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Notes on Architecture

MoDus Architects

Notes on Architecture
By Conrad-Bercah -

Ennio Flaiano, Fellini’s screenplay writer, is famous for describing Italy as “a country where Italians have bivouacked”, and Italians as a people who insist on “imagining Hell as a place abounding with nude women and where despite everything some sort of agreement can be worked out with the Devil”. For Flaiano, Italy was also the country where “the shortest line between two points is an arabesque”!

Looking at the body of work produced over the last decade by MoDus Architects - a Trentino-Alto Adige practice - it is immediately apparent, 150 years after the “unification” of Italy, how great is the divide between this extreme northeast region bordering on Austria and the rest of the country still inextricably embroiled in endless “arabesques” sometimes and oblivious of what’s going on in the contemporary world.

In my soon-to-be-published book “water-line” I affirm that architecture is a complex discipline halfway between the generic and the unique. I also opine that architecture is nonetheless a contradictory, inconsistent entity that defies any kind of generalization, and that Wittgenstein’s definition of the thinker could very well apply to commentators of architecture: “Der Denker gleicht sehr dem Zeichner, der alle Zusammenhänge nachzeichnen will” - like a craftsman, a thinker’s aim is to show how things relate to his thought.

Of the body of work by MoDus shown here there are three architectures of particular interest: the Via Resia school complex in Bozen, the private Wolf house, and the Kostner home/studio in Castelrotto. This is because they are not radical designs and so cannot be classed as either minimalist or parametric, the only two categories of architecture that seem to have currency today, at least in the polarized vision of certain sector-specific literature. (Indeed it is as if computation were the...

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