Ricerc@Sapienza

Interventions on existing buildings are increasing every day. The actions do not
only affect buildings to be preserved for their history or importance, but also
“Tiers-Paysage”: in other words, abandoned or marginal residual places and
buildings become objects of interest. The object of intervention – once the
spirit of conservation is abandoned in spite of re-use and the sacredness of the
existing building – becomes manipulable, overwritable, making the waste as
activator of imagination. Is it possible today to define an architectural language
of modification? Nicolas Bourriaud, in his Postproduction affirms that from the
beginning of the 1980s, artworks were created from pre-existing ones. He
defines this tendency as post-production, or the artist's action to create
manipulation “processes” on materials that already exist. The use of this term is
borrowed directly from the audiovisual technical language used in filmmaking, to specify the last part of a movie production, which takes place when
shooting is over and the process involves video editing. The present essay thus
links cinema and architecture. Through this vision, we cover a narrative
sequence of moving frames for a static viewer in a first case, or processed in
the mind of a dynamic viewer in the second. If the perception and creation of
architecture would take place as a mounting of scenes or frames, what would
the editing design methodologies be? These might include chroma-key, jump
cut, fast cutting, graphical mach, mach on action, fades, mounting trick,
metamorphosis, cross-cutting, freeze frame, etc. New invention techniques are
investigated through an analogical comparative process, made on a selection of
projects in the built environment, by transposing the movie mountingtechnology and definitions within the architectural design discipline.