paradigm islands by teresa stoppani manuscript

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

1.

PARADIGM ISLANDS

 Manhattan and and Venice For the multiplicity of dimensions of its urban being, Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century was a sort of New York of its times. … A great melting-pot city that experienced within its urban context all the uncertainties and anxiety deriving from having reached the peak of articulation of its quality of life. (Giovanni Scarabello and Paolo Morachiello) 1 The resistance that Venice opposes to the nineteenth century is a cipher of the irrelevance of modernity. What Venice rejects is its own transformation into a city, … . It rejects the dream of reason in order to remain Gegnet . Physically as well, Venice opposes the city: as Gegnet , it is, in fact, already metropolis, vast space where it is possible to ‘acknowledge that things themselves are places and do not only belong to a place’. (Francesco Dal Co) 2 Manhattan and Venice are often associated in discourses on the city, across disciplines and chronology. Unique, dense, vertical, influential, mythical, open: the attributes of the two cities blend their bodies and their images in the association. This is what the city is: not just a set of physical, economical, political, geographical and organizational relations, but also the irrational elements that define its image and perception. The making of the physical city and the construction of its idea (or myth) proceed in parallel. Architecture can thus be redefined as a spatial practice that affects the physical environment but is also informed by the constructs of narrative, legislation, social mores, and by the spatial investigations performed in the visual arts. Manhattan and Venice constitute extreme situations, exceptions in which differences and unexpected contaminations become explicit. For their particular physical and cultural conditions of insularity, Manhattan and Venice, in different ways, rejected the architectural theories and praxis of architectural modernism, and for their resistance and resilience they can suggest ideas and operations for the contemporary city. Manhattan implemented its own version of modern architecture, fast, profit oriented and pragmatic, and yet concerned with its image and mediatic effects. Venice offered the most radical resistance to modernism, combining an image that had frozen it for centuries in apparent slumber, with a praxis of continuous (re)making that makes it today a fertile example even for cities that are culturally and geographically remote from it. What connects the two cities at first sight, beyond their obvious physical condition of geographical insularity, is the fact that they have both been or are, in their own times and specific situations, a metropolis. Late-medieval and Renaissance Venice was a metropolis of its time: for its situation of political and commercial independence, for the dimensional leap that made it active and influential from the most strictly local situations to the global one, for the congestion of its space and the multiplicity of its commerce and communications, and for the coexistence of opposite situations in close proximity. While Scarabello and Morachiello limit their analogy of Venice and New York to 1

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

the past splendour of Renaissance Venice, Francesco Dal Co’s observations open the analogy of the two cities to the present being of the metropolis. In the sense of the ever-present suggested by Dal Co (via Martin Heidegger), it is possible to establish a relationship between Manhattan and Venice. Both cities are islands generating networks of relations that are much wider than their geographical limits – not only in the sense of a territorial dimension, but also in the sense of the transferability and mobility of their paradigm. Important and consolidated, Manhattan and Venice thrived in the past for their global commercial relations, physical hubs of invisible world-wide networks of commerce and finance (and, today, tourism), maintaining a privileged relationship with the world that was more important for their survival than the (obviously necessary) contacts and exchanges with their immediate vicinities and outskirts. Invisible cosmopolises (for their worldwide influence), Manhattan and Venice continue to operate and thrive today in an international dimension, reinforcing at the same time their special insular and urban condition of cultural discontinuity, which confers them a special status, in both the imaginary and the history of the city. Invisibly connected but ideally isolated and visually identifiable, we continue to call Manhattan and Venice ‘cities’, bringing into play the importance of the spatial conditions and physical environment for a discourse that embraces and relates the two.

City We can conceive of the city as a ‘whole’ that exists only if it is in a perpetual state of change. Never the same, this whole changes, and yet it allows us to identify it, recognize it, and name its. As it changes, the whole reinforces our idea of it. Of it we can only produce partial and biased representations, and for this reason we need many. As it changes, the whole never achieves ‘wholeness’ (its completion), and continues to redefine itself through accretions, micro-trauma, new growth and considerable mutations - expansion becomes relative, and almost secondary. This ‘whole’ difficult to grasp is what we still call, for lack of a better word, ‘city’. Perfectly apt and fantastically adaptable, ‘city’ indicates, together, a physical environment, its forms of inhabitations, the human beings that make, inhabit, and mythicize it, and the complex networks of their relationships, both permanent and volatile. ‘City’ has evolved throughout history to continue to adhere to its complex, never complete, and changing ‘whole’, now open and yet still always identifiable. Both Manhattan and Venice, two old cities that are now cores of vast metropolitan expansions, continue to function while undergoing constant change. They both persist and change in their permanence, and continue to occupy the urban imaginary while escaping attempts to fix their definitive image. Established, widely known and fantasized, these cities continue to both produce images of themselves and escape a single definition. Architecture – its culture, its imaginary, its projects and representations – has addressed the two cities with theories and projects at crucial moments of change. The resistance that Manhattan and Venice have often opposed to sudden change, to ideas that had not matured from within their body and culture, has always posed challenges to architecture, exposing its partiality as a discipline and revealing the established orders and operations of the city that both precede and transcend architecture. In different ways, Manhattan’s and Venice’s cultures of adjustments and transformation have worked at different speeds through negotiations in time, succeeding thanks to rules of spatial organization that are both clearly defined and flexible. The combination of definition and flexibility 2

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

has allowed the production of two cities that are apparently complete and yet always capable of renewing themselves and their images. The image of the city, much more than a visual representation, is understood here as a description of its physical, social, cultural and political ambit, including also the myths, stories and figures that contribute to the definition of the city’s imaginary and to its very existence.

