Vittorio Gregotti
Translated by Peter Wong and Francesca Zaccheo
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Chicago, Illinois
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
103 pp. 1996.
ISBN 0-262-57115-3 (paper)
Foreword by Kenneth Frampton
Translator's Introduction
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mass Homogeneity
In Defense
Critical Reasons for the Project
Prevision, Prediction
The Necessary Limit
Advanced Mediocrity
Against Vulgar Pluralism
1. On Precision
2. On Technique
3. On Monumentality
4. On Modification
5. On Atopia
6. On Simplicity
7. On Procedure
8. On Image
Notes
Of the many critics and theorists who enter the lists of architectural thought today, not one has been of such enduring importance as Vittorio Gregotti, not least for his exceptional clarity and longevity; in the first instance as an editor, scholar, and teacher and in the second, but of no less consequence, as an architect who has been in practice for nearly forty years. It is this combination of theory and practice that has bestowed upon his discourse such subtlety and conviction, since all of his writing has arisen out of a dichotomous process in which the critical subject constantly oscillates between the textual and the tectonic, that is to say, between the daily act of reading and writing and the equally creative struggle broached each day with his professional colleagues and collaborators.
Like other Italian architects of his generation, Gregotti found his feet as an intellectual as one of the young Turks that served under the leadership of Ernesto Rogers on the editorial staff of Casabella, during its second incarnation from 1949 to 1958. In the company of Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi, and Guido Cannella, Gregotti participated in Rogers's rereading of the history of the early modern movement in order to integrate its legacy into postwar European practice. Thus, in issue after issue, the work of Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, H. P. Berlage, and Hans Poelzig came to be photogenically presented and analyzed for what their finest achievements could still bestow upon the evolution and enrichment of twentieth-century architectural form. Gregotti would continue with a similar genre of research during his editing of Edilizia Moderna, which did much to restore the reputation of the anti-futurist Novecento movement as this had manifested itself in Italy from around 1914 to the mid-twenties; from say Giorgio De Chirico's Nostalgia for the Infinite of 1914 to Giovanni Muzio's Ca' Brutta apartments, completed in Milan in 1923. No one could then have imagined that the metaphysical, atectonic syntax of the Novecento that had served as the parti pris for the prewar Italian rationalist movement would also do the same for the Italian neo-rationalist movement of the mid-sixties, the so-called Tendenza, turning in part upon the revival of the typological method in the writings of Giulio Carlo Argan.
Unlike the leading architects of the Tendenza that became recognizable as a significant position in the Milan Triennale of 1966, Gregotti resisted the reductivist aspects of this reinterpretation of earlier Italian rationalism that was latent in the initial projects of Rossi and Grassi. Unlike the "degree zero" approach adopted by these architects, along with their typo-morphological implications, Gregotti kept his faith with the structural rationalist tradition as this had been evident in postwar Italy in the work of such architects as Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, Gino Valle, and even in that of Rogers himself, particularly in his Torre Velasca erected in Milan in 1958. As a result there was something almost Perretesque about Gregotti's early work in Novara, where the modenature derived from the mode of construction; that is to say, from a syncopated expression that articulated only too precisely the interaction between the structural frame, the brick skin, and the precast concrete window surrounds, together with other accoutrements executed in the same material.
