In the act of creation, few moments can be more debilitating and confusing than staring at a blank page. Overcome with paralysis, staring into nothingness. At the other end of the spectrum, a pin-up board with hundreds of references, a constellation of endless choice, can also generate a distinct sense of nausea. Perhaps a remedy to avoid this sensory seasickness is to place ideological opposites face to face, in a precise and deliberate manner. Could perhaps reconfiguring ancestors and juxtaposing the knowledge they have produced work as a medicine for states of artistic delirium? ‘Referential Alchemy’, another way to name this operation, can be understood as the transformative process through which art and architecture draw on pre-existing models and ideas, precisely selected for their contrasting states of being, creating a third way that transcends the original sources. Like a chemical experiment without a known reaction, disparate elements are fused into a new whole, carrying traces of their origins, becoming something unique in the process.

Although historians might argue for a plethora of influences and references that are necessary for the creative mind to find a resultant body of work, drawing on a long list of precedent, it is perhaps more interesting to distill them to their core, discovering two main points of inflection worth analyzing, that can become self-evident in the work while also avoiding didacticism. It becomes a Tom and Jerry game of cat and mouse, the two ever chasing one another with no clear winner. Borges’ image of two mirrors facing each other captures the essence of these references face to face: the ability to create the infinite from the finite, the new from the old, the labyrinth from two mirrors. In this endless play of reflection and transformation lies possibility, through reconfiguration and appropriation, a complex space where meaning is multiplied and deepened. Each new work reflects that which came before and yet reshapes it into something new.

Take, for example, the work of Marcel Duchamp. In one of those remarkably scarce moments of pure artistic innovation, he broke away from any inherited model and presents to the world the idea of appropriation. The possibility of a ready-made object becoming art, simply by the context in which it is placed and the accent of a signature, a subversive and revolutionary act that laid solid foundations for conceptual art thereafter. A signed prefabricated urinal submitted to an exhibition challenged any sense of lineage or historical continuity, agitating the very foundations of art and tradition, a new field was open.

On the other end, lies the work of Paul Cézanne, slightly Duchamp’s senior, who, rather than breaking from tradition, sought to transform it.  He stated his crusade clearly “I want to paint Poussin from Nature,” possibly expressing his desire to merge the classical compositional rigor of Poussin with the immediacy and truth of impressionistic light. E.H. Gombrich tells us Cézanne was after the essence of Poussin’s order and discipline of formal representation but sought to infuse that structure with the vitality and directness of nature as he experienced it. Through the progressive adaptation of received models, Cézanne successfully achieves his crusade: paintings with a sense of depth and volume without sacrificing the brightness of colors, achieving an overall flatness. He succeeds in the goal he himself declared he was after: to turn ‘Impressionism into something more solid and enduring, like the art of the museums’. He bathes his subjects in light and yet they are firm and solid, Gombrich wonders how he was able to flatten the picture plane yet retain volume? How had he retained the richness of light and truthfulness of experience of the Impressionists yet the grace and clarity of form of the Old Masters? Cézanne is both looking back and moving forward at the same time. Each and every one of his traces is so alive they almost have a pulse.

Seemingly then, Cézanne and Duchamp stand as two irreconcilable models. Cézanne has grounded art in a deep sense of continuity with history, it is a new iteration, one next step in the road, offering a vision that is rooted in tradition yet forward-looking. On the other end, lies Duchamp, the subversive act, a new start, nothing must stand on the shoulders of giants and an entirely new road should be paved. Could these two mirrors be put face to face and create a labyrinth? Robert Gober’s work would suggest yes; in an unleashed reaction of ‘Referential Alchemy’ looks to these two models of Duchamp and Cézanne – irreconcilable at their cores – and by blending and overlapping them somehow finds a way to create compatibility out of the incompatible, synthesis out of the incongruent.

