A sense of optimistic forecasting can be smelled throughout the book. The same is true of the presence of Venice, the “illusion” and the filigree of its image reflected in water, where décor becomes structure and lightness becomes substance.

The core of the book (six chapters and a conclusion, plus a portfolio) is forwarded by an inspiring essay by Federica Goffi and closed by an interview with Claudio Sgarbi. 

Although this is a recent publication (as architects and readers we must be forever grateful to Federica Goffi for her precise and meticulous editing and, more importantly, for sharing these delightful pages with us), the main body of the book was first written by Marco Frascari in 1992 and edited for more than twenty years. It consists of a commentary (or, at least, such is the underlying pretext) on the project of a house-tower. The project was developed to answer questions posed by guest curator Daniel Friedman (currently, Dean of the School of Architecture, at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa – Ed.) in the competition brief titled “The Architect's Dream: Houses for the Next Millennium.” 

The title of both the competition and the design entry clearly echoes Italo Calvino’s influential Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Published posthumously by Harvard University Press in 1988, Calvino’s memos were still fresh and resonating in 1992.

In these pages Frascari masters the Calvinian art of subtracting weight. He is able to remove mass and monumentality from the complex plot (intreccio) of stories, names, figures, relationships and signs, even if his language is far from any kind of adjective-less, neutral and referential minimalism. Overall light and smooth, Frascari’s prose strikes the reader as tasty in the mouth and persistently resonates in the brain.

Can a book conceived in 1992 be still up-to-date? Is Frascari’s lesson still valid and timely? In my dual role as professional architect and architectural educator, I am totally convinced that Frascari’s work is today more meaningful to us than ever. In fact, it is more up-to-date than most architectural speculations put forth in the last decade. With the far-sightedness that is peculiar to a genius and with the “mantic” capabilities of a tarot reader, as early as 1993 Maestro Frascari foresaw the crisis of architectural imagination that we are witnessing today. He wants to free us from all kind of imaginative slavery and design addiction. To comment on his claim for freedom and its actuality I will use two loci (i.e., two “places” or tropes) of Frascarian imagery largely described in this book: “non-trivial drawings” and “pneumatic spaces.”

“Non-trivial drawings,” as opposed to drawings that promote an explanation of architectural events under the aegis of verisimilitude, are drawings that elicit wonder and “construe the architect’s poetic understanding of human dwelling.” Today’s main means of architectural representation (photo-realistic renderings and B.I.M. software) cannot embody “dreams of possible constructed worlds.” Writing has been reduced to calligraphy, and the mirror has been confused with the reflected image. Imagery has been replaced with static, artificially sugarcoated images. And, as we all know, sugar and sweetening agents are addictive. They create addiction and slavery. I am speaking of addiction to virtual reality and slavery to software and hardware brands. Renderings have lost their original sense of wonder. As a consequence, students start being bored of pinning up “bad smelling” drawings.

“Pneumatic spaces,” instead, are spaces with a spiritus, rooms which “smell good.” 

“…by the term pneumatic - Frascari says - I do not mean inflatable architecture, but a space where a pneuma, or élan, resides. The building then becomes either a deity or a machine, a pneumatic machine, a construction with an aura”. ²

Today, the only scenario that allows people to pair these two words (“pneumatic” and “building”) is the so-called Blower Door Test, a test performed to achieve high standards in the efficiency of an inhabitable space. This test, by the way, must be performed to get a building certified by the main certification institutes, such as LEED, Itaca and Casaclima. It consists in the creation of a “pneumatic” emptiness in a room to assess potential air leakages and, consequently, the level of proofing and sealing. Not only a building must be sealed to make it possible for it to house a soul that would otherwise escape, but it also needs mechanical ventilation to provide acceptable indoor air quality. In other words, it is slave to a machine that keeps it alive and makes the habitation “not-so-commodious” and more expensive.

Architectural imagination is chained to the building industry and to real estate investments. Frascari’s imagery provides a potential escape through words and drawings.

We think visually and we draw ideally. Frascari teaches us that there is no difference between drawing and thinking if we keep hands and brain consciously connected. 

For an architect, to draw and to think visually should be a vital necessity and an extremely compelling experience. Nulla dies sine linea is the Latin quote reported by Frascari in a drawing from 2007 titled The Science Without a Name, which is reproduced in the introduction by Federica Goffi. Literally, the motto means: “No day without a line.” We find this well-known quote in Pliny the Elder (Historia Naturalis, Bk. 35), where it is attributed to Apelles. This ancient painter was said not to spend a single day without drawing a line and, in so doing, contributing to the research for perfection and truth. 

By the end of the book, at the end of the trip, approaching the Santa Maria Novella train station in Florence, I started feeling a growing need to grab a pen and begin sketching, developing forms, tracing circles, lines, axes for potential compositions, designing a dream house. Useless sketches and innocent doodles, some might say. Architectural dreaming, I would argue.

I was drooling over drawing as a hungry person aches for food after reading the recipe of a tasty dish. A book that can trigger the need for drawing, that makes you hungry for visual thinking and craving for architecture, is indeed a great book of architecture.