How would you describe the Lapsus Imaginis Studio from the fall? What motivated you to teach such a unique Studio?
Lapsus Imaginis: Bulding a future past, translates to lapse—a mistake that we do involuntary, through speaking or writing, which hides a desire—and images. It is very complex for me in only one sentence, to describe what this title and the Studio are about. I can tell you that images to me are somehow errors of reality, intending error as a deviation from reality: we create them through manipulations as a desire for a different reality. Images of a city like Rome are errors and wishes of Rome, expressed by all those people that produced them. So Lapsus Imaginis is a Studio Course based on the Image of a city (Rome for example) that has always been in my mind as something I wanted to do one day. There was a wish in the reason and the pretension to do it. Moreover, with the traveling Studio, I have found the other opportunity to accomplish a desire of mine and to travel to Rome with architecture students that have never been to Rome but that have the desire to travel to that city and to learn from that city. What is the Image of the City more than what the city is? I believe that this question and my interest in teaching narrative and architecture/design were the 2 aspects of the wish that motivated the Studio. I believe the future of our discipline is comprehensive in the sense of going beyond the differentiation that exists in between the definition of different disciplines of design. Design needs to be taught as a Cultural Project. The Studio was based on this idea of focusing on the value of narrative in design and it was a Studio we all enjoyed— me, the students and the jurors at the end—because, by bringing together narrative and design, it went beyond Design.
I am an architect that was taught during the late 80’s as architect as well as interior designer, industrial designer, landscape architect, scenographer, historian: I was taught everything. It’s amazing how now, by bringing the idea of interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity, we are back into that idea. The thing that finally motivated me to offer the traveling Studio was having the opportunity to have students from different programs and with many different backgrounds. The Studio was composed by landscape architects, urban designers and architects, and it was amazing to see them, through the lesson of Rome, going beyond their own disciplines to meet the ones of their colleagues. It was a wish and an opportunity to teach this Studio.
How did the students develop such interesting narratives for the basis of their Studio projects?
The basic idea of the Studio was that the students had to go to Rome to learn about what the Image of a City is. The Roman trip was a pre requisite. We travelled to Rome to found our basis for a project to develop once back home in Tempe. Rome has been our teacher on how to develop a narrative, especially using the drawings of Giambattista Piranesi as a reference: before traveling to Rome, the students had to explore here in Tempe the images of Rome produced by Piranesi and build their own expectation of the city, the mental image of it. Piranesi’s images, in the Studio, were intended to show the history of the images of the city, not of the city. Piranesi was an architect from the18th century that, without having a job and real commissions, started to build Rome as it existed in his imagination: the production of images of his Rome was mainly celebrating a kind of memory of the Grandeur of it. My students, after, had to travel to Rome with me and study the object of those images in reality, to discovered that the Image of a City as seen and represented by an architect, is much greater than what reality is; that the city is different from our expectations. So, when we were back here in Tempe, we did the same exercise learnt from Rome, and we started to build an Image of Tempe. We went first to the archive in the Hayden Library looking for images of the recent past of Tempe. We looked at images from the beginning of the last century as ruins of Tempe. The students then had to rebuild a 360-panorama image and to speculate and imagine a narrative from that one picture they selected. For example, Marissa Mendoza found an image of the white washing event of the “A” on the Tempe mountain: she
built the entire panorama and narrative that started from that picture. Of course, students were not only digging into the past through the photographs but also through history in order to build a story from an imagined event that existed in a lapse of Time of an image: a Lapsus Imaginis. All of them pictured a specific event in a different past and imagined that the event was developed till the present as a different image of the present. This Studio was not about guessing a different future: it was about digging into the past to imagine a different present. I call this a future past. Over the semester, the students were dealing a lot with guessing to comprehend the profession of architecture as one of the best tools to speculate about the future, to understand design as a way of simulating and testing. We, the designers, have the capacity to invent a different future and, in order to do this, we have to be able to speculate. So, when I speak about narrative and architecture, I am trying to give back to architecture the cultural aspect it has innerly and essentially and that I consider is sometimes missing in architectural education.
What did you perceive as the biggest challenge students had to overcome?