Let’s take for example Gober’s ‘Painted Plywood Sheets’ in 1992, engaged with the complex relationship between appropriation and material. At first glance, Gober’s plywood sheets appear to be off the shelf, ordinary, functional construction materials; they begin with a ready-made act, a la Duchamp, selecting a pre-existing object- symbolic and recognizable, directly from the hardware store seen in every small town American Main Street, almost an homage to the pragmatic industrial American materiality of Donald Judd’s work. Upon detailed inspection, however, it is revealed to us that it is not actual plywood at all, but a meticulously and exhaustively labor-intensive painted particle board that resembles a plywood sheet by recreating every detail and texture with ultimate precision, spectacularly inconspicuous. Subversion through painterly production. He is surrendering to this conceptual approach but fighting uphill the entire way, not giving way to a laissez faire complacency. While plywood is generally seen as mundane and functional, like a Duchamp urinal, what Gober does is elevate the ready-made into the realm of hand craft, a la Cézanne. Total appropriation is not enough for him- it must still have a degree of artistic convention, hand paint. It's cerebral yet slow, inherited yet made, impersonal yet personal. In a way, like Jasper Johns, Gober takes a recognizable object, a familiarly banal but meaningful symbol, and through his play with perception, continuing another step in the historical lineage of art as production, creates something far beyond art as conceptual appropriation. A tension between the real and the represented emerges and we are facing the illusion of materiality.

Or take for example Gober’s piece titled ‘Untitled’, which from the name alone already suggests some kind of Ready-Made, an anonymous branded stick of butter, a perfectly imperfect rectangular extrusion, made to imitate the soft greasiness of butter, and at the same time has the kind of shine of a polyurethane block. The wrapper on the floor as a kind of Carl Andre carpet, perfectly unfolded, gives it a figurative painterly quality, a recognizable household object, dematerialized and over-scaled, the same and yet the opposite of the plywood sheet. It lives between sculpture and an enlarged still life painting, neither a Cézanne still life, nor a Duchamp readymade, instead it becomes a reflection of both the canon of painting and sculpture history and the conceptual appropriation of the everyday object, a battle between that which is authored and that which is borrowed and copied.

One such further example of an artist who unleashes a chain reaction out of two incompatible models is Dan Flavin. The analysis Kirk Varnedoe makes in ‘Pictures of Nothing’ is fascinating and worth referencing. As described before, Duchamp stands as a model for renewal, a new beginning. On the other hand, the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich attempted to reduce painting to its absolute essence, to its fundamental core, he wanted to produce the last painting. One could put him at the end of the iterative lineage of which, for instance, Poussin followed by Cézanne belong. It is tradition through dialogue and iteration, and although radical in concept, the work of Malevich can only exist as a part of a greater whole. The two extremes then seem once again, irreconcilable, but in a puzzling way, we find in the work of Flavin a reconciliation.

Varnedoe couldn’t put a finger on the problem more precisely: “So is early minimalism, like Malevich, trying to purify the spring of modern art? Or is it, like Duchamp, trying to defile it? Is early minimalism saying ‘yes!’ in a hard, concrete, reductive, but affirming way? Or is it saying ‘no!’ as a way to subvert and pull out the rug from under modern art?”.  Flavin’s ‘Monument for V. Tatlin’ from 1964, is on the one hand a subversive act, one could argue meant to agitate certain conventions of the time, where traditional mediums of plaster and marble for him become fluorescent tubes, borrowed directly from a catalog of generic mundane office lighting, a new sculptural medium. They have nothing to differ, in principle, from the Ready-Made approach of Duchamp. Varnedoe emphasizes: “Does Flavin mean this to be a contribution to the history of art, or a demoralization and deconstruction of it? Is it anti-art or pro art? Is it yes art or no art?”. One cannot answer this question and that is where the sheer power of his work comes from.

The purity of innovation through iteration is present, it is undeniably after an aesthetic response, a high ideal of beauty, symmetry, composition.  It holds even a sacred quality. This ambiguity is precisely what makes his work fascinating, not either/or but both/and, it is at the same time high art and low art. Like Malevich, is he trying to make the last sculpture in a lineage of sculpture, or like Duchamp is it simply a rebellious act of subversion? A rhetorical question that is impossible to answer, as it is both/and. We can see clearly here in this example that even if one mirror changes and one remains constant, in this case Duchamp as the constant, the resultant labyrinth of thought and production is entirely different (Gober versus Flavin). It is in this possibility of reconstitutable reconfigurations where the excitement of ‘Referential Alchemy’ arises. No longer simply a clear equation of two plus two equals four, it defies logic and yields inexplicable results, the work still traceable to the source, but never identifiable as derivative.

