DAISY AMES

“Precedent is everywhere, and if you don’t know architectural precedents then everything is new. But, if you are able to recall from where these precedents derive, then you are already aware of their possibilities.” 

- Peter Eisenman, in class October 14th, 2010

Our Eisenman drawing assignment this week is to compare the concepts of sprezzatura and close attention, as demonstrated in the work and drawing of Scamozzi, particularly Fabrica Fino in Bergamo. 

Eisenman defines sprezzatura through the lens of Manfredo Taturi taken from Venetian Epilogue :

"Tafuri addresses this other idea of covert transgres- 
sion in his last book, Interpreting the Renaissance. He 
cites the literary idea of sprezzatura, or a calculated 
carelessness, to describe an historical shift in reading. 
Sprezzatura depends on the subtle misuse of codes. It 
is a way of seeming unconcerned that is in reality very 
concerned. Sprezzatura is a maximum of naturalness with 
a maximum of artifice. Sprezzatura implies a context of 
norms that are known and from which certain rules are 
broken, not in an obvious way, but in a laconic, almost 
accidental or hardly noticeable way, as if the break were 
an oversight or a mistake. Tafuri sees sprezzatura as a 
dialogue between following, ignoring, and breaking 
the rules. For breaking the rules requires even greater 
attention to those rules, for rules must be well known in 
order to be so subtly broken that the break is not realized 
at first glance. If breaking the rules is revealed overtly, 
it may seem vulgar, or the reverse: the obviousness of 
the break affirms the prior period through its dialectical 
opposition. In this sense, sprezzatura reflects the ability 
to register both a subtle break and the ability to distin- 
guish between overt and an almost indistinguishable 
subversion of rules, which is ultimately non-dialectical."

The idea of sprezzatura is thought to have originated in Aldine’s 1528 book called The Book of the Courtier based off of the life of Baldassare Castiglione Venitan author and diplomat. It explained that you do not need to be of noble birth to become an elegant gentleman. The ideas of chivalry, morality, education, sophistication and grace are qualities that distinguish a man from a gentleman. 

Author Seth Godin also provides a more contemporary definition of sprezzatura here.   

i’m loving the hum of the busy archi-bees working in the rudolphian hive… there’s a pranayamic quality to it… intense, regular, silent, concentrated, aware, focused, and still.

all this… for petie! 

“Analysis allows us to have “holy shit” moments… to realize something we cannot see and to be able to go somewhere with it.” 

- Peter Eisenman during third year studio critique September 17th, 2010

“So, this is my favorite class. It’s not going to be yours… but that is why it’s mine. I’m not here to make you happy. There are plenty of things to spend $50,000 on to make you happy.”

He’s a straight shooter and I like that… a lot. 

“This absolute pre-cendence and pre-dominance of the transcendental as content of the signified as “narrated” by the signifier, has as consequence for the Middle Age a profound, radical devaluation of the significance of the empirical experience and, with that, of the reality of the physical world.” 

- Guido Zuliani “On the Origins of the Conceptual Difference in Architecture”

what.