Smiljan Radić
There are places I will never go. Due to laziness or boredom, or premature fatigue. But there are also landscapes or buildings I should have visited a long time ago. This text reviews those possible places. All of them are part of my story, and they are places I am familiar with in one way or another.
I should have visited the megalithic remains in Carnac, in Brittany, and also all the work by Sigurd Lewerentz, especially the mist in the Eastern Cemetery in Malm., the messy interior of the flower kiosk, the Resurrection Chapel and the gloom of the nave in Sankt Petri Church, which I imagine may have something in common with the darkness of the hall in the Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh, India: feeling your way in the dark. I would visit Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Chapel to confirm once again that every chapel aims to be a cathedral and every animita wishes to be a chapel; that’s why its fa.ade is blank and its monumentality is domestic. After touring these quiet and unpredictable buildings, I would like to visit Asplund’s Public Library in Stockholm.
I would go to the museum in Hamar by Sverre Fehn.
Italy, which at one time seemed like an infinite country that I could continue to visit until the point of nearly 'complete' fatigue, has been reduced to the interior of a small art gallery near Campo Santo Stefano, to visiting the Church of San Salvador with its lined-up domes, and a small bar in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, all of them in Venice. However, I am curious to visit the Casa del Fascio in Como, by Giuseppe Terragni, and the Malaparte House by Adalberto Libera on the island of Capri, a lizard in the sun on the rocks. I would try one more time to get into the cemetery by Aldo Rossi in Modena.
A few months ago I visited the convent of La Tourette by Le Corbusier for the first time. I wanted to sleep in one of the rooms for €42 a night. That way I could understand how similar they are to the rooms of the cloisters on Mount Athos or the monasteries in Meteora, where I spent the night in 1993.
I should visit out of curiosity, before they go out of fashion among contemporary architects, the churches set into the cliffs in Lalibela, Ethiopia.
Africa. I would visit a moveable city, the Laayoune camp in Algeria.
I would also travel for a few days along the Chilean coast with a poor circus.
In Russia, out of ignorance or fear, I would only go to see the buildings by Konstantin Melnikov; it would be enough to see his house, so well described by Bruce Chatwin some time ago. The house must share some similarities with the pictures I took of Santo Stefano Rotondo, restored by Leon Battista Alberti in Rome. I would visit everything by Alberti again. The basilica of Sant’Andrea or the Church of San Sebastiano in Mantua, which I was able to visit recently on the occasion of a lecture. It is not the first time that I have found a place open by chance after years of unsuccessful attempts. For example, the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice, with the nave split in two, was closed to the public for years. A couple of years ago I was able to enter that solid interior where Luigi Nono’s Prometheus was premiered, in the legendary wooden structure by Renzo Piano. Today the interior has been torn up by archaeologists looking for something, a new echo from beyond.
Motivated by the drawings of Louis I. Kahn, I would visit the Cathedral of Sainte-C.cile in Albi and also the Mayan pyramids in Tikal, Guatemala; I think he may have liked them as much as the ones he visited in Egypt and drew with pastels. The building of the National Assembly in Dhaka has always been difficult for me to understand; I thought it was a good exercise in plan. I figured that, in person, it might have the miserly feeling of graphic architecture.the same feeling I had when visiting the Business School in Ahmedabad. Perhaps I saw the building by Kahn at a time when I was too impressed by Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Spinners in the same city, but Christian Kerez visited the National Assembly of Dhaka last summer and he told me it was "One of the best buildings I have seen in my life". Sometimes we travel on the obligation of friends, so I’ll go to Dhaka soon. With Christian we agreed to visit the Alhambra together, which I have never seen; I would happily return to the Fuente Grande, a laundry by Juan de Herrera in Ocaña, Spain. Likewise, in keeping with that same monumental and domestic atmosphere, I would take another tour of the buildings by Francesco di Giorgio, especially the Rocca de Sassocorvaro in Urbino.
I have to go back to India, too, to see the Towers of Silence in Mumbai, which I have never seen. Very recently I was shown some very harsh images of these constructions; death transformed into flesh and organized on platforms of convergent rings, like one of the ideal cities by Superstudio; I remember the smells of human flesh on the pyres in India.
