Art and technology. Spartaco Paris’s pamphlet “per un umanesimo politecnico”

In Amate l’architettura, Gio Ponti distinguished between technical language and pseudo-technical language – that is, the language of technocrats and technophiles (who, in other words, ‘bark’ technically): the former is like a jargon or dialect useful for internal dialogue amongst technicians, whilst the latter is also aimed at public debate, with the result, however, that in the end nothing is understood – ‘it is hermetic, and therefore neither technical nor precise’. To break this deadlock, Spartaco Paris respectfully takes up the baton passed to us by Ponti way back in 1956. And it is paradoxical that, seventy years later, the very person seeking to speak plainly in order to revive this ancient art—so integral to Italian culture—is a professor of technology at La Sapienza University, author of Amiamo l’architettura. On the Uncertain Fate of a Civic Art (Laterza, 160 pp., 16 euros). The situation is paradoxical because we are, in fact, increasingly inundated with technical jargon every day – not only in relation to the now-completed PNRR projects or the post-earthquake reconstruction in central Italy, but also regarding the forthcoming housing plan.

Practising architecture, now more than ever, means focusing first and foremost on building services, even before any formal considerations. Systems of all kinds – not just water, electricity and gas, but also solar panels, air conditioning, wastewater treatment, heat pumps, etc. In this respect, Paris follows in the footsteps of his mentor Nanni Morabito, an engineer from the illustrious Neapolitan school who, on a whim, chose to take a degree in architecture as well, with Carlo Scarpa as his supervisor – Scarpa being, amongst many other things, the editor of one of the most important essays of the 20th century, *Environment and Technology in Modern Architecture*, in which Reyner Banham argued in 1969 that the definition of building services was the true nature of modernity and that this would remain so in the decades to come, beyond stylistic concerns. The Centre Pompidou, built shortly afterwards, with its colourful, exposed rather than concealed services, would immediately prove him right. Today, however, due to the technicisation of architectural language, safety parameters dominate; it is in the name of these that funding and authorisations are granted, and at times the worst kinds of architectural desecration are carried out: demolitions and reconstructions, ramps, greenwashing, and structures that are sometimes incomprehensible. After all, as Rem Koolhaas recently wrote, ‘we see at work here a new trinity: the traditional European values of liberty, fraternity and equality have been replaced in the 21st century by comfort, safety and sustainability’. The Paris pamphlet, on the other hand, seeks to break new ground, refusing to resign itself to a fatal technocratic destiny, ‘for a polytechnic humanism’, as one of the paragraphs is titled. The first chapter lists all the problems that those involved in architecture know well and discuss at every public or private occasion, from the decline of specialist publishing to the now de facto separation between the profession and research (in Italy, those who build cannot teach and vice versa), as well as a certain criminalisation of the profession – ‘concrete’ is a derogatory and illicit term almost on a par with ‘cocaine’ – to the scarcity or ineffectiveness of competitions, both at university level and for public works, with the result that disciplinary knowledge is fragmented or outsourced to technical expertise in the name of safety and supposed cost savings, precisely.

Paris is cautious, at times even verbose, but always precise in his use of the past: he never quotes at random; on the contrary, he is precise and therefore, technically speaking, also a historian. For example, when he quotes a perceptive thought by Marco Zanuso: “The real vice of the historical danger in which we live is not technology in itself. The flaw lies in technology that is only half-realised. That is to say, technology that is not taken to its ultimate consequences – which are, in fact, liberating – of a return to nature and humanity”. A fundamental problem is, in fact, the traditional millenarian nature of Italian culture, whereby every innovation is seen as a threat of impossible escapes into the past; and therefore, Paris continues, ‘in an age in which the detractors of technology, rather than understanding it, fear it, deluding themselves that they can scale it back or slow its development, in an attempt to limit its deepest potential’. Precision, an essential virtue for both the historian and the engineer, must serve a unified disciplinary body of knowledge—that of architecture—which Paris, drawing on Aldo Rossi—perhaps the least technical of all the architects of the last century—reminds us must be a heritage of cultural and social meanings, because it is characteristic of the university to answer the question: ‘What does it mean?’ Not the question ‘what is it for?’ Therefore, rather than focusing on forms, Paris is concerned with redefining the architect’s role as an intermediary with what was the world of yesterday because, as Ponti wrote, ‘time is measured solely by the transformation of things: where they do not transform, there is no time, there is no history’.