Let’s now turn to architecture, by addressing first a special irony. What is Modernism? It behaves in our minds in the same elusive way by which Saint Augustine described the feeling of trying to explain the concept of time; if no one asks, we instinctively know what it is; if we wish to explain it to whoever asks, we do not know how. But for the sake of the argument – acknowledging the difficulty of putting a finger on its exact meaning – we can describe it as a denial of the use of a figurative vocabulary, the recursive historical catalog of forms, the various cultural syntaxes as a fundamental creative resource in beginning a project, opting instead for homogeneity and total abstraction.

Before modernism, the architect did not have agency over the decision of using or denying history and historical reference. More or less the only agency was what precedent to use, not whether or not they would use a precedent altogether. This certainly did not hinder the birth of authenticity, despite this autopilot mindset to embrace the precedent. By dialoguing, reconfiguring, reimaging, recombining, having ancestry as a creative anchor, the doors still opened wide to many grammatical conjugations of a locally, regionally, or globally shared vocabulary. It is impossible not to smile when acknowledging the perfect balance of tradition and innovation when confronting such works. One could say, by knowing and understanding others, the pre-modern architect came to find and know themself. Then, a radical schism occurred. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, a sharp U-turn from this iterative way of conceiving of form as part of a lineage came in the form of Modernism. In some ways it was a liberation, in others an insipid recipe that eventually resulted in a bland impasse. Those that saw it as an impasse sought to ratify the solid foundation of the pre-modern project, fighting to recover the historically recursive agency of the architect.

In this new world, embracing ancestry as a starting point for creating architecture is a conscious deliberate decision, no longer a kind of cultural autopilot. Modernism did unchain and perhaps awaken the architect in that sense. This conscious choice of returning to history as a figurative source, became fragmented, no longer a linear process, but rather one of sampling all layers of the past, in a way, liberating, free like Gober to choose between the referential path of Cézanne and the non-referential of Duchamp. The cocktail party of possibilities was an open invitation for all to join, and the drinks being served inside were widely diverse, with two in particular being party favorites. Two camps of Postmodernism were at odds. Venturi Scott Brown’s work, especially as delineated in 1966 in Venturi’s seminal text ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, proposes a bold departure from the austerity and purity of modernism, leading the crusade to reintroduce historical references and context, symbolism, appropriation, and last but not least, ornamentation and signage. Salt into a bland cultural soup. In contrast to rigid Modernist formalism of that time, Venturi advocated for an architecture that embraced urban complexity and formal contradiction. Later on, both Venturi and Scott Brown in ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ would also introduce the ordinary or mundane and mass culture as crucial ingredients for the Postmodern. The “both/and” approach —accepting the coexistence of opposites— shook the foundations of discourse by challenging the dogmas of minimalism and modernism, offering a more pluralistic, nuanced architectural language, and a field of new possibilities.

In this sense, VSBA allowed for a certain messiness of life itself, of mass culture to permeate into buildings, the work is characterized by the mix of high and low culture. Tradition is both respected and subverted through their standing that architecture should engage with the realities of popular culture rather than retreat into formal abstraction - their patron saints being artists like Oldenburg or Warhol. As such, one is confronted with an architecture that embraces ambiguity, irony, and eclecticism, arguing that buildings should reflect the complexity and diversity of the world around them, not just a ‘Rossian melancholy’ and silent nostalgia. In the Vanna Venturi House 1964, the case is made: a seemingly simple suburban house that, upon adjusting our eyes to the light, reveals a host of contradictions and ambiguities. The façade features a gabled roof but with an oversized, abstracted pediment that is disrupted by the domestic chimney, cleaved in half at the center. The interior spaces have asymmetrical rooms and unexpected spatial relationships that challenge the expectations of typical domestic suburban American architecture, layered references and styles to create a visual and spatial richness. And what more iconic a reference than the image of his mother at the entry below the inscribed half circle, which becomes a contemporary nod to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, we are in front of a new age yet still part of a lineage, spiced up with the irony and satire of life.

