Who Laughs Last?

“Any­one who does not under­stand irony at all […] does not know the refresh­ment and strength­en­ing that comes with undress­ing when the air gets too hot and heavy and div­ing into the sea of irony, not in order to stay there, of course, but in order to come out healthy, hap­py, and buoy­ant and to dress again”[1].

On Sep­tem­ber 18^th 2023 Ital­ian Prime Min­is­ter Gior­gia Mel­oni received a phone call by the African Union Commission’s President.

On Novem­ber 1^st, 2023, news was leaked that the phone call was actu­al­ly a prank call car­ried out by the Russ­ian com­e­dy duo Vovan & Lexus. In fact, dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, no dis­crep­an­cies emerged com­pared to the pub­lic posi­tions of the gov­ern­ment on the issues ten­den­tious­ly raised by the Russ­ian inter­locu­tors.[2]

The sim­plic­i­ty of a prank call esca­lates into an inter­na­tion­al diplo­mat­ic inci­dent. This episode becomes emblem­at­ic as it demon­strates (in addi­tion to the sys­temic fragili­ty of the fil­ters with­in the Ital­ian Prime Minister’s Diplo­mat­ic Counselor's Office) how irony is employed to address extreme­ly seri­ous issues, such as, in this spe­cif­ic case, the war in Ukraine and ille­gal immi­gra­tion from North Africa.

This episode tran­scends the mere news event and leads to a recon­sid­er­a­tion of the cur­rent sta­tus of irony. If, on one hand, polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness seems to have flat­tened the debate, and on the oth­er hand, polit­i­cal incor­rect­ness chal­lenges the achieve­ments of civ­il liv­ing, can irony still be a use­ful tool to inter­pret the present and, more specif­i­cal­ly, the cur­rent state of the archi­tec­tur­al project? 

Irony is the fruit of a sin­u­ous, ​“mali­cious” intel­li­gence: it’s the cun­ning of Ulysses, the Labyrinth of Daedalus. It’s one of those inter­ac­tive strat­e­gy devices that reverse the signs of a force: weak­ness, through intel­li­gence under­stood as mètis, becomes a strength, swift and poly­mor­phic. Here aris­es the iron­ic aspect of the dolos, the sur­prise for the dis­cov­ered trick, the sub­tle play with the truth. Irony works by lever­ag­ing the opponent’s imag­i­na­tion, the ambi­gu­i­ties of inter­pre­ta­tion, and antic­i­pat­ing the gaze of oth­ers, artic­u­lat­ing a dia­logue in search of sys­tem­at­ic agree­ments, con­tracts, armistices, dis­so­nances, or con­flict­ual voids, where argu­men­ta­tion means sav­ing vio­lence, which is not elim­i­nat­ed but rather inter­nal­ized and used as a stimulus. 

This paper opens with a news sto­ry from Italy to draw atten­tion to how irony, even against our will, con­tin­ues to per­me­ate every­day life and the spaces in which we live. 

The con­tri­bu­tion is struc­tured around reflec­tions that emerged from the mono­graph­ic issue of the Ottagono mag­a­zine in 1991, ded­i­cat­ed to archi­tec­ture and enter­tain­ment. It devel­ops across three inter­pre­ta­tions of ​‘fun’ in rela­tion to archi­tec­tur­al design: fun as an archi­tec­ture of devi­a­tion, fun as a world with­in the world, and fun as the frag­men­ta­tion of the Vit­ru­vian tri­ad.

The word ​“fun” is placed in rela­tion to irony, under­stand­ing ​“fun” as a poten­tial appli­ca­tion of the iron­ic approach in archi­tec­ture. In the projects pre­sent­ed below, the idea of ​“fun” opens irony up to a more col­lec­tive dimen­sion: the iron­ic per­spec­tive of the indi­vid­ual design­er extends into the col­lec­tive sphere, trans­forms ways of liv­ing, and ques­tions con­sol­i­dat­ed habits of inter­pret­ing shared spaces.

Irony, architecture, and entertainment starting from Ottagono

Irony belongs to the sub­jec­tive realm of dialec­ti­cal exchange, leav­ing objec­tiv­i­ty to be what sur­vives objec­tions: it emp­ties the con­ven­tion­al code and intro­duces one or more vari­a­tions on a cod­i­fied subject. 

Irony’s gears lead to dis­con­nect­ing shared mech­a­nisms from the usu­al sup­port of lan­guage to apply them in new yet coher­ent seman­tic universes. 

As Giulio Giorel­lo writes: ​“Irony, in order to work, needs a polar­i­ty, in the sense that some­one must be iron­ic about some­thing else, so there must be an object of irony and an audi­ence for the irony, and this audi­ence must be intel­li­gent enough to per­haps be simul­ta­ne­ous­ly the object of the irony: this, I believe, is a con­di­tion for under­stand­ing more about the world in which we live.”[3]

Such a con­di­tion repeats cycli­cal­ly through­out his­to­ry. To exam­ine how this is reflect­ed in the field of archi­tec­tur­al design, some works by Cedric Price are tak­en as case stud­ies in rela­tion to a series of projects, start­ing from issue 98 in 1991 of Ottagono mag­a­zine, of which this con­tri­bu­tion quotes the text on its cov­er, ​“Who laughs last?”.

