July | 2012 | architecturefarm

The final event of the trip was the fourth triennial International Congress on Construction History, held in Paris and bringing in nearly 400 scholars from around the world. The Congress was quite selective this year, and the papers that I saw all reflected that, including the eight that I had the pleasure of shepherding through two sessions on concrete.

Best of all? The home base for the event was at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank. Great neighborhood–our hotel was a short, patisserie-heavy walk away–and the place echoes with all kinds of architectural ghosts. Students there seem to have a healthy skepticism, though, regarding the place’s history:

Super pleased with the official announcement on the last day that the Fifth Triennial Congress will, in fact, be in Chicago in 2015. We have some work to do to live up to the job that the Paris crowd managed, but we’ll do our best…

After three weeks of Nervi sites and archives, my partner and I have headed out for a grand tour of sorts. There’s a long list of sites in Europe that we’ve long wanted to see, but for whatever reason haven’t yet been to. We decided that there were a handful that were kind of unforgivable lapses in our travels, and that we should start seeing them together,

We’ve had kind of a loose theme. Her research interests are in cognition and perception in architecture, in particular in detailing. And I’ve been ready for a break from the rigors of expressive structure–something with a bit of mystery sounded good.

So we strung together a loose itinerary starting from Rome and ending in Paris, where I’ll be hanging out at the triennial Congress on Construction History this week. There’s a lot between those two, and we think we’ve done a pretty good job of it.

We started in Verona, at Castelvecchio. We’d both seen this one, but not together, and it’s just the sort of immersive environment that gets you thinking about what’s really going on in your mind when you approach a detail–in this case, details that are often a bit baffling. Scarpa’s hugely improvisational approach means that there are families of details–handrails, for instance–that subtly change throughout the museum, and it’s not always clear why. That lack of clarity, though, makes connections that keep you engaged and kind of staring at things over and over–effective, if not always generous.

Zumthor’s baths at Vals, Switzerland, on the other hand, seem more than generous, even if they’re famously enigmatic. The spaces inside all flow into one another through the detailing, which consists entirely of horizontally laid, thin-set local stone and concrete floor and roof slabs. After a while, the material recedes into the background, meaning that there’s a really meditative experience between you and the pools. Small changes in smell, sound, and temperature all become super important, which plays into the intensity of the baths culture. Midnight sessions are silent, and incredibly beautiful. (As a small thanks to the good folks of Vals and surrounds, I’ll mention that we got there and back entirely by public transit. While you can get there by car, the town is small, the road is unbelievably tight, and less traffic obviously is better. We went from Zurich to Chur and then Ilanz by local train, and then caught a 45 minute bus ride from the Ilanz train station that took us to the door of the Hotel Terme. Beautiful ride, all of the connections are designed to work efficiently, and it was cheap…)

From Vals we took trains to Belfort, France, and the next morning caught a €25.00 taxi to Ronchamp. I’ve always found Corbusier interesting but not always compelling, and I have to say that Ronchamp was utterly impressive and convincing. It’s a building that should give the tech historian in me fits given its mysterious construction techniques and its insistently willful form. But the space and the light are everything people say, and as an immersive experience it’s absolutely transcendent. Every moment seems composed if slightly off balance or enigmatic, but the collection of little vignettes ends up being remarkably coherent. Not all of the iconography makes sense to someone who’s not steeped in the liturgy, but it doesn’t really matter. The space is profoundly emotional, and whatever your spiritual engagement it is hard not to be moved by it.

The most impressive moment, though, has been Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I use Gaudi all the time in my structures courses, but I was totally unprepared for what an immersive experience his buildings are–and how convincing even the quirkier elements of his designs are. L took me to Casa Mila almost right off the train, and even though I expected to like the attic structure and rooftop details, the entire building made sense not only as structure, but as a meandering set of spaces that never seemed quite the same, but that were always connected through materials of details. Sagrada Familia has all of that, but it also has the absolutely awe-inspiring forest of undulated and striated columns that collectively work with and against one another to support the vaults overhead. It’s as thorough and as captivating a space as I’ve ever been in, and to see it first hand after a month of running ideas about Nervi through my head this seems both reassuring–you can make poetic, even willful architecture out of efficient structural diagrams–and challenging. Nervi undoubtedly knew of Gaudi’s experiments, and it’s clear that he took some of Gaudi’s ideas and found ways to rationalize and efficiently construct them. I have to admit, though, that he never quite reached the emotional resonance that Sagrada Familia offers. Not that every building or architect has to be a piece of poetry, just like not every building has to be structurally rational or expressive. But to see this amazing piece of stonework do both so fluently has been a real revelation, and I’m thinking that it offers a nice coda to this round of research, one that asks more questions than it answers…