Around the World
In Memory of Bruno Zevi Architect and Theorist of Modern Architecture
Manouchehr Mozayeni
Memar 7 · Winter 1999
In the early morning hours of January 9th of this year, Bruno Zevi, the esteemed Italian architect and theorist, passed away in Rome — the city where he was born 81 years ago and where he spent most of his life. The news that major agencies published was essentially the same: "Rome: Architect and architectural historian Bruno Zevi, a passionate enemy of fascism in politics and architecture, died at 3:47 AM today (January 9). He was a professor at the universities of Rome and Venice. Through his writings, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright became widely known, and the concept of Organic Architecture — which Wright originated and which entails the fusion of nature and architecture — was explained by Zevi."
News agency dispatches are, by their nature, brief and, while conveying part of the truth, do not fully do justice to the subject.
In my view, Zevi was a theorist of architecture before he was an architectural historian. He knew the history of architecture well and was thus well-equipped to analyze architectural phenomena. Though Zevi played a major role in introducing Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture to Europeans (and to the world), his role in theorizing about modern architecture should be considered prior to his analyses of Wright's work. As far as I know, no other theorist or historian has analyzed modern architecture with such clarity and boldness. Moreover, explicit references to post-modern architectural tendencies can be found in his writings.
In his book "The Modern Language of Architecture," he enumerated seven characteristics — which he called "invariants" — of modern architecture. With clarity, candor, and a fiery language that seems to stem from his temperament, he analyzed and explained them, citing historical evidence — both old and new — in support of his views.
The first "invariant" he calls the List, as a method of architectural design. He writes that this list, which encompasses all the functions of a work of architecture, is the founding principle of the modern language of architecture and all other principles are subordinate to it. The example he provides is the element of the window in a building. The top facade represents a classical facade; the middle one represents a superficial or fake modern facade; and the bottom one is what Zevi himself proposes. In the first two, the windows in no way represent the function taking place behind them. Whereas in the bottom facade, each window plays its own tune.
He compares this principle to the concept of palimpsest: this principle wipes clean the tablet of accepted architectural rules, reconstructs it, frees it from these constraints, and writes a new prescription in its place.
Zevi himself writes in the preface to the second edition (1994): "Four years after the Italian edition of this book, I read a very amusing article entitled The Post-Modern Language of Architecture by Charles Jencks. This article shows that post-modern architecture, which has set itself against modern architecture, is in truth pre-modern architecture — the architecture of academic classicism. In that case, my book should be called The Post-Post-Modern Language of Architecture."
Zevi calls his second "invariant" Asymmetry and Discontinuity. He equates symmetry with waste of capital plus intellectual arrogance and contempt for human beings. He writes: "Whenever you have freed yourself from the vulgar fashion of symmetry, you have taken a very large step toward democratic architecture!"
Zevi calls his third "invariant" Anti-Perspectival. Perspective was discovered during the Renaissance by Italian masters, and Leon Battista Alberti first used it in the Church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua. But it was insufficient for conveying the concept of space-time of the modern age. The Cubist concept, manifested in works by painters like Picasso, best expresses the anti-perspectival concept Zevi proposes.
The example Zevi provides is Piazza Farnese: "If the buildings around this square had been built at angles to one another, it would have added to its three-dimensional richness."
The fourth "invariant": "Break the box!" He means that any architectural space enclosed in a purely cubic box should be opened up. Enclosed space confines a person like a corpse in a shroud. But if we open the six surfaces of this cube from one another, we have taken a revolutionary action fundamental to modern architecture. The Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe (1929) and his villa (1923) are built examples of this principle.
The fifth "invariant" begins with a quotation from Wright about Fallingwater: "...I knew enough of engineering to know that the outermost corner of a box is not the most economical place for bearing the box's load." Zevi names this invariant Cantilever, Shell, and Membrane Structures.
Zevi's sixth "invariant" is Space in Time, influenced by Giedion's "Space, Time and Architecture." Zevi writes: "The history of architecture shows lost opportunities: great leaps forward and long retreats. Michelangelo took a very great step forward. Everyone praised him, but no one followed the path he opened. Bernini made a forward leap, but was sidelined in his lifetime. Constructivism showed major advance before the October Revolution, but Stalin — who should be called a famous classicist — froze this movement..."
What I have written about Zevi, though brief, illuminates his most fundamental ideas about what he calls the modern language of architecture. Books could be — and will be — written about his ideas.
I saw Zevi only once, when he came to Iran for the Second World Congress of Architecture held in Shiraz in 1974. Colleagues at the Faculty of Fine Arts invited him to lecture. His warm manner and fiery personality — described by news agencies with the word "passionate" — and the content of what he said greatly captivated me.
At the time, I had recently returned to Iran from abroad, and the Farsi translation of "Space, Time and Architecture" had been published shortly before. I regretted not having been Zevi's student. Both his warm personality — perceptible through his gestures even without knowing Italian — and his penetrating analyses drew my attention. Later, through his books, although I did not agree with all his opinions, I admire his candor and his analytical method, which is always pedagogical. May he rest in peace.