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Expressionist Zeroing. Anachronism in Bruno Zevi’s Paradigmatic Counter-Histories

par Van Acker, Wouter
Editeur scientifique Van Acker, Wouter ;Lyna, Bourouiba
Référence Degree Zero in Architecture: Form, Value, Authorship, Spector Books, Leipzig, page (215-236)
Publication Publié, 2026-04-01

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Résumé :

Within the crisis of architecture’s contemporaneity in the architectural debate on postmodernity, and the divergent explorations of architecture’s relation to its own history during that period, Bruno Zevi’s notion of “expressionist zeroing” occupies a singular position. The idea of a “zero degree” was a trope through which he regularly articulated his repositioning of expressionism within the history of modernist architecture, elevating its counter-historical temporality to an operative level. Just as the drawings of Michelangelo or the Sydney Opera House by Jørn Utzon could be mobilized to clarify the work of Erich Mendelsohn, so too could expressionism function as a pivot for re-reading the major works of the past and projecting them into the future. From his counter-historical viewpoint, expressionism was treated as testimony to a continuity of the pre-historical—from the Roman catacombs to Louis Kahn—and enabled the application of a “critical-operative” method that involved updating and re-proposing the past as an irreplaceable moment for understanding the contemporary period. This chapter aims to investigate Zevi’s anachronistic conception of expressionism and the paradigmatic logic it played in his counter-history of modernist architecture. In the work of architects such as Erich Mendelsohn, Alvar Aalto, and Jørn Utzon, he identified an alternative coherence of architectural techniques and values that sidestepped—precisely as a degree zero was meant to do—the polarities of architectural debate as it grappled with the modernist legacy. Starting from Il manifesto di Modena (1998) and his advocacy for the work of several deconstructivist architects, this chapter traces, through a range of publications and lectures, Zevi’s fascination with expressionism’s simultaneous physical and psychological understanding of the perception of architectural space and form. It resituates how he found in expressionism a source of resistance against various forms of postmodern appropriation and a keystone for defending its recurrence and longevity.