‘Space within’ I suggest here that we do not need a new word for the ‘city’, as this is a perfectly apt name, malleable and adaptable like the ‘thing’ it sticks to. What is obsolete, having exhausted all their possible variations and declensions, are the prefixes that have been attached, in time (in the last century or so, and often retroactively), to the term  polis, in relation to hierarchy, size, context and fashion ( metro, mega, cosmo, meta , etcetera). ‘Polis’ comes to us from the series of independent but strongly interconnected city-states of ancient Greece, and it often came to indicate the political and social body of the city, more than its physical structure. The composite words that derive from it continue to focus on systems of relations and networks that characterize and produce the body of the city in different ways. ‘City’ is an elastic word, and a body that is both physical and relational. The city is characterized by (and indeed exists because of) a system of relationships in a place ( locus ). The city is measured, administered, and opened, rather than delimited. by its legislation, which, as flexible as its body, includes and articulates differences. Not defined by a fixed form, or by a series of physical objects, the city has internal and external boundaries, holes, and discontinuities, and these are both nonphysical and always subject to negotiation and redefinition. (Let’s not forget Georges Bataille’s impure, intestinal and cleansing laughter that reveals ‘central insufficiency’ and ‘weakens authority, allowing its precarious character to be seen.’) 3 The city changes. Its form is successful in that it remains adaptable and flexible. The city is therefore characterized by the rules and relations that determine it, rather than by a fixed physical body. Can the city then be defined by a condition of interiority that has nothing to do with walls or affiliations, but is rather determined by a densification of contacts? This is not sufficient though. The n on-object ‘thing’ that the city is can only be if the contacts and relationships that determine it remain open to the different – that which originates elsewhere and operates according to different rules. Interiority is redefined here as a relational space ‘within’. Con-tainment then has nothing to do with an enclosure that defines a measurable physical space, and suggests instead the idea of a space that is activated by and works through tension. ‘Containment’ is thus returned to its etymological instability of ‘holding together’ ( con-tenere ), which is performed by the reciprocity of its agents rather than by an external cohesive force. Dissociated from the notion of enclosure, the ‘con-tainment’ of the relational space of the city defines an interiority that remains exposed and open to change (instigated from outside or generated from within). Transformed by and transformative of the different, the city absorbs, assimilates, adapts and modifies itself, engaged in perpetual redefinition. Because it is open to the different, it becomes different; because it becomes different, the different is no more - and so on. Far from closed, defined, and protected, its interiority is always at risk challenged, reworked, softened, penetrated. The possibility of a ‘space within’ implies at once notions of inclusion, togetherness, and collaboration, but also openness, exposure and vulnerability. Exposed, malleable and adaptable like its name, the city is also very fragile. Changes accumulate and leave traces, build up an identity and slowly solidify in a nucleus, and yet this too remains 3

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

precariously balanced – it can be broken. And yet the city remains recognizable in relation (or reaction) to processes of dispersion and rarefaction. The city is an interior of densification - of spaces, structures, bodies, ideas and exchanges - rich in relationships that no longer require identification or belonging. It is the site of the concentration of experiences and the intertwining of times, of possibilities and contaminations that are impossible else-where: the relational system that makes the city needs to be situated. ‘Site’ and ‘where’: beyond everything and after everything, the city remains, inevitably, spatially connoted. It is not only a physical space, but it is also a physical space: the relational system that makes the city needs to be situated. In established and consolidated physical contexts - such as Manhattan and Venice which I consider here - within the superimposition and emergence of the different orders and structures that exist in them, within the making-undoing-remaking of their elements, in their complex spatio-temporal palimpsests, some constants emerge, revealing a programmed identity constructed according to a deliberate project, but also a non-programmed identity, equally strong and often produced or enabled by the same project. What I propose here is the idea of a city that is strong and continues to ‘work’ because it not only undergoes change, but empowers change, always already containing it in its project. Fragile, open, free, the city constructs a strong and layered image that is able to incorporate change within itself. The core of such image, if it exists, is the product of gradual constructions, of condensations and accumulations of spaces, images, significations and identities. Not a starting point or generative centre, this core results from the accumulation of the many. Far from being a centralized and structured system, the interiority of the city (the city as ‘space within’) works as an accumulation of densities. ‘Accumulation’ does not have a generative centre, nor is it an interior delimited by an enclosure, or defined by an external condition that delimits it from the outside and organizes it from within. Always already plural, the city’s ‘within’ is at work in the peripheries as much as it is in the centres, its agents of change not always identifiable a priori . Accumulation is generated by centripetal forces that produce accumulations of densities (of phenomena, matter, people, events), without acknowledging a prevailing centre. Accumulation ( cumulus ) works in an additive manner, without a rigid hierarchy and symmetrical growth structured around a centre. Repeating, reproducing, multiplying and shifting its centres, it allows the possibility of multiple and different temporary orders, as well as their infinite intermediate states, potentially generative of variations and different developments. Accumulation is non-centric but dense. The multiple collisions, overlaps and attritus that constitute it (rather than form it) produce an excess – of energy, of density, of effects – that is capable to further redefine and modify the already heterogeneous and precarious given situation. Accumulation produces forms, but its concern is not form – rather, density, proximity, heterogeneity; nor is it transparency, total control and visibility. While it is measured, regulated and administered, the city thrives in the blind spots of decontrol and in its margins of freedom, the grounds of its change. The interiority of the city is defined by the tension that con-tains (holds together) its elements, materials and relations. As accumulation, it does not have an inside or an outside; its interiority is relational, in the sense of an active reciprocity that occurs ‘with’ (between, among) and ‘in’ (inside). The accumulation is inclusive - it accepts, absorbs, adapts and incorporates. It overlaps and 4