Rossi, on the other hand, focused on the autonomy of architecture, and the idea of the city as a repository of collective memory. In his seminal work, ‘The Architecture of the City’, of the same year 1966, an architecture in which buildings are vessels that evoke a deep sense of history and memory is called for. Simple geometric forms, which some have called silent architecture, acquiring meaning as they accumulate layers of history, valuing continuity with the past and seeking to root contemporary architecture in historical precedent. Rossi called for buildings to embody the cultural and historical memory of a place, thus his fascination with typology, and his stance that architecture is not just about nuanced creation but about the reinterpretation of established forms that resonate with a collective vocabulary that exists apriori. In contrast to Venturi, this reading of the city and historical form is not as literal, not as filigree in its level of ornamentation or formal reference, opting instead to reinterpret historical form with bold primitive geometric abstractions, that still embody the power of their ancestors, but with a contemporary modern removal of excess. Rossi’s new reading of historical form, his abstraction and purification is not intended to kill the past, but in fact to again give it a pulse, to bring it back to life. Rossi’s work underscored the importance of architecture as a cultural project, perhaps best exemplified in this drawing of The Analogous City, where he evokes the possibility of a person sitting at their table looking out a window, could understand all the complexity of a city, the layers of present and past, all the immensity of the collective memory in a precise moment in time, through a singular object.

A labyrinth could then emerge through reflection on and synthesis of this Postmodern dualism. And that is exactly what Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron go on to do with these two ideologies. From Rossi, who is worth noting was their university degree project advisor, they inherited a respect for lineage, form, and their pressing formal preoccupation with the way buildings engage with the historical layers of a city. We see strong echoes in their work of Rossi’s emphasis on typology, particularly the image of his ‘primitive cabin’ sometimes explored inconspicuously and other times monumentally in their work, to create structures that anchor themselves in the urban fabric and its collective vocabulary. However, Herzog & de Meuron also seem to embrace Venturi’s call for complexity and contradiction, infusing their work with a subtle playfulness, an exploration of surface, texture, and layering of assembly.

Take their Ricola Storage Building in Laufen in 1987 as an example, where they seem to draw on both traditions to create a building that stores herbal sweets in a singular unified whole. The project reflects Rossi’s ideals through its adaptation of received models: the Palazzo, a monumental and historically resonant structure made with clear rules, logics, a “diagram” of gravitational forces and structure. Tripartite in organization, a strong concrete plinth, layered piano nobile, and lattice-like cornice that crowns the building with grace. These abstracted tropes of our collective memory from a civic palazzo are here in dialogue with the local traditional stacking of sawn timber boards, drawing on mass material culture a la Venturi. Layers of construction are left exposed, in a clear reference to what Venturi once said: ‘it is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration’. As such, we have a building expression that oscillates, it welcomes the lay person with the image of familiar stacked planks upon approaching the building, yet, from a distance, it retains a clear classical purity that one can imagine would likely gain Rossi’s approval. It is playful and serious, conventionally unconventional, blending high-end cultural history with mass culture local industry. It is both contemporary and deeply rooted in its environment. The close-up a Venturian position and the distant view a Rossian position.

In another context for another project, these two mirrors are placed again in front of one another yielding an entirely different labyrinth, but with very similar ideas. The Eberswalde Technical School Library is both a heavy abstracted palazzo, tripartite, flat with deeply carved openings, a Rossian take on the surrounding Neoclassical context, and on the other hand an almost Postmodern Venturian over-scaling of entablatures, caryatids and cornice bas relief that act as a complete skin, a billboard of relatable iconographies from popular culture, organized as a Neoclassical container of knowledge. This building submits to historical tropes of a public architecture, but through these refracted references uses contemporary construction methodologies, silk screen foil glass printing and spray washed concrete relief to create a building that resembles ideas of the two mirrors, and yet not bowing to either, a totally unique creation.

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In this sense, VSBA allowed for a certain messiness of life itself, of mass culture to permeate into buildings, the work is characterized by the mix of high and low culture. Tradition is both respected and subverted through their standing that architecture should engage with the realities of popular culture rather than retreat into formal abstraction - their patron saints being artists like Oldenburg or Warhol. As such, one is confronted with an architecture that embraces ambiguity, irony, and eclecticism, arguing that buildings should reflect the complexity and diversity of the world around them, not just a ‘Rossian melancholy’ and silent nostalgia. In the Vanna Venturi House 1964, the case is made: a seemingly simple suburban house that, upon adjusting our eyes to the light, reveals a host of contradictions and ambiguities. The façade features a gabled roof but with an oversized, abstracted pediment that is disrupted by the domestic chimney, cleaved in half at the center. The interior spaces have asymmetrical rooms and unexpected spatial relationships that challenge the expectations of typical domestic suburban American architecture, layered references and styles to create a visual and spatial richness. And what more iconic a reference than the image of his mother at the entry below the inscribed half circle, which becomes a contemporary nod to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, we are in front of a new age yet still part of a lineage, spiced up with the irony and satire of life.

