari

The Pleasure of a Demonstration

Sam Ridgway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Marco Frascari believed that architects should design thoughtful buildings capable of inspiring their inhabitants to have pleasurable and happy lives. A visionary Italian architect, academic and theorist, Frascari is best-known for his extraordinary texts, which explore the intellectual, theoretical and practical substance of the architectural discipline. As a student in Venice during the late 1960s, Frascari was taught and mentored by Carlo Scarpa. Later he moved to North America with his family, where he became a fulltime academic. Throughout his academic career, he continued to work on numerous architectural projects, including exhibitions, competition entries, and designs for approximately 35 buildings, a small number of which were built. As a means of (re)constructing the theatre of imaginative theory within which these buildings were created, Sam Ridgway draws on a wide selection of Frascari's texts, including his richly poetic book Monsters of Architecture, to explore the themes of representation, demonstration, and anthropomorphism. Three of Frascari's delightful buildings are then brought to light and interpreted, revealing a sophisticated and interwoven relationship between texts and buildings.

1 Representation Building Drawings and Drawing Buildings

DOI: 10.4324/9781315567624-2

The art of architecture is based on imaginative representation.¹

Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture

In his article, “Architects Never Eat Your Maccheroni without a Proper Sauce!: A Macaronic Meditation on the Anti-Cartesian Nature of Architectural Imagination,” Marco Frascari tells a story about his early teaching experiences as an assistant with Carlo Scarpa in Venice at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV).² He recounts the macaronic (a mixture of high and low languages) conversations that took place over the “delightfully educative lunches”³ in the Trattoria del Gaffaro, a restaurant close to the IUAV where, “during the days devoted to the review of student work for Scarpa’s design courses, the Professore and his assistants enjoyed their lunch.”⁴ Conversation sometimes began by delving into the problems caused by a view of architecture “as a cloven world bounded by design and construction.”⁵ Scarpa selected the dish to be served to everyone at the lunch and a comment about how the food was prepared or the way it tasted often started a discussion about architecture. As the group had just spent the morning critiquing student design projects, the topic of drawing would inevitably surface.

Frascari explains that students entering Scarpa’s third-and-fourth-year design studios at IUAV learned on the school’s grapevine that “a major change had to take place in their design habits.” This related to the way their designs were drawn; specifically, they had to change from using china ink on heavy translucent vellum – “the favored method elaborated by the architects of Italian rationalism” – to “Bristol Boards or similar material using a range of colored pencils and pens.” Confrontingly, any use of color to realistically render materials was discouraged. Too often, however, students produced drawings with “light blue skies, red bricks, light green glass-panes and gray concrete, black poché and terracotta parterre.” These drawings “unfailingly … dissatisfied and frustrated Scarpa who, at the Gaffaro lunch, urged his assistants to explain to students that the colors used in the drawings were not to suit a process of materials identification or to give pseudo-effects of tridimensionality.” Instead, students were required to use color in ways that transformed the drawn surface into a “glimmering receptacle of architectural desire” rather than drawings becoming “frozen mirrors denying any reflection of architectural perceptions.” In Frascari’s words, “a fecund account of Scarpa’s request for factual lines and non-factual coloring is that architects, in tracing colored lines on paper, are not giving transparent images but synesthetic notations.” Architects use drawings to “figure out dwellings that are bundles of intertwined sensory perceptions, which determine human thinking.”⁶

In Frascari’s view, drawings that attempt to be realistic, in this case in the use of color, are frozen mirrors. Instead of helping to figure out or explore how a building might engage all the senses of its inhabitants, these drawings are locked into the visual realm only. Frascari likens them to the “plastic fish and rice displayed in the windows of many sushi bars.” They may look good “to a non-synesthetic eye, but there is no way for us to know if they project any valid quality of the real ones since the rules of cutting, baking, or cooking are not transubstantiated in the casting and coloring of plastic.”⁷

The analogical relationship between food and architecture is one of Frascari’s favorite topics, and the culinary setting of this story is important. His article explores the damage the Cartesian world, cloven into mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa), has done to the imagination and construction of buildings, something that, leaving aside the issue of fast food, has not occurred so catastrophically to the imagination and production of food. Cooks cannot work only in the intellectual and visual realms. To be satisfying and enjoyable, food must appeal to all the body’s senses, and to achieve this, cooks need to understand their ingredients and possess the skills, knowledge and imagination to transform them into food by using certain combinations, proportions and techniques.

