The other Rationalism   By Ivo Tagliaventi

A vision of Europe: an exhibition of trends, no doubt. It was inspired by a previous one entitled A vision of Britain, held in London in 1989, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales. We now want to investigate thoroughly, to expand, to update the theme which has evoked so much surprise and also much controversy in a number of academic and professional circles; the theme which then had an effective starting point not so much for the authority of the promoter, but for the feeling spread among people, not only the British, of all social classes, who are starting to love cities again, to understand the importance of environmental conditions, to appreciate 'living' and totalizing nature.

As a kind of 'shipping point' in the broad ocean, the mare magnum of the architecture and town planning production of these last years; most of all, it is a chance to exchange ideas, within the given culture and the given history that we want to defend, expressly adopting the works presented as good references, as to reaffirm a few principles and fortify them sufficiently so as to modify on one side the already resigned monologue of many young architects relegated to the design-exercise and, on the other side, the deceptive methodology, at different levels, which is applied upon the urban and non-urban territory.

A trend of principles, goals, and even of fundamental methods, even if many-sided and many-colored in the expressive forms and techniques of detail linked to a single author's personality, a trend which - in Europe as well as in America and elsewhere - makes a number of qualified architects share the same passions, hopes and activities.

This cannot be a trend shared only by a few people if, despite thousands of obstacles, it arouses the interest of many sociologists and public managers in the Western World, it fascinates the most sensitive scholars of art, and it gains increasing approval by students of the schools of architecture.

After the purposeful statement of sharp observers of the urban phenomenon, it seems to us that the strict theorization of the city has been intensely characterized by poets of built-up space and by the therapeutic examples given by some of the most sensitive designers over the last years, it seems to us - we are saying - that the present moment is a moment of strong civil suggestion, of huge intellectual resources, but also a moment of great responsibility. We do not want to misrepresent premises and fail to fulfill the expectations of all those who, as a law of nature, really wish a 'rational' space.

This means that our 'shipping point' is now a point of no return, even if now the professional scene is still ruled by the dogmatic imitators of an international movement which has been dominant, if not practically undisputed, for over seventy years.

Opening the gateways to doctrines (the Charter of Athens?) and toppling heroes which, in any case, deserve all our respect, the success of a wide and thoroughly examined theme on the city and its design derives from the fact that the building has returned to the urban space with a precise public role, the fact that, once the technological neurosis had gone, it became topical again that the composition according to rules of proportions, rhythms, harmony, semantics of the whole - of the whole environment, not only of a 'monument-building' - is as valuable as that characterized by 'functional' hygienic, economical rules etc.. For many decades, people have obsessively insisted on this last idea, overlooking the value of form and of the reproducibility of vital forms.

This is certainly a conceptual and methodological question, based on causes and conditions whose convincing logic and connected developments we can neither deny nor ignore: we are referring to the redeeming aim of liberation from social injustice by means of industrialization and the Bauhaus relationship between project making and industrial production; a question to which the 1800's eclecticism and the heritage of Enlightenment have given a precise dogmatic asset, even if - as we will see later - it has weakened itself during the journeys through the miscellaneous axes of experimentation while torn inside by the contradictions between epistemological and aesthetic values, between ethical and economical principles.

Even if the system in itself is appropriate for some operational processes and in any case, necessary for knowing directly and precisely all the technical, economical and practical elements, we are convinced that, culturally, the separation of its elements is only negative and also damaging when, even for a single moment, one loses sight of the fundamental unity of the whole and is not driven by a strong scientific tension through which he can re-assemble that unity.

As an example of the organization of industrial territory, but as an independent category in its respect, zoning is a glaring example.

We are referring to those hundreds of very wide areas or industrial districts 'designed' with a wealth of rules, streets, squares, road-junctions in the City Plans, built with thousands of isolated, many-sided, 'workshop-like' buildings built without the least functional co-ordination; apart from the short periods of rush hours at the beginning or the end of work-shifts: always dead, barren cities, at night and even during the day. Nor are the handicraft areas better when considerable settlements and the related utilities are lacking.

This approach has provoked many as well as a few serious mistakes, upon which a great part of 20th century architecture and town planning have been produced, especially during the last forty years.

On the one hand, one has lazily - but also in a time-serving manner - let oneself be driven by the march of a 'revolution' of principles which, even though they were expressed in a completely different way, were typical of Sant'Elia's Futurism, denying - as a dogmatic presupposition - any value to history, experience, learning, and letting oneself go to fantastic, often weak and poor formulations. On the other hand, one has rejected every painstaking meditation, every relaxation on the secular sedimentation of styles and representations of functions. And the particular and subjective functionalism of the geometrical patterns 'at liberty' (asymmetry, most differentiated volume compositions, release of buildings from the road net, etc.) has been enhanced.