In the edi­to­r­i­al ​“Archi­tec­ture and enter­tain­ment”, Mar­co De Miche­lis writes regard­ing the ​“new towns” designed in the Unit­ed States for Dis­ney: ​“Charles Eames seems to have been the first among archi­tect-design­ers to realise that this con­trivance offered an almost ide­al way of repro­duc­ing qual­i­ties com­mon­ly attrib­uted to cities, which the cities them­selves are in actu­al fact mate­ri­al­ly inca­pable of cre­at­ing.”[4]

From here, archi­tec­ture comes into play as the cre­ator of alter­na­tive worlds, where desires of leisure and will for dis­ori­en­ta­tion take shape into projects fueled by iron­ic visions towards the same real­i­ty that tries to exclude these dimen­sions from dai­ly life. From this crack in the gran­ite wall of effi­cien­cy at all costs, emerge archi­tec­tur­al projects that cre­ate pock­ets of resis­tance to a modus viven­di that seeks to fore­see and opti­mise every­thing. It’s the para­dox of liv­ing in a present where every­thing seems to be enter­tain­ment, and where yet noth­ing real­ly is. On the con­trary, to make attrac­tive, easy, and quick what by nature requires effort, con­cen­tra­tion, and slow­ness (infor­ma­tion, edu­ca­tion, cul­ture), neces­si­tates an endeav­our that has noth­ing to do with the light­ness being pro­mot­ed. In these spaces gen­er­at­ed by such an exhaust­ing labor we wit­ness the con­tra­dic­tion: pure enter­tain­ment is replaced by its slav­ish com­mit­ment to be enter­tain­ing and to be enter­tained.[5]

Con­sid­er­ing Price as one of those authors capa­ble of bal­anc­ing the rigour of tech­no­log­i­cal ten­sion and the deter­mined open­ness of abstrac­tion, today the need to revis­it Price’s stud­ies is linked to the desire to recon­sid­er the project of enter­tain­ment as the con­struc­tion of alter­na­tive imag­i­nar­ies, in a pro­lif­ic exchange between tech­ni­cal sci­ences and the­o­ret­i­cal visions. Expe­ri­ences such as those devel­oped by Price once again become cen­tral issues in the present, where the sep­a­ra­tion of the var­i­ous lev­els of the design process has estab­lished an auton­o­my of the dis­ci­plines, caus­ing their pro­gres­sive and rec­i­p­ro­cal emptying.

The detach­ment between the the­o­ry of archi­tec­ture and its unfold­ing with­in real­i­ty has become increas­ing­ly evi­dent and diver­gent in recent decades. While until Post­mod­ernism, tech­no­log­i­cal research and archi­tec­tur­al imag­i­na­tion would eas­i­ly exchange their terms in spa­tial solu­tions that saw inter­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty not as an obsta­cle but as an oppor­tu­ni­ty, today the abrupt meta­mor­phoses of the archi­tec­tur­al project’s real­i­sa­tion process­es seem to leave no room for diges­tion, ver­bal­i­sa­tion, and irony. The clash of the the­o­ry seems to cool down until becom­ing a vague shad­ow, often a con­struct retroac­tive­ly placed around a project, or per­haps sim­ply a premise for oth­er pro­fes­sions with dif­fer­ent names.

The­o­ries should help us remem­ber the ques­tions that led to com­plex answers and should be insep­a­ra­ble from oper­a­tiv­i­ty, as they are projects in them­selves. Archi­tec­ture is a lan­guage, and as such, its form is also its con­tent. The archi­tec­tur­al project is the man­i­fes­ta­tion of a thought, and prac­tice is a thought enact­ed. Archi­tec­tur­al think­ing is insep­a­ra­ble from both the tan­gi­ble real­i­ty and the intan­gi­ble dimen­sion, as it always per­tains to the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of space, which is com­posed of both con­crete­ness and intan­gi­bil­i­ty, bod­ies and relationships. 

We trace the steps of Ottagono, which, with Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,[6] begins a series fea­tur­ing key projects that embody the notion of fun, expressed through a series of expe­ri­ences shar­ing the same iron­i­cal approach, meant as an atti­tude towards real­i­ty that is char­ac­ter­ized by ana­lyt­i­cal aware­ness and an irrev­er­ent con­scious­ness which often ger­mi­nate in times of cri­sis and change.

The projects pre­sent­ed in the pages of Ottagono are: The Fun Palace by Cedric Price (1961); The Enter­tain­ment Cen­ter for Leices­ter Square (Michael Webb, 1962); the Enter­tain­ment Tow­er for Mon­tre­al (Peter Cook, 1963); the tem­po­rary the­atre by Pietro Derossi for the XIV Tri­en­nale di Milano (1968). Here we can add to this list three more projects in order to out­line an overview of the theme which may last up to the present day: The Bang Bang Club (Ugo La Pietra, Milano, 1967), the project for Min­istry of Sound (OMA, Lon­don 2015) and Andreas Angel­i­dakis instal­la­tion at the Bres­cia Due metro stop in Bres­cia (Italy, 2023).

