Rainmaker

This may seem out of place but I don’t think that it is. I was walking along Marylebone Lane in London and because it was close I took a minor detour to visit the Wallace Collection. I had a few minutes and wanted to see a painting, a rather famous one, by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 -1806) - you will recognise it, ‘Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette’ or ‘The Swing’ (c.1767). There are many reasons that this painting is popular and nearly all of them are unimportant in relation to my purpose, but one or two are meaningful, the luxuriant outdoor setting, and the pleasure of all concerned.

While working on the buildings at the University of Bath in 1982, Alison Smithson made a pair of drawings for the Parc de la Villette competition, that were published later in ‘Italian Thoughts’ (1993) - her text describes an arrangement of lattice frames, a matrix, as a ‘Fragonard Bocage’. Each frame holds a swing, and is covered with roses, jasmine or honeysuckle. The grid is punctuated by Lombardy Poplars, the perfectly pointed tree. Her use of the word ‘bocage’ is perfectly pointed too, being simultaneously a patchwork of small fields, orchards, heath and woodland, divided by hedgerows as could be found in the west of England or France, and...an ornamental background in porcelain work. With a multitude of swings, to the left and the right, Fragonard’s Rococo pleasures, amorous indiscretions and happy accidents are democratised, the territory is decentralised, everyone takes their turn…

...tomorrow I return to Bath after a long interlude, maybe ten years, it seems impossible but there it is, because in so many ways I never left the City, the University, the places and people - a territory. I returned often in my thoughts and would agree with Peter Smithson, as he wrote in the ILAUD Yearbook 1986 - 87: "One's 'returns'...to Bath...to Athens...to Cambridge, Mass...to Milan...to Stockholm are each if one examines them, ritualized in this way; one seeks - like an animal, to the salt-lick - the flavour of one's earliest experiences of the territory at its most extreme. One seeks the places where the sensation is sharpest in us." For me, like him, Bath is and always had been one of those 'returns' - a 'salt-lick'...

I had not seen Alison and Peter Smithson's ‘Italian Thoughts’ (1991) until today. It makes sense to me now that the organisation of this carefully edited collection of lectures, projects and short essays from 1977- 88 for Giancarlo De Carlo's International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) would be profoundly affected by the quite recent completion of four buildings at the University of Bath, including the School of Architecture.

I visited Cato Lodge, 24 Gilston Road in Kensington at the time to talk with them and have a vivid memory of the atmosphere of the house during the work-day, the light focused but soft, and the sound, very quiet, so quiet that even the city seemed far away, which it was not. I was writing for the Architects Journal in the UK, so our conversation was inevitably biased in favour of all four new buildings, their significance in relation to earlier work, and their historical status in relation to ‘inheritance’ as a principle - the structural importance of the ‘three generations’ - in the 15th century from Brunelleschi to Alberti to Francesco di Giorgio and in the 20th century, from Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies via the Eames and Prouvé to them.

The moments that I spent there remain in my mind as sufficiently perplexing that I return to them from time to time as I am now. While I was reading this morning I became interested in a photograph by Peter Smithson from 1970 that was used for an essay on ‘Territorial Density’. It was shown with the caption: The inside space of Gray’s Inn, London; ‘Public Space without trees is unimaginable in England’. The image is intriguing, but the caption is more so - the conjunction of ‘inside’ and ‘public’ as complex as the feeling that I had long ago leaving the house. Gray’s Inn is only public today insofar as there is access granted at lunchtime. At all other times it is private.

North London: enjoying the neighbouring rooftop museum of technologies, in particular the carefully aimed high-gain UHF Yagi-Uda terrestrial TV antennae, remembering the revelation known as BBC2... I will be at the AA Library soon, looking for references to 'things that stick up' and other party-wall, parapet and ridge devices in Peter Smithson's 'Italian Thoughts' - I have something in mind...