This, one must consider, has also been a consequence of a massive documentation and description research on architectural monuments carried out in the rationalist period, which has given illuminating information, but also - compare with the amount of work done - not exactly a big contribution to the global interpretation of the 'monument' in itself, and, therefore, not even to the critic's work.

The consequential link between the Modern Movement and Functionalism, which is the basis of Rationalism, has accordingly displayed its capacities, especially after the fertile contributions of the Masters, the initial enthusiasm of followers and even the power of logic (in the Latin sense of vis logicae) of commentators had disappeared.

When the Messianic strength of the foretold social redemption through an idyllic territorial asset has vanished in the routine of planning of further and further suburbs, more and more undifferentiated, lonely, good both at giving some shelter to the poorest classes, and also because of this, even more 'marginal' classes, and at favoring especially land speculators; when social costs have grown very high in economical, sanitary, psychological terms - the economical burden of services, the crime on the increase, the pollution rate, the feeling of frustration, etc. - and, on the contrary, the benefits for the individual as well as for the community have decreased; when the omnicomprehensive nature, which reminds one of Shelling's philosophy, has been offended beyond remedy inside and outside the city and the historical landscape has not only been vulgarly altered, but - rather incoherently - the romanticism of the landscape dear to Wordsworth and Coleridge has also been forgotten, and the defense of the little asphyctic tree - the green, the garden, the parks are really something else - has become the symbol of the last hope of survival; when man, sad and silent, has stopped communicating with his/her neighbor and even greeting him and knowing him in a number of hallucinatory urban quarters, only then the insurmountable limits of the 'modern' architectural and town planning conditions have revealed.

In that moment, all the contradictions of the 'rationalist' movement have revealed themselves with respect to absolute faith in Reason which is conceived and built by its own means. In that moment, people have kept on denying, it is true, the determining value with respect to sense and experience, to tradition and stylistic principles, but it has also been destroyed any chance of identifying Reason with the mathematical procedure; discipline, modesty, the science of order and measure, the rationality of coherence have all been abandoned.

And for the sake of pseudo-Reason, there has been a decline from high intellectual to low profit-making speculations.

When architectural Reason has demonstrated that it was unable to establish a coherent dialectical relationship between the Realities of architecture and town planning, the Rational has failed to become materialized throughout the design-experience, and, because of the confusion of all the dialogical terms, (casual) empiricism has been even more applied than rationalism, more (and not even pragmatic) experimentalism than systematic application of principles (e.g. the sun exposure of buildings, the shadow projection of tower buildings over low 'bar'-long ones, the use of modules co-ordinated in size, the standardization of forms and of building elements, etc.).

Axioms have been homologized, such as the demiurgic 'function' of the preliminary widespread survey on socio-economical-demographical-environmental realities which, indeed, has never been utilized for an attentive synthesis regarding needs, possibilities and advantages; and the subject has then been emphasized as an intermediary between the object and the project, whereas the rationalistic and utilitarian target of the project should have involved and ennobled the object.

At the same time, the artistic imagery (when one has been artistically working) has overcome the socio-political dimension of the rationalist program. The planning of needs has become a way to authoritarianism. Creativity has been dried up by formulas. The 'fourth state', product of the industrial revolution, has been relegated to dormitory suburbs built up through the deception of the industrialized building industry, on areas designed according to a politically neutral town planning, insensitive to the forms of industrial society.

Indeed, the fact that town planning has now become independent from architecture has favoured not only the conflictual multiplication of interlocutors with the organic space, but also, and most of all, the antithesis between natural space and walled space, meanwhile the interested abuses of the insidious distinction between the 'two cultures' has produced the misunderstandings (as well as the damages) of industrialization, of structuralism, of predominance of technical aspect.

The mania of profaning typical of the '20-'30's and the over-ambitious 'long-march' towards the ville radieuse which trod roughly on the relics, styles and symbols of the past (does the hosanned 'hygienic' clearance of many historic town centers, the demolitions of 'crumbling' buildings mean anything in order to make space for dull modern buildings?) how could these trends overturn in such a short time what was rooted inside the people's conscience, what had been thought and investigated thoroughly by generations of architect-thinkers, what had established, stratified and also slowly modified in the course of centuries, always keeping a logical relationship between the old and the new, giving the citizen the civil pride of belonging to a given urban reality of perhaps sectarian links, of perhaps dolorous events, of perhaps uncontrolled ambitions, of perhaps superstitious beliefs, but in any case, signs of a specific distinctly characterized culture born in the shadow of a tower or a dome?

