 | RAIA GOLD MEDALLIST ENRICO TAGLIETTI - BUILDING THE INVISIBLE CITY
The 2007 RAIA Gold Medallist is Canberra architect
Enrico Taglietti. Four writers – Paola Favaro, Howard
Tanner, Jennifer Taylor and Massimo Tadi – consider
his oeuvre, influences and contribution to architecture
in Australia, and we present snapshots of Enrico’s work
through four ‘frames’ of emotion and time.
|
|
Enrico Taglietti,
2007 RAIA Gold Medallist.
Portrait by Vikky Wilkes.
|
|
|
JURY CITATION
The Gold Medal is the highest honour the RAIA can bestow, recognizing
Australian architects who have produced buildings of high merit, who have
produced work of great distinction resulting in the advancement of architecture,
or who have endowed the profession of architecture in a distinguished manner.
Enrico Taglietti’s architecture is highly significant in Australian architecture,
both for its individual character and for its regional base in Canberra – away
from the large coastal cities of mainstream Australia.
Taglietti’s work over the second half of the twentieth century has
consistently pursued an Australian architectural vision as seen through Italian
eyes. Arriving in Australia, his first impression was of “the sort of emptiness
which was very conducive to creation”. His work demonstrates the architectural
story of an immigrant – seeing a new country with clear vision – and he
continues an important tradition of successful immigrant architects, including
Harry Seidler, Frederick Romberg and, more recently, Romaldo Guirgola.
Having come to Australia as a young graduate in the late 1950s, Taglietti
settled in Canberra, then an intimate city of 40,000 inhabitants. At the same time,
the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) emerged and engaged
the country’s prominent architectural talent to undertake the major projects
required to implement the capital’s growth. In a period when Canberra practices
were usually branch offices of Melbourne and Sydney, Taglietti’s succeeded as the
first Canberra-based practice of note. Today he is regarded as one of the national
capital’s active “elder statesmen” of architecture. His work has been critically
acclaimed in Australia and internationally in numerous publications.
Taglietti’s influences come from the philosophies and work of Frank Lloyd
Wright rather than the international modernity of the Bauhaus. The links and
lineage between Wright, the Griffins and Canberra has been significant to
Taglietti’s thinking and work, particularly the idea that meaning in architecture
is developed from an organic relationship between architecture and landscape.
This empathy with the landscape has made him a natural advocate for the
Griffins’ vision for Canberra.
The design of his buildings is based on what he has described as a
“calligraphy” of elements – long, horizontal flat roofs and balconies, sloping
fascias and balustrades, and battered walls – and often incorporates sloping
window reveals and unpainted surfaces for texture and minimal maintenance.
Both his domestic work and large-scale public commissions gave him the
opportunity to explore the free use of concrete. Concrete also enabled his
houses to work into their bush settings. Prominent weathered timber fascias and
boarding added to the fusion of his buildings with the landscape.
Enrico Taglietti was born in Milan in 1926 and completed his architectural
studies at the Milan Polytechnic, studying under such luminaries as Gio Ponti,
Franco Albini, Bruno Zevi and Pier Luigi Nervi. His work led him to Australia
in 1955, and his practice has continued in Canberra through to the first
decade of the twenty-first century. His practice has had a long commitment
to domestic architecture but has also built many public buildings including
schools, churches and major commercial buildings. Notable projects include the
McKeown House (1965), the Church of St Anthony (1965) and the Embassy of
Italy Chancellery (1974). Notable public buildings include the St Kilda Library
in Melbourne (1972), Giralang Primary School and Preschool (1975) and the
Australian War Memorial Annex (1979) in Canberra.
Working outside the architectural mainstream, Enrico Taglietti’s influence
on Canberra architecture has been to stimulate the intellect and eyes of those who
know and admire his work. The philosophic, aesthetic and formal qualities of his
creations are remarkable. He is an outstanding architect of national significance,
who has made a major contribution to the growth of the national capital.
