A Rendez-vous with Christian Norberg-Schulz: Drinking Campari at Piazza Navona

I share Sharon Kivland’s need for a response, a point of encounter with the people whom she follows. As her research and artistic practice delves into the mind and work of others, I can understand that she is seeking something in return. Looking back at Sigmund Freud (the protagonist of her project Freud on Holiday (2006)1), or Jacques Lacan (as in the case of her recent article ‘ENVOIS II: Letters for JL to SK 1954-1955’), she seeks envois from those who came before.

‘ENVOIS II’ springs from Kivland’s reading of Lacan, and her reading infiltrates her writing, comprising of her edit of his words. In her reading, she begins seeing sections of Lacan’s original letters as love letters, written to her, from him. As she removes the sections involving psychoanalytical theory, what remains are tender, longing and loving sendings. A relationship is formed. I share her fascination for Jacques Derrida`s The Post Cards: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980) where he addresses the complex way thinkers relate to others: a series of envois, or sendings, sent across time and space.2

I come from the field of architectural history and theory, and seek out buildings and places marked by the past. I, also, long for contact and encounter. As I read Kivland’s article– the letters written by JL to SK – I wish for a similar connection with the objects and subjects of my studies, which have focused on the life and work of the Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz.

Some very surprising things can happen here. How are we to approach them?3

Internationally renowned for bringing phenomenology into the field of architecture with his landmark treatise Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980), Norberg-Schulz builds upon Martin Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein, being-in-the-world, to explain how our being is formed in relation with a surrounding world. Here, he discusses the phenomenon of place and its spirit – genius loci – which he defines through its character, structure and spirit, all of which the architect should take into account in the design process.4

In my engagement with Norberg-Schulz`s theory of genius loci, I became interested in where his thinking took place. His own writing addresses it: one day, Norberg-Schulz was sitting at Piazza Navona in Rome after having spent the morning in the valleys north of the city. He was enjoying a Campari and watching life in the piazza, when he was struck by a sudden feeling: that the piazza and the valleys that he had visited earlier in the day were the same. Not similar: the valley was rural with steep tufa-rock formations in the landscape; coloured yellow and brown. The piazza was surrounded by buildings, filled with fountains, sculptures, restaurants and people. In an article discussing the importance Rome had on his authorship, he describes the moment:

Suddenly, I had a feeling of still being in a ‘tufa-valley’: this is the same, (despite not being similar)! So started my study of the genius loci. Because of sudden inspiration, and not at all a logical line of thought.5

Published in 1999, this anecdote describes how Norberg-Schulz’s study of genius loci began. The realisation of the fact that the valley and the piazza shared a sameness, and that the Roman term genius loci could be a way to describe sameness came to him, immediately and suddenly, when drinking a Campari at Piazza Navona. He had what I describe as ‘a Campari-moment’.

I would like us to talk a bit, so I get a sense of where you have got to. I try to put some landmarks in place. That’s very delicate. We find ourselves confronted with the problematic situation.6

But where the authorship of Kivland’s pen-pal Lacan focuses on the mind, love and lust, my own object of desire is above all concerned with place, space and architecture. Instead of requesting a love letter, I long for a spatial encounter, a meeting, a rendez-vous. If Lacan put landmarks in place with his writing and thinking, Norberg-Schulz describes spatial landmarks that I easily can seek out. I went to Piazza Navona first in 2014 and then returned in 2016. Thirsty for knowledge, perhaps I needed a glass of Campari to gain a greater understanding of the subject at hand. With me, I had my camera. As part of my following of Norberg-Schulz, I re-enacted the Campari-moment on those two occasions. The two re-enactments share some similar traits: both are recorded from the other side of the piazza with my Blackmagic Cinema Camera, and the recorded sound comes from a radio-microphone attached to my clothes. Twice, I walked into the frame from the left, sat down at one of the restaurants and ordered a Campari.

On my first attempt in 2014, I was tired after too many appointments and too much travelling. Sitting in Piazza Navona in Rome, I perhaps no longer expected proximity to my subject of study. My attention was mainly on the practicalities of filmmaking: being there, with the camera, setting it up, recording, performing, packing it all down again before leaving for the next shot. The weather was hot. I had gotten up early to arrive at the Piazza before the hordes of tourists. I was sleep deprived and the drink was strong. From the corner of my eye, I paid attention to the camera across the piazza, and hoped the recording went well. My Campari-moment was more about me than it was about Norberg-Schulz. I wonder if I felt disappointment. The intimacy apparent in Kivland’s edit of Lacan’s letters seems difficult to arrive at in an encounter with place and architecture.

