July 2020

Viceversa 9

Edited by

Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Martina Motta, Giacomo Pala, Bettina Siegele

The (architectural) masterpiece

The ninth issue of Viceversa, dedicated to the topic of masterpieces, is organized in three sections: 1) Masterpiece Reloaded: fragments of past essays that are useful to approach the topic of the masterpiece; 2) Masterpieces and Cigarettes: a distance conversation on the meaning and value of the concept of masterpiece; 3) Masterpiece Now!: a critical selection of contemporary architectural masterpieces.

Index:

Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Martina Motta, Giacomo Pala, Bettina Siegele

Masterpieces are dumb

The first recordings of the word “masterpiece” date back to the guild system of the late 16th century, when the term was used to indicate a piece of work that an apprentice had to produce in order to become a master craftsman.

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Valerio Paolo Mosco

The Wheel of Time

There is a distinction to be made if we talk about “masterpiece”: on the one hand paradigmatic works, on the other emblematic ones. Paradigmatic are the works that represent an era by synthesizing it in their forms. Paradigmatic are for example the villas of Neutra, where we breathe the Californian spirit of the 50s...

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Bart Lootsma

The Masterpiece and the Genius

A genius and a masterpiece – if they exist – seem to live in absolute symbiosis with each other. They’re intrinsically linked. We can see this in Watch Picasso Make a Masterpiece, a five-minute fragment from the film The Mystery of Picasso...

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Theresa Uitz

Lieber Meister

Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Chicago in 1887 – about 16 years after the Great Fire had destroyed nearly the entire city – to find work in local firms. Just a few months later, Dankmar Adler and Louis L. Sullivan were looking for a draftsman to help with the plans of The Auditorium. Thrilled by the office...

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Andreas Körner

“Hello Fräulein Voronoi”

The drawings, prints, and paintings of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) occupy a high position in the echelons of digital formal references. In this, his work Kunstformen der Natur (1904) falls in the category of the masterpiece. It is hard to imagine a design studio using digital tools where his work does...

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Marco Biraghi

Le Chef-d’œuvre reconnu

The notion of “masterpiece” has an unmistakably idealistic matrix. Idealistic is the way of conceiving the work of art as an exceptional, isolated product, the result of the sublime intuition of a genius. And also idealistic is the presumption of the existence of a relationship of “continuity”...

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Emanuele Piccardo

Supreme Masterpieces

In the past century, the word "masterpiece" was used to identify the extraordinary architectures built by designers such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, which altered earlier architectural tradition and led to the foundation of Modern and Organic Architecture...

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Roberto Damiani

Modern Masterpieces of Subcultural Fiction

In 2012, I spent a few months as a visiting scholar at a prestigious university in Upstate New York. Browsing online looking for something to visit nearby, I discovered that the First Unitarian Church, designed by Louis I. Kahn in the early 1960s, was in Rochester, just...

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Beniamino Servino

On the Masterpiece

The Masterpiece is the best work, among those produced by an Author. It is the work that I prefer. The Masterpiece, more than the other Works, becomes a text: it is arranged for my use. And, the more I like it, the more I want to own it, to make it mine, to make it pass through me.

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Hans Ibelings

Mansplaining

Calling a building a masterpiece says a lot about who makes the call. In the old days, a carpenter, a silversmith, or shoemaker would set out to work on their masterpiece, as a requirement to gain full membership of a guild. Nowadays it works differently. Masterpieces are made by the person...

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Alejandro Zaera Polo

The Evolutionary Masterpiece: The Design Space

The hypothesis here is that true masterpieces are not the design of a mastermind but the capacity of a work to articulate the set of constraints acting at a given time and in a given environment. The intelligence of such...

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Camilo Rebelo

The Openness of the Masterpiece

"Time is a great architect," says Alvaro Siza. Time provides buildings with different lives, and these different lives seem to be incorporated into the buildings that possess them: even if we can't perceive...

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Francisco Mangado

The Masterpiece's Principles

Masterpieces to be such, especially in architecture, need time; with time, architectures become masterpieces. A masterpiece "survives" over time. It is usually the critics who determine whether an architecture, or a work of art, is a masterpiece or not: hence their power.

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Lidia Gasperoni

Anthropocene Masterpiece(s)

Architectural buildings and infrastructures are main factors of the human impact on the environment. As such, they shape the current agenda for architecture. By critically rethinking architecture’s environmental impact, the mastery of teaching, designing, and...

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conrad-bercah

Anti-villa

"It is called Antivilla," says Arno Brandlhuber, "because it is the size of a villa but is not used as one. Its shape is given by the land on which it sits; a plot up for sale for a 100 sqm building that already housed a 500 sqm industrial structure in which women's lingerie had been produced in the GDR."

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fala

Mühlezelgstrasse’s column

A masterpiece that is not a building or a house but a column. A masterpiece that is quite modest yet extremely powerful. A single element, a fragment. A column that, according to the two authors, was tested on site in real size in paper. A column that is not a literal structure but a joyful compositional device.

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Jeff Kaplon

Picassohaus

The Picassohaus is a steel and glass office block located on an oblique corner plot overlooking Picassoplatz in Basel, designed by Peter Märkli and completed in 2008. This project may not be an obvious “masterpiece” within the architect’s oeuvre; nor is this selection intended to be subversive by highlighting an underdog.

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Nina Bassoli

Ponte Polcevera

The invitation finds me unprepared. To speak of "masterpieces" in the 21st Century – the century stating that "the next big thing will be a lot of small things" – is an embarrassing task. I immediately thought of writing about one of those many magnificent projects, perhaps a Japanese one...

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Fabrizio Gallanti

Encants Market

Pictures do not make justice to the Mercat dels Encants project as they often concentrate on the spectacular gilded roof over it. Though it is a wonderful feature, what happens below it is even more remarkable. The new structure, close to the Glories huge roundabout, substitutes a previous run-down facility...

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Alona Martinez Perez

Falls Road

I lived in Belfast from 2009-2012, the crisis was hitting in a post-2008 world, and my first academic job took me to this city which I had heard of but have never been to. When confronting writing about a project that for me exemplifies what a great street is, my mind goes back to the Falls, commonly referred by local people as...

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Daniel Tudor Munteanu

Manabe Equation House

This house is not a house. Or is it? What makes a house a house? It has no doors. It has no windows. It has no floors. It has no roof. Do wooden lattice or flat sheets of glass qualify as floors and roofs? This house has only walls. Heavy, blind, structural walls. And stairs. A lot of them.

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Paula Victoria Álvarez

EJHNMC

The buildings that we recall today as masterpieces of the first half of the 20th century –the Bauhaus in Dessau, the Barcelona Pavilion, or the Ville Savoye– have been so imitated and so distorted after they were popularized and integrated into the market, that it is difficult to see their experimental character...

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WAR – Warehouse of Architecture and Research

Nantou Old Town Preservation and Regeneration

We could have written about some impeccable projects of the Portuguese school, dear to us for biographical reasons and academic training; we could have looked at the excellence of Central European architecture; we...

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Lluis J. Liñán

Zollverein School of Management

Masterpieces are a function of value: the ways in which it is assigned, exchanged, and agreed upon. In architecture, irrespective of the source that generates it, value is inherently dependent on pictures...

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