A

architecture

art

atopia

B

banality

beauty

boredom

C

collectives

contemporaneity

curiosity

D

debate

dreams

dystopia

E

ecology

eroticism

ethics

F

failure

fakes

fantasy

G

generosity

gods

grace

H

hermeneutics

history

hygiene

I

indices

individuality

interpretation

J

jokes

journeys

joy

K

keys

knots

knowledge

L

labour

loss

love

M

memory

migration

modernity

N

nature

naturalism

no(t)

O

oneirism

ontology

organization

P

place

planet

poetics

Q

questions

quiet

quotations

R

rigour

romanticism

rubrics

S

sanitation

surpluses

sustainability

T

technology

temporality

translation

U

un_

use

utopia

V

values

vectors

vortices

W

walks

water

work

X, Y, Z

It is one of the smallest places in Paris, with the biggest reputation. At least that is how it should be. It isn’t. It is very old, and is close to the oldest tree in the city. That much every tourist and tour guide will know…I checked. In an hour I heard about a 13th century church that has never been completed, and that very nice tree. Impressive enough but nothing compared to the story that I am about to tell - based on very little evidence, no trace that could become a central figure, hardly any photographs, and only a few witnesses who are long gone and didn’t say very much. It is possible that whatever happened was entirely fictional but I am sure that it was not, is not. I am equally sure that as a ‘remedy for the incompetence of guides’ whatever happened there was a success and continues to have consequences.

I went at 3.00 p.m, on time but 96 years, 3 months and 9 days late…Then, it was raining. Today the sun shone, it was ordinary in every way, that afternoon was…the first ‘event’ of the ‘1921 Dada Season’ held at Saint Julien-le-Pauvre on Rue Galande. It was billed as an excursion, a visit to a ‘deliberately derisory place’ that ‘had no reason to exist’. The public were invited to a rendez-vous in what a flyer or poster called the garden of the Church. This had been used as a dump for years. Their guides would include Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tzara.

Tempio di Minerva Medica, Montefoscoli, Italy - designed by Ridolfo Castinelli in 1823 for Dr. Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri.

The sign by the side of the road is crudely handwritten, the word ‘Tempio’ and an arrow in reddish-brown on a roughly carved piece of wood. There are rumours about this place and the man who built it, Dr. Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri. Dark mysteries have been in circulation for more than 180 years. The temple, dedicated to his father and to the goddess Minerva, was designed in 1823 by a young architect, Ridolfo Castinelli. It is an austere neo-classical structure, a portico with eight ionic columns and a primary volume that is resolved as an apse or exhedra giving the building a specific orientation and address. It is built in brick.

Two years before the start of the French Revolution, Andrea with one of his brothers was sent to school in Paris. He was an impressionable 15 year old, and embraced the Enlightenment. Over the next fifteen years he would travel to London, participate in the Revolutionary wars on the French side, study medicine in Paris and become a Professor of Surgery at the University of Pisa. His scientific work was discussed vigorously. The Vaccà name was invoked by Lord Byron as one of the most significant in the field of advanced medicine. Andrea was his friend and a notable raconteur. Byron’s Pisan circle included artists, poets and scientists, among them the Shelleys and his personal physician, John William Polidori, author of ‘The Vampyre’ published in 1819. In early nineteenth century Pisa the scientific revolution and romanticism overlapped productively.

Following in the footsteps of Lewis Mumford, Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Edmund Bacon and Colin Rowe there are a number of well established walks that must be taken in Florence. Today, other than making an obligatory procession, despite the heat, starting at the Station, via the Mercato di San Lorenzo and the Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria, past the Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi, through the cortile of the Uffizi, turning right along the Arno, under Vasari’s corridor, across the Ponte Vecchio to the Plazzo Pitti and back, I decided to spend most of the afternoon in the shade in a place that the tour guides had clearly chosen to ignore, looking at the principle facade of Santa Maria Novella, by Leon Battista Alberti. This had been commissioned by Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai in 1465 and was completed in 1470, ‘to the great satisfaction of all, who found the entire work pleasing,’ wrote Giorgio Vasari, ‘but most especially the door, where it is evident that Leon Battista expended more than ordinary effort.’ Vasari spent a lot of time working on the interior of the basilica, and may have had a more than ordinarily complex relationship with the building and its benefactors. It is impressive how much more interested he is in Alberti’s writing, and his projects in Rimini or Mantua that are, self-evidently, not in Florence…

I was reminded about the power of allegiance earlier in the day when one of the guides at the Uffizi approached me as I was looking at a sculpture of Alberti, muttering, “he’s not from here, you know - people think that he was Florentine but he was born in Genoa…” and based in Rome I could have added, but didn’t. Clearly there is a lot going on beyond or around that particularly good door, not least the possibility that four hundred years after Vasari’s ‘Lives’ was published Rudolf Wittkower could declare the facade ‘the first great Renaissance exponent of classical eurhythmia’, creating ‘venustas’ or beauty by the rigorous, systematic application of a conception of harmony that depends upon the simplest of principles, ’a progressive duplication or…a progressive halving of ratios’ 1:2 or 2:1*.