Monoliticità

To speak of monolithicity in architecture is to speak of closure and introversion, of mass, excavation, weight and material. It means thinking about essence and image, about how to deal with volumes without affecting them, about the gap between reality and appearance, about the silent eloquence of the external form which guards what is within, not to hide it, but to later reveal it in all the richness of its spaces. It means shifting one’s thinking beyond the many stereotypes of present day production, going back to a canon that only appears to be reductive and reinterpreting it in the light of one of Le Corbusier’s suggestions concerning the various ways of composing. His second method of composition was for him the ‘poorest’ and the ‘richest’ of the four, the most complex. The one where, one might say, the section is the generating factor (double and triple heights, windows overlooking the interior, lines of sight, skylights that capture the light from above so that only a few openings need to be inserted in the façade). Exemplified by a small ‘muted’ parallelepiped, adorned only by its own shadow, Le Corbusier’s second method of composition presents the greatest challenge, the most difficult (tres difficile); yet it is the only one that can, if successful, give the highest satisfaction (satisfaction de l’esprit). Contemporary architecture enables us to combine monolithicity and lightness, monolithicity and quantity of light, even monolithicity and transparency, since small signs on facades can reveal a great amount. This is not a rule, however; it is not a parameter. Thus to speak about monolithicity inevitably entails telling different stories by means of images. Monolithicity in architecture does not represent a style; it is something much broader in meaning. Something that has always existed beyond time periods and fashions, and despite the etymology of the word, even beyond materials.