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Filippo Alison, investigatorof the historical objectFrançois Burkhardt

My contract as director of the CentrePompidou in Paris had just expired, inthe summer of 1991, when the phonerang at home. On the other end of theline was Franco Cassina, president ofCassina SpA: “Hello, ProfessorBurkhardt, we are working on a newproject. We want to expand the‘maestri’ (great masters) programmeled by Filippo Alison, who I believe youknow.” “Certainly,” I answered him,“I know Alison from his work for youand from his writings, and I have hadthe opportunity to see him and hearhim speak at various round tables hehas participated in.” “Good,” contin-ued Cassina, “we want to create awork group comprising Domenico DeMasi, a sociologist and expert in theevolution of consumer taste; yourself,with your good relations with muse-ums and collectors and expertise inthe field of the history of design andFilippo Alison, who has deep knowl-edge of Cassina production. Wouldyou be interested in participating inthis group for the expansion of the ‘IMaestri’ collection?” “Willingly.” “Ok,come to Meda as soon as possible todiscuss the details of the contract withthe chief administrator.”I only found out later that it was Filip-po Alison who proposed the idea toCassina of setting up a work group forthe expansion of the I Maestri collec-tion, and also Alison who put forwardmy name. It was the best thing thatcould have happened to me at thetime, since after eight years at theCentre Pompidou, some teachingaside, I was practically without work.After contacting Cassina again, I got onthe first plane for Milan, in the directionof Meda. Arriving at the airport, I wasgreatly surprised to find a car waitingfor me there. Impeccable, I thoughtto myself. And in fact, the two and ahalf years I spent working for Cassinawere carried out in an environment ofcourtesy, helpfulness and truly ex-emplary cultural openness. At the firstsession, which would be followed byso many others, I finally met FilippoAlison and Domenico De Masi in per-son, and we quickly established bondsof professional exchange, commoninterests and a friendship that remainsstill today.

My connection with Alison emergedfrom our common interest in the re-cuperation of history and the adapta-tion of its contents in order to projectthem toward the construction of apossible future. We both believe thatit is necessary to consider history as afriend who accompanies us towardthe future and not as an enemy to flee,as unfortunately sustained by the “ad-hocist” idea that predominates today,which sees the present as complete-ly separate from the past and the fu-ture. According to this view, the onlything that has value is that which isimmediately perceived, taking into ac-count neither the consequences ofthis “immediate” on the future northat which is destroyed of the past. Itis the concept of the continuity of thevalues of history through the civilisingtransformations underway that makesit current, and this is the idea that liesat the foundation of our friendship. Anidea that profoundly marked FilippoAlison’s generation, which is for thatmatter also my own. Alison’s reflec-tions depart from the debate on con-tinuity or the crisis of the ModernMovement promoted by Bruni Zevi,Ernesto Nathan Rogers and GiovanniKlaus König, who are, together withRenato De Fusco, his theoretical ref-erences. Both in the construction ofresidences, as attested by the Rosahouse in Naples of 1972, which evi-dences a design approach concernedwith integration into historical contextand where one finds the lessons ofZevi and Samonà, and in the propos-al of remakes of historically importantfurniture, as he did for Cassina.In this regard, his research, whichtakes concrete form as much in histeaching at the University of Naples,in the Department of Furnishings andInterior Design, as in his furniture re-makes, is centred on the idea thatthere is an analogue between the de-sign processes focused on the preser-vation and revitalisation of historiccentres and those focused on the re-assessment of furnishings. Alison iscorrect when he writes that from apreservation perspective the prob-lems relative to the protection of ahistoric centre and those relative tothe restoration of a piece of furnitureare the same (see F. Alison, “I Maestri:ideologia di una ricostruzione”, inMade in Cassina, ed. G. Bosoni, Skira,Milan 2008). And this is perhaps the

correct angle from which to under-stand the breadth of his activity andthe uniqueness of a way of thinkingthat emerges from his training andfrom the practice of architecture ap-plied to design. I would say, in this re-gard, that Filippo Alison has carriedout a historic project that from themethodological point of view will re-main a model for future furniture re-makes. His reproposals of furnishingsfor Cassina by now constitute anachievement that is an integral partof the history of design in the twenti-eth century.Let’s stop for a moment to assess themethodology that Alison has appliedto this objective. It should be remem-bered that the “I Maestri” collectionwas the first attempt to remake his-toric pieces of furniture belonging tomodern culture and to propose themto the market producing them in se-ries, according to criteria typical of de-sign. As a consequence, the methodrefined by Alison became a model forthe collections that followed. The cri-teria applied were the following:- the objects chosen must be arche-typal, “rich in formal predicates capa-ble of revealing meaningful informa-tion about the cultural climate to whichthey belong”;- the nature of the model must be pre-served intact. Alison gives equal im-portance to the fact that the objectschosen must satisfy contemporaryuse. This despite that that value sys-tems of the time of original manufac-ture and those of the present are dif-ferent;- one must attribute importance to therecuperation of current forms andtechnical production methods with-out betraying period techniques. Onthis issue, Alison talks about consid-ering the past in the spirit of a con-temporary experience;- add nothing and take nothing away.It is necessary to find a manufactur-ing method that uses the techniquesof our own time, in accordance withprinciples the designer himself wouldhave approved of;- it is necessary “to avoid subjectiveaesthetic reactions that might polluteauthenticity”;- the objects reproduced in this wayare neither originals nor copies. Theydo not substitute the original product,but rather enrich it with a value de-rived from the methodology applied

to its reproduction and updating, there-by highlighting new problems in thefield of product design.

This last criterion is doubtless essen-tial for giving meaning and sense tothe reproduction of objects from dif-ferent periods and cultures. The factthat I myself was called in 2001 byThonet Vienna to become the artisticdirector of a series comprising re-makes of historic Thonet furnishingsbrought me even closer to thesethemes so dear to Filippo Alison. Inaddition to a solid friendship, giventhat I myself was a professor of thehistory and theory of design, a dia-logue developed between us, focusedon issues tied to the reproduction ofobjects and to teaching in this field.Together, we established that whatwas missing in this industry was a le-gitimising theoretical base capable ofopposing the majority of design pro-fessionals, which considers remakesa sentimental reflection tied to nos-talgia for the past, by now supersededand useless to our post-modern world.The widespread amnesia among con-temporary design historians should al-so be added, still tied to the greatthemes of architecture and the arts inthe wake of Deutscher Werkbund andBauhaus. Forgetting how the themeof furniture was interpreted by theUlm school starting from the 1950sas an integral part of design theory andno longer of architectural theory. Evenif the Ulm school vigorously opposedthe replication of historical objects.Between Filippo Alison and I there ishowever a major difference concern-ing the relationship between the his-torical object and the meaning to be at-tributed to this manufacturing industryin a period marked by postmodern cul-ture. Alison inserts his mission in thecontext of an era that he considers anextension of modernity. Whereas I,though my experience with theParisian exhibition “Les immatériaux”,conceived in 1985 with Jean-FrançoisLyotard, the father of post-moderntheory, have instead perceived the lim-it of this model, embracing the ideathat the production of historical furni-ture is legitimised no longer solelythrough agreement but also throughdisagreement, a positive element andproducer of renewal.If one wishes, one can consider thedevelopmental path of history through

the practice of reproduction, keepingin mind the constant acceleration ofprocesses that crosses the problemof accuracy and the return to the orig-inal. Thus one finds oneself facingchoices that generate a series of keyquestions: how to transform the ideaof the remake in order to assign it anoriginality corresponding to the post-modern culture? To what degree canwe transform and update a designer’sideas, especially when dealing withone of the “masters”? Alison engagedwith the work of Le Corbusier, Wright,Mackintosh, Rietveld, Asplund andothers; I with Thonet, Wagner, Hoff-mann, Loos and others. What are thelimits and rights, for those of us whoare collection heads, for transformingan original? And what right does thecompany we represent have to ex-clusivity over the manufacture ofworks by designers from the past?Dedicating myself to remakes for Ge-brüder Thonet I learned that curvedbeechwood was a simple and easilyadaptable technique, subject to infi-nite copying. It is a technique that goeswell beyond belonging to a brand, andthat gave impulse to countless busi-nesses, large and small, in Czecho-slovakia, Poland, Germany and Italy(especially in the area around Udine),arriving all the way to Russia. I alsoasked myself whether, in the nameof industrial progress, this impulseshould be slowed down by questionsof copyright and industry protection.Thonet’s success and the expansionof its production, let’s remember,were ensured by the “privilege” per-sonally awarded by the Kaiser to Ge-brüder Thonet, such as to protect itfrom competition. But, to tell the truth,this protectionism does not corre-spond to the industrial development ofsocially evolved countries, like thoseof Central Europe of the time, that as-pired to a process of democratisation.I think therefore that we can tranquil-ly produce for an elite that has expe-rience with history, that pursues theidentification of its knowledge with itssymbols and that privileges a “mon-tage” of history in private spaces andwith customised settings.At this point, however, one poses thequestion of the limit of the historicalobject as a mass product. Here it isnecessary to recognise the limits ofthe concept of modernity sustainedby historical Bauhaus, tied to a social

democracy that aspired to the indus-trial object for everyone and consid-ered design an element of social reg-ulation. This concept was in fact an il-lusion. And those of us who are artis-tic directors of historical collectionsmust recognise that we are produc-ing only for an elite prepared to un-derstand the objects and their histor-ical value. A concept, in practice, thatis not very popular.For Thonet, as for Cassina, the deci-sive criterion for ensuring quality isthat of guaranteeing the public an au-thenticity obtained not only throughthe exactness of the formal copy butalso through an absolute authenticitythat faithfully reflects the original mod-el in its constructive details. It is in thisaspect, that is the quality of the detail,that the original for which royalties arepaid differs from the rude copies pro-duced without paying any royalties.Alison and I go beyond, however, as-serting through the remake a culturalreflection which takes its theme asthe insertion of objects from one his-torical period into another, the presentday. We thus see the necessity of ap-plying a theory to this process, there-by legitimising the reproduction todayof a historical object.With Thonet, more than with Cassi-na, we grappled with the problem ofthe antique. Considering the high qual-ity of the products marketed by Ge-brüder Thonet, the number of originalpieces put on the antiques or modernfurnishings market is immense. Insome ways, a Thonet piece, if it is notrare on the market, when it is put upfor sale, turns out to cost less than thesame piece, remade.As for that which concerns themethodology applied to remakes, thecriteria to be followed are based onfive key points:- guarantee the absolute authenticityof the object choosing iconic models;- choose iconic models that featuretechnological innovations;- propose groups of objects taken fromoriginal catalogues, for example ahook, a mirror and an umbrella standthat constitute a wardrobe;- make a selection of models that canbe easily paired with contemporaryfurnishings;- limit the collection to a pre-estab-lished number of objects, with the ob-jective of guaranteeing greater valuefor the individual pieces; by surprising

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the competition through delaying theannouncement of the remake as longas possible and by concentrating pro-duction time, one avoids plagiarisedpieces, since when forgeries show upon the market the model of the re-production is already off market.

Differences notwithstanding, the con-tribution of the methodology I devel-oped to a theory of the remake is lessimportant for design than that whichAlison defined years earlier, in part be-cause my experience is above all con-centrated on the history of Viennesefurnishings.For the project “Mestieri d’autore”—for which the Siena Chamber of Com-merce assigned me the task of reviv-ing small businesses and local artisansand which was inaugurated in 1993,devoted to glassware of Colle Val d’El-sa—Filippo Alison was one of the se-lected designers. I was curious to seehow Alison would handle this revivalthrough a project that stood halfwaybetween design and craftsmanship.The given theme was the tie betweenthe present and memory. It tried toreunite the past (memory) with thepresent (creation today), a theme onecan define as an extension of his long-standing research on furniture by mas-ter designers. For this occasion, hebetrayed his own theory of the re-make to work a personal interventionon the iconography of the masters,departing from the drawings of Le Cor-busier (Dessins à partir de naturesmortes), Wright (a glass and somevases for the Hotel Imperial in Tokyo)and Mackintosh (a glass version of thefamous metal centrepiece). This ap-proach led him to one of the criteriathat he formulated for remakes, name-ly the copy according to principles thatthe “master” himself would haveidentified.Having deep familiarity with the waythe three chosen “masters” con-ceived of the design object, Alison cre-ated a series of objects “in the man-ner” of Le Corbusier, Wright andMackintosh. Unfortunately, the man-ufacturer lacked the courage to launchthis initiative, which would have cer-tainly been expanded with the inclu-sion of other “masters”. It was cer-tainly, for Alison, a step toward a se-ries of objects that would have inte-grated, in the field of furniture acces-sories and the art of the table, a project

already begun with furniture. On manyoccasions, Alison tried to relate hisconception of the “masters” to ob-jects of different types and materials,as he did for example with Sabattini.I would be tempted to say that theprinciples and methods developed byAlison starting with his work on the “IMaestri” collection stayed with himlike an obsession to the present day,in all of his fields of activity. It is enoughto attentively observe his plan for thepublic lighting of the piazzas andstreets of Ravello, or more recentlythe repurposing of the church of CristoRedentore and San Ludovico d’Angiòin the Royal Monastery of Santa Chiarain Naples (2007), to find the spirit ofthe masters so deeply studied and feltas to be present in all of his work.I have had the opportunity to observefirst-hand Alison’s great mastery in theredesigning of objects. With an eyeattentive to constructive systems, hedescribes the shape of an object, with-out erring and with such precision thatit corresponds to a scale drawing. Henotes down details and measure-ments in his notebooks such that, witha few pages of annotated sketches,he can redesign an object almost frommemory. He also notes what a re-make would need to correct in theconstructive system. His annotationsinclude materials and colours. In do-ing an analysis, Alison does not hesi-tate to turn the object upside down,turning it and turning it again until heunderstands the principle, the con-struction and the rationalisation of itsconstructive system. In his mind, hedisassembles and reassembles theobject until he knows it so well thathe never has need for taking pho-tographs. If ever he does need them,it is only to ensure that he has not for-gotten any aspect of the object to beanalysed. And all of this is done inrecord time. Listening to and spendingtime with him, he seems to be a slow-moving person, but when doing thiswork he is extremely fast. I remem-ber that on many occasions, over thetwo and a half years we spent travel-ing together in search of objects forCassina, it was necessary to study ob-jects in collections without drawingattention to ourselves. And at suchtimes Alison, with his fast drawingstyle, was able to record an object inhis sketches like a true investigator ofthe historical object.

The numerous trips that we took withDomenico De Masi to thirty-three Eu-ropean cities allowed me to get toknow Alison in the everyday. He wasalways affectionate and friendly, andour trio enjoyed moments of tremen-dous excitement over our numerousdiscoveries in museums and privatecollections, and also great happinessand tranquillity in the selection of nu-merous objects to propose to Cassinafor the expansion of the “I Maestri”collection. It was the orthodox de-signer interpreters of the contempo-rary who made our project fail, whichin my view was promising. With thetask binned, what remained was afriendship rich in exchanges and dis-cussions about the place of history,and that of presence and of memory,even if our visions of how to valoriseit differ. He, the modernist, convinced,I sceptical about modernity and its re-visions. Both however in search of anidea of society, based on innovation,that takes into account the lessons ofthe past for a more promising future.

