Poetics of Underground Space

Architecture, Literature, Cinema

Antonello Boschi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Critica sull'architettura

This book investigates the relationship architecture has with the underground. It provides a broad ranging historical and theoretical survey of, and critical reflection on, ideas pertaining to the creation and occupation of underground space. It overturns the classic dictates of construction on the surface and through numerous examples explores recoveries of existing voids, excavations, caves, quarries, grottos and burrows.

The exploitation of land, especially in areas of particular value, has given rise to the need to reformulate the usual approach to building. If the development of urban sprawl, its infrastructure and its networks, generates increasingly compromised landscapes, what are the possible strategies to transform, expand and change the usual relationship between abuse of soil and unused subsoil?

Psychological, philosophical, literary and cinematographic legacies of underground architecture are mixed with the compositional, typological and constructive expedients, to produce a rich, diverse and compelling argument for these spaces. As such, the book will appeal to architecture students, scholars and academics as well as those with an interest in literary theory, cinema and cultural studies.

1

HUDDLING

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214960-1

The natural distrust of the subterranean world has distant, mysterious and deep roots. They are undoubtedly historical in character, because shelter has been an issue in every period of the past, at every latitude; but they are also cultural. While in the past going to ground was a way of surviving, of seeking protection from the elements, of choosing the earth as a roof under which to live rather than a surface on which to tread, with the advent of the industrial revolution the underground universe has coincided with the concept of mobility. The belly of Paris, as well as other capitals, began to contain not just immense sewer systems, but also entire underground rail lines.

In this way, the substrate has wound up taking on different forms and meanings: on the one hand, the contribution to public hygiene made by the Romans through the introduction of sewers and the Cryptoporticus (Figure 1.1), a true service tunnel, and on the other the pedestrian mobility of the capital of Canada and certain northern European cities¹; just consider the use of underground spaces as water tanks or to store comestibles, and as parking areas in contrast with modern above-ground garage facilities. We can think about the importance assigned in the past to lodgings – whose term fully indicates the temporary nature of the construction, as opposed to the tombs and burials, considered domus aeternae – and how the latter tell us much more about certain civilizations than the remains of houses or huts.² Or we can consider the symbol that from Freud³ onward fastens onto the dark thoughts of anyone who descends into the bowels of the earth (Figure 1.2):

FIGURE 1.1 View of the Cryptoporticus, Aosta, 1st century BC © Antonello Boschi.

FIGURE 1.2 Graciela Vilagudin, Nude man in a hole in fetal position, 2019 © Graciela Vilagudin.

He was fascinated in particular by necropoli. […] He often visited them […] and immersed himself in that navel of earth that led him in front of a vagina-gate so precisely represented as to trigger the urge to sin. Through that gate one enters a uterus that grants death. […] To wedge oneself into the uterine tube and enter that warm, silent place, a place of life forever and therefore of death, one has to crouch and curl into the fetal position […] He liked to vanish from the surface of the earth and hide down there, in the mystery, inside the earth, becoming earth forever.⁴ (Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3 Leonardo da Vinci, The fetus in the womb, 1510–1512 Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II 2020.

An image, that of the cryptal architecture, fed as can be seen by mythology, literature, comics and other expressions of a narrative character, like cinema. From the Chasm of Tartarus to Plato’s cave, the Commedia of Dante to the Mundus subterraneus of Father Kircher (Figure 1.4), from Gulliver’s Travels by Swift to the voyage of Niels Klim by Holberg, to Casanova and Poe,⁵ the archetypal vortex of adventure continued to dig a path into the center of the earth, until a 19th-century writer was able to make his popular descent. We are reminded of one of the first “modern” science fiction accounts, the Voyage dans la lune of Cyrano de Bergerac that already contains, in embryonic form, the concept of mobile architecture, legitimizing the winter burial of lodgings in terms of climate. We can look at The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which in its story exploits all the effects of the underground pathway, the secret passage, mystery, darkness, or the crypt of the vampire that grants concrete representation in popular fantasy to the mysteries of ancient labyrinths and the shrines of archaic or initiatic cults. In The Time Machine by Herbert George Wells the traveler discovers the existence of a community, the Morlocks, that lives in the darkness amidst the din of machinery and ventilation devices. We can talk about Jules Verne, who describes the sous-sol not only in his famous Voyage (Figure 1.5), but also in Les Indes noires where the protagonist, Simon Ford, raised in a coal mine, refuses to abandon that microcosm so arduously conquered.⁶ Words that become images in the drawings and etchings of Abildgaard, Piranesi, Barbant, or in the scenes of the slaves in Metropolis by Fritz Lang (Figure 1.6), the outcasts hidden in the sewers in Batman Returns by Tim Burton and the poor of Kim family in Parasite by Bong Joon-ho (Figure 1.7).

FIGURE 1.4 Athanasius Kircher, Systema Ideale Pyrophylaciorum Subterraneorum, quorum montes vulcanii, veluti spiracula quaedam existant, Amsterdam 1665.

FIGURE 1.5 Édouard Riou, Ce n’est qu’une forêt de champignons, illustration from Voyage au centre de la terre, by Jules Verne, Paris 1864.

FIGURE 1.6 Still taken from Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, Germany 1927.

FIGURE 1.7 Still taken from Parasite, by Bong Joon-ho, South Korea 2019.

The passage from literature to film cannot help but have repercussions on our way of looking downward: it is as if the underground had absorbed the sinister, anguishing traits, Misérables, of the hiding places of Hugo’s hero Jean Valjean, and had transported them onto 35 mm celluloid. First going to occupy only the depths of manholes, passages and tunnels in The Third Man by Carol Reed, then the metro lines and parking areas that quickly become the preferred places for criminals: attacks, illegal dealings, chases, swapping of hostages – in short, the entire reservoir of images to which we have been accustomed by noir, thriller and espionage genres. Therefore not just the magic of the Parisian voyage of Zazie dans le métro, the surreal characters of Subway, the outcasts of London in Extreme Measures or the theme of New York escape of The Warriors, but also the garages of Someone to Watch Over Me or All the President’s Men. All the way to the extreme recipe of people relegated to an existence of suffering in the many conflicts, epidemics and dystopian scenarios of science fiction – Things to Come,⁷ THX 1138, Soylent Green,⁸ Twelve Monkeys – as well as fears more imaginary than real, as in Blast from the Past or Underground. And while the foundations of a building embody solidity, rationality, almost the memory, the echo of construction, a small space like a cellar can also become a metaphor of the unconscious (The S...