A comparable articulation but at a mega-scale would appear almost thirty years later in Gregotti's University of Calabria of 1986, where a typo-morpho, tectonic assembly would he developed as a territorial intervention. This "viaduct block" was a didactic demonstration of Gregotti's critical/creative strategy as it had been set forth in his book Il territorio dell'architettura of 1966. Completely opposed to rendering buildings as freestanding objects, Gregotti regarded architectural form as the primary agent capable of contributing to the ever-evolving character of both land form and land use. In this respect he remained critical of any open-ended, instrumental exploitation of land. As he would remark in one of his more trenchant Casabella editorials:
I believe that if there is a clear enemy to fight today, it is represented by the idea of an economic/technical space indifferent in all directions. This is now such a widespread idea that it seems almost objective. It seems to have gone a long way beyond the logic of profit to the point where it casts its ideological shadow even over the best intentions of public development in an exemplary alliance made up of bureaucratic thought, the power system and petit-bourgeois culture.... It is a question of a shrewd, modernistic enemy capable of accepting the latest, most fashionable proposal, especially any proposal capable of selling every vain formalistic disguise, favorable only to myth, redundancy or uproar, as a genuine difference.1
Gregotti was the first to recognize that it is the land itself that is at stake today rather than the traditional city. He came to see that the full crisis lay not only within the historical urban core but also in the ever-proliferating tentacles of the megalopolis, since it was these that were having the greatest cultural and physical impact, through the process of speculative subdivision and the wholesale consumption of agricultural land, not to mention the equally devastating abandonment of our obsolete industrial plants with all the negative ecological consequences that this entails. It is perhaps for these reasons that the "memory" of the site served as the mainspring of Gregotti's thought, since for him the geological and mythical history of the site was of as much consequence for its imminent development as the necessary recognition of its current use.
The other imperative for Gregotti was the need to take a "realistic" approach toward the production of built form, if for no other reason than to retain the architect's mastery over building production. For Gregotti, this whole aspect was to be subsumed (in both a pragmatic and poetic sense) under the term technique, although needless to say this invocation of the technical in a quasi-craft sense was not to be simplistically translated into universal technology. As he was to put it in another Casabella editorial:
We have an exaggeratedly technical idea of technique (that marks out the productive aspects of the project instead of projection), whilst we tend to overshadow technique as a transformational guide, specific to architectural design.... Certainly design does not depend absolutely on technique; besides, there are never, nor have there ever been direct connections: technique is no longer a rational model of production nor the linguistic mimesis of its practices; however, since technique is the support of design ideas, the formation of meaning in architectural expression is in some way under its constant supervision and guarantee. It is a matter of guaranteeing that the building enterprise does not turn into a loss but becomes a consolidation of the design. Such supervision is all the more necessary because building is no longer "a natural act" in any way, or even less linked to inhabitation. On the contrary it is undermined by uncertainties due to the habit of constantly starting anew to which design has been subjected for more than half a century.2
This dialogical habit of mind, which swerves unexpectedly as it moves from one level to the next, is characteristic not only of Gregotti's qualifying thought but also of his equally inflected practice. One might even say he is a builder rather than an architect, a Brunelleschi rather than an Alberti, and it is this ethos that has permeated Casabella throughout the fifteen years of his tenure as editor, a line sustained through insightful commentary and critique in one editorial after another. This stoic performance puts Gregotti in a class apart not only as an intellectual but also as an editor, since he has been one of the few editors in the field to assume the responsibility of writing a cogent column in every issue. Over the years these editorials have inevitably returned to the same set of themes, for all that the manner of broaching them has continually varied, the tack depending upon the content of the issue or the articulation of a particularly topical debate.
