The notion of emptiness is a basic prerogative for understanding space in architecture. Intimately linked to space, emptiness is, according to Bachelard’s phenomenology, the potential being and the “matter of the possibility of being” 2 that precedes the formal definition of architectural space.
Silence becomes conjecture through the analysis of some architectural works, posing reflections on the intrinsic value of emptiness often generated by it, catalyzing even more attention to the continuous relationships between authors (be they architects, painters, writers or philosophers) and poetics (expressed through different disciplines). The thesis is anchored in the reflections of two twentieth-century architects Carlos Martì Aris and Fernando Espuelas who, in a simple and reflective way, address the theme of emptiness through disciplines transversal to architectural ones in a continuous osmosis between architecture, art, literature, music and science.
Architectural space and time become compositional hardware and themes of analysis, where architecture is conceived as a construction in the void; a void that simultaneously encloses and defines. Time, through its silence, that of memories or even that of the rhythms marked by the body of the man who passes through it, serves to reveal the traces of absence. The research thus follows the same ideas of transversality proposed by the Spanish authors, crossing different disciplinary fields, but concretizing these concepts through the study by analogy of architectural works.
The aim is to highlight the role of the aesthetics of silence linked to the place as pure emptiness and to the action of man who, in walking through it, perceives its suggestions and continuous relationships linked to the tangible architectural reality, the one in which touch is a fervent witness. «From the void arise unique thoughts, never thought of before, just as from it arises the absolutely original work. For them to happen it is necessary to know how to produce the void»3. Emptiness, reminiscence, time and meditation will be elements of study and means of meaning to analyze the different architectures that history and contemporaneity lead us to recognize and appreciate every day as continuous rediscoveries. L. Kahn said «that the continuity between what was valid yesterday and what is valid today is taken into consideration by every thinking architect». Returning to the title of the research, silence is analyzed from an aesthetic point of view, where aesthetics is a sector of philosophy that deals with the knowledge of natural and artistic beauty, therefore with the judgment of taste. The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten wrote Aesthetica in 1750, the origin of the word is given by the union of the Greek word αἴσθησις which means sensation and the word αἰσθάνομαι which means perception mediated by the sense. Originally aesthetics is not a separate part of philosophy but simply the aspect of knowledge that concerns the use of the senses is in its archaic meaning. Therefore the reason for the presence of aesthetics in the research theme is perception of a space understood and absorbed even before its form through the sensitivity of our senses; the same ones that seduce us, excite us and make us creators and fascinators of new forms. Without an aesthetics of the senses, our architectures would be countless boxes of dark matter, hollow volumes for the cataloguing of inappropriate functions, a series of containers for the collection of human objects, cold mechanisms for a life useful only for the achievement of an equally useless end such as death. The aesthetics of silence means a digression that places the void not as an absolute principle but as a subject of analysis with reference to a series of experiences of and on the void. Silence as an alveolar tissue that insinuates itself into the secret hiding places of language. A void referred not to the total absence of matter, but in a relative sense, to something that is present differently from the common physical fullnes.
«II silenzio è un’alternativa. Quando nella polis le parole sono colme di barbarie e menzogne, niente parla più forte della poesia non scritta»
G. Steiner
Steiner’s unwritten is our architectural silence, what we want, what we desire, what is essential to silence the spatial excesses full of nonsense where matter, color, sound, space, mix and clash with the frenzy of aberrant contemporaneity. Silence, in this perspective, overflows like a veil of fog that threatens to slowly invade the world until it becomes invisible. The fog obscures and hides the impurities of our society and helps us to perceive, through the visual unfinished, what only benefits the intellect. Not seeing and not hearing reactivates the receptors stunned by media reality. We naively want to be enveloped in a mere eclipse of visual language, which interposes a filter or a veil that prevents us from seeing too much and from succumbing to the pomp of publicity. Sometimes silence constitutes a renunciation or a mutilation that arises as an expression of refusal in the face of the atrocities committed by man, other times silence indicates the recognition of the progressive defeat of the world of words and the growing difficulty of translating reality through verbal language.
As C. M. Aris writes, any text that deals with concepts with such a broad semantic extension cannot have the intention of being compact with respect to the theme treated. In fact, the aesthetics of silence refers us to the concept of absence, of indeterminacy, of emptiness in the contemporary project, trying to propose reflections that can stimulate and act as possible design tools, delegating the role of consignors of knowledge to concrete works. Like the artistic movements of the Avant-garde of the early 1900s, with their maximum formal, conceptual-expressive freedom, they anticipated and radically conditioned architecture.
In the world of contemporary art, the invocation to silence is a common figure, but not all invocations have the same meaning. Sometimes silence is nothing but an act of surrender or abandonment expressed in ironic form, other times, on the rare occasions in which it goes beyond language, silence becomes the place where art is born. Silence is therefore a sort of hidden source from which the waters of meaning can flow naturally.
Architecture can become art when the design of space clearly surpasses the design of the object, the spatial will is the living soul of architectural creation.
We live besieged by noise, subjected to the syncopated and frenetic rhythm of a current event that sends fleeting flashes of light into the world to evoke instantaneous images that disappear before we can capture them. From the ferment of this disintegrated and turbulent reality arises a culture increasingly obsessed with having to record the palpitations of the present. A media culture, immersed in the noise of information and facts, which, to make itself heard, has no choice but to shout louder. An ephemeral culture that, dragged by current events in a dizzying flight forward, ends up merging with them, reproducing and amplifying them without the slightest sign of distance. The noise of the world is oppressive and deafening. The only thing capable of opposing the noise is silence. Silence opens a deep breach in the convulsive and feverish scenario of our daily life. It generates a cavity and an empty space, which distracts us from the vortex of current events.
gianni cinquegrana