{"id":32021,"date":"2014-07-09T16:01:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T14:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/paesaggi-artificiali-tra-architettura-e-cinema\/"},"modified":"2016-09-19T18:01:50","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T16:01:50","slug":"paesaggi-artificiali-tra-architettura-e-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/paesaggi-artificiali-tra-architettura-e-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"paesaggi artificiali tra architettura e cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marco Casamonti<\/b><\/span>: In this issue of area, dedicated to artificial landscapes, we are trying to tackle the theme of simulation in architecture in its various facets, including that of kitsch, by presenting a number of images like the fake Venice in Las Vegas, an architectural genre which is paradoxically also very appreciated.
\nDavid Grieco<\/b><\/span>: Not long ago I read an article about the problem of the serious crisis which is also affecting the city of Las Vegas \u2013 a place that I by way of parenthesis know very well, and that I have seen transformed in the last ten years \u2013 that pointed out, underscoring the great ignorance of Americans, that many tourists who visit the reconstruction of Venice in the Nevada desert believe that is the real thing.
\nM.C.<\/b><\/span>: The editorial of this issue, written by Francesco Ventura, is a treatise on the truth of the false where the author asserts that by now even the original, that is to say Venice itself, which has become a kind of bazaar of souvenir shops, has turned into something fake, and thus, on the one side we have the explicit fake in Las Vegas, and on the other the progressive falsification of the authentic one, which leads to a loss of references. In this play between reality and fiction, not only architecture but above all cinema plays a fundamental role, and the relationship between these two arts is particularly close because, as in the movies, also architectural design is a vision, a dream, a mental projection of a landscape which is eventually not built. Also Rossi wrote that the architect is, to some extent, a director because he is not the mason, he is not the blacksmith and he is not the carpenter but the one who orchestrates all these professions.\u00a0Also the director is not the photographer, set designer or costume designer; he builds the scene in which the stories are told, just like the architect does, in the final analysis.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/b><\/span>I believe that also this process is changing. For instance, in his movies Federico Fellini used Roman architecture to reinvent them completely, it is sufficient to consider the scenes he has shot\u00a0 <\/span>in the Eur district, which becomes something for the director that it has never been for Romans, who in the final analysis have never accepted it or chosen to live in it. This may be the very reason why Fellini has managed to turn it into a completely imaginary place, even if hundreds, thousands of people have come to live there, as it is cheaper than central Rome. The Eur was originally created as a result of a ministerial decision, on the basis of an imagery, that of the architects, to create a kind of institutional city, a project which was never realized.\u00a0Cinema avails itself of architecture, it uses it, mystifies it and turns it into one of its greatest attractions. It is sufficient to consider the two movies based on novels by Dan Brown, the \u201cDa Vinci Code\u201d and the recent \u201cAngels and Demons\u201d where you see a completely fake Rome, which however represents the real driving power of the movie. The result has obviously been an incredible increase of American tourism in Rome and in the last years, in which the movie industry is clearly facing a crisis, it often overcomes it by using placed that then become very popular tourist attractions.\u00a0I lived in Tuscany for some years, not far from Pienza, a small town which was completely abandoned in the Sixties because of a quite violent earthquake, a city that has been propped up, neglected; it was pretty but completely dilapidated.\u00a0As a boy I have unfortunately also been an actor, and\u00a0I happened to star in Franco Zeffireli\u2018s movie \u201dRomeo and Juliet\u201d. During the search for a location, which could not be Verona, the original location of Shakespeare\u2018s play, because it had already become an industrial, inhospitable and inaccessible city, we ended up in Pienza, where some locations which were completely abandoned in those years allowed us to shoot in absolute tranquillity. Many years later the city was completely rebuilt, and in spite of the fact that it had been transformed into a true gem, it remained outside the tourist circuits. But one fine day Anthony Minghella, an Italo-British director, chose it as location for the \u201dEnglish patient\u201d, a movie created without any great pretensions that ended up by winning, due to a series of strange alchemies, no less than nine Oscars. A month after swarms of coaches began to arrive from all over the world, and they still do, it is no longer a city, it has become unrecognizable. A good example in this regard is the case of Prague, a city completely invaded by the pollution of images; even the famous Jewish cemetery is completely covered by posters, billboards, advertisements; it has been transformed into a place for consumption. Prague is one of those cities that no longer exists to the eye and glance of people.<\/p>\n

\"\u201dLe<\/a>
\u201dLe tentazioni del dottor Antonio\u201d episode by Federico Fellini in \u201dBoccaccio \u201970\u201d, 1962. Photo Paul Roland \/ Archivio Storico del Cinema \/ AFE<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