Rossi, on the other hand, focused on the autonomy of architecture, and the idea of the city as a repository of collective memory. In his seminal work, ‘The Architecture of the City’, of the same year 1966, an architecture in which buildings are vessels that evoke a deep sense of history and memory is called for. Simple geometric forms, which some have called silent architecture, acquiring meaning as they accumulate layers of history, valuing continuity with the past and seeking to root contemporary architecture in historical precedent. Rossi called for buildings to embody the cultural and historical memory of a place, thus his fascination with typology, and his stance that architecture is not just about nuanced creation but about the reinterpretation of established forms that resonate with a collective vocabulary that exists apriori. In contrast to Venturi, this reading of the city and historical form is not as literal, not as filigree in its level of ornamentation or formal reference, opting instead to reinterpret historical form with bold primitive geometric abstractions, that still embody the power of their ancestors, but with a contemporary modern removal of excess. Rossi’s work underscored the importance of architecture as a cultural project, perhaps best exemplified in this drawing of The Analogous City, where he evokes the possibility of a person sitting at their table looking out a window, could understand all the complexity of a city, the layers of present and past, all the immensity of the collective memory in a precise moment in time, through a singular object.

A labyrinth could then emerge through reflection on and synthesis of this Postmodern dualism. And that is exactly what Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron go on to do with these two ideologies. From Rossi, who is worth noting was their university degree project advisor, they inherited a respect for lineage, form, and their pressing formal preoccupation with the way buildings engage with the historical layers of a city. We see strong echoes in their work of Rossi’s emphasis on typology, particularly the image of his ‘primitive cabin’ sometimes explored inconspicuously and other times monumentally in their work, to create structures that anchor themselves in the urban fabric and its collective vocabulary. However, Herzog & de Meuron also seem to embrace Venturi’s call for complexity and contradiction, infusing their work with a subtle playfulness, an exploration of surface, texture, and layering of assembly. Take their Ricola Storage Building in Laufen in 1987 as an example, where they seem to draw on both traditions to create a building that stores herbal sweets in a singular unified whole.

The project reflects Rossi’s ideals through its adaptation of received models: the Palazzo, a monumental and historically resonant structure made with clear rules, logics, a “diagram” of gravitational forces and structure. Tripartite in organization, a strong concrete plinth, layered piano Nobile, and lattice-like cornice that crowns the building with grace. These abstracted tropes of our collective memory from a civic palazzo are here in dialogue with the local traditional stacking of sawn timber boards, drawing on mass material culture a la Venturi. Layers of construction are left exposed, in a clear reference to what Venturi once said: ‘it is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration’.

As such, we have a building expression that oscillates, it welcomes the lay personwith the image of familiar stacked planks upon approaching the building, yet, from a distance, it retains a clear classical purity that one can imagine would likely gain Rossi’s approval. It is playful and serious, conventionally unconventional, blending high-end cultural history with mass culture local industry. It is both contemporary and deeply rooted in its environment. The close-up a Venturian position and the distant view a Rossian position. In another context for another project, these two mirrors are placed again in front of one another yielding an entirely different labyrinth, but with very similar ideas. The Eberswalde Technical School Library is both a heavyabstracted palazzo, tripartite, flat with deeply carved openings, a Rossian take on the surrounding Neoclassical context, and on the other hand an almost Postmodern Venturian overscaling of entablatures, caryatids and cornice bas relief that act as a complete skin, a billboard of relatable iconographies from popular culture, organized as a Neoclassical container of knowledge.

This building submits to historical tropes of a public architecture, but through these refracted references uses contemporary construction methodologies, silk screen foil glass printing and spray washed concrete relief to create a building that resembles ideas of the two mirrors, and yet not bowing to either, a totally unique creation.