To define what are the com­mon traits of these projects, from an archi­tec­tur­al and polit­i­cal point of view, we can extrap­o­late three archi­tec­tur­al dec­li­na­tions of the adjec­tive fun, coined by Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, and which can be traced back to the oth­er men­tioned projects. First dec­li­na­tion: fun as the archi­tec­ture of devi­a­tion, that is a project of time-space dis­lo­ca­tion through the use of mate­ri­als, colours, and com­pos­i­tive solu­tions. Sec­ond dec­li­na­tion: fun as a world with­in the world, through the use of dif­fer­ent scales with­in the same project, and the simul­tane­ity of micro- and macro­scop­ic. Third dec­li­na­tion: fun as the frag­men­ta­tion of the Vit­ru­vian tri­ad of: fir­mi­tas, util­i­tas, venus­tas.[7]

The Archi­tec­ture of enter­tain­ment, in each of the above­men­tioned projects, invites the view­ers to take on a crit­i­cal stand regard­ing the time and the space they inhab­it: in this sense, all these projects are also polit­i­cal projects.

1. Fun as Architecture of deviation

“Lux­u­ry, for Adorno, is the expres­sion of unadul­ter­at­ed joy. It is also con­sti­tu­tive of art. Life thence finds ful­fil­ment in nei­ther prac­ti­cal­i­ty nor instru­men­tal rea­son. Instead, true joy springs from excess, exu­ber­ance, sump­tu­ous­ness, the sense­less, the lux­a­tion of the nec­es­sary. The sur­plus or super­flu­ous is what frees life from all com­pul­sion. The absence of com­pul­sion or care is more­over an ele­ment of enter­tain­ment, even of utopia, and is the sub­stance of ​‘pure amuse­ment’. This is a form of lux­u­ry, a lux­a­tion of work and neces­si­ty, that brings it close to art: ​“Amuse­ment, free of all restraint, would be not only the oppo­site of art but its com­ple­men­tary extreme.”[8]

Refer­ring back to Adorno’s def­i­n­i­tion of lux­u­ry, as quot­ed by Byung-Chul Han, the con­cept of Fun as Archi­tec­ture of devi­a­tion is posit­ed here. Devi­a­tion is the dis­cov­ery of an alter­na­tive path, of non-obvi­ous design method­olo­gies. Anal­o­gous to the con­cept of lux­u­ry in this sense, fun is also ​“a lux­a­tion of work and neces­si­ty”, and there­fore a voice of free­dom that res­onates clear­ly in the works men­tioned below.

In Price’s design approach, the archi­tec­tur­al arte­fact is not con­ceived to be con­fined with­in its ​"wall-bound" finite­ness, but to extend beyond its func­tion­al voca­tion and trig­ger the cre­ation of new phys­i­cal and social land­scapes. Archi­tec­tur­al objects devi­ate from their perime­ter, expand and become envi­ron­men­tal, based on Von Uexküll's notion of envi­ron­ment,[9] Where a por­tion of ter­ri­to­ry is acti­vat­ed by cer­tain stim­uli that define the subject's envi­ron­ment and the sub­ject itself. Archi­tec­tures, as envi­ron­men­tal objects, act upon real­i­ty like these stim­uli, ignit­ing a reac­tion in an ​"unknown and invis­i­ble world" and recon­fig­ur­ing it into an environment. 

Price’s archi­tec­tures expand and re-mod­u­late the space, in an oper­a­tion sim­i­lar to that pro­posed by Caset­ti for media: ​“Media are far more than sim­ple pres­ences in a space: they are com­po­nents that inner­vate the ter­ri­to­ry. […] To inner­vate means to pro­vide an indi­vid­ual or col­lec­tive body with new organs that were pre­vi­ous­ly exter­nal to it.”[10] It’s not a coin­ci­dence that Price often employs media devices, empha­sis­ing the pub­lic dimen­sion inher­ent in his projects aimed at col­lec­tiv­i­ty, where archi­tec­ture draws new dis­tri­b­u­tion process­es and ways of per­ceiv­ing the city, blur­ring the bound­aries between inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or, pub­lic and pri­vate, real and vir­tu­al, ever­last­ing and ephemeral.

The iron­i­cal mech­a­nism of archi­tec­ture is to be under­stood as one of the pos­si­ble read­ings of real­i­ty, an even­tu­al mode d’emploi for the present, iden­ti­fy­ing in its essence a stingy tan­gency with that which is the Form­less. As indeed ​“noth­ing in and of itself, the form­less has only an oper­a­tional exis­tence: it is a per­for­ma­tive, like obscene words, the vio­lence of which derives less from seman­tics than from the very act of their deliv­ery. The form­less is an oper­a­tion.”[11] Irony could thus be under­stood as one of the deviant ways that allow ideas to sur­vive the impact. With real­i­ty, and to actu­ate its uni­ver­sal inten­tions with­out expe­ri­enc­ing its contingencies.

