francesca torzo: day by day

We want to put our feet firmly on the ground,
but we want to reach for the clouds with our heads.
(Mies van der Rohe, 1924)

The exhibition “Day by Day” for aut wishes to convey a sense of trust, both in our profession and in our society, by sharing some questions and experiences gathered in our daily practice.

Building is one of the oldest human activities, always alive, in transformation, we could say always “new”, as it expresses the limits and possibilities of alternating societies. Building serves and reveals life. Architects should assume people’s intelligence as much as their vulnerability, and recognize their need to reconnect to a language – fabulation or langue. It may well be a language defined by contradictory ingredients, these that allow us to share an understanding and an imaginary of things. Architects’ tools are culture and technique. 

Leon Battista Alberti wrote that the purpose of architecture is to provide beauty as well as to satisfy necessity. For centuries all arts have had the goal of beauty through mastering technique but, strangely, present day societies seem to address beauty as something subjective, an individual aesthetic.

Could beauty be readdressed as collective dignity, the décor of citizens? And how can architects serve this sense of dignity? The project translates a nonlinear narrative, where people are invited to wander as they wish, walking from room to room as through landscapes, disclosed as the landscapes of the mind sometimes are. The installation proposes four rooms and three entrances.
 

animations
Drawings are notes of observations, of experience and memory, entwined with visions of spaces which are not yet built and they become notes on paper. Sometimes plans, sections and views merge in one seemingly abstract image, while searching the interrelation among spaces; other times geometries dispose possible orders, conflicting ones; other times again they are miniatures or fragments of a whole yet to come.

Vitruvius described how square and compass – in Latin straight lines, euthygrammi, and constellations, circini – were the utensils of geometry addressed as the tools in charge of tuning harmony of the parts with the whole.

On the other side, drawings allow to investigate construction details and to communicate with constructors and craftsmen. It is surprising how we can communicate such concrete information through utterly abstract representations. Through lines we try to foresee the steps of production, the cracks in materials, the invisible sneaks of water. Through lines we negotiate pennies and habits. The animations show these drawings as a flow of thoughts.
 

postcards
Wandering through streets, alleys, rooms, courtyards, gardens and other rooms, other courts, other alleys, people recall familiar images, familiar as a folk melody or a fable can be. Is it not wonderful how our minds constantly recompose in unpredictable ways experiences that our senses gathered just a few moments before together with other experiences that are faraway in time and space, and that we keep archived in unknown ways? An entrance gate, a stone, a leaf. What do I remember? What do you remember?

The silk prints present a collection of images, which may be read as stolen gazes of the real, even though they are simple shots taken during travels in lengths of years by an amateur. These images express a sense of wonder in front of the intelligent and unpredictable associations of the mind, hinting distant dialogues that are mysterious, yet genuine and lived as such by people.
 

models
A building is a building. It reveals dialogues at distances of metres and kilometres, of decades and centuries.

Architects could emancipate the idea of “context” from the nostalgic figurations of a sense of place and from the simplified versions of analogue city. Architects could initiate with freshness the discovery of the essential relations that people keep alive, thus allow us to share with others and for that reason belong to a civilization.

Fragments of context models, together with fragments of building’s models, inhabit the space as individuals, and raise the question on how we can dialogue with the culture of a place, beyond the mime of volumetric figurations either geometric plan fascinations.

These fragments invite to search for the traces of the acts of settlement that in each place have endured through society transformations, as people found them valid and worthy of preservation, investing them of new meanings that reflect their needs and dreams.

The question around building in continuity with this non authorial wisdom of time past translates the question on how we, as architects, may support a sense of dignity for a society, a décor.

atelier archive
The beginning of any kind of assignment is the brief and the budget, as well as the administrative constraints, such as plots of property and actual urban and building regulations. The work of an architect begins building the tools to negotiate these constraints as a means of revealing meaningful relations.

My team and I have learned that architects can challenge the conventional professional roles and system patterns, which are often the product of comfort zones and of a fear of change. We invest time in building a continuous dialogue with all the actors involved, addressing conflicts and disagreement with an open mind towards achieving a feasible process with the goal of preserving the quality and integrity of the vision we commit to. There is a need for cultural and technical maturity in the profession, with an empathy towards both present reality and past cultures. It seems that all tools already exist, but they may have been forgotten, or disguised.

The tools to build belong to a present living society, but the past offers us ways to think. For this reason, we would like to share with the public the body of our work, the experiments as well as the failures and the successes, making visible the faces and the hands of the people we worked with.

A building is the result of the work of many people, that shall be honoured.
 

francesca torzo architetto
The studio consists of a small international team of young architects. Collaborators are named project architects for individual assignments and are required to attain knowledge and awareness of all projects running in the office. The choice of entrusting a combination of an individual responsibility with a common dialectic is grounded on the belief that thoughts need to be exposed daily to a critical process in order to achieve a shareable clarity.

The teaching and the academic research, the collaboration with builders and the design practice challenge and influence each other in the perspective of building a public discourse, which may support the awakening of a curiosity for understanding our way of living and a confidence in taking responsibility.
 

people
Nicolò Conti, Giacoma Di Vieste, August Kraft Fossmark, Giulia Novati, Gabriele Pace, Silvia Ponte, Yang Tian, Francesca Torzo

Mehr zum Thema

francesca torzo: day by day

ausstellung Fr, 03.03.2023 –
Sa, 24.06.2023

Eine von der italienischen Architektin gestaltete assoziative Ausstellung, in der architektonische und gesellschaftliche Fragestellungen verhandelt werden.

weiterlesen …