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

interpenetrates different orders and systems; it combines doing and undoing. It may need to be amnesiac in order to function or just survive, but it exists in time, and has an unsettled past that can be reactivated at any point and moment, threatening present orders and formations. Objects and singularities here ‘make sense only in relation. The distinction of and ‘inside’ (interior) as opposed to an ‘outside’ (exterior) no longer makes sense, as everything here is both outside and inside, and implicated in a relational space (‘within’). The city thus defined is not identified by limits or enclosures, but a space-time of condensation: events, decisions and interventions on its physical space produce an accumulation and coexistence of different phenomena, spaces and times that are often conflicting. The conflict does not deflagrate the city in a process of self-annihilation, nor does it resolve into the prevailing of an order over the others, but remains both suspended and expressed - it both fosters and restrains change. This is the city of the “within” – an interiority defined by the tension that con-tains (holds together) its elements, materials and relations. The city of the ‘within’ offers an alternative to the spatial dispersal and rarefaction of the contemporary city, suggesting that the condition of interiority (what I have called ‘space within’) is necessary to instigate the abundance of relations that define the city. While the idea of ‘city’ can no longer be linked to a sense of belonging by an individual or a group, while ‘community’ is no longer necessarily linked to a physical location with which it identifies, the city can be redefined as the site (in the territory, the metropolis, the cosmopolitan conurbation) in which experiences are concentrated, different times coexist and overlap, possibilities are multiplied, and contaminations occur that are impossible elsewhere. Administered, defined, named, constructed but not sealed, the city is the space of freedom. What emerges here is the idea of a city that (like the  polis and the civitas, but redefined in its rules and forms to accommodate today’s lifestyles) is not only physical, but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected. Imagination as projection is intended here not only as an ex post  production of image (representation) and interpretation of a physical datum, but also as a form of anticipation and pre-figuration - as a project and projection. My attempt to define and represent the city of the ‘space within’ as a dynamic non-linear and noncausal complexity derives from a series of ideas on space proposed by some of the thinkers I refer to in this study – from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space, to Manfredo Tafuri’s identification of the intricate ‘bundles’ of ideologies and their spatial agency, to the relativity of the ‘mollusc’ space that Massimo Cacciari borrows from Albert Einstein’s physics. These theories of space, architecture and the city, in part incompatible, in part complementary, are brought together here to offer different ways to understand the conflicts and contradictions that produce and inhabit the city. In  Mille Plateaux  (1980) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose the figure of the ‘rhizome’ to describe phenomena of non-linear complexity that allow for returns, are multiverse, non causal, and non binary. Deleuze’s the definition of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ spaces – where striation characterizes the systematic ordering processes that define the city – is contextual with the impossibility of the pure separate existences of the two, and the city is in fact identified as the ideal site for the contention and combination of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space. 4 More cautious in untangling historical developments, Manfredo Tafuri proposes a method for architectural history (the ‘project’) that unravels the complexity of the political, religious and ideological motivations affecting the production of architecture and the city. Tafuri writes of ‘bundles’ that the historian is to untangle, in 5

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

order to identify the specificity and the linearity of each of the ‘forces of environmental formation’, as well as the complex intricacies of their influences. 5 Concentrating his discourse on the dynamics of the urban space, Massimo Cacciari borrows from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity the idea of ‘mollusc space’ to propose a reading of orthogonal space beyond form and figuration. The ‘mollusc city’ is a dynamic system in which the variations of density, forms and times, erase the distinction between space and objects, redefining them in a mobile system of multiple and simultaneous chronology. 6 These are some of the triggers that provoked my reconsiderations of the city beyond its form and in terms of its space-making operations and its ‘rationalities’. In this framework the city and its processes are intellectually understood not only by reference to the urban cultural context, but also by drawing categories from other disciplines. This open reading is focused on architecture’s histories and theories, but it intersects also art theory and practices, land surveying, cartography, philosophy and urban studies. Architectural manifesto, architectural history as a ‘project’, grids and ‘grid effects’, different mappings, rectilinear and meandering spaces, and the associative processes of capriccio, montage, and ‘tenderness’, are some of the processes that inform the making of the city beyond the appearance of its form, and are proposed here as unorthodox analytic devices to understand the urban complexity.