RAIA Gold Medal Jury 2007, RAIA National President Carey Lyon (Chair), RAIA
Immediate Past President Bob Nation, RAIA 2006 Gold Medallist Kerry Hill,
Kerstin Thompson and Robert Morris-Nunn.
|
| UN’ARCHITETTURA PARLANTE |
|
Giralang Primary
School and Preschool,
ACT, 1975.
|
|
|
PAOLA FAVARO
Enrico Taglietti’s architecture has been described by
Australian and international architectural critics as an
architecture “whose highly personal style remains outside
the main streams of current Australian architecture”, as
“impossible to place in a convenient stylistic basket marked
‘F. L. Wright’ or ‘Scarpa’”, as being of “genial expressionism,” and overall as “idiosyncratic design”.1 It is not difficult to
see that the organizing idea behind his buildings – when
experienced either from outside, walking along their
edges, or from inside, moving through the sequence of the
inner spaces – is the product of a personal, individual and,
at the same time, complex series of decisions. For me, the
question is: to what extent is his idiosyncratic architecture
the result of his early formative experiences?
Through interviews with Taglietti, his family and his
contemporaries in Milan, a significant aspect of his life
emerges: his consistent exposure to contrasting events,
people and places. Within his family environment and his
education at the Jesuit primary school Leone XIII in Milan
(1932–36), the Francesco Martini high school in Asmara
(1940–45) and later at the architectural school at Milan
Polytechnic (1948–53), Taglietti experienced debates on
confronting and, at times, conflicting ideologies. Cautious
though one must be about making too deterministic
a reading of his life, I nonetheless believe that certain
formative influences helped to shape his idiosyncratic
frame of mind, his unwillingness to compromise, and his
intransigent determination to stand up for his convictions.
The first aspect of contrast can be detected within
his family life and his early education. Inside Taglietti’s
family there was a consistent conflict regarding education
between his more conservative father, a real patriarca, and
the liberal attitudes and beliefs of his mother. His secondary
education in Asmara (in Eritrea, formerly Ethiopia)
during the Second World War, exposed Taglietti to the
ideological debate among his high school’s educators,
who were following diverse political and philosophical
directions promoted by the Italian Fascist colonial power
and later by the British government. But most significant
was the ideological debate that emerged during Taglietti’s
architectural education in 1950s Milan. The polytechnic
environment revealed a conflict between the conservative
teaching approach of the Head of School and the Milanese
Tendenza, and the Modernist alternative of Gropius’s
Bauhaus philosophy – perceived by Taglietti as a “rigid,
direct and structured approach with everything arriving
to one conclusion”. This period also saw the merging of
technical components, through Pier Luigi Nervi’s lectures,
with the notion of architectural space as the fundamental
expression of the Modernist period on the basis of Bruno
Zevi’s “speak architecture”, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “sense
of space” and the Milanese architect and teacher Carlo
de Carli’s ideas of spazio primario. Furthermore, Taglietti
witnessed Italy’s postwar reconstruction, with its social
and political conflicts and architectural debates, which
saw the main cities of Milan and Rome as protagonists
of a dispute between the rational architecture of MSA
(Movimento di Studi per l’Architettura) in Milan and the
organic architecture of APAO (Associazione per l’Architettura
Organica) promoted by Bruno Zevi in Rome.
The second aspect of contrast can be identified in the
places Taglietti inhabited – Milan, Asmara and Canberra.
Milan, unlike Asmara and Canberra, doesn’t rely on any
dramatic natural landscape for its urban development. It is
certainly not on a plateau 2,500 metres above sea level, and
nor does it have hills, mountain, river or lake to count on.
As architect Vittorio Gregotti comments, “Because
Milan is not blessed with a dramatic setting (being absolute
flat), has no fine river running through it and – unlike
Florence or Rome – no mythically beautiful surrounding
landscape, its architecture has to work that much harder
to create urban quality … Milan does at times seem an ugly
city, this is because the architecture is ugly and there is
nothing else to look at.”2
And a similar view from architect Aldo Rossi, “The first
is that Milan has no natural landscape to distinguish it
(hills, mountains, rivers, sea, etc.): and the second is that it
does not even have a vertical construction to characterize it
(Empire State Building, Eiffel Tower, etc.). It is an extremely
flat, horizontal city, which has almost exalted the condition
of flatness.”3
With no exciting natural landscape and no significant
vertical buildings, Milan is shaped by the contrast of the
regular grid of the Roman Mediolanum with the irregular
pattern of the medieval streets and the intricate, navigable
canal system designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Taglietti
was alert to the ideological tensions in 1950s Milanese
architecture made, for example, by Ernesto Nathan Rogers
in his Torre Velasca, with its contradiction between rejecting
the neoclassical principles still pursued by most of the
Milanese architects at that time, and accepting innovation.
