Dream and architecture

Борхес подчеркивает - литература состоит из снов, - напоминая нам, что все всегда начинается со сновидения. В том числе и Стивенсону приснилась центральная сцена романа «Странная история доктора Джекила и мистера Хайда», на основе которой позже автор выстроил всю историю.

Ключевые слова: мечта, архитектура, Плечник, Гауди.

Borges again points out literature is made of dreams, reminding us that everything begins with a dream/It would seem Stevenson dreamt the central scene of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and built the story around it.2Architecture too is built around a dream, since the dream is not necessarily tied to a precise psychological state:you can dream while awake.3 A dream is nothing more than the vision of an incorporeal image, and architecture has the primary power of making it come true, therefore turning an image, an idea, a dream, into matter.4

The English word project, as we know, comes from Latin proiectum, that means `something thrown forth', and in fact, what distinguishesthe worst architect from the best of bees, as Marx wrote in Das Kapital, is the fact that the former `raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.' This means the artefact was only an ideain the mind of the designer before being built; an intangible image only architecture can forge into something concrete. More than any other artistic field, architecture has the peculiar capacity to operate on the reality of a place transforming it, by working on a subjective vision, in a reality objectively different; thus com- pletinga metamorphosis of the existing. But this metamorphosisis nothing butthe concretisation of an image,a vision, just a dream.

It can only bethe fruit of a dream, for example, Joze Plecnik's Ljubljana that, through a series of architectural interventions inthe first half of the past century (between 1921 and 1957, the year he died,to be precise), he `invented' a city that only existed in his fantasy, where memories of Italy and Florence were blooming, where ancient Rome and Renaissance met Baroque and Slovenian typical architecture, and the knowledge and professional experiences he had in Europe.5 Vienna in particular, where he worked in Otto Wagner's office, and Prague, where he inter- vened beautifully on the Castle with a highly symbolic architectural approach.6In order to forge this `dream', Plecnik moves from the urban scale to architectural details, dealing withvarious themes of civilian and religious architecture. He takes on the issueof the monument and manages brilliantly the coexistence of architecture and vegetation. The Slovenian architectattributes to architecture a meaning tied to the concept of collectivity, and tries to restore a social and psychological dimension by recovering symbolic elements of local architecture.

This intervention takes place within a master plan for the extension of the old city designed by Max Fabiani. The two shores of the river are treated as urban spaces. Plecniktransformed the levees in an original way repurposing them as pedes- talsfor the buildings on the street level. Besides the many artefacts soaked in evident symbolic values, he designed bridges of extraordinary beauty, a denseweb of open spaces, a series of urban furniture objects of high quality, placing statues, fountains, obelisks and colonnades in a whole plan where every little architectural gesture gets a sense of completeness, also on a urban scale.7Even vegetation finds a role thanks to the careful choice of arboreal essences that goes as far as planting weeping willows with their branches pointed toward the water in the same spots where the river arches into a curve. Thanks to a detailed work on composition, Plecnik manages to shape a peculiar promenadearchitecturale8 articulated into a harmonious string of spaces and paths that will soon become the city's main walk.

If a dream was the starting point for Plecnik s Ljubljana, Gaudi's Barcelona, with its lavish architectures, transports us directly into the dream. This is obviously mostly due to that `material fury' Tafuri spoke about,9which leans toward a sense of total petrification.Lahuerta says this is one of the most eloquent effects of Guell park,10somethingthat, in a similar fashion, characterizes housingcomplexes such as CasaMila.(Frampton saw in La Pedrerathe image of a rocky wall eroded in time,11 and Semerani defined itasrocky and Wagnerian.12) All of his other buildings are peculiarly shaped into sinuous forms that, topped with sculptural shapes, create an effect of strong emotional impact. In fact, Gaudi's houses - with their fantasy-like appearance, their sense of petrification or an opposite, polychromic, kaleidoscopic, richlyshadedcladdingof the fa?ades - seem to be taken right out of a dream and, just like in a fantasy tale,they show scaly surfaces, theriomorphicshapes, and interiorsan- imated by plastic objects and grotesque deformations that create a sequence of surreal and phantasmagoric environments.

For example, House Battlo, realizedbetween 1904 and 1906, despite being a work of renovation of anexisting building, urges the same emotional response as the projects he made from scratch.The old building is heavily transformed, especially the fa?ade and most of the internal distribution, to the point it acquires a completely new and extremely expressive configuration. The balconies take on the appearance of unsettling masques, the fa?ade is dressed with a mosaic of varied ceramic fragments; the entire building is adorned with decorative and architectural elements inspiredby the animal or vegetal world, geological and organic shapes, fossils, dragon backs and snake scales. However, the dream could come close to being a nightmare when fantasy forms and petrified images accompany the sense of magic, of myth, as it can be seen in the `informal and delirious'13 arrangement of the Guellestate, where pillars become trunks and trees petrify: the real trees Gaudi plantedin the garden of the park are weeping willows, poplars and elms, all of which are trees thatEsperide's daughters were turned into in JacintVerdaguer's poem La Atlantida,dedicated to Antonio Lopez.14

Architecture, dream, poetry and tale thus cross their paths, they penetrate into each other, fuse and exchange roles to settle the perspicuity of the differences of narration's capability to evoke. Plecnik's Ljubljana is accordingly a sort of tale, a narration. Sergio Polano uses thisterm when saying Plecnik buildscompositions on the urban scene `by the narration imprinted on places along the flow of water, the unfolding of the streets, the pauses of the squares.'15And also Paolo Portoghesi,describ- ingthe cemetery of the Slovenian capital- where Plecnikdesignedevery single detail, from the benches to the uniforms of the funeral service workers -, compares his little constructions to the words of a tale.16 Just like in certain novels, Plecnik's`tale' also contains various architectural and decorative elements that pave the way to the creation of a language with different levels of understanding, as highlighted by Burkhardt,Arvois and Von Eybesfeld.17

Notes

1. `Namely I believe it is a mistake thinking literature might be made out of words. No, it is not made of words; I mean, it is also made by words, but mostly by images, dreams [...] and the past is also a dream.' Borges in conversation with Alberto Arbasino, in Jorge Luis Borges, Antologiapersonale, p. VI.

