I travelled to Rome to study the travel sketches and photographs of two twentieth-century architects: Louis I. Kahn (1901–74) and Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975). These two architects worked in tension between classical ideas and modernity; both also worked with their historical sources in esoteric ways.
In the history of architecture there have been various approaches to working with the past, but what I find important is the consistent reworking of a spatial and material language that fundamentally questions how we make windows in walls and how we stack and join materials together. I believe that this is more than a technological question. Indeed, it is a cultural question, and I believe that it has always been approached in this way.
The language of architecture is rich with elements that have continuously been recycled, but those elements have also been translated through time. Architecture is therefore both accretive and malleable. We are unable to escape some form of expression of construction, and the volumes that we shape are charged with the memory of those we have experienced or studied. The buildings by Louis Kahn and Sigurd Lewerentz dealt with these fundamental questions of construction, but they are not derivative, nor are they whimsical. They work with a skilled play of volumes, of light and shadow, of material surfaces and junctions. Most importantly to me, though, the resulting buildings speak to me emotionally.
Through studying their travel sketches and photographs I hoped to understand how an architect's formal language can develop through their emotional reading of buildings. Louis Kahn spent a year in residence at the American Academy from 1950–1. He drew the medieval squares of northern Italy in soft chalk pastels, reducing them to their essential volumes. I sat in the Campo in Siena and drew for a long October afternoon, in the same spot where Kahn had drawn 70 years prior. I had brought with me those same soft pastels, and I tried to capture both what I saw and what I felt.
Sigurd Lewerentz travelled to Italy in 1922 and took a series of esoteric black and white photographs that focused on small details: bits of broken stones and sagging mosaic floors. These photographs inspired me to visit the medieval churches of Rome, such as the Basilica of San Clemente. Here a stream runs through the Roman dwellings, two floors below ground, beside a flowing brick floor and below massive supporting piers that crash through the vaulted and plastered ceilings overhead. I tried to capture the layered potential of these spaces in both their original form and in reuse and stabilization.
In the studio I made models from found and recycled materials, roughly sawing and carving them, with the direction of cuts made intentionally, in the same way one would make directional marks for effect when drawing. I also created facsimiles of spolia, in soft clay, and arranged them to imply pediments or column capitals. In Rome, I understood that so much of our human culture is about recycling: forms, ideas, matter itself. Reuse is not simply pragmatic, especially if we consider the ancient column capitals that were reused in medieval churches, irrespective of size or order. My aim was to find a way to work with the forms of the past in a way that was not derivative, but instead translated them, to engage those forms in the conversations of the present. Architecture is an important part of our human culture and its formal elements, even down to the simplest architraves and lintels, give an important sense of familiarity to buildings. That is not to say, however, that we must use architraves and lintels in the way they have always been used. I believe we ought to acknowledge their presence in the history of architecture and decide what we want to say about them when we are making holes in the walls of the present.
