The synesthesia of representation

Measuring the architectural project with the architectural project

Abstract

The architecture design relies on the multiple techniques of representation, which are shaped by the language and the choice of the way the project itself is narrated. An important observation regarding the drive that the architect-designer has in the moment of composition is expressed by the Soviet group of the 1920s 'Architekturu merite architerturoj' (architecture measures architecture), which, in contrast to today's interdisciplinary approach, seeks the solution to architectural problems in architecture alone. Architectural representation, specifically that aimed at the project description, requires a moment of distancing, as an unavoidable act aimed at creating the new, which, to "be realistic, demands the impossible". The impossibility referred to lies in that continuous state of undecidable position before which representation places us, the irreconcilable synesthesia between technique and theory and the fundamental accident between form and content. In this essay, the description of romantic realism becomes the instrument through which the conscious displacement of the project and its representation is explained, but also how utopia is productive of tomorrow, as opposed to today, which has the role of the reservoir of the heavens of the past. The essay, starting from the representations of Viktor and Aleksandr Vesnin up to Ivan Il'ič Leonidov, aims to highlight how the creative freedom of expression contains the value of anticipation, although not starting from the simulacrum of the project and the design of a speaking architecture, from the will to invent (understood as εὑρίσκω, to find after having searched) a new system, which shakes convention.