ORIZZONTALE: THE "EMPTY STAGE SYNDROME"

FRANCESCA GOTTI: Referring by way of example to your designs for squares, public space proves to be a place for confrontation and challenge, in terms of negotiation of social life. In addition, urban transformations have compromised cities’ public places producing neglected and abandoned spaces. How do you perceive this dimension?

ORIZZONTALE: Before saying what it means to us, I would say how it has evolved and what are the reasons that compelled us to work on it. The contemporary city we live in has been shaped by a series of urban theories that didn’t have public space at the centre of their debate; it’s a city born from the holy will to deliver houses to everyone, answering a strong necessity at the beginning of the 20th century. Public space was just a junction, a system of voids, and there was a shared idea that these voids would have been activated on their own: this was derived from the observation of the historic towns, themselves made of voids that were active because they were filled with memories and traditions; but the same didn’t happen in the modern context. We now have to deal with this type of city, where the concept of public space is suffering a crisis. A crisis that affects the only real place dedicated to confrontation, together with the school: these two are the only moments where people relate to others who are not part of their intimate circle of relations. And, as a school needs to be designed to offer occasions of learning and sharing, to be stimulating and welcoming, so a public space should be treated with care to promote sociality and generate mechanisms of encounter. We look at public space from this perspective: trying to give it a spatial, social and programmatic dimension to ensure a qualitatively high life to collectivity.
This crisis affected the space, emptying it of meanings and people: it’s logical that with time the main users have become those who are cut out of normal social mechanisms, who especially use these places because they don’t have clear social dynamics. The relationship between citizens and public space has witnessed increasing difficulties regarding inclusion: the lack of spatial configuration provoked a loss of familiarity and detachment.
We move within this perception of public space and the failures of contemporary planning, trying to produce projects that can re-unify the social and urban fabric.

FG: Public space is an inevitable dimension of the city where anyone happens to use it or cross it, despite perceiving this detachment. Which practices do you implement to create or re-interpret a rapprochement between people and places?

O: On the one hand, we operate with a rather traditional spatial design, and on the other hand, we try to understand how to engage people and make their needs emerge; we use many methods. The starting point is always that people, generally, don’t find themselves involved in the decisional process of designing the spaces they inhabit daily.
We try to recover the engagement of people through design, considering that they are the inhabitants and we are people with specific knowledge to serve this process. In an urban reactivation project, there are various actors with specific roles, from the municipality (which we need to work with to carry out a project) to local associations, the ones that can really bring out the demands of the community and promote specific transformations: intercepting these necessities is the best way to involve inhabitants.
It is really hard to comprehend public space in its entirety, because it’s a heterogeneous ground with many factors: to design it fully is almost impossible. Also, for this reason we use the method of self-construction which best represents this processual character of being unfinished, which opens up to development. The different phases of self-construction and this processuality allow us to reuse energies that otherwise would have remained submerged, and to involve people that are usually excluded.
We usually understand how to engage people only in an intermediate phase. Sometimes it starts from an association that contacts us with a specific goal, but we still need to confront the complex reality of neighbourhoods where hundreds of people live. Architecture becomes the excuse to provoke a reaction.
A good example is the Iceberg: we executed this project in Largo Perestrello and we are still developing it. It is common to have an idea of participation as “design made all together,” when instead it has a bigger complexity and it uses unconventional methodologies, different from what was created in the last 20 years of academic discourse.
In Perestrello, we initially built an iceberg without designing it collectively: we wanted to create a story that could get us to know all the actors affected by the place. For this “scanning” we decided to put an object at the centre of the square, mediating with the associations: the story had to be powerful enough to break the existing tensions and trigger a series of reactions and approaches.
These triggering events that architecture produces become the starting point for developing our projects. Temporariness is what allows us to have a growing engagement and at the same time to translate a series of activities which are important for the community.

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FG: This ability to dialogue with other disciplines is something you have in common with other practices: for this reason, you are assimilated under different labels – tactical urbanism, DIY architecture – which still all give an incomplete definition. But you are primarily architects: do you recognise some recurring archetypes in what you design?

O: There are some modes of designing public space that recur in our works, not really for their shapes but for the approach. In our studio, we are many heterogeneous heads with a horizontal organisation: we share some design principles that aim to create moments of sociality. An example: benches as they are usually placed one after the other are very impractical as soon as more than two people are using them. The way people sit and interact, to bring design from the scale of the square to the scale of the body, to create human dimensions for those who use or just cross the space, to create a strong narrative character to involve people, to think about the playfulness, the explorative dimension – like in Van Eyck’s projects: these are all expedients that we share; then the way to translate them is what differentiates our approaches and our projects.
It’s actually important for us to detach ourselves from an idea of architectural authorship: maybe it’s also a reaction after our university years, but it creates a balance that makes our projects qualitatively high.

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Extract from the interview "A talk with Orizzontale: The 'empty stage syndrome'." Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.