Eaux d'artifice

In the sixteenth century the visitors to the Villa d’Este at Tivoli entered from the north gate. A wooden pergola covered with shady vines and flanked by high walls led to the wide terrace forming the lower part of the gardens. From there they could walk up to the Villa, their attention constantly diverted by the innumerable fountains with their lavish supply of water and by the great collection of ancient statues that had been bought in Rome or excavated at Tivoli. Pirro Ligorio, who designed the gardens for the Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, gave water an architectural quality. Its constantly varying sounds and the lights filtering through the lush vegetation added a very theatrical atmosphere.

Veduta del palazzo dal piano del giardino con le sue fontane, Giovanni Francesco Venturini

In his masterful book about the Villa, David Coffin gave a detailed description of the Water Organ and its harmony of music introduced by trumpet calls; the fish pools; the continuous stream of bubbling water down the balustrades of the Bollori; the jets of the Fountain of the Dragon varying so that at times it made explosions like a small mortar; the game between the birds and the owl in the Fountain of the Owl; the Fountain of Rome with water tricks activated by the visitors’ steps; the Lane of the Hundred Fountains; the great cascade of the Oval Fountain surrounded by a semi-oval arcade, the tennis court, the secrete garden, and the Grotto of Diana.

Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Claude Duchet

Today Venus’s hair, moss, ivies, periwinkles, acanthus, blue aloes and violas generally cover the grottoes and fountains while centuries-old cypress trees, pines, laurels, oaks and spruces form a thick vegetation that protects the visitors from the deadly heat of Roman summers. Though this environment was completely man-made, the human figures strolling through in the shade seem almost insignificant when compared to the imposing presence of the water, the marbles, and the vegetation.

Attilio Rossi described quite vividly the crowd hovering around the sixteenth century illustrious patrons, real stars of wealth and power: cronies, parasites, Greek teachers, slaves, doctors, jugglers, and of course the beauties most in vogue, labeled as joyful bestowers of love and oblivion. But the splendor did not last forever. During the eighteenth century this chimerical dream of beauty started to fade: the gardens were neglected and the collection of sculptures slowly sold out.

Veduta della Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Both the Villa and the gardens were restored after the First and the Second World War and opened to the public.

In 1953, Kenneth Anger filmed here Eaux d’artifice. Carmilla Salvatorelli, who was introduced to him by Fellini, played a mysterious figure in an eighteenth-century costume, wearing a mask. She seems to appear from a fountain, inhabit the gardens playing hide and seek with the waters and the sculptures, and finally dissolve back into a fountain. Anger deliberately chose a small woman, always seen at a distance, to enhance the sense of scale and make the fountains appear more monumental. This was a technique that he had observed in Piranesi’s etchings.

He filmed on 16mm reversal film using a deep red filter for the night effect, which meant he used natural light as if it were artificial light. “The light would sometimes be right in a certain area only for ten or fifteen minutes. The light would come through, and then it’d be gone for the rest of the day.”

Anger had originally conceived Eaux d’artifice as part of a tetralogy of baroque garden films, one for each of the four seasons. He used here Vivaldi’s winter movement and visited Bomarzo next but, unable to find the financing, he eventually moved back to the States.

Eaux d'artifice, Kenneth Anger, 1953

In 1961 Yves Klein, through Jean Larcade who represented him in Paris, proposed to the mayor of Tivoli to add fire jets to the fountains and pools during the summer season. In 1958 he had designed with Norbert Kricke fire and water fountains for the Trocadéro. Claude Parent had worked on the program and sketches known today as the Air Architecture drawings. But none of these propositions was ever implemented.

Water and fire fountains, Yves Klein, 1959

Wall of water traversed by flames, Yves Klein, 1959

In 1959 Klein presented a lecture with Werner Ruhnau at the Sorbonne entitled “The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial.” He asserted: “I believe that I can say with good reason this evening that it will not be with rockets, sputniks, or missiles that mankind will achieve the conquest of space, for he will then always remain just a tourist in space. Rather it is achieved by inhabiting its sensibility, which is to say, not by joining up but by impregnating oneself, by becoming one with life itself, this space where the tranquil and tremendous force of pure imagination and of a feudal world reigns that, like mankind, has never known neither beginning nor end!”

Le choc permanent, Yves Klein, 1958 

References

Barbieri, Patrizio. “Organi e Automi Musicali Idraulici di Villa d’Este a Tivoli.” L’Organo, Vol. XXIV (January-December, 1986).

Coffin, David R. The Villa d’Este at Tivoli. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960.

Coffin, David R. Pirro Ligorio. The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

MacDonald, Scott. A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Ottmann, Klaus, ed. Overcoming the Problematics of Art. The Writings of Yves Klein. New York: Spring Publications, 2007.

Rossi, Attilio. Tivoli. Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1909.

Rossi Attilio. La Villa d’Este a Tivoli. Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1935.

Yves Klein / Claude Parent. The Memorial, An Architectural Project. Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2013.