I must visit .lvaro Siza’s Funda..o Iber. Camargo, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I need to walk along its ramps suspended in the air and curled up on themselves, Lina Bo Bardi style... A couple of months ago I went back to eat at the restored Boavista Tea House in Matosinhos. As a student I visited it when I had no money and asked for a glass of water just to sit and pass the time looking out at the sea from the chairs. "Someday I’ll be back for a meal", I told the waiter. Twenty-five years later, a few months ago, I had the pleasure of going back to have lunch under those eaves.
I should visit the Santa Paula jetty by Jo.o Vilanova Artigas.
I have been to Japan five times and I am still stuck between Tokyo and Kyoto and little else, unable to move beyond there. I should go to the Ise Shrine and visit some fishing villages in the north. I would ask Enrique Walker for a guided tour of modern Japanese architecture and what remains of Metabolism; no doubt those buildings will disappear very soon. I should see what is left standing of the work of Kazuo Shinohara.
I would go to Mongolia again, for the same reason I would go to Nepal or Iceland: so as not to see another human being for a while. Is that possible today? In the early 1990s that could happen even in extremely touristy places: on the island of Rhodes, on the Acropolis in Lindos or in Aegina, touring the pigeon houses on the island of Tinos in Greece, even at certain suspicious times: a rainy day at closing time on the Acropolis in Athens, as Giorgos Seferis described it 50 years ago.
I would happily visit the private garden of Piet Oudolf and the garden of Jacques Wirtz in Belgium, enthused by the photographs by Marcos Valdivia. I have contact with enough nature, but as for naturalizing the natural, making the natural human, there is very little. I’ve always believed that there is something wrong with the old idea of landscaping and that makes it more attractive to me.
Every so often a talking do appears.
I will visit Le Corbusier’s church in Firminy to find out about the bunkers and the sloping surfaces referred to by Paul Virilio and Claude Parent; Las Vegas by day, following the photographs by Ed Ruscha reissued by Robert Venturi.
I would love to be able to finally get inside Tristan Tzara’s House by Adolf Loos and the Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau in Paris; Frank O. Gehry’s house in Los Angeles and Donald Judd’s loft in New York. The two times I visited Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa it was a big surprise. The winter sun there is serene; the same sun as in September in the Atacama desert or the winter sun in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, accompanied by the cries from a caravan of women dressed in thick black. The hidden backside of the columns in the stepped colonnades of the temple of Hatshepsut is quite a sight.
By Claude-Nicolas Ledoux I would go to see the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans.
Without thinking twice I would not go back to Turkey or China; those countries require a special strength to be able to hold up to their cities, which 20 years ago seemed aggressive and unbearable. For the same reason, I would not go back to Mexico City, although I would return happily to visit Luis Barrag.n’s house to see the jugs submerged in the pool of the courtyard entrance. I will go back to Caracas when people can walk in the streets again, and I’ll go to the Helicoide building by Jorge Romero. I will be in Peru again next year, but I do not know where to go because there are too many things buried in that country and it is frustrating not to be able to finish anything. I will visit the Amano Pre-Columbian Textile Museum again, in Lima, and I have been invited to a small house in Cuzco... It’s been 30 years. Peru is too close to miss out on it. I would drive out to the salt flats between Chile and Bolivia and see the fragile constructions that persist at their edges. I will visit some of the wooden sheds on the sheep farms in Chilean Patagonia before they turn them into boutique hotels.
On vacation I would visit the island of Guadalupe, where Saint-John Perse was born; the island of Saint Lucia, where Derek Walcott was born; and Martinique, where .douard Glissant was born; all together they form the archipelago of mondialité.
I have to see the red museum designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza for the sculptor Jorge Oteiza. After having seen all the work by Eduardo Chillida, you must&mdashaccording to Oteiza fans&mdashreturn to the origins.
I’d like to visit some architectural archives, but that would take a lot of time, so I probably won’t. The rest&mdashchalk it up to tiredness&mdashI will consider as seen.
This text was included in: Puente, Mois.s (ed.), Smiljan Radić. Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears and Other Essays, Koenig Books, London, 2019. (English translation by Angela Kay Bunning)