Notes on the Architecture of Cannatà & Fernandes
Paulo Martins Barata
In a letter under the name of Lord Chandos, Hugo von Hofmannsthal declared: "In truth the language in which I may be able perhaps not only to write but also to think is not Latin, nor English, nor Italian nor Spanish, but a language in which dumb things speak to me and in which I may perhaps one day, in my grave, prove my innocence before an unknown judge". Hofmannsthal's somewhat enigmatic plea is in fact the acknowledgement of the problem of language and speech in modern society. For him, as probably for his Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus, silence was the only possibility opened to those who wished to say something of significance. That void created by silence would be heard farther than any vociferous scream of the populace.
If that was the roar of the media in the premonitory Vienna of 1910, what are we to say of the drawing of this next century in regard to noisy symphony of facts and figures? Those of us who have chosen not to work with the urbane aesthetics of the chaos - as if adding to chaos would neutralize its demoralizing effect - are still faced with the disconcerting impossibility posed by Hofmannsthal.
In fact, the present level of immediacy to which mainstream architectural production has to respond to, leaves hope for the coming of the colder and sober days that Karl Kraus hoped for. Even to receive its limited share attention, architecture has to resort to the same processes of such professional activities as marketing and politics. Captivating names, self-appointed utopias, readymade metaphors and disposal iconography, are all part of a game that is increasingly devoid of substance and feeble in results.
Fortunately, this all seems to coexist with a mechanism of self-criticism that as seemingly allowed a certain historical filter to balance the architectural media hype phenomena with the lesser known practices that nevertheless produce a work of critical significance. In the case of the Cannatà & Fernandes this is all the more true since for over two decades this Italian and Portuguese couple has produced a body of work that is both impressive in terms of theory and practice. Following a tradition that is second to none in Italian architecture culture, Michele Cannatà and Fátima Fernandes have raised awareness, activated debate, commissioned exhibitions, served as international correspondents, spearheaded events, enlighten the building industry, and fostered the publishing of architecture in Portugal. In doing so, they have been generous and open to all the inflections that lead to a wider understanding of our time, having done so without succumbing to fashionable and sterile stimuli. If nothing else their contribution to Portuguese architecture culture would be already inestimable.
The fact that their production has been divided between Portugal and Italy is of particular interest to the relations between theory and practice. In that regard we may note that Porto School has always remained an intensely pragmatic school, despite its political agenda, where both politicized milieu of post-war Italian schools has been a reference in the production of architectural theory. Thus, its comes as no surprise that the result of the training of Fátima Fernandes as a graduate from Porto would match so intensely with the experience of Michele Cannatà as a former student of the University of Reggio Calabria. Their early work in Italy, notably the cemetery of Melicucco, still incomplete from their design of 1990, is evocative of such elementary principles of the Graeco-Roman prototypical architecture such as the intersection of the Tholos and the Stoa.
We need only to look back to the mid-seventies to note that Portugal is one of the countries that embodied more vigorously Kenneth Frampton's Critical Regionalist manifesto, of which those like Fátima Fernandes, educated in the Porto school in the early 80's, were certainly exposed to. The aphorism coined by Nuno Portas, writ large the "school of rigor", sought to define a school that, faced between the degenerate formalist and decorative gratuities practiced by the design firms engaged in servicing the booming tourism on the one hand, and the ex-urban sprawl of the maison type owner built homes as dreamt by the returning émigré on the other, took to a stance of resistence, if not protest via a hard-to-please critical revision of the modernist legacy. As Nuno Portas once noted:
In an atmosphere in which proliferated bizarre forms, profuse details and allusions to the newly re-discovered vernacular, it became necessary for a school of rigor to be formed and which would fundamentally deal with these problems and produce the formal answers that could address them. It is not surprising that from the 1970s on, the school of rigor would take upon itself to rehabilitate purist sources of German and Dutch rationalism of the 1920s, while at the same time re-utilised Aalto's free interpretation of those sources, by-passing, not only Le Corbusier, but also Wright, Khan, Italian Neo-Liberty (in 9H, London: Nº5 (1983), p.41).