M.C.<\/b>: <\/span>The singular aspect of our study is the fact that artificial landscapes, in the moment they become icons in the collective imagery, turn into something else, they become \u201dartificial\u201d as we may see in the fate of cities like Pienza or Venice: the movies use them, and then instil the theme of fiction in them.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>The reason is that the procedure you just described turns them into a scenario of pasteboard which we may, in the final analysis, define a consumption of merchandise.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>This may be considered as the negative aspect, but the positive side to the relationship between movies and architecture is that the former has the ability, as it is based on fiction and the possibility to modify these places, to show us a reality that is the way we, or the director, would like it to be, creating a kind of hyper-architecture. The architect designs the city by creating unique places, but cinema succeeds in making them become even more extraordinary, it is sufficient to consider the Ennis-Brown House by Frank Lloyd Wright in \u201cBlade Runner\u201d; the spaces are charged with meanings, images, histories: cinema has this possibility to take architecture and make it take a further leap ahead, or backwards, in the imagery.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>Cinema somehow manages to destroy places rich in history, personality and poetics because it also overwhelms them with the tourism that comes in its wake, turning them into great shopping malls; vice versa, it also has the ability to enhance places which we are blind to: there are many science fiction movies from thirty years ago which have enabled us to discover the large abandoned industrial settlements which have, in the course of the years, become something else. Today the most beautiful districts and houses in London are the old warehouses which have been completely reinvented to create a habitat of great quality and charm. In the past they were completely uninteresting to the eye of the passer-by, because they were merely beehives of workers and machines, while they have become extraordinary lofts today.\u00a0I think this is the positive element which cinema has brought, that is to say it has made us discover that an industry that is by now obsolete in terms of space, machinery and technology may become environments of great quality and charm. This phenomenon has not taken place very frequently in Italy because we have never, in any case, been a country with a truly industrial vocation, but it has taken place in many other countries, as in Germany.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>Could we say that the work, the professionalism and the practice of the architect and that of the director who plans a story and then realizes it, are actually very similar?
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>They are absolutely identical because a director, just like an architect, must imagine not so much a space as the world within it; he must imagine an architecture on the basis of the way in which it will be used. The starting point is the same, and I don’t see all that much difference between Renzo Piano and Ridley Scott. It is evident that the key of simulation changes. In the movies one may resort to any trick, one may show only the fa\u00e7ade of things. If there is nothing behind a set, it does not matter at all, while the architect must make a project that is really usable and inhabitable.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>There\u2018s also another difference. While the architect always has to mediate with the construction company, the director may really imagine a set and realize it. Sure, he avails himself of the set designer, of all the necessary stage machines, but he is actually much closer to the realization of the work. Movie making is design and building at the same time, while these two moments are sometimes very distant for the architect.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>The problems are actually very similar. The sets of a movie are created in order to be destroyed, but also the director has to deal with the problems of construction. Today movies are shot in the places that are most satisfactory from an economic point of view. This often affects the final architectural quality of the movie a lot, because we often have to compromise. To make a movie of ancient Rome, we may be forced to shoot in Bulgaria, seeking to adapt the environmental situations to the desired suggestions.\u00a0There is a mediation with an imaginary builder, the producer of the movie, which imposes precise limits on the budget. So they both face the same difficulty.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>Italian architects have in mind a period during which cinema and architecture have influenced one another, that of Neorealism. In the Fifties and Sixties Italy was a country ravaged by war. The architects no longer knew whether they should be modern, because that was tantamount to being Fascist, and in the face of this stylistic disorientation they found, in the neo-realist Roman city outskirts of the movies of De Sica and Visconti, the idea of a return to reality, to popular culture, to the vernacular. They found a way to express themselves which made them alternative and original as compared to the rest of the world, it was a moment of extraordinary intensity.\u00a0I believe that while this neo-realist tradition is by now finished in an architectural context, it has perhaps remained to some extent in the movies. Italian cinema is in any case neorealist. The most successful contemporary movies deal with reality, also when it is terrible. Consider for instance \u201cGomorra\u201d which was shot in Secondigliano and in the city outskirts, in the housing project called\u00a0\u201dLe Vele\u201d.
\nWhat remains of neo-realism in the movies today, and to what extent does the movies need reality, as opposed to architecture which, perhaps sometimes wrongly, is always in search of new scenarios?