Anna Ulrikke Andersen, Campari-Moment, 2014, film still.

Yesterday’s evening meeting marked a definitive step forward. We maintained the dialogue better and for longer. You mustn’t try to say elegant things.7

Where Kivland arrived at worldly response through her encounter and edit, my protagonist remains a silent date. Our dialogue exists as an undercurrent in my film and my site-visit, difficult to access if not explicitly pinpointed. If my aim was to say something new about the phenomenology of place, I cannot claim any definite step forward in our relationship.

Perhaps I needed time? In LK’s dated letters, time passes and a relationship is slowly formed. Although Norberg-Schulz describes his Campari-moment as a singular, immediate moment of insight and understanding, and he did not visit twice, I became curious to see what a second visit could do. After returning to London where I had spent time reflecting on my disappointment, I embarked on a second journey from Norway to Italy in 2016. Time had passed and a step forward had been made.

Something moves, shifts. I urge you. It’s a message. It isn’t the obstacle. Doubt is part of the message. I feel this is an important disagreement, that there is some sort of misunderstanding on your part. This may seem funny to you, but I want it to seem tragic. No need to ask yourself questions about I-know-not-what.8

On the second visit in 2016 I was facing the exact same direction as in 2014, my camera recording from the other side of the piazza. This time, my attention was not on my camera, but instead wandered to Bernini’s fountain, located right before me. As I occupied the seat at the restaurant, my mind wandered to the Baroque and a lecture on Bernini I remembered from my undergraduate studies. Perhaps the rain on that February day reminded me that the two visits had taken place during different seasons, and that something had evolved.

Anna Ulrikke Andersen, II: Campari-Moment, 2016, film still.

This time, when watching my footage, I was not disappointed. Instead of longing for a response through my filmed re-enactments, doubt and misunderstandings led me elsewhere. A departure takes place, both from Norberg-Schulz’s thinking and from Kivland’s intimate conversation with JL.

Some research projects are pure with fulfilment, intellectual enterprises that gratify both mind and fancy. This book was just such a guilty pleasure, the culmination of a persistent desire to occupy, if only for a moment, the private lives of celebrated authors.9

Diana Fuss writes this about her project The Sense of an Interior (2004) on four authors and the rooms that shaped Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Helen Keller. As I followed Norberg-Schulz and drank my Campari, I no longer expected to ‘occupy’, or get close to Norberg-Schulz’s private life. What, then, was the purpose of my visit, and my ‘following’ of his journeys and as part of this – my attempts to re-enact his experiences? Watching Bernini’s fountain, I took another sip of my drink and started feeling a different kind of guilt – one that was not related to pleasure.

Most of the time, we’re fooling ourselves. One is left without a compass, you know neither where you started, nor where you are trying to get to. I can’t tell you more about that today. What matters to us is knowing where we have to locate ourselves in our relation. Desire is always confused with need… what detours will have to be taken?10

I re-read Kivland’s article, and let the words depart from their edited new context. I wonder how I fool myself, and how I venture without a compass from a sense of longing, then to disappointment, doubt, and an embrace of misunderstandings. I am left with a feeling of guilt.

Trying to get too close can cause guilt. In 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, and during his trial, Hinckley claimed that he was re-enacting a scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi-Driver (1976). In this film, Vietnam War veteran Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, plans the assassination of Presidential Candidate and Senator Charles Palantine. As his attempt fails, he instead goes to Iris, a prostitute he has befriended, played by Jody Foster. Taking out his aggression towards the senator, Bickle kills Iris’s pimp instead. But instead of being seen as a murderer and villain, the public treats Bickle as a hero who saved the young woman. Perhaps Hinckley also dreamed about becoming a hero, as he dressed like Bickle and drank the same alcohol that the character drank.

Discussing the aspect of re-enactment in Hinckley’s crime, Peggy Phelan describes the following, potentially questionable behaviour, that is often seen in re-enactments:

Imitative behaviour, such as buying a jacket that looks like Travis Bickle’s, or drinking the same liquor as the character, expresses identifactory logic that is the bedrock of both capitalism and advertising’s raison d’être. Imitative behaviour becomes dangerous, when the imitation is so complete it erodes a sense of self, and a sense of a world independent of one’s own relationship to it.11

In Hinckley’s case, such behaviour could have had fatal consequences for the president.