This continual reworking of a critical stance across a decade and a half has evidently served as the basis for this present volume, as one may judge from the itemized contents that treat sequentially projection, precision, technique, monumentality, and modification, to touch on only some of the key words that have preoccupied Gregotti over the years. In addition to these concerns, the first half of Inside Architecture has been devoted to the theme of conservation, with an emphasis upon its problematic relationship to modernization, particularly as this relates to the vast urban and territorial changes that have taken place in recent years. It is hard to imagine how this dilemma might be put more succinctly than in Gregotti's own words:
It should be said that the resurgence of conservation has been greatly aided by the positive meaning that this word has recently assumed as a protector of architectural heritage, of nature, and of historical memory, in opposition to a modernization that demolishes and forgets. This originates largely from a widespread feeling of resistance to the domination of scientific thought, whose task is to continuously surpass the present: what has been done does not matter; what matters is to see what can be done....Conservation invokes not only memory, but also the fact that the appearance of Picasso's painting does not make that of Poussin obsolete. In other words, conservation demands recognition for the share of eternity (although this expression is largely metaphorical) connected with the idea of artistic practice, as opposed to the essentially linear concept of progress--one that inevitably abandons its own past--common to all the natural sciences.3
Conservation is fundamentally opposed to the skeptical values of the postmodern world that for immediate gain is quite prepared to sacrifice the future as well as the past. This maximizing drive is to be distinguished from the unfinished modern project of the Frankfurt School that in criticizing its own processes puts into question any assumptions we may have adopted as to the necessary relations obtaining between reason and progress. This opposition between modernization and critical reason has now been further compounded by the rise of telematic communications and by the massification of the society through media, through what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno long ago identified as the culture industry. That no one is quite immune to this homogenizing process is evidenced by Gregotti's subtle indictment of the way in which the architectural profession has been coopted by the commodifying values of the late modern world that are all the more insidious for being implied rather than declared. Thus we may recognize through Gregotti's characterization those aspects of contemporary practice that favor
a little bit of modernity in techniques and communication; and perhaps a little tenor's high note here and there to add a touch of "artistry," especially in the form of inconsequential originality which introduces a shade of ineffability into the solution, an ineffability necessary for proving the existence of creative freedom. And above all a great deal of flexibility, which often results in close adherence to the folds of profit; a generous share of that plastic democracy that goes under the name of animation. . . . No definite form: rather, total plasticity and interchangeability of solutions within this context. In other words, no architecture.The solution is thus never the one that would suit the project and the place, one that would interpret them according to some necessity. It is more likely to be a solution already open to all hybridizations: not the solution that, in its clarity, is able to include and confront authentic differences, but rather a solution that tends to drown such differences in the process of homogenization set in motion by diversity turned into pure ideology.4
This concern for authentic differences and for their articulation on many levels at once is the recitative that runs throughout this identification of the aporias confronting contemporary practice in the last decade of the century. The author believes that the modern project. irrespective of its scale and scope, must assume the responsibility of criticizing the status quo, together with its own contingency, rather than passively accepting the brief or responding simplistically to a given techno-economic demand. Nothing could be further from this notion of the project as an act of critical transformation than the supposedly "natural" linear process by which productive criteria come to be merged only too smoothly with the myth of progress. In the face of this ideological elision critical practice must be capable of synthesizing the necessary factors, without flattening the macro and micro differences that are built into the program or embodied within the site. Such an act of articulation is unavoidably opposed to any kind of pseudolinguistic effect or to an artificial diversification "that lacks any actual diversity or significant conflict." Thus Gregotti's layered approach encourages one to discriminate between a whole range of interconnected polarities, to wit pluralism versus populism, monumentality versus monumentalism, technique versus technology, ornament versus decoration, manner versus caricature, consistency versus homogenization and last but not least, when it comes to legitimizing theoretical positions, between the description of a confusion and a confused description.
