Art critic

The best of goodness

In the last fifty years we have lost at least fifty percent of our heritage either through the damage to the coasts or in the destruction of villas and smaller houses, small buildings, rural dwellings, barns sometimes in order to build absurd skyscrapers as happened on the Rimini and Riccione coast. This world record has not however been the fault exclusively of the architects that design but also of those who restore. The methods of recuperation most widely practiced are in fact two: either the old habit of making stonework visible or the new habit of redoing the plasterwork.

Both are misguided: in the first case the effect is created that we might call “scaly skin”, in the second “meringue” or “plum cake”, that we can admire on the Quirinale (the parliament building) and Palazzo Chigi (the President's Palace). Both furthermore, repudiate the only plausible models: the conservation of what is existing or the reproduction, almost like a theatrical set, of what should have been there. Just as Balthus did with Villa Medici, obtaining the effect of a dirtied wall: the restoration is there but you do not see it.

The best restoration is therefore that which cannot be seen. An obviously simple principle, yet never understood by restoring architects, determined to lead everything back to an abstract idea of cleanliness, where there is no trace of the history of the monument and that can only be justified by the ignorance of the historical, artistic and geophilosophical aspects. “Before the landscape of Orte, ruined by the disorder and the sloppiness of the new building”, as Luisa Bonesio, one of the academics most attentive to the equilibriums between places and human works, has written, “Pier Paolo Pasolini was able legitimately to demonstrate how aesthetic decay went hand in hand with civil and social decadence. In the same way, Cesare Brandi, already in the Sixities, harshly denounced the beginning of the civil and environmental disaster that was starting to be perceived for the Italy caught up in the frenzy of the economic boom, in the incomprehension of the unique value of the identity of the Italian landscapes, of its being not a generic picturesqueness  “but a picturesqueness with a historical import, being elevated to the status of the very physiognomy of the country”, claiming an active defence and support of agriculture, against the more irresponsible industrialisation, with the most effective form of safeguarding the facies of the historical landscapes [...]. However today the fact of drawing attention on the inseparability of the aesthetic manifestation of landscape from its cultural reality, from the way of life that is common in that area (i.e. the economic, environmental, social, religious choices and so on), showing how the ruination of the landscape and the dissipation of the historical and architectural heritage is not a deplorable mistake caused by the priority of unavoidable questions (the economy, the market, the modernisation), but it descends  from the cultural model of the modernisation and the indiscriminate opening to globalising models makes one immediately be suspected of conservatism”. 

The danger of a model of development based on the dogma of unlimited growth or rather the diminishing of the territory to a space that can be modified on the basis principles of mere utility did not escape Pasolini, Brandi, or Cederna.

“The question is raised with urgency”, adds Bonesio, “regarding the irreversible destruction of that patrimony that are the places, once they are interpreted as mere depositories of resources. The territory, as it is a natural and environmental reality has its own rules of conservation and reproduction (of long duration), which, if they are ignored lead to disagreement and destruction”. Besides, it is an age old idea that sees places characterised by their own individuality, by an aura that the absurd abolition of geography in schools, decided with the Berlinguer reform, has contributed to the loss of. Cancelling this aura with architectural intrusions breaks the link created by communities that have determined equilibriums and characters for centuries, establishing the “value of a place”.

This does not mean conceiving protection in exclusively binding terms not least because that would mean recognising the impossibility of stopping the devastation by trying to preserve what is of past splendour. On the contrary, it requires rethinking the places and the monuments in a way that does not confuse enhancement with exploitation or with a conception in museum or tourist terms. In other words, it is necessary to begin to think of monuments, buildings and places not as containers or resources to exploit but as part of a living organism. Concepts that are clear to the best architects and restorers, as shown by the opposition to the bridge of the Straits of Messina, the high-speed train and the doubling of the Motorway of Sun (Autostrada del Sole, linking northern and southern Italy) by Pier Luigi Cervellati, outlined in the book “Modesta proposta per non perdere la nostra identità storica e culturale e per rendere più vivibili le nostre città” (Modest proposal for not losing our historical and cultural identity and to make our cities easier to live in). “These three works might probably become white elephants and certainly damaging. They destroy the landscape, threaten geomorphological equilibriums, trigger decay and they are anything but modern: they are conceptually backward. [...] If we really wanted to possess modernity, we would have to close the Motorway of the Sun. Programme other ways to transport goods. Consider the identity of the country not just as a cultural but also structural fact”. And returning to the concept of reinstatement, i.e. the return to history, Cervellati writes: “Reinstatement constitutes a part that is anything but secondary to restoration. All the more so if the restoration concerns the urban, the outskirts and the natural environment. All the more so if the restoration is understood as the operation that gives back – or repairs from the damage suffered – the altered urban building or violated nature or the countryside that becomes abandoned land waiting for concrete to be spread over it. [...] And reinstatement necessarily involves understanding and taking up the original design again, trying not to go beyond the  boundary between restoration and interpretative reconstruction. The reinstatement /reconstruction may neither be interpretative nor subjective”.