For FilippoRenato de Fusco

In beginning the present note, I wouldlike to develop a few considerationson the theme of the “citation”, a top-ic pertinent to Alison’s work and tohow I have decided to write this textand, in general, to the citation in and ofitself and for itself. A more or less ex-tended textual reproduction of some-one else’s words, the citation is notonly verbal; it can also concern a ma-terial work, a gesture, a behaviour and,above all, a thought.My love for citations is borne out bythe magazine I founded in far-off 1964,titled Op. cit., and that I continue topublish faithfully according to the oldformula. Moreover, I hold the citationto be effective, first of all because itconstitutes an act of honesty towardthe original author, it respects his orher work and thought, it puts us intune with him or her.In addition, it is clearly distinguishedfrom the “paraphrase” which I some-times consider an act of hypocrisy inthat it is often, even without arriving atdeformation, at the least a reduction ofthe original assumptions for the useand consumption of he who is havingrecourse to it. Of course, if the cita-tion gives way to a new creative in-

terpretation, all the best is to be saidof the paraphrase.The preceding also serves to say thatin this text I am turning to the citationof that which I have already writtenabout the Filippo Alison’s design ac-tivity. Previously, I framed his bestknown work, the “I Maestri” seriesof the 1960s, when design cultureturned to the past, for a range of rea-sons: weariness with rationalist forms,the socio-cultural “contestation of thepresent”, historical revision after anabstinence from the past that lastedlonger than necessary, the “recoveryof unexplored values” (this funny ex-pression was in use in those years) orof values not completely developed,the anxiety of certainties, the desireto avoid further cultural waste, the willto reverse the tendency towardephemeral fashions and the viciouscircle of consumerism, etc.In this pile of motivations, impulsesand counter-impulses, from the ideo-logical “aesthetic professionals strike”to the sad games of radical design, afew designers—Gabetti & Isola inTurin, the young editors of Rogers’Casabella, the more mature Azucenadesigners and the Castiglioni broth-ers—turned their attention toward are-examination of the past. Nor wasthe playful and ironic component miss-ing from this re-examination, the wil-ful incongruence between old formsand new materials: one thinks of manyof the products designed by Starck.Out of all of this activity, definable as“neo-historical”, the most “scan-dalous” was that of Filippo Alison, withhis “I Maestri” series, produced byCassina. His programme, more broad-ly realised, was to re-propose fur-nishings by Mackintosh, Rietveld, As-plund, Le Corbusier and Wright. Thisproject was striking for many reasons.From when part of the public becameinterested design culture, there wasnot a single small business in Lom-bardy or Emilia that did not reproducelow-cost version of the Breurer arm-chair or some other Bauhaus-stylepiece, but who was thinking of thepost-Liberty style of the ScottishMackintosh, with whom Alison beganhis series of citations? Not only that,but who could have paired the work ofa Neapolitan architect, an artisan parexcellence, with big business in theItalian furniture industry, like that rep-resented by Cassina? Here one adds

that each series of these “citations” al-so included books and articles, exhi-bitions and publicity activity worthy ofa multinational. Very often, the happysite of an artistic/cultural enterprisedepends on organisation and perse-verance in the reproposal of theworks. Mondrian would have re-mained an unknown, had he not in-sisted for years on three basic coloursand lines at 90°.And so, far from being a nostalgic ini-tiative, a flight from the present or aneclectic revival, the reproposal of thework of the Masters, with its annexedcritical and philological investigation,was one of the most tangible aspectsof work on the renewed relationshipbetween history and design. In thephenomenology of this relationship,in which many were in one way or an-other involved, in the rescuing fromoblivion of an old piece of furniture, inthe giving shape to an original sketchmaterialising it into a modern object,the term “history” loses all aura (evensupposing, for the sake of argument,that “aura” is a negative) and everyaestheticism in order to present itselfas an “operative” field, while the term“design” loses all absurd pretext ofmodifying reality and of designing thenew beyond all precedent and allcode.In particular, what were Filippo Ali-son’s merits, and those of his “IMaestri” project? First and foremost,the choice of models that, a few dozenor so years old, could still be appreci-ated and used today. And from thisperspective, the Le Corbusier, arm-chair, Le grand confort, pace one hun-dred other, more modern ones, is theone that one sees more around. Ali-son’s second merit in terms of ma-nipulating old things and designs liesin that which, thanks to his precisephilology, he was able to draw from asketch by Mackintosh, often littlemore than a splotch, a very re-spectable piece of furniture. Nor canone ignore in Filippo’s choices the re-turn to those pieces of furniture that“cut a figure”. Here one thinks of thehigh-backed chairs originally designedby Mackintosh.After this attention to professional as-pects, we will now turn to another kindof discourse, that of the more personalspace reserved for sentiments. Inspeaking of a friend, as is Filippo Ali-son, I immediately think of another of

the few Neapolitans who have takenpart in the history of twentieth-centu-ry architecture and design, EdoardoPersico, who wrote: “perhaps, onecannot speak without some bombastabout these things, the impassibilityof the witness and reserves of the crit-ic are irredeemably swept away whenit comes to such a hot subject: theheart of a generation”. I think of Rober-to Mango, of Riccardo Dalisi, of Er-manno Guida, of Gabriella D’Amato,of so many others who contributed tospread design culture in our city.Since I deal almost every day with thearts and trades, with architecture, his-toriography and mass media, today Iwould like to write, as I repeat, some-thing about Filippo for “personal rea-sons”when, if one thinks about it, wealways act for personal reasons, whichthe moralists confuse with “conflictsof interest”, of course without failingto remember that I am speaking of agreat designer and a professor emer-itus of Federico II—and how we havelaughed together at this distinction,shared in common!I do not recall the first time I met Fil-ippo, but I have never forgotten hisfirst question: “do you like flowers?”,a question even more unexpectedsince posed by a hulk of a man à laHemingway, a native of Torre An-nuziata, a handsome young man witha British surname. I do not rememberthe encounter because perhaps weemerged together and together wehave shared the same interests, fromlove for architecture to that forwomen. Also similar has been our un-conventionality, the kind free of clam-orous gestures or adversity towardsomeone.We have not been without our differ-ences, and one in particular above allothers: Alison, always travellingaround the world, on the hunt for“masters”, while I have coexistedwith my agoraphobic neuroses on thePosillipo hill, from which even myideas moved, however entrusted tothe classic bottle in the sea lent to meby Vito Laterza. Filippo came to seeme after every trip with his fabuloustales, then re-elaborated by my criti-cal and aesthetic interpretations.These encounters generated a book,L’artidesign, in which we first distin-guished art, craft and design to thenreconstruct their synthesis, which is insubstance true industrial design. There

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are many who believe a book cannotbe written by two people, but fewknow the stuff that real sharing ismade of.

Ten fragments of an affectionatediscourseDomenico De Masi

I am neither an architect nor a de-signer. I have already confessed else-where that my initiation into these dis-ciplines derived, as a joint product,from my profession as a sociologist.The occasions through which this mul-tiple initiation came to be made sub-stantial were eight in total, all chance.The first came from the need to analyseWienerwerkstätte and Bauhaus or-ganisation, for a book on creativegroups in Europe. The second, moreempirical, coincided with the creationand execution of the whole sociolog-ical side of Giancarlo De Carlo’s projectfor the Villaggio Matteotti in Terni. Thethird, more in the consulting vein,played out in a sociological contribu-tion to Vittorio Gregotti’s planning fora Montedison research centre in Por-tici. The fourth occasion, more con-crete, was personal in nature: togetherwith some friends, at the beginningof the 1970s, we decided to build asmall “commune”, as was fashion-able in those semi-revolutionary times,in a splendid little town in Sicily. Eachof us contributed a sum that would to-day correspond more or less to 30,000euros and we entrusted Cesare de’Seta, who was the same age, to de-sign a house in the country in whichthe individual and collective dimen-sions could integrate in harmony. Thefifth occasion, of more expansivebreadth, permitted me to pass fromwhat one might call a “resident” ex-perience of architecture to one thatwas “nomadic” and comparative. In1991, on Filippo Alison’s suggestion,the furniture company Cassina creat-ed an interdisciplinary team of threeprofessionals—the director of the de-sign department of the Centre Pom-pidou, François Burkhardt, the under-signed and Alison himself—to scour allof the European countries, one by one,in search of design objects worthy ofbeing reproduced in series as Alisonand Cassina had done with the “IMaestri” collection. We combedthrough the best palaces, the best vil-las and the best applied arts muse-

ums, from Chechnya and Portugal toNorway and Hungary. The once-in-a-lifetime fortune of having two travelcompanions bursting with aestheticculture was for me like taking a com-plete intense and accelerated univer-sity course. And so, I learned that ar-chitecture and design are disciplinescomplicated by the fact of being es-tuaries of multiple other abundant dis-ciplines and I learned the differences,sometimes glaring, sometimes sub-tle, between the styles, the buildings,the objects of a Berlage or an Asplund,of a Horta or a Gaudí.After this, three further occasions fol-lowed. One is to be attributed to theexuberant imagination of Bruno Zevi:according to the statues of In/Arch,the president of the Institute cannot bean architect, and Zevi asked to me takethe post, thus giving me the chance tobe surrounded by the psychology ofhundreds of architects young and old,Italian and foreign.The seventh occasion brought meback at the side of Filippo Alison, sinceI recommended him to the Munici-pality of Ravello as the best-suited todesign the urban furnishings for thatincomparable town. The commissionwas realised in a number of benchesas beautiful as they are functional and,above all, in the street lamps for pub-lic lighting that today draw the admi-ration of tourists.The final occasion, as unpredictableas it was definitive, saw me in thecomplex role of promoter, controllerand mediator, which added a furtherfacet to the prism of my rhapsodic en-counters with architecture and design.For many years, I have visited Ravel-lo, and for just as many I have visitedRio de Janeiro. I am an honorary citi-zen of both. Among my friends in Rio,one of the most dear and certainly themost illustrious is Oscar Niemeyer.When, in summer 2000, the mayor ofRavello at the time decided to havean auditorium designed for this en-chanting “city of music”, it was naturalto think of Niemeyer. Oscar acceptedthe idea, enthusiastically drew up theplan and generously gave it to me asa gift. After a troubled journey of bu-reaucratic disputes and lunatic con-testations, now, finally, the work hasbeen completed. It comprises two pi-azzas, a great hall, two bars, a book-shop, two parking lots and variousspaces for offices, reception and ser-

vices. It required on my part assidu-ous, warlike control over the bureau-cratic process and, then over the var-ious construction phases, but it per-mitted me to observe on the field thethousand problems of architecture andfurnishings.Despite this multiple initiation, due ingreat part to the patient pedagogicalvocation of Filippo Alison, I would nev-er hazard the formulation of an analy-sis of his various scientific and artisticactivities: for this volume, this is han-dled by François Burkhardt and Rena-to de Fusco with all of their prestigiousexpertise. I will make a few forays in-to Filippo Alison as a person, even be-fore his role as architect, designer,teacher and writer. Ten fragments ofan affectionate discourse, which Ihave had the privilege of carrying outwith Filippo for thirty years.

1. Authoritative Neapolitan streeturchinFilippo Alison was born in Torre An-nunziata, between Vesuvius, the sea,Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum andOplontis. His Ithaca is in Posillipo, butfor his whole life he has travelled theworld in search of objects, colours,shapes, people and emotions. Justlike in a song by Lucio Dalla, in the mid-dle of the nineteenth century his great-grandfather Michael came from Scot-land to Meta di Sorrento, where hestayed to build boats. From his great-grandfather, Filippo inherited his blueeyes, a powerful stature and a facethat evokes the wise, adventurousbeauty that Ernest Hemingway at-tributed to Santiago, the protagonistof The Old Man and the Sea, or thatHerman Melville gave to Ahab in Mo-by Dick.An unrepentant modernist, he intro-duced the whole world to the mostbeautiful furniture designed by Mack-intosh, Wright, Le Corbusier, Rietveldand Asplund. In turn, he designedhouses, chairs, lamps, tableware, ur-ban furnishings, silverware, tables andthe prized Filumena espresso ma-chine, using wood, iron, clay, silverand fabric. “Everything there is onearth is design”, he likes to say. Anda notable part of that which has to dowith design has passed through hishead and through his hands.When Alison remakes a piece, hegoes through a procedure like that ofa philologically impeccable orchestra

director, who rigorously selects onescore from among thousands of oth-ers, studies it carefully, unearths itsmost intimate brilliant details, sagelyarranges it in the time, biography andwork of its composer to understandits meaning, and then gives it to thecontemporary public, through an or-chestra equipped with modern in-struments, obtaining stunning resultsthat not even the composer wouldhave imagined. In other cases, Ali-son succeeds in grasping, from theuncompleted drawing of a Master,sufficient information to completethe object as the designer wouldhave done, just as happened in themusical sphere with Schubert’s Un-finished Symphony or Mozart’s Re-quiem.The critics called it neo-historical. Amiraculous revitalisation, it appears tome, I having been able to acquiremany pieces of furniture handled byAlison with authentic prototypes, builtby the designers. Filippo did all of thiswithout any academic arrogance sinceall of his activity has the gift of light-ness.“It is necessary to be light like a spar-row,” said Paul Valéry, “not like afeather”, to borrow a metaphor thatperfectly fits our present case. Everyobject that has bloomed from Alison’spencil is gently light and sagely deli-cate. It has the self-assurance, thefreshness and the sensuality of a bril-liant Neapolitan street urchin.