Echoing Alvaro Siza's aphorism that "architects don't invent anything, they transform reality," Gregotti asserts that the task of tectonic transformation involves confronting the rapacity of fashion and commodification while grounding the site in a literal sense, in order to endow the work with a feeling of historical depth. Given the thrust of multinational capitalism that oscillates between unmediated territorial exploitation and neglect, Gregotti is only too aware that such a call to arms can only be made in the name of a professional practice that would
have none of the glorious characteristics of the great avant-gardes of the past.... It would be a patient minority, one able to consider duration without conceit, monuments without monumentalism; a minority capable of deep respect for skills and techniques, without the ideology of a craftsman's leather apron, and without any naive faith in the powers of hypermodern technological society; a minority able to take pleasure in free invention as the necessary solution to a question, not as frivolity. A minority whose acts would respect an economy of expressive means, as well as a simplicity achieved by passing through the complexities of reality without oversimplifying them; a minority capable of continuously constructing a critical distance from reality, above all from an over-justified context; a minority capable of rebuilding within itself the diversity required in a quest for clarity, but without undue pride over the momentary certainties that this produces; a minority that wishes to remain outside of fashion and of image; a minority capable of returning materiality to the embodiment of things.5
Such a minority would be capable of restoring the value of parsimony implicit in the Latin term praecisus -- meaning precision -- without falling into reductive instrumentality. Thus the need at both a macro and a micro scale for the values of definition, measure, and corporeal integrity as these may be applied to the earthwork as much as to the roofwork. As the author is fond of saying, after Auguste Perret, "Il n'y a pas de detail dans la construction," meaning that even the smallest detail is crucial to the realization of the whole. Under this rubric ornamentation may only arise through a mutual synthesis of spatial and material articulation, that is to say, through a multiple inflection by which the program achieves an appropriate hierarchization of its parts.
Elsewhere Gregotti insists, after Louis Kahn, that monumentality is not a genre, that it is above all an aspiration for institutional durability rather than a rhetorical display of power; a concept best exemplified by the German word Denkmal that etymologically combines denken, to think, and Mal, time. On the other hand, as Gregotti ironically remarks: "If no value is given to the memory of past and present events, then there is no reason to build monuments for their future testimony. Nor would there be any reason to worry about the future existence of the value that we bring into being through the construction of architecture."6
As opposed to the stylistic superficialities of our time and the climate of opportunistic reform that suffuses the reactionary politics of the moment, Gregotti aligns himself with the prewar modern project in its most organic aspect, that is to say, with the "not yet" of Ernst Bloch -- projected hope -- as this must now address itself to the modification of land and the cultivation of the earth. He sees this going to ground, so to speak, as a cultural and ecological necessity, for, as he was to put it in 1983, the origins of architecture do not reside in the primitive hut but rather in a primordial marking of ground in order to delineate a human world against the unformed, chaotic indifference of the cosmos; in short, in the act of culture in the void of nature. This respect for primal symbiotic beginnings underlies Gregotti's categorical antipathy to the atopical typologies of the American strip, the supermarkets, parking lots, and service stations that permeate the ubiquitous megalopolis; tropes that, unlike the elements of the antique extra muros, are governed solely by the relentless processes of commodification and distribution. Against this "society of spectacle" that constantly strives to naturalize its existence, Gregotti posits a simplicity that is far from being natural, spontaneous, and dynamic. On the contrary it is rebarbative and complex. As he puts it, simplicity is neither a viable starting point nor an objective, for architecture is not ipso facto simple; it can only become simple.
As Lewis Mumford observed, the darker side of the information age resides in our incapacity to assimilate the unending proliferation of data that is placed at our disposal. While a great deal of such material is only of passing relevance, there can be no doubt that this continual flow has had a negative effect upon the overall quality of everyday production and hence has already prejudiced, as it were, the possibility of such input becoming culturally integrated into normative building form. The supposedly well-informed architect is often obliged to indulge in the consumerist trait of speed-reading, in which a text is read once and once only; a scanning reflex that one cannot fruitfully indulge in, in this particular instance. For this is a Socratic dialogue in which the architect talks unceasingly to his double, that is to say to his critical muse who weaves back and forth across the loom of the world, suspended between the intellectual refinement of an urban elite and the harsh confrontations of architectural practice.