The irony of anticipatory architecture

David Kolb high­lights how archi­tec­ture is less ​“well-equipped” than all oth­er arts to real­ly be iron­ic.[12] What Kolb seems to reproach irony for is pre­cise­ly its ten­den­cy to often slip into moral­ism. In yield­ing to the temp­ta­tion to pass judg­ments, irony los­es sight of one of the essen­tial con­di­tions for its exis­tence: the lit­er­al mean­ing it employs must nec­es­sar­i­ly not be iron­ic, because only the deduced mean­ing can be iron­ic. The author empha­sizes how roman­tic irony aris­es from the dis­par­i­ty between the bound­less­ness of feel­ing and the lim­i­ta­tions of the lan­guage that must trans­late those feel­ings, that is, from the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to use finite tools to express the infi­nite. On this trace of the infi­nite, of the inde­ter­mi­nate, the prin­ci­ple of irony is trig­gered, which attempts not to fill this void but to make it vis­i­ble and express­ible. Accord­ing to Kolb, anoth­er dimen­sion is added in the post­mod­ern peri­od: the idea of decay inher­ent in every ide­al. Irony, there­fore, decon­structs roman­tic the­o­ries and intro­duces the Pla­ton­ic gap between real­i­ty and its appear­ance. For this rea­son, decon­struc­tivist thought, which empha­sizes the inef­fa­ble, finds in irony one of its most dis­tinc­tive fea­tures, as it does not estab­lish itself in the lan­guage among fixed mean­ings but in the con­trast between the attempt to fix a mean­ing and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of doing so. There­fore, the pro­found val­ue that irony can have is to make us aware of our fragili­ty. In doing so, the design­er should not force thought or space into rigid and unchange­able forms; this is the dan­ger iden­ti­fied by Cedric Price: the con­text will change quick­ly, and the build­ings will out­live their irony, los­ing all meaning.

A response to this issue can be found in Price's notion of ​"antic­i­pa­to­ry archi­tec­ture," where the author designs his works by plan­ning both their begin­ning and their nat­ur­al and nec­es­sary end. Accord­ing to Price, the life of a build­ing is so inter­twined with the soci­ety for which it is built that as one changes, so does the oth­er; as one ends, so does the oth­er, and so the ​"iron­ic" rela­tion­ship, or sim­ply the rela­tion­ship of mean­ing, remains con­stant, where con­stant does not mean unchang­ing, but respon­sive to the rec­i­p­ro­cal fluc­tu­a­tions of mean­ing. Indeed, pre­cise­ly to avoid this risk – that the future inher­its struc­tures from the present that are now mean­ing­less and use­less – archi­tec­ture must learn to think of itself with­in a lim­it­ed tem­po­ral duration.

The design process can last a few min­utes or a few cen­turies, what mat­ters is to not fos­silise in a giv­en moment try­ing to quick­ly tack­le issues of con­tin­gency, in an hon­est and con­tin­u­ous effort to ques­tion the real util­i­ty of an architecture.

Cedric Price under­stands that archi­tec­ture is always too slow in respond­ing to the spin­ning muta­tions of the city, and there­fore must project itself into the future, striv­ing to inte­grate with this ongo­ing meta­mor­pho­sis while know­ing how to adapt in turn. Con­se­quent­ly, ​"antic­i­pa­to­ry archi­tec­ture" takes time, rather than space, as its pri­ma­ry sub­ject – much like irony – in order to come to terms with the plan­ning of its own obsolescence. 

Time is always the cen­tral dimen­sion around which the design process revolves: accord­ing to Price, one of the key strengths of archi­tec­ture lies in its func­tion as a large time-dis­tort­ing machine.[13]

An exam­ple of this is the pro­pos­al pre­sent­ed by the author in 1994 for the inter­na­tion­al recon­ver­sion com­pe­ti­tion of the Bank­side Pow­er Sta­tion, now the Tate Mod­ern Gallery. Cedric Price pre­sent­ed a sketch and a two-page text titled ​“State­ment on the Role of Cul­tur­al Cen­tres in the Twen­ty-First Cen­tu­ry,” relat­ed to the devel­op­ment of the South Bank project. The pro­pos­al was to install a glass dome on top of the for­mer pow­er sta­tion, trans­form­ing the build­ing into a muse­um item for the city, ready to move along the riverbanks.

With this mul­ti­fac­eted inter­pre­ta­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion announce­ment, Price pre­cise­ly echoes the way muse­ums are expe­ri­enced in the Eng­lish cap­i­tal, as authen­tic pub­lic spaces – infor­mal in their usage and open in the free struc­tures offered to vis­i­tors like large cov­ered squares. Price takes this vision to the extreme: the exhi­bi­tion leaves the muse­um, becom­ing a ful­ly pub­lic event, exposed to the eyes of the cit­i­zens, and finds its place in the city, which is sim­ply a slight­ly larg­er museum. 