2. NaplesI met Alison many years ago, in Mi-lan, on the occasion of a conferenceorganised by Rodrigo Rodriquez. Iknew him first by his fame, associat-ed with the “I Maestri” collection. De-ceived by his markedly Irish name, Iwas complaining that Cassina, need-ing to select an art director, went so farafield to find one, instead of turningto the great many excellent designersat home. I was talking along this lineto Rodrigo when he burst out laugh-ing: “Not only is Alison Italian,” he re-vealed, “but he is even more Neapoli-tan than you. And he is also here, onthe panel of speakers; I will go findhim and introduce him to you”. Bysheer luck, a photographer snappeda shot of us in the exact moment thatwe were introduced, and I keep thatphoto as a rare testimony to the in-stant in which our long-long friendship

was conceived. Alison, therefore, isNeapolitan, and thinking of it, hecould not have been anything otherthan Neapolitan. In a dense interviewwith Patrizia Capua given when heturned seventy-five years old, hespoke of his utopian project and said“it only could have come out ofNaples… The South knows thisrange of values that go beyond venalinterests”. Goethe said somethingsimilar about the Neapolitan lumpen-proletariat: “I find in this small popu-lace the most active and enterprisingindustry, not for getting rich, but forliving without cares.”Immediately after Italian unity, placedbefore the crossroads “industrialiseor fall into decline”, Naples fell into de-cline. Then came the first world war,then the second, and the city contin-ued to decline together with the restof the Italian South.Until the second world war, Naples,remained urbanly inter-class: in Spac-canapoli, in the Spanish Quarter, inSanta Lucia, the rich and poor lived to-gether. Today, instead, the rich are toone side, and all the rest are to theother. The Neapolitan character—in-tellectuals call it “napoletanità”, orNeapolitan values and culture—de-rives in great part from that mix ofclasses and social strata that, for cen-turies, lived together in the sameneighbourhoods, helping each otheror dominating each other in the bestialstruggle for survival: flashily the aris-tocracy, parsimoniously the middleclass, miserably the proletariat, des-perately the lumpenproletariat. But allwith ill-disguised cunning, ostentatiouscheer and substantial childishness.If one wants to understand “napole-tanità”, one must add to that mix ofclasses the thousands of years of ac-tivity of the sun and the Mediterraneansea. To the sun we owe the luminos-ity—that is the bold candour, the ex-uberant cheerfulness, the inclinationtoward carefree good humour—whichhas always struck foreigners. Goethewrote in his diary: “Everyone lives ina state of intoxicated self-forgetful-ness. Myself included… Yesterday Ithought to myself: Either you weremad before, or you are mad now.”But, under the sun-eros of the sky,which brings luminosity, there is thesun-thanatos of the earth, whichbrings the infernal: that Vesuvius andthose Campi Flegrei, always ready to

carry away houses and entomb in-habitants, imprisoning the Neapolitansbetween God and Satan.And then there is the sea. TheMediterranean. This sea in the shapeof a lake, onto which face Naples andTorre Annunziata, was once the cen-tre of the world, halfway betweennorth and south, and between eastand west. Here were born urban plan-ning, temples and museums, libraries,amphitheatres, baths and arenas, fes-tivals and universities, grammar andrhetoric, monasticism and monar-chism, reflection on life, death and hu-man happiness. The variety of thelandscapes, colours, civilisations,types, histories, religions, aesthetics,symbols, values; the co-presence ofwater and desert; of permanence andnomadism, of grapes, grain, palm, oakand olive trees. In short, the very old-est and the most post-modern. In thisMediterranean, Naples and Campaniaare a great repertoire, a summationand an estuary of types and styles, amobile land that invokes anchor pointsfrom which to orient oneself.Alison was a creator of anchor pointsin the mounting tide of Italian design.Anchor points that change the solidi-ty of history and the functionality ofthe future. Take, for example, the largeMackintosh dining table. It was de-signed for middle-class families at atime when they had staff for servingmeals. In remaking it, Alison kept inmind that today it would be unlikelyfor a middle-class family to have dailyservice staff and so he added a rotat-ing centre-piece like the ones used inChina, which lets diners serve them-selves and easily pass dishes. I sawthe original prototype of this table inGlasgow and I eat every day on theone reproduced by Alison: it is impor-tant to recognise that this one is evenmore beautiful and I am certain thateven Mackintosh would prefer it.What is Neapolitan about these an-chor points gathered by Alison in thevariegated universe of design? Whatis Neapolitan about Alison himself,with his Anglo-Saxon surname and hisIrish great-grandfather?As we have already seen, what Filip-po and his masterpieces have in com-mon is lightness, to which should beadded sageness and wisdom. Eachone of his works is the intellectualproduct of a highly intellectual mind,nourished by a stratified culture where

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Greece and Rome, the Gothic and theBaroque overlap; a culture fed by eyesthat investigated one by one thebrushstrokes of Massimo Stanzione,Aniello Falcone, Luca Giordano, Mat-tia Preti and Francesco Solimena; byhands that have calculated in palmsthe buildings of Vanvitelli, Fuga andMedrano; by ears accustomed to lis-tening to Pergolesi, Gluck, the twoScarlatti, Rossini and Donizetti, theglory of the four Conservatories andthe Royal Theatre of San Carlo. A citywhere Spain was present first withthe viceroys and then with the Bour-bon kings; Vienna was present firstwith the viceroys and then with thewife of Ferdinand, Maria Carolina,daughter of Maria Theresa of Austriaand sister of Marie-Antoinette ofFrance; England was present with Ac-ton, with Nelson and with the refinedHamilton.All of this and more is needed to ob-tain a mind as complex and sophisti-cated as that of Filippo Alison.

3. VesuviusBut Filippo is also a “primitive” whofeels every slightest change in na-ture, every slightest shading in flow-ers and leaves, every slightest varia-tion of light in a landscape. Thiscomes, I believe, from his birth andchildhood in Torre Annunziata, in theNeapolitan periphery between Vesu-vius and the sea. Around Vesuvius,everything seems fatal and primor-dial, conditioned as it is by the mys-terious and telluric forces of the vol-cano, as unpredictable as the wrathof Jupiter or the caprices of Venus.Here, the past and the natural stilldominate over the present and thebuilt, as invasive as this can be. Thismakes even the future primitive.As much as the Vesuvian construc-tions want to be modern, as much asthe cement and anodised aluminiumcan triumph there, these neverthelessremain closer to Uruk or Delphi thanNew York; nature not having yet beensupressed by culture, fear for the erup-tive violence of the earth not havingyet been surpassed by the stress of ur-ban life, desire for security and beau-ty not having yet been conquered bythe “desire for self-destruction”.Here, artisans produce their wares incoral, in paste, in cloth. Here, therepermeates a choral propensity to thejoy for life, a network of exchanges

with lands beyond the sea, a growingtension between identity and globali-sation.It was here that the mind and hands ofAlison became constitutionally and de-finitively artisan. It was here that thedeepest layer of the artist’s personal-ity was shaped: in this measure prim-itive and postmodern. The primitivedimension of the area around Vesu-vius (and of Alison’s personality) is ow-ing to the volcano, always differentand the same since the beginning oftime, imposing, hot, unpredictable,friend and enemy, domestic,Olympian, detached, providential,threatening, giver of fertility andbringer of fear and death. The post-modern dimension is owing to themélange of styles, the cement andthe anodised aluminium that jostlewith the Baroque style of the Vanvitellivillas, the perennial recycling of peopleand things, the temporal and spatialconfusion with the eternal and uni-versal, the intimate contest betweenroots and identity on the one hand andhomologation and globalisation on theother, the vitality, the hybridisation ofform and substance, viscera and skin,latent and manifest, challenge, victo-ry and capitulation.Here, the joy of life, which exudesfrom the songs, the fields, the faces,the tarantelle and the opulence of theorchards, is made more intense bythe insecurity, the looming perennialand enigmatic threat of Vesuvius. Theexcavations of Pompeii, the casts ofmen, women and animals petrifiedtwo thousand years ago by the dustand the lapilli, the gouaches that dec-orate every house one by one datingthe fiery eruptions that succeededone another over the centuries, re-main like nourishment for the collec-tive unconscious of the reckless na-tives. Among whom, the highly sen-sitive Filippo Alison.

4. DesignAlison is eighty years old: he has there-fore had the fortune of being con-temporary to the epochal passage ofour society from rural and industrial topost-industrial. To understand who Al-ison is and what his work represents,it is necessary to frame his personaltrajectory in the broader one of theworld that surrounds him and us. AsHaeckel would say, Alison’s ontoge-nesis recapitulates the phylogenesis

of society. And it could not be other-wise, as Arnold Hauser has demon-strated.In the nineteenth century, a few bril-liant entrepreneurs realised that a sci-entific combination of human andmechanical labour would permit farmore efficient results than what goodsense had obtained in all of the pre-vious centuries.In the manufacturing plant, creativitywas the absolute monopoly of the en-trepreneur/demi-god. His employeeswere there only to repeat, in millionsof copies, with millions of always thesame gestures, the prototype that theentrepreneur had conceived. Themost famous car of all time, the “Mod-el T”, designed by Ford in 1908 andproduced on an assembly line start-ing in 1913, would be churned out un-til 1932 in sixteen million substantial-ly identical copies.This is the production model that theWest would perfect and that wouldguide the economy until the middleof the twentieth century, when a se-ries of combined factors (demographicexplosion, increased life expectancy,urbanism, scientific and technologicalprogress, mass education, the media,cultural homologation, globalisation,increasingly widespread wellness)transformed industrial society, cen-tred on the serial production of mate-rial goods, into post-industrial society,centred on the production of imma-terial goods: services, symbols, val-ues, information, appearance.This revolution was anticipated by de-sign: by Thonet and the Wiener Werk-stätte in Austria; by the Arts and Craftsmovement, by Mackintosh and by theBloomsbury group in England; byBauhaus in Weimar and Berlin.After these avant-gardes—which unit-ed the beautiful with the useful, theaesthetic with the practical—furthertechnological progress made it possi-ble to delegate to machines almost allphysical and intellectual exertion.Longevity, acculturation, productivityand travel determined the exponen-tial increase of free time, of relaxation,of creative leisure, of learning and ofattention to aesthetics. From herecame the widespread need for objectscapable of accompanying man in thisnew adventure, supporting the plea-sure that comes from reflection, fromconviviality, from play. Objects de-signed to serve Narcissus, not

Prometheus, dense in aestheticmeaning and historical evocations, ca-pable of giving the user uncommoncreative stimulus, where imaginationand the concrete find reciprocal exal-tation. Made functionally perfect byperfected technology, these objectsdraw their market value no longerfrom their expected practical perfec-tion but from their renewed aesthet-ic dimension, which becomes a dis-tinctive factor for choice and preva-lent criterion for appreciation.In post-industrial society, which likesto define itself as a kind of democrat-ic Renaissance, the beautiful ceases tobe the exclusive realm of aristocratsand special occasions to put itselfwithin reach of the everyday of allthose who have eyes trained to enjoyit. Aesthetic reason, therefore, be-comes valuable, enriching objectswith metaphysical meaning and mak-ing it so that the useless, in order to beuseful, remains substantially useless.With our primary needs resolved andthe average life span doubled in justtwo generations, the focus turns tothe quality of life in order to confer alonger time on earth with richer anddeeper meaning.Serving this trend is the need to an-chor one’s own daily existence in“strong” signs and objects, providedwith meaning and capable of confer-ring it to those who use them, rootedin history and in consolidated culturebut launched to cross over restraints,intrinsically unsettling and rewarding,capable of resisting changing fashionswithout however obstructing or con-ditioning.With the lethal intuition of a consum-mate marketing expert, Alison andCassina perceived all of this and of-fered the voracious market a thundershower of objects perfectly in line withemerging needs, thanks to the au-thority of the signature, the perfectionof the remake, symbolic density andmaterial solidity.

5. Creative participationUntil the first half of the nineteenthcentury, aristocratic residences all overEurope were filled with “Biedermeier”furniture, heavy and joyless like theirdecadent owners. The middle classwas prospering, but their homes werestill remains. It was then that MichaelThonet (1796-1871) burst into theseanonymous homes, giving them an

identity. Carpenter, artist and brilliantentrepreneur, Michael glimpsed hismarket and his fortune in the emer-gent middle class. For middle classresidences he developed furnishingsin a wholly new, light and harmoniousstyle that would characterise hun-dreds of objects: from cradles, clotheshooks and chairs to kneelers, tablesand beds. Furnishing their homes withthese pieces, the middle class all overthe world demonstrated that theywere richer and more sophisticatedthan the proletariat, more cultured andcourageous than the aristocrats.Before the advent of design therewere splendid aristocratic residences,but these were masterpieces creat-ed by few artists for few users. Withdesign, instead, the whole materialuniverse that surrounds us—from theteaspoon to the city, it was said—wasanimated by objects created by manyproducers for many consumers, withthe aim of transferring the beautifulfrom exclusive locales to everyday life.The objects simplified but multipliedso that their arrangement would be-come increasingly complex. Next tothe designer, who creates objects,would however emerge the interiordesigner, who selects them andarranges them in dialogue with theclient and transforming spaces ac-cording to unified criteria born of thatdialogue.Design democratised not only beauty,putting it within reach of everyone,but also production processes andmodes of use, entrusting them to theintegrated activity of a “system” com-posed of entrepreneurs, artists, arti-sans, workers, transporters, critics,disseminators, publicists, exhibitors,buyers and furnishers. The designer,in turn, signs the objects but their re-alisation is the fruit of a choral effortwhere the artist and his or her collab-orators work shoulder to shoulder.Filippo Alison is a peerless expert inthis necessary choral activity, involvinghimself in extremely close relationswith the artisans and workers em-ployed in the construction of his pro-totypes. His propensity for dialogueand creative participation is compara-ble to that testified by William Morrisin a discourse of 1889 in which he saidthat, in applying art to everyday ob-jects, not only does one add beautyto these objects, but one renders joy-ful the work necessary to making

them. A wall hanging or a glass couldnever be produced by one man alone,but emerged from “millions and mil-lions of blows of the hammer, thechaser, the chisel, the brush, the shut-tle… an expression of the harmoniccooperation of a great number ofartists and artisans, and of the plea-sure that they experienced.”Filippo’s working method recalls thatadopted in Hoffmann’s Wiener Werk-stätte, where masters the calibre ofKolo Moser, Klimt and Hoffmann him-self worked side by side with silver-smiths, blacksmiths, typographers,bookbinders, tailors and carpenters.As written in a magazine of that epoch,“in the Wiener Werkstätte… the ob-jects are not designed only by theartist-designer, but also by the execu-tor, the artisan, the worker.”And so Filippo Alison’s design, in ad-dition to giving us beautiful and usefulobjects, has suggested to us, by ex-ample, a more just society where,next to material wealth, it is neces-sary to redistribute intellectual knowl-edge through co-participation in beau-ty in the very act of its creation.

6. Discreet luxuryThe evolution of design is closely tiedto the evolution of the concept ofluxury, since design emerged as aform however atypical of middleclass luxury.In the past, the luxury life consistedin the display of things of rare richnesswith the aim of stunning, intimidatingand reinforcing one’s own power andthe unbridgeable distance that sepa-rates the rich from the mass. But whatis luxury in our post-industrial society,where the majority of the populationis composed of middle classes thatcan allow themselves a comfortablelife? If luxury presupposes a tenor ofrare and exceptional life, what deter-mines rarity and exceptionality in a so-cial system marked by widespreadwellbeing? He lives in luxury who pos-sess things that are scarce: what isscarce in our lives today?According to Hans Magnus Enzens-berger, six things are scarce: time, es-pecially for bustling businessmen; in-dependence, which permits one tomake decisions without constraint ormanipulation; space, increasingly cor-roded by population growth, the floodof traffic and by the useless objectsthat amass in our homes; peace and

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quiet, threatened by the din of urbanlife and the crowds of citizens whotake away our solitude without givingus their company: a healthy environ-ment, made up of unpolluted air, wa-ter and food and security, which de-rives from a peaceful context wheresynergy prevails over competitivenessand kindness over aggression.To these increasingly rare (and so in-creasingly luxurious) commodities in-dicated by Enzensberger, I would addat least another three: conviviality, withwhich to fight solitude; a creative en-vironment, which allows us to investin reason and imagination and beau-ty, which lets us live among happythings and souls, even if not costly andcomplex. “A thing of beauty”, saidKeats, “is an eternal joy.”According to the rules of the old luxu-ry, it was not enough to possess agreat quantity of splendid things; itwas also necessary to put them ondisplay. But he who wants to live thenew luxury must acquire for himselftime and space, conviviality and inde-pendence, peace and quiet: all things,that is, that lend themselves poorly tobeing shown off like jewels. And so,in the future the most luxurious liveswill also be the simplest and most re-tiring.Today, design has the task of givingshape to this discreet luxury and togood taste, compatible with evenmodest purchasing power. MichaelThonet, the first artificer of this de-mocratisation of the beautiful, offered,through the inexhaustible creativity ofhis countless objects, infinite small op-portunities for everyday enjoyment.Filippo Alison incarnated the spirit ofdesign, impressing his life, even be-fore his works, with the new forms ofdiscreet luxury. He refused to supply,through objects, pompous status sym-bols, choosing instead to do otherwork more worthy of gratitude: en-riching things with meaning, insemi-nating conviviality and silence, peaceand pleasure, providing persuasivesupport for the luxury of the pause, alife nourished by creative leisure.

