Fundamental Acts Book

Fundamental Acts Book

The FUNDAMENTAL ACTS propose a collective reformulation of five great themes of the human existence – LIFE, EDUCATION, CEREMONY, LOVE and DEATH – based on a palimpsest provided by Superstudio in 1972.

The FUNDAMENTAL ACTS were conceived as a series of films centered on the relationship between architecture and the acts of human life. The films were sketched in storyboard format and later published as a series of documents on the pages of Casabella. The first of them, Life: Supersurface, was shown at MoMA in the exhibition Italy, The New Domestic Landscape.

The FUNDAMENTAL ACTS contain the possibility of reintroducing a discourse on the relationship between architecture and ritual. They explore the spatiality of rituals and their structure, focusing on architecture as a technology at the service of memory. They fight against the impossibility of producing a truly monumental contemporary architecture. They imagine an architecture that is capable of expressing a complexity that goes beyond – and is inaccessible to – an ingenuous functionalism. They consider architecture not so much as the activity of providing shelter, but rather as the act of constructing something that will oblige us, our sons, the sons of our sons, to remember. They recognize the sweet and enigmatic beauty of many architectures for unknown ceremonies.

The FUNDAMENTAL ACTS have been (re)produced by a group of international contributors. Each contributor submitted a document that investigates a specific act. Every document contains material produced in different formats. It can include a text, a series of drawings, a catalogue of images, an architectural project, a storyboard, photos of models, photos documenting a performance… The number of pages in the document is free.

The FUNDAMENTAL ACTS have been produced by: Andrea Balestrero, Tatiana Bilbao, Stefano Boeri, Ciguë, Nick Ross, Point Supreme, Giovanna Silva, Alberto Sinigaglia, Jean-Benoit Vetillard, 2A+P/A and Davide Sacconi, Aristide Antonas, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Joana Rafael, Curtis Roth, Sauter Von Moos, Matilde Cassani, Louis De Belle and Bethan Huges, Go Hasegawa, Aaron Moulton and Jason Metcalf, Productora, Renato Rizzi, The Ship, WAI Think Tank, Laurent De Carniere, Lanza Atelier, Miniatura, Monadnock, Roosmarjin Pallandt, Stefano Zeni and Ester Ghislieri, Baukuh, Giulia Cenci, Ludovico Centis, Michele Marchetti, Marco Scapin, Giancarlo Zampirollo, Ganko, Stefano Graziani, Amedeo Martegani, Thomas Raynaud, Salottobuono.

The documents have been collected in five chapters of a book. The book has been edited in Milan, designed in Venice and exhibited in Mexico City.

SALOTTOBUONO FUNDAMENTAL ACTS

1 FUNDAMENTAL ACT (LANZA ATELIER)

We fell in love as when we belonged to different parts of the world, under the influence of a machine. For a long time, we lived far away. Occasionally we would meet in a random city, sleep together at a random place and then separate again. Lodgings comprised hotels, strangers’ houses and public areas, depending on our budget at that point in time. We would have liked to write to one another describing what we had experienced in each of our encounters, but not one of the words in our vocabulary was suitable for describing that…….world (the adjectives are missing) in which love has been washed away from everything. Instead, we took photos of our sleeping accommodations as we believed every time to be the very last.

Once we drove for five consecutive days before reaching a tiny village in the middle of the Chiapas jungle. At night we both re-dreamed all the architecture we had separately produced. We re-dreamed all the buildings we had built and all those we had lovingly measured. We dreamt again of our love for stone, steel, crystal… of that catalog for an oriental satrapy, certainly written through a fear of death, but also written with a furious love for a life of reason, for a rich and varied life filled with all the shades, transparencies and glow of marble and mirrors.

When we woke up we took a long walk which led us to a desertic landscape. There we saw all the interrupted architecture, all the frustrations of an intellectual profession, and the illusions of revolution through architecture were condensed into a spheroid of frightening density. This mass, after having been suspended in the air for some minutes, drew nearer to the earth at ever increasing speed. The earth then began to withdraw and with no need for violent impact, a crater was formed. At the bottom of the crater, certain geometric shapes were born and it is from those shapes, which keep coming out of the pulverized siliceous sand, that we feed our architectural work until now.

Nevertheless, there is still one project exhaled by the crater that we have not yet succeeded in making real. It consists of innumerable geometric forms, as in an infinite polyhedron, out of which grow organic excrescenses, tensile structures and pneumatic appendices. Innumerable libraries are contained within its body, and within those libraries a countless amount of books are stored. Billions of books holding the plans of all the potential portions of space occupied by a couple in love.

Edited by: Matteo Ghidoni
with: Giorgio De Vecchi, Nicolò Ornaghi, Francesco Zorzi
Copy Editing: Steve Piccolo
Graphic Design: Tankboys
Published by: a+mbookstore, Milano
Printed in Italy in 500 copies