All the sens­es through which the exhi­bi­tion space is per­ceived are con­sid­ered in the design, from the sound of the muse­um doors open­ing to the dif­fer­ent speeds at which vis­i­tors move through it, and even to how one can inter­nal­ize an inti­mate expe­ri­ence of art in such a vast environment.

Different ways of dealing with History

This con­cep­tion of real­i­ty as some­thing that is already muse­u­mi­fied high­lights the com­men­tary on real­i­ty itself, which, through inter­pre­ta­tion, makes it inter­est­ing. This changes the rela­tion­ship one has with his­to­ry, mak­ing it indeed more flu­id: her­itage becomes new mate­r­i­al for design in the form of sec­tions, frag­ments, and cut-outs. 

In line with such design atti­tudes, the projects pre­sent­ed in the pages of Ottagono, which illus­tra­tive­ly detail their plans and sec­tions, include, among oth­ers, the Enter­tain­ment Cen­ter for Leices­ter Square by Michael Webb (1962), the Enter­tain­ment Tow­er for Mon­tre­al by Peter Cook (1963), and Pietro Derossi's design for the the­atre in the Ital­ian Pavil­ion of the XIV Tri­en­nale di Milano (1968).

Michael Webb’s Enter­tain­ment Cen­ter for Leices­ter Square (also elo­quent­ly known as Sin Cen­tre) presents itself as a tow­er device where the sup­port ele­ments appear stripped and cov­ered in metal­lic scales, trans­form­ing the whole archi­tec­ture into a large danc­ing object. The two parts that com­pose the project spin around the two large cir­cu­la­tion sys­tems, the ver­ti­cal and the hor­i­zon­tal one. As a mat­ter of fact, void of any com­mer­cial or enter­tain­ing aim, the idea of fun lies pre­cise­ly in the cre­ation of the project itself.

Fol­low­ing the same impulse towards ver­ti­cal­i­ty, Peter Cook's Enter­tain­ment Tow­er for Mon­tre­al is struc­tured. The tow­er accom­mo­dates a vari­ety of func­tions con­densed into an inter­stel­lar archi­tec­ture, engag­ing with the dream of immi­nent lunar land­ings and desired celes­tial col­o­niza­tion. Audi­to­ri­ums, the­atres, hotels, restau­rants, a danc­ing area, art gal­leries, and an obser­va­to­ry coex­ist with­in a stark design built with geo­des­ic domes and mov­able elements. 

A mesh tow­er also appears minia­tur­ized in Pietro Derossi’s the­atre for the XIV Tri­en­nale di Milano (1968). The tow­er, on which spot­lights and loud­speak­ers are attached, is one of the mobile devices that com­pose the project, which boasts: a pul­pit with a con­vex mir­ror, a pro­jec­tion booth, mov­able par­ti­tions for pro­jec­tions and sound iso­la­tion, a semi­sphere in polyurethane and moquette, plat­forms called ​"pluripuffs", inclined planes, and semi-rollers. These devices are aimed at struc­tur­ing space in an adapt­able man­ner; each object does not have a sin­gu­lar use but serves a momen­tary neces­si­ty.[14] Thanks to its ver­sa­til­i­ty, dur­ing the occu­pa­tion of the XIV Tri­en­nale, this place became the per­fect the­atre for the lit polit­i­cal debate, as Derossi writes: ​“The con­struc­tion of the mag­ic and the unre­al to break through the prac­ti­cal-inert world that oppress­es us may become the road to fol­low in the search for free­dom.”[15]

2. Fun as A world within the world

Projects of vary­ing scales, com­mis­sions, and mate­ri­als pop­u­late the Price archive, rang­ing from a recipe for cook­ing a nice­ly crunchy bacon to a project for the Port of Ham­burg. Mea­sur­ing the world is one of the recur­ring themes in his writ­ings: mea­sure­ment is what allows us to rep­re­sent real­i­ty in a nar­rat­able way, pro­vides the nec­es­sary data to alter it, and helps us under­stand the rela­tion­ships between the ele­ments of a project. 

The issue of mea­sure­ment is dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent from that of scale. In fact, regard­ing the Gen­er­a­tor project, Cedric Price wrote: ​“THE SYMBOL: any size, only one shape.”[16] Archi­tec­ture is no longer a mat­ter of scale but rather of shape, and how its mean­ing changes with alter­ations in its mea­sure­ment. The over­turn­ing of these dimen­sions cre­ates an impasse, encap­su­lat­ing in a ges­ture the uni­ver­sal and all-encom­pass­ing pow­er of a sym­bol that is inher­ent­ly scale-less. 