It was fatal that the cosmopolitan aspect of the city soon

opposed itself to the local one and was followed by linguistic abuse, loss of distinctive as well as vernacular values and, in the end, by a general deteriorating provincialism often the provincialism of the 'masterpiece'. All this has taken place because people have been operating according to the post-enlightened pretension of a palingenetic catharsis which was produced by the mind of the prophet-Utopian, cradled in the factories and, beyond any contamination of 'pastist' schemes and stylistic elements, given vital force by new planning means which had used the zoning just as the classical tragedy had used the deus ex-machina (your fault, Tony Garnier, though surely unintentionally!). All this has happened because in accordance with the international logic of rationalism which considers the economical factors of big public and private works on the territory, as much as the supra-national dimension of the capitalist economy.

Besides, what was once the proficient content of the rationalist message, has been degraded by hear-say persons into careless results, so that historic town centers have been altered beyond remedy by 'functionalist' works, in that technical instruments of rationalism which have been here governed by the triumphant intrusion of motorized circulation. The surroundings of the city have frayed themselves in a disorderly fashion throughout the countryside. The countryside has been disfigured by an 'irrational' maze of roads, superhighways, motorways, fly-over bridges, junctions, caves, discharges, shopping malls, tanks. Villages and small city-like agglomerations have awkwardly swollen up like the Aesopian frog.*

And now? now, we think that there is the need to go back to the organic unity between the subject-man and the object-nature solely through the use of reason, which assigns a determined function to each site impossible to disconnect from the function of the whole, in terms of total fruition which is at the same time practical and spiritual, near and far, simultaneous and subsequent. That is why the art of making cities and architecture implies the task of stimulating, addressing, correcting, proposing human behavior in historic continuity and in organic flux within a culture.

As we know, around 1850, Horatio Greenough publicized an anti-neoclassical and anti-academic theory, mechanically transferred from bio-physical observations, which Francastel defined romantic naturism, "a kind of rudimentary compromise between the Rousseau's philosophy and some ideas taken from Curvier's, Darwin's, and Lamarck's discoveries", a theory set out in accordance with the axiom "the form follows the function". An axiom which was emphatically taken back by Louis Sullivan at the end of the last century, in the circle of the rationalist school of Chicago: "is it the eagle which flies away, the apple flower, the horse which paws, the ramified oak, the snake-shaped river, the clouds which run away, or the sun which, over all this, rises and sets down, the form is always the result of the function".

On the wings of these lyrical statements, Functionalism had a good hand among the different currents of thought, revivals included, from the end of 1800's to the '30's of the 20th century. A kind of march which cannot be stopped until the Rationalism of the Modern Movement had exasperated the basic concepts of the positivistic functionalism of the 19th cen., after which the first engaging contributions of ideas and the amount of works which in that period, thanks to skillful architects, descended to the territory as bright crystals which will remain noteworthy in the history of contemporary architecture. Rationalism has also supplanted the form to technical principle. It has assigned artistic value in the wake of static sincerity. It has assigned an absolute primacy to the building process over and above ways of expression. It has destroyed the relationship between the work and the complexity of Man, it has made matter the reality which ultimately acquires mastery over intuition. And it was unable to insert the value of technological data in the organic structure of the work, but instead pursued a structuralism and predominance of technical aspect which were ends in themselves, despite tiring dialectical alchemies in order to historicize the value of the technical data.

Functionalism, as both praxis and theory of function is not only the ability to make a building available to one or more users in the sense of the Vitruvian utilitas, that is, in the sense of practicability according to a strictly pre-established concrete need or in the sense of polyvalence and versatility of use. But, it is also the whole of the characteristics typical of a given school, providing for ideological and methodological foundations and certainly good achievements from a static, economical, technical, and managerial point of view, but also, and especially, of an aesthetical nature. It is the search for ways and means of performing pre-established tasks; it is the verification of the results achieved; it is the need for enduring a vital condition of a given work - and, with it, it is the persistence of a formal general trend - in the context of a cause-effect rapport, when the formal trend is acquired by a culture which expresses itself because of a need for beauty, composition, regularity, balance, solemn but simple style and composed serenity.

Functionalism is therefore an aspect of the attitude to 'function' in its widest sense.

