area 104 | introverted architecture

Herzog & de Meuron, Tate Modern London, 2000 - photo by Margherita Spiluttini

While the idea that architecture shows its essence through its façade, its outer appearance, cannot be denied, neither can it represent an exclusive assumption, an a priori concept according to which the value of an architecture primarily depends on the design of its façade. By now thirty years have gone by since the Strada Novissima, and we can undoubtedly observe that experience from a sufficient distance since, beyond the temporary propaganda, the experience of postmodernism tended to assert not only the importance of the architectural score and the fundamental character of the composition of the façade, but above all the sense and value of the city, of the urban structure centred on the street. From this point of view, according to a progressive sequence which had already been identified by Leon Battista Alberti, what we refer to as the exterior of a building does not define anything except its interior, the limit, the substance which forms the perimeter of the urban space, thus designing the places in which the life and activities of the community takes place. Concretely, beyond the natural environment and architectures conceived on a landscape scale, every urban architecture paradoxically ends up with being interpreted, but above all experienced, not as a solitary building but rather as a fragment of a more general interior design which outlines and represents the inhabitable space of the city, in which each individual moves once the threshold of the private space has been crossed. It is a matter of a completely introverted dimension and vision, which identifies, at every transition of scale, a more ample container, and never a merely external dimension. The city itself, and every public environment, by virtue of being negotiable and measurable space, is merely a place endowed with a border, which consequently cannot be anything, in a fully accomplished way, but an interior. On the other hand, any architecture which is included within an conceived as a part of a larger aggregate is paradoxically always, and in any case, introverted, both when seen from the outside and, obviously, when lived in and crossed from within. But in some buildings this condition becomes absolute and not relative, evident and fundamental and not a mere metaphor; it is a matter of a decision and dimension that is intentional and, also in this case, interior with respect to the project. However, these reflections do not express an judgment, as futile as it is specious, of value, they do not follow the completely obsolete precepts of Zevi, according to which an architecture is only worthy of the name if it contains an internal space; on the contrary, they tell a story about decisions linked to the value of the inhabitability of a place, or to its intangibility. With this issue Area takes a look at these projects, publishing a selection of works and thus of texts which, by virtue of their introverted nature, bear witness to an approach that is intentionally timid or reserved, but not thereby any less efficient or interesting.