Con­nect­ing the dis­cus­sion on archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing with that of scale, it's inter­est­ing to note how Cedric Price used a stamp fea­tur­ing the out­line, both in plan and ele­va­tion, of a red Lon­don bus as a unit of mea­sure. He would apply this stamp to the draw­ings he pre­sent­ed to his clients. This was imme­di­ate­ly use­ful for eas­i­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing, even to those unfa­mil­iar with tech­ni­cal draw­ings, the pro­por­tions of the project. The Lon­don bus used as a unit of mea­sure is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in Serre I (1986) and Serre II (devel­oped lat­er between 1988 and 1990), a project for two green­hous­es com­mis­sioned for Parc de la Vil­lette in Paris, inter­pret­ed by Price as two secret gar­dens with­in the large pub­lic park designed by com­pe­ti­tion win­ner Bernard Tschu­mi in 1983. In the case of Serre I and II as well, the con­cept that a sin­gle form could be deci­sive when repeat­ed at dif­fer­ent scales is revis­it­ed, and the stamp of the red bus aids in under­stand­ing the rela­tion­ships between the parts. The pre­sen­ta­tion of the project always fea­tures very pre­cise tech­ni­cal indi­ca­tions regard­ing the tubu­lar struc­tures that would com­pose the two large trans­par­ent tun­nels of the glass green­hous­es. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, there are almost dream­like signs that out­line their inef­fa­ble yet equal­ly impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics: the colours, the sound of water, the vari­a­tions in plant tex­tures, and the scent of ros­es. Since ros­es were the main guests of these green­hous­es – com­mis­sioned by Der­ly, a per­fume com­pa­ny – they fea­ture promi­nent­ly in Price's notes as large as architectures. 

The struc­tures have an ellip­ti­cal sec­tion, defined through a series of ear­ly dig­i­tal devel­op­ments aimed at max­i­miz­ing inter­nal vol­ume and nat­ur­al light for opti­mal plant growth.[17] This project also echoes, as in the Fun Palace project, the theme of a minia­ture uni­verse, a world with­in a world, an archi­tec­tur­al bub­ble pro­tect­ing a small wonder.

No longer pro­tect­ing a nat­ur­al micro­cosm, but a vivar­i­um of archi­tec­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tions, the par­al­lel uni­verse of club­bing in the late Six­ties draws from a com­po­si­tion­al lan­guage anal­o­gous to that of Cedric Price in terms of graph­ic signs and struc­tur­al devices, which is seen in the use of mesh beams the homage to the archi­tec­ture of transformability.

The microworlds of nightclubs

Night­clubs con­sti­tute an island of iden­ti­ty in the city's homogenis­ing mag­ma; they are spaces of immer­sion in unease. Par­tic­u­lar­ly in Italy, projects such as the Piper in Rome (Francesco and Gian­car­lo Capolei, Man­lio Cav­al­li, 1965), the one in Turin (Pietro Derossi, Gior­gio Ceretti, Ric­car­do Rosso, 1966), and Mach 2 (Super­stu­dio, Flo­rence, 1967) trans­form night into the new day of exper­i­men­tal archi­tec­ture. These are places where the rela­tion­ship between body and space is exam­ined, denied, and con­demned. Music becomes a cat­a­lyst for all the arts. Over the fol­low­ing decades, the space of club cul­ture evolved along­side chang­ing music trends, to which the design must adapt. 

Club archi­tec­ture faces the chal­lenge of design­ing the enchant­ment of a sus­pend­ed space, where the recipe for suc­cess fol­lows mys­te­ri­ous rules and is dif­fi­cult to repli­cate else­where. Mak­ing a desire tan­gi­ble is the start­ing point of these projects, which, like any sacred rit­u­al, suc­cess­ful par­ty, or indomitable bac­cha­nal, is made of noth­ing becom­ing the engine of every­thing: archi­tec­ture has the dif­fi­cult task of chan­nelling this ener­gy with­out impos­ing hier­ar­chies, allow­ing it to explode in its yearn­ing for free­dom. In this sense, night­clubs become true tem­ples of fun, where enter­tain­ment cap­tures the fresh­est cul­tur­al trends and makes them enjoy­able for an audi­ence that absorbs their dis­rup­tive impact almost by osmo­sis. Enter­tain­ment becomes cul­ture, and cul­ture becomes com­merce: the twists of irony are often ruthless. 

In 1969, Ugo La Pietra designed the Bang Bang night­club and the Altre­cose bou­tique[18] in Milan. The bou­tique is locat­ed at street lev­el, while the night­club is sit­u­at­ed in the building's base­ment. Like two sides of the same coin, these two real­i­ties coex­ist iron­i­cal­ly, each mir­ror­ing the oth­er: music and fash­ion, art and archi­tec­ture, com­merce and enter­tain­ment. Day and night blend togeth­er in a simul­ta­ne­ous exis­tence that sees both the bou­tique and the night­club open at the same time. Both spaces are neu­tral and are acti­vat­ed by the vis­i­tors who, through a series of con­trols, can low­er trans­par­ent methacry­late cylin­ders from the ceil­ing. These cylin­ders, serv­ing as dis­play cas­es for extreme­ly valu­able or dan­ger­ous items, con­tain mer­chan­dise for sale. A slight­ly larg­er cylin­der hous­es the inclined ele­va­tor that con­nects the com­mer­cial area of the shop with the night-time area of the club, allow­ing nightlife mem­o­ries to resur­face in the daylight. 

3. Fun as The fragmentation of the Vitruvian triad

In the work of Cedric Price, we wit­ness a ques­tion­ing of the dialec­ti­cal pairs on which archi­tec­ture has always relied: inside/outside, open/closed, smooth/striped, static/dynamic.

