Journal

Stone surfaces

Jean Starobinski, through his The reasons of the text, spurs us towards awareness of our theme, to search for the "distance" and the "measure" of interpretation1.
In general terms the word "surface" indicates the visible part of a body (architectural, in our case) marked by geometric elements such as length, width and – consequently – planar extension. "Two-dimensional" figurative entities, consequently, that outline the volume and the mass of every body. Our exploration starts from this inevitably schematic definition. If the theme is that of the stone surface, then unfolding of this theme passes through an interpretative path regarding its expression in the form of covering, cladding of other materials, of other parts of the built organism. Conceptually opposite pairs – verticality/horizontality, continuity/discontinuity, two-dimensionality/three-dimensionality, monochromism/polychromism – have the role of catalysts for our inevitably selective and partial reflection in this direction of analysis.

Lithic monographism
Mies van der Rohe, in his Barcelona Pavilion in 1928, set the foundations for lithic monographism, fixing it in aeternum on continuous and uninterrupted surfaces. Young "modern" Italian architects pick this up and interpret the theme in an original manner.
The experimental writings of Italian Modernism – while they start from reminiscences, survivals and borrowings – at the same time also propose themselves in the shape of archetypes and models for the entire Twentieth Century, giving architectural research a totally peculiar contribution when compared with the European avant gard movements. Experimentation time is fast and innovative. Subsequent time is slower and repetitive, addressed as it is to construction of a tradition, of a statute able to impose itself as the spirit of the epoch.
The desire of the avant gard movements to design architecture in an abstract and pure form brings back the ancient intellectual dispute between idea and matter, between monochromism and polychromism. The search for purity and the rejection of polychromism in favour of one colour increase the admiration given to homogeneous surfaces where all colour clamour is rejected with great determination and where all plastic elements are made to sink back into the plane.
Italian modern architecture – which also looks towards and borrows from the new repertoire of forms spaces and technical solutions from the other European avant gard movements – comes to the crucial phase of the nineteen thirties in a totally singular manner in this process of renewal. Two dominant characters emerge from the most representative buildings: the first regards the aesthetics of lithic surfaces and the image itself of architecture in stone suspended between innovative tensions and traditional atmospheres. The second invests, more specifically, the conception of space.
The lithic surfaces of Italian Modernism are reconceived and redefined both morphologically and in terms of executive technique. The apparent simplicity and unity of these casings is achieved, in the most superb works, by solutions employing refined precision. Joints and connections between loadbearing structures and coverings, between curtain walls and openings, between thin slabs and special massive elements, between the vertical plane and the ground, become the founding themes for the architectural project which, to a great extent, becomes a "project of surfaces". The works of Giuseppe Terragni, Mario Ridolfi, Adalberto Libera, Luigi Moretti – to mention only the most emblematic and well-known names – follow this direction of research and open up the season of European architectural renewal with authentic masterpieces, still capable, today, of dialogue with contemporary projects.
We want to emphasize how, in the concreteness of built architecture, the life of each surface expresses itself – unlike what was stated at the beginning – far from the abstract horizon of pure two-dimensional geometry, taking form and visibility through matter, investing space, confronting itself and solving the contiguity, depth and stratigraphic logic of the bodies that participate in construction of the work. This is especially true for vertical surfaces, those which found the image and the spatial bordering of architecture, never reducible to a pure outline, to the suppression of thickness. In a world of basically concrete, three-dimensional constructions the sense of surfaces is immediately related to their material, to the tools that process and configure it, to treatment procedures, to joints.
The life of lithic surfaces, in particular, takes place in a three-dimensional space. Specific "border aspects" take form in materials that are cut, smoothed or deeply engraved and brought together through suitable thicknesses.
Even when works are solved through the most elementary and pure formal economy the multitude of passages, openings and level changes correct all expressed continuity. Light itself, introducing itself through the plumb walls, creates shadows that break down all presumed two-dimensionality. The vertical surfaces of architecture – in the end – are found to be inevitably discontinuous, three-dimensional even when the architects aspire towards purification of the volume and the search for complanarity, for material monographs. The experiments of Italian Modernism to not escape from this condition.
At times we find ourselves facing evident transfigurations of the masonry order, as in the case of the Post Office of Piazza Bologna (1933-35) in Roma by Mario Ridolfi where we witness corrugation of the undulated wall surfaces by means of bands of travertine placed where they exercise weight, give structural sense to the wall (although exclusively in an optical manner), arriving at a growing stratigraphic rhythm underlined by continuous joints that are significantly recessed. We have, in cases like this, solidification and plastic expression – strongly three-dimensional – of the surfaces.
A mirroring of masonry character is also proposed by Adalberto Libera in the Rome Reception and Convention Building (1937-54), transferring the device of pseudoisodoma wall dressings on monumental marble surfaces, engraved by a network of horizontal and vertical gaps. Here the simulation of masonry stratigraphics is illustrated in less substantial ways when compared with Ridolfi’s work. The shade of the gaps is barely able to mark the Apuano marble surfaces.
The opposite transfigurative process, lacking all reference to masonry order, can be seen in the Casa del Fascio (1932-36) at Como by Giuseppe Terragni, in the Post Office (1933-34) in Rome by Adalberto Libera, in the Casa delle Armi (1933-36) in Rome by Luigi Moretti and in many other architectural works of the times. In all these works the lithic surface undergo a metamorphosis, calling the stone slabs to form coplanar surfaces that are continuous, homogeneous, uninterrupted, zeroing all expression of bonds and connections between the single elements: “surfaces that have risen to abstract spatiality”, to use the words of Luigi Moretti2. The expanded and continuous fabric of the surfaces, legible through evident outward projections with respect to the structural supports behind them, whether they are masonry or reinforced concrete frames – these latter ready to embrace the innovations in construction technology ongoing in the country – remains to make all the architectures evoked – hallmarks and models of an oncoming tradition – comparable. The thickness and three-dimensional character of the matter remains, in any case, clearly evidenced at interruptions or holes in the walls and in the key details for composing the facades, where the slabs stop in contact with lithic masses: edges, borders, connections, surrounds, bases, crowns. Here the depth of the lithic material embraces, in negative, the shadow as an entity that enhances the value of the planes.
The lithic homogeneity, continuity and monographic character of the surfaces impose themselves on this datum as the salient characters that the avant gard movement delivers to contemporary happenings. It is difficult, still today – for many – to depart from this epochal intonation of monographics of exteriors that not infrequently overflows into interior decoration as well.

