On Walking

I came across some books and material recently, connected in a way to the rebirth and increasing popularity of walking as a random activity, following on one hand Walter Benjamin's flâneur and on the other Situationists' psychogeography.

Francesco Careri, member of neo-situationist group Stalker, "a collective subject that engages research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around the city's margins and forgotten urban space, and abandoned areas or regions under transformation", wrote in 2001 Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, in which he goes back to the primitive men to introduce his suburban idyll on foot. Needless to say that they took Tarkovsky as main inspiration.



In the same year Rebecca Solnit, cultural mastermind of San Francisco, was writing Wanderlust: A History of Walking, with a more American and artistic/historic viewpoint, influenced by Italian anthropologist and architect Franco La Cecla, who by himself, wrote Perdersi (to get lost).

Iain Sinclair published in 2003 London Orbital, a book and short movie about his city, seen from the perspective of a pedestrian who walks following the marginal land and territories near to the M25 motorway that encircles Greater London.



Two other wonderful publications, connected with the idea of detour and the relationship between architecture and journey: Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, by Giuliana Bruno, a deep insight on the history of vision, roaming through photography, cinema, geography and architecture, and The Situationist City by Simon Sadler, a history of the Situationist Movement and psychogeography applied to the city.

Form Does Not Follow Function

Photo by Jean-Francois Chérnier

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.”

Louis Sullivan

Probably this is the most renowned motto of Modern architecture (actually in the easiest way “form follows function”), the first one everybody learns when starting to study architecture: but it is surprising that, for such a banal declaration nobody well-known has conceived the counter-motto, as for instance Robert Venturi did with Van der Rohe’s minimalist essence “Less Is More”, saying “Less Is Bore”.

Let us analyze what Sullivan Wrote: well, for instance there is no reference to architecture, rather a poetic mantra pretending to understand the secret law that runs life; but why, if in nature this statement is supposed to be “true”, should be like that in architecture? Do we believe in some kind of communal presence ruling everything?

Saying that form follows function, and vice-versa, means that we reduce architecture to structure: I would follow Bernard Tschumi’s theories (in The Manhattan Transcripts, but he is not the only one), speaking of architecture as the result of: structure, form, event, body, fiction. Also the Situationists, with whom Tschumi is indebted, elaborating the Urbanisme Unitaire and psychogeography in the late 1950s followed this intuition, being aware of the complex and interdisciplinary approach needed to deal with this themes. On the other hand, saying that forms follows function is denying the potential of buildings, which can live many lives, depending on changes of society, despite the intention with which they were designed and built. A former factory can be the best discotheque!