In contrast, the eastern African city of Asmara offered
Taglietti the experience of a multicultural environment.
There he saw the rich urban and architectural quality
of a city built over time with oriental and indigenous
constructions, from the mosques and the churches to the
growing colonial city with its Modernist constructions
rapidly built by the Italian Fascist regime. But, most
importantly, Taglietti appreciated the relief of the early
Christian churches that were carved out from the rock of
the surrounding landscape.
What, on reflection, might be drawn from Taglietti’s
pattern of conflicting experiences? The consequence,
it could be argued, is Taglietti’s consistent, passionate
architectural arguments, as revealed in his projects, his
writings, his lectures and his conversations.
It was in Canberra, “a city where the landscape
made its architecture,” that Taglietti came to test his
design principles. Taglietti learnt from his experiences
to construct his own ideas, not to be a follower of any
architectural group or style, and to figure out ways to
have the architecture connect with the city and its
surrounding landscape. Ever mindful of Walter Burley
Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s original design for
a national capital, marked by strong water and land axes,
Taglietti’s architecture is in constant dialogue with the
place – with Lake Burley Griffin, Mount Ainslie and the
Black Mountains beyond. His discussions are a dialectic,
at times a polemic, between the place and the architecture.
Accordingly, Taglietti’s architecture is not so much a silent
architecture as an architettura parlante. Every element forces
discussions and polemic, fights to say something, first to
the place, then to the people. His architecture provokes
a discourse between the internal space and the external
space, forcing the inhabitants and the users to think about
how they want to inhabit the space – where they want
to walk through, how they want to sit down to work or
to relax, and in what ways they want to engage with the
surrounding landscape. This architettura parlante, this
dialogue with the place, has been Enrico’s preoccupation
since his arrival in Canberra in 1955. As Aldo Rossi
reminds us, “places are stronger than people, the fixed
scene stronger than the transitory succession of events.”4
Events occur and change. People come and go. Places
stay. A picture emerges of an architect, in particular a
migrant architect, with contrasting formative experiences
and places stored in his memory. This picture raises a
series of questions related to identity and adaptation
to a new culture. One can argue that with adaptation
comes the necessity of belonging to a place and a culture.
Taglietti’s extraordinary attachment to Canberra – the
place of choice and of the opportunity to contribute to
the making of that place – is the most significant aspect
of his character as a migrant architect. One only has to
read his recent articles and letters regarding Canberra’s
future growth, and his vision for it, to realize that Taglietti,
at eighty years old, still has a passionate furor architectonicus
for the place that is Canberra.
Taglietti has developed an architectural language
that responds to place through strong formalist external
volumes juxtaposed with idiosyncratic complex
internal spatial arrangements. One example is the 1968
Paterson house in Aranda, which shows the extent to
which Taglietti questions the surrounding landscape
through a fortress-like external envelope whose specific
openings frame the natural environment and the distant
horizons, cleverly overlooking visually undesirable
elements. Another is the 1975 Giralang School, where
the nondescript immediate landscape gave Taglietti the
possibility of creating one. The exterior outline resembles
a section of a city, with sloping sections of walls and
angled vertical surfaces rising towards the open skylights
above. The volume of Giralang School, when read in this
light, could be interpreted as giving a context to the site
– in other words, a landscape which “speaks” of surfaces
rising from the ground, even reflecting the line of the
Black Mountains on the far horizon.
The composition and proportions of Taglietti’s
architectural spaces have a distinct personality, a
resonance to the cultural language of the places inhabited
as well as a sense of continuity derived from his maestri,
Bruno Zevi and Carlo de Carli. He appropriates a cultural
language in an idiosyncratic way as a base to expand
upon rather than seeing it with its limitations related
to a specific time and location.
In Canberra, Taglietti has been questioning since
the late 1950s how architecture, expressed through the
dialogue of external volumes and surfaces, interacts with
the landscape, and how it explores the iconic memory of
spaces and their relevance to human presence. Taglietti’s
work, in relation to his Australian contemporaries,
is outside the mainstream, offering more depth and
playfulness of forms and content.