Why this failure?12

I was also following someone I had never met and I was drinking what he had been drinking. My feelings of guilt might very well be justified. Twice, I record my Campari-moment with a radio microphone attached to me, while the camera captured the scene from across the piazza. The way the camera is located so far away from the restaurant, and the fact that this is a public space, resembles the practice of filming using a hidden camera, where the people being filmed are unaware of it. Attaining permission to film at Piazza Navona proved to be incredibly expensive, my budget simply did not allow for it. Hence, I did not ask the restaurant for permission to film, nor did I ask the waiter if I could record his voice. The waiter could not be recognised from the footage, so the actual ethical implications regarding consent are perhaps not as severe. But does this make my covert practice acceptable? I first think about how I perhaps only should include the unedited rushes, footage I even wasn’t that happy with from a technical perspective. I put the two sequences into premiere pro, ‘add titles and export’: I: Campari-Moment (2014) and the other II: Campari-Moment (2016).

I wouldn’t want to leave hanging whatever may have been left unfinished in our meeting. It is always hard to knit something into a dialogue. We can’t pretend to exhaust the question in one evening. The important thing is that it is still with us, alive and open.13

In my attempt at a rendez-vous with Norberg-Schulz, something else had been opened up in conversation with his work. I am concerned neither with the psychology of human relation, nor with the nature of sexual instinct. Instead I am concerned with the spatial temporal experience of the relationship between myself and Norberg-Schulz: the follower and followee. My Campari-moment opens up critical concerns regarding what it means to visit – and revisit – Pizza Navona today, where the Campari itself appears more as a raison d’être of capitalism and tourism than the phenomenology of place or my wish to get closer to a historical figure. As such, I depart from Kivland’s project and venture into the realm of architectural history and theory. My inclusion of excerpts from her reading of Lacan, clearly visible in Campari-red font, moves from responding to Kivland’s work to offering another use of Lacan`s work. Kivland repurposes Lacan, and I am inspired by her gesture. ‘Before I leave you…’ I add, as a final quote. In my response to Kivland’s work, references to love and sexuality are removed and what remains addresses issues related to human relations appropriate to frame a rendez-vous. In my engagement with Norberg-Schulz, these encounters are spatial. Without explicitly aiming for the field of architecture, Kivland’s envois makes its mark on my thinking on the history and theory of architecture.

Thanks to Mikkel Due, John Øyvind Hovde, Jane Rendell, Claire Thomson and the Bartlett Film+Place+Architecture Doctoral Network. With the kind support of The Norwegian Institute in Rome, Stenseth Grimsrud Arkitekter AS and The Bartlett Doctoral Research Project Fund.

1 Sharon Kivland, Freud on Holiday (York: Informations Material, 2006).
2 Jaques Derrida, The Post Cards: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
3 Sharon Kivland, “ENVOIS II: Letters from JL to SK 1954-1955”, in OAR, issue 3/ Dec 2018. 18-25. 21
4 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, (London: Academy Editions, 1980).
5 ‘Etter en av turene til tuffdalene og etruskergravene satt jeg en ettermiddag på Piazza Navona med et glass campari og gledet meg over folkelivet. Med ett hadde jeg følelsen av at jeg fremdeles var i en tuffdal; dette er jo det samme (selv om det ikke er likedan!) Slik begynte mitt studium av genius loci. Det skyltes altså en plutselig inspirasjon, og slett ikke en logisk tankerekke.’ My translation, Christian Norberg-Schulz “Genius Loci: et opprinnelsens begrep”, in På klassisk grunn: Det norske institutt gjennom 40år, ed. K.B. Aavitsland and R.T Eriksen, 100-109 (Oslo: Andresen og Butenschøn, 1999), 102.
6 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 23.
7 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 19.
8 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 21.
9 Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Room that shaped them (New York: Routledge, 2004) VII.
10 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 21.
11 Peggy Phelan, “Hickley and Ronald Reagan: Reenactment and the Ethics of the Real” in Life Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, 147-168 (Rotterdam: Witte de with Center for Contemporary Art, 2005) 163.
12 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 21
13 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 19.
14 Kivland, “ENVOIS II”, 24.