Architecture cannot be entirely private. An interview with Pier Paolo Tamburelli

Tadeáš Říha: In your Prague lecture, you spoke about your recent projects, both built, and written, but today I will mostly focus on the written work. To start with, what we are creating here is going to eventually become a text, over which I only have little control and of which you had no premeditation. So, I am curious, as a as a writer and as an architect, what does interview mean to you? 

Pier Paolo Tamburelli: Interview?  

Yes Interview.  

I never thought about it. I think it’s something for journalists. A kind of thing I'm not very fond of, to be honest. People tend to lie in interviews. An entire cultural project based on interviews might end up being a lot of bullshit. But at the same time, interviews can be something light and witty. So, interviews might at least be fun to read. But again, I am not light and witty, so it is definitely not my thing. 

In your lecture, you joke that you are not a very good writer, but you are a good editor, that you're good at erasing things, so I was wondering, how do you create by editing? 

I think, I also design that way. Or at least my contribution to baukuh’s design, because, contrary to writing, I do design together with my partners. My contribution is always more in terms of corrections. I can put it this way: my creative side is not that creative. In writing, the actual moment of writing down the first version is rather painful, particularly because I start from notes. Writing the notes is OK because if I write it down, it's because something interested me. So, notes are kind of spontaneous reactions, most of the times taken on the phone while reading something. They are a sort of reaction. But then I must put together the notes. I end up having these massive piles of 2 or 3 line sentences which are in a way impossible to put together. And they are normally always very repetitive, as I am rather stubborn and repetitive, and there are always huge logic gaps in between those notes, so at a certain moment I must fill those gaps, as I am repetitive but rather precise, so I see the missing parts of the arguments, or at least I see bits of them. This gap-filling moment is always horrible. After that things become sort of easier. I think that I'm relatively good at seeing what doesn't work and dropping things that are just useless. Erasing is definitely my favourite part. 

In your work, or at least in the way you present your work, there are always key historical precedents, is that part of this editing process too? 

That is more because we don't have ideas. 

Does anyone have ideas of their own? Is that a possibility in architecture?  

I don't know. I don't have them, but maybe others do. There are people who pretend to have ideas, maybe they do. I'm not in favour of ideas, but I'm also not against ideas.  

Coming back to the idea of notes and fragments, your recent Grundkurs book is a collection of such fragments, it’s a compilation of hand-drawn slides you prepared for the first-year students at TU Vienna in 2021. It's full of sketches and notes and maybe there you somehow found a way to not to have to fill these gaps, to not do the boring part, because the book is simply a collection of sketches and notes and that is kind of the beauty of it. I thought we could go through a few of these fragments just taken out of context. 

OK.

Architecture cannot be entirely private; it is a problem and a resource.  

Today it seems like everything is private. And this progressive privatization (not as a social/economical process but as an anthropological one, that is somehow parallel to the other) is of course more developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, but it is now dominant everywhere in the so called “West”. In this perfectly privatized landscape, architecture seems to be an exception. And this without a clear ideological standing, given that architects are obviously involved in the same processes as anyone else and are not particularly heroic, but simply because architecture, just because of its scale, because of the money involved and because of the workforce that is required, has an inherently public dimension. And also: architecture is slow. 

I think every everyone except me would love architecture to be faster, easier to build. You have an idea, and you turn it into a building immediately. The Futurist dream: a new city every week. But it's not like that. And this forces architects to think of the long term. So, architecture, probably against the will of architects, ends up incapable of forgetting the long term and incapable of becoming entirely private.  

So, Architecture is inherently public, simply because of the time and effort it takes to create it?  

Yes, inherently public, and inherently abstract. And this is also the only interesting thing in architecture. I mean, yes, you can use architecture as media, but it's by far the worst of all possible media. If you really want to communicate, why don't you do it with pictures, with movies with music, with videogames, anything but architecture. I honesty do not understand architects who try to fight against this condition. Why should architecture become faster, or lighter? There are so many fast and light things. If you are interested in that, then just don’t do architecture, do something else. What is interesting in architecture is that it is so slow, and so it is also so strangely unpredictable. And here is this marvellous contradiction. On one side, architecture requires so much work, so much organization, and you would think it should be so fixed, so stiff. But in reality, and exactly because of this extreme rigidity, and because it lasts for very long periods, architecture ends up doing things that were entirely not expected when it was designed. And this is by far the most interesting thing about architecture, that there's this kind of mismatch between intentions and results and this mismatch is there from the beginning, and the good architects always work together with (if not for) this mismatch. And this is so unexpected and so generous. And it is also, in a way, so much out of our time, this wonderful slowness, this unpredictability. We live in a society that would like to control everything and would like everything to happen at once and actually, there is this thing called architecture that is slow and is not entirely under control. If you don’t like that, you simply don’t like the only interesting thing in this damn business, you simply don’t like architecture.  