7. Work and playIn the collective imagination, condi-tioned by two centuries of hard-work-ing industrial society, work was op-posed to play, just as activity was op-posed to leisure, considered a lazy in-ertia connected to vice and waste.

Play, in turn, was considered infantileregression, this too inclined towardvice and the wasting of precious time.According to this mentality, a serious,reliable and well-educated adult nev-er lazed about and rarely played; hekept his emotions under control andlaughed in moderation. Play con-cerned children and, thanks to school-ing, had to gradually give way to work,which represented the very essenceof man, that which redeemed himfrom original sin, which made him freeand actively centred him in his com-munity.During adult life, play was clearly dis-tinguished from work and was rele-gated to free time. Henry Ford, thefounder of the mythic automobilecompany and inventor of the assem-bly line, wrote in his autobiography:“When we are working we need towork. When we are playing we needto play… When work is done, onlythen can come play.”In the previous centuries it was notlike this: the farmer and the crafts-man lived in the same places wherethey worked, their work time inter-twined with that for relaxation. It wasindustry that separated the homefrom work, the life of women fromthat of men, exertion from enter-tainment.Filippo Alison practiced and taught adifferent work mode, which tres-passed work and play and that I call“creative leisure”. Thanks to this, forhis whole life Alison joined the pro-ductive activity with which one cre-ates wealth, the research activitywith which one creates knowledgeand the activity of play with whichone creates high spirits. This is howhe worked and this is what he taughthis students.

8. The gift of meaning“To educate”, said John Dewey,“means to enrich things with mean-ing.” In his pedagogy, meaning andexperience are central. To prepareoneself for life, he argued, everyyoung person must actively experi-ment, first-hand, with the concrete as-pects of the world around him, bit bybit expanding his curiosity, his knowl-edge and his reflections, appreciatingthe dialectic between differing opin-ions and dedicating himself first-handto improving society. Dewey’s peda-gogy presupposes that the world is in

continuous development and that so-ciety possesses the strengths nec-essary for renewing its values, formaking a treasury of its traditions andfor winning the great challengesposed by nature.These are also the ideas that guidedthe educational activity of Filippo Ali-son, who beginning in 1971 taught“Furnishing and interior architecture”at the University of Naples, deeplyloved by his students, who enjoyedhis charisma.Alison never theorised his pedagogicalprinciples, but we can easily deducethem from his concrete teachingmethodology, based on a premisedear to Dewey, according to whichonly a democratic society stimulatesrenewal through its recurring crises.To overcome these crises and achievedemocracy the active participation ofevery single student or every singlecitizen is necessary and there can beno real participation if the individual isnot adequately educated in freedom ofthought, in sharing, in sociality and inbeauty.Before the same panorama, the samemonument, the same film differentpeople perceive different meaningsand experience different emotions ac-cording to the way in which they wereeducated to understand, assess andsavour all the richness of content thatthat film or monument or panoramacontains. The long lines of visitorscrowding to see an exhibition can beseen to demonstrate that the deepneed for cultural enjoyment is on therise, but can also signal the commer-cialisation of art reduced to fashion.For an experience to be rich in mean-ing to the point of making us happy, itis necessary to treat it like an adven-ture of the spirit for which one pre-pares with the attentive trepidationthat merits an amorous encounter.Mollie Orshansky said that “poverty,like beauty, is in the eyes of the be-holder”.Alison does not venture to say, likeDostoevsky, that beauty will save theworld. For him it is enough to believethat beauty can save those among uswhom nature has gifted with the righteyes for seeing it, a heart suited tofeeling it and a mind cultivated to de-cipher it. Nature, in fact, is not enough;culture is also needed. Bertrand Rus-sell wrote: “I have enjoyed peachesand apricots more since I have known

that they were first cultivated in Chinain the early days of Han Dynasty; thatChinese hostages held by the greatKing Kaniska introduced them to In-dia, whence they spread to Persia,reaching the Roman Empire in the firstcentury of our era; that the word ‘apri-cot’ is derived from the same Latinsource as the word ‘precocious’, be-cause the apricot ripens early; and thatthe A at the beginning was added bymistake, owing to a false etymology.All this makes the fruit taste muchsweeter.”It is culture that gives sense to things,fills them with beauty, multipliesmeanings. This is true whether saidof a dress, a recipe, a building or anobject. The same film, the same book,seen and read by people from differ-ent cultures, become different booksand films. It is culture that allows us tounderstand what “beautiful” is andwhat its function is; what relationshipthere is between the beautiful, thegood and the true; what connectionexists between art and life.Filippo Alison’s life has been dedicat-ed to study, hands-on experience andresearch. With his books and his uni-versity teaching, he enriched ourthings and our lives with new mean-ings, teaching us that “it is necessaryto cultivate our garden”, as Voltairewould say.

9. Happy sobriety“Relieve me of the necessary, butleave me the superfluous”, to para-phrase Oscar Wilde, incapable of per-ceiving the serene conquest of a so-briety happily equidistant betweenlack and excess.Cleobulus, one of the great sages ofancient Greece, when invited to syn-thesise all of his wisdom in a singlephrase, wrote: “Due measure isbest!” All of classical philosophy priv-ileges sobriety, starting from the con-viction that life is a rare and preciousnectar, to be sipped, not gulped.Filippo Alison has been a healthy bear-er of this wisdom: in his works and inhis life.Agnes Heller holds it difficult but in-dispensable to avoid the excessesinduced by the consumerism/competitiveness dyad, directing ourenergies instead toward qualitativeneeds coherent with our humanroots.What are these needs? The need for

introspection demands that, isolatedfrom the world, we turn back ontoourselves to reflect on our destinies.The need for friendship requires thata part of us is realised through solid in-dividuals, capable of completing ourlives with theirs. The need for lovecalls for an incandescent, pervasiverelationship, with persons more thanany others worthy of our uncondi-tional dedication. The need for playleaves space for the child in all of us,with its wonder, its curiosity, its senseof adventure and its brilliance. Theneed for community requires our self-recognition in a collective worthy ofour dedication.To these needs, which Heller called“radical”, I would add others of a sim-ilar character: the need for beauty,which calls for a universe of signs andobjects around us, coherent with ourcultivated sensibility; the need forserenity, which demands the luxuryof the pause and the awareness ofthe fleetingness written into our hu-man destiny and, finally, the need forgenerosity. “Experience”, wroteMarx, “defines as happy he who hasmade the greatest number of othershappy” and since, as we have seen,a work of art is an eternal joy, it is nec-essary to consider that Filippo Alison,having made happy the thousands ofpeople who have used his creations,has been, in turn, happy himself.We might distinguish in humanity, ina Manicheanly drastic manner, be-tween those who, by nature, cultivatean “instinctive propensity for credit”,they feel it is their right to receive fromothers, without obligation for grati-tude, everything they ask for. Thereare others who instead nurture by na-ture an “instinctive propensity for deb-it”, feeling obligated toward humani-ty and taking all opportunities to repaythis debt through a range of actionsrunning from small daily generositiesto major expressions of altruism.In every room of my home and of myoffice, there is at least one object de-signed and realised by Filippo. His gen-erous presence is assiduous in thehomes of all of his friends, in signsand gifts of serene beauty.

10. Beyond the necessary“The role of design”, declared FilippoAlison when he turned seventy-five,“lies in the diffusion of values throughthe satisfaction of necessity, is it the

task that society has given to archi-tects. In educational activity it is nec-essary to go beyond the necessary,since in any work done with passionthere is always something more to beknown.”Going beyond the necessary does notmean going over into the superfluous;it means achieving perfection. Andthis is what Carlo Scarpa did with hisfurniture where nothing can be addedand nothing can be taken away. Andthis was also done by Anton Dohrn,founder of modern biology and cre-ator of the mythic Naples Zoology Sta-tion, who revealed: “I need to try tostretch the elastic of my life as far aspossible.”I believe that there is no great Neapoli-tan more similar to Alison in terms ofrigour and passion than Dohrn. Andso it seems to me that the best wayto draw these fragments to a close isin the juxtaposing of these two fig-ures.I am happy when the things I careabout also care about each other. Iwould have therefore liked for FilippoAlison to have been a contemporaryand friend of another great Neapoli-tan by adoption, who even resembledhim physically and whom I hold inequal admiration. This is Felix AntonDohrn (1840-1909), the German biol-ogist who chose Naples as the site forhis research and his laboratory, whichone can still admire today on theNaples promontory, destined to be-come the incubator of hundreds of sci-entists, nineteen Nobel prizes amongthem. When the laboratory’s jubileewas celebrated, two thousand scien-tists from all over the world wrote: “Itis impossible to conceive of what thestate of biological science would havebeen today without the influence ofthe Station.” In the same way, itwould be impossible to say what de-sign would be today without the in-fluence of Filippo Alison.Like Alison, Dohrn was also a consci-entious, orderly, meticulous card-com-piler on the one hand, and a volcanictraveller, organiser and exciter of en-ergies on the other. A sanguine andvital optimist but also a meditative dis-illusioned type who for his whole lifefollowed his interior demon, his cre-ative furore.Felix Anton Dohrn, who from a youngage demonstrated a marked artisticspirit destined to find later expression

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in the organic form, conceived of theZoology Station as a work of art, de-signed by Adolf von Hildebrand andfrescoed by Hans von Marées. Filip-po Alison, who from a young agedemonstrated a marked engineeringand constructive spirit destined to findlater expression in the aesthetic formof design, conceived of his works ofart as technically perfect as well asaesthetically enjoyable machines.Dohrn and Alison share great charis-ma, a solid scientific foundation, anacute and restless intelligence, a lim-itless imagination, a secular and liber-al upbringing and a creative will thatpushed them to start new initiativesno sooner than glimpsed the result ofthe preceding ones. Inclined towardirony and tolerance, capable of movingeasily among both the humble and thepowerful, always ready for conversa-tion and cultural exchange, highly at-tentive to technological innovation,tireless travellers, open to dedicatingall of their energies to teaching, whichcame before all else.In 1876, Anton Dohrn wrote: “Ofcourse, the activity consumes my bestenergies, my best interests, and yet itis so grand as to give me immensehappiness. And this happiness is thebest compensation, the strongeststimulus to further creation… I de-ceive myself that the real aim of mylife was that of creating this great lab-oratory. And yet it is not true. I want-ed something different. Who knows ifI will get there? I wanted to create spir-itually, live spiritually, conclude my ex-istence in an atmosphere of inner ci-vility. But in our time this is more dif-ficult than before: the wild, hasty lifeof today drags away even those whowant to put up a fight … It drags themaway, Lord knows where.” This wasin 1876!More than one hundred years later,when he turned seventy-five, FilippoAlison, a tireless researcher with anextremely fast mind in a slow body,confirmed, speaking of himself: “Ask-ing oneself continually the why ofthings gives force to existence. If Imeasure these reflections with theconcrete time of my life, I can say Iam content. In the microcosm towhich I belong, I believe I have doneenough. And yet, I still have the de-sire to investigate. I always work withthe idea of making another discovery.”Naples is an unlucky city, but it hides

in its forever declining body thesegems with which we adorn our souls.In the wild, hasty life of today, in thetorrential jumble of infinite ephemer-al objects, Alison laid down anchorpoints that we can cling to. Anchorpoints from which one does not es-cape and which one does not debate.“Whereof one cannot speak, thereofone must be silent”, Wittgensteinwould say.

Habitus/Inhabiting in FilippoAlison, master builderNicola Flora

Filippo Alison can be rightfully includ-ed in what many critics have definedas the Modern Movement’s “thirdgeneration of masters”. He has fullyshared, in his more than sixty years ofactivity, its cultural dynamics andstrategies, even if with a powerfullyindividual operative undercurrent, asone will argue in the present text.There has always been in Alison thatpropulsive, positive edge, factual butwithout dogmatism, that has charac-terised the thought and activity of thatlarge group of European architects,the most important and famous ex-ponents of which are Fehn, Utzon, Al-ison & Peter Smithson, Siza, Sottsass,Rossi, Gabetti & Isola, Távora and DeCarlo. Over the long temporal arc oftheir theoretical and operative activi-ty, through the constant modificationof expressive interests and ap-proaches, the original passion for themasters of the first generation of themodern has always been openly de-clared. His love for the social achieve-ments of architecture in the earlytwentieth century was such as to mo-tivate Alison to also investigate the ar-eas in shadow, the minor production,works set aside by the critics thatwere for him carriers of new spacesfor reflection and research.During this journey, sometimes alsothe herald of direct conflicts and gen-erator of intellectually significant frac-tures (here one refers to the experi-ences of TEAM X and its bitter clash-es with CIAM), the third generation ofmodern masters—and Alison withthem—turned its attention to au-thentic masters wrongfully forgottenby the more oriented and sectarianhistoriography of early modernity. As-plund, Plecnik, Gaudí, Voisey and Mac-murdo were finally recognised as car-

riers of a figurative and philosophicalspecificity that was original and little in-vestigated, and thus enormously use-ful for those who wanted to move for-ward without however losing a senseof continuity with the recent past thatfor some rigorously modernist histo-riography had to be absolute and with-out reconsideration1.We owe to architects like Alison muchof the intellectual freedom and ca-pacity to ask fundamental questions ofhistory, recent or distant, without fear-ing finding unexpected or perhapscontroversial answers. Reflecting onit, one should recognise that this is ac-tually the heart, the best and mostoriginal part of Western architecturalresearch in recent decades. Follow-ing these guidelines one can also readthe results of a long life of researchand practice in Filippo Alison’s trade,architect and teacher, builder and cul-tural promoter. The lines of researchthat he followed and opened up haveproposed directions along which manyhave oriented themselves and grownintellectually and professionally. Thecertainty, deeply felt by this group ofyoung men in the 1950s, was that thenew paths that they were startingdown would be interesting. Today onecan say with confidence that their in-tuition turned out to be spot-on. Onecan affirm that thanks to that work,the inheritance of the masters of thefirst generation of the Modern Move-ment, healthily de-mythicised, be-came fertile material for the youngergenerations of architects and archi-tectural researchers.These architects, and Alison withthem, immediately understood thatnothing could be more lowly than be-ing afraid of looking for and investi-gating new paths, ceasing to ask ques-tions. They were able to pay attentionto the smallest and least striking thingswhile the whole Western world, de-finitively organised in a capitalist key,was demonstrating increasing inca-pacity to regenerate thoughts and ma-terials, to welcome different and far-off cultures and hybridise themamongst themselves and with ourlong and venerable history. Asplund,Mackintosh, Plecnik, Voisey, Lewer-entz, Elien Gray, and certainly alsoWright and Le Corbusier, becamework companions and the sources ofnew research possibilities for theseyoung architects. For Filippo Alison in

