Acts of Making: engravings in the Mediterranean landscape
Fabiano Micocci2008, Ripam_3
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Abstract
"The landscape of Mediterranean area is object of daily interest starting from the devastations caused by urbanity and the great migratory movement of people. It brings to a real need to re-envision the relationship between man and his environment through a new sensibility toward terrain and people way of life. If we look back in the past, we can recognize a ground with deep natural and artificial engravings as a faithful witness: here man has been forced to work hard to survive because of a climate constantly changing and of a terrain too tough to be transformed. The evolution of this landscape tells us the history of cultures gathered around this area: as most of plant species where imported during centuries then becoming typical, different populations took possession of the main land working the same ground and changing the natural aspect of what is perceived. Obviously we have to consider landscape both as cultural and physical: the Renaissance’s perspective view, the first representation of an organized space, displayed an artificial landscape as manifestation of human attitudes. It is impossible to consider physical conditions apart from the cultural meanings they sustain. As a matter of fact the origin of the adjective Mediterraneus means an opposition to maritimus, and during the Roman Empire it identified the territory of the continent. As Fernando Ribeiro points out, the unity of the Mediterranean area is not referred to the sea but to the environment, the physical characters, the nature of the ground and includes a vast territory from the Lusitania to the Maghreb. Here we can recognize a nature in constant transformation during the centuries as a collective work of art produced by humanity. This link between man and his land has been often negated in modern times. This paper aims to point out a critical approach to topographical qualities of a place as a heritage of human actions. The idea of Mediterranean in architecture was defined at first by Le Corbusier, in opposition with the gothic architecture from the north: anyway Ignasi de Sola-Morales notes an interest focused by nature to a Mediterranean classic idea. But Pedrag Matvejevic warns: the identity of being blurs the identity of doing. For him the burden of the past and the myth has to be overcome. In the Second Post-War Period Mediterranean tradition was regarded in a new way: less formal or plastic, focused over the relationships between forms and functions and between building and urban space by the interest to vernacular architecture: the abstraction of the Modern Movement is overcome by a physical approach with materials and phenomenological core for a more human architecture. This apparent conformity with traditional buildings is overtaken, as Sigfried Geidion noticed, by the use of new materials and new productions methods; the affirmation of a new aesthetic as a new emotional expression; the study of the climate of living. In what follows meanings of this kind are introduced in consideration of Dimitris Pikionis, Fernando Távora and Giovanni Michelucci’s works during the ’50 and the ’60. They represent a third way between the International Style and the Vernacularism to face the fails of Modern Movement and the reconstruction of an identity after the war. This research do not consider individual forms but try to remark the all-embracing factors that a Mediterranean site offers for a contemporary space conception. The overcoming of perspective view in behalf of the use of sections, plans and front views is a primary mode of eidetic imaging. By eschewing a prosaic representation of the aesthetic landscape, field of interest is for all the expression of utilitarian demands that form the landshaft. Indeed vertical section allows the knowledge of the site: it controls natural elements, the transformation of the terrain, the essence of materials to forge, the creation of platform and roofs. This allows a great continuity between interior and exterior, as Pompei ruins suggest. Orographic definition imposes deformations and addictions to a planimetric design raised from typical Mediterranean house (from Cnosso palace to vernacular country houses). It creates a sequence of spaces in times by the movement of the subject that uses the topographical memory for orientation. A great representative power is done by surfaces endowed with pictorial representation with narrative values recalling traditional human works as collective memory and emotional needs. New and old materials have to be used for their evocative and communicative shade accordingly to the landscape. This paper evokes a heritage of Mediterranean architecture by acts of making. It examines how some experiences during the ’50 and ’60 enrich the debate over regionalism and vernacularism with new concepts of place, space and tectonics. "