Island The idea of the city as a space ‘within’ alludes to a space that is not delimited by physical boundaries, and yet remains defined and recognizable; a space that, varying in scale, time and degree of openness/enclosure, is both perceived and inhabited as an ambit in a non-homogenous space.7  Spatio-temporal and relational, the city can be redefined as an island, if we consider the island in relation to the nature of its edges rather than to the condition of physical delimitation and finished-ness. ‘Island’ is conventionally defined from the outside as a delimited field of physical discontinuity, externally rather that internally determined. At the same time the island increments concentrations and density; it more clearly manifests processes of centripetal convergence; it tolerates, or even imposes, proximity and coexistence. In fact, because it is delimited, the island can be reconsidered as a field subject to incremental saturation, to the point where an endless interiority could be hypothesized. Even at the edge, the island is only apparently clear. Its edge is a mutable space that constantly negotiates relationships. The island is not determined by an opposition of solid/defined and liquid/variable, but by the co-existence of the two. At once space and edge, the island is an unstable figure, with a mobile and constantly redefined edge. Its threshold is a space that embraces change and the construction of different identities in time. Far from ideal (Plato) or utopian (Thomas More) scenarios of philosophical, political and legislative (and physical) delimitation, the island thus redefined is not only a system of relations, but it is also in relation, and as such open to the plural. The plurality and differences that characterize the island within, affect also its edge, exposed and open as it is to a ‘different’ that operates elsewhere and according to different rules. The idea of ‘islands’ - in the plural - suggests systems of relations across physical discontinuities and temporal distances, with a ‘different’ that is not incorporated but remains active in reciprocal attraction and complementariness. ‘Island’, as one of many, is an accumulation that holds together (con-tains) mutable and heterogeneous fragments and different times. ‘Space within’, ‘accumulation’, and ‘island’, the city is a phenomenon of both spatial and temporal condensation. Its vitality and richness lie in the presence, the complexity and the multiplicity of both. 6

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

The city as ‘island’ becomes instrumentally useful to question conditions of spatial delimitation and physical finitude in the city, in relation to openness and to networked remote relations. To think ‘by islands’ means to perform samplings of territories that are pre-defined and limited by physical conditions (natural and artificial) which increment concentrations, tolerating or imposing proximity and coexistence. For its given condition of physical discontinuity, the island provides a delimited field for the measuring of phenomena and their intensity, and a testing ground for different ways of probing the city and working on it. The island, physical or of the mind, becomes a laboratory for projects and thoughts on the city, for readings of its space, and indeed for architectural and urban analysis and design projects. ‘Island’ is, also, a temporal island, a space in which it is possible to distinguish times that are spatially located. This study uses the idea of ‘time island’ to explore ambits where the coexistence of different times in the same space (physical or mental) allows the existence of elements apparently incompatible, suspended in a not yet unfolded conflict, in a tension that is continuously balanced and redefined. To work by ‘time islands’ means to define spatio-temporal ambits, that is, crucial times of specific spaces: those which reveal and express the peak of tension that immediately precedes breakings and crucial shifts. To work by ‘time islands’ means also to understand the reasons that induce to seek elsewhere to find the motivations, the causes, the influences, and the origins of changes and shifts in progress. What I have called here the city of the ‘space within’ are the outcomes of these spatio-temporal accumulations, the physical or bodily effects of these specific condensations of phenomena. The richness and vitality of these spaces resides in the complexity and multiplicity that they carry ‘within’, in their not yet unfolded potentialities, in the possible developments not yet achieved. These spaces (and times) become paradigmatic situations for this series of essays. The paradigmatic spaces of Manhattan and Venice are considered here as dynamic knots that cannot be untangled: undoing them would mean to flatten their complexities and try to simplify that which is irreducible. This work attempts to read inside and between these knots, in order to reveal their dynamic nature of elements in constant mutation, albeit with different manners and languages.

 Paradigms One hundred profound solitudes form the whole of the city of Venice – this is its spell. An image for the man of the future. (Friedrich Nietzsche)8 The knowability of the paradigm is never presupposed, and … its specific operation consists in suspending and deactivating its empirical givenness in order to exhibit only an intelligibility. (Giorgio Agamben)9 ‘Spaces within’, ‘accumulations’, and ‘islands’, Manhattan and Venice are considered here not as models (they are indeed unique products of unique circumstances), but as paradigms of the making of the city that remain effective and continue to operate today, beyond historical categorizations, and beyond the differences between a modern and a mediaeval city that often blind urban history.  Paradigm, from the Greek term   paradèigma, ‘example, exemplar’, contains the verbal root  paradeiknynai , ‘to show, to compare’, and is an action word. Relational, deiknynai , ‘to show, to indicate’, 7