The next one is a bit lighter. I just wanted to bring some animals into this, so the note goes Penguins must move according to a script. 

Yeah, that is about Lubetkin's penguin pavilion at the London Zoo. The poor penguins were placed like actors into this strange structure of intertwined ramps, basically a rip-off of El Lissitzky’s design for Meyerhold theatre. It was a very nasty joke on modern architecture, but also a very nasty joke on the penguins. 

Yeah, I have lived in London for years and I’ve never seen the Lubetkin Pavilion at the London Zoo.  

Me neither. I think no one ever saw that thing. Like, it's just kind of a legend. 

Maybe that’s the only thing we can do for the penguins, to not go see them being coerced by architecture.   

The last fragment I wanted to mention brings us back to humans, though maybe it is related in some ways: “The building is a gesture that creates the possibility of other gestures”, referring to Minoletti’s design in Milan.  

I think it's quite clear. It is what it is. 

Yes, it is simple but also contains a lot. I find it intriguing, creating something that defines public space or allows for people to act in the public space in a certain way. So, what kind of other gestures do you have in mind? Architectural gestures, or human gestures.  

I believe architecture defines a setting for gestures to happen, and it partially controls those gestures. There are certain gestures that become possible and impossible in a given architectural context, although the control exercised by architecture is never too precise. In this respect, I think that the famous reading of the Panopticon by Foucault is misleading (as are so many of Foucault’s other ideas). The Panopticon as machine to impose certain behaviour is terribly ineffective: Without police, the panopticon doesn't force you to do anything. And Panopticons can be used as museums or luxury hotels. It is true that certain shapes influence certain types of behaviour. And so certain gestures become more evident in certain spaces. It is also easier to remember gestures that happened in certain architectural circumstances, but this control is very indirect and it's not the kind of policing that Foucault was talking about. Foucault really overestimated architecture’s repressive potential.  

What can architecture do?  

What it can do, is to operate as a setting for things to happen, for gestures to appear. And there's a different between a gesture and an action. I think gesture is something that should also be recognized by the person who “receives” it. It is not sufficient to perform it; a gesture is an action that is “seen and recognized”, and so understood as the combination of an action and a meaning. A gesture is something more than an action, so architecture is probably a machine to turn actions into gesture, but in this case, it's also a clumsy machine. 

I like the idea of architecture as a machine for turning actions into gestures, because the human body can likewise be seen as such a machine and by doing things with hands and bodies and voices, you give meanings to movements that are otherwise meaningless and that is something bodies and buildings share or maybe buildings are just extensions of the bodies.  

If we just stay with Grundkurs for a moment, it can be read as a kind of personal atlas. It’s witty and it is fun but, precisely because it is personal, it is also very excluding, it is also almost entirely western centric. Of course, any historical writing or teaching is an exercise in excluding, but I could not help wondering if this is still a feasible way for young students to first encounter architecture? 

Well, this is the product of two conditions. The first condition is I can only teach what I know, so I don't think I would be a really good teacher of classic Hindu architecture simply because I have no idea. The second condition is way more important and, to put it bluntly, is: is there an alternative architectural culture that is available in 2024? I don't think so.  