Stillness in motion

It takes around six hours to drive from Porto to the Spanish border and reach the Aldeadávila Dam on the Douro River. The landscape changes surprisingly, from green to rocky. You cross plantations of eucalypts and get inebriated by their heady scent. You get to minutely ordered vineyards and olive groves. You encounter fewer and fewer cars the more you drive, but you have to keep your eyes on the road, which is narrow and winding. Sooner or later the falling rocks signs get to you and with one eye you check for what is hanging over your head. It is only when you cross over to Spain at the Saucelle Dam and get to the Castilian plateau, that you finally see the dark granite boulders emerging from the ground. These rounded shapes described by Miguel de Unamuno as an antediluvian landscape of giant mushrooms, where used for generations to build low walls that demarcate property boundaries.

I visited Aldeadávila in late August: it was a very hot afternoon and the place looked deserted. From the power plant's viewpoint I could clearly see the three main elements that shape the landscape. The concrete parapet stands for all that was man made, the additions and the alterations; the rocks embody what appears to be permanent in nature; and the ever-changing sky adds a temporal rhythm to the scene. There is also the water, green and quiet, at the bottom, but I had to lean forward to see that.

In 1910 the Spanish government initiated conversations with Portugal to exploit the hydroelectric potential of the area. In 1927 they signed a trans-boundary waters agreement: Spain got the drop between the mouth of the Tormes and the Huebra Rivers, while Portugal got the stretch until the Tormes and after the Huebra.

The further delay in tackling the exploitation of the international section of the Douro had the enormous advantage of allowing the engineers to benefit from the extraordinary progress of the hydroelectric technique in the second quarter of the century. 

Pedro Martinez Artola finally designed a concrete arch-gravity dam crowned by eight spillways that can release up to 12,500 m³/sec of water. It was built between 1956 and 1963 and like the Saucelle dam, it was placed at the end of one of the few granite massifs that cut the gneiss formations predominant in the Douro Valley, downstream from Zamora. Although the heroic story of its construction has always fascinated me, I will refer you to the interesting book by Alvaro Chapa and I will focus instead on the structure as it is today and on how it appears to the naive eyes of a visitor that comes here for the first time. Looking down is mesmerizing. At first glance the concrete and the rocks are seamless but a closer examination shows the sixty-years-old traces of construction: the access road for the trucks, the anchoring structures of the rock crushers and the trommel screen, the bases for the blondins.

Once the construction was completed and the machinery was removed, Nature regained its role as a main actor. Today the Portuguese side is protected by the Parque Natural do Douro Internacional and the Spanish side by the Parque Natural de Arribes del Duero.

But if you really want to understand how much the landscape has changed since then you have to go twenty kilometres further and visit Pozo de los Humos. When you reach the falls you will realize what is now missing at Aldeadávila. The river has been silenced. Its song, very much present at Los Humos, has been replaced by the surreal hum of the power plant. This persistent sound is the only element that today seems out of context: while the sculptural structure can be perceived as one with the granite, the electric buzzing is not a good match.

It is also worth considering that it is what we don't hear and what we don't see that matters the most. We don't see the hundreds of meters that were excavated below our feet to accommodate the Francis turbines. We don't hear the waters constantly pushing through the six penstocks that feed the power plant. What we do know is that Aldeadávila alone generates ten per cent of all hydroelectric power produced in Spain.

During the twentieth century the hydrology of the Douro has been greatly transformed.

Fifteen dams have been built along its course. In Spain Iberdrola operates San Román (1907), Ricobayo (1933), Villalcampo (1949), Castro (1953), Saucelle (1956), Aldeadávila (1963), and Villarino (1970). In Portugal Energias de Portugal operates Picote (1958), Miranda (1960), Bemposta (1964), Carrapatelo (1971),  Régua (1973), Valeira (1976), Pocinho (1982), Crestuma-Lever (1985).

References

Artola, Pedro Martinez. "El Salto de Aldeadávila." Revista de Obras Públicas (December, 1962).

Artola, Pedro Martinez. "El Salto de Aldeadávila." Revista de Obras Públicas (January, 1963).

Chapa, Alvaro. La Construcción de los Saltos del Duero, 1903-1970: Historia de una Epopeya Colectiva. Barañáin: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1999.

El Gran Cañón del Duero: la Construcción de Aldeadávila (1957-1987). Iberdrola, 1987.

Luces del Duero 1900-1970. Aprovechamientos Hidroeléctricos de la Cuenca Hidrográfica del Río Duero. Madrid: Fundación Iberdrola, 2009. 

Olaguibel, Luis. "La Construcción de la Presa de Aldeadávila." Revista de Obras Públicas (April, 1964).

Unamuno, Miguel de. "Los Arribes del Duero. Notas de un Viaje por la Raya de Portugal Ilustradas con 15 Fotografias." Hojas Selectas, No. 37 (1905).

Acknowledgments

Let me start by acknowledging the Italian architect Luigi Moretti and the seven issues of SPAZIO that he published between 1950 and 1953. He had something to say about Space and used his thoughts to structure a narrative. For those like me that have struggled for a while with the idea of practicing architecture and finally found themselves in the infinite stories that could be told about the discipline, his sophisticated writings will sound refreshing.

