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Performing Casa Malaparte: Architecture as a Living Portrait

Iacovou, Popi; (2017) Performing Casa Malaparte: Architecture as a Living Portrait. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The overlapped realities of built architecture and human action raise questions that concern the separation of the built from the lived, experience from representation, the imaginary from the everyday. In this thesis, considering movement in time as the agent of interpreting place is a proposition for a performative understanding of architecture that aims at expanding its feld of practice by blurring the boundaries between objectsubject and space-time. Through the twentieth century, movement has been explored in urban and land-art practices, yet the role it can play in rethinking building has been understated. When movement has been the focus of architectural design, such as in the Beaux-Arts marche and Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade, it has been limited to expressing the aspirations of the architect. My thesis expands existing understandings of the role of movement in architecture through the study of one building: Casa Malaparte by the writer Curzio Malaparte, mistakenly attributed to architect Adalberto Libera. Through on-site and archival research, I expand the literature on the house’s authorship and discuss Malaparte’s architectural practice as an intentional blurring of living and building. Malaparte considered his house the best portrait of himself and called it ‘House Like Me’. I discuss the house as a building portrait that embraces movement beyond modernism’s insistence on functionality and effciency. I argue that the house is a ‘stage of life’, creating ‘living pictures’ of its inhabitant. My study is a synthesis of textual and design research. I introduce the concept of the architect-performer, an active subject attuned to movement, who interweaves knowledge acquired from direct place experiences with insight from historical, theoretical and design research. Working between analysis and design, I use the moving image as a performative tool to explore a flmic documentation that is able to render intimate and temporal conditions of place that otherwise remain unspoken.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Performing Casa Malaparte: Architecture as a Living Portrait
Event: UCL (University College London)
Language: English
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10040478
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