CALL FOR PAPERS San Rocco 14:

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San Rocco is interested in gathering together the widest possible variety of contributions. San Rocco believes that architecture is a collective knowledge, and that collective knowledge is the product of a multitude. External contri-butions to San Rocco might take different forms. Essays, illustrations, designs, comic strips and even novels are all equally suitable for publication in San Rocco. In principle, there are no limits – either minimum or maximum – im-posed on the length of contributions. Minor contributions (a few lines of text, a small drawing, a photo, a postcard) are by no means uninteresting to San Rocco. For each issue, San Rocco will put out a “call for papers” comprised of an editorial note and of a list of cases, each followed by a short comment. As such, the “call for papers” is a preview of the magazine. The “call for papers” defines the field of interest of a given issue and produces a context in which to situate contributions.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINESA External contributors can either accept the proposed in-terpretative point of view or react with new interpretations of the case studies. B Additional cases might be suggested by external contributors, following the approach defined in the “call for papers”. New cases might be accepted, depend-ing on their evaluation by the editorial board. C Proposed contributions will be evaluated on the basis of a 500-word abstract containing information about the proposed sub-mission’s content and length, as well as a list of the number and type of photographs, illustrations and/or drawings it in-cludes. The abstract must be submitted as a PDF file that begins with the author's name and the title of the proposal and includes reproductions of all images intended for pub-lication. The PDF should be named using this format: SUR-NAME_TITLE.PDF. The editorial team of San Rocco will not review abstracts that fail to follow these guidelines. D Con-tributions to San Rocco must be written in English. San Roc-co does not translate texts. E All texts (including footnotes, image credits, etc.) should be submitted digitally in .rtf for-mat and edited according to the Oxford Style Manual. F All illustrations and drawings should be submitted digitally (in .tif or .eps format). Please include a numbered list of all il-lustrations and provide the following information for each: illustration source, name of photographer or artist, name of copyright holder, or “no copyright”, and caption, if needed. G San Rocco does not buy intellectual property rights for the material appearing in the magazine. San Rocco suggests that external contributors publish their work under Creative Commons licences. H Contributors whose work is selected for publication in San Rocco will be informed and will then start collaborating with San Rocco’s editorial board in order to complete the preparation of the issue. Proposals for contributions to San Rocco 14 must be submit-ted electronically to mail@sanrocco.info by 14 February 2017.

1966 was a promising year. Aldo Rossi published The Architecture of the City and Robert Venturi came out with Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The stage seemed set for a productive critique of modern-ism and the development of a more mature approach to the intricacies of architecture. Architecture seemed on the verge of rediscovering its collective nature and about to redefine its knowledge by starting from the city. In the meantime, a few extraordinary projects were made (the San Rocco housing scheme, the Foot-ball Hall of Fame, the Florey Building). Then things started to go wrong. In May 1968, a bunch of spoiled idiots decided to celebrate their fake revolution. They wanted l’imagination au pouvoir and spent time searching for the beach sous les pavés. For reasons that we fail to understand, European social-ists could not resist following them, and so they left neo-liberals in complete control of common sense for the next 50 years. “No sign is a good sign,” wrote Henri Lefebvre, and armed with this invincible intellectual weapon, the European working class was ready to be stabbed to death by the primitive truisms of Margaret Thatcher. In this tragicomic intellectual and political climate, architecture was ready to start experimenting with all sorts of self-inflicted nonsense, from postmod-ernist “irony” to deconstructionist “criticality”, from starchitects to the 1,001 revivals of “Architecture With-out Architects”, from free-love communes to “green cit-ies” in the Saudi desert.

Now, let’s forget all of this and go back to the point when things started to go wrong. Forget all of the pre-tentiousness and suicidal complication of French The-ory, forget the pathetic architectural adaptations of it. Back to 1966. Back to an obviously idealized 1966.

