From structural logic to spatial poetics: the concepts of core-form and art-form in contemporary architecture

This PhD thesis, titled “From structural logic to spatial poetics: the concepts of core-form and art-form in contemporary architecture”, examines the architectural potential of such concepts as an analytical and designing tool for contemporary practice. Originally formulated by Karl Bötticher in 1843, within the context of his studies on the origins of Hellenic architecture, these concepts asserted the correspondence between a mechanical necessity, the structural function, and a symbolic manifestation, the ornament. Later, in 1860, Gottfried Semper adapted the idea of art-form to his theory of the cladding, ascribing priority to the symbolic act of dressing a building and relating it to the emergence of primitive cultures and the presence of mankind in the world. Almost a century later, in 1995, Kenneth Frampton recovers the theoretical contributions of both authors and expands our understanding of these notions for the purpose of refocusing the disciplinary discourse around the idea of tectonics.

Our research investigates how these terms have evolved over time and what are the specific manifestations that allow us to identify their interconnection and coexistence. On the one hand, these concepts have been almost entirely removed from contemporary theoretical discourse, although we can infer their presence in the built works. On the other hand, their use has been invariably associated with the idea of structure and of its concealment through cladding, thus thwarting the possibility of their coexistence in a same single entity capable of simultaneously bearing the load of the building and investing it with meaning. Designing a structure-based building, while embracing its full expressive and poetic potential, immediately presupposes a rational starting point that allows the incorporation of symbolic and cultural aspects which are inherent to the discipline itself.
This study demonstrates that through a physical and conceptual symbiosis between the core-form, statically resistant, and the art-form, symbolically apparent, it is possible to reconcile Bötticher’s original conception, which stated the primacy of gravitational forces and their transmission to the ground, with the cultural aspects proposed by Semper, thus fulfilling Kenneth Frampton’s purposes, which today may manifest themselves through fundamental issues such as the economy of means, the flexibility of uses, or social and political representation.

It is from this perspective that we analyse several reinforced concrete buildings constructed in the last two decades, in which we can identify a relationship of interdependency between core-form and art-form. From such a relationship, the concept of essential-form emerges. The geographical diffusion and formal diversity of the presented cases confirm that this approach moves away from a notion of style and combines the universal, imposed by the laws of gravity, with the particular, determined by cultural heritage, in an everlasting dialogue between nature and culture.