Introduction: a photographer’s sense of space
Alexandra Tommasini2019, The Journal of Architecture
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Abstract
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This paper explores the work of photographer Gabriele Basilico, focusing on his unique approach to capturing urban environments and the relationship between photography and architecture. It highlights his influence in documenting contemporary urban conditions while also addressing the lack of scholarly attention in Anglo-American contexts. The collected essays delve into personal and theoretical responses to Basilico's images, emphasizing his ability to provoke nuanced readings of city spaces and his critical engagement with the built environment.
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The city inhabits me: space, topology, and Gabriele Basilico's Milano. Ritratti di fabbriche
The Journal of Architecture, 2020
The 1975 New Topographics exhibition has been inscribed into the history of photography as a starting point to which nearly all visually cognate practices can be traced back. This held back more subtle and nuanced readings of much English and European work of the same era, particularly in the English-language press. Set in a more extended historical and geographical context, the work exhibited in New Topographics can be understood as part of a wider process of photographic exploration that took place alongside shifting patterns of production and consumption that transformed the global landscape in the decades following the Second World War. The exhibition also set out a specific position regarding the nature of topographic photography itself. Although New Topographics did not take an explicitly critical stance vis-a-vis landscape, one of its most enduring legacies has been the emergence of a ‘new topographics’ aesthetic that is understood as critically engaged by virtue of its distanced, deadpan style. To argue that particular photographers work in the topographic mode is thus to overlook the socio-political and geographical specificities of the places they represent, in favour of formal similarities. This paper examines Gabriele Basilico’s first project, Milano. Ritratti di fabbriche (1978–80) [Milan. Portraits of Factories], through the photographs themselves, the context out of which they emerged, their presentation in book form, and Basilico’s own approach to the environments in which he photographed. I argue that Milano. Ritratti di fabbriche shares less than we might assume with the New Topographics work. Rather, it embodies a way of understanding and representing space as topological: heterogeneous and fluid, composed of multiple and often contradictory objects, processes and agents.
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Mapping Urban Spaces, 2021
Let us imagine a work of architecture at the moment of its emergence, merging design with construction, from the originating idea all the way to the keystone, but still without any imputation of a meaningful purpose, without aligning it with the existing location, and without any presuppositions concerning the time that may have elapsed, which is to say, in relation to a " framework," and in the absence of any internal or external " padding," 1 so to speak: at this point, it becomes conceivable that neither " purpose," nor " place," nor " time" is among the attributes of a building, despite the fact that these factors have, more or less, influenced its realization as " external" factors. The external factors determine the "inner" specifications-those concerning "materials," "construction," "form," "function," and " space"-all of which emerge, in turn, as characteristic attributes of the building itself. The essential work of design and construction also consists, then, in transferring such external conditions, by means of the idea, into the architecture, into the building, inscribing them onto its inner specifications. 2 This is not, however, the time or place to investigate this process further or to reflect upon the significance of the design process, the idea, or this process of transfer: what is pursued here instead is the content of these basic concepts. In the discipline of architecture today, " space" is perhaps among the most controversial concepts, and perhaps the most ambiguous, t oo-but why should this be the case? While in previous eras, disputes over the conceptual and contentual determination of " space" were invested with claims to philosophical and physical authority, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the discourse on space migrated into various disciplines, among them art history, sociology, phenomenology, and psychology, but the natural sciences in particular. Today, the implications of the term " space" and the theoretical model that underlies it are still being negotiated and affirmed in diverse ways within the various disciplines. It appears that only a transdisciplinary history of the concept could provide insight here, one that would bring together the various " evolutionary" threads of understanding and imagination, meaning and content, and theoretical models and synesthetic perception together in a nuanced way. With the spatial turn in the cultural and social sciences that began in the late 1980s, and also with the succeeding revival of an architectural and theoretical discourse on space, spaces, and spatiality 3 around the turn of the millennium, a disciplinary differentiation of conceptual terminology has become evident.