In this context, 1966 means, first of all, the books by Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi and their designs, but it also means those of Giorgio Grassi (at that time, still collaborating with Rossi) and of James Stirling. This is certainly the core of the work that, more generally, this magazine is trying to revive: the incredibly rich vein that all too soon was soon left unmined and that can (or at least we hope can) be reactivated in contempo-

rary architecture. We propose considering these works as the key to looking at other works that can be associ-ated with them. As a consequence, our starting point is relatively simple and straightforward. And, of course, you can argue that we talk about this over and over, and that we are running out of ideas (indeed, we are), but at the same time we think it would be good to be as clear and unequivocal as possible before concluding this adventure. So here are a few reasons why the ar-chitecture of 1966 looks so bright and promising to us:

• 1 •In 1966, Rossi and Venturi were serious. Their work was not without humour, but it was clearly no joke. In 1966, Rossi and Venturi tried in earnest to imagine a new architecture. Their proposals were reasonable and realistic means for producing beautiful buildings and pleasant cities in two very precise contexts at the time (Italy and the United States). Their work was nei-ther utopian nor cynical. The goals attributed to this work were not impossible to reach, and the means to achieve them were precisely identified among those available.

• 2 •In 1966, Rossi and Venturi presented their theories in the clearest possible manner (The Architecture of the City can sometimes be very obscure, but it is never de-liberately unclear). Rossi and Venturi never employed the childish/sensationalistic jargon of the avant-gardes; they presented their ideas as polite and edu-cated bourgeois intellectuals, with no need to provoke or to shock. As Vincent Scully once wrote: Venturi pro-foundly civilized the profession. (Also, at least in 1966, they were polite enough not to let us know anything about their private life.)

• 3 •Rossi and Venturi’s architecture – compared to mod-ern architecture – had a very different relationship to the city and to the history of architecture. This archi-

tecture was based on the city and on the architecture of the past, and so it implicitly recognized a multiple subject (the city as found) as the starting point of any architecture. Contrary to the liberal anthropology presupposed by modern architecture, the subject of this intellectual construction was plural from the beginning. So was its audience. Rossi and Venturi’s ar-chitecture of 1966 addressed a collective subject. Be-yond any romantic individualism, this architecture was committedly public and shared. Despite Rossi’s retreat into autobiography and self-commiseration after 1966, up until then his work was open to and available for ap-propriation by anybody.

• 4 •Rossi and Venturi’s architecture did not really care about “being contemporary”, at least not in the terms established by the avant-gardes. It seems that for them (in 1966, anyway), the correspondence of their work to the zeitgeist could be taken for granted, or at least need not be frantically verified. This relative ease with time, this mild disbelief in historicism (which is quite surprising for an Italian Marxist such as Rossi), resulted in a certain diachronic freedom. By not be-ing particularly keen on corresponding to the present, by looking at the past with at least relative sympathy, Rossi and Venturi’s architecture was ready to survive in an unpredictable future.

• 5 •Rossi and Venturi’s architecture, at least for a brief moment around 1966, was not just an accumulation of fragments. It clearly searched for a classic unity. The plurality of the presuppositions of this architecture (the plurality of its subject) corresponded to a com-mitted quest for unity in the final result of the process. The buildings were simple and did not want to broad-cast particular “messages” (this is particularly remark-able in the work Venturi produced before his collabo-ration with Scott Brown). This unity corresponded to the incredible generosity of these works, which did not exclude anybody from their potential audience. These

buildings – possibly for the last time before an era of architecture systematically made for market niches – addressed everybody.

• 6 •Rossi and Venturi’s architecture, in 1966, was about space. The complexity of the city corresponded to the spatial articulation of the buildings, to their place-ment in the urban scene, to the flat articulation of possible planes in their façades. The complexity was exposed not textually but spatially. Venturi in 1966 was still quite a bad writer (Denise Scott Brown would greatly improve the consistency of his arguments), but he did not enforce a consistency of a “textual” kind in his buildings, and as consequence, his buildings were rather complex and opaque, and so incredibly richer than the dry, didactic ones of the Scott Brown era. For Rossi and Venturi, in 1966 there were no messages or jokes. No semiotics or iconography. No sheds or ducks.

For all of these reasons, the fantastically generous architecture of 1966 is an excellent starting point for developing an equally glorious architecture of today.Fifty years after 1966, let’s start again – with more in-nocence and more stubbornness – and this time, let’s try not to give up immediately.

