EXPO. SURE?

Sustainability as Entertainment 

along the Cardo and Decumanus

the Swiss Pavilion

I gave a talk about the TASIS campus as an alternative to the crisis of sprawl at the Swiss Pavilion at Expo Milano on October 10. Expo’s ostensible theme is Feeding the Planet, and while there was a subtext of food at the national pavilions, this is hardly comes off as an event intended to change the world. After all, McDonald’s had a place on the so-called Decumano (allusions to the Roman decumanus being a form of pretense without much substance). This was sustainability as entertainment, and wow, does it work: on a beautiful autumn Saturday it was absolutely packed, the waits to get into many of the pavilion exhibits ranging toward four and even 

the Decumano looking west

six hours, and the dense (in more than one sense) crowds along the Decumano almost un-passable. 

benvenuti in Italia!

Questions are un-escapable about how sustainable the Expo itself is: the Expo website has a page on Sustainable Expo, but when I visited it the link to Sustainable Architecture of Self-Built Pavilions was broken. It’s one thing to recycle building materials, another to reuse buildings; I suspect there will be much more of the former than the latter. The Swiss pavilion tower, earnestly didactic almost to the point of pedantry about limited food resources, was built of concrete, steel and glass, accessible only by (small) elevator, much of it hard to imagine being salvaged and reused—although the glue-laminated timber passerelle that snakes its way somewhat irrationally (formal rationalism may no longer be the dominant Swiss mode) around the tower could theoretically be unbolted and reassembled. Very few pavilions could be recognized for their national identity without signage—Italy perhaps most egregiously; but this is in a way to say that few were in any sense evocative of traditional architecture (Romania being among the notable exceptions).

feel the slove-nia

Mmmmm, meat!

This was, paradoxically if not cynically, not at all about seriously dealing with hunger, healthy eating, traditional foods (the only “traditional” displays of food were Dante Ferretti’s jumbo-crèche carts of fake food along the center of the Decumano), or biodiversity. This was about consumption being swallowed with a soupçon of concern. Feel good about yourself while chowing down at a food cart in a throw-away landscape! 

taking the long view: Yikes!

Zooming out and seeing the fair in context, the increasingly nightmarish landscape that takes over as Milan dissipates into its periphery begs the question of how the Expo could have been more “constructive:” maybe rehabilitating a dilapidated neighborhood instead of operating in a cordoned-off hinterland? Taking over an at-risk or moribund field and rendering it arable? But this Expo isn’t all about constructive change, it’s more about the status quo—and full steam ahead! Fortunately, many in the food world are more serious than Expo expresses, and certainly more enlightened than the hegemonic architectural forms on display. They have Slow Food, where's the Slow Architecture?

Laudata Siena

The World Pope Francis Advocates Already Exists: It’s Called Tuscany

143. Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat. This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city. It is not a matter of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the environment yet not always more attractive to live in. Rather, there is a need to incorporate the history, culture and architecture of each place, thus preserving its original identity. Ecology, then, also involves protecting the cultural treasures of humanity in the broadest sense.

Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ Of The Holy Father Francis, 18 June 2015

p. 42

156. Human ecology is inseparable from the notion of the common good, a central and unifying principle of social ethics. The common good is “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment”.[122]

pp. 45-6

View of Siena from the south

With the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment it might be said that there is no longer any excuse of ignorance for ignoring our common home. It should also be borne in mind, though, that the situation he fears and the future he hopes for are equally evident already on the planet—the former in so many places built in the last century and a half, the latter in the world we inherited from before. Where that older world has not been destroyed, even if only preserved and not augmented, a vision of what the world could be is available, tangible, and accessible.

The Virtues of the well-governed city on the left,
and their effects on city and countryside on the right

The common good was painted in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Siena town hall as the “ruler” of the well-governed city. As the city in the fresco is understood to represent the real city outside, so too is the harmonious and fertile frescoed landscape meant to be continuous with the real landscape outside the room’s only window. This is how I summed it up in my book Timeless Cities:

"Lorenzetti’s attention to detail and the rich complexity of life he shows must have made his fresco seem very “real” to his fourteenth century audience; he also, consciously, wrote the inscription carried by Securitas in Tuscan rather than Latin, to make it accessible to a wider public. The real world is also intertwined with the allegorical world in the Good and Bad Government tableau by frescoing only three walls of the Room of the Nine, leaving the fourth, exterior wall (flanked in the corners by the extensions of good government of the city into the painted countryside) open through its large windows to the real Sienese landscape beyond, thereby blurring the distinction between illusion and actuality: just as the real city of Siena is alluded to in the image of the well-governed city by the way one enters the room, so too the well-governed contado is extended from the fresco out through the room’s real windows to the landscape beyond. Here, by means of this single simple leap from the fictive landscape of the painting to the real Sienese countryside available outside the window, practical politics (the actual “good” Government of the Nine which takes place daily in the room) ideally merges with the painted allegorical Virtues (the figures surrounding the good governor) and the sacred realm (in the form of the mater misericordia frescoed in the preceding room and embodied in the very shape of the piazza outside) in a complex sequence of scenes which iconographically convey many potential symbolic readings simultaneously, while their novel realism speaks directly to the humblest petitioner. As a work of art the fresco is almost inexhaustible in its possible levels of a appreciation. As a moral message it is both a promise to the citizens and an admonishment to their leaders. As an architectural ideal it both sums up and spurs an urban vision that would receive additional fleshing out over the next three centuries."

Looking south from the campanile of the Palazzo Pubblico

Siena and its landscape remain humane, beautiful, and sustainable. It has been a choice to preserve them, but the fact that they exist means we can also choose to make them again, wherever there is the will.