\n<\/span>D.G.<\/b>: <\/span>The Italian movies from the neorealist period have been extraordinarily influential, in fact, everyone both in Europe and in the world have taken inspiration from them. For instance British Free Cinema was born after neorealism; it was based on the same principles, rendering an explicit homage to Italian movies. Great British directors as Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz have always admitted that they could not have created that cinema if it had not been anticipated by Neorealism and by De Sica. It is a cinema that is based on human beings and their needs, indisputably guided by the essential things in life.\u00a0Consider, for instance, a minor movie by the De Sica titled \u201dthe roof\u201d which tells the story of a small poor family which, in the late FIfties manages, in spite of a thousand difficulties and threats, to build a house to then see it torn down. The need inspiring this movie is that of Man, and Italian cinema confirms this tradition, this point of view, except that today the drama is that it uses reality without asking too many questions, without doing any real research. Since Fellini, no-one has made any effort in this direction.<\/p>\n

\"\u201dLe<\/a>
\u201dLe tentazioni del dottor Antonio\u201d episode by Federico Fellini in \u201dBoccaccio \u201970\u201d, 1962. Photo Paul Roland \/ Archivio Storico del Cinema \/ AFE<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

M.C.<\/b>: <\/span>In a world where everything is becoming more and more artificial, this persistence in a\u00a0 <\/span>search for reality, as witnessed by \u201dGomorra\u201d or other movies set in the city outskirts, this tradition of reading reality in its crudeness, which is typical of Italian cinema, is really an opposition of the fiction of the great American movie tradition.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>This is the strong point of the Italian movie industry, which forty years ago managed to produce up to 480 movies in a year. Our industry has been the second after the American, precisely because it represented an antithesis to the construction of a happy imaginary world where all dreams were possible. A great strength, which it has lost and which it recovers every time it succeeds in combining these two things. I imagine that an American spectator who sees \u201dGomorra\u201d does not believe that \u201dle Vele\u201d is a real place, but thinks it is a set prepared for the occasion, as he cannot image that such humanity can live there.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>Sometimes the movies feature fiction, but fortunately or dramatically, we discover that reality is always ahead of even the most exasperated, most extreme imagination.\u00a0In the debate among Italian architects one often speaks of the tendency to pursue behavioural and cultural style models which have their origin in other countries: sometimes we encounter, in our city outskirts, small somewhat distorted Dutch buildings or somewhat deconstructed Californian ones\u2026 While the Italian culture has expressed its most fertile side in the golden age of the Fifties and Sixties, both in architecture and literature and in the movies, then perhaps our fate or peculiarity is that of interpreting reality.\u00a0And so the best path for Italian architects, and for that matter also for directors, is not to emulate the Americans in fiction, hyperrealism or deconstructivism, but to be authentic, interpreting their own reality which is absolutely extraordinary.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>This must be our only guiding principle, even if it is very hard to apply it in\u00a0a country which vaunts 70% of the world’s architectural heritage and which struggles to get ahead in the present and in the future, because it is subject to pressure from every side. As a people we are the victims of a perpetual identity crisis, because we do not manage to make the two things coincide, because we do not have the culture of modernity, it is sufficient to consider the very scant response there is in Italy to contemporary art. In New York or in other parts of the world we find great recognized and acclaimed Italian artists, whom we do not even know in Italy because we are the victims of this kind of Fascist cloud which overshadows everything modern. Not long ago I shot a movie in Kiev, in the Ukraine, which no-one used as a location, and where I unexpectedly found a small harbour station on the river Dnepr designed by Gio Ponti. A wonderful gem, unknown to both Ukrainians and Italians, in the final analysis the great Italian architects of the last hundred years have lived like, and worse than, Jewish refugees.
