It has taken barely forty-five years for there to be a Spanish edition of Genius loci. Paesaggio ambiente architettura, a book by the Norwegian critic and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz which first came in Italian in 1979. In the interim it has become a classic, and now we can read it in our own language thanks to a fine translation by Jorge Sainz.
Genius loci is a theory of place to be read alongside the rest of the author’s essential writings, led by the ambitious, bold Intentions in Architecture, tempered philosophically in Existence, Space and Architecture, and completed by his no less theoretical Meaning in Western Architecture. In this new book the reader will find his usual systematic approach: a solid discourse in a language built like an invetigatory tool, which relishes in anaphoric conceptual triads or pairs, of a near-didactic clarity, but with a rigidity that occasionally bogs down the argument.
Norberg-Schulz was a Giedion disciple but the book quotes other influences on the singular thought of this omnivorous critic, especially Heidegger, whose language impregnates the text, but also thinkers from the phenomenological orbit: Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Bollnow; in addition to references to Piaget, Gestalt psychology, Kevin Lynch, Venturi, or Kahn.
The translation of this text updates the portrait of a historic moment, that of the revision of modernity’s universalist postulates. In the manner of what Kenneth Frampton would later call ‘arrière-garde,’ an entire generation of architects – of very diverse positions, from Team X to New Empiricism, from Ernesto Nathan Rogers to Aldo van Eyck, or from Rossi to Venturi – gave nuance to the avant-garde to lead it towards what Frampton’s own critical regionalism would present as a location-specific modernity.
Somewhere between acritical technophilia and regressive nostalgia, from which Norberg-Schulz did not always know how or wanted to escape, lies Genius loci, whose greatest virtue is the importance given to the notion of ambience, sometimes called ‘character’ in the text and at other times ‘atmosphere,’ a no less evocative and long-used term. In contast with form, atmosphere – with its diffuse, evanescent nature – refers to a sensibility that for Norberg-Schulz enables man to tackle the contemporary ‘loss of place’ and construct meaningful, livable ambiences.
A key chapter in this science of atmospheres that has turned out to be so fertile – some recent epigones being Pallasmaa, Holl, and Zumthor – Genius loci falls short of more vigorously associating these atmospheres with energy-related, thermodynamic, and environmental notions. Themes which in 1979 appeared on the horizon and which today are fundamental within the paradigm of sustainability (pardon the word), in the context of a global climate crisis. For all the reasons, we welcome a timely translation. After all, forty-five years is nothing.
