Design, craft, city Architecture without volume

Architecture, as for the architects, specialized journals and a large part of the academic world happens with the building. It can be pictured, indeed, the overcoming of the idea of architecture as a construction, opening up to new forms of ’participation’ to be experienced in particular in the peripheries. It is understandable, therefore, to think about ‘Architecture without volume’, programmatic synthesis, with a little of special effect, ofthis cultural attitude, if a motto is somehow wanted. It is not just amatter of drastically contracting the construction of new buildings by choosing a large-scale reuse of the already existing ones but to convey, through unforeseen or underestimated design approaches, a new sensitivity which shall prefer, to the violent and a bit machostyled gesture of the predatory business, the culture of mending suggested by Renzo Piano. The same idea is thus awakened by Richard Sennett’s studies, and a new participation arisen from the ashes of the work of Giancarlo De Carlo, which nowadays expresses itself through manifold forms of re-appropriation of the urban space. It isn’t about designing in a void to fill it in, indeed of creating with sartorial techniques novel physical, aesthetic and functional relations between empty space and existing buildings. It means caring of the connections and reconciliations between parts of an urban system, including micro dimension – i.e. a district, a lot, a street – shifting the attention “from objects to relationships”, as Gregory Bateson argued in his sychotherapy studies, to induce that beneficial epistemological leap from the form to the process. Riccardo Dalisi, who has been inserted only few weeks ago in the permanent collection of the Parisian Centre Pompidou, can be considered a forerunner of an architectural design made using wasted things, the objets trouvée, the hand-made. One of Dalisi’s works lasting a sign in the city of Naples was the one for Rua Catalana. Metallic sculptures and street lamps, generated from the collaboration with the blacksmiths who have been working since ever in the workshops of this ancient street, have been placed on the facades of the buildings. Thus, the urban space does not show the signs of modification only on the skin of its edifices. Transformations aren’t outside but internal to the city, due to the intense dialogue, consistent, structured between designer and craftsmen/residents of the neighbourhood. Craftsmen with this operation have been sustained in improving the quality of their business, have had the chance to be noticed and appreciated by new customers, above all by architects. Exhibitions, conferences, essays and books have brought further notoriety to the designer of “the Neapolitan coffee maker by Alessi” and have made famous the artisans themselves. These transformations alter the space, the quality of living, the work and its dignity; they affect as well the economy of a neighbourhood, which has always supported with participation and sympathy the work of Dalisi as well as its craftsmen. ‘Non-volumetric architecture’ can therefore be interpreted through a resizing process, in a subtle design project in the city, delicate, clever, participated, ‘poor’, never miserable.