With­out mass, with­out sur­face, archi­tec­ture renounces every­thing that used to char­ac­ter­ize it: it emp­ties itself of a pre­cise func­tion in order to become pluri-adapt­able, it takes off its sta­tus of the insti­tu­tion­al mon­u­ment to become a rela­tion­al device, it strips itself of mate­r­i­al con­sis­ten­cy to be reab­sorbed by the hori­zon, van­ish­ing once again in nature, but always thanks to the high­est arti­fice of technique.

There­fore, the mal­leabil­i­ty of irony requires the inter­locu­tor to over­turn com­mon and lit­er­al mean­ings to be under­stood. In its elu­sive con­tours, irony can embody a thought that antic­i­pates the future. 

With­in its capac­i­ty to mul­ti­ply mean­ings, irony can high­light or smooth out, reveal the unspeak­able through a new code, or cre­ate new alpha­bets for sub­merged worlds. How­ev­er, in this rever­sal of sce­nar­ios, it can also lead to exclu­sion. Irony car­ries the risk of ambi­gu­i­ty and, con­se­quent­ly, the dan­ger of being mis­un­der­stood or not under­stood at all. It leaves the receiv­er with the final oppor­tu­ni­ty: the pos­si­bil­i­ty of grasp­ing or miss­ing the pro­found mean­ing of the mes­sage. For those who prac­tice irony, this pos­es the risk of end­ing up on the mar­gins of deci­sion-mak­ing, in the desert­ed and uncon­test­ed realm of those who are exclud­ed or who exclude them­selves from the game.[19]

Ide­al­ly con­tin­u­ing the review pre­sent­ed by the mag­a­zine Ottagono, we insert in this sec­tion the project for the Min­istry of Sound II (OMA, Lon­don 2015) and the instal­la­tion by Andreas Angel­i­dakis at the Bres­cia Due under­ground sta­tion (Bres­cia 2023).

Stu­dio OMA won a com­pe­ti­tion in 2015 to redesign the Min­istry of Sound in the Ele­phant and Cas­tle neigh­bour­hood of Lon­don.[20] From the ash­es of the icon­ic night­club, the stu­dio devel­oped a pro­pos­al which both in its inten­tions and in its design solu­tions, recalls the matrix of the Fun Palace.

Like the Fun Palace, OMA’s archi­tec­ture for Min­istry of Sound II is a dynam­ic con­tain­er of expe­ri­ences, capa­ble of adapt­ing not only its inter­nal lay­out to accom­mo­date var­i­ous func­tions but also its exter­nal form. The project reimag­ines its sil­hou­ette accord­ing to its pro­gram­ming, alter­ing its vol­ume to expand or com­press in response to the activ­i­ties inside. The recur­ring large lat­tice beams that slide floors between them like giant draw­ers recall the tubu­lar struc­tures envi­sioned by Cedric Price for the Fun Palace. Indeed, as evi­denced by the project pre­sen­ta­tion, it explic­it­ly adopts the Fun Palace con­cept as a desire machine intend­ed for a wide range of activ­i­ties.[21]

As with every sub­cul­ture, its end is defined as soon as it begins to be decrypt­ed, and per­haps this is the case today for club cul­ture, which pass­es through the mesh­es of ​“the con­stant frag­men­ta­tion of a leisure offer that encom­pass­es every­thing and aggre­gates noth­ing.”[22] To this increas­ing­ly frag­ment­ed offer cor­re­sponds an increas­ing­ly indi­vid­u­alised use of the enter­tain­ment space, which, from muse­ums, night­clubs, the­atres, and mul­ti­func­tion­al cen­tres, moves cen­trifu­gal­ly to focus on the sofa in our homes. From there, through our devices, we access claus­tro­pho­bic cul­tur­al, musi­cal, and artis­tic offer­ings, increas­ing­ly tai­lored to what we already know and increas­ing­ly restric­tive to the niche to which we belong. Thus, a moment of unusu­al light­ness sur­pris­es us when we are forced to go out, move, and remem­ber that our bod­ies live and move in a shared phys­i­cal space. 

In con­ti­nu­ity with what was already inau­gu­rat­ed by Post­mod­ernism regard­ing the shift in the mean­ing of an object that trans­lates based on its mea­sure­ments in space, Andreas Angelidakis's project for the ​“Brix­i­aDue”[23] metro sta­tion is an exam­ple of out-of-scale that iron­i­cal­ly brings the theme of archae­ol­o­gy into the inef­fa­bil­i­ty of the present. Here the but­tress­es of the sta­tion are dressed as cyclo­pean Doric columns. The rever­sal of the clas­si­cal struc­tur­al ele­ment unleash­es the sense of ver­ti­go at the base of the iron­ic approach: to show, through an oper­a­tion of rever­sal, an unprece­dent­ed read­ing of real­i­ty. In this spe­cif­ic case, the iron­ic lan­guage is also used for a reflec­tion on the times of archi­tec­ture, trig­ger­ing a short cir­cuit between the archae­o­log­i­cal find and the tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion. The load-bear­ing ele­ment becomes a con­tem­po­rary ruin and tells of the amaze­ment of find­ing one­self in an unsus­pect­ed else­where. The forked columns unleash an iron­ic dis­tur­bance of Vid­ler­ian mem­o­ry, accen­tu­at­ed by the mate­ri­als used: the soft columns in rock wool and PVC give the final slap to the rigid­i­ty of the Vit­ru­vian tri­ad, trans­form­ing the mar­ble cold­ness of clas­si­cism into the uncer­tain soft­ness of con­tem­po­rane­ity sus­pend­ed in mid-air.

