In 1925 when Le Corbusier presented the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion at the International Expo of

Decorative Arts in Paris, naming it after his renowned periodical published from October 1920 until

January 1925, the French-Swiss architect’s intention was to present an exhaustive version of the

residential unit model, a primary and essential living chamber. Unfortunately due to a shortage of

funds and time, Le Corbusier was not able to complete the Pavilion according to the project’s

goals. He had in fact intended to include prefabricated elements, solar panels for energy supply

and specifically designed room-dividing furniture. The project was built with temporary materials

and remained effectively unfinished. The logistical difficulties were augmented by a more serious

public incident, brought about by the Expo visitors’ reaction to the structure itself. The reaction was

so negative compared to the triumphal reception of the other Pavilions that the Expo directors

decided to erect a meters-high wall around Le Corbusier’s construction in order to avoid the view

and entry to it.

Direct intervention of the French Minister of Education was required to reopen the Esprit Nouveau

Pavilion to public view.

The embryonic idea that Le Corbusier had set out would be completed many years later, in 1977,

when several Bolognese architects who had worked closely with Le Corbusier decided to give life

to the 1925 project in Bologna, for a French architecture exhibition. It was built in cement and

represented in completed form the project of half a century earlier. The letters E.N. emblazed on

one side of this philologically perfect reconstruction, this prospective architectonic volume. They

were the manifest formulation and exemplar model of the Le Corbusier living unit.

Davide Cascio’s reproduction in sculpture and installation of the two letters of Esprit Nouveau, is

substantiated by the use of minimal and simple materials like wood, cardboard and neon. The

texture recalls that of Le Corbusier’s Immeubles-Villas project in Marseilles, a grilled structure

containing living units organized in succession. Cascio’s work does not mean to register exactly

and philologically the original project nor produce an intellectual document in monumental or

hagiographic terms, rather it intends to evoke symbols and references to Le Corbusier’s

rationalistic reflection, starting from the geographically tautological suggestion of the 1977

Bolognese reconstruction. So as the 1925 Le Corbusier Pavilion represented a linear and

sustainable idea of habitation, Davide Cascio takes that prospective of harmony and functionality in

hand tracing the proposal of an aurean and anthropometrical measure for the E.N installation.

In “When Cathedrals Were White”, published in 1936 as a diary of his notes after his first trip in the

United States, Le Corbusier wrote “Man limits himself to a box which is his room; and a window

The theme of livibility and its importance is central to Cascio’s work, where the idea of form

dominates, expressed in multiple ways and possibilities, all oriented humanistic and rational

themes. Cascio’s artistic practice has worked itself out in differing works through the formulation of

hypothetical environmental types, characterized by specific functions and imagination.

Saint Girolamo in his study (2003) illustrates a first reflection on this theme, as it reproduces Saint

Girolamo’s study in exact terms proportionally speaking, as in the work by Antonello da Messina.

Cascio has reduced the saint’s study to an elementary living unit, stripped of every personal detail.

It has become a mental place, a room for appearing, not unlike those of the numerous

Annunciations to Mary in the painting tradition. Therefore, this work expresses a precise theory of

livibility as a philosophical model, as a synthesis of anthropometric harmony and metaphysical

aspiration, that announces the artists search for an averaging formula, a space that dovetails

rationality and utopism, domestic docility and ideal intuition.

Polyhedra, stanza per leggere l’Ulisse di Joyce (2004) (Polyhedra, reading room for Joyce’s

Ulysses) accentuates the idea of a chamber room or cell as a place for spiritual refuge and

resonance. It is constructed respecting exact mathematical canons, in this case a 26-sided

polyhedron, in order to respond to the needs set out already in the title of the work. The idea of

livibility and living unit is characterized in Davide Cascio with an elective proximity to the traditional

medieval concept of hortus conclusus. In this conception, the habitat is an ideal peaceful and

timeless space, halfway between contingence and transcendence, dedicated to certain functions

and built according to various symbolic figures. The artist’s strategy of intellectual thinning, leaves

History as simply an indirect presence, and his works are just a reversed mirror of History, as if

they are almost constructive paradigms proposed as models of the ever imperfect reality.