particular, then, every piece of writ-ing, every design and constructivegesture was a cue for engaging in di-alogue, for understanding and ex-plaining to oneself, to students and towork and research colleagues howmuch beauty there was in even thelesser-known depths of the work of agreat many authors. Those masterswho, “sacralised”, engendered awe inthe many, were for Alison a stimulusfor dialogue and comparison throughconstant re-readings of works andwritings.It is not easy to imagine what it mighthave meant for a young architect, justbeginning his career as a profession-al and researcher, to wake up onemorning to see, in Casabella maga-zine, the Guggenheim Museum inNew York or the Tourette convent orthe project for the Venice Hospital.Certainly, he would have been able togenerate an uncritical adulation andso a sense of impotence in the face ofmaking and producing. Instead, thisgeneration of architects grew up dur-ing the second world war and, Alisonwith them, were instinctively certainthat they needed to re-think the waysof co-existing with these influential fig-ures. But even more than this they in-tuited that they would have much tolearn from people and places thatwere for too long regarded as ene-mies and inhospitable. They under-stood, on their own, that the close in-teraction between doing, the searchfor meaning and understanding howto orient one’s own work would findsure nourishment in local traditions,even distant ones, humble and far-offones, and not only in the “word” ofmasters still so “cumbersomely” ac-tive and prolific.It was precisely this a-rhetorical, Iwould say diagonal and profaning,gaze that saved them from being daz-zled by the mythicising and sacralis-ing reflection that history had alreadydeposited on these figures. Return-ing more specifically to Alison, whowrote that he has always thought thatalready in the structure of his name—and in his even bodily contrast withthe people of the places where hewas born and raised—he had antici-patory traces of a future that wouldbe manifested in the forms of a back-wards journey to places that, withoutknowing, needed to instinctively feellike real, true places of origin. De-

scending from an Anglo-Saxon trav-eller who stopped in the nineteenthcentury on the beautiful shores ofCastellammare di Stabia, nature giftedhim with a powerful physique, clear-ly like the men of the North who hadgiven him his stature, his counte-nance, even the pale colour of hiseyes. Alison grew up and nourishedhimself on centuries-old traditions andcultures in the shadow of the ruins ofGreek and Samnite cities (Hercula-neum and Pompeii), before a sea filledwith echoes, of songs about thedeeds of heroes and mythological voy-agers.Those who have had the chance tospeak, converse or better still workwith Alison know the strength of theinteraction between his imposingphysique, his smiling and curious gazeand his elegant and tapering fingers,constantly caressing objects, materi-als, pencils and pages. Everythingdone with calm, tranquillity and refinedelegance in addition to an absolutelypure, never ostentatious passion, inconstant need of getting closer to theform without disturbing it, with a light-ness that appears impossible in a bodyof that impressiveness. Observing himat work one witnesses the obstinateattempt to push the form to make it-self clear, to emerge from the obliv-ion, in order to understand it, fix it and,finally, realise it in the most varied ma-terials. In an interview of Renato Gut-tuso, one of the last, the interviewerasked how he seizes hold of inspira-tion when it presents itself. After a si-lence and a look worth all the timespent watching that broadcast, the oldpainter answered: “simply put, I makesure I am always in front of a canvas”.This is just as true for Filippo Alison. Heis always there, ready with a pencil, apiece of paper, a notepad, material, aspace, in order to give shape to theform that he is investigating and that,when called forth with Alison’s inten-sity and assurance, inevitably presentsitself: it is enough to make sure he isat work, ready to seize it.While still very young, he took off in aFiat 500 with a travelling companionand life-long friend for the North, theNorthern Europe that for men fromSouthern Italy is a separate, but nev-er forgotten, homeland. And for Ali-son for a double reason. While he wasgaining practical experience, still a stu-dent in the young faculty of architec-

ture in Naples, he worked constantlywith his professors, Canino, Cocchiaand, especially, Mango. These teach-ers, who had their professional stu-dios in Palazzo Gravina, the historicseat of the Neapolitan faculty, werehis first direct masters in the schooland practice of the trade. Neverthe-less, Alison instinctively felt the limi-tations of their activity and thinkingabout architecture. Of course, thesefamous and austere instructors, how-ever with enormous expertise andmany social and institutional connec-tions, perceived the restlessness ofthe young and talented architect. Per-haps they also thought that one wouldhave been able to be content withtheir authoritative teaching. The youngAlison was however inspired by an ur-gency to know first-hand the Anglo-Saxon world he knew to be intrinsicto the European culture of inhabita-tion in the twentieth century and thatfor him also meant discovering his an-cestral land.The experience would be, as we knownow, a happy one. The emotional andcultural treasury that Alison broughtback from that trip, the first of a greatmany others, would be the domesticspirit for which the modern would al-ways be indebted to the Anglo-Saxonworld. That domestic spirit that fightsagainst the monumental, that de-sacralises masters “divinised” bymodernist publicity hagiography, re-admitting them to intellectual and fac-tual use for all of us who are architec-tural professionals; that absolute at-tention to the well-made, to designthat explores the rigour of the as-semblage so that the object, even ifthe most minute and simple, reveals,through the senses of he who will useit, the reason behind its form; the ab-solute priority of comfort over thebeautiful form made only to dazzle.This is the prize, the reward, and itwas this that he would work on withobstinate determination opening pathsto many who would after him followthe strategy of working in constantmovement, like a pendulum, now at-tracted by speculative and philosoph-ical cognition and immediately afterby operative praxis.As one will probably understand fromthe argumentation presented up tothis point, the identifying code for Al-ison’s work is more methodologicaland philosophical than figurative and

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formal. More precisely, it is manifest-ed in his practice of holding the just-found solution to be momentary, nev-er definitive, in the certainty that con-tinuing to investigate, to compare, totry, some more considered reasoningwill lead to the revision of the solutionthat in the first instance seemed nec-essary and rigorous. All of those whoknow Filippo Alison well affirm to havebeen always fascinated by the sur-prising capacity of the Neapolitan ar-chitect to constantly shift his point ofview for the working out of a problem,never becoming attached to a singlesolution, aware that its form can beso persuasive as to be deceptive andpetrifying.Alison, as with the Smithsons andTávora, always remembers that it isnecessary to train oneself to resist thepure sensuality of form: the sketchmade with the “wrong” hand, à la LeCorbusier, in a certain way sought toprotect designers from exactly thisdanger. The thing that, in the finalanalysis, rewards getting close to thework and thought of Filippo Alison isknowing how to appreciate the needfor cutlery to have a curve, a specificthickness for encountering the hand insuch a way as to become one withthe person and strengthen that ges-ture of collecting and raising food forwhich it was always designed, ratherthan being the representation of thedesire for possessing the food itself.Attention that also manifests itself inhis constant invitation to his studentsand the architects he has worked withto become like children if they needto realise a children’s room or like stu-dents if they need to design a univer-sity classroom or like nuns if—and thepresent writer had the good fortuneto verify this personally—one neededto ponder the small facilities andspaces for the rituals of a cloisteredcommunity.The identifying code for all of Alison’swork is, in the final analysis, design-ing and redesigning, to the point of ex-haustion, chairs conceived by othersbut that in his hands are transformed,becoming more comfortable and wel-coming: a little bit higher, a little bitbroader, a little bit differently shapedin the development of an area like thefeet, from where they touch theground up to meeting the cross-pieceand then the support of a person’s tor-so up to the encounter and design of

a figure in the air. All of it investigatedon sheets of paper where a streetlamp often shares space with a build-ing plan and the title of a book to beread or remembered, with a noteabout a lecture to be given, the nameand number of a cabinet-maker or ablacksmith or a ceramicist.Recently, Giorgio Agamben, in thebeautiful volume Altissima povertà2,wrote the words that the presentwriter had long searched for in an at-tempt to describe Filippo Alison’s de-sign work, Agamben wrote: “Themost precious legacy of Franciscan-ism, to which the West will always,as its undelayable task, have to returnin order to measure itself, [is] how tothink of a form of life, that is a humanlife completely removed from theclaiming of rights, and a use of bod-ies and the world that never substan-tialises in appropriation. So again: thinkof life as that in which there is no prop-erty but only common use”3. Design-ing a house, Alison has always said,is preparing a site so that one can bringforth a banquet that aspires to “coeno-bitic” character (in the sense of koinosbios, of life in common) and not think-ing only about an object that repre-sents it. Think of a form of life that con-siders things, thoughts, shapes andmaterials not as subjects for some-one to appropriate but rather consid-ered and naturally felt by all to be avail-able for common use.Life itself, always made present byAlison as a reason for encounter withthe other, is the real end of this mostancient and in this way most nobletrade of the architect (literally: archétèkton, builder of/according to princi-ples4), is the only “goddess” to whichone must explain oneself. The form isa discovery, a gift in a certain way sec-ondary and that matters only if it nar-rates the meanings of the reason forwhich that space, that form, that ma-terial was planned or carried out. Yes,this is the aftertaste that Alison leavesbehind every time someone speakswith him about architecture, in en-counters that then always lead to talk-ing about himself, about his own re-lationship with others and with theworld, about his children, about hisaspirations, about the ideas and pro-jects he is working on, about ap-proaches to teaching for improvingthe quality of communication with hisown students.

Again citing Agamben, here regardinghis reflections on the deep relation-ship of meaning between the wordshabitus (way of being), abito (clothing),and abitare (inhabiting): “for monks,living together thus means sharing notsimply a place and way of dress butfirst and foremost a habitus and themonk is, in this way, a man who liveson the way of ‘inhabiting’, that is fol-lowing a rule and a form of life”5. Inthis sense it would not be improperto state that Alison has followed a“monkish path” to architecture, in theextremely close, vital relationship be-tween his way of being, the ways ofrepresenting his persona and his in-habiting and making inhabited thespaces that he has designed, lovedand realised. Here is another gift andquality of this third generation of mas-ters to which Alison belongs: neverhaving felt the need to declare them-selves masters, but having led a pro-fessional life and conducted researchwith the goal of constructing one’sown being-in-the-world and thus one’sown habitus for dwelling with one’sfellow beings, poetically, in this world.Following the furrow of Agamben’sreflection, we can say that for Alisonthe habitus becomes inhabiting-with,inhabiting the world and things, shar-ing through use the intellectual knowl-edge and physical beauty of things,without principles of authority to besubjected to or worse to impose onothers.Thus the spatial interiors that FilippoAlison realised with workmen who al-ways felt him to be a work compan-ion—one of them, who knew how towork wood, fabric, glass, brass, cop-per, clay, tufa, plastics, enamels,resins—never had the goal of makingmonuments, but rather intimatespaces and interiors designed andbuilt always and only for the peoplewho would live in them. Of course,those who have followed Alison’swork through his activity as publicistand teacher will have noticed how ar-chitectural production is the most con-cealed aspect of his activity, and veryoften concealed by Alison himself,precisely due to the stylistic code wehave signalled. Even among Neapoli-tans, the only building one knows ofas the work of Filippo Alison is thatelegant salmon-coloured structurethat appears, discrete and extremelybeautiful, travelling the esplanade of

Via Partenope in the curve that stilloffers a view of the Villa Comunalebehind but that hides the docked-tu-fa-ship that is the Castel dell’Ovo. Thisposition as well, although by chance,being one that foreshadows the dis-covery of the beauty of which it ishandmaiden and servant, and that re-moves the work from direct compar-ison with the castle, is in a certain way“Alisonian”.The building, so apparently simple,displays a slight torsion of the pow-erfully horizontal balconies that, as ifarrested in the moment of wantingto come out of the architectural vol-ume toward the sea, counterpoint thesubstantial vertical development of thebuilding bringing it to a more tranquilcondition as a wing of the ViaPartenope curtain. Its profound pur-pose seems to be that of welcomingpeople, accompanying them along theroad, where they are emotionally filledby powerful and direct contact withthe Neapolitan sea, higher up to pro-ject them again toward this same sea,here revealed in all of its magnitude.This internal dynamic is legible tothose who walk along the esplanadethanks to the transparency of theground floor, which welcomes andinvites them to enter. Only in that mo-ment is the reason for its lateral face,so enigmatic from the outside, re-vealed: a deep interior space where acircular stair gently accompanies theprogress of the people who arrivefrom the open air of the esplanade upto the individual apartments (one perfloor), to face the sea again, but froma different height. Flows that thebuilding offers simple assistance inits own unfolding, without opposingobstacles, whether figurative, formalor of another character.The beautiful hand-drawn ink draw-ings made on a photo from the 1960santicipated the insertion of the build-ing in context, testifying to Alison’s at-tention to the fact that everything wasdiscreet without falling into the easyflattery of formal and figurative mime-sis. A singular colour covers the whole,a “non-traditional” colour for a city likeNaples, recalling (certainly by chance)the fish of the Northern sea. A colourthat seems so obvious seeing it theretoday, capable of giving plastic con-sistency to a fluid form, to a highly so-phisticated composition, where thecounterpoint of the horizontal lines of

the green metallic friezes—the wood-en rolling shutters are also green—curbs the original vertical slendernessof the small apartment building.Completed at the beginning of the1970s, this small work of great mod-ern architecture—a true rarity inNaples—is almost contemporary tothe small vacation home that Alisonbuilt for himself in Nerano, a town onthe Amalfi coast where in recent yearshe has carried out one of his most po-etic and delicate projects, about whichwe will speak later. In the work of re-search and organisation, conductedwith infinite passion and care6, variousversions of this project were found,probably due to the fact that he wasconsidering similar, but different,places for the site of the house. In abeautiful volume edited by AdrianoCornoldi, in describing this house it isrecalled that “the architecture is madeorganic with the aim of supporting andinterpreting the strong stimulus of thesurrounding natural environment [atthe same time reflecting] the interestsand the passions of the designer who,avoiding the construction of a monu-ment to himself, instead realisedshowcases for his own personalmemories, the traces of his own his-tory”7.The pen-drawn designs by Alison dis-play a play of concave and convex linesthat from the sketches, and evenmore so from the section, one seeswere dictated by a desire for the littlestone house—imagined of the samematerial that acts as a foundation forthe house among the green droppingsheer to the sea—to become one withthe natural bends of the rock, trans-forming into a series of small cavitiesfor the insertion, in a few square me-tres, a few spaces for living—resting,cooking, conversing, eating togeth-er—which, engaging themselves con-stantly the one with the other, need-ed to remain in constant contact withthe beautiful Sorrento sea. Nests,therefore, more than rooms. Sinuousrecesses that settle at heights from30 metres above sea level to 19.5,and, lower down, little external ter-races, as one sees in a planning ver-sion of this little vacation house. A con-tinuous play of interior and exteriorspaces recuperated with the ancientexpertise of the farmers of those landswho modified the morphology of thesteep but fertile mountain over the

millennia, terracing it, planting citrustrees and grapevines.In the end, the house is stratified bywork carried out by Alison overdecades: objects, prototypes for chairsand tables, books that render this pre-cious and intimate house a formaland physical extension of him asdweller/designer. We can affirm thatthis house, as stated by Cornoldi in hiscategorisation of housing built by ar-chitects for themselves into two op-posing conceptual types, falls into thecategory of a “house of life, that with-out conditioning or ulterior motivesrepresents human depth, the interi-ority of the designer and, throughthese, a culture of dwelling at the high-est level”8. But the “house of life” inthe case where it is the house of thearchitect himself is as if it were twicedomestic, since “in the house of thearchitect this dichotomy [author’snote: house of art/house of life] ismuch more radical, exemplary, thanin other residences since the design-er is with only himself, his activity isnot tempered by the presence of aclient”9.For the understanding of this work andof his work more generally, the wordsof Alison himself are very clear in hisintroduction to the volume he editedfor the presentation of the recon-struction of Le Corbusier’s Cabanonto the public at the Milan Triennial. Al-ison wrote, referring to the small LeCorbusier hut, that “this shack, lackingin apparent splendour, in reality con-ceals—investigating the interior—anexquisite work of architecture, com-pleted by the Master in 1952, whenwith it he intended to build for himselfa summer retreat—‘a modestshack’—defining it as a ‘chambre devilleggiature’ and actually produced anexample of a superior culture ofdwelling with discreet awareness ofassigning its primary architectural val-ue solely to the interior of the habita-tion”10. But it is the passage that fol-lows that illuminates the reading ofthe vacation house in Nerano, whenAlison wrote that “among the otherconsiderations, then Cabanon, con-ceived, designed and built by the veryarchitect who occupied it, it enclosesthe ideal conditions of architecturalplanning, that synthesis or better ofthe dialectic between design momentand use, where the general proxy con-ferred to the professional by many