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Providing a critique of the concepts attached to the representation of urban space, this ground-breaking book formulates a new theory of space, which understands the dynamic interrelations between physical and social spaces while tracing the wider urban context. It offers a new tool to approach the reading of these interrelations through reflexive reading strategies that identify singular reading fragments of the different spaces through multiple reader-time-space relations. The strategies proposed in the volume seek to develop an integrative reading of urban space through recognition of the singular (influenced by discourse, institution, etc.); and temporal (influenced by reading perspective in space and time), thereby providing a relational perspective that goes beyond the paradox of place in between social and physical space, identifying each in terms of relationships oscillating between the conceptual, the physical and social content, and the context. In conclusion, the book suggests that space/place can be read through sequential fragments of people, place, context, mind, and author/reader. Operating at different scales between conceptual space and reality, the sequential reading helps the recognition of multiplicity and the dynamics of place as a transformational process without hierarchy or classification. Publisher: Routledge: Taylor and FrancisISBN: 9781409452287 March 2018
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EPFL Thesis, 2017
Recent turns in social sciences, namely the visual, qualitative, actorial or spatial turns, all indicate a rising interest in individuals. Since the aesthetic dimension always nourishes and informs individuals' spatialities and their decision-making processes, my research explores how the subjective realm of the aesthetic has proved itself able to generate conditions that lead to action, and consequently influence other dimensions of society, especially in the ethical, political or legal realms. My systemic approach is grounded in the relational theory of space, the phenomenological study of the imagination, and the theory of urbanity. Hence, I investigated both urbanity and beauty as some of the most intriguing and interesting emergent (and not resultant!) phenomena of the urban system; where urbanity belongs to its objective realm and beauty to its subjective realm. It is essential to recognize that humans, unlike the components that create the natural systems, are capable of a particular sort of action due to their imaginative capacities that allow them to overpass the actual perceived world. The aesthetic dimension directly involves the human imaginative consciousness, which in turn activates the realm of the virtual, i.e., the realm that which exists only in a latent state, and does not appear visibly (fr. ce qui n'est qu'en puissance). While engaged in aesthetic experience, humans exhibit a particular sort of intentionality through which they bring to mind what is not visible through what is present and perceived. By making use of their lived body, individuals are capable to engage in a particular sort of imaginative play through which memories of the past, anticipations of the future and the actualized perceived present are conjured together, informing one another. Since every human intentional experience is spatialized, I investigated a particular spatial structure through which aesthetic experience occurs as such. I called this structure aesthetic space. In the last chapter, I investigate more precisely the influence of the urban environment on the way in which individuals' aesthetic judgments evolve and mature. By considering the experience of modernity and the city as pivotal in the construction of individuals' aesthetic sensitivities, I explore the spatial component of aesthetic judgments on some particular cases. I also focus on the importance of the urban public space, the lifestyle change, as well as on the period of childhood, which appear to be critical to the (aesthetic) development of individuals.
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Textual Cities/Working Drawings: Rereading the Space of Drawing
Writingplace: Investigations in Architecture and Literature (nai010), 2016
The analogy of the text is a common one for space and the city, whether it is referred to in terms of reading, enunciating (De Certeau) or writing it (Serres). In the beginning of the 20th century, the new theories of space-time and the increasing mobility and mechanization of the world brought forward the inadequacy of architectural notation to engage with the complex interactions of movement that take place in the city. Normative representations of the city conventionally forgo the microbe-like processes that occur within it. This partial illegibility of the city (Allen) appears to refer back to the illegibility of movement, and the temporal and kinetic character of space. This paper looks at the transcriptive operations that take place between real space and the space of the architectural drawing as an opportunity to rethink and expand the limits of architectural representation in order to embrace the complex negotiations and interactions that occur in the city. This emphasis on the infraordinary (Perec) reveals the users and their non-human counterparts as the markers of différance (Derrida) within the text of the city, bringing individual experience to the centre of this reading. In the textual city the users configure space both physically and perceptively. This paper is further concerned with the transcription of this condition into another form of writing and particularly with the transference of the effect of various agencies from one to the next.The locus of the reading is transposed from the city to the drawing that forms a new site of investigation, yet the characters remain the same. The drawing as ‘writing’ involves a series of ‘readings’. As the architect faces the duality of being a ‘reader’ and an ‘author’, the transition from the actual to the virtual cannot be considered as being merely a transcription from experience to sign. Moreover, the author’s intentions are not just liable to the intentions of an external reader but to internal agencies such as the material procedures involved and the autonomy of the signs in use. The drawing becomes an operator in the narrative of space while the architect himself acquires the status of the ‘character’. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ opposition between the text and the literary work, this paper will conclude that the textual nature of the city should already presuppose the nature of the drawing as a site of interpretative readings, a process itself temporal and kinetic, capable of revealing the possibility of new realities.