This then is a summation of Gregotti's thought to date; an artificial anthology, as it were, that has been expressly compiled for an Anglo-American audience. As I have suggested, this is a text that demands to be read repeatedly; indeed it is hard to know how many times one might come to peruse it before exhausting its content, since here, more than in other essays of a similar genre, every sentence resonates with implications that escape the constraints of the format and thus provide a primer not only for an emerging theory of architecture but also for an immediate form of reflective practice.7
Kenneth Frampton
This translation is taken from Vittorio Gregotti's original edition of Dentro l'architettura, published by Bollati Boringhieri in 1991. It is the most comprehensive of Gregotti's writings, covering many of the themes that he investigated in his monthly editorials for Casabella, the Italian journal that he directed from 1982 to 1996. It presents us with a candid view of the discipline from within, citing its many problems and contradictions while also offering concise ways of reconstituting its purpose and direction.
Certainly, Gregotti is writing in a time when there is much to be questioned in architecture. He has approached this debate cautiously, withholding any pretense of offering simple answers to its problems. Instead, he is more inclined to be inductive in his reasoning: examining the work of others, sifting through critical discourse, and surveying the territory of other disciplines before advancing any hypotheses. In the tradition of Edoardo Persico and Giuseppe Pagano in the 1930s, or Ernesto Rogers in the 1950s (all past editors of Casabella), Gregotti has structured a means by which he can first understand urgent issues of the profession before acting upon them. Few contemporary architects have positioned themselves in this manner, and Gregotti, with Casabella as his platform, has striven to circulate such questions in a consistent and serious manner. It is therefore no surprise that we find Inside Architecture dedicated to a further examination of what lies at the center of these questions, issues that help to redefine our position with respect to modernity, and more specifically to the future prospects for an architecture of modernism.
It is also significant that Gregotti has enriched his discourse by engaging in a substantial professional practice. Gregotti Associati, established in 1974, has designed, planned, and built projects both in Italy and abroad. Few architects today, with the possible exception of Alan Colquhoun, can claim to have profoundly influenced the discipline as both practicing architects and critical writers. Of course, many have annotated built works of others in order to announce coming trends, or have published colorful monographs and collected works that clear alternative paths to follow. But although such displays may offer temporary relief from the anxieties that plague us, seldom do they have any lasting effects within the discipline.
Gregotti is quite suspicious of those critics and architects who isolate themselves from the specific environmental and social context of an architectural project. He is equally troubled by those who disregard the traditions of architectural culture itself. Instead, he seeks to understand and modify the specific situations that confront theory within a project, while simultaneously engaging in the specialized activities of construction through a grounded relationship with its own traditions. Such a perspective involves not only constructing critical ideas, but also dismantling built work in order to generate alternative concepts. On this note we can better understand why Gregotti structures Inside Architecture in two distinct parts: one addressing critical questions that encourage reflection on the reasons behind our projects, and one outlining the motives and mechanisms that drive the activities involved in project-making itself.
Many of the book's themes are shaped by Gregotti's concerns about contemporary conservatism, and specifically about works promoted by architects who have attempted to reject the modern project in favor of past architectures and the sentiments of historical memory. Some might argue that we have passed beyond such interests, and that we are now wiser and better equipped to address the actual problems of architecture and culture (for example, those that advocate renewed interest in the avant-garde, or experiment with techno-popular imagery). But the flood of historical sentiment has not necessarily subsided; on the contrary, it seems to have spread well beyond architectural circles. Clearly, the damage we see in today's urban environment stems less from the nostalgia of architects who championed such imagery fifteen years ago than from the aftershock of second-order designers, developers, and speculators who continue to market such illusions to the general public. In Gregotti's view, this market-driven wave has led to a "homogenization" of architectural culture, a kind of "hyper-modernism" that resists any alternative representations. He also remains doubtful that more recent trends will be able to evade this problem, simply because they rely on the same market mechanisms to disseminate their images. It is only a matter of time before these experiments suffer a similar fate at the hands of second-rate promoters.