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

establishes a three way relation between a subject who shows or indicates, a subject who is shown to, and an object (or model) that is shown. In this relation though the object is active too, important not for how it looks, or sounds, but for the way in which it has been achieved; it is also active because it continues to make and change itself. The comparative  para- further complicates and activates the relation, as it indicates the possible continuation of a regulated action, but also the distancing from it, and the production of a difference or a shift. The paradigm, in other words, is not an object. It indicates a modus operandi,  rather than a result to achieve or a requirement to fulfil. Dynamic, the paradigm is an action; it contains within itself the possibility of variation and movement, it indicates oscillation and multiplicity rather than fixity and one-ness .10 Manhattan, place of total artificiality defined by an orthogonal layout that is volumetrically extruded, is a city that rebuilds itself by ‘self-destruction’, thanks to the possible transmigration of movable traces within its artificial grid. Venice, place of paratactic (dis)continuity that is built gradually, island by island, in the mobile territory of its lagoon, is a city that rebuilds its body on its own physical traces, ‘reusing’ itself. Here I propose the modern capitalist orthogonality of Manhattan and the medieval cosmopolitan curved space of Venice as ‘paradigms’ for the contemporary city. Their clear physical-geographical delimitation as islands helps to define the spatial and cultural ambits of this study. It also supports the redefinition of the island as a field whose apparently clear boundaries are instead complicated by multiple variations and contaminations. Manhattan and Venice are thus read as urban phenomena that are indeed geographical islands, but extend their manifestations beyond their physical boundaries, transferring operations and producing effects in other places and times. ‘Paradigm islands’, they are the places where particular processes of growth and space making are defined, derived from the specific local conditions. Their processes are also manifest elsewhere, in diluted or less easily identifiable forms, and they are reproduced today in the re-densification of metropolitan cities (for instance, through processes of grid infill and paratactic densification). A critical re-examination of the makings of Manhattan and Venice as paradigmatic opens the possibility for a reconsideration of their modus operandi   to address contemporary forms of making in the architecture of the city. A study of the two cities as the enactment of performative paradigms provides a background to develop conceptual tools to address the dynamic making of space today. The gradual processes of adjustment, the making of a constantly changing dense space, the emphasis on making and forming rather than on figure, the incorporation of new forms and languages through their adaptation and transformation, make both Manhattan and Venice, in different ways, the ideal places to contextualize and address the issue of an architecture of the dynamic. Nietzsche’s reading of Venice as an anticipation of the condition of isolation of the contemporary city extracts Venice from Venice. His fragment presents a city divested of its cohesive social dimension and of the connective tissue of its physical body. Reduced to islands of ‘solitudes’, Venice is taken away from itself and projected onto the contemporary metropolis. Let us suppose here that the contemporary condition of isolation offered by this image could be that of the densely packed but separated islands-blocks laid out by the grid of Manhattan. Simplified, reduced, and removed from its original nature (collective and cohesive), Venice is turned into a paradigm for the metropolis. The possible proximity of the two cities is not causal (there is not a direct cause-effect 8

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

relation between Venice and Manhattan). The operation here is rather that of an intellectual association. Venice offers an ‘image’ for the city of the future (which I suggest might be Manhattan), even if in fact Nietzsche does not relate Venice to any other city, but makes of it a metropolitan condition. Once the connective tissue of Venice is dissolved, and its ‘solitudes’ are isolated, Venice becomes a condition, and can only relate to a future ‘man’ that is both individual and universal, but not social. The intellectual operation that produces this image works by first defining a distance of the object from itself (it re-moves the object from its singularity), to then return it to another singularity. This is the operation of the paradigm, activated by the distancing performed by its prefix  ‘para’. It is as a paradigm that Venice can relate to Manhattan. Another operation that we need to perform to enable this relationship is a distancing from acquired historical, morphological, and typological preconceptions and classifications of the city that are well known in architecture and urbanism. The paradigm as an operation is what makes it possible to perform the association, and to relate an abstracted Venice - simplified of its complex connections and reduced to separate islands - to Manhattan. Here the production of a proximity is not a question of forms, styles, histories or intents, but lies in a series of operations that define the space of the two cities. As in Nietzsche’s fragment, the construction of a new or unexpected proximity between these two singularities must first occur trough a distancing of the object from itself. The figure of the “island” both suggests and begins the paradigmatic operation, with its defined boundary of isolation (edge, limit) and its (sea of) connectivity. The island is never an island in itself: separation and relation always define it. Nietzsche’s remark contains, somehow, an anticipation of the space that we intend to construct here, and its method: a suggestion of plurality, the isolation of an element, and the simplification and abstraction of such element, in order to construct relations that allow the transfer/translation of ideas. The paradigmatic operation needs to be further explored. In the essay ‘What is a Paradigm?’, 11 philosopher Giorgio Agamben has provided a comprehensive and operational reconsideration of the ‘paradigm’ in the history of Western philosophical and scientific thought, and the definition of paradigm that emerges can offer an insight to better explain the method and the scope of this work. Agamben’s fundamental starting point is the notion of ‘scientific paradigms’ developed by epistemologist Thomas S. Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions .12  Of the different definitions of ‘paradigm’ that Kuhn proposes, the one that Agamben considers ‘most novel’ in a productive way is the concept of paradigm as example, ‘a single case that by its repeatability acquires the capacity to model tacitly the behaviour and research practices of scientists.’ 13 For Agamben this is an important shift in the reconsideration of the paradigm as productive of knowledge. Here the paradigm replaces the rule as the canon of scientificity, and ‘the universal logic of the law is replaced … by the specific and singular logic of the example.’ 14 Agamben explores the use and the signification of the paradigm in the work of several thinkers, in order to produce his own definition of what the paradigm ‘does’ in the production of knowledge, not only in science but also in philosophical thinking. A brief analysis of Foucault’s problematic and implicit use of the paradigm allows him to elaborate on the distancing process that occurs in the paradigm - something close to what we have proposed here: ‘the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.’ 15 The isolation, decontextualization and definition of the singularity of the example-object are part of the paradigmatic operation. The paradigm as a cultural operation works toward the production of a non-dialectical form of knowledge, but this knowledge 9