One may erroneously suppose that in order to embrace ‘Referential Alchemy’ one has to be afforded distance, to be blessed with a certain artistic “indifference”, freed from pressing formal and stylistic impositions in a given historical moment. Or at least that’s the context in which these reconciliatory examples have been explored so far. But to push the argument further, let’s turn to a moment in history characterized by a certain immediacy, rich in latent stylistic demands, where a synthesis out of dualism still manages to emerge, two opposing mirrors creating a labyrinth. In 18th and 19th Century Prussia, architectural styles were shaped by the tension between the neo-Gothic and neo-Classical movements. Neo-Classical influences were driven by the Enlightenment’s embracing of reason, order, and symmetry, through Greek and Roman tradition. They were synonymous with clarity and ideals of progress. Neoclassicism became at its essence a vessel to connect the monarchy to ancient imperial traditions in order to strengthen the perception of Prussia’s role as a European power.

This, however, didn’t exclude the 19th century witnessing a latent fascination with medieval architecture and the rise of neo-Gothic styles. Unlike the rational and formal neo-Classical style, neo-Gothic architecture evoked a sense of spirituality, national heritage, and the romantic vernacular. Gothic forms became associated with a desire to reconnect with Germanic roots and evoke unity through a vocabulary of pointed arches, steep gables, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, tabernacles and intricate stonework. Neoclassical architecture was linked to state power, while neo-Gothic was tied to “local” romanticized and mystical histories. At the operating table, architects often oscillated between which of these two styles to use for surgery, depending on the function of the building. For the most part, buildings associated with governance and public monuments were frequently designed as neo-Classical, whereas churches and buildings for education were often dressed neo-Gothic to evoke tradition.

What had not happened until this point, unthinkable in terms of ancestry, was for someone to embrace the two in a single work, both/and not either/or, putting these two ideological mirrors to face each other. Perhaps Schinkel was critical of the Gothic Architect working in formal benevolence, a kind of good faith complacency. However, he still retained a melancholic penchant for the Gothic. Giorgio Vasari criticized Gothic architects for being overly focused on intricate details rather than the overall composition. His analogy was a carpenter who is so immersed in his work that he neglects self-awareness to step back to appreciate the entirety of the composition. Thus, the vegetal element, “the plague of little tabernacles” as Vasari critiques the Gothic Style in 1550. He believed that the overindulgence of ornamentation and decorative elements cluttered and distracted from the building's essence, its structural ingenuity, sacrificing clarity and proportion for ornament. Palladio too disliked Gothic architecture, not only did he find it ugly and unsafe, but also terrifying. He felt it created seasickness, frightening those who stood below, the buildings always seeming to be balancing on the point of collapse and generous in structural defects. For him too, excessive ornament was a useless expense. They both lamented the absence of a coherent structural and formal logic. Gothic architecture can be seen in contemporary terms, through their lens, as those luxury watches with too many chronometers and time zones inside the bezel, in which one doesn’t know where to even begin reading the hour, where the genius of its engineering is lost. Classical architecture on the other hand is the reliable go-to IKEA furniture that enhances your apartment following a simple manual, a set of rules and almost kit of parts, one has to try really hard to mess it up. Maybe Schinkel woke up in the middle of the night from a stylistic nightmare, and in a cold sweat asked himself; could I conceive of a Gothic building that wins Palladio and Vasari’s approval? He went on to invent something unprecedented, marrying the Classical and the Gothic with an extraordinary painterly blending, a new style from these juxtaposed mirrors. The Friedrichswerdersche Church, contemporary to the Altes Museum, is a powerful essay on abstraction.

What is particularly remarkable is that Schinkel somehow found a way to work out a structural system where the syntax can be conjugated in these two different languages. The result: the church exterior has a very peculiar image; it is a Gothic building that can never escape Classicism. An oddity, with spires that end bluntly, the pinnacles smooth and plain, the pitched roof concealed behind a flat parapet cornice. Pointed arch windows of the exterior seem almost like cutouts, rather than the result of flowing Gothic ornamentation. Wall surfaces of the interior are plastered and painted to look like quarry stone, rather than the natural stone walls of German cathedral buildings, almost in a Gober-like process of deliberate deception. Pure forms, surfaces, Classical profile details, it has nothing to do with the high Gothic Cologne Cathedral, or the Strasbourg Cathedral. Inside, there is nothing Gothic about the organization, nothing derived structurally from the perimeter wall; the piers do not emerge from flying buttresses, it is simply a brick wall with pilasters in low relief and no expression of the structural skeleton.