Whatever I teach, in general—whatever country I am teaching, whoever I am teaching, whatever year I am teaching—I am only interested in the person. So the biggest challenge was, through bringing the students through narrative and architecture, to facilitate the discover of their own and natural talent, their Genius. I am always telling my students that they all have a talent if they are able to discover it. So, whatever I am teaching, the biggest challenge is to help you overcome and discover this talent that is inside of you. If you are not aware of it, it is a lost talent. Secondly, the Studio was a pretext to reflect on knowledge of history of architecture as a tool for designing. At the end of the course, when we had the final review and the exhibition of all the works, we had that crucial moment in between students and the reviewers when the critical discourse of architecture was finally happening. The conversation reflected many Times on the value of the Precedent as a tool to design the future and how important is for contemporary design to learn from the lesson of the history. When we were in Rome, I could show the students 27 centuries of architecture in one building just because Rome is one of the few places in the world that has all the levels and layers of Time visible to you, Anyone can see and understand how the upper part is based on a foundation that before was an upper part too and that Time pushed it down below. When we were in front of the Marcello Theater, the students were able to understand that the design of the upper floor was only able to exist because it was based on what was already existing and strong enough to support it. When we were back in Tempe, all of them had to build their projects starting from the Precedent which was an Image, a letter, a ritual or whatever they could found as a ruin in the archive, our improvised archeological site. During the weeks of the semester we had to put together the Precedent, the existent and the future, and, in this sense, try to understand that, whatever we do, we always need to reflect on what is existing—including existing architecture, the site and the intricacy of their relationship with Time. I think all of them went through this process and opened their eyes into this new awareness of what a Precedent means—and I call it the Precedent—of what comes before you. History represents to me what is not visible anymore because it is past. It represents in a way the non representable—so this Studio challenged the students on how to represent the non representable through using narrative and Images. Designers are one of the only people who can see these invisible lines made evident through our projects. The world will always need Designers. Therefore, we are the Agents of the non-representable stories because history teaches us how to do it. The students all had very poetic projects taken very seriously and which images, the only things we produce the most while we design, were very seriously built. Another challenge from a narrative-type Studio was that the students had to forget about reality. The first step in design is to imagine in order to have the capacity in our mind to not really think technically, but to first have an understanding of what is the narrative of the place. I was sharing this idea with the students in order to show how to not have the reality limiting our imagination at the beginning of a project. It was also a challenge to convince them of that idea.
What do you believe was the strongest aspect of your college education? Did this become integrated into the Lapsus Imaginis Studio?
It is my passion. First of all, I am an architect because I grew up in Rome: I wanted to be an architect because I am from Rome and because I wanted to contribute to the history of my city. If you have ears enough to hear the invisible, Rome seems to always tell you “be an architect!” The school of architecture, la Sapienza at Valle Giulia, was teaching us, through representation, how to be the narrator of a story. That part of the narrative learnt through education is what I am bringing all over. And, when I speak about education, I am not referring only to the one received at the college. Our education as architects requires us to be as our building: as them, we need Time and Phases. One day, one year after my degree, I went to look for my Mentor in order to start to have a conversation with him while working, and to finally manifest as an architect. So, when I was twenty-eight, I left Rome and went to Barcelona to meet with Enric Miralles, who taught me a lot more about this way of having a conversation with myself in order to put my talent into my projects. What I was bringing in the Lapsus Imaginis Studio was my city, which is my main education, which is my passion, which is my talent. And I was very lucky to have this opportunity of matching things—my college, my life, my architecture—to teach the students while finding myself again through them, to learn from them, and in a way to bring back my entire experience and fitting it into the semester. I have been the teacher and the student; I was exactly like when I was back in my early university years but with a distance. And I am very thankful for this opportunity that the school gave me because it is amazing to talk about architecture of your city in your city, which is exactly the way I have learnt architecture: Rome is the best of the laboratories of architecture under the sky.
What was your biggest takeaway from teaching this past Studio?
This Studio started in a very peculiar way—at the beginning of 2014 I introduced it to the audience that had to pick one option to travel by projecting a mysterious video I put together with a Cello Bach Suite as a background and, in that moment, the students who selected the Studio were very special already—because none of them understood that video or the title (including myself) but have had an impression. So, on the first day of class, I asked them why they chose this Studio and they all told me, “well, the video you showed was mysterious, we didn’t understand what you wanted us to do.” That moment put together a mysterious group of mysterious people that wanted to travel together to a place to learn something together with the professor and other disciplinary colleagues. So, I think the best thing I took away was the experience of learning with them while they were learning: it is important for teachers to find the Time to learn when the students are learning and make Time by learning while waiting for them to learn.