We find the clue for deciphering his first article right on the cover: a Doric façade (Vignola docet) on a cloudy background. Eclecticism and Unity of Language is a prize of those moments of clarity when various modes of expression - art, architecture, literature, music - come together in a consonant harmony and reach a dense maturity. The Golden Square of the Villa Adriana in Tivoli, San Pietro in Montorio by Bramante, La Rotonda by Palladio echo the happy times of Pericles, the early Renaissance, the extraordinary seventeenth century. But the plenitude of expression sooner or later wears out and gives way to eclecticism. These are the times when restless spirits start searching for the new essential relations that will constitute a new language. And who better than Carlo Mollino (the cloudy background comes from Casa Rivetti) to stand for the eclectics?

Perhaps it is from Mollino, whose obsession with women's waists and hips had so clearly influenced his practice, that Moretti took inspiration to write about the relations existing between the human body and the world of figurative arts. His article opened to Biagio Pace's text on the Discobolus and the issue of roman copies, which is still a very contemporary topic. 

Moretti acknowledged the modern tendency to deviate from the human body and to progress toward exclusively formal relations, something that he traced back to the Roman Baroque where arms, hands and faces could be considered as signs placed to ensure a literal understanding of a hard and esoteric figurative language. He chose the 

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi by Bernini and one of the angels by Antonio Raggi for the Castel S. Angelo Bridge and made explicit their abstract formal qualities by zooming in on draperies, wings, clumps of greens, water and rocks.

[Images: Castel S. Angelo Bridge, Antonio Raggi; Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, Bernini]

These complex structures don't allow for immediate perception, and are only readable sequentially. The composition is dissociated into tree or four compositional centres whose successive vision is determined by their relative positions in a determined space. Each fragment is a world in itself with its own gravitational forces. Moretti found that baroque plasticism and abstract languages shared the same formative process. He devoted a whole issue to abstract art and its relations to architecture.

How did the ancients intended the relations between architecture and non-figurative pictorial spaces? The Romanesque walls striped in white and green or dark grey were the most abstract and concrete surfaces that Moretti knew about; he was dazzled by the simple law behind the process that led a wall structure, adding nothing, in the realm of the most violent and most pure pictorialism. By using materials of different colours and similar tectonic qualities, not only the resulting surface of the wall looked purely pictorial, but the very act of construction was enhanced. The Church of S. Francesco in Prato materialized Moretti's reading. He then identified a completely opposite strategy in the Baptistery of Florence, where only bearing structures are striped while wall surfaces with no tectonic strength are characterized by lines, squares, and circles, all abstract figures that naturally suggest a connection to the abstract works of Piet Mondrian.  

[Images: Church of S. Francesco, Prato; Baptistery, Florence]

[Image: Composition with red, Piet Mondrian, 1936]

In Discontinuity of Space in Caravaggio Moretti wrote about the instrumental use of light in Baroque paintings: where there is light there is also a body, a fact; while the dark is emptiness, a sidereal and eternal void. Caravaggio's inspiration may have been the atmospheres of Rome during the summer. The blazing sun draws the deepest shadows on palaces and churches: certain elements almost disappear in the background, others glow in the light as if they were apparitions. But then of course Moretti was an architect and was interested in reading reality in a tectonic way. In seventeenth century Roman architecture, light was a synonym of strength and was used to emphasize those architectural elements where the loads are condensed. The architectural counterpart of Caravaggio is Borromini: on the church of S. Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, the midday light points to the structural role of the four columns. Light is a construction material.

In The Value of Moldings, Moretti wrote: "Ancient architects realized through sensibility and cultivated experience that a wall is in itself a worn-out reality, untouched and bear. To make it come alive and be expressive - dense with existence - one must change it, evoking forces, making it erupt with movement and corrugations to exalt its presence. [...] Cornices condense the sense of existence because they impose themselves on our vision with their neat, rapid, cutting sequences of distinctive frequencies and differences. Their spaces are vivid and dense with signs, and they engage our attention to the utmost. [...] Everything that is visible communicates with us through its surface."  

The architectural surface insists on interior spaces which consequently have specific geometry, determined dimension and density, and are charged with certain energy according to the pressure that the liminal masses of the construction exert on them.

This charged void and the way that it can be structured into sequences is essentially what Moretti was interested in. 

[Image: Diagram of the structural sequence of S. Pietro in Vaticano]

Spaces speak quite loudly to our bodies: we cannot help but feel on our skin the pressure of a doorway, the limited liberation of an atrium, the opposition of a wall, the brief pressure of a gap, the sense of liberation of a nave and contemplation of a dome. Our reactions are immediate and instinctive but our bodies can also get used to almost anything. And that's why architects have such a big responsibility.

We spend most of our lives in interior spaces that powerfully affect our physical and mental well-being. We should always wonder: are we turning up like the boiling frog?