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(and they are too many, especiallyamong the moneyed) thinking of thehouse as other than oneself, or as afetish to emulate, represents the per-fect synthesis”11.This passage seems, other than be-ing a reading of the Le Corbusierhouse, to be poetic self-declaration, akind of “outing” of the real value ahouse should have and even more soa house built by an architect. At thispoint the following statement byCornoldi, relative to the value of thehouse of the architect as a litmus pa-per of the designer’s poetics, takeson still more force: “the habitationsbuilt for oneself, beyond limitationsand so also beyond corrections im-posed from the outside, are thus aprivileged laboratory for simultane-ously verifying the art and humanityof the designer, the light and shadowin the figure of the artist and theman”12.For Alison, the Nerano house know-ingly has, therefore, the value of an in-timate and personal manifesto ofdwelling in relation to Nature andMyth, an explicit declaration of thestrategy that he also pursues in his in-vestigation of the work of his chosenmasters. In the thirty years that wouldfollow, a series of interiors, furnish-ings and works of various dimensionssuffered the neglect of the architec-ture press due to Alison’s absolutededication to the “I Maestri-Cassina”project, discussed by others in the pre-sent volume. Moreover, education be-came, in those long years, the centreof his interests, all rotating—researchand operative praxis—around that in-tense experience that made Alisonone of the best-loved, in addition tobest-known, instructors of the wholeNeapolitan school. But I retain that thesmall interventions for the design ofurban furnishings for Salerno and Rav-ello at the beginning of the centuryshould be noted, however briefly, fortheir grace and measure. In particular,the Ravello street lamps, with those lit-tle bronze pigeons that seem to betransformed to stay and keep themcompany for eternity, and the bench-es that move like waves, as if to man-ifest the traces of the sitting action ofthe host of people who over time (itseems to tell the form) were able togive them a shape and rhythm. Right-ly, these small projects are carriers ofthe whole Alisonian poetic project

stratified in sixty years of work and re-search. One does not intend to forgetthe spaces for the main hall, the Coun-cil Chamber or the multifunctionalrooms for students at Salerno Uni-versity in Fisciano, with that most hap-py Asplundian echo of the 1930 Uni-versal Exposition in Stockholm ex-pressed in the use of polychromecloth placed to delineate the coversof the interior spaces, or the delicateand austere design for the Chamber ofCommerce, also in Salerno.But I cannot keep silent about the pro-ject to which the present writer is par-ticularly tied, through having sharedwith Alison and other colleagues anunforgettable personal and profes-sional experience. All of the time ded-icated to modifying the internal spacesof the wing of the Franciscan friars inSanta Chiara in Naples and making itthe new church of Cristo Re with awooden choir—almost three years,between 2005 and 2008—for theClare sisters of the Neapolitan con-vent, was a direct exercise of knowl-edge of Alisonian strategies for con-ceiving and realising architecture. Buteven more so these three years per-mitted the verification from up close ofthe fascination that Alison generatesin the people he comes into contactwith, his incredible patience in meet-ing the obstacles and hindrances thatsuperintendencies, workers and theinnumerable other subjects found atconstruction sites placed before himas the work advanced.All of this was handled by Alison with-out anxiety or hurry in the certaintythat everything, sooner or later, wouldfind its proper place. Because every-thing is useful, each thing can have anunexpected meaning, it is enough toknow how to shift from one’s ownpre-judgements. Clarifying in this re-gard is what happened with the defi-nition of the new wooden choir, forwhich one day, after numerous groupdiscussions, designs and hypotheses,Alison brought a new 1:50 scale mod-el to the work site. This model, whichwas in continuity with but also pro-foundly different from what had beendiscussed up to then, showed every-one that while for the others the com-mon solution had been decided, hehad continued to search until finding amore congruent and innovative solu-tion. Those seats cannot be judgedsolely with the usual parameters for

the assessment of form, but shouldbe evaluated above all for their ab-solute and priority attention for the life,the body first and foremost, of thepeople who would need to use them.The delicacy of thinking that the nuns,who dedicate long hours to personaland community prayer, would havebeen able to use them, in the closingphase, as a small support for stand-ing prayer, reveals the vital spirit ofthis architect. A small but importantlesson that those who collaborated onthe project received, with lightness,first-hand.Returning to a more general view ofAlison’s poetic and operative strate-gies, it is necessary to state that thelong work of preparation carried outwith others for this volume was for agreat part of the time directed towardorganising papers, photos, writings,prototypes, mementos and articles,in order to know and go and see worksintense and small, in order to enter in-to contact with a body of productionthat appeared on each occasion morecomplex, articulated and varied thanwhat one imagined at the beginning.Over these years, the thing that mostdeeply struck all those who partici-pated in this project is that in so manyyears Filippo Alison never felt the needto catalogue and organise, or betterto generate an archive for the advan-tage of those who might later be in-terested in what he thought and did.Drawings and plans for more suc-cessful works were sharing spacewith an infinity of notes for minor pro-jects, reconsiderations to be proposedfor works during the constructionphase, as well as notes of numerousphone numbers, materials to bechecked, places to get to or visit.Drawings on pieces of paper of everykind, notes about chairs, furniture andauthors whom he would be able to orneed to investigate shortly; sheets andnotes on parts of buildings, interiorsthat one might have been able to re-alise or modify, for which one can nolonger reconstruct the dates, occa-sions, clients, other than the place ofthe realisation or the actual final re-sults. All of it kept in folders, on rolls,in binders filled with writings, articles,photos of construction sites or of pro-totypes. As much to say: for Alisonthe problem has never been to gen-erate a museum for his own immor-talisation.

Up to the present day, what is impor-tant to him is to fully honour the“now”, that precise instant in whichone is thinking of one thing while anexhibition is underway, a course be-ing carried out, a building or an objectbeing built, simply because he knowsthat you need to find yourself at workwhen the goddess of inspiration ar-rives. No attention to the “represen-tation” oriented outwards of himselfas architect, thinker, builder. No needfor self-celebration. Only an inex-haustible desire to understand andpass on to others the great quantitythat he established, provisionally in-cluded, realised. Waiting for you,there, in front of him, to sense and getinfected by his curiosity and followhim, accompany him on the journeyof knowledge that he is about to un-dertake and that, if only you want to,you can share with him. To profaneand desacralise, in order to admit themto everyday use, forms and knowl-edge, so that cultural and materialgoods and riches are available to thegreatest possible number of people:this is in our eyes the essence of theactivity of Filippo Alison, architect. Tocite Agamben once more, “it is in thecontext of the monastic life that theterm ‘habitus’, which originally meant‘way of being or acting’, becomes syn-onymous with virtue, tends increas-ingly to designate the mode ofdress…”13.I hold that Alison, as also with SverreFehn—another great master knownand dear to the present writer—is ful-ly described by these intense words ofAgamben. Dressing oneself as an ar-chitect, being one, and making of thishabitus the physical and mental figurewith which to cross the world and en-counter people and things: this is oneof the teachings of this master of thethird generation of the modern, forthose who draw near to his work andhis thought. In the two years of meet-ings, conversations and visits directedtoward the drafting of this work wehad the sensation of being not in astudy (atypical as only a former garagewith a view of the splendid Neapoli-tan gulf can be) but rather in an archaicand extremely old forge, an incunab-ulum where what we were seeingwas none other than an extremelysmall part of the fragments and re-mains of processes that had involvedFilippo Alison to the point of becoming

his whole life. Perhaps, this is why henever felt the need to set up a muse-um to himself, or a professional studioas everyone imagines. Simply put, forhim it has been enough to be one sin-gle thing with a place for keeping closeat hand the remnants of those pro-jects, since “sooner or later I mightneed them for something else”, asthose who have spent time with himhave always heard him say with a de-vious smile. For this teaching, we cannever be grateful enough to Filippo Al-ison, architect and master builder.

1 In the work of organising the materialfound in Filippo Alison’s studio, an importantmoment for the authors of this publicationwas stumbling upon a group of notebooksfull of notes written by Alison in recentyears. Notes on readings underway mixedwith thoughts to be more fully developed,reflections for lectures or quick personal an-notations for fixing thoughts, reflections,with the aim of going back at a later time tonot interrupt the thread of one’s ownthoughts. In particular, as concerns theabove, one notes that many parts of one ofthese notebooks investigate the word“memory” and its implications, as for ex-ample when Alison writes “M. [note fromauthor: memory] as active faculty does notfind things as they were but reconstructsthem… Our memories, moved by othermemories, in [their] turn from [starting from]the memories of others… Hyper-real M.can push to the point of convincing oneselfof things that never happened… The M. inthe work [assumed] of exhibiting the past,preserving the present from the squeeze,preserves the depth of time.” In the samenotebook, on the following page, Alisonwrote: “Active memory… not filing but ac-tive faculty and reconstructive [of the] for-mation of the very meaning of time.”2 G. Agamben, Altissima povertà. Regolemonastiche e forme di vita, Neri Pozza, Vi-cenza 2011.3 Ibid., pp. 9-10.4 It seems interesting to consider, in theeconomy of the reflections that are beingmade, part of the etymological definition ofthe term “architecture” found in theweb–encyclopaedia Wikipedia: “…‘Archi-tecture’ derives from architect, a term de-rived in the Western languages from theLatin architectus, but of Greek origin:!"!"#$%&$'( (pronounced architékton), aword composed of the terms!"!") (árche)and $%&$'( (técton) which means ‘engi-neer’, ‘head builder’, ‘chief artificer’ or ‘ar-chitect’. The first term, !"!") —connect-ed with !" !"*#( (árchein), ‘commence’,“command”—, expresses in ancient Greekthe meaning of ‘undertaking’, ‘departure’,‘origin’, ‘foundation’ or ‘guide’. The secondterm, $%&$'( (técton), evokes variousmeanings, including ‘invent’, ‘create’,

‘shape’, ‘build’: technical making but alsoart, manual making but also craftsmanship.The union of the two terms in!"!"#$%&$'(indicates who will see to giving rational in-structions for the construction of some-thing. The reference to building or habitationis not in fact explicit. In fact,!"!"#$%&$'(originally concerned that which was ‘build-able’ in general. This interpretation is sanc-tioned by Vitruvius, who defined architec-ture as activity that ‘nascitur ex fabrica etratiocinatione’, that is from building capac-ity joined with theoretical knowledge.”5 G. Agamben, op. cit., p. 27.6 If one was able to make many reflectionsthanks to notebooks, writings and photos ofless-known works by Alison, this was pos-sible thanks to Bruna Sigillo’s nearly twoyears of work in the small, crowded spacesof Alison’s studio, passionate work forwhich the present writer is grateful as arecertainly all of those who worked on thisvolume.7 N. Flora, “Alison, Filippo”, in A. Cornoldi,Le case degli architetti. Dizionario privatodal Rinascimento ad oggi, Marsilio, Venice2001, p. 47.8 A. Cornoldi, op. cit., p. 16. Cornoldi’s def-inition immediately follows the descriptionof the first (and less suitable type, accord-ing to the author) of domestic space, “thehouse of art”, which, according to the au-thor, “a magnificent abstract object, it is ex-traneous to the author’s attentions to do-mestic use (to whom one should never turnfor the design of a habitation”.9 Ibid.10 F. Alison, Le Corbusier. L’interno del Ca-banon, Electa, Milan 2006, p. 21.11 Ibid.12 A. Cornoldi, op. cit., p. 17.13 G. Agamben, op. cit., p. 24.

Research as a methodof knowledgePaolo Giardiello

“Scientific research” is activity aimedtoward discovering, interpreting, un-derstanding and investigating humanbehaviour. Not only that, but also thefacts, theories and events that con-cern humans through the collectionof objective data and empirical andmeasurable evidence. It is called in-ductive if founded on observation andexperimentation, and deductive whenit involves the formulation of hy-potheses to be submitted to verifica-tion. Well beyond the simple action ofgathering information and data on de-terminant phenomena, it results fromthe observation of the existent, withthe goal of understanding its mean-ings, and develops through experi-ments capable of revealing the rulesthat underpin reality.

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In this sense, the work of Filippo Ali-son, his activity, his research, histeaching and his production, is as-similable, overall, to a single constantand uninterrupted investigation withman at the centre of his interests. Anactivity that is never pedantic or aca-demic, never divorced from the every-day, an exemplary effectiveness formethod and dedication without pre-occupation with outcomes or results.Research is, for Filippo Alison, the waythrough which he satisfies his hungerfor knowledge and his curiosity aboutthe world around him. A desire forknowledge and understanding neverdictated by precise or determinant ob-jectives, but always and only by pas-sion for the signs, objects and spacesleft by man over the course of his jour-ney, for the traces that describe, inturn, the passion, wonder and curios-ity of other people.“Research”, Alison explains, “corre-sponds to an investigation of aestheticvalues, those of the past and those ofthe present day, with the goal of ac-quiring those notions that merit beingrelayed, passed down and transmit-ted. In objects, in fact, there is aban-doned content to be brought back tolight, there are carriers of values fromwhich one can obtain new meanings,sometimes of minor importance,sometimes of major”1.Filippo Alison dedicated himself, ashe himself confirmed in an interview2,to retracing the values of things, phe-nomena and activities, integrating,without distinction, teaching and learn-ing, profession and study, productionand experimentation, in a continuousand homogenous process. The onlymoments of despondency or dismay,as he himself likes to confess, havebeen those rare times in which he hasbeen unable to penetrate the contentsof that which surrounds him, the whyof situations, the reasons for events.This is never done with the detachedspirit of a scholar or motivated by acold scientific will aimed only at cata-loguing—freezing—reality, but alwaysin accordance with his artisan charac-ter, that of a homo faber, an architectand a working designer. It is not there-fore with erudition as its exclusive aim,so much as inspired by technologicaland operative needs in general, moti-vated by the pleasure of “building”spaces and objects intended for life,contemplation and use.