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

does not aim to achieve the universal and to derive principles (rules) from it. Agamben traces back the origin of this concept of paradigm to a passage of Aristotle’s  Prior Analytics , in which Aristotle obsrves that ‘the paradigm does not function as a part with respect to the whole, nor as a whole with respect to the part, but as a part with respect to the part, if both are under the same but one is better known than the other’. 16 From this Agamben derives that while induction proceeds from the particular to the universal, and deduction from the universal to the particular, the paradigm is defined by a third and paradoxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular. The example constitutes a peculiar form of knowledge that does not proceed by articulating together the universal and the particular, but seems to dwell on the plane of the latter. 17 The paradigm as particularity challenges the form of knowledge that proceeds through oppositions between the particular and the universal. A ‘singularity irreducible to any of the dichotomy’s two terms’, the paradigm does not operate in the domain of logic, but in analogy, and ‘the analogon it generates is neither particular nor general.’ 18 Agamben explains, ‘analogy intervenes in the dichotomies of logic … not to take them up into a higher synthesis but to transform them into a force field traversed by polar tensions, where (as in an electromagnetic field) their substantial identities evaporate.’ 19 There are in this redefinition of the paradigm a few important points that are relevant to the concept of ‘paradigm island’ and its use in this work. The isolation, decontextualization and definition of the singularity of the object-example are not sufficient to activate it as a paradigm. The fundamental step for the activation of the paradigm is the exit of the object from itself. The paradigm in a way is not the object, but the cultural construction that is produced around the object, the movement of oscillation that does not follow a defined direction, but sets in motion and in tension (it electrifies, it polarizes) the object itself. The paradigm is then both the definition and the activation of the object ‘with’ and ‘in’ its force field – it indeed is  this very force field. The paradigm as analogical third is attested here above all through the disidentification and neutralization of the first two, which now become indiscernible. … It is thus impossible to clearly separate an example’s paradigmatic character – its standing for all cases – from the fact that it is one case among others. As in a magnetic field, we are dealing not with extensive and scalable magnitude but with vectorial intensities. 20 (Giorgio Agamben) The paradigms that I discuss here are not only the two objects of this investigation, but also the very placing of the two in relation. The paradigm that I attempt to define is the relational space between Manhattan and Venice, as established in architecture and by its operations in the two cities, across them, and abstracting from them. The ‘paradigm island’ then is not a physical island of oppositions between solid and liquid, defined and undefined, but a relational possibility to redefine a nonprescriptive non-dogmatic form of knowledge on the city - as ‘a paradigm actually presupposes the impossibility of the rule … [and] implies the total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference’. 21 What is relevant to this study is the redefinition of movement as 10

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

‘tension between’ that is embedded in the paradigmatic relation, and activates it as a form of knowledge that opens connections that are not aimed at producing a general rule. Agamben observes that the relational aspect of the paradigm is already present in the definition proposed by Plato, for whom the paradigm ‘is not a simple sensible element that is present in two different places, but something like a relation between the sensible and the mental, the element and the form (“the paradigmatic element is itself a relationship”)’.  22 In Plato, the paradigm is not a given object or a pre-existing likeness, but it is produced ‘by “placing alongside”, “conjoining together”, and above all by “showing and “exposing”. The paradigmatic relation does not merely occur between sensible objects or between these objects and a general rule; it occurs instead between a singularity (which thus become a paradigm) and its exposition (its intelligibility).’ 23 The purpose of this work is to produce a paradigmatic relation between Manhattan and Venice, through an exploration of their architectural discourses, projects and representations.

 Discourses in architecture The rules of operation of Manhattan and Venice, physical (the solidity of the schist island or the muddy movements of the lagoon), abstract (the Manhattan grid plan or the Venetian sumptuary laws), or socio-economic (speculative capitalism or aristocratic republic), incorporate in their architecture the complexity of forces that concur in the definition of the city’s form. In both cities, the rules of making space and their flexibility allow for an adaptation in which the process of making and its structure prevail over form. It is this character that, in both cities, has faced the modernist architectural project with a dilemma, its rigid categories incapable of comprehending a making of space that escapes their control. To these cities return the critical architectural projects of the 1970s (by Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Gianugo Polesello) to overcome the modern legacy and to re-address architecture as a process, in a way that then affects the contemporary project. While the history of the discipline was questioned or rejected by the early stages of architectural modernism, today the past of the discipline is dismissed or altogether ignored by the contemporary architectural avant-gardes. Architecture looks outside, intent on opening its operative boundaries, but the unanswered question remains of what the specificity of architecture is today, once it becomes inextricably enmeshed with other forces of environmental formation and different specialisms. The association of Manhattan and Venice that this book investigates proposes a reconsideration of architecture as a process that operates according to rules that are both flexible and generative (paradigms). The makings of the two cities - the cannibalistic reconstruction of Manhattan, the intestinal adaptations of Venice - remain active today and become propositional for current architectural research. A consideration of the city as a work of architecture takes also into account the by now accepted but still problematic overcoming of the isolated architectural ‘object’. The making of the city is not a solid architectural project (or masterplan), but an extended spatio-temporal operative set of instructions that include its material making. This book shows how pre-formal diagrammatic operations of space making were at work in architectural experimentation well before their recent theorizations, and how such operations were defined through material conditions and implementations: in the anti-classical of Venice, in the anti-modern of Manhattan, in the decompositions of the post-modern, but also – and very significantly - embedded in the operative ‘rationalities’ and abstractions of modern architecture. In this sense Manhattan and Venice can be read as ‘paradigms’ of a making of space that still affects the city today. 11