The traveling Studios have this amazing component when you start. You start and you don’t know anybody, but you live together in a place for ten days and that place does not belong to anybody, and that synergy creates the Studio. The level of documents that the students produced was showed to the entire Design School through the exhibition we put together at the Tempe Arts Center. I think it was amazing to see the quality of the images: I like to call my Lapsus Imaginis Studio a 2D Folies Studio—which is a French word roughly translating to something peculiar and extravagant and, in this case, in a format of a flat image. Extravagant Images of Future Pasts. I believe one of the essences of architecture is the Image of it. Architecture starts and ends in images. And if the future of architecture it is going to be digitally produced, to me this future is Photoshop, not Revit. I taught my students how to build a Photoshop image with the tools of it and I taught them the method of collaging images as a common language we shared the 3 disciplines that composed the interdisciplinary class. The greatest achievement to me was the uniform Beauty of documents from students of different backgrounds; through the representation and the images, we were able to have a conversation between different disciplines. The fluidity seen at the final review exhibition showed the fluidity of what happened over the semester, which was all about having a conversation between us due the collaborative nature of the Studio. By offering the tools of imagination and representation, the students established a common conversation that I think was a great achievement. At the end, we all deal with the representation of ideas with the different scales of landscape and things and rooms and objects and words.
How would you describe the rhythm of the semester?
When I teach Studio courses based on the value of narrative in architecture, the strongest and struggling point is to have the students forgetting about reality, to develop the capacity to invent a narrative of a place and to not only think it technically. I have, in my Studio, some very radical exercises to test your own strength because one of our most difficult part in a project is to sell it to someone else. How do you defend your idea? I believe that, if you bring the students for a while into speculation, you can make them having harder muscles to resist the effort. When you take a Studio with me, it’s like training into a dream, as we were in the movie Inception: loaded with very heavy weights, there’s a moment where I try to push you back and you fall down and the exercise is to stand up again. So the purpose of the Studio—just because I’m interested in student’s talent—is to make you stronger by being aware of it. So, every Time, I have to push my exercises to almost the absurd.
Do you ever get to the point where you pull them back, or does the entire Studio focus on such a narrative that you don’t want to end the narrative at the end of the Studio?
So that’s a very complex and interesting question, and I believe that there is something that we cannot teach you here at the school, which is called Time, because every Time that we deliver a project, we have some years to do it. You will learn about Time in Time anyway, we don’t need to teach this and we cannot. You understand when you study and when you work that the project must be delivered in phases. So, there is a preliminary phase and the basic project one and so on till you build something. I think that a semester its Time enough to simulate a preliminary design and a basic project, in my understanding. In other courses, you simulate the construction phase. In other, you simulate management. My course took into consideration the serious proposal for a preliminary design. So the student has to only make the hypothesis stronger by building the hypothesis and not the building, because that would be a second step. But, normally, if you are applying in a competition, and this competition is one of ideas, which is where we are always looking for a job, we try to really build a speculation. I believe that there is always a phase when a Teacher decides to have the Studio reflecting on. I can’t teach the entire process, because I can’t simulate the Real Time of architecture. Time is experience and that needs to be experienced in Time. So for example, now I am teaching the Integrate Studio ADE 522. We are learning about another phase. In that Studio Course there is no the same amount of Time to build the speculation of an idea. And I am learning a lot with Phil Horton and Tom Hartman because there is no Time for speculation which is my main interest. That Studio is more realistic and into the necessary of architecture. I think one day I should put a course together on the culture of all project phases. In my Studios, I always teach about everything but, mostly, I teach about Time and Design. In an office, if you have the problem of how to make it, if you are frustrated into your ideas and your imagination, you know that, for a while, you need to not think about reality and its reality. You let your ideas be explorative. And you step into the absolute and the pseudorealistic part of your ideas. You try to be in your mind. But there is a moment when you go out of your mind and you test what you have found into reality. To answer your question, there is a moment when the students are aware when the game of narrative ends and about the necessity to step back into reality. They know as a premise that they are acting in this space and not in that one. We can’t teach everything in a limited Time. A semester is a very short Time for a student to take in all of that information. It is the entire building of the curriculum that is feeding you everything you need. You have to have the awareness to comprehend it at the end of the program and you will. The knowledge it is made out of parts that you have to, at the end, put together into a body. Each professor is different because it’s delivering you a different pill to feed some part of your body. And over Time, that pill eventually will be an integral part of your body.