He was a migrant by choice, searching for better
opportunities in both Asmara and Canberra. What is
significant in Taglietti’s experience is his ability as a
migrant architect to discern and manipulate universal
and general premises of culture – the values placed
on history and culture, allowing change, assimilation
and adaptation to a new culture, confirming Werner
Seligmann’s argument that, “For a true architect, the mind
constitutes an unfathomable storehouse of information
and impressions that, in the process of creating, lose their
identity and are converted into something new.”5
Taglietti’s search for a dynamic and sculptural form,
for an architettura parlante, has been successful throughout
his career. His buildings and his representational
language deal with architectural problems, they “speak
architecture” convincingly behind an overt functionality
and commodity. His projects embrace cultural issues,
aesthetics, and disciplinary and ideological issues. In short,
they represent the substance of an educated, idiosyncratic
point of view that is both universal and of its place.
Paola Favaro is a lecturer in architecture at the University
of New South Wales. She is writing her PhD on the work
of Enrico Taglietti. This essay draws on her interviews with
Enrico Taglietti in Canberra 2003 and his sister Silvia Negri
in Milan 2004.
|
| EUROPEAN SENSIBILITIES
IN THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE |
|
McKeown House,
Watson, ACT, 1965.
Photograph Harry
Sowden. This image
was the frontispiece
for Australian Housing
in the Seventies.
|
Osborne House,
‘Grantham Park’,
Currandooley, NSW,
1961. Photograph
Max Ahearn. Taglietti’s
first house was widely
published in Australia
and internationally.
|
|
|
HOWARD TANNER
Canberra in the 1950s was an odd place: a scatter
of formal public buildings, and six garden suburbs
in search of a city. Lacking the central lake, its flanking
bridges and an established parliamentary triangle, it was
almost impossible for a visitor to grasp the Griffins’
vision for a remarkable capital city.
In 1955, fate, in the form of an invitation from leading
Sydney retailer and entrepreneur Sir Charles Lloyd Jones,
brought Enrico Taglietti to Australia. The task before the
young Milanese architect was to coordinate an exhibition
of modern Italian art and design in Sydney, which included
examples of his own work. Through the generosity of the
Lloyd Joneses valuable introductions were effected, and he
travelled to Canberra and further afield.
At this moment – and for the first time since 1929
– the realization of Canberra as the nation’s capital was a
serious item on the Commonwealth agenda. Options for
the formation of the lake and the definition of the Anzac
Parade ceremonial axis, and the advice of international
city planning experts such as Sir William Holford, led
to the formation of the National Capital Development
Commission (NCDC) in 1957. With significant
government investment, the NCDC planned and shaped
the city we see today.
For Taglietti, who left Milan in 1956 to live and work
in Canberra, it was an opportunity to contribute to the
blank canvas of an “invisible city”, and to participate
in the imminent requirement for an Italian embassy.
Educated Italians were aware of Costa and Niemeyer’s
creation of Brasilia (1956–61), and Canberra was clearly
the other national capital on the cusp of fruition.
Taglietti’s initial projects were modest, but in 1959 a
group of Canberra developers engaged him to design the
first of a series of distinctive motels and hotels, allowing
Taglietti to develop his idiosyncratic use of angular
concrete balconies and powerful roof forms. These led to
later office buildings and to institutional commissions,
of which St Anthony’s Church at Marsfield, NSW, and
Giralang Primary School in the ACT are best known.
Early acclaim is evident in the inclusion of Taglietti’s
work in the 1979 exhibition Transformations in Modern
Architecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Architectural critic Arthur Drexler wrote in the exhibition
catalogue of Taglietti designing in a “Wrightian manner” and, while parallels can be drawn, Taglietti and architects
like Bruce Rickard and the Sydney School of the period
were all open to Prairie School influences.