Frascari’s story explores the sensory and synesthetic parallels that can be drawn between the production and enjoyment of food, and the production and inhabitation of buildings. In relation to how sensory qualities might be represented in recipes and in architectural drawings and then translated into cooked or built outcomes, it is worth noting that the main way of representing a dish of food is a written recipe, which often includes a photograph of the final result. It is common knowledge, however, that following a recipe does not guarantee success; it is a guide only. A good cook will be able to interpret the recipe and adjust the proportions, cooking times and so on according to the availability and nature of ingredients and the occasion at which the food is to be served. Written recipes, photographs and drawings of food are produced after or during the successful cooking of a dish. This is true of both new versions of old recipes and entirely new creations. As Frascari notes, “The synesthetic experience of eating and cooking cannot be merely put on a piece of paper, but it results from and becomes a demonstration.”⁸

In relation to architectural drawings and the use of color, Frascari suggests that the use of non-factual colors helps stimulate the imagination, provocation and revelation of buildings that engage all the senses. The imaginative use of color stimulates a synesthetic engagement with the design project. He uses the term “synesthetic” to mean a crossing over between the senses: “the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses.”⁹ In the case of architectural drawings, the crossing is mainly between vision and the other senses, in particular the sense of touch. Looking at the drawing gives us a sense of the proposed building’s tactile and spatial qualities. The process of creating an evocative drawing that aims to “emulate the human phenomenology of perception”¹⁰ allows us to develop our understanding of what it will feel like to inhabit the physical building.

Frascari’s proposition is that we all constantly experience sensory crossovers in our daily life, but they are so natural that we are mostly unaware they are happening. To create buildings that properly address the body–building relationship, however, architects need to employ representational techniques that bring synesthetic experiences to the forefront of their practice. This is similar to the way cooks use their skills and various cooking techniques to create dishes that not only look enticing but also have pleasing textures, tastes, aromas, and even sounds: the crunch of bread being cut, the crack when breaking through the caramel topping on a crème brûlée, or Chinese sizzling meat or prawns for example. Sound, however, is probably more commonly understood in relation to cooking than eating food. In the kitchen, cooks become very attuned to the sound of their dishes bubbling, gurgling, sizzling and crackling as they cook, and this is perhaps more comparable to the technique of using unconventional colors on drawings as a means of understanding and predicting the feeling of being in the constructed building, since both are sensory techniques of production.

While Frascari acknowledged that there are many reasons for the well-documented failings of much modern and contemporary architecture, he singled out a poor understanding of architectural representation as one of the main problems. In the introduction to From Models to Drawings he writes:

In an age in which unconsidered consumerist interests have exploited architecture, when a hasty abuse of public and private edifices has reached institutional intensity, and when buildings are the target of technologies of absurd variations, it is imperative to re-evaluate the graphical procedures involved in the conceiving of buildings. It is vital to recognize the processes of conversion and transformation taking place within the highly undisciplined discipline of architectural imagination, in order to provide architecture with a measure of resilience and resistance.¹¹