2. `I remember a famous case: Stevenson dreamt the central scene where Dr.Je- kyllbecomes Mr. Hyde; then he had to make up all the rest. But [...] the central scene was a present of the dream.' Ibid.,p. VII

3. `I think it always starts with the Dream, it starts with the Muse, it starts with the Holy Ghost, with the King, with God, for Jews with the Bible, and then these materials must be reworked. [...] It starts with a dream and imagination, which is the same thing. To dream: it doesnot matter if you are asleep or awake, no!” Ibid.

4. `There must always be two elements: the first is imagination, the dream, the image [...] and then the reason must be put to work. They need to cooperate, they are not foes.I - bid., pp.VII-VIII. `Dreams are real, like being awake; dreams are real and fantasy is real; my past is real; my past and memory, the story is real, and the story is a dream for us [...] or, as Schopenhauer well put it, Die Welt als Will und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Representation: our will and the dream are one and the same.' Ibid.,p. VIII.

5. `In 1921, with the construction of the building for the newly born Technical School of Ljubljana and the startingof its architecture class, Plecnikseems willing to take on an active role inside Slovenian culture. The architect gets set to transform Ljubljana into a capital city: the search for a suitable language of shapes forthe current artistic-cultural reality is pursued neglecting the folkloric repertoire,and drawing from the archaic and classic wells of the Mediterranean architectural patrimony and from the inventions of a few select Italian Renaissance masters. With the architecture of the Slovenian capital, Plecnik intends to shape thoughts that sink their roots in the times of his trips to Italy, when the young architect had matured the certainty that Slavs “will still must go searching in Rome” for theirown “original force.”' Sergio Polano, Lubiana.L 'opera di JozePlecnikiMilm: Stella Polare,1982), p. 9.

6. `The process of working on the Castle - symbol of the city - engages the architect for morethan a decade, from the early 1920s, in an idealcomparison with his experience in Ljubljana. [...]He wants to infuse the Castlein Praguewith the value of the place people identify with, transforming it froma regal manor into an ideal bastion of the new republic, bom after the eclipse of the Austro-Hungarianconstellation.' Ibid., pp. 8-9.

7. This occurs for instance in the two obelisks realized in 1929 and 1938, the former marking the beginning of an organized street, that ends with propylaea, the latter, `an enormous pillar that takes inspiration from the Tuscan order of Vignola and that replaces an old monument placed in St. Jacob Square.[...] A similar role is attributed to the Pyramid of Zois, of 1927;he used itto mark the breaking point of the street axis, and at the same time to- visually interrupt the inclination of the terrain towards the Ljubljanica.' DamjanPrelovsek, `Il mestiere e la vita di un uomo', inJozePlecnikArchitetto 1872-1957(Rocca Borromeo: Centro culturale di arte contemporaneainternazionale, 1988), pp. 73-74.

8. Polano, p. 10.

9. Manfredo Tafuri, `L'architettura del Romanticismonordico e il“Modernismo”catalano', in ArchitetturaContemporanea, ed. byManfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co (Milan:Electa, 1976), vol. 1, p. 77.

10. Lahuerta, p.138.

11. Kenneth Frampton,Storiadell 'architetturamoderna(Bologna:Zanichelli, 1982), p. 68.

12. Luciano Semerani, ` Continuity e discontinuity', luav, 65 (April 2009), Elogiodell'architettura. Omaggioa Ernesto N. Rogers,p. 4.

13. Tafuri, p. 77.

14. Lahuerta, p. 43.

15. Polano, p. 10.

16. `PleCnik's most important work might be the Cemetery of Ljubljana, the Jugoslav city where the architect was born and where he was active between the two World Wars. The small cemetery, that opens with a colonnade, inhabited only by light, and made of small constructions in human scale, tied to one another by a relation ofcontinuity, like the words of a tale.'Paolo Portoghesi, `L'architettodeglianniOttanta', in JozePlecnikArchitetto 1872-1957, p.4.

17. Plecnik`doesnot hesitate to add to his architecture decorative elements that allow for the creation of a language with many levels of reading.'Frangois Burkhardt, `Mod- erno,postmoderno: unaquestione di etica?', inJozePlecnikArchitetto 1872-1957, p. 107.`This will be the side where we will offer a second reading keyfor Plecnik's work: the side of the culture of the city conceivedas a “big shape” that places itself in history through asure and reverentknowledge of “small architectural shapes”, allowing the continuouscounterpoin- torchestration of the city.' Alain ArvoisandCristina Conrad von Eybesfeld, in JozePlecnikArchitetto 1872-1957, pp. 29-30.

Fig. 1. Gaudi, Casa BATTLO Fig. 2. Gaudi, Casa BATTLO Fig. 3. Gaudi, Casa Mila

Fig. 3. Plecnik Castello di Praga

Fig. 4. PLECNIK Lubijana

Fig. 5. PLECNIK1 Lubijana