I came to know of Taglietti through research for my
book Australian Housing in the Seventies (1976). While
rewarding early projects by Glenn Murcutt, Gabriel Poole,
Terry Dorrough, Viv Fraser and others were included, it was
Taglietti’s dramatic McKeown house (Watson, ACT, 1965)
that took pride of place on the frontispiece – it was
quite different to anything else of the period. As I wrote:
“An interest in built massing as sculptural form (the
new geometry) reflects part of this release from basic [post
war] building. The work of Italian-trained Enrico Taglietti
… shows the varied modelling and articulation possible
within the domestic framework. Take as an example
Taglietti’s McKeown house in Canberra: tapering walls,
cantilevers and roof planes tie together to make a very
strong and carefully composed ‘work of art’. Here plain
building is transcended.”1
Reflecting on the Allan C. Smith house (1968) at West
Pennant Hills, then on the outskirts of Sydney, I commented,
“Dr Taglietti … has over the last ten years revealed through
his architectural work, especially his houses, sculptural
solutions to the built form. Unusual shapes and angles
and contrasts of light trellis and massive masonry, and the
use of hovering cantilevered planes of roof and deck, have
given his work a distinct character and individuality.”2
Thirty-five years later, to refresh my memory of the
impact Taglietti’s work had on the Australian scene at that
time, I revisited his first new house in Australia, designed
in 1961 for Pat and Sally Osborne on the grazing property
Currandooley, which edges the eastern shore of Lake
George, north-east of Canberra.
The Osbornes clearly recall the excitement of the project:
“Pat wanted a contemporary house.” “There was a young Italian architect in Canberra who
was doing very interesting work.” “Taglietti was very charming, very enthusiastic, with
piercing blue eyes.” “His ideas appealed to us immediately.” “We wanted an L-shaped plan which would cut out the
wind from the south, and nestle into the hill.” “The most unusual aspect of the house was the roof: all
hips and no ridge, with suntraps cut into the angular forms.” “Taglietti said that it was his first site with unlimited
space … while a clever designer … he was quite economical.” “The house cost 13,000 pounds, while a standard project
home at the time cost 6,000 pounds – to us it represented
good value.”
In essence, it is a simple three-bedroom house of
21 “squares”, with a large living space and kitchen in one
wing, and the bedrooms and bathrooms in the other, the
two wings terminating in verandahs with distinctive
roof cut-outs, and enfolding a rectangular garden space.
Triangulated openings, a spectacular fireplace and heated
floors counterpoise bagged walls and typical parquet and
tiled floors of the period.
Good design, especially exciting domestic design,
has interested Sally Osborne’s family for generations.
Her Crace ancestors furnished residences for the Prince
Regent, worked with A. W. Pugin, and shipped out specific
furnishings for their homestead Gungahleen (now
surrounded by the Canberra suburb Gungahlin). Sally
and her sister Julia McFarlane – who later ran successful
design businesses in New York – were inspired by Marion
Hall Best, the celebrated Sydney interior designer, and
these influences revealed themselves in the detail of the
new Taglietti house. There were Bertoia chairs, the dining
table was by Clem Meadmore, curtains were of linen
scrim, blinds used Marimekko fabrics, two large Finnish
rugs of abstract design came from David Jones, and the
internal walls were painted with special glazed finishes,
as recommended by Marion Hall Best.
This was probably the most distinctive house
constructed in the Canberra region in the early 1960s,
and arguably the most famous, being published in
Domus, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Architecture and Arts,
Architecture Today and Cross-section, and being included
in the exhibition Transformations in Modern Architecture
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Architecture
and Arts, listing it among the ten finest buildings of
1961–62, described it as “a forceful and virile house
with a thoroughly Australian character”.
Howard Tanner is a national councillor of the RAIA
and Chairman of Tanner Architects in Sydney.
|
| A TRIBUTE |
|
Design study,
learning units, Gowrie
Primary School and
Preschool, 1977.
|
“At the beach”.
Enrico Taglietti, top,
at the Le Corbusier
Workshop, Marseilles,
1954. Francesca Tadi,
a fellow architecture
student at Milan
Polytechnic, is top left.
Enrico and Francesca
married later that year.
|
|
|
JENNIFER TAYLOR
The buildings of Enrico Taglietti are distinctive in the
repertoire of Australian architecture. To me, his work
has never lost the Italian spirit, with its sense of fun and
theatre, and with a sculptural richness inherited from
Italian architecture.