\nM.C.<\/b>:<\/span> In Italy architecture, and especially modern architecture, is not a very popular art, and this is something architects have to make amends for, because after the felicitous period of the Fifties and Sixties they have been the cause, since the economic boom of the Sixties, of the destruction of a large part of the Italian landscape. The architects are paying the price now for this uncultured process with which they have yielded to the demands of a country that only needed quantity.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>I\u2018m not sure to what extent the architects are responsible, because in those years Italy was the country of surveyors, and the architect in the strict sense of the term was merely an evocation. Houses were built by anyone, and most importantly, with any criterion.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>Some years ago\u00a0I interviewed Franco Purini who expounded a theory according to which we must learn to see the city outskirts with new eyes, with another lens and another objective.\u00a0Since 80% of people today live in the city outskirts, and only a lucky 15-20% in the historical centres, we must per force convince ourselves of the fact that the city outskirts are beautiful unless we want to accept the idea that 80% of people live in alienation.\u00a0In this context movies could be helpful, because the scenic effects may make the suburbs appear in a completely different dimension, as compared to what it really is, or appears to be in our eyes.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>It is hard to find someone who has this enthusiasm in cinema. The only example I can think of is that of the episode with the \u201dVespa\u201d in \u201dDear Diary\u201d where Nanni Moretti drives around the city outskirts of Rome, and on reaching Spinaceto, one of the first threatening districts born in the Roman suburbs, concludes with an exhilarating pun: \u201cSpinaceto: I expected worse, it’s not bad at all!\u201d. This is the only example I can remember, unfortunately this fantasy is missing in Italian movies.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>As architecture is an art of prediction and anticipation, something which incidentally also applies to movies, it sometimes produces housing models that people are not yet ready to inhabit at the present moment.\u00a0Today the Corviale is a place we consider degraded, but also Le Corbusier\u2018s Unit\u00e9 d\u2019habitation in Marseilles was a similar place, and it has today become a trendy part of the city, where intellectuals and artists live. This enormous tenement house, considered ugly and impossible to live in, has become a quite pleasant place. According to this process, perhaps also the Italian city outskirts or the Corviale could, in twenty or thirty years, become a comfortable housing system. In the final analysis architecture, just like the movies, is an art of anticipation, capable of creating a gap, and quite often also a conflict, with the present.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>From this point of view the French have a great talent. It is sufficient to think of another urban periphery, that of Villette, whose park with a cultural theme has become one of the greatest tourist attractions of Paris. While we may also say negative things about the architecture of this complex, they are cancelled by the extent to which this space is used.\u00a0Italians, on the contrary, do not have a great fantasy in this field because they are burdened by a past that condemns them not to find a new identity. The French are always ready to overturn situations, transforming them in a positive sense, and also the Germans have to some extent succeeded in this, because they have had to get as far as possible away from the nightmare of World War II, Nazism and the Holocaust; and this is why Berlin, of all the great European capitals, is perhaps the most interesting city from an architectural point of view, because there is this freedom and this desire for redemption which is something we Italians lack.<\/p>\n

\"\u201dIl<\/a>
\u201dIl tetto\u201d by Vittorio De Sica, 1956. Photo G.B.Poletto \/ Archivio Storico del Cinema \/ AFE<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

M.C.<\/b>: <\/span>The theme of identity in architecture is a fundamental one, because of the need for identification with the places in which we live and spend our time. How important is this subject in movies, both to the director and to the story he is telling, and vice versa, how efficient is the theme of alienation, of getting away from the classical places to create artificial landscapes?
\n<\/span>D.G.<\/b>: <\/span>A movie, its setting and the world it tells the story about must be credible. Not in the terms in which credibility was understood thirty or forty years ago, that is to say in the sense of\u00a0 <\/span>verisimilarity; it is the world the story is about, the problems that world has to deal with, the life of its personalities that have to be real for 90 or 120 minutes. It must obviously also be credible in its total invention, it is sufficient to consider a movie like \u201cBlade Runner\u201d which is completely realistic even though it describes a completely invented world; the identity of the universe one is telling the story about, the leading figures of the story must be strong and clearly outlined, so the spectator in the stalls may identify completely with them.
\nM.C.<\/b>: <\/span>In the final analysis there is no architecture without narration; a building that has nothing to say for itself is not a building but merely an inhabitable box, and I think the same may be said of the movies.
\nD.G.<\/b>: <\/span>Also to me the setting is one of the key elements of my work. I tell stories that are carried to extremes with respect to reality, and I am always in search for places capable of concretizing my fantasies, this is why\u00a0I travel around the world, and every time I only find a small percentage of what I would be interested in representing, which I must magically manage to transform in\u00a0a 100%, but sometimes\u00a0I have to admit defeat. To me the setting of a movie is more important than any other element. Next winter I\u2018ll go to shoot in Tunisia, where there is a natural-size reconstruction of a small Sicilian village called Bagheria. Giuseppe Tornatore, who was born there, has had this town near Tunis rebuilt, recreating it in three different periods: the early Twentieth century, the Thirties and 1975. The movie will be launched in September with the title \u201cBaaria\u201d and perhaps it is bound to be a failure precisely due to the enormous resources invested, due to the creation of such painstaking and precise sets.<\/p>\n