area 109 | art and architecture

Could we understand the role or value of Leon Battista Alberti, Brunelleschi, Raffaello, Michelangelo – and the list could certainly go on – by choosing, among their different works, the role or value in relation to the discipline practiced? More specifically, is it possible – even if we should first of all ask ourselves whether it would be correct – to make a distinction between their role as architects and their activities in the arts, literature and sciences? It is certainly possible; to facilitate the interpretation and knowledge this separation is made, not without effort, by researchers (unable to make a valuation of the transversal work of the masters that goes beyond their specialized expertise), but it cannot be doubted that the all-round approach of artists at the time of humanism took the form of a research that made no distinction between thought and action, a creative art developed coherently and independently of the text: a painting, a sculpture, a building, a constructive invention, the intuition of a way to represent reality – we are thinking of the invention, or rather discovery, of perspective – were nothing but parts of one body, different means of expressing the same feeling.
Unfortunately, as we know, the unit of the arts and in the arts did not last long, not so much and not only due to the authors themselves as to the objective difficulty of critical thought to build a credible aesthetic theory within which to place, coherently with the prefixed objectives, the different artistic activities and expressions. In fact, if art, and in particular the Fine Arts, achieve their peak, the sublime, in an imitation of nature, considered perfect and marvellous because it is created by God, how can architecture which necessarily builds artificial landscapes to meet the needs of Man, aspire to the status of art? The belated literary expedient introduced by Laugier, aimed at identifying the primitive hut as the natural model to imitate, the archetype, the origin of things and thus of houses, has been of little avail in solving this impasse, and the same applies to natural forms, too feeble and marginal, banished to the borders of the Corinthian capital in the form of acanthus leaves. These attempts have not sufficed to elevate architecture to the same dignity of artistic expressions as painting and sculpture.
As if it were not sufficiently abused on an expressive level by its impossibility to imitate divine perfection, and on a scientific one by the technological studies and researches conducted by the engineers of the École Polytechnique, architecture is definitively declassed, by Kantian thought, within the circle of the arts which serve a purpose (pulchritudo adhaerens); rather than an artistic activity, a practice clearly placed at an appropriate distance from the arts, whose purpose is accomplished solely in the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure (pulchritudo vaga). Modern thought attempts to overturn pre-established values, asserting that the form follows function and thus that the meeting of different requirements represents the attainment of the ultimate purpose of art; unfortunately this position is belied both by the international style and by the dogmatism of orthodox position, it is sufficient to mention the accusatory tones of Argan’s challenge from the pages of Casabella against Ronchamp, a church considered futilely expressive and formalist, a building lacking the moral rigour proper for a work of art. And so, how can art and architecture dialogue today, building convergent and/or parallel trajectories? The answer is not simple, but it is clear that both these disciplines have become arts of communication, narrative expedients which use different instruments to assert the same need: for a dialogue between the parts. The conditions and the players involved in this exchange of information may obviously vary, changing intellectually from the individual to the multitude, geographically in space and historically depending on the moment in time and the references, borrowed from memory or projected towards the future. In any case and in every circumstance, the contemporary reality has made it necessary for the arts to converge within a collective mediatic process where the essence of the message, as such, sometimes prevails on the content, making it indispensable for every thought to undergo a transferral, a transition, a clash or a meeting; it is probably for this reason that urban landscapes have become the best and most efficient stage both for the figurative arts and for architecture.