The banal and the beautiful

Nathan North, 'Eurobuild CEE': I'm talking to you today just before your speech to the Budma construction fair in Poznań. What are the main themes that you are going to address in your speech?

Renato Rizzi: I would like to develop the idea of what architecture is today. As architects, we don't have enough consciousness about our culture and what our discipline is. This is not a simple question at all. When I ask my students what the culture is of where they grew up, it is difficult to get a good answer. Our contemporary culture is actually based on technique and science, and this is based on another important principle, the isolation and function of things. But technique and science cannot collate objects into their original contexts. If we look at the Greek origins of the word 'architecture', apxi [archi-] is the first root, meaning 'chief', and this rules over tektwv [-tekton], the construction process. apxialso means first principles, the intellectual space where you find the real images of your ideas. apxi is needed before we can move onto tektwv.

So where would you put the true emphasis of architecture, in contrast to the architectural mainstream? Well, according to the Russian writer Joseph Brodsky, the most important thing in literature is aesthetics, and this over-rides ethics. But in architecture ethics often comes before aesthetics. We seem to believe that aesthetics is about our private taste, but there is also the definition of aesthetics as being how things appear out of our judgement. In architecture, aesthetics is where everything is connected. Our scientific culture teaches us that everything is separate, but aesthetics demands that we think of the shape before the function. So aesthetics should precede ethics. To reach the aesthetic level of architecture we need to expand individuality into singularity. Individuality is self-referential, but singularity involves reference to everything. When we form any shape, we should put into it everything in our culture to achieve the aesthetic ideal. Invisibility is the real structure in the shape of visibility. We need to put our interiority into the real body of our buildings.

How do you personally express this philosophy in your designs, such as for the Shakespearean theatre in Gdańsk? To design such a theatre today as the Theatre of Two Times is not to make a building purely for performances. I addressed three different themes when conceiving the shape of the theatre. The first was connected to the boy in 'The Tin Drum' written by Gdańsk-born Günter Grass, who didn't want to grow up, which is essentially a story about freedom. The second was that Gdańsk was the birthplace of Solidarność, which with the help of John Paul II helped to bring down the Berlin Wall and redefine the boundaries of Central Europe. And thirdly, the historical centre of Gdańsk is quite small but dominated by a beautiful church, the Bazylika Mariacka, which protects the entire city. The problem was how to find a relation between our project and this nearby church.

And how did you achieve this synthesis of these different ideas? The competition stipulated that the theatre could either have a closed roof or an open one like an Elizabethan theatre. So I thought, why not both? A modern theatre needs to have a roof, and this one resembles a book or wings opening, linking all these ideas together and thus representing the entire city.

But the design has aroused a great deal of controversy. Yes, the design was controversial, but I can understand why some people were not happy. I won this competition as an Italian, despite that fact that it was a Polish project. And the competition was not held with the support of the Chamber of Architecture in Poland, so I've heard. But, more importantly, as I've explained, the project also goes against the grain of contemporary architecture.

Coming back to that, do you see this damaging trend for globalisation in architectural design as having affected this country? Yes. If we look at how Warsaw has changed in 20 years, the projects that have been built there have denied the city's true character. The centre of Warsaw is completely homogenised. The emphasis our culture places on technique and science means that it doesn't care about the place and its history. This self-referential attitude is the problem. I don't care about this sort of individuality, only singularity.

Can we do anything to reverse this trend? Or is it simply too ingrained in our culture and how our modern economy functions? What is lacking today is a theology - contemporary culture is based on individuality, on atheism, a point of view where you can do everything you want. But this creates ugliness. I don't want to be a nihilist. The fundamental character of our culture is just that something should work, reducing and nullifying all other thoughts about it. Would you like to be globalised and become like everyone else? So why do we produce works that deny our true individuality?

Do you think that it is possible for architecture to escape from this trap?Architecture today seems to be based on the last two months, but our knowledge goes back at least 5,000 years. Where does this banal approach to public buildings come from? Why is it so difficult to talk about metaphysics? Why do we always have to talk about physics, when metaphysics is the real basis of all our forms? We can instead think of endless time or thousands of stories. It is our minds that create and so invisibility is the true shape of things.

But architects still have to work in the economy and culture in which we live.Yes - we are given one week to design a building, a sad fact about the culture we live in today. If people have or don't have a passion for what they are doing, and if we are living in a time of economic crisis, what do you do? The culture today is for everything to be fast and easy. But there is also the loneliness of the city - if you homogenise everything, we end up living inside a glass sphere, in which singularity has been destroyed for the sake of a banal individuality.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

The original theatre in Gdańsk was first mentioned in records in 1611, during Shakespeare's own lifetime. The Polish theatre was apparently based on the Fortune playhouse in London. It was later rebuilt in 1635 according to a design by Dutch architect Jakob van den Blocke, before being demolished around 200 years ago. In 1991, however, a group of enthusiasts set up the Theatrum Gedanese Foundation to revive the tradition of international theatrical companies visiting the city. This was accomplished in 1993, followed by the establishment of a festival in 1997. The Prince of Wales became the patron of the foundation, while theatre and film directors Sir Peter Hall and Andrzej Wajda also became honorary patrons. This led in 2005 to an international architectural competition to design a new theatre on the original site, which was won by Italian architect Renato Rizzi. Rather than rebuild thetheatre in the style of the Globe in London, the design is modern, featuring an opening roof and the facility to alter the shape of the stage into a thrust stage, a box stage or a theatre-in-the-round. Construction work began on the new theatre, now named The Theatre of Two Times, in March 2011. It is due to be opened by the Prince of Wales next year.

the bio of an architect

Renato Rizzi is a lecturer at the University Institute of Architecture Venice. He was born in Rovereto in 1951 and completed his studies in architecture, but remained fascinated by philosophy. For ten years he cooperated with another well-known architect, Peter Eisenman. Rizzi has won a number of competitions, including for the design of the EUR 70 mln Sport Palace in Trento, Italy. He also designed the Tokyo Opera, a district in his home town, and the La Viltette district in Paris.