Cascio’s ideal path begins to emerge from the architectural sculpture Esprit Nouveau in even more

essential and synthetic terms, by provoking an absolute philosophical rationalism, the same as Le

Corbusier, here reproduced concretely and architecturally sustainable in two letters, designed in

terms of true and plausible living anthropometrics.

The second installation on show, Project for a Happy Island, sets out an equally minimalistic

economy of media and instruments in an ideal metropolitan aggregate, a sort of modernistic

skyline, suspended between the avant-garde of the 1920’s and a futuristic dimension. The work

concentrates on clean and linear forms, suggesting a formal nearness to the prismatic volumes of

natural crystals and mineral concentrations.

The search for the relationship between form and substance, model and function, here is seen as a

distillation of an exact visual experience, a sort of out-of-time humanism, concerned with

discovering the ideal proximity between mankind and nature, living unit modularity and natural

essential object-ness.

The idea of scale is fundamental to the work, in its ability to put side by side the macroscopic and

the microscopic, the completed natural universe and a possible urbanism. Idealism and realism

are mirrored in each other, reverberating in a dialogue of distance, so central to Cascio’s work,

between model and example, archetype and derivation.

The Swiss artist’s work constantly contains idealistic thought, spelled out in research for an

effective genealogy within the history of western utopias. Starting from the title, Project for a Happy

Island hints at a multitude of abstract theoretical models of perfect and rational cities, traceable in

the political literature from antiquity to the Renaissance. Possible references to Italian

Renaissance functional urban models might be those of Leon Battista Alberti and Filarete, but the

installation is so literary that it seems rather to call to mind the island of Utopia of Thomas Moore,

kingdom of harmony and heir to classical rationalism, made of absolute communion of property

and dotted with interchangeable homes, each closed within the confines of luxurious gardens. The

centrality of the livibility theme is once again manifest by Cascio in his tension between idealism

and pragmatism, between organized linear modular programming and individual improvisation. In

an interplay of historical references, we have returned to Le Corbusier and Cabanon, the

minimalist housing unit he constructed for himself on the beach of Cap Martin in Cote d’Azur, with

no glass windows and with variable openings; but an ulterior reference could be made to the

philosophical naturalism of Henry Thoreau and his cabin on Lake Walden in Massachussets.

In the same way Project for a Happy Island gives Cascio the opportunity to adventure into the

formulation of his own utopia, as a free exercise in thought, as a philosophical hypothesis or a

game of intelligence. The island is but a pretext, a literary topos, classically ideal, utilized by the

artist to redesign the confines of an individual wisdom, by measuring the difference between

abstract and concrete, imagined space and historical space.

The utopia movement as opportunity for thought, as the immovable motor of intelligence, is

reviewed as well in the two collages Utopo and Black Map. The first depicts anthropometrical

measurements and Islamic geometrical forms, where the positioning of the block composes a

natural-rational harmony, suggesting the formula of humanism with a Renaissance twist,

reconciled between classical knowledge and oriental culture. In Black Map we see the more

sharply utopian alternative again; the possibility of drawing a map of an ideal place using

hypothetical cartography, unfettered by predetermined orientation. The distinction between ideal

and real floats here in a soft and fluid creative formula, open to all sorts of personal interpretations,

whose sections become pieces of a free-thought puzzle. The artist frees himself thusly from

hermeneutical expectations, while privileging a much more personal combination of the inheritance

of the western utopian tradition, of which modernistic rationalism is an important element, but not

the only one. Both Utopo and Black Map transmit a cosmological idea of infinitely variable

reproductive capability, of geometric multiplicity as an open and futuristic strategy. The medieval

hortus conclusus is indeed fractured in its perfectible theology while leaving room for a completely

non-religious universe which is no longer identifiable with any specific unit.

back        Mostre