Polychromatic traces
We are fascinated by the idea of moving away for a second from singleness, from the search for lithic monographics of so much contemporary architecture, overturning the theme of "surfaces" from vertical to horizontal. Abandoning parietal frontality to interest ourselves in the walking surface which means, for us, highlighting a different ebb and flow of lithicity. We ask our readers to follow us in this overturning of planes in a jump – which we hope – is not exaggeratedly acrobatic.
The floor plane is that surface that separates, along a horizontal line, the natural from the artificial, the bare earth of man’s existential space. The floor must ensure that in it (or on it) “we accomplish the time of man and not that of nature”3 making a site "healthy", creating an act of "hygiene". In this act of separation it must oppose Nature to prevent this latter from imposing the laws of its constant and cyclic regeneration, made of flourishing weeds, bushes, upheaving of soils.
Floor surfaces – unlike wall surfaces – have always posed the problem of achieving "complete" closure of the plane surface by adopting geometric components.
There are those who have seen in masonry modularity – in its variety of concatenations – the initial motifs for compiling flooring, considering them as horizontally built walls. But in reality the reduced restraints (and above all the absence of static performance requirements) permit an enormous "enlargement" of the formal world of walking surfaces.
Interior floors – unlike exterior floors which always have "movement", slopes and even actual jumps in level with steps, interruptions and barriers that articulate the spaces and vary the expression in spatial terms – bring a necessarily more limited and enclosed world onto the scene. The present themselves, above all, always on the same level: coplanar, without thickness, reined into two-dimensional pictures inhabited by geometric figures and lines.
We find, repetitively inscribed in the project of pavement surfaces, the "straight" lines that intersect perfectly to define squares and rectangles joined in orthogonal grid compositions. But the stone surfaces also welcome triangles, rhombuses, hexagons, polygons of all types. And not even curved lines – those flexuous signs placed to limit and define, more demanding and "aristocratic" figures in the form of ovals, circles, ellipses and whatever else – remain excluded from this world of variations, of experiments in composition.
With the passage of time geometric figures and lines contest the definitive design of surfaces – sometimes – with a degree of regularity and repetitive modularity – other times – with a higher "rate" of virtuoso ability and combinatory complexity addressed to making this world – otherwise dangerously "linear" and "flat" – a world of splendid expressions.
If – as we have said – paved surfaces have only two dimensions – width and length – then no relief or recess can find expression in the reality of the plane (except for illusionistically introduced third dimensions). There will never be a high nor a low, nor an above nor a below but only and always a continuous coplanar surface.
But even a flat site – we know – implies measure, direction, requires a text, a representation. Pavement surfaces use – to this end – pure outline figures that are ordered and repeated, have rhythm and pattern. Elements that expose their forms and their proportions, often their colour, in a multitude of possible creations.
Colour. Here we finally have colour appear on stone surfaces. Their great fascination but also the problems they have always posed.
Man, checkering the ground with mosaic tiles, slabs, polychromatic inlays, exhibits a very particular compositive logic and design syntax. We began thinking of colour as a second nature of the geometric figures that dispute, ever since the origins, the walking plane. Without colours (without the colours of stone) the pavement them would be extremely impoverished and handicapped.
We become aware that colour physicalizes – like, and perhaps even more than, geometry – every body, connotating its presence almost as if colour itself constituted a "fine" and "impalpable" matter:
“Colour – as Johan Wolfgang Goethe tells us – occupies a very high place in the series of original natural manifestations, filling with a well defined multitude the simple circle that is assigned to it. We therefore are not surprised to learn that it exercises special actions on the sight, to which it evidently belongs, and through sight on the soul and its more general elementary manifestations without referring to the constitution or the form of the material on the surface of which we see it.
It consists, we should say, of a specific action when colour is taken in its singularity whereas when it is in combination with others it is an action that is in part harmonic and in part characteristic, often not even harmonic, always, however, decided and significant and that connects directly to the moral moment.
This is the reason why colour, considered as an element of art, can be used as a moment that cooperates for the highest aesthetic ends”4.
Archaic civilization began with strong colours, with exuberant colour ornamentation. We all remember the brilliant and intense tones of the Mediterranean civilizations: the colours of the kingdoms of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, the Egypt of the Pharaohs and subsequently Ptolemaic Egypt, of Crete and the Mycenae world, of Classic Greece itself, where polychromy has been often obliterated, negated by the "whitewashing filter" of philosophy, ideas, aesthetic theories; of Rome, finally, with its polychromism lit up to be the cosmopolitan taste of the Imperial age.
Architects, captured and blinded by the attractions of the colours of stones, use these generously for centuries – just as do artists who take colours from their palettes – to decorate, to "paint" the varied pavements of occidental architecture, brought back with lively and contrasting colours. But here, in lithic pavements, we do not have – to keep to the pictorial metaphor – colours "spread" on surfaces, "coated" like a film, but rather colours that are conjugated with the substance, the essence of the lithic material.
Geometric tessellation and combination of colours set, ever since the archaic origins of the ancient Mediterranean, precociously, the themes of a multimaterial and sensorial scenic taste, of a Style that was subsequently stratified in the centuries to come to represent, throughout the world, Occidental interior design culture.
The Twentieth Century stopped all evolution. Yesterday’s Modern Movement filter, and today’s Minimalism, still prevent us from freeing ourselves from this colour elision, colour abstinence, that we were given by the last century.
We are still far from rehabilitation, from the pleasure of colours.