The words of Michele Cretella, his in-structor during his years of training,about his own studies and researchcan also be applied to Alison: “I saw,thought and wrote as a working ar-chitect, which I have been for manyyears, placing before all else the lovefor truth, or at least what I believe isthe truth. And I have no pretence ofbeing removed from defects orsins…” nor of having worked “withthe expertise of a critic”3.Thinking and acting, studying and plan-ning as a working architect, as an ex-pert artisan, this one can certainly sayof Alison, since the love for doing isalways at the centre of his every ac-tion. “Love” that, as Roberto Gabettisaid at a conference held in Alba in1990 with Koenig, Rodriquez and Ali-son himself, implies knowing, pene-trating and understanding the em-blematic nature of the artistic object,understanding what, in the worldaround us, can influence the futureand, therefore, change the life expe-riences of each and every one of us.This activity is not exclusively focusedon understanding the aesthetic rangeof the form or the utility of the func-tion, so much as on understanding thevalue and meaning of the objects andproducts desired and conceived byman over time. Technical, construc-tive and morphological values, but al-so social impact and thus the politicaland cultural function of every singlework by man.Understanding the meaning, not in or-der to contextualise it in its time but toread its potentials, intuit its permanentvalue and the degree to which its con-tent it up-to-date.Yehoshua, in his last novel, hassomeone say to the protagonist, thedirector Moses, about one of hisfilms, that “the conclusion of a workof art is definitive, and he who triesto imagine the after does so on hissole responsibility”4. So Alison’s po-sition seems to be precisely that ofhe who wanted to shoulder the “re-sponsibility” of imagining “an after”for the objects and goods that mostseemed to be able to express “time-less” content, values capable of ac-commodating to the changing of so-ciety, but also of marking the epochin the name of the continuity of tra-dition. Tradition understood as theconsignment by one generation toanother of the permanent values and

contents characterising cultural andsocial identity.This departing from the role of his owntrade, which motivates to explore thepast not for the simple desire of know-ing but for understanding the method-ological paths that brought forth de-terminant episodes. Looking at andre-reading history with the eyes of hewho is able to not only appreciate itbut also “use it”, make it the livingmaterial of the project of the new, aninforming substance for interpretingone’s own time.“Making the past seen and loved, giv-ing constructed objects the meaningand value of the function of life in theirtime, emphasising the differences,analogies and characteristics, is theobligation and duty of culture. In partto evade the romanticised and fash-ionable formula in which the history,architecture and, more generally, lifeof the past are presented to the pub-lic at great damage and danger totruth. One feels, consequently, theneed for a more alive and completecritical and scientific vision”5. Therecognition of that which is effective-ly a carrier of values is, in fact, alreadya project.Toward understanding his operativemethod, one can identify in Filippo Al-ison’s activity a few phases, the firstof which is that of awareness andchoice, the moment of “observation”.The gaze of he who designs is not animpartial gaze; it is not without preju-dices. Starting from the observed ob-ject, chosen because considered ca-pable of expressing contents beyondthe time to which it belongs, of sug-gesting, that is, new methodological,aesthetic or communicative opportu-nities in social and cultural conditionsdifferent from those for which it wasconceived and realised.Observing, for a designer, means en-tering into the creative and construc-tive process of an object or a space.Decoding the method, learning the ap-plication and user interaction modes.A methodological process to be un-derstood not in order to be slavishlyre-applied, but to place it in continuitywith itself, evolving it and relating it tothe present. The observing architectdoes not in fact see the finished prod-uct, but studies it to perceive the de-signer’s original intention, its symbol-ic and aesthetic value, also beyond theinitial idea, and above all the meaning

that the object can have today, as-sessing, that is, that which it mightbecome or what it would be if con-ceived today.“The artist works in the service of theform that use requires: his task is of anessentially sociological nature, sincehe must compose the multiplicity ofthe designed forms from use in theunity of an image of the world”6.The assessment of the form is not, infact, unambiguous nor stable overtime, it corresponds to the image thatit has and that it gives of its own time,to the form with which to communi-cate its own being in the world.The action of observing, therefore, isto be done with the knowledge of thatwhich characterises and identifiesone’s world and of what this needs. Itis only in this way that the things, ob-jects and spaces that man has con-structed over time can be read beyondtheir functional and practical range andbe located on a path made of signscapable of describing the shape of itshabitat.Just like, according to Italo Calvino,the first being who decided to leave amark on the universe, Qfwfq, the pro-tagonist of his Cosmicomiche7, whowith that simple gesture of adding ascratch to the continuity of the cos-mos, done solely in order to orienthimself in time and space, triggers theprocess of representing the world andof communicating the desires andwills of every single living creature.The phase after that of observation,in the working method of Filippo Ali-son, is that of the survey. It is not yeta creative or ideational moment, somuch as the objective investigation ofthat which has been observed and se-lected from among other things.The operation of surveying tends infact to obtain a degree of impersonal,real, knowledge of each thing. It has,that is, the function of restoring theimage to the existent—the morphol-ogy, dimension, proportion and con-formation—through a shared andtransmittable code. The survey, in the-ory, cannot betray the observed prod-uct, nor can the one surveying influ-ence it. It is not however an operationlacking in participation and interest. Torestore a thing, according to the codeof geometric design, means translat-ing it into a language and a compre-hensible and communicable logicalscheme, revealing its potentials com-

parable and equal to others, under-standing its meaning and interactionwith users. Beyond dimension andmorphology, the survey explicates thematerials, the placement techniques,the treatment of same, it discloseshidden geometric rules, the relation-ships between parts and the use ofhistorical forms or symbols. Last butnot least, it relates the objects to man,to his behaviour, dimension and pos-ture, his actions and movements, hisspaces, reading, in the relationship be-tween these and his environment, thereasons for its use and physical pres-ence among other objects.“Desenho é projecto, desejo, liber-tação, registro e forma de comunicar,dúvida e descoberta, reflexo e criação,gesto contido e utopia. Desenho é in-cosciente pesquisa e é ciéncia, reve-lação do que se explica noutro tem-po. Liberto, o outro desenho conduzao desenho consciente”8.The survey, Filippo Alison states, isthe moment in which one enters intocontact with the “importance” of anobject. In the sense that this opera-tion reawakens interest in the onewho is doing the surveying, it makesemerge the desire to arrive at thedeeper understanding of meanings,departing precisely from the most su-perficial aspect, the one before every-one’s eyes, to return to the source ofinspiration. It is a slow process, inwhich details often escape that canreveal themselves as identifiers of themeaning of things. It is also an activi-ty connected to the planning phase,since it is a further moment of under-standing, not only of the object but al-so of the reasons that substantiated itand, therefore, it cannot be passed toothers nor to tools capable of me-chanically or electronically reproduc-ing the forms of the things studied. Itis a further step on the path that leadsto understanding what, about a de-terminant object, will need to be val-orised and reproposed today.“Artistic creation is not inherent in dis-covering the form, but in displaying it.The structured form becomes the ob-ject of artistic representation”9.From this perspective, Alison’s dis-cussion of Mackintosh’s famous high-backed chair for Hill House is exem-plary: “this chair is the anchor point ofall of Mackintosh’s conceptual devel-opment. It is his original and charac-teristic sign. Although preceded by

others, even important ones, none ofthese had grasped the main objectiveof the time, and namely that of aminute, immediate beauty that couldbe easily seen, understood and re-spected. In this piece of furniture,every element is necessary, nothing issuperfluous and everything is aimedtoward a formal synthesis with whichit achieves its essential beauty. In oth-er chairs with the same morphology,that of the high back, the characteris-tic elements were such that onecould, as it were, take them and movethem to a different area, they were,that is, plastic elements placed at thetop of the chair-back like added deco-rative elements. The difference withthe one for Hill House is precisely inthe overall form and decoration. Herethe form is structural, it is the chair it-self, and does not derive from the jux-taposition of superfluous elementsbut solely from the relationship be-tween solids and voids, betweenopenings and lines.”If the survey is therefore the objectiverestitution of reality, the re-design, thethird phase of Alison’s research, in-stead represents the true criticalphase, the moment in which one hasthe opportunity to intervene, coher-ent with the decoded method, on theobjective reality of the piece, updat-ing it and adapting it.The graphic restitution of the objectssurveyed is not in fact an automaticoperation. If the survey discloses thecharacteristics of the object stoppedat the time in which it was conceivedand produced, the re-design insteadpursues its potentials, reads the dy-namics of becoming contained there-in and infuses it with contemporarycultural and technological knowledge.It is therefore the operation in whichthe planning intervention manifests it-self in all intents and purposes. It isthe moment in which it is possible tounderstand how certain methodolog-ical choices might be improved by cur-rent knowledge, adapted to today’sneeds, geared to the expectations ofthe man who wants to preserve thesame values but relate them to every-day use. It is the phase during whichone verifies, for all intents and pur-poses, the soundness, in addition tothe capacity, of an object to persistbeyond the time in which it was con-ceived and constructed. “Nothingadded nor eliminated: the work was,

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one reproduces nothing in all of its in-tegrity but in a version more conso-nant with our own time, according toprinciples that the designer himselfwould have perceived, so that the sub-stance of the original object is cur-rent”10.Filippo Alison’s operation of re-design, and so of the re-significationof the past, is assimilable to theKierkegaard’s concept of “repetition”,an action, that is, aimed to bring theobject forward from the memory, tocreate a happy recollection that wouldotherwise, if left immobile in time, beno more than a carrier of nostalgia andabsence regarding something lost.“Repetition and recollection are thesame movement, but in the oppositedirection: the object of the recollec-tion in fact was, it is repeated back-wards, whereas repetition proper re-calls its object forward. For this rea-son, repetition, where it is possible,creates happiness, whereas recollec-tion creates unhappiness…”11

Observing, understanding and re-newing contents are the operationsat the foundation of Alison’s researchprocess and they are, not by chance,the preliminary conditions of the com-plex phenomenon of “reconstruc-tion”, of that particular planning oper-ation that saw him as a leader in oneof the most important adventures incontemporary Italian design. Recon-struction entails the transposition ofan object—furniture, design, craft—from a determinant value system be-longing to a specific culture to anoth-er in a later age.For this reason, the natural continua-tion of the method described up tothis point, they are experimentationand production, as well as communi-cation and dissemination of the cul-tural effect of the new product.As concerns objects for everyday use,furniture, the transfer of the culturalvalues and of the meanings inherentto a work must necessarily be sup-ported by the possibility of reproduc-ing the complete object, in total readi-ness to be used in a different time, inits complete functionality. “Objectsare in truth vehicles of a much richerand more articulated communication,since depositories, even if indirectlyso, of uses and behaviours and, moregenerally, of those formal values thatone reconnects to the social or groupethic, with the difference that the so-

cial values of the figurative arts are ac-quired through the contemplation ofthe work, while the historical valuesof objects must be acquired and en-joyed also through their effective use,held to be effective carriers and dis-seminators of those values, becauseobjects of everyday use”12.And so it is, therefore, that the phaseof experimentation becomes an ex-tremely important moment. It is notonly about verifying with models trueas much as “redesigned” but also ofassessing their possibilities and po-tentials. First and foremost the ca-pacity to respond to market expecta-tion, then productive and innovativeneeds for technologies and materials,but above all understanding its cultur-al and communicative result as con-cerns the requirements of contem-poraneity. Verifying, that is, the his-torical product’s capacity for penetra-tion as a contemporary value and inthe form of an object that preserves itsspecificity but that is capable of sup-porting the requirements of the pre-sent day.Experimentation, therefore in a broad-er sense, not only of the material struc-ture but of the form itself, of the aes-thetic effect and of the functional anduse values. This phase is the one thatfinally permits production, which is notsolely the moment of realisation somuch as the stage in which the prod-uct is compared with real marketneeds. The commercialisation of anobject must in fact communicate themeaning of the entire planning pro-ject, explicating the cultural effectproper to the obtained product. It isnot simply about the promotion ofsomething new, so much as the dis-semination of a complex path of whichthe product is both part and carrier.Only in this way is the “reconstruct-ed” piece of furniture able to affirm it-self not as a copy of what once wasbut rather as a vehicle of somethingthat still is, and that therefore belongsto everyone.Much has been written and said aboutthis phenomenon. In the beginning,the critics found themselves unpre-pared and only verification over timehas confirmed the spirit of Filippo Ali-son’s research. They are the thou-sands of reconstructed objects byMasters that today enliven our do-mestic spaces, the living testimoniesof a wholly original intuition and a cor-

rect and stringent methodology, thatof the concrete use of the values ofhistory, of the living and active productof tradition and of the cultural contentsof objects, the result of man’s wis-dom and knowledge.In this regard, Alison put it simply:“what I do seems eccentric to whomknows how many people: putting in-to production objects conceived byothers. […] The production of otherdesigners is instead part of my cul-tural life. […] I believe myself to be for-tunate in being able to develop sub-jects that continue to enrich my exis-tence. I like the life I live”13.And it is for this “eccentricity”, thiswanting to keep oneself in the back-ground, that we thank Filippo Alison,for having chosen to carry out an ar-duous task, not only as a teacher butalso as an architect and designer, thetask, that is, of contributing, day byday, to the circulation of culture andto the moral and aesthetic growth ofsociety.1 This, as with other statements made by Fil-ippo Alison (put in quotation marks) cited inthe present essay were recorded in nu-merous conversations with the authors overthe course of 2011.2 Cf. the interview with G. Gargiulo pub-lished in Roma on 1st June 1999.3 M. Cretella, Botteghe di Ercolano e Pom-pei, Treves, Naples 1961, p. 34 Cf. A.B. Yehoshua, Hessed Sfaradí, HaK-ibbutz HaMeuhad, Tel Aviv 2011.5 M. Cretella, op. cit., p. 76 S. Polano (edited by), H. Häring, Il segre-to della forma. Storia e teoria del NeueBauen, Jaka Book, Milan 1983, p. 23.7 Cf. I. Calvino, “Un segno nello spazio”, inLe cosmicomiche, Einaudi, Turin 1965.8 Á. Siza, from the texts accompanying ourtravelling exhibition: “Trabalhos de SizaVieira. Desenho figurativo e objectos de de-sign”.9 S. Polano, op. cit., p. 32.10 F. Alison, “I Maestri: ideologia della ri-costruzione”, in G. Bosoni (edited by), Madein Cassina, Skira, Milan 2008.11 S. Kierkegaard, La ripetizione, Rizzoli, Mi-lan 1996, p. 12, Italian translation from theoriginal published as Constantin Constan-tius, Gjentagelsen, Copenhagen 1843.12 F. Alison, op. cit.13 Cf. the interview with G. Gargiulo, op. cit.

