From next April 16th, “Everything you can’t see”, the new issue of, will be available on newsstands and bookstores Urban, the urban planning and architecture magazine born on the occasion of the first hundred years of activity of Borio Mangiarotti, a real estate development company founded in 1920. At the center of the new issue are the subsoil, underground architecture, the relationship between geology and that man decides to build. As the architect and researcher Galaad Van Daele tells Alessandro Benetti in the interview we are publishing here as a preview. The issue will be presented on April 15th at 6.30pm at Ædicola Lambrate (via Conte Rosso, 9, Milan), the neighborhood newsstand soon to reopen (to take part in the event, register here).
AB: Your profile is in many ways typical of an architect who doesn’t just design. What are the most important steps in your training journey? What are you doing today?
GVD: I did some literary studies and then continued in the field of architecture, in Paris and in Berlin. These two complementary areas of my education have also clearly influenced my current interests. After my studies, I collaborated for a few years with the 51N4E studio in Brussels, and in the meantime I approached the world of publishing, in particular as editor of the independent magazine Beggar. For a few years now I have been mainly involved in research, teaching and writing. In fact, I don’t even know whether to call myself a designer anymore! Since 2017 I have been working with An Fonteyne and his chair of Affective Architecture at ETH Zurich and since 2020 I have started a doctorate, also at ETH. I am writing a thesis that takes inspiration from the Grotta Grande, a cave building built in Florence in the 16th century, to investigate the relationships between geology and architecture. In recent months I have been deepening my research on site, as a visiting researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut.
AB: On your website you explain that with your recent research you are exploring «the possibility of writing a history of architecture that recognizes the various levels of geological presence in built spaces». What do you mean? How did your interest in these topics arise?
I began to reflect on these issues a few years ago in Germany, observing the artificial hills made with debris from the Second World War. Today they are mostly covered with greenery and vegetation and many are also unaware of their origin. They are objects for which a clear problem of categorization arises, because they are nature and culture at the same time. Reliefs of this type also exist in other parts of the world: I am thinking, for example, of the Middle Eastern tells, urban settlements continually built, destroyed and literally rebuilt on top of their rubble. They are examples of how architecture is an exquisitely “terrestrial” practice – which therefore comes from the earth and can, over time, return to the earth, in the earth. At the same time, they demonstrate the geological impact that the practice of architecture can have on the earth itself. I was already investigating these themes when I discovered the Grotta Grande in Florence: a fortuitous but fundamental encounter for the direction my research took.
AB: How did this meeting happen? What is the Great Cave and why do you consider it such an important case study for studying the relationship between geology and architecture?
The Great Grotta, or Buontalenti’s Grotta, was built in the second half of the 16th century inside the Boboli Gardens, as an artifact attached to the aqueduct that flows between the Ginevra source and Palazzo Vecchio. It is named in reference to Bernardo Buontalenti, the architect who created its current configuration. It is a rather well-known work, but the histories of the Renaissance have only described its more strictly architectural-artistic aspects, studying the composition of its façade, its cycles of frescoes and sequences of statues, etc. In doing so, they failed to delve into another “layer”, which is equally constitutive, namely the stones, the concretions, the geological forms used by Buontalenti. One of the objectives of my research is to write a geological history of this work, an alternative to the reading of traditional historiography and which recognizes the multiple trajectories of the material that constitutes it, from the earth to architecture and from architecture to the earth. It is no coincidence that a fundamental source of inspiration for my work is some research from the 1960s which radically questioned common canons and the centrality of reason in Renaissance thought and achievements. I think, above all, of The Anti-Renaissancea fundamental work by Eugenio Battisti.
AB: It is a research topic for which the skills of an architect or an architectural historian are not sufficient, but which requires, on the contrary, a necessarily multidisciplinary approach.
Yes, I had to deepen my knowledge of other areas of knowledge. Geology, first and foremost. I became interested in studies on the stratification of geological matter over time, for example on the value of stalactites as climate archives. I focused, in particular, on research that highlights the exchanges between living and non-living, explaining how biogenetic matter can transform into mineral matter and how the latter can in turn be parasitized by organic life. The Great Cave is an extraordinary example to verify these crossed trajectories. Blurring the boundaries between living and non-living also implies reviewing the hierarchies we establish between these two poles, usually in favor of the first. The studies I have done in the field of environmental human sciences and eco-critical literature – I think, for example, of Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett et al Geontologies by Elizabeth Povinelli – have helped me build a theoretical framework that recognizes the agency of inert matter. The mineral world is always positioned at the lowest end of a scale that favors the human and then the biological. What happens if we abandon this biocentric prejudice? It’s quite a change in perspective…
AB: … which I also seem to recognize as having an important political value.
Yes, my research recognizes and wants to participate in what specialists define as a geological turn (ed: literally, geological turning point), a change of perspective with potentially enormous consequences. Among the notions that I formulate in my research and which I think have political and social implications is that of “geological debt”: a concept that I define as the debt that every human work has towards the planet and more specifically with the geosphere, if we adopt a geological-based reading of human culture and its expressions (including architecture) which leads them back to their terrestrial origins. Admitting the existence of a geological debt means evaluating from a new perspective the fundamentally extractive nature of many human activities, their consequences on the environment and the resulting imbalances on a planetary scale. These are questions that continually return in my thesis and in the academic and popular articles I write on these topics. My goal is not so much to point the finger at harmful practices, to denounce or condemn this or that activity, but rather to propose an update to architects.
AB: In your opinion, what could be the impact of the geological turn, in general, and of your reflections, more specifically, on the architect’s work, on the way of thinking, designing and building architecture?
In addition to the Great Cave, during the trips I made with my ETH students I came across other architecture and places that powerfully demonstrate the blurring of the boundaries between geological and architectural, between mineral and biological. To stay in Italy, I think of Bagni San Filippo, in Tuscany, the Tivoli quarries and Villa d’Este with its fountains. Visiting these places in sequence allowed me and them to directly visualize different stages in the life of the materials – in this case travertine – from extraction to architectural modeling to modification by biological life. I believe that a new understanding of materials, their nature and their origin can translate into a greater empathy of architects towards the non-living and in a greater awareness of the history of the earth in which their design and material choices participate. On a practical level, it could also mean much greater attention in selecting the material with which to build. The latter would no longer be based only on aesthetic, technological and budgetary considerations, but also on assessments of a more specifically geological nature. I believe that the architect’s work would be enriched, more cultured and closer to current global issues. It’s about understanding that geology is architecture and that architecture never stops having a geological life, not even after its construction.
