The work has been exhibited in the Italian temple of artistic avant-garde: the Biennale di Venezia. It is a structure conceived by Massimo Scolari, painter and sculptor.
The artist has meant to represent the break-up of Babylonia: a gigantic and inexhaustible cultural source, whose vestiges are not always easy to identify.
To build the extraordinary with wood
Babel Tower by Massimo Scolari at the Italia Pavilion of the IX Biennale di Venezia on Architecture
Metamorphosis, theme of the 2004 IX Biennale di Venezia on Architecture, alludes to the transformation, an attempt to the highest definition of a process of constructive-architectural mutation started illo tempore (at the time).
Massimo Scolari had already conceived the end of the Argonaut journey for the V Biennale of 1991: the wings of the hypothetical Aliante (glider) had landed – what a construction effort trying to keep those wings in a delicate equilibrium and jutting out over the rio Arsenal! – exactly at the entrance of the Exhibit.
Now these wings are located in the School of Architecture of S. Marta, which the Chancellor Marino Folin has wanted as a symbol of a new teaching.
Scolari planned and constructed a mythical event: the collapse of Babel Tower. The tower – there is a metaphoric idea! – it is generated exactly by the rotation of the wing around its straight profile.
The end of the event has not come yet, because the process resumes ab initio (from the first principles). Therefore, in the tower generated by the wing of the Aliante, more than an instance of destruction, an event is contemplated, which transform form and not the mind.
What remains unchanged is the intellectual journey, although with interruptive stops: it concludes only to regenerate itself for a new journey. Flight or translation of matter, the Tower therefore inaugurates a new adventure – a powerful and mysterious strength which lifts the oriental Tower and returns it to the lagoon, where the impenetrable rage of the God strikes it down destroying it?
Mercy of men has built an envelope around the wreckage: the Italia Pavilion which, along with the intent of protecting it, forces it in a cramped space, after the Tower had experienced celestial spaces, in a continuous fight with cumuli–cirrus stormy clouds. The true catastrophe seems to me not as much the violent disassembling – although the Artist seems to indicate its easy reassembling anyway, thanks to a extremely precise centring mechanism evident in the interface of the drums on the floor – but rather noting that the Tower has been swallowed by the lagoon mires and men pity, stooping to protect what has miraculously survived, has been useless.
These three drums lead to other thoughts, so distant in their metallic coldness from the raw tile held together by the bitumen, like the Babylonian or biblical tradition has handed us down. Even the building material has undergone a strong metamorphosis.
More than the floor of a ziggurat, the drums allude to an endless column, of Brancusian time, because sky is infinite, and through the same Scolari annotates in his writing on Rassegna (1989), the conicalness indicates an unreachable perspective meeting point.
A Metamorphosis even as a response to the unexplainable events that Scolari Tower represents: rotating Tower, circular, rather than of bricks never fired. Inner cylindrical stair, with consequent denial of the traditional external spiral ramp, as an attempt by men to find a secret passage for rising to heaven to peer at the gods.
However exiting from the last drum is anyway obstructed, in spite the propulsion by the turbine or by the Archimedean screw, to which image refers the metal spiral of the stair intrados. But then, why attempt to explain the perfect instinct it has overcome in its metamorphosis, the stops necessary to the development path? I find the three wooden drums of excellent workmanship (HABITAT Legno) as well as the metal core (CMP Camuna).
In the two previous wooden performances by Scolari, the already mentioned wings of the Aliante to the extraordinary blow-up of the knot of the frame of the world-renowned Caesar bridge, which he ordered in 54 a.c. in order to cross the Rhine, constructed in the courtyard of Barbaran da Porto Palace in Vicenza, seat of the Centre for the palladium studies, collaboration with HABITAT Legno, has been proven to be fruitful and synergetic. To leave the practice of building large laminated wood structures and fulfil the works of Scolari is certainly easier to write than do them. In fact, it is about turning into normal and of simple making what is extraordinary! But HABITAT Legno has accustomed us to these challenges.