One could say, more than any other Gothic building, the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche resembles the stripped ruin of a basilica. The horizontality of the church is fascinatingly unusual. As opposed to the blurred edges of Gothic cathedrals that dissipate to the heavens, this church sits against the sky with a flat and sharp edge, where one can almost extend the perspective lines to their vanishing point, like Ed Ruscha’s painting of the Standard Gas Station. There’s no pitch roof to be seen, not even a slight indication. Unlike the vegetal quality of the Gothic, ornament here is deprived of any vitality, the plain obelisks only reiterate the irony. The church has a mundane appearance because its brick structure was not clad in stone or covered in stucco but left exposed in the manner of vernacular building traditions of German and Northern Italian medieval architecture. It is the first sacred building in Berlin to use brick since the Middle Ages. The outer facades somehow evoke the same gridded structurally rational composition as the sides and rear facade of the Altes Museum, stamped on all four faces with clarity and rigor, very unlike the agitation and differentiation of front versus sides of traditional Gothic architecture. Schinkel is deliberately reading and writing history at the same time, we are in front of an architecture both freed from the baggage of the past but also carrying it, through stylistic versatility and synthesis.

To conclude, we must make one last necessary stop, at the oeuvre of work that perhaps better than any other serves the arguments developed here: the resolution of the paradox of ancestry in a more precise manner than any other architect in history has achieved. That is the work of Andrea Palladio, representing past, present, and future in continual dialogue.  Today Palladio’s engagement with ancient architecture may obscure the reading of the modernity and radicality of his practice but adjusting our vantage point in order observe his works in a close reading, reveals an unprecedented capacity to negotiate the equilibrium between respect for the traditions of ancient architecture and his uncompromising capacity for innovation and what was at his time considered to be modern.

To best exemplify his ability, let’s take these two mirrors, on the one side Ancient Greece and Rome (antiquity) and a northern Italian abstraction from other Renaissance architects closer to Rome (modernity), and put them face to face. We turn then to Palladio’s work at Palazzo Chiericati. It is a surgical synthesis of classical forms and city making, reconciling the openness, lightness and permeability of the Greek stoa with the centralized composition, weight, and urbanity of the traditional city palazzo. In this design, Palladio synthesized the democratic, public-oriented space of the stoa, with the hierarchical, symmetrical urban order of the palazzo, creating a structure that serves both civic and residential functions and expressions. In this house built for Girolamo Chiericati, Palladio presents to us his thesis, his manifesto, in the most precise and deliberate incarnation: the two identifiable models in the genetic code of the project are clear, but the resolution represents a completely new ‘species’.

The site exists at the intersection between the rural and the urban Vicenza, precisely at the edge of the city, already hinting at the perfect cocktail for invention in terms of resolving opposing forces. The building then takes on a dually ambiguous state of being, as it needs to be both city palace and civic loggia, providing views of the rural, yet serving as a “gate” to the city. Chiericati, the patron, was granted permission by the city to occupy public land stretching out to 4.64 meters, in front of the adjacent existing houses, but in compensation for that, he committed to building a civic gift: a public passage. This is where the idea of the Greek stoa comes in. In antiquity the Greek stoa’s architecture was composed of a long colonnade, permeable, non-hierarchical distribution, which resulted in public shelter, allowing civic life to permeate in through its inviting open screen-like facade, protecting civilians from rain and sun, where public meetings could take place, and merchants could come together. For the most part, stoas were found in agoras - the city’s public squares- and were integral buildings that enriched the social tissue and dialogue in ancient Greece. They were the infrastructural backdrop to communal and philosophical discussions, trading, and community gatherings, which were constitutive to the character of the Greek mind.

Palazzo Chiericati is anchored by this influence, with the ground floor opening directly to the street, no barrier between the building and the urban fabric, a transparent screen. This, however, stands at odds with the organization typical of Renaissance palazzi, which are the opposite: an emphasis on a central axis, verticality and protection.