These concerns inform Gregotti's desire to clarify the specific nature of modern thought in contemporary architecture. As he explains it, although the idea of modernism has been criticized as a unitary process, a rigid ideology, or an appeal to the myth of progress, in fact these traits are more stereotypical than real. The modern movement of this century has included several lines of thought, at times conflicting; it accepts its own limits while simultaneously questioning the interdisciplinary agents that define these limits. An architectural project of modernity is "a new thing that moves, interprets, and reorganizes the overall system" of what is known; it should be recognized as a mode of working rather than as a form.l The task of modernity, argues Gregotti, is therefore to establish difference: not the kind of difference that frees architecture from any established historical memory or scientific development, and not a difference that attempts to defer meaning linguistically, but rather one that organizes the conflicts of a situation by functioning as a critical instrument for examining what already exists.
With this description, Gregotti attempts to re-form the concept of modernity, drawing on its earlier meaning. As Jurgen Habermas has noted, prior to the Enlightenment "to be modern" was a mode that allowed new epochs to form themselves through a changing relationship with past traditions. Following this period a new view of modernism arose, one that sought to sever all ties with the classical in order to advance new trends. This led in part to a culture of bourgeois aesthetic appeal, where any single artistic achievement could only exist through a cycling, novelty-driven relationship with other more stylish ideas that would subsequently replace it.2
Gregotti acknowledges that recent architectural efforts have attempted to reconnect with past traditions, but while "attempts to find legitimation in traditions and history ought to hyper-modern be the main weapons of conservation; instead, they are often a product of the transience that generated and then overturned them through transforming the very concept of transience into a myth, which also became a cyclical reconstruction of many traditions."3 Though well intentioned, the failure of these attempts have left recent architectural productions exposed to future eradication by the next new canon that is certain to replace them.
In his 1923 introduction to Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, Walter Benjamin tells us that when literary works are translated, the success of the result depends on the "translatability" of the original. Even though a translation may fail to reproduce the precise significance of the earlier work, it nevertheless assumes an "afterlife" that moves the essence of the original into a new context. A translation thus involves more than repeating information; it establishes a "kinship" to its previous form that does not rely on simple imitation.4 For Gregotti, a renewed sense of the modern project would assume such a mode. Like the translation, the project must actively acknowledge existing situations and patterns so that their essences remain readable without becoming sentimental or nostalgic. In this view, architectural project-making becomes a creative activity that seizes ideas and materials that appear to be worn out and then rewrites them into a situation that allows for further maturation.
Some may question whether Gregotti's ideas can be effectively translated to our situation in the United States, where architectural traditions may seem too shallow to muster any significance comparable to that of their European counterparts. Yet this is where Inside Architecture reads most urgently, since it questions, by virtue of the modern project, many attitudes that originated in this country, reflecting on the conditions of our own modern predicament.
I would like to thank The University of North Carolina at Charlotte and its College of Architecture for providing essential funding and support for this project. Special mention should go to my colleague Francesca Zaccheo for her excellent work on the initial translation. I would also like to thank Kenneth Frampton, Joseph Rykwert, and Roger Conover for their enthusiastic encouragement. and in particular Pamela Grundy, whose dedicated editing efforts proved essential to its realization.
Peter Wong
Inside Architecture, Vittorio Gregotti
This book consists of two parts, which differ in the way questions are posed rather than in contents or materials, and which reflect two symmetrical, equally architectural points of view.
The first part considers some of the conditions surrounding current developments in architectural discourse. Since I am convinced that empirical conditions provide essential material for the artistic practice of our discipline, I consider a discussion of the hierarchy, the nature, and the significance of such conditions to be highly important for architecture.
Some possible ways to use these conditions in the architectural project are discussed in the second part of this book. These methods have been chosen and treated in fragmentary form, as pieces of possible design procedures, but although they do not claim to form a complete theory of architecture today, they do at least present a particular point of view.
Many of the questions that I consider as conditions for a project in the first half of this book become protagonists, as procedures, in the second. There, I describe how conjunctions, disjunctions, and hierarchies place the various materials in an organized and essential relationship with purpose and place, coming together to form an architectural project.
