Sempering

Part of the XX1 Triennale, the “Sempering” exhibition, curated by Luisa Collina and Cino Zucchi, provides food for thought on the current relevance of Semper and his “principle of cladding” in terms of the relationship between the arts and techniques in the production of design and architecture.

In 2003, Semper was the focus of a major exploratory exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich entitled “Gottfried Semper. Achitektur und Wissenschaft”. Curated by Werner Oechslin and Sonja Hildebrand, it showcased his significance in the bicentenary of his birth.

In the case of “Sempering”, the title/neologism offers an excuse, via a lofty reference, to suggest re-forging a close relationship between the design act and knowledge of the necessary techniques, trying to free ourselves from the contemporary misunderstanding of its reduction to a “concept” – sometimes even a mystical one – more akin to the marketing world than the design process. Reference to the relationship between art and technique lay at the heart of Der Stil and by declining the four arts (weaving, ceramics, carpentry and stereotomy) Semper sought to define several ontological matrixes of architecture in a dialectic mix of sculpture and tectonics.

“Sempering”, curated by Cino Zucchi and Luisa Collina at the Mudec“Sempering”, curated by Cino Zucchi and Luisa Collina at the Mudec, Milan — “Sempering”, curated by Cino Zucchi and Luisa Collina at the Mudec, Milan

Deliberately adopting a non-philological approach, the curators have “invented” eight new categories for a selection of architecture and design productions placed in semantically uniform groups. The result is as many small sections along the exhibition route, in which each category corresponds to a design action or technique applied to materials: stacking, weaving, blowing, moulding, connecting, folding, engraving and tiling.

Within each grouping are recent and distinctive design objects and images and models of contemporary buildings or their parts. In the background is a collection of citations – historic photos referring to archetypes – and, at the entrance, a fine glass case containing drawings by famous designers of the past and a shelf with models by contemporary designers whose exploration of form has been based on technique: from Semper’s primitive hut to Lewerenz, Schmitthenner, Michele De Lucchi’s “little wooden houses” and Adam Caruso’s educational experiments ‘Structure and Pattern’ about connections at ETH.

This rich medley of objects and designs raises doubts on the efficacy of the taxonomies chosen to assemble the works: for design, the categories of “operations” on materials have an immediate semantic correspondence with the objects displayed, more so than for architecture where some categories inevitably blur one into the other and where the relationship between body and surface is more complex.

In all, however, a reference to techniques is the leitmotif of the exhibition and the key to reflections on where it all ends.

Let us, however, come to the heart of the reflection, which revolves around the relationship between techniques and primary importance of decoration, the designer’s true ultimate domain, in a possible implicit reference by the exhibition to Frampton’s tectonic studies of the 1990s and the role of cladding, and therefore to the surface of artefacts.

Years ago, in a memorable issue of Rassegna (n. 73, 1998) entitled Ri-vestimenti (Coatings), Joseph Rykwert offered a prophetic warning on the predominance of representative components over protective and functional ones in contemporary architecture. Reference to the art of decoration has always been linked to the applied arts – then design – and by extension architecture. Loos himself argued that a true architect had to think about the surface, the skin of the architecture, because it is the surface that determines the reactions of those living in it. The formal connotation of an artefact’s surface, with all the variations offered by the techniques available, is the most stimulating crux – as Semper would say – of the exhibition.

It might have been more effective if the architecture categories had featured a review of facades, fields better suited to Semper’s reinterpretation of the proposed actions. On the other hand, some actions – primarily belonging to product-forming processes such as moulding or blowing – transferred to contemporary architecture in the exhibition highlight an inevitable hybridization with design objects, with the ensuing reduction to inventions not far removed from a banalisation of the concept.

We hope this is not an isolated episode but will stimulate new thoughts and exploration of the links between forms and techniques – in both the conception and production of artefacts.

Sempering

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