As such the idea of hierarchy is reintroduced and coexists, by inventing a pseudo-centralized order through essentially a wall of columns. It is this very invention, the “Siamese column” that allows Palladio to retain the permeability and nonhierarchical, egalitarian nature of the Stoa, but generate the centrality of the Palazzo. Almost just a hiccup in the otherwise even rhythm of the colonnade, this plastic merging of columns creates a moment of ‘wall’ to highlight the central bay above. This negotiation allows Palladio to create a building that is at once civic and monumental, public and private, permeable and protective.

One must here make a note of another invention, considering columns in the renaissance were prohibitively expensive. Made of solid stone, they required the architect to select a few distinct moments to accentuate. The generous use of columns at Chiericati was made possible through the discovery of Palladio, the pizza slice shaped bricks that are arrayed and stacked and covered in a stucco epidermis, avoiding the inaccessible cost to sculpt column blocks of pure marble. His precision on the selection of the free-standing column on the facade necessitated one last invention to negotiate the stoa distribution with the inner facade of the loggia. The corresponding pilasters on the inside walls are not simply rectangular projections of the columns on the exterior, but instead they have a slight entasis, like the beginning of a child in the womb becoming noticeable, they swell outward and create a belly before tapering up back to receive the capital. It is a detail of great finesse and formal sophistication. It creates an incredibly sculptural motif that is full of grace with a unique softness to go from the sculptural standing object to the planar surface, a mediation of opposites. In a way, the mirror of ancient Greece and Rome facing the mirror of modern Renaissance Palazzi of that time become two north stars, both with their immense gravitational pull, and yet their reflexive mirror-like qualities, give space for Palladio to dance between the two and create something entirely familiar, yet conspicuously radical. It is a civic palazzo born out of sheer invention through precise formal reconfiguration, ‘Referential Alchemy’ par excellence.

In short, this appropriation through the progressive adaptation of his models, which only became more refined and personal throughout his career, creates in Palladio’s work a labyrinth of meaning. We can see from this project Palladio’s ability to create total architectural systems: detaching motifs from their respective original source, by adapting them to new conditions and circumstances, all with the goal of finding solutions to contemporary problems. We can see for him history was a way to be free- he would redesign ancient ruins in drawings as he surveyed and experienced them to fit his taste and desires. All these generated works in the spirit of the poet Pietro Aretino’s description in 1542: “anciently modern and modernly ancient”, putting the finger on the admiration for antiquity yet a commanding feeling of novelty. An inseparable relationship of theory and practice emerged through him, fabrica and discourse (‘building’ and ‘discourse’), studying and drawing, writing and designing, building and explaining were linked in a total personal and intellectual project. Palladio’s surveys, his trips to Rome, investigations and reflections, all fed directly into his practice, while his built works became the clearest and best illustrations of his system and principles, disseminated through his ‘Four books of Architecture’ in 1570. It’s safe to say he was able to produce a level of invention and resolution in the design of villas, palaces, public buildings, churches, that redefined boundaries and conventions of architecture to become the most imitated architect in history.

Returning to the metaphor of "two mirrors to create a labyrinth,” one can see how art and architecture, when informed by opposing or divergent philosophies, become a labyrinthic process of reflection, reconfiguration, and ultimately resolution. By embracing multiple influences, it is possible to create layered artifacts that engage with the past, present, and future. Antithetical references are alchemized into something new and original, creating a labyrinth of meanings that continues to unfold with each new interpretation. The artifacts here have been selected under the premise that their existence honors history, yet simultaneously departs from it. As these examples have shown, attempting to reconcile dualism can be a powerful fuel for cultural production.

The examples here are not simply borrowing from their ancestors but actively engaging with them, dissecting and reconfiguring them with new visions and propositions. It is this very active engagement that gives ‘Referential Alchemy’ its power: the creative agent is not a passive receiver of tradition but a transformer of it, references must be digested, and a critical stance must be developed to transcend the original source. It is in this way that they can become an instrument of cultural expression creating distinctly malleable yet enduring outcomes. From this a potential answer to the paradox of tradition versus innovation emerges, palimpsests of history that are anchored, yet free to balance opposing forces. None of the projects imitate or quote in a conventional way: the references are dissolved through their own language, like the melting of two rusted metals, forged and combined to make a new alloy. As these works show, surrendering to authority while fighting all the way can be a powerful and effective creative methodology to produce new history. Cultural production, at its core, thrives on paradoxes and contradictions.