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Introduction

The Landscape of Time

Like an “Exquisite Corpse”—the famous collective art technique invented by André Breton and his friends—the images on the Archipendium 2014 form together an infinite landscape. The casual juxtaposition between two successive pages follows a “jump-cut” fashion, but as the series progresses one can statistically infer the customs and habits of contemporary architectural culture.

In the old atlases or geography textbooks, the different features of each country were summarized by concentrated icons depicting costumes, buildings, landscapes: Switzerland with white-topped mountains, still lakes, cheese forms, cows and cowbells; Holland with windmills, tulips, ladies with clogs and funny hats; Mexico with mariachi, sombreros and Aztec pyramids. Omitting the boring and dull “in-between”, their collection showed the amazing variety of material cultures, a vast mosaic of colors and shapes testifying our will to give form to our environment, to create “events” and “places”.

Architecture is the background of our daily activities, and is perceived in a state of distraction. But we need icons to understand the world, to recognize its geography, to picket a number of fixed points from which we trace our daily paths. Paul Valéry once said that Art is what transforms Arbitrium into Necessity. The bright features of the architectures depicted in Archipendium form a constellation of spatial possibilities of our design culture, showing our wonderful capacity of transforming the continuum of Time into a “calendar” of seasons and days, the continuum of Space in a geography of regions and places.

Cino Zucchi