At the time of the first German Rationalism, Adolf Behne pointed out that the rationalist is a rebel against the despotism of practical functionality, which is an end in itself, and, later, Lauwe warded off the risk of attributing "a too narrow and technical meaning to the term function, a meaning which represses any individual freedom, almost as if the issue were not to house human beings, but rather rats or rabbits". From here, one also derives the noble essence of the whole environment, in which the aesthetic role is consistent with the utilitarian one in the wide sense as much as the visual pleasure is useful for the process of refining sensibility, beyond any pure sensism.

It is obvious that town planning is a purely calligraphic exercise on territory, whereas architecture is merely simple building, if they are considered in an architectural town planning context, not in the sense of a reflection of both the interior and exterior human life or as an organic form complementary to its organic function of that life in the society, but as a function of coolly objectified social life, within which the complete standardization of inter-human relationships takes place.

So then, if town planning becomes conventional graphics, that is the freezing of prevalent interests of power and financial speculation, if architecture degrades itself into roles of simple building processes, perhaps disguised as wonderful technological artifices, then one comes to prefer the Edwin Lutyens' paradox(?), which says: "architecture begins where the function ends". But, if functionalism performs a task of satisfying moral needs, to re-enhance form, not as an intellectual mask of a material entity, but as a cultural expression of a civil reality, and of participating in the formation of a space which surpasses the physical requirements, to be 'rational' only in the execution of these tasks. If what is rational coherently answers to a principle, to a way of interpreting the legitimacy of things done or thought, to a consistency between utterances and performance, one can define oneself as a 'rationalist'; if one returns to concerting with history and therefore, at least for this, is freed from the theories which have defined the rationalism also on an aesthetic basis, from Descartes to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke and Kant and, not to mention Hegel, (but also the Modern Movement has never been linked to philosophical semantics) and freed from strict schematism, then one can also rightly define oneself as a 'rationalist'.

In any case, the versatile trend which is clearly displayed in the Exhibition A vision of Europe does not reveal anything new: it is not rather the popular longing for the convinced total pleasure of the urban space purified by the gratification of narcissistic authors.

Authors, perhaps, to which too many critics hungry for fame and desirous to be ˆ la page have over the last decade become officious. It does not discover the authentic aspects of the movement to towns and of the urbanism devoted to civil life conditions, which in any case, were already successfully treated between the 1500's and 1600's. It does not discover the harmonic rules for the volume combination, for the surface composition, for the use of colors, ornaments, rhythms, proportions which, since Athenian and Roman times have always made space 'beautiful'.

That trend uncovers nothing which is not already the property of the western historic town, not already a valuable heritage particularly from classical times: numerous examples, suggestions, stimuli; a masterful lesson regarding urban design, setting of 'monuments' and of 'spontaneous' architectures, public-private rapport, use of materials, organizational logic, and even mass production, geometrical standard, building technique.

And, therefore, what else can one invent, should one attempt to teach the 'savages', confuse more than what has already been confused, as if the fantasy products and the results of ideological disputes were at the same time for the good of all the citizens and for the fortunes of the city?

Besides, apart from Functionalism, function has always existed and in particular, the aim of representing a certain kind of society has always been assigned to the form-function. Still, during the centuries before Loos and the other preachers of Functionalism, the technical problems which concerned the (global) function of the work, have contributed to the expression of design rationality. Meanwhile, one has assumed as a support for the monumental magnitude and plasticity, the measure, the homogeneity, the coherence, the closed structure, the simultaneous perspective instead of scene succession, the whole perceptions instead of the segmentation of appearances, the joint and agreement among all the elements instead of their changing combination, the uniform unit of the building to which Hauser refers.

For all this, in Italy and in other western countries, where the critical temperament of the inhabitants is strong, the classical tradition has always been alive and today the need for an architectural and town planning renewal is expanding, a need aroused by the rebirth of the classical spirit.

This does not mean sentimental nostalgia of the past, a purely selective attention to memories and relics, a mechanical joining process between yesterday and today, our secret incapability to build up our imagery, but it is rather the need to verify, to select, to revive the signs of the urban Golden Age in which it would be possible not only to enjoy the present but also to program the future.

During this moment of awareness of environmental protection and of the particular traits of the individual Man, it is impossible to distinguish the naturalistic conception and fidelity to life's immanent laws, from a methodology which first observes and then represents the global reality scientifically. That means to say: "There is an absolute need to rationalize our work as town planners and architects".

* Translator's note: an Aesopian fable about a frog who died because it had tried to become as big as an ox.