His main concern was not the possible extinction of hand drawing or the current hegemony of the digital, but the demise of proper architectural imagination, which he attributed in part to the unimaginative state of architectural representation. This state of affairs has been evolving since the Renaissance, and can be at least partially attributed to a false understanding of the relationship between drawings and buildings. This false understanding has many elements, but one of its key constituents is the current belief that there should be an exact, almost one-to-one relationship between architectural drawings and the resulting building. This belief has undoubtedly reached new levels with the advent of photo-realistic computer graphics and ultra-precise construction drawings “fulfilling the sole purpose of mechanically describing visual appearances that are utterly insignificant from a properly imaginative way of architectural thinking.” The attempt to be visually exact, a superficial procedure that becomes an end in itself and excludes other important modes of representation, is now standard practice and has become enshrined in the profession and in law. The latest and most extreme manifestation of this is the development of building information modeling (BIM), a form of 3D digital representation that aims to completely remove uncertainty from the drawing–building relationship and to thus increase the efficient production of buildings. Frascari writes that “the new electronic imaging prevents imagining, and the resulting representations promote acts of merely logical ‘thinking about architecture’ rather than bringing architects, contractors, clients and critics to think within architecture.”¹²

While he understood and acknowledged the immense forces working against the production of worthwhile (non-trivial) buildings, Frascari’s suggestion that we should think and work within the discipline of architecture is a strategy that can help provide a firewall against their more damaging effects. He believed that, by gaining a better understanding of architectural knowledge, including representation, it is possible for architects to design better buildings. This optimism and the design strategies he proposed are a distinguishing feature of his theoretical writing, teaching, and professional practice. Despite his knowledge of the problems, he remained optimistic about the possibility of change for the better. A much more comprehensive and theorized understanding of architectural representation, particularly digital representation, is axiomatic. This view is supported by Alberto Pérez-Gómez, who claims that without this understanding we fail to address the possibility that, for example: “Digital media merely provide much more powerful tools to continue with ways of conceiving and making architecture that have already failed.”¹³

One of the compelling insights Frascari offers in Monsters of Architecture into the relationship between drawings and buildings is the characterization of drawings as either pre-posterous or pro-sperous. This is a strong invocation for architects to think about drawing in relation to past, present and future buildings. Describing architectural drawings as “semiotic tools that make tangible what is intangible,”¹⁴ he refers to the changes that have occurred between the traditional (pre-Renaissance) and modern eras:

The architectural project is based on the processes of sign transformation taking place in the translation of a building into a drawing and, vice versa, in the translation of a drawing into a building. The traditional interpretation of this translation is that an architectural drawing is a graphic representation of an existing, or a future building. The present modern and post-modern condition of the understanding of the actors in these translations is that buildings are representations of the drawings that preceded them.¹⁵

He goes on to portray the traditional method of drawing buildings as pre-posterous (back-to-front) and proposes that nowadays, since this is no longer possible, we should instead aim to make pro-sperous (promising) drawings that show the intent of a project, not a result. Pro-sperous drawings would, for example, replace the vast quantities of reductive, conventional working drawings he refers to as “scientific tools for presenting a future reality within an appearance of continuous and uniform order; they show a result, not the intent.”¹⁶

In Frascari’s interpretation of the classical and medieval (pre-posterous) relationship of drawing to building, in a very real sense the building preceded the drawing. The drawing was either a measured drawing or sketch of an existing building, or it was a drawing embedded within the construction process of a building project that was already well established, the final goal of which was well understood if not fully drawn. During the medieval period, for example, some basic drawings may have been made on parchment, as a means of initiating and guiding construction. Once construction began, these drawings were no longer needed and may have been scraped off the parchment so it could be reused. The plan of a building, particularly a complex sacred building like a cathedral, was not set out using angles, dimensions and geometries that had first been completely resolved and drawn. Instead the plan, which in the case of religious buildings would have been developed from complex sacred geometries, was drawn and resolved directly onto the site, perhaps using large compasses, strings, boards and other surveying and leveling devices.

Another form of construction-embedded drawing practice was the making of template drawings. These were often drawn or s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Color Plates
• Biographical Notes
• Foreword—David Leatherbarrow
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Representation: Building Drawings and Drawing Buildings
• 2 Demonstration: Making the Invisible Visible
• 3 Anthropomorphism: Human and Architectural Bodies
• 4 Master’s Apartment for the Class of 1925: Demonstrations and Monsters
• 5 Stanza Rossa: Dream House
• 6 The Villa Rosa: Angels and Angles
• Bibliography
• Index