The didactics of Filippo Alison’sInteriorsGennaro Postiglione

Filippo Alison: “here, inside, there, out-side”People and things always at the cen-

tre of his attention: this is both thefirst memory and the most importantlegacy of the work of Filippo Alison ineducation. People, seen in their be-ing single or collective individualities,in relation to contexts, and things, un-derstood as objects in which the cul-ture—not only material—of every cul-ture is manifested. The discipline ofInteriors, with the task of creating re-lationships starting from these twoparadigms without forgetting the set-ting in which the actions take place, in-troducing the third term of a singulartheory that has never found a true andproper formulation, in order to main-tain that “liquid” character indis-pensable to avoiding crystallisationand necessary for responding to thealways new and different requests towhich the design of interiors is sub-mitted.

Material culture/poeticsof the everydayThe use object has represented for Al-ison, probably more than anythingelse, a limitless field of inquiry. An in-terest that rooted in a tireless curios-ity about production processes, arti-san or semi-industrial (such as thosefor furnishings) capable of transform-ing the intangible heritage of a cultureinto specific and determinant objects.Curious about the things that sur-rounded him or that he encountered inhis everyday life, he investigated theirformalising and productive process-es, the materials and techniques, thetechnologies and meanings.In education, this research manifestsitself in the specific form of what foryears constituted the first exercise ofthe Furniture course in the Faculty ofArchitecture in Naples. “Survey, re-design and plan an assigned use ob-ject.”The objects usually assigned de-manded a direct, physical use rela-tionship with the user (a set of silver-ware, a wine glass, a pair of glasses orother similar objects) that from the ini-tial individual I of the student-design-er evolved toward the collective I towhich the object was directed andwhich it needed to serve. There werehowever other occasions in which oth-er spatial dimensions were investi-gated, the two-dimensional ones ofwallpaper or fabric, both with a pow-erful decorative connotation, or ofgreater plastic expressivity like ac-

cessories for the home (trays, vases,lamps, etc.). Each phase of the exer-cise had its own clearly specified anddeterminant educational value.The survey, which often started fromuse objects that were physically pre-sent in the classroom, required an in-vestigation and study of the materi-als, techniques and technologies em-ployed that silently informed the objectitself, influencing its final materialisa-tion. One learned that there is no artwithout technique and that these twoare not in conflict but rather collabo-rate in the process of formalisationwhere available materials and tech-nologies (also put into relation withthe cost/benefit ratio in terms of theecology of processes) represent theother determining factors. Hetaught—through the survey—that de-sign is not a strategy for constrainingthe realisation to pursue an abstractidea (about form), but rather a pro-found process of mutual and continu-ous exchange between the forces atplay: a mutually conditioning fluid sys-tem in which some choices of mean-ing, or of practical reason, precipitatetoward a determinant formalisation.The project dealt with at the end ofthis phase was solely methodologicalin character and served to close thecircle of educational experience con-nected to the first exercise.Alison’s curiosity about and interestin the use object, when it came to therevisions, transformed into an inter-est in the student’s elaborations andthe reasons characterising his choices.An intimate, never abusive, dialogueemerged that put the work and the in-dividual together at the centre of at-tention and that maieutically led thestudent to acquire greater awarenessof the different planning moments andprocesses. A pedagogical activity fromwhich Alison did not absent even themoment of the exam, which he likedto define as “the last chance to helpthe student grow”, not wanting to for-go affirming the principle of a didac-tics interested in processes and notresults, in the multiple dimensions ofthe project and in the idea of con-struction more than in form.

Furniture culture/The art of makingOne can also frame the second exer-cise usually assigned in the Furniturecourse this same vein: “The redesignof a piece of furniture by a master from

the Modern Movement.”The production of furniture pieces bydesigners like Mackintosh, Le Cor-busier, Wright, Hoffmann and so on,was constantly under observation withthe aim of investigating their effectand values in order to direct them to-ward the knowledge of history andthe development of the project, alsofrom a perspective tied to production(as testified by the Cassina adventure).A historical/critical investigation aimedtoward an operative activity that rep-resented one of the most typical char-acters in Italian culture of design ofthe 1960s.In this context, pieces of furniture bymasters represented an interestingfield of inquiry in which typical ques-tions asked of the use object joinedwith others of an aesthetic/expressivenature and still others of a biographi-cal character, also typical of architec-ture. The experience of investigationof the production of the masters of-fered an opportunity for mediation be-tween these different moments andfor closer disciplinary analysis aroundwhich Alison elaborated his own the-ory of the interior over the years,which is in fact a reflection throughthe project—didactic and profession-al—without turning to any textualspeculation. A theory and research“by design” due to the fact that in thefield of furniture, as in all artistic prac-tices—and among these also archi-tecture and interior architecture—mak-ing anticipates specification and dom-inates abstract reflection. This also il-luminates Filippo Alison’s predilectionfor ex-cathedra communication of acritical/interpretative character moreabout works and objects than authorsor movements, finding himself moreat ease dealing in a critical and opera-tive manner with aspects traceable tomaking. The figure that comes to mindis that of the archaeologist, an ar-chaeologist of the present who like adetective excavates all the way to themost hidden recesses of spaces andobjects in order to reconstruct theirhistories, reasons and meanings. Butalso for extracting indications useful,when not indispensable, to design. Anarchaeologist who studies the past inorder to build the future.Like the first exercise, in this case aswell, one proceeded with the surveyand redesign of an object, suppliedhowever only in representation (usu-

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ally a photograph). An exception be-ing the case of Thonet furniture, ofwhich there was at least one exam-ple available in the classroom: every sooften the incursion of an ex temporaobligated the students to find their feetwith the survey from life of a large-scale object, where the callipers usedduring the first exercise was still use-ful, but where a great many other toolsand measuring techniques were alsoessential.The students were therefore askedto investigate the relationship be-tween the designer’s productive andcreative processes and toward thisend were called to enter into the mer-its of techniques, materials, tech-nologies and languages. The knowl-edge acquired flowed, and were atthe same time verified, in the redesignthat followed the survey. A redesignin life scale, a scale that allowed al-most nothing to be concealed and thatwould rarely be, and is still rarely, ex-perimented with in other architecturecourses. After the initial shock fol-lowed the concrete difficulty (in partdue to the change in tools and tech-niques) of designing on a similar scale,directly relatable to the real dimension.And it was precisely this losing oneselfin the life-size representation of theobject, which sometimes engulfedthe students with its size (an armchair,a bed, a table, etc.) that in the end se-duced them, rewarding them. Toknowledge one added passion or, toparaphrase St Augustine, love was thestimulus to knowledge that camethrough making.The joint operative and critical char-acter of these first exercises reflectsand was at the same time influencedby Filippo Alison’s professional andcultural experiences. It was probablythe years of post-degree training nextto Roberto Mango that introduced himto the world of furniture and industri-al production and that at the sametime immersed him in the Arts andCrafts culture and that of Bauhaus: adualism and a complexity that Alisonwould never want to resolve and thatpervades his whole professional andacademic career, also perhaps deter-mining his success, through a hybrid,non-reductionist position toward fur-niture culture. The fruit of a deep fas-cination with material culture devel-oped under Vesuvius among the re-mains and traces of a Pompeii to

which he constantly and ideally returnsand a “pauperistic” and social ethicshaped during period after the secondworld war.

Humanist culture/The centralityof the individualIt was precisely his training experiencein post-war Naples that influenced Fil-ippo Alison’s activity in the first yearsafter completing his degree. A friendand colleague of Mario Marenco, UgoLa Pietra and Riccardo Dalisi, he par-ticipated in the first experiments withartistic-social participatory activity thatcrossed the world of art, architectureand design in the 1960s. The streetwas the place of action, the lumpen-proletariat at once both subject andobject, the artist, designer and archi-tect the facilitators and directors of anemancipation promoted through thetools of the trade.In this context, there matured in Filip-po Alison a different centrality in de-sign, that of the individual, who fromergonomic and performance parame-ters, typical in the design of use ob-jects, also became the focus of at-tention for that which regarded socialand relational, emotional and aestheticaspects. This was the transition fromthe abstract scientific approach to thehumanistic one of the social sciences,its gaze turned toward a poetic ap-proach characteristic of artistic prac-tices, with the goal of recuperating theplural meaning of the existence ofevery individual, who next to needsharboured many desires. A system inwhich objects could return to havingthe value of a good that emancipatesand not only of merchandise that oneconsumes.The third and final exercise in the Fur-niture course referred, as background,to this universe: “Design a space foryourself inside an assigned architec-tural volume.” Two poles that onceagain illuminated the profoundly dis-ciplinary meaning of his educationalassignment.The autobiographic connotation wasindispensable for stimulating the stu-dent to go beyond simple aestheticsatisfaction and the pure stylistic ex-ercise, having to take one’s measurenot with an abstract client but with aspecific individual. The short circuitwas such as to guarantee the maxi-mum reliability of the design circle inwhich the requests of the one (the

client) found correct and appropriateresponse in the proposals of the oth-er (the designer), letting the studentdevelop skills in investigating, record-ing and interpreting needs of rarepedagogical efficacy. It is not bychance that another Interiors scholarand teacher, Adriano Cornoldi1,whoworked for years on domestic and liv-ing space, was at his moment ofgreatest intellectual maturity dedi-cated to the study of the residencesthat architects, over the course of his-tory, had designed for themselves.The principle element around whichthe activity revolved concerned themodalities through which the actionsidentified as meaningful would haveneeded to be carried out in the settingto be designed. If on the one hand theautobiographical and self-referentialcharacter of the exercise guaranteedthe precise identification of the workto be carried out, and of the qualitiesconnected to it, the long work re-mained of focusing the modalities ca-pable of meeting spatial and emotionalexpectations as well as those of com-fort. One also worked on researchingmethods of the representation ofspace capable of transferring qualita-tive and environmental values that arenot abstract but rather intimately con-nected to the carrying out of the ac-tivity and to the presence of peopleas indispensable elements of the de-sign process.Naturally, nor would the other exer-cises, both that which involved a useobject and that which focused on apiece of furniture, have had a real con-crete meaning if they, too, had notintroduced and proposed the cen-trality of the individual and the ges-ture. In fact, it was precisely from theexperience gained from the first twoexercises that the students wereready to confront the third, strength-ened by having already tried to un-hinge traditional design logic and hav-ing already found new meanings forthe project no longer understood asa style exercise nor as a mere com-position exercise.In the post-degree Furniture Speciali-sation course, this same exercise wasproposed with an increased degreeof complexity. Here, it was no longerabout defining a space for oneself, butrather specifying a place in the house,usually the dining area, departing froma few specifications for the interpre-

tation of the activity without the sup-ply of or request for the complete de-finition of a space. It was a settingwithout a room that exalted the cen-tripetal character of the design of in-teriors which has a focus on gesturesand actions and that lets the marginsof the space remain undefined withoutthis invalidating the project. In this waythe design attention of the studentnecessarily had to be concentrated onthe relationships between the specif-ic things, people and qualities that onewanted to characterise them.In this case as well, it was more thana little help to study the masters andthe spaces of many of their best cre-ations, which Alison presented duringhis lessons: C.R. Mackintosh’s whitebedroom in the Hill House2 and thedining room in F.L. Wright’s RobieHouse3 were among the emblematiccases most often examined, but therewere a great many others and it wouldbe impossible to cite them all. A truecollection of emblematic spaces, un-derstood as a critical/interpretative col-lection of historical interiors. It is noaccident that another of his col-leagues, Gianni Ottolini, in his decen-nial activity at the Politecnico of Mi-lan, dedicated and still dedicates anentire semester to the meticulous andprecise study of historic interiors andcurrent paradigmatics for interiors, pro-moting the modelling and redesign,at detail scale (1:50 and 1:20), ofspaces of major significance for thehistory and theory of the discipline4.

Culture of history/The value of the pastHistory, in the study of Interiors,takes on for Alison a prominent rolenot only for developing knowledgeof works and phenomena, as hap-pens in any discipline, but also for de-veloping design theories and prac-tices.This awareness pervades all of theexercises assigned in the Furniturecourse and the Specialisation courseand are also at the base of the focusof the Degree Course in Furniture,Interior Architecture and Design aswell as, to an even more determinantand incisive degree, the definition ofthe Doctoral programme in “InteriorArchitecture and Design”, institutedby Filippo Alison in 1990 togetherwith some of his colleagues at thePolitecnico of Milan5.The Doctoral programme has with-

out question been a privileged placefor historical/critical reflection, bothin the seminars that constitute themain didactic aspect of the pro-gramme and in the individual re-search projects developed by the stu-dents. In this context of advancedstudy, the private theoretical and dis-ciplinary reflection of the active partremained however relegated to thefield of epistemology, making it losemomentum to that typical feature ofpost-war Italian school critical culturethat joined history and design de-clining their relationships into a sin-gle modality capable of bringing forththat which was defined by Tafuri as“operative criticism”, which still hasa strong presence in many architec-ture schools in Italy and beyond.In contrast, in all of Filippo Alison’sother didactic activity, history has al-ways had a cognitive character andvalue, prevalently aimed toward de-sign activity, to making. This is thegreat lesson and legacy of Alison’seducational activity, where the his-tory of the discipline, interpreted byits characters’ productions (whetheruse objects, furniture or interiors), isthe object of interpretive reading andtranscription with the goal of under-standing processes and practices thatcan be reused in contemporary de-sign. A reading that is never histori-cist, even if historicised, approachedwith the means and specificitiesproper to the designer, not the his-torian. Teaching that might becomeshared heritage with the creation ofan archive dedicated to his activity atthe school, where drawings, models,photographs, finds, sketches andmuch more used in his personalworking method, might become eas-ily consultable by students and schol-ars interested in the discipline of In-teriors.1 Cornoldi, who died prematurely in 2009,was professor of Interior Architecture atIUAV in Venice. To him we owe the launch,in 2005, of the International Interiors Con-ferences which later merged with the bi-ennial IFW-Interior Forum World meetingsorganised by the Politecnico of Milan(www.interiorsforumworld.net). He au-thored numerous articles and publicationson the theme of the house as a specific andsingular site of the architectural phenome-non in which he argued the necessity fordetachment from the traditional typologi-cal approach in order to investigate newand different relationships between type

and use (Cf. A. Cornoldi, L’architettura del-la casa, Officina Edizioni, Rome 1991; L’ar-chitettura dei luoghi domestici, Jaka Book,Milan 1994).2 Helensburg, Scotland, 1902-04.3 Chicago, Illinois (USA), 1908-10.4 Cf. R. Rizzi (edited by), Civiltà dell’abitare,Lybria, Milan 2005 (www.european-interiors.org). This book chronologicallytraces the development of the Europeanculture of living, from the Middle Ages to themore recent variations on formal codes,through an iconographic system of scalemodels that focuses the permanent valuesof living rooted in the architectural culture ofthe Old Continent, with special attention totwentieth-century developments.5 Including Gianni Ottolini, Gian DomenicoSalotti and Cesare Stevan.