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

This work is not a history of Manhattan and Venice, and, rather than focusing on their images and architectural objects, it concentrates on their practices of space making – and the representations and narrations of these. The modern metropolis of the orthogonal grid is intersected here with the pre-modern cosmopolis of the liquid meander, to explore the rules of their operations, their interpretation, their rules and transgressions. The book is therefore constructed like an architectural project: specific on its sites, it addresses more general issues of the relationship between architecture and the city that were originated from or developed in Manhattan and Venice, but whose implications and further elaborations remain open to research, speculation and invention elsewhere. The readings that follow here are partial and orientated. Chronologically discontinuous and organized in spatio-temporal fragments, the chapters trace a map of the moments of crisis and change in the relation between architecture and the city. Manhattan and Venice provide the territories where this mapping is performed, as it identifies possible points of contact, complications, and closeness. The study though refrains from direct confrontations or comparisons, nor does it seek ungrounded parallelisms or fabricated correspondences. Chapter two, ‘Frames’, defines Manhattan and Venice through the construction of their architectural narratives, focusing on specific historical moments that were marked by the impact of the ‘new’ in the two cities. Rem Koolhaas’ study of nineteenth and early twentieth century Manhattan and instrumental ‘retroactive manifesto’ for the city, 24 and Manfredo Tafuri’s application of his historical ‘project’ 25 on the many faces of Renaissance Venice offer the conceptual and chronological frame for an understanding of the processes of space making and myth fabrication in the two cities. Both authors study the city as a work in progress of self-construction and self-definition, and as the testing ground for ideas and processes that are readied here – in Manhattan, or in Venice - to migrate elsewhere. My analysis of their works focuses on both the contents and the spatial structure of the texts in relation to their objects; it proposes a making and reading of the text in architecture as a ‘project’, and advocates the idea of plurality as a possible development of ‘delirium’ and of the historical ‘project’ in architecture. Chapter three, ‘Makings’, analyzes the structure and the process of making of the two cities and their possible relations. The joint analysis of Manhattan and Venice produces a reconsideration of the urban and territorial ‘systems of order’ at work in the city, before, after and beyond the debacle of the modernist tabula rasa. The Grid of the 1811 Plan is the rational tool for Manhattan’s project. Its forms operate between rule and figure, between representation and performance, constructing an outer order that is at the same time replicated and transgressed in the interiors of the Manhattan’s blocks, and is literally carpeted over by Central Park. Venice operates according to other rationalities, combining a plurality of orders in its making, from topography to topology (the tentacular structure of the lagoon islands), to the inclusion of elements of orthogonal rationality (Roman palimpsests and spine-and-mat morphology), to the curvilinear assemblage along the Grand Canal. The joint consideration of these two different ways of city making produces a reconceptualization of the grid as a ‘grid effect’ that is still at work in contemporary architecture. Chapter four, ‘Readings’, proposes alternative unorthodox categories to read the space of the city and interpret the role of architecture in it. It argues that Manhattan’s normative homogeneity becomes the ground for an architecture of exhibitionism that offers slogans and strategies rather 12

Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

than fixed forms. Similarly, in Venice, the normative prescription of a collective behaviour regulates the buildings’ structures more than it does their final image: ‘chorality’ here is a constitutive concordia discors  that holds together in tension different elements and different styles, absorbing or marginalizing the new for the construction of a cohesive city body. Chapter five, ‘Modern(s)’ examines Le Corbusier’s different ways (hence the suggested plural) to come to terms with Manhattan and Venice in his studies and architectural proposals, and the impossibility of the modern project to assimilate the established spaces and ‘rationalities’ of both cities. Le Corbusier claims that Venice is a guiding temoin in his project for a new architecture of the city,26 but, while he explores its functional details and produces of it partial representations, Venice remains for him an impenetrable and inexplicable whole. Manhattan equally defies European modernist comprehension with the saturated vertical density of its ‘beautiful catastrophe’ (Le Corbusier).27 In both cities the modern project is fragmented or reduced to ‘silence’, ineffectual in applying its categories, and incapable to produce a tabula rasa in territories that are already too dense with built histories and fabricated stories. Chaper six, ‘Contemporaries’, shows how in the 1970s (and later) architectural research returned to these two ‘impossible’ cities, in the attempt to redefine its languages and techniques after the modern project. In Manhattan, Bernard Tschumi transcribed and exploded the city through a series of choreographed architectural events. In Venice, Peter Eisenman returned his formal architectural experimentations to the city, to read it as a topological diagram in the making, while Gianugo Polesello reinvented the modern project by reducing the composition of its fragments to a generative diagram for a new urban architecture. It is there and then that crucial issues and design strategies for architecture in the city where devised that still inform the contemporary project. Chapter seven, ‘Representations’, considers spatial practices that have produced alternative ways of representing and understanding the structures of Manhattan and Venice, often offering suggestions or raising issues for architecture. It is through these other eyes that architecture learns to question itself and renew the understanding of its operations. It is by looking outside architecture that the notions of ‘vertical’, ‘horizontal’, ‘round’ and ‘labyrinthine’ can be redefined and reintroduced in a discourse on the city and architecture. In Manhattan, the ‘vertical’, the ‘horizontal’, and the ‘round’ offer different interpretations of the urban space, in photography (Horst Hamman, Wiliam Hassler),  video art (Steve McQueen), and performance art (Sophie Calle). From measuring the Grid’s voids as ambits of non-control to domesticating its exterior spaces, these works offer alternative readings of the Grid. In Venice, the ‘labyrinthine’, the ‘vertical’, the ‘horizontal’ show how one of the most portrayed and photographed places in the world always exceeds its representations, in fact throwing into crisis the visual with its dynamic elastic body. The city is in fact better rendered by haptic and  vicarious experiences (Sophie Calle), or by images that question its verticality and density (Dionisio Moretti , Claus Carstensen,). The epilogue, ‘Islands’, returns to a re-conceptualization of the island, via Massimo Cacciari’s relativistic reading of the Manhattan Grid as a dynamic elastic whole, and Gianugo Polesello’s challenge of the limits of Euclidean geometry with a project for a new island in Venice.

