Right behind the Superstudio installation at the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition that we analysed in yesterday's post, there is a project dedicated to the Biblioteca Laurenziana (Laurentian Library).
The installation consists in a series of photographs by Dutch artist and writer Charlie Koolhaas, portraying bits and pieces of the library. Scroll-like elements, cornices, corbels, niches, the tongue-like protruding stairways occupying half of the floor of the vestibule, and all the sections creating tensions and strains are broken down in an attempt at analysing Michelangelo's architectural puzzle and at tackling the sense of disquieting ambiguity that the building evokes in the visitor.
Commissioned in 1523, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Laurentian Library), based in Florence, Italy, opened in 1571. After Michelangelo left Florence in 1534 it was continued by Tribolo, Vasari, and Ammannati who based their work on plans and verbal instructions from Michelangelo. For the revolutionary use of space Michelangelo operated, the library remains one of his most important architectural achievements.
This is a unique building since Michelangelo subverted in it the ordinary structure of the library and disposed of almost all the rules of classical architecture working in a Mannerist mode.
Order and stability were forgotten and Michelangelo united two contrasting spaces - the long horizontal of the library where he reduced the volume and weight of the walls, and the vertical of the vestibule or ricetto. According to the standards defined by the classical ideas of Bramante, everything in the vestibule is wrong. The latter presents indeed a vertically compact space, a compression chamber where the viewer is subjected to physical stress and anxiety, with recessed columns sunk into the walls with no real supporting functions, and blank tapering windows framed in pietra serena.
The text accompanying the installation explains the project commissioned by Rem Koolhaas through his own words: "In the Fall of 2006, I felt a sudden urge to revisit, or visit for the first time, the Italian Renaissance (...). By far the most disturbing space I experienced on this journey was the vestibule of the Laurentian Library by Michelangelo. This space was terrifying, almost like a nightmare. Nothing worked, everything was 'wrong'. But the sum of its dysfunctionalities was gripping. It was as if the outside skin of the palace had been stripped off and used to line an inner courtyard - folded, condensed, even crumpled. All proportions were off in this heavy-handed compression. Its space was blatantly an interior, but strangely it offered the experience of an exterior defined by four different façades through which you could enter four different destinations (…) Michelangelo takes each architectural element and forces it into new shapes and new relationships - he respects no rules and ridicules the 'lessons' architects have applied to their own profession. He breaks down and re-imagines the wall, the window and the door in an area no bigger than a living room, dominated by a huge sculpture that pretends to be a staircase. For contemporary artists and architects the lesson of the Laurentian Library is perhaps that Mannerism is a dish best eaten cold and in small doses."
Though this is a strictly architectural project it makes you think about fashion collections suspended between beauty and horror, or characterised by disturbing elements and wrong proportions/volumes (think about Comme des Garçons for example...).
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