The visceral revolution

from Domus 897 November 2006Two interiors designed by Fabio Novembre and Tokujin Yoshioka provide an opportunity to reflect on the “interiorisation” of metropolitan space. Text by Andrea Branzi. Edited by Francesca Picchi

An (interesting) part of design culture today is experiencing this “interiorisation” of metropolitan space in the most radical way. By “interiorisation” a number of things are meant. The first results from the substantial prevalence of “interior” spaces over the architectural shells that contain them. The quality of an urban place is no longer therefore formed by the effectiveness of its architectural setting, but rather by the sophistication of its various interior designs, by the products of its shop windows, and also by the public who invade streets and squares, bearing a constant flow of uncontrollable expressiveness. In other words the old city, made of architectural boxes (redundant and no longer perceptible within the context of a complex urban scenario), has been substituted by another, less visible, less flaunted, more extensive and vital city. It supplies emotions, goods and information - but it does not build cathedrals. It is a city of interior spaces, immaterial experiences and pulverous systems of micro-projects and environmental sub-systems. These do not together possess an exterior form, but are like the viscera of a body. They are not seen, but are the places of an intense endocrine production, which in fact feeds the development and vitality of an organism. The Visceral Revolution is this: the city’s viscera today are the core of its operating capacity; the outer form is accessory and of little significance. This, then, is the first “interiorisation” mentioned. The second is a by-product of the first, but concerns other matters. In a context of this kind, architecture begins at last to move onto a level of “abstraction”. Superseding its own, old “figurative” limit, it too (like art, music and literature) becomes a fluid system, a “semiosphere” not to be looked at but tested. For it is made up of perceptions, emotions and continuously transformed information; living plankton that float through the architectural boxes and flood the urban territory, blurring its inner borders and making its specialised functions opaque. If this is the direction in which architecture is moving, as the mature phase of the metropolitan complexity which it set in motion, it means that architecture is becoming an “inward” experience: not only of “interior” spaces but of mental logic and psychological spaces. So it follows those processes which modern culture adopted at the beginning of the 20th century, by “interiorising” figurative languages in order to regenerate them in fresh “abstract” codes which sprang not from external forms but from the depths of the psyche, from the darkness of the viscera or from the unexplored recesses of the mind. In this way it shook off the easy limits of known languages to open up a new, perhaps riskier season, where culture looked for foundations that may have been less recognisable but were better suited to the times of an unknown modernity. When we speak, therefore, of an “abstract” architecture, we don’t mean an architecture “that is not there any more”, but an architecture that produces spaces and structures which, as in nature, are changeable and provisional. In the same way, nature is “abstract” because it is a limitless realm in which we see a merging of autonomous and complex realities that possess no single expressive code, but infinite codes and languages that are transformed in time. So architecture seems on its way to overcoming its limit as an exclusively “constructive” activity to become a more complex process, attaining to territorial qualities matched by systems of evolutionary enzymes and not just by formal codes. This means architecture becomes a sort of placenta, an incubator of ever-changing and unpredictable situations. This type of tendency often occurs in (let us say) a preliminary manner, through designs that interpret the processes of “interiorisation” as landscapes made up of “innards”; that is, of nebulous scenarios associated with an almost visceral stage set, as if it were a visible account of the substitution of “constructive” processes by physiological ones, produced by an architecture that becomes a “placenta” to feed its own inner organisms. Design culture has often resorted to this simplification: suffice it to think of the idea that the architecture of a Civilisation of Machines was to have been itself a “machine” (from Le Corbusier to Archigram); or of the beginning of the electronic era with a city that formally represented information “links” (Alison and Peter Smithson). Simplifications of this kind play the important role of symbolically heralding monumental changes within the depths of design; changes not yet evident and theorised but corresponding to society’s altered states of mind: a society like ours, which no longer possesses formal models of development, but has to summon “within” itself the necessary energy to self-reform continually. The “main body” of the city represents perhaps precisely this: the disappearance of an external (including political) space from which to examine itself and from which to draw ideas and stimuli for its positive evolution. It must therefore draw the endocrine capacity to transform itself from its own “interior”. The Visceral Revolution is thus already in progress, and it belongs to the limits of our present. Andrea Branzi

Fabio Novembre
Stuart Weitzman, Via Condotti, Roma Photography by Alberto Ferrero

The American shoe brand’s 95-square-metre shop is situated in Rome’s fashion district. The shoe box-shaped architecture is marked by a potentially boundless band that seemlessly loops around the walls to design the shelves and folds that envelop the entire space. The interior is the work of highly skilled craftsmanship in so far as the folds are connected by handmade “welds” created by a complex system of moulds and dies that draws on skills normally asssociated with fibreglass boat construction. Novembre arranges a continuous loop of planes in revolt. This “Folding Architecture” is subject to the turbulent fascination of the surface. It is a melted whole that ignores, confuses and overcomes the codes and forces the layers beyond the vertical/horizontal limit. The space is characterised by over-abundant but openly declared movements, driven by the obsession of an infesting vegetable force. The materials, above all Corian, are used with amazement, always bringing out the virtuoso side with the same spirit as those who first sounded out the folds and continuity of matter with stuccoes. Francesco Librizzi

Tokujin Yoshioka
Maison Hermès, Ginza, Tokyo
Photography by Nacása & Partners Inc.


For the windows of the building designed by Renzo Piano in the heart of Ginza, Tokujin Yoshioka puts on “Paris in the air” at Hèrmes. These are not snapshots of Paris but the traces they leave in our memories. Tokujin uses the windows as devices to register indeterminable moods, sensorial imprints, 3D images like souvenir pictures on intangible plates. The space is filled with 300,000 transparent straws that create ethereal cavities and give the illusion of an oneiric, cloud-filled landscape. Here, the large number of components provokes a change of state in the material, triggering a configuration that verges on chaos.
Francesco Librizzi
Tokujin Yoshioka. 
Maison Hermès, Ginza, Tokyo. Photography by Nacása & Partners Inc.
Tokujin Yoshioka. Maison Hermès, Ginza, Tokyo. Photography by Nacása & Partners Inc.

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