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M. Spunta, ‘‘Dentro la città”: Gabriele Basilico’s Photography and the Embodied “Experience of Place”, Annali d’Italianistica, 37 (2019), Urban Space and the Body, pp. 79-107
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Annali d italianistica seeks to promote the study of Italian literature in its cultural context, to foster scholarly excellence, and to select topics of interest to a large number of Italianists. Monographic in nature, the journal is receptive to a variety of topics, critical approaches, and theoretical perspectives. Each year s topic is announced ahead of time, and contributions are welcome. The journal is published in the fall of each year. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically as attachments in Word. Authors should follow the journal s style for articles in English; articles in Italian should also conform to the journal s style sheet for articles in Italian. Visit the journal s website (www.ibiblio. org/annali) for further information on the contributions style. For all communications concerning contributions, address the Editor in Chief of Annali d italianistica at annali@ unc.edu. Notes & Reviews This section occasionally publishes essays and review articles on topics treated in previous volumes of Annali d'Italianistica.
Marianna Charitonidou, "The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision", IX Aisu Congress of the Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana “The Global City. The Urban Condition as a Pervasive Phenomenon”, University Bologna, 11-14 September 2019
This paper aims to shed light on the status of travel-photography and is based on the hypothesis that the automobile revolutionized the way architects perceive the city. It focuses on a close examination of the photographs taken by architects John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo Rossi during their travels, with special emphasis on those taken from the automobile and while encountering places for the first time. The main hypothesis that it explores is that the view from the car changes the architecture of the city, as well as the relationship between architecture and the city. It explores this hypothesis through the investigation of the above-mentioned case studies, contributing to a broader understanding of what is happening in cases of photography taken from the car. Regarding the theoretical framework on which my interpretation is based, I could refer to Rosalind Krauss’s understanding of photography in “Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”. Besides from the photos they thematised in their book entitled AS in DS: An Eye on the Road, depicting landscape views of the British countryside, Alison and Peter Smithson also took many photos during their summer vacations. The main interest of these photos lies in the fact that they employed them in their teaching process and reasoning. The way they treated these photos in order to illustrate their arguments in their teaching, their publications and their projects is an aspect that is scrutinized here. Rossi started taking polaroid photographs during his journeys in the late 1970s, nearly a decade after noting his first impressions in his 47 quaderni azzuri (1968-1986), which are strongly reminiscent of travels diaries, both in form and content. His polaroids, which documented journeys and his whereabouts, include images of boats crossing a river in Bangkok, a Shaker village in Massachussets, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and constitute a visual diary of the Italian architect and an important source for understanding his use of travel-photography in order to organise his “visual memory”. In John Lautner’s archives, tens of thousands of slides can be found, illustrating trips throughout the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, and Egypt. One of my objectives is to show how these photographs of landscapes can inform us on the specific vision that his buildings introduced and vice-versa. Lautner’s travel slides constitute a precious resource since they represent a visual record equivalent to the more usual sketchbook used by many architects to record their study notes. His buildings trigger an ocular-centric vision which cannot but be related to the pre-eminence of landscape views in his conceptual edifice, as emerges not only through his architecture but also through the views captured on his camera when confronted with various landscapes.
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