Marco Frascari died in 2013 on June 2, Carlo Scarpa’s birthday, and this will possibly not be the last trick he will play on the audience who, for over thirty years of his career as an architect, teacher, theorist, and writer of macaronic texts, willingly accepted his plays on words and things. His first broadly distributed book, Monsters of Architecture, treated the semiotics that tied architecture to divination and forever maintained its repository of the coincidenta oppositorum. His last major book, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination, presents personal yet universal advice about why drawing is the same as, or better than, thinking. Frascari was at his best giving an account of his growing up in Mantova, where to get to school on time, he had to take a short-cut through Sant’Andrea where nuns were lying prone on the floor doing the final stages of their marriage to Christ. Like any obstacle course runner, he had to gauge his prospects of jumping without landing on a nun, and days differed by being “three nun days” or “four nun days.” I think this is where he got his idea for the conference he held when teaching at WAAC in Alexandria on the subject of “hopscotch.” There was never any room in Frascari’s thought for accident, but, as with the trans-nun jumps, necessary space made for luck.
is there such a thing as frascari-ism?
In the years following Marco Frascari’s death in 2013, a series of annual symposiums served to continue the community of theorists and teachers who had grown up around his work. Many were ex-students, some were colleagues, others were sympathetic to the idea of speculative adventures calculated to avoid the usual academic traps. Occasionally, those who had never met Marco wondered if this continuance was a cult or fan club, a criticism best answered by the adage, “the half-life of missing the point is forever.” Frascari was not one you could copy without making a fool of yourself. There was only a style, a manner, a witty angle.† As a creature of the Veneto, the art of agutezza came naturally; which was the way of seeing the same only in the fragility of things that change. This rules out having “followers” or “copyists,” if only because the universe works by a principle of absolute theft.
Architecture officialdom in the US and Canada was sometimes resentful of Frascari’s mental agility, and spent long hours after work rummaging around his footnotes. Clearly, they had never read Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a “macaronic text” par excellence,†† but not the first to advance a principle of universal plagiarism. As Timon of Athens put it:
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth’s a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing’s a thief:
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Have uncheque’d theft. Love not yourselves: away,
Rob one another. There’s more gold. Cut throats:
All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go,
Break open shops; nothing can you steal,
But thieves do lose it: steal no less for this
I give you; and gold confound you howsoe’er! Amen.
Thievery is criminalized only by those who do not understand the ecology of thought that runs simultaneously to lower-energy states and, miraculously, like the counter-currents in even small rivers, in a reverse-entropic direction. This is not a binary opposition but, rather, a profound understanding of the nature of energy and thought as a flow. Only a few in the world of architecture education caught on to this logic, of which Frascari was a born master. When the difference between getting the point and missing it is matter of being on an inside or outside, the estate of Frascari’s thought reverts to its original heir, (Vichian, later Lacanian) extimity — the principle of the self-inverting 2d surface, the auto-poetic and auto-erotic conversation machine.
This is to say that certain thinkers cannot be copied (or robbed) because they are “process-based.” They are mannerist in the purest sense of “having a manner” that does not settle to the bottom of any pond. There can be no question of litmus tests to determine which ideas are “Frascarian” or “non-Frascarian”; only a continuance of the momentum that is the same whether it is speeding faster than light or refusing to budge. Both velocity and the lack of it are key to finding what in Frascari’s thought made it tick in any tin heart.
The automaton theory of affect in architecture puts it at odds with most sentimental versions of Heidegger and phenomenology. The automaton is less of a mechanism than it is a flow of liquid, electrons, or impulses/pulsions that, if frozen, disappear faster than Schrödinger’s Cat. There can be no success in identifying themes or sources, only a cloud chamber to make the tracks of passing particles visible, for brief moments, as vapor trails. If automation best describes the affect component of Frascari’s thought, the liquid so essential to Heraclitus’s version of plus ça change would be, for Frascari, a sauce, indispensable to the cuisine of thought as to actual cooking.
There are several theories about what constitutes the table of contents in the book of Frascari, and no need to have just one. Mine would follow the example of Tristram Shandy and have some blank pages as well as others filled with black ink. Occasionally there would be something recognizable, unearthed from past common experiences: the 1945 Ealing Studio thriller Dead of Night. The Krazy Kat comics of George Herriman. The chef-charleton, Georges Auguste Escoffier. The phenomenon of synesthesia. The adoration of everything to do with Gargantua and Pantagruel. A common interest in the poetic history of Giambattista Vico.
Apart from the Vico connection and occasional encounters at schools, conferences, and dissertation committees, I cannot claim any authority over Frascari’s legacy, but I do see the point of continuing it, if only the principle of energetics can be grasped today, as academia is both challenged from inside and outside, to produce as much fully credited meaninglessness as possible. With scholarly thought squeezed dry of any idea of play, the general role of comedy is incredibly unappreciated or re-assigned. Yet, if there is any field that needs a sense of humor, it is architecture. The ruse, the skit, the conjecture, the parody, the scam, the charade, the farce … these are the theater’s versions of the portent, the omen, and the miracle. What in religion inspires sham reverence, on stage produces the laughter that is the sure substance of wit.
Gongorá, Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare … later the masters of fou littéraire (Verne, Roussel, Jarry, Cage) are not taught in architecture schools, not because they would not be likely to be understood but because, if they were understood, they would be banned. The hands that have put instrumental cause, automatism, and plagiarism into holding cells to give free rein to sustainability and other “good causes” are starving the imagination, which testifies to Oscar Wilde’s observation, that “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.” The genius is a rascal, a pickpocket, a thief in the night. Hermes the thief is, as Norman O. Brown wrote, the protective spirit of invention and the origin of the ecology of flow. As Frascari himself used to say, repeating the Italian witticism, Se non è vero, è ben trovato.
†Frascari enjoyed telling about a paper he had submitted to the JAE, rejected because a reviewer advised that the author “should stop trying to sound like Marco Frascari.” This situation recalls the scene in the 1930 Marx Brothers film, Animal Crackers, where Captain Spalding comments to a guest at Arabella Rittenhouse’s party that “he looks a lot like Emanuel Ravelli.” Ravelli responds that he really is Emanuel Ravelli but Spalding doesn’t give ground: “Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance.”
††By “macaronic text” Marco referred to the ability (or obligation) of any text to say multiple things at once, but also to comment about itself, as if standing outside of the act of enunciation “watching the whole thing from a distance.”