From the Spatial Work to the Inhabitable Work
Spatial Work and Inhabitable Work are not separate categories.
They share the same question:
what happens to the human being within space?
In the Inhabitable Work this relationship enters everyday life.
In the Spatial Work it can be brought to a more concentrated condition, free from the constant need to organize programmes and functions.
Threshold.
Measure.
Light.
Body.
Matter.
Time.
thus become instruments through which architecture directly questions experience.
Experience, however, is not the ultimate criterion of the Work: it is the passage through which human being, place, matter and time can enter into a necessary relationship.
This is why Purini can speak of inhabitable sculpture.
Inhabitable does not necessarily mean residential.
It means that the Work admits the human being within its own form.
Between architecture and art
The separation between architecture and the plastic arts belongs largely to the categories through which we have learned to classify works.
But real space does not necessarily recognize those divisions.
Franco Purini identifies in Ferrara’s research precisely a tension toward the unification of artistic languages.
In Spazio Sensoriale he recognizes a condition of architecture realized through an environmental intervention and an inhabitable sculpture, situated on the boundary between installation, performance and built space.
This boundary is not erased.
It is made productive.
Architecture preserves its ability to construct place.
Art preserves the freedom to put perception into crisis.
The result, however, is not a hybrid genre. It is a different condition of the Work.
The Spatial Work arises precisely within the tension between these two possibilities.
Spatial Work
When a work does not simply occupy a space, but constructs a condition to be crossed, perceived and inhabited.
A sculpture can be observed.
A building can be used.
An installation can temporarily alter the perception of a place.
But there are works that escape these separations.
The body enters the form.
Space is no longer the container of the work.
The path becomes part of the composition.
Light, matter, water, shadow, distance and time participate in the experience.
It is within this territory that an essential part of Fausto Ferrara’s research is situated.
Spatial Works do not arise from the intention to arbitrarily merge architecture and art.
They are neither enlarged installations nor sculptures made simply traversable.
They arise from a more radical question:
what happens when space itself becomes Work?
Crossing instead of looking
The image tends to deliver everything at the same instant.
The Spatial Work instead introduces a sequence.
Before.
After.
Near.
Far.
Hidden.
Revealed.
What is perceived from one point does not coincide with what will appear a few steps later.
The work does not offer a definitive view of itself.
To understand it, one must give it time.
Purini identifies precisely in this condition the gap between the immediacy of reading and the duration the structure continues to assume in the mind of those who have crossed it.
The image is received.
Space is crossed.
The Work happens in the distance between the two.
The body enters the composition
A photograph can show walls, volumes, matter and light.
But it cannot replace what happens when a body enters space.
Walking changes perspectives.
A wall appears and disappears.
One vertical element overlaps another.
A distance contracts.
Then suddenly opens.
In Spazio Sensoriale, the visitor’s movement is part of the perceptual construction of the work.
Cristallini describes an environment that alters the traditional perception of space and awaits the physical reactions of those who cross it.
The body is therefore not added after form.
It is one of the conditions through which form can exist as experience.
But, as in the Inhabitable Work, perception is not the end: through the body, the human being measures space and recovers their own position in relation to it.
Spazio Sensoriale: a spatial prototype
Realized in Hudson, New York, in 2006, Spazio Sensoriale constitutes one of the original nuclei of this research.
It does not arise as a traditional building.
It does not arise as an autonomous sculpture.
It does not arise as a simple installation.
Cristallini defines it as a spatial prototype and an environmental situation generated by visual and tactile stimuli, compressions and expansions, real and virtual axes.
Walls, vertical elements, water, openings, nature, light and movement do not construct separate objects.
They produce a sequence.
Meaning is not deposited in a single form.
It emerges from the overall experience.
Spazio Sensoriale does not show what space is.
It forces the body to perceive it and to measure itself against it.
The space-situation
Franco Purini uses a particularly precise definition for Spazio Sensoriale:
space-situation.
The word “space” alone might still suggest a container.
The word “situation” instead introduces something that happens.
A temporary relationship between elements.
Between body and wall.
Between light and matter.
Between movement and distance.
Purini describes the work as the result of visual-tactile stimuli, compressions and expansions, volumes organized around real and virtual axialities.
Space is therefore not neutral.
It alters those who cross it and is continually reconstructed by those who perceive it.
The Spatial Work does not contain a situation.
It is the situation.
Structure is not only what supports
In an ordinary building, structure is often considered through its technical function.
Supporting.
Carrying.
Resisting.
In the Spatial Work, structure can do something more.
It can generate relationships.
Draw voids.
Produce directions.
Establish tensions.
Construct a measure between body and space.
In his essay on Spazio Sensoriale, Philippe Daverio reads the relationship between structure and nature as a system capable of transforming space into existential experience: the building ceases to be simply an object to contemplate and becomes something to inhabit.
Structure becomes form when it does not merely support the Work, but participates in its necessity.
Nature enters the Work
Landscape and nature are not the background in which an artistic object is placed.
They enter the composition.
A tree can appear between two walls.
A surface of water can hold the sky.
A shadow can slowly cross a wall.
Wind can make an opening perceptible.
Daverio recognizes in Spazio Sensoriale precisely this ability to select fragments of nature and amplify their presence through architecture: the wall becomes simultaneously separation, protection and a perceptual device.