The second half of this book might thus be seen as the enumeration and description of a discontinuous series of design acts that I believe to be significant in the present debate, also from the perspective of their underlying exclusions.
The first part of the book takes the form of a continuous discourse. It proposes a series of connections, including some with issues that other disciplines have considered with much greater authority. Here, I attempt to present these issues from the point of view of architecture and its dilemmas. The ambiguous notion of conservation runs through the entire first half, which presents its reasons, advantages, and many contradictions in relation to new interpretations and discussions revolving around the theme of modernity.
This part attempts to look beyond the self-legitimizing discussion recently carried on in architectural circles, often in cannibalistic fashion. It proposes to revisit the uneven and uncertain terrain of values and objects that make up the reality against which, beyond which, or for which design projects are formed. Obviously, this return does not seek to approve or justify; rather, the terrain becomes a subject of architectural critique, a starting point for a possible architectural project for understanding and rearranging the present.
The second part, where I consider issues of design practice, also serves to distinguish the significant actions pertaining to our discipline, including the most imaginative, from those belonging to other artistic endeavors.
In the architectural project, the complicated involvement of diverse and often culturally distinct creative forces, as well as the system by which construction information is communicated and the considerable time employed in development and realization, all come together to establish a unique need to produce transformations, within limits that must be known, suffered, and utilized in the project's formation. In fact, I find it impossible to consider my discipline a mere representation of, or a peripheral writing about, what is already there.
Moreover, the issues raised by today's large urban and territorial interventions, as well as by solutions employed for smaller, even minute, strategic modifications, require a talent for mastering complex issues, which include relationships between fields of expertise and the critical limits of their respective roles, as well as the all-important effort to lay the groundwork for specific projects. Perhaps this is, for architecture, one of the most exhausting, intriguing, and inevitable conditions of our time.
All this should not involve transforming architects into managers or cultural organizers, and certainly not converting them into political racketeers. On the contrary, it involves resisting our expulsion (or self-exclusion, by taking on a purely decorative role) from our own universe of specific expertise, traditionally called upon to give meaningful form to the available techniques for transforming the physical world.
These writings take a form that might a bit pompously be defined as theoretical reflection. This is not a choice but a necessity for our projects. It is not directed against talent; rather, I believe it is an indispensable condition for the cultivation of talent. Many have pointed out how difficult it is to find a suitable platform for the issue of theory that serves our specific problems as effectively as did architectural treatises of the past. Until now, we have failed at this task, and our theoretical reflections have often become a subspecies of philosophy or a simplification of historical or epistemological thought. At some times, such reflections serve as a posteriori justification for architectural work. At others, they produce a metaphoric interference between different languages that instead need to maintain open but clear identities in order to communicate.
But this does not mean the problem of theory does not exist. Within the complicated geography of the feeble positions of recent years, it has been easy to surrender to the fatalism of fragmentation, seeing in it a portrait of the infinitely open interpretations that characterize the disorder of our consciousness, or to react against it by espousing a totally imaginary order.
In spite of the much-discussed crisis of the intellectual, I believe it is more important than ever for today's project to practice the highest possible level of critical reason, which even with its well-known limits should be considered suitable material for construction. This matters also because only critical reason makes it possible to continue with the modern project, to whose incompleteness I here expose myself entirely.
NOTES
NOTES TO THE FOREWORD BY KENNETH FRAMPTON
1. Vittorio Gregotti, "Clues," Casabella, no. 484 (October 198Z), 13.
2. Vittorio Gregotti, "In Praise of Technique," Casabella, no. 480 (May 1982),15.
3. Inside Architecture, 5.
4. Inside Architecture, 11.
5. Inside Architecture, 40.
6. Inside Architecture, 65.
7. See Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in
Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
NOTES TO THE TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
1. Inside Architecture, 22.
2. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity -- An Incomplete Project," in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays On Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 3-15.
3. Inside Architecture, 25.
4. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 69-82.