Episodes such as that of Angel­i­dakis bring the archi­tec­tur­al lan­guage, hybridised with that of con­tem­po­rary art, out­side of its con­ven­tion­al spaces. A slice of enter­tain­ment escapes the log­ic that wants to pack­age it and falls onto the tracks of every­day life, bring­ing us back to dis­cov­er a moment of irony that awaits us not in a muse­um or a club, but at a provin­cial sub­way stop.

If enter­tain­ment risks to be cap­tured in the algo­rithms, and the fun frays in the design of utopic archi­tec­tures, is it then pos­si­ble to still be iron­ic today?

Is irony in archi­tec­ture per­haps a lux­u­ry that we can’t afford any­more, or is it a way to see real­i­ty, to inter­pret the world from a non-schemat­ic point of view, free of preconceptions?

Irony in archi­tec­ture is an aware­ness, a dis­trust of what until recent­ly had been car­ried for­ward with blind faith: in the dis­tance between the sub­ject and the object, it repo­si­tions the author in rela­tion to his work and the work in rela­tion to its time. In rela­tion to irony, archi­tec­ture is called to ques­tion its own mon­u­men­tal­i­ty, and the archi­tect his own author­ship, relaunch­ing a reflec­tion on the mean­ings with which these terms are charged.

Irony is gen­er­at­ed from a lack of faith and push­es there­fore towards research, it fears immo­bil­i­ty, it is hereti­cal but not dis­cour­aged by the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the answers can be found else­where and that the only way to find them is to ques­tion the giv­en data, the fixed points. In this sense, it can still be a way of read­ing our time.

In the feared Post-iron­ic city,[24] obsessed by eco­log­i­cal rigour, where ​“the human delir­i­um” has been flat­tened by sus­tain­able effi­cien­cy, irony seems lost: it’s the tragedy of dis­pens­able archi­tec­ture. Bau­drillard writes: ​“Indeed, this is the only gen­uine func­tion of the intel­lect: to embrace con­tra­dic­tions, to exer­cise irony, to take the oppo­site tack, to exploit rifts and reversibil­i­ty – even to fly in the face of the law­ful and the fac­tu­al. If the intel­lec­tu­als of today seem to have run out of things to say, this is because they have failed to assume this iron­ic func­tion, con­fin­ing them­selves with­in the lim­its of their moral, polit­i­cal or philo­soph­i­cal con­scious­ness despite the fact that the rules have changed, that all irony, all rad­i­cal crit­i­cism now belongs exclu­sive­ly to the hap­haz­ard, the viral, the cat­a­stroph­ic – to acci­den­tal or sys­tem-led rever­sals. Such are the new rules of the game – such is the new prin­ci­ple of uncer­tain­ty that now holds sway over all. The oper­a­tion of this prin­ci­ple is a source of intense intel­lec­tu­al sat­is­fac­tion (no doubt even of spir­i­tu­al sat­is­fac­tion).”[25]

Evanes­cence of lan­guage requires a con­tin­u­ous readap­ta­tion of the terms of think­ing in order for this to be com­pre­hen­si­ble in the pas­sage from one sub­ject to anoth­er. As seen, the ambi­gu­i­ty of irony ampli­fies this already com­plex dynam­ic, and for this rea­son it is often expe­ri­enced with scep­ti­cism: he who knows how to smile can be a dan­ger – he keeps some­thing dia­bol­ic inside which can desta­bi­lize the order of things.

There­fore, one of the tasks of the pro­jec­tive irony can be that of help­ing to become aware of an occa­sion[26] and of its unique­ness, improv­abil­i­ty and irre­versibil­i­ty. And this, as Jankélévitch remarks, is because irony, unlike humour, is a direct­ed tac­tic. Humour is vagabond, wan­der­ing, while irony has ​“secu­ri­ty and root­ed­ness”. In essence, an inten­tion to want to change things, even if some­times veiled, is present in irony and is miss­ing in humour, which is con­tent to smile about it, which ​“does not hide swords in the folds of its tunic.”[27] In light of this, it can be said that irony includes a strat­e­gy in its approach and that this strat­e­gy can man­i­fest itself in archi­tec­ture through objects capa­ble of pro­found­ly mod­i­fy­ing a giv­en envi­ron­ment, ini­ti­at­ing rela­tion­ships that were pre­vi­ous­ly unex­plored, bear­ers, beyond their con­struc­tion, demo­li­tion, and recon­struc­tion, of new modes of polit­i­cal thought for the project.