Nature is not imitated.
It is not transformed into decoration.
It is made perceptible again.
The Work does not place itself in front of nature.
It constructs the relationship through which we can encounter it.
Beyond function
Architecture is normally justified by a function.
A house must be inhabited.
A museum must exhibit.
A theatre must host a performance.
But what happens when function does not exhaust the reason for the Work?
Purini observes that Spazio Sensoriale puts architecture to the test even of the absence of traditional utilitas: what remains is tectonic articulation and the intensity of spatial relationships.
This does not mean producing useless spaces.
It means recognizing that perceiving, lingering, crossing, remembering and thinking are also human necessities.
The Spatial Work does not eliminate function.
It questions the very idea of what we consider useful.
What does Spatial Work mean?
Spatial Work does not indicate a typology.
It does not define a dimension.
It does not coincide with a technique or a material.
It can be a pavilion.
An enclosure.
A system of walls.
A structure in the landscape.
A traversable place.
A condition constructed through a few elements.
What distinguishes it is that form is not perceived as an autonomous object.
The work generates a space in which body, matter, light and place enter into relationship.
What defines it is therefore not the hybridization of disciplines, but the fact that space becomes the matter of the Work and form acquires necessity through its relationship with body, place and time.
For this reason the Spatial Work belongs simultaneously to architecture and art without being exhausted by either.
It does not represent space.
It makes space experience.
Critical recognition
Critical readings of Fausto Ferrara’s work converge, from different perspectives, precisely on this capacity of space.
Kenneth Frampton places Ferrara within the tradition of tectonic culture and recognizes in his work a research founded on place, matter, light, perception and construction. But his reading goes further: Ferrara renews the lesson of the twentieth-century masters and at the same time transcends it, restoring architecture to its deepest essence — that of being an “act of truth”.
Francesco Dal Co recognizes in his projects places of meditation, interiority and permanence, capable of transforming the simple visitor into an inhabitant through time.
Elena Liotta reads Spazio Sensoriale as psychic space, an experience of wholeness and a place capable of assuming the condition of a temple even without worship.
Elisabetta Cristallini identifies an architecture that induces silence and contemplation and recovers the profound relationship between space, nature and human being.
These are not definitions of a style.
They identify a deeper capacity of the Work:
to construct places in which human beings can encounter the world again, recovering their own measure without being continuously distracted from it.
Thought and works
The research on Spatial Works runs through the work of Fausto Ferrara from Spazio Sensoriale onward and continues through works, pavilions, contemplative places and structures in which architecture, art, body and landscape cease to be independent elements.
It is not a collection of objects.
It is a field of research into space as a condition of the Work.
The Spatial Works page brings together the corpus of works.
This page instead makes its criterion explicit:
when the work ceases to be an object within space and space itself becomes the matter of the Work.
The Spatial Work as a contemporary possibility
We live in a time in which much of our experience of art and architecture takes place through images.
We see before arriving.
We know before crossing.
We consume representation before experience.
The Spatial Work introduces a radical resistance to this condition.
It cannot be entirely possessed by a photograph.
It does not coincide with a façade.
It cannot be reduced to a privileged point of view.
It requires body.
Movement.
Time.
Presence.
For this reason, Spatial Works are not a secondary genre within Ferrara’s architecture.
They take to an extreme a question that runs through all of his research.
Here the Spatial Work also encounters the criterion of the E9 Grid: it is not enough for a space to produce an intense experience. It is necessary to distinguish between Work and Built, Place and Surface, Necessary Form and Image.
What must space do to the human being for the built to become Work?
Light, matter, water and shadow
In the Spatial Work, elements do not constitute scenery.
Light does not simply illuminate an already completed form.
Water does not decorate it.
Matter does not clad it.
Shadow is not an effect.
Each of these elements actually transforms space.
Light separates.
Shadow makes weight visible.
Water multiplies and destabilizes distances.
Matter offers resistance to the body and the gaze.
In Ferrara’s thought, light acquires meaning through relationships between things and through the changing of time and seasons; architecture acquires dynamism through natural phenomena and human movement.
Form does not contain these phenomena.
It exists through them.
The Work is not an object
An object can be circumscribed.
It possesses a limit.
It can be observed from outside.
The subject remains in front of it.
The Spatial Work alters this relationship.
It does not ask only to be looked at.
It asks to be approached.
Crossed.
Measured with the body.
The visitor does not remain outside the composition.
Position, movement, distance and time continually alter what is perceived.
The Work is no longer only in front of the human being.
The human being enters the Work.
Spatial Works
Spatial Works do not possess a predetermined form.
They do not have to be monumental.
They do not have to be large.
They do not necessarily have to be enclosed or covered.
They do not have to resemble sculpture.
They are not defined by typology, scale or location.
They can arise in a garden.
In a landscape.
Within a private collection.
Beside water.
As a pavilion.
As a place of memory.
As a space dedicated to perception.
What unites them is a criterion:
form is not offered as an autonomous image, but constructs a physical and mental relationship with those who enter the space.
And that relationship acquires the value of Work when form is no longer arbitrarily interchangeable without losing the necessity that generated it.
The Spatial Work is not a thing placed within a location.
It is a place that becomes Work.