When Enrico arrived in Australia from Italy concrete
was the material of the day, with many of the major
works being built in his new home city, Canberra. The
expressive freedom and exuberance in his architecture
is found even in his very first buildings of the 1960s,
which served as an antidote to the sobriety of much of
the concrete architecture of the time. Refusing to accept
structural and functional rationale as the overriding
determinants of form, Enrico has always placed aesthetic
and emotive appeal high on his list of criteria, moulding
the plasticity of his materials to bring drama to space and
to capture light. He never hesitates to shape form simply
for its delight or its moving qualities. In his words, “Why
not create something beautiful … when you can do it for
the same cost as something ugly.” But his compositions
are never random; rather there is a clearly perceived
order that frequently culminates in a point of focus,
be it an entry, the crown of a skylight or the sculptural
antics of a key wall. Yet, for all of their vigour, the
buildings seem relaxed, welcoming users, children,
vegetation, the sun and breezes to play through them.
We have indeed been fortunate that Enrico Taglietti
chanced to come to Australia, and decided to stay. His
buildings have continued to invigorate the profession and
have brought joy and much pleasure to those who visit
and use them. Congratulations, and thank you, Enrico.
Jennifer Taylor.
|
|
The Taglietti
apartment in Milan,
published in Domus,
no 292 (March 1954).
|
Osborne House,
Currandooley, 1961.
Photograph
Max Ahearn.
|
McKeown
House, Watson, ACT,
1965. Photograph
Harry Sowden.
|
Dingle House,
Hughes, ACT, 1968.
Photograph
Harry Sowden.
|
Tabitha and
Tanja Taglietti, c. 1961.
|
Cinema Center
Building (Stage 2),
Canberra, 1966.
|
Captain
James Cook Hotel,
Griffith, ACT, 1968
(now demolished).
|
Convention
Centre Complex,
for Australian
Consolidated Press,
Campbell, ACT, 1967.
|
Letter from
the Museum of
Modern Art. Taglietti
projects included in
the exhibition were
Giralang Primary
School, Osborne House
and the Townhouse
Motel, Wagga Wagga.
Transformations in
Modern Architecture,
Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 1978.
|
Townhouse Motel,
Wagga Wagga, 1963.
|
Smith House
(now Li House), West
Pennant Hills, NSW,
1968–70. Photograph
Kerry Dundas for
Max Dupain.
|
Paterson House,
Aranda, ACT, 1968.
|
Kileen House,
Mt Majura, ACT, 1971.
|
The family,
Franca, Tanja and
Tabitha Taglietti, 1973.
|
The Apostolic
Nunciature (Embassy
of the Holy See), Red
Hill, ACT, 1978.
|
Church of St
Anthony, Marsfield,
Sydney, 1965.
Photograph Harry
Sowden.
|
Evans House
(now Nicholl House),
Cook, ACT, 1973.
|
Giralang Primary
School and Preschool,
ACT, 1975.
|
Rudd St Centre,
Canberra, 1985–86.
|
The family,
1976. Photograph The
Canberra Times.
|
| |
Sketches for the
Parliament House
Temporary Exhibition
Centre, 1982
(demolished).
|
McKeown
House no. 2, Watson,
ACT, 1994.
|
IBM Building,
Barton, ACT, 1995.
|
Michael
O’Connor Stand,
Phillip District
Enclosed Oval,
ACT, 1990.
|
Parliamentary
Zone Early Childcare
Centre, 1991.
|
Sea Residence
for Dr and Mrs de
Crespigny, Lilli Pilli,
NSW, 1994.
|
Australian War
Memorial Annex,
Mitchell, ACT,
1978–79.
|
The Meeting
Place, a proposal for
the development
of an Australian
National University
Arts Precinct. Joint
venture between ANU,
Kumagai Gumi and
Enrico Taglietti.
|
Residence and
Chancellory for the
High Commission of
Pakistan, Yarralumna,
Canberra, 2005 (in
design).
|
Enrico and
Franca, 1998.
|
Residence for
the Ambassador of
the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, Garran, ACT,
1996.
|
Penny and Randal
House Extensions,
Griffith, ACT, 1988.
|
Design for the
architectural envelope
of Canberra’s City
Hill. “A design to stop
buildings constricting
the void. One must
have a vision, adapt
the nothing therein to
the purpose in hand.”