I think that there are no more “non-Western” architectural traditions, if you allow me this very rough categorization. Architecture is probably one of the most successful (or devastating – it’s one and the same) cases of imposition of a western set of principles onto a specific practice, and now these principles are taken for granted all over the world. I think that in this respect, architecture, as a discipline, is an extreme case. I think that in other fields—literature for instance—this process of homogenization has found more resistance, and I believe it can be argued that there is still a German or Arabic literature that follows paradigms that are not strictly the same as those defining English literature. But in architecture the situation is the same all over the world, even when architecture is confronted with very different societies, different desires, different possibilities. Still, what is taught today at architecture schools in Paraguay and what is taught in Indonesia is the same, and it is some sort of “post-international style” doctrine, whose roots are undeniably in a western tradition. This does not mean non-western architectural traditions cannot be partially re-used, it simply means that they can be re-used in the context of this “post-international style” condition. So, for instance, I believe the Chinese contemporary context is quite interesting, and I think that many contemporary Chinese architects are now trying to address a Chinese tradition but starting from a westernized background anyway. So, and again, to put it in its simplest possible form: I teach a “western canon” because this canon has already been imposed all over this planet, and I think any criticism of this (which is most welcomed) must start from knowing it. And I also think that, by pretending that they are still viable, we would not render a good service to non-western architectural traditions.  

I think it's interesting when you say that Architecture is more western than other disciplines, other fields of knowledge or art, because architecture is also more many other things: It’s more socially exclusive. It's also more heteronormative and male-dominated, it's more white, it’s all these things that other art forms and other disciplines seem to be much better at countering. So I wonder why it is that Architecture seems to be perpetually behind the general cultural movement. 

I don't know. Architecture is more socially exclusive than other practices because architecture is so crucial for the organization of society, that it cannot but identify with society at large. So, I would say that architecture is exactly at the level of exclusiveness of society at large, maybe other fields can be more progressive, but architecture must correspond to society. It is impossible to make architecture that goes against the society in which the architect lives. As for the maleness, I don't think there's any ontological maleness in architecture. But there is an ontological relation to power. Architecture needs power, needs institutions. In a way, architecture is a technique for institutionalizing a certain social practice: you think that football games are socially important, and you build a stadium; you think that theatre plays are socially important and you build a theatre.  

I think, in architecture, this coupling of buildings with institutions, and before of buildings with actions, is something that was first defined by the Romans because of certain specific features of Roman religion, which of course are entirely forgotten now, but are still playing a role, and this, I think, is something we should discuss. Because it's very current and contemporary, as you are saying, and this is something I would like to write about.  

Is that the next project?  

Yes, maybe that will be my next big project. A book about the ancient Romans and what we are still kind of unconsciously doing that we inherited from the Romans, who still define our idea of architecture. And whether that still make sense today, in such a different society. 

I think that's what some people call the unknown knowns, right? I think Žizek calls it that.  

Known Unknowns and unknown Unknowns, if I remember correctly, but that was Donald Rumsfeld, before Žizek. 

Yeah, Žižek was drawing from Rumsfeld’s saying that if there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns (in Iraq) there must also be unknown knowns, things we do not know we know, past cultural moments that shape our actions unconsciously. 

And I think all that brings me to my next question, which is also, about looking into the past.  

In your second most recent book, On Bramante, which was published by the MIT press in 2022, you say: “Bramante was there. I didn't go looking for him.” How do you choose your topics and what's the criteria of their relevance? Or even, to be slightly provocative, we’re now 22 days into February, and February is on track to becoming the hottest February ever on record. So, in this context, why should we talk about Bramante?  

Well Bramante is certainly interesting as an architect, and as an intellectual, but he is also probably the person who undertook the most daring and, I would also say, craziest experiment in the history of Western architecture – razing to the ground the most important building available just to build it anew.   

You are talking about St. Peter’s Basilica. 

Yes. St Peter’s was built not really as a church, but as an image – an image of space, an image of a certain possible civilization, of a certain possible form of coexistence. And of course, Bramante did not really manage to build it; the existing church is related to what he started, but very different. So, at St. Peter’s, architecture operates as a way of envisioning a possible way of coexistence and giving this political construction a very concrete appearance. And Bramante both succeeds and fails at doing this. I think it is still extremely relevant and extremely interesting – and extremely unresolved as well. 

And to go back to our very hot February 2024, I don't think we can transition to a society that is capable of managing climatic and other environmental issues without a political project and without visualizing such a political project. I think we should regain the capacity of long term political thinking. The fundamental thing about neoliberalism is that it erased the notion of the long term and the notion of planning from the realm of possibilities. I don't think there's any possibility to address environmental issues without planning, therefore without a certain definition of collective goals. And that requires an idea of the city and a representation of the city. And as much as I see how contemporary Western society goes against this urgent need in so many respects, at the same time I also cannot not see that the alternative is extinction.