Isaline Maire

Palomar, a novel published in 1983 by Italian writer Italo Calvino, opens with the main character's description of a wave. In this slow, meticulous and metaphysical quest, Mr Palomar sets out to observe his surroundings, with a view to exploring detail and recording reality. First published as a series of short stories between 1975 and 1978 in the national daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, Calvino's text was quickly criticised for its distance from the social issues that were shaking Italy at the time. And yet, in this elementary exercise of describing the immutable movement of the elements that constitute us, there was a fundamental political act. To stop the noise of the world in order to describe, piece by piece, the evils that contribute to the mechanism of its change.

Giving an account of reality, detailing its components, was the thread that implicitly guided the doctoral research. Describing the reality of a phenomenon, also metaphysical and slow like Mr Palomar's wave, that of the rising waters on the coast between Camargue and Liguria, and the actions taken to accompany its inexorable transformation. The research then embarked on a vast multi-scale exploration, the design of which was intended to describe the narratives. At the same time, the research investigated possible forms of experimentation with development approaches to coastal risks, in order to question the place and condition of the project in the development of strategies to make the new climate regime habitable¹.

From this relationship between doing and the drawn survey of the corpus we were then compiling through the creation of the atlas, questions arose about the methods used and what they could contribute to critical discourse on how territorial changes and adaptations would take place. Drawing to understand the past and the present and to sketch the future was a systemic exploration that trained the eye and the hand in detailed knowledge of spaces, phenomena and objects. Representation was seen as a tool for transcribing and mediating reality, but also for translating plural, interdisciplinary knowledge in order to make it visible in space and produce knowledge for the project. However, this knowledge originated in the act of describing the territories, their components and the invisible phenomena that constituted them. While the subject of the thesis prompted reflection on the contribution of this research to coastal adaptation in our discipline, and particularly in its teaching at the crossroads of other disciplines exploring adaptation solutions to respond to future changes in the territory, it was clearly evident in what the act of describing in architecture sought, enabled and engaged. Describing thus became a manifesto for resisting the immediacy of assumptions, hypotheses and scenarios. It brought back to the centre of the project the present time of observation, the long time of the constitution of territories, and, looking to the future, the promise that description would bring about a refocusing on places, their specificities and attention to the spaces that define us.

From then on, the undertaking of this description required a detour to encounter other research trajectories that made the act of describing an exercise and the very object of their exploration. These three trajectories share the common characteristic of having questioned the description of contemporary space at different times of change and from an outside perspective to that of the planning disciplines. In a way, these three perspectives responded to the crises of representation of the present in their respective eras, proposing approaches that shed light on how our commitment, as architects and teachers of architecture, can respond to a better acculturation to descriptive methods in order to engage in the hypothesising of the real: the project.

Italo Calvino, writer and essayist, made writing the medium for his literary and political commitment to becoming a living eye² to recount the transformation of the country and the territories in which he lived. His work is rooted in an exercise in observation and description that he developed in his childhood in Liguria. In his early writings, he retraced the meticulous description of the Ligurian lands at the end of the war, the importance of words and the hidden meanings of those who, still speaking in dialect, conveyed a message about understanding the construction of territories in a world that was becoming increasingly coastal and uniform.

Luigi Ghirri, a surveyor by training, travelled throughout the Emilia-Romagna region in the 1970s, creating a unique photographic observatory of the changing landscape, the “margins” of cities that were then under construction. He captured snapshots of these expanding cities and described their ordinary appeal, the uniqueness of what people did not want to see at the time. He helped to name places that were still marginal, on the edge of ‘known’ space, undergoing radical transformation.

Paolo Rumiz, journalist, explorer and walker, travels across Europe's wide open spaces for his investigations, drawing on his correspondence with La Repubblica to paint a portrait of the men and women who live there. His interest in investigative walking has led him to retrace the history of symbolic infrastructure, such as the River Po, which he has travelled by foot and by boat from its source to its mouth. Through his travels and his journalistic and literary accounts, he questions the intertwined stories of the people who inhabit these spaces, from the present day to the structured imaginaries that symbolise places at the crossroads of global crises (environmental, societal, political).

These three figures have fuelled a reflection on the act of describing in and through the disciplines in which they have all developed their work. By transposing what they bring to our own work, we can turn their observations into methods that are enlightened, transgressive and incredibly timeless, in order to highlight the importance of reflection on method in architecture, with a view to restoring a sense of proportion and the *stance from which architects can take part.