Enrico Taglietti, 2005.
|
Detail of proposal for City Hill Park, Canberra.
|
|
|
| THE SEARCH FOR INFINITY |
|
The architecture of Enrico Taglietti
between eternity, utopia and dream.
MASSIMO TADI
"Always dear to me was this solitary hill
And this edge, which from so great a part
Of the farthest horizon excludes the view
But, sitting here and gazing, I imagine
Boundless spaces beyond that edge and more
Human silences and profoundest quiet.
In the mind where the heart is almost filled with
Fear. And, as I hear the wind rustle among the shrubs,
That infinite silence and this voice, I compare.
And the eternal comes to mind and the dead seasons,
And the present and living one and its sound.
So, with this Immensity, my thought is drowned.
And its foundering is sweet to me in this sea."
In order to understand the work and poetics of such
a remarkable and versatile figure as Enrico Taglietti
it is not necessary to place his work within a school, a
rank or even a place, nor is it useful to invent imaginary
pigeonholes. Certainly, such an endeavour would
reassure those who need always to reassemble the
fragments of often enigmatic and unique personae
within the known bounds of official historiography.
However, it would also lead to the irremediable loss of
those elements which, in my opinion, make up the most
relevant features of the cultural lesson of Enrico Taglietti
– a unique identity based on his belief in the “epiphany” as the foundation of architecture.
In fact, the most distinctive finding of my
architectural research into this cultured European
intellectual is not to be found in his evident affinity with
certain principles of structured poetics, but rather in the
moulding of his work through his personal search of the
“elsewhere” and by his conscious and tenacious effort
to always be part of a cultural and critical “minority”,
associated with his wonder when confronted with
“infinity”, when “the heart is almost filled with fear”.
Within this recurring theme of the “elsewhere” and
“infinity” – with which he was physically confronted for
a large part of his life – Taglietti seems to have developed
his deepest and most personal cultural identity. This
began at a young age when he first encountered the
maraviglia of Greek pathos and the reassurance of
lex romana in the classic literature that had so big an
influence during his education. This took place not in the
classroom of an Italian high school but in the limitless
horizons of a then Italian Africa, where Enrico spent his
formative years in close contact with a rich and refined
international community.
It seems plausible to assume that in Asmara he
started to form the embryo of his particular way of seeing
the world, which he never abandoned and which led him
via Milan to Sydney and, finally, to his “invisible city”,
Canberra.
“In this land it is written that what you seek you will
find, what you overlook will escape you.”1
Following the return of his family to Italy, Enrico
Taglietti became an architect at the Polytechnic of
Milan – a university that, within the traditionalist
Italian cultural landscape, had always represented the
point of contact with the outside world, the cultural
avant-garde of the nation, and a place where a link
was created between technical/scientific knowledge
and humanistic culture. It was here, “during a postwar
socialist and euphoric moment, in an heroically utopian
climate when the mission of the architect was seen as
a Messianic one and the architect as the new Universal
Man destined to rebuild a new and perfect world”, that
Enrico was trained and actively took part in the debate
for the definition of a new architecture to be considered
as epic.
His participation in the works for the 10th Triennial
(1954), also in Milan, was an important experience that,
as well as providing him with international contacts,
remains with him as a vivid memory and will contribute
to keeping alive the vision of architecture as epiphany,
the search for which became his dream.
“Newly graduated, it was for me like a sensual and
dazzling ecstasy. There I met Richard Neutra, Alvar Aalto,
Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer. All
of them left in me a memory of their dreams: Californian
houses, buildings amongst the pines, living units,
cardboard domes, white converged forms. However, the
men with whom I had the most human relationships
were the artists; the Spaniard Eduardo Chillida, the Finn
Tapio Wirkkala, Saul Steinberg, Agenore Fabbri, Henry
Moore, Marino Marini and Lucio Fontana.”
Those years also saw the development of his support
for a critical minority against a triumphant majority, a
majority that looked at the ideas of modern architecture
in terms of Le Corbusier and Gropius and which, in
some cases, would result in the worst of international
functionalism. In contrast, Taglietti’s architectural ideas
developed following principles inspired by the teaching
of the environment. With this he longed for an image
that flowed through a strict relationship between Nature,
the Territory and Man, without the abandonment or
obliteration of the deeply-rooted culture of humanist
ideals proper to Mediterranean classicism.