Certainly one can read the presence of Miles, notably of the canonical Barcelona Pavilion, in Cannatà & Fernandes' elegant Piazza Nicolas Green, built between 1990 and 1995 for the Municipality of Melicucco. The careful insertion of this travertine table in the plot left vacant from the demolition of a ruin created a place that is both solemn and civic. Elsewhere in Italy, in historical centre of Polistena, the shadow of Loos comes to fore in the elevations of the Marchetta house where the suggestive anthropomorphism of the deeply veined marble portico is counterpoised by two receding eyes that seemingly stare at us from the upper floor. Evidently the critical influence of Rossi, by way of Cannatà's background, is notable in the large scale housing projects. I have in mind the social housing projects built in Polistena for the co-operative "Progresso e Lavoro" between 1984 and 1988. Here the triple height portico servicing the apartments' entrances brings to mind the prototypical sensibility of La Tendenza. Significantly more Neoplasticist in its spirit is the addiction to the Church of São Francisco in Vinhais, in the North of Portugal where the insertion of an immaculately jagged volume, framed in a plastered whitewash and hollowed by a glassed surface, creates a decisive contrast between the church building and the adjacent house.
Loos, Mies, Rossi and Siza seem to have been inspiring figures in the early work of Cannatà & Fernandes, with the small commissions of shops and houses being literally detailed as "poésie d'équipage"; a form of building experience that can only be accomplished by a highly engaged proximity between the architect and the craftsmen.
The larger scale of their recent commissions and competition projects shows evidence of a more self-restrained and radical sensitivity toward the architectural object, having in mind, for instances, the three-storey stairwell and elevator shaft crowning the late-modernist hostel (Pousada) of Picote. This exposed concrete mute box forms a sort of monolithic L-shape with the half-sunken auditorium box. The latter is shaped has a hollow glassed stage with the magnificent vistas of the Douro mountains as a backdrop. Currently under construction, this project is particularly interesting in the context of the Cannatà & Fernandes practice given that prior to its design, they undertook an extensive survey of the modernist legacy of Douros's architecture of damps and electrical power station campuses, published in 1997 under the suggestive title of "The Sunken Modern" (O Moderno Escondido).
Nowhere is this Neoplastic objectivity better expressed that in their competition entry for the healthcare sciences central building of University of Coimbra. There, the prototypical square plot of the university campus is fully occupied by a dence and translucent box from which sprout portentous cantilevered slots, recalling the canonical image of the hand that slides off one of the units of the model of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation.
Cannatà & Fernandes would return once more to the minute scale with a challenging commission from the Portuguese national fair of building technology (Concreta 2002) to design an experimental house incorporating new building materials and home applied electronic technology from a throng of different suppliers and contractors. The house stands in a flat and abstract plot of 12 by 12 meters, at present in front of the fair's entrance, indicating that it could virtually be built anywhere as long as the technology and craftsmanship are readily available. Not surprisingly, the structure of this twin-patio single floor house owes something to John Estenza's experimental program of Case Study houses built inCalifornia between 1945 and 1950 to the designs of Ellwood, Soriano, Koenig, Eames and perhaps most notably by Frey and Neutra (the latter an underlying influence but not participants in the program). Here however the brick and wood panels of the former, gave way to a wall system based in U-shaped glass profiles filled with foam micro-granules for insulation and lighting control.
I Begun this excursus on the work of Michele Cannatà and Fátima Fernandes with the recognition that the problem of language remains of essence to the cultural validity of what we choose to do with the tools we are granted. In truth, we advance in minuscule steps by reconstructing the world from the signs, images and forms of history. Our task is a relatively silent construct.
AUTHORS
FÁTIMA FERNANDES AND MICHELE CANNATÀ
DESIGNER
JOÃO MACHADO
EDITOR
ASA EDITORES II S.A.
Avenida da Boavista, 3265 - Sala 4.1
Apartado 1035
4101-001 Porto
Portugal
Tel. 226166030
Fax: 226155346
e-mail: edicoes@asa.pt
internet: www.asa.pt
@ MICHELE CANNATÀ & FÁTIMA FERNANDES
1st Edition October 2003
LEGAL DEPOSIT
200 509/03
ISBN
972-41-3629-9