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Stoppani, Teresa (2010) Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on Architecture and the City, Abingon, Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 56185 3. Chapter 1: ‘Paradigm Islands. Manhattan and Venice’. ***manuscript version***

1 ‘La

Venezia della prima metà del Cinquecento, per quel che riguardava la molteplicità delle dimensioni del suo essere urbano, era una specie di New York dell’epoca. ... Una grande città-crogiolo che viveva nel proprio contesto urbano le incertezze e le inquietudini di un culmine raggiunto nella propria vicenda di articolazione della qualità della vita.’ G. Scarabello and P. Morachiello, Guida alla civiltà di Venezia , Milan: Mondadori, 1987, p. 53. Author’s translation. 2 ‘Ma proprio la resistenza che Venezia oppone all’ ‘800 è cifra dell’irrilevanza del moderno. Ciò che Venezia respinge di quel secolo fiducioso è la propria trasformazione in città, … . Essa respinge il sogno della ragione per rimanere Gegnet. Anche fisicamente Venezia si oppone alla città: come Gegnet, in realtà, già metropoli, spazio vasto ove è possibile “riconoscere che le cose stesse sono i luoghi e non solo appartengono a un luogo”.’ F. Dal Co, ‘Venezia e il moderno’, in F. Dal Co (ed.), 10 immagini per Venezia, Rome: Officina, 1980, p. 10. The quote is from M. Heidegger,  L’arte e lo spazio, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1979, p. 23. Author’s translation. 3 ‘Laughter is not only the composition of those it assembles into a unique convulsion; it most often decomposes without consequence, and sometimes with a virulence that is so pernicious that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions.’ G. Bataille, ‘The Labyrinth’ (1935-6), in Visions of Excess. Selected writings 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 176. 4 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari,  A Thousand Plateaus  (1980), London and New York: Continuum, 2004. In particular, see ‘Introduction: rhizome’, pp. 3-25 and ‘1440: The smooth and the striated’, pp. 474-500. 5  M. Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The historical “project”’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and architecture from Piranesi to the 1970’s , Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 1-21. 6 M. Cacciari, ‘Metropoli della mente’, Casabella , 523:50, April 1986, 14-15. 7 ‘Ambit’ and ‘non-homogenous space’ are terms used in phenomenology, and in particular in G. Bachelard, The poetics of space (1957), Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. 8 F. Nietzsche,  Aurora , in Opere, (G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds.), vol. 5, book 1, Milan: Adelphi, 1965, p. 296. 9 G. Agamben, ‘What is a paradigm?’, in The Signature of All Things , New York: Zone Books, 2009, p. 26. 10 My Italian dictionary indirectly confirms my take on the word, telling me that in the philosophy of science ‘paradigm’ indicates ‘a coherent and articulated group of theories, methods and procedures that predominantly characterize a phase of the evolution of a certain science.’ (‘Un insieme coerente e articolato di teorie, metodi e procedimenti che contraddistinguono in modo predominante una fase dell’evoluzione di una determinata scienza.’ N. Zingarelli, Vocabolario della Lingua Italiana , (M. Dogliotti and L. Rosiello, eds.), Bologna: Zanichelli, 2000. Author’s translation). The paradigm thus is not only heterogeneous – including ‘theories, methods and procedures’ - but it is also dynamic and subject to change – ‘a phase of the evolution’. 11 Agamben, ‘What is a paradigm?’. 12 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. 13 Agamben, ‘What is a paradigm?’, p. 11. 14 Ibid., pp. 11-12. 15 Ibid., p. 18. 16 Aristotle,  Prior Analytics , 69a13-15. Quoted in Agamben, ‘What is a paradigm?’, p. 19. 17 Agamben, ‘What is a paradigm?’, p. 19. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 20. 20 Ibid., p. 20. 21 Ibid., p. 21. 22 Ibid., p. 23. Agamben refers to and quotes from Victor Goldschmidt’s study of the paradigm in Platonic dialectics, V. Goldschmidt,  Le paradigme dans la dialectique platonicienne , Paris: Vrin, 1985, p. 77. 23 Agamben here translates and paraphrases from Plato, The Statesman, 278b-c. 24 R. Koolhaas,  Delirious New York. A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan  (1978), New York: Monacelli Press, 1994. 25 In particular: A. Foscari and M. Tafuri and,  L’armonia e i conflitti , Turin: Einaudi, 1983. M. Tafuri, Venezia e il  Rinascimento , Turin: Einaudi, 1985; Venice and the Renaissance, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989. M. Tafuri,  Ricerca del  Rinascimento. Príncipi, città, architetti, Turin: Einaudi, 1992;  Interpreting the Renaissance. Princes, cities, architects , New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 26 ‘I call upon Venice as a witness’, Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization (1935), London: Faber, 1967, p. 268. 27  ‘New York is a vertical city, under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe … though a beautiful and worthy catastrophe.’ Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White (1947), New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 36.

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