For its penultimate issue, San Rocco asks you to start over again by considering this list of 66 things from (an ideal) 1966 and to extend the list by adding more cases in order to create (an ideal) yearbook:

1Franco Albini, Franca Helg and Bob NoordaMetro line 1Milan, 1964

2Woody AllenTake the Money and Run1969

3John BaldessariWrong1967

4Francis BaconPortrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle1966

5Luis Barragán, Jesús Reyes Ferreira, and Mathias GoeritzTorres de Satélite1958

6Samuel BeckettLe Dépeupleur1970

7Ingmar BergmanPersona1966

8Thomas BernhardVerstörung1967

9Lina Bo BardiMASPSão Paulo, 1968

10Cini BoeriVacation HouseLa Maddalena, 1967

11Piero BottoniCity HallSesto San Giovanni, 1967

12Robert BressonAu hazard Balthazar1966

13Marcel BreuerWhitney MuseumNew York, 1966

14Achille and Piergiacomo CastiglioniAllunaggio garden seat1966

15Peter CelsingBank of SwedenStockholm, 1976

16Alejandro De la SotaCalle Prior Apartment BlockSalamanca, 1963

17Friedrich DürrenmattDie Physiker1962

18Miguel FisacHydrographic Studies CentreMadrid, 1963

19Peter Fischli and David WeissDer geringste Widerstand1980

20Roberto Luís GandolfiPetrobras HeadquartersRio de Janeiro, 1972

21Ignazio GardellaTheatreVicenza, 1969

22Frank GehryWorld Savings and Loan BranchLos Angeles, 1982

23Alberto GiacomettiThe Cat1954

24Giorgio Grassi and Aldo RossiSan Rocco Housing SchemeMonza, 1966

25Vittorio GregottiIl territorio dell’architettura1966

26Charles Gwathmey and Robert SiegelWhig HallPrinceton, 1972

27Helmut Hentrich and Hubert PetschniggPhoenix-Rheinrohr BuildingDüsseldorf, 1960

28Werner HerzogAuch Zwerge habe klein angefangen1970

29David HockneyBeverly Hills Housewife1966

30Hans HolleinRetti Candle ShopVienna, 1966

31Arne JacobsenSports StadiumLandskrona, 1964

32Stanley KubrickDr. Strangelove1964

33Ricardo LegorretaNissan FactoryCiudad Industrial del Valle de Cuernavaca, 1966

34Sergio LeoneThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly1966

35Sigurd LewerentzFlower kioskMalmo, 1969

36Enzo MariPutrella1958

37Paulo Mendes da RochaBrazilian PavilionOsaka, 1970

38Rafael MoneoCity HallLogroño,1980

39Pier Paolo PasoliniMedea1969

40Cesar PelliPacific Design CenterLos Angeles, 1975

41Elio PetriIndagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto1970

42Pink FloydThe Piper at the Gates of Dawn1967

43Gianugo PoleselloOffices for the Italian ParliamentRome, 1966

44Sigmar PolkeGirlfriends1966

45Cedric PricePotteries Thinkbelt1966

46Gerhard RichterOnkel Rudi1965

47Richard RogersRogers HouseLondon, 1968

48Ed RuschaTalk about Space1963

49Mario SchifanoGiallo Cromo1962

50The Rolling StonesAftermath1966

51Mark RothkoCentral Triptych1966

52Eero Saarinen (with Kevin Roche)John Deere HeadquartersMoline, 1964

Next page, from top to bottom: Still frames from Cul de sac, directed by Roman Polanski, 1966; Persona, directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1966;The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, directed by Sergio Leone, 1966; Au hasard Balthazar directed by Robert Bresson, 1966

53Kazuo ShinoharaHouse in WhiteTokyo, 1966

54Alvaro SizaLeça Swimming PoolsLeça de Palmeira, 1966

55Alison and Peter SmithsonEconomist Building1965

56SOMMcMath-Pierce Solar TelescopeKitt Peak, 1962

57Ettore Sottsass and Perry A. KingValentine typewriter1968

58James StirlingFlorey BuildingOxford, 1968

59The StoogesThe Stooges1969

60Kenzo Tange and Arata IsozakiExpo ’70Osaka, 1970

61Andrei TarkowskyAndrei Rublev1966

62Stanley TigermanIllinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically HandicappedChicago, 1978

63Oswald Mathias UngersGrünzug SüdCologne, 1965

64Robert VenturiNational Collegiate Football Hall of FameNew Brunswick, 1967

65João Batista Vilanova ArtigasJaú Bus DepotSão Paulo, 1973

66Paolo VolponiLa macchina mondiale1965