His was, and is, an adherence to general principles in a
more articulate and complex way than any apparent choice
of camp. During an interview with an Italian architectural
magazine in later years, he spoke about his contribution to
the Australian architectural panorama as follows:
“I think that mine is the contribution of a solitary
preacher of the organic principles of the ‘modern’ that is
the antithetical meaning of my Mediterranean culture in
the middle of a predominantly Anglo-Saxon tradition. My
position as architect is, I hope, poles apart both from the
questionable ecologist Puritanism and from the formal
continuity of the international modern that is reduced to
an excuse, a ‘style’.”
This recurrent attitude to the differences between
identities was grasped by Jennifer Taylor, who, in her
Australian Architecture from 1960 to Today, defined Taglietti’s
architecture as an exuberant combination – without parallel
in Australia – of Italian ancestry and Japanese sobriety.
Taglietti landed in Australia due to his involvement
in an exhibition of Italian architecture and design in
Sydney in order to promote the Milan Triennial. The
epiphanic dimension of his architecture seemed to find
fulfilment in a special occasion fate presented him with,
when the Italian embassy commissioned him to look for a
suitable location for the move of the Italian embassy from
Sydney to Canberra. The search for an inspiring location,
which characterized his formative years as well as his
first professional years, was realized. Taglietti would later
remember this event:
“During my formative years when I was in desperate
search of revelation that would eventually make me
understand the essence of architecture, I explored
many cities like Marco Polo. Cities of temples (Athens,
Rome), cities of pyramids (Paris, Cairo), cities of dreams
(Venice), cities of churches (Orvieto), cities of markets
(Verona), cities of mansions (Urbino), cities of cathedrals
(Barcelona), cities of tombs (Beijing), musical box cities
(London), cities of skyscrapers (New York), cities of
golden domes (The Kremlin). I reached a fundamental
conclusion: planners do not create Cities, they are created
by architecture. Architecture is the genuine matrix of the
city. I found that Sydney was a city without a matrix, a
city of long red roofs with a coat hanger as a bridge and a
neo-Gothic and neoclassical architecture. Its core was not
its architecture but its hundreds of bays – the city of ports.
During an afternoon in September many years ago – the
wattle and prunus in bloom, the mountains sprinkled
with snow – I reached the city of Canberra in a Fiat 500.
A city without towers, without golden domes, without
cathedrals, a city without a past. It was the dream of any
modern architect. There was nothingness: the silence, the
music, the clean slate, the end of an exploration, maybe
the destination, and the invisible city.”
Now a long story began of extraordinary architecture
for his Canberra, created according to the principles of
asymmetry, of plastic continuity of the internal space, the
architecture of silence, generated by deep and extended
horizontal lines – architecture that is immersed in
vast horizons and reconciled with the landscape of the
Australian Capital Territory. Within it, the internal tension
between the vast covering layers and the fluid forms of the
connections to the soil shatter any possibility of the facade
being seen as a bi-dimensional closure, generating different
cuts and cracks which reveal the existence of deep internal
voids. In these the light becomes a special architectural
material to be moulded in them and with them. Taglietti
carries out his lyrical journey.
“For me after forty years the light, the challenge of the
emptiness and the relationship with the fragility of this
ancient land are still reasons for my profound attraction
for this country.”
From this time Canberra – the city untouched by
ugliness and history, the city of emptiness, of spaces
without boundaries, the vision of the invisible city, of
the inhuman silence which hangs over it, of infinity and
eternity revealed, the city defined by him many times
as “the elsewhere”, “the dream of a new city and still to
be discovered, invisible and liveable at the same time” – becomes an inspirational muse, elevated to a “solitary
hill” from whose “immensity” his “thought is drowned” and
in which even today “its foundering is sweet … in this sea”.
Massimo Tadi is professor of architectural design at
the Faculty of Building Engineering and Architecture,
Polytechnic of Milan. All quotations are from Enrico
Taglietti, unless otherwise indicated.
Gold Medal Speaking Tour
Enrico Taglietti’s national tour begins
in Canberra on 15 March. He speaks
in all state capitals between March
and September, with the A. S. Hook
Address in Canberra in October.
For details contact your RAIA chapter
or see www.architecture.com.au
|
|
