BAU[M]

This small exhibition of photographs by Giovanni Menna, curated by Olga Starodubova, was inspired by reading Maurizio Oddo’s L’albero dell’architettura, which focuses on the relationship between the tree and building. The exhibition presents a selection of images devoted to works that have honoured architecture, for the most part built by great masters, from Mies van der Rohe to Aalto, from Kahn to Luigi Cosenza, from Saarinen to Souto de Moura and Francesco Venezia. The exhibition has no didactic or documentary aim, nor any poetic or theoretical ambition. These are simply images of architectural fragments “framed”, “set alongside”, or “cut” by the presence of a tree, an evocation of the world from which the material arises that human hand and thought transmute into construction: stone, water, sand, and then metal forged in workshops or clay fired in kilns. The relationship between tree and architecture is ancient and very close. In Goethe’s language, the word Baum denotes “tree” and Bau “building”, “construction”, “structure”, thus forming the root of Baukunst, the art of building. It is a resonance that makes with luminous clarity the conceptual link human beings have established between the natural structure of the tree and the artificial structure of architecture. Both Baum and Bau derive from Old High German buan, meaning “to dwell”, itself generated by the Indo-European root *bheue-, “to be”, “to exist”, but also “to grow”. Tree and architecture are therefore associated with dwelling understood as the foundation of being, and with the idea of growth as permanent change, an organism in transformation, a being in becoming. That is enough to plunge us into the vertigo that seizes anyone who questions the meaning and the manner of dwelling, that is, of being. A vertigo that, among the many possible, appears as the most persuasive allegorical figure of the love of knowledge, the Φιλοσοφία, one of the finest gifts the gods chose to offer humankind at the origin of the world.