Alfonso Acocella
(Traduzione di Micheel Lake)

Notes:
1 “We take it for granted that the choice of the object of a study is not an innocent choice, that it already presupposes a prior interpretation and that it is inspired by our current interests. We recognize that the object is not a pure datum but rather a fragment of a universe that is enclosed by our intentions. We also admit that the language by which we notify a datum is already the same language by which we shall subsequently interpret it. This does not, however, stop our attention from moving in two distinct directions, starting from our desire to know and to encounter: one regards the reality to grasp, the being or object to know, the limits of the field of research, the more or less explicit definition of what we are interested in exploring; the other regards the nature of our reply: our contributions, our instruments, our ends – the language that we shall be using, the means that we shall be employing, the procedures which we shall be turning to. Certainly we are the only source of this double choice: this is why we so frequently choose means for exploration in function of the object to be explored and, reciprocally, the objects in function of the methods. But there is nothing more necessary than ensuring the greatest possible degree of reciprocal independence between objects and means. If it is to be hoped that the style of the research be compatible with its object, it is no less to be hoped for that the deviation and difference between we ourselves and what we aspire to better know, between our "discourse" and our object, be marked with the utmost care”. Jean Starobinski, "Il testo e l’interprete" (1974), in Le ragioni del testo, Milan, Bruno Mondadori, 2003, p. 175.

4 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, La teoria dei colori, Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1999, p. 260, edited by Renato Troncon (ed. or. 1808).