Cervellati thus developed a thesis inspired by the special nature of Italy and respect for its history: there must be no building of new cities and monstrous infrastructural works, but restoring (reinstating) the shapes of the territory before the modernist barbarisation. Once again the logic is not strictly binding: it is not in fact a case of embalming everything that has survived the wave of modernity, but starting again from history, that is the only possibility of looking after the present and designing for the future. “The landscape does not belong so much to the sphere of creativeness but that of maintenance. And what of restoration understood as giving back.” An idea that allows us to conceive the future while reconciling the aesthetic, civil and ecological aspect, “re-establishing the original conditions of the blemished location”. It is a prospective that requires preparation, study and sensitivity, qualities that represent the only basis for safeguarding, but architects, both restorers and builders, show they have in short supply. Otherwise they would have been careful not to build the horrors that we are talking about, just as not to think that good restoration is the one that makes everything new, everything shiny, like the floors of the Byzantine churches in Ravenna or Taverna in Calabria. Good perhaps for ballroom dancing but unworthy in a historical sacred building. Floors further more that evoke the restorations in Yemen.

No, this not a boutade. Yemen in fact has a lot in common with Italy, in the morphological characteristics of the landscape and also the towns and villages, too. The only difference, and this is not a trifle, is that there are many fewer monuments, often more fragile and made of mud. Therefore when there is an intervention with same clumsiness that characterised Italy in the Sixties and Seventies, when fragile structures are knocked down completely to make way for building in reinforced concrete, the result is fatal. It must be an anthropological constant: in order to forget poverty, when one becomes more or less rich a strategy of distortion is devised which is expressed in the construction of buildings that wipe out history. The Yemen case is useful for reflecting on something that happened here for many years when innumerable historical buildings were knocked down in the uttermost indifference. Until, in recent years there has been a recovery of conscience on the part of private parties who have begun to restore in accordance with the principles indicated by Cervellati and Paolo Marconi, who used to teach his students that architecture as a violent statement must be repudiated in order to become patient reconstruction, a historically rigorous and measured compensation. An architecture that forgoes new structures for highly conservative interventions on buildings with a historical value.

The  ideas of Cervellati and Marconi  have constituted rare forms of resistance to the violences inflicted on Italy, sometimes in the service of the so-called well-being and sometimes to make a historical building “useful”, so as to exploit. In the name of usefulness and well-being, the only valid principle of protection has been turned on its ear: the awareness of the asset, the “health of the asset”, that State defines. The state, in fact, is not just the state, but the regional, provincial and municipal authorities and also a private entity, that private entity that feels the responsibility to protect what it owns, because the conscience of the asset is in itself the state. Whosoever wants to gain material benefits and is in contrast with the asset of the asset: it is therefore outside the state, against the state.

Nothing is more dangerous than giving a “value”. The “value” of a place, of a monument or a building is in its integrity. The assumed value-giving makes it possible to obtain advantages eliminating the reasons for visiting a place or monument. This happened on the Costa Smeralda (Sardinia), where some interventions were followed by building speculation and landscape devastation. One possibility might therefore be a sort of “private state property”, of those who buy portions of land, not to use them but to protect their integrity. A seemingly paradoxical principle, but that is perhaps the extreme possibility of saving from devastation what still remains property of the state.

The problem is the conservation of the memory. Before deciding any new construction, every effort should be made to reinstate, compensate and also rebuild what there was (when one thinks of the Castelvecchio bridge in Verona, one thanks heavens that the Gregotti of the time was not called in. He would have built a new bridge, shiny, made of steel or reinforced concrete).

So, only the interventions that have respected the uniqueness of the places and the monuments can constitute a a solution to the survival of the small old town centres compared with cement cast called the outskirts, as in the case of Ruvo di Puglia, marvellous little town with outskirts impossible to see and impossible to live in, without a square, the church and its courtyard, the place where the community could meet. Today it is no longer like that but tragically the situation from some points of view is worse. Today the devastation occurs under the ideological profile that we have talked about.

Monsters are not created for small comforts or in the name of development but the great architect is called in who is given carte blanche to do what he or she wants. A criminal idea: who has in fact said that today’s architecture must make its mark by destroying even a small nineteenth century rural architecture?