Architecture in tension: between aesthetics and data (or art and science)

Due to thematic affinity, the present contribution is intended by the author as the natural result of the annual cycle of EDAR PhD lectures «Contemporary Modernity», where the difficulty to temporally place Modernity arose. According to classical historiography the Modern Age starts with the discovery of America in 1492. In art and architecture it is different: Gillo Dorfles finds the roots of Modernism in the late Enlightenment «Modern Architecture is a product of the western society. It has its origins in the late 1700» (Dorfles, 1972). According to Giulio Carlo Argan it rises in the XX centuryEU. This ambiguity - or better different personal interpretation – concerning its definition suggests a change of viewpoint. It makes more sense to interpret Modernity as an aptitude, rather than a precise historical period. This approach finally proves to be useful also to get a clearer idea about the significance of Post Modernity or Contemporary Modernity. Exploring the literary meaning of the term becomes fundamental. The Oxford dictionary reports that the adjective Modern means relating to the present time or involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas (Oxford dictionary, 2021). The first definition can be considered as the real and primitive meaning of the word, since it comes from the Latin adverb modo that means just now, recently, lately (IL Castiglioni Mariotti, 2014). Under this wider point of view it appears that the common feature of the temporarily different ‘’modernist approaches’’ is the desire to satisfy contemporary needs or find an answer to specific social problems. And the modern means are knowledge, progress and technique. As Lyotard noticed, the years 1970s and 1980s faced the end of the grand narratives of the past with the consequent opening towards new horizon of possibilities (Lyotard, 1979). The relativism typical of that age has been gradually reduced and today, not only in architecture, but in the disciplines’ majority, a new grand narrative seems to have arisen: natural sustainability. This concept has become increasingly important starting from the growing consciousness of petrol crisis at the end of the last century. And also building field has been affected. Nowadays, the latest European Union programs (EU parliament directives) related to energy efficiency underline the need for retrofitting existing buildings, which are responsible for 40% of EU total energy consumption (Eurostat, 2020). Accounting for almost 45% of the existing building stock (Effesus, 2013), the architecture of the second half of the twentieth century represents one of the main targets, becoming a vulnerable category despite its heritage value (Graf, Marino, 2012). In this sense, Modern Architecture is at risk, not only due to invasive retrofitting practices, for instance the ex-Siemens building in Saint Denis by Bernard Zehrfuss, but also to the convenience of rebuilding instead of restoring or developing renovation methods tailored to modern buildings (Graf, 2014). The result is a new global crisis: alongside the environmental crisis a new cultural crisis is born. This consciousness clarifies the urgent need of developing a new methodology for the Energy Retrofitting of Modern Architecture (Graf, Marino, 2012). As happened in the past, even today architects and urbanists are called to answer contemporary crisis with modern means, but always remembering their past experience. Vincent Scully grasps the right point defining Modernism as an approach capable of finding a combination between past and future: the Modern Movement «remembers us at the same time what we were and what we aim to be» (Scully, 1985). In particular, in preservation field, the complex situation is asking for a general overview, capable of considering at the same time the different fields linked to architecture, among them: math, statistics, building physics, technology, chemistry and construction history. The developed method is structured into five major phases: architectural inquiry; technological analysis, thermal diagnosis, variants proposition and multicriteria comparison. The method allows to rank different intervention scenarios, to finally select the most effective and appropriate actions. In particular, the multicriteria comparison is based on the definition of an estimation matrix. It presents on the lines the possible project scenarios and in the columns the evaluation criteria, for example: energy demand, architectural quality, heritage respect, technical and economic feasibility. The fundamental aspect of this approach is the possibility to consider in a single evaluation process, both the quantitative (energy demands, costs, technical feasibility) and qualitative (architectural quality and heritage respect) aspects (Galbiati et al., 2021). The final aim is to find the right balance between the two issues of architectural preservation and energy improvement (Graf, Marino, 2016). It is the way towards environmental but also cultural sustainability. This act means working at the border, at the border between art and science. In this sense contemporary needs are pushing today architects towards a transition period, which implies a new and close relationship between the values of aesthetics and the rigor of the data. This combination of qualitative and quantitative aspects is nothing to be taken for granted and the way ahead is still difficult, but imperative. «Only in recent years, researchers have raised and analyzed the topic of combining architectural safeguard and energy retrofitting» (Loli, Bertolin, 2018). «How to balance sustainability with the aim of preserving heritage is still an open question» (Buda, Mauri, 2019). Scientists find it difficult to accept results based on the personal experience or on the interpretation buildings’ characters, since it is an act that implies people sensitivity to the architectural values of Modernism. On the other side architects find it difficult to understand and explains the reasons of a project only through the impersonal and deterministic means of statistics and math. How qualitative results can be accepted by the exact sciences and vice versa? It seems that in Contemporary or Post Modern condition this tension state is proper to Preservation and its main feature is to be a borderline field between art and science. Walking to the frontier is also my personal condition, being educated among engineering and architecture. All these questions are guiding my current research in preservation and methodological development.