PARA PARA, THE FULL AND THE EMPTY; SARA SARA, THE FLUID AND THE SOFT; GURU GURU, THE TURBINE AND THE TORNADO. ONOMATOPOEIC JAPANESE WORDS THAT REFER TO CONSTRUCTIONS IN HARMONY WITH THE ELEMENTS OF NATURE. AN EXHIBITION AT PALAZZO FRANCHETTI EXHIBITS THE VISIONARY PROJECTS OF THE FAMOUS JAPANESE ARCHITECT.
The "onomatopoeia" is the rhetorical figure that reproduces the noise, the sound, the effect, the sensation, we could say, referable to an object or a subject, through the sounds of a specific language. Kengo Kuma, one of the great masters of contemporary architecture and the only architect nominated in the list of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2021, now 68 years old, uses Japanese onomatopoeias to imagine his architecture, to describe with an abstract and sensorial language the things that cannot be expressed in a rational way.
The dialectical relationship between Nature and architectural Artifice developed by Kuma and admirably exhibited in these days and until the end of the Biennale (26 November 2023) at Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal, results from his "anti-objective" approach, free of stylistic clichés: the built space results from a sort of disintegration of the construction elements that Kuma calls "particles". This "particulation" of architecture, made of harmonious fragments that create a compositional unity, reminds us of the relationship between the leaves and the crown of a tree, between the part and the whole, capable of generating "sensitive onomatopoeias" for those who experience these architectures.
In the exhibition entitled Kengo Kuma: Onomatopoeia Architecture, curated by Roberta Perazzini Calarota and Chizuko Kawarada, we can notice the dimensional progression: from the small model to the "site specific" sculptures/models of Albero della Barca and Laguna, to the photographs of the actual architecture. In many projects Nature seems to re-embrace the materials used just as Venice and Palazzo Franchetti with its garden on the Grand Canal welcome the works exhibited according to the onomatopoeic experience designed specifically for this place and this special city.
The proposed resonances recall the image of Zen philosophy: the whisper, the ephemeral, the imperfection and the material aging (which in Venice is an obvious aesthetic trait) that we call Wabi Sabi. Some small pavilions remind of the tea room, well described in the famous book by Okakura Tenshin, where the assonance is dancing... onomatopoeia.
Another fundamental element is the penumbra, described in the Book of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki (Bompiani) in which the luminous gradient, shadow and filtering light shape an empathetic sensation with nature and they generate well-being. The harmony and resonance that are generated are at the same time poetic and primitive, ancestral (almost from the gut we could say). It always seems that Kuma wants to take us back to the first "shelters", protective shelters, which derive from Shinto thought, the pantheistic religion par excellence where the cosmic and material vibration finds resonance in our direct sensations.
The Palazzo Franchetti exhibition is organized according to a very scenic thematic and spatial itinerary. Climbing the main staircase you are welcomed by the «site specific» sculpture Tree of the Boat which, with its tsun tsun explosion, guides the visitor towards the exhibition rooms. At the beginning we can find the biography and work of Kengo Kuma followed by the general introduction to the concept of "onomatopoeia". The first room contains para para, fullness and emptiness, followed by sara sara, fluid and soft and guru guru, turbine, tornado in the second room. The third one shows us suke suke, horizontal, flat while in the fourth room we find giza giza, hard, folds and zara zara, roughness/raw, perception.
The fifth room continues the exhibition with tsun tsun, pressure, explosion and pata pata, light, fold and then the sixth with pera pera, plan, finesse and fuwa fuwa, elasticity, membrane. The seventh room houses moja moja, wave, line and funya funya, elasticity, membrane, and finally the eighth room with zure zure, which also refers to the concepts of elasticity and membrane.
To conclude this journey into architectural onomatopoeia there is a room with videos and the bookshop (original catalog by Dario Cimorelli Editore) towards the exit in a perfect scenography that culminates with the climax of the Laguna pavilion. Like a wave of aluminum covered in sand, Laguna rises from the garden on the Grand Canal: porous, ephemeral zara zara made of roughness (the Piave sand applied on the expanded metal) and perception (the solar reflections that give glare on the edge of the aluminum blades that compose it). Having to find a sort of automatic translator for Kuma's 13 onomatopoeias, one could choose Italo Calvino and two of his very famous works: Invisible Cities and American Lessons.
Calvino's cities are onomatopoeic starting from their fantastic names just as the principles of the Lessons of lightness, speed, multiplicity, accuracy, visibility and consistency return in the work of the great Japanese master. The perception of synesthesia and poly-sensoriality conveyed by the onomatopoeias that Kuma suggests in the Palazzo Franchetti exhibition brings us closer to a concept of architecture that defines pavilions, buildings and landscapes as real and dreamlike at the same time, like an "invisible city", like the worlds of Hayao Miyazaki or the music of Ryuchi Sakamoto whose echo, according to Kuma, remains within us like the sound of matter.