101 research outputs found
Corridoi: demiurgici sguardi e frammenti di esistenza
No full textA place for encounters and confrontations, the corridor is a philosophical place par excellence, to the extent that it gathers the sediment of an epistemological conflict that imposes itself in architectural forms on man’s daily life. Between its walls, the geometric spatiality of order and of the perspective that controls everything is traversed by the continuous flow of existence, of fortuitous and unexpected knowledge, of becoming, of waiting. A sort of interval in the inhabitant’s existence, seen through the absolute, demiurgic eye of perspective, coexists with the interior site of small moments, of fragments of that same existence seen from the inside.
The result of the architecture of reason, the corridor contains multiple aspects as a site of transit and a site of order, distribution, and rational organization. Initially opposed, the corridor would have to wait for a ‘modern’ mentality for it to expand to public buildings. The corridor then gradually imposed itself in the articulation of the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeois dwelling with its rooms divided by scrupulous protocols – those of hygiene, convenience and decorum – which impose a distancing between private and public life. Only in the nineteenth century would Cartesian perspectivism agree to only accept the evidence of mathematical logic and the geometric scheme imposed by perspective on reality as formal instruments of technological intentionality. The divorce between metaphysics and reason thus functionalized Euclidean geometry by depriving it of its residual symbolic content and ushered in the era of descriptive geometry that, systematically reducing reality to two dimensions, made the Industrial Revolution possible. Without the encounter at infinity of the parallels of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate and perspective understood as an invisible hinge between projections, the modern technological world could not have existed, nor could have the corridor in the way that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented it. The enfilade of rooms typical of hierarchical thought and the social hierarchy that had been dominant up to that moment thus leaves room for the taxonomic order of the ascending efficiency-oriented bourgeoisie, giving rise to a device whose history has yet to be written
Abitare nel Tempo. Venti ville del Novecento
No full textLa villa è lungo l’intero arco del Novecento tema di sperimentazione tipologica
e linguistica per eccellenza. Attraverso il racconto di casi paradigmatici e di saggi
che ne mettono a fuoco i temi, relazionandoli tra loro, il libro esplora l’evoluzione
dell’abitare unifamiliare. Villa Savoye di Le Corbusier e Villa dall’Ava di Rem
Koolhaas sono i termini a quo e ad quem che definiscono una collezione di venti
piccole e preziose abitazioni, ciascuna rappresentativa di un modo di significare
lo stare nel mondo quanto di concepire l’architettura
Caryatids
No full textTwo models, two columns. One talks through a univocal language which embodies the spirit of that precise cultural moment. She is sacred, univocal, exclusive, essential; a sign of a Grand Recit.
The other expresses herself through a multiple layer of signs. She is desacrating, ambiguous, inclusive; a sign of a syncretic and relative speech.
Both are iconic
Rocco e Piero: la tipologia come "impegno sul reale"
No full textWhat do a boxer from Lucania and a disoriented Milanese broker have in common? Perhaps nothing—except Alain Delon, who played them both, and the city of Milan, where their cinematic lives unfold: Rocco, the boxer, in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960); Piero, the broker, in L’eclisse (1962). In these films, by Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni, the two directors offer two radically different visions of modernity: one melodramatic and cathartic, the other elliptical, alienated, unresolved.
These are not simply stylistic oppositions but reflections of deeper tensions between narrative coherence and formal breakdown, between representation and its crisis. As Umberto Eco wrote in 1962, they embody two distinct ways of “forming as an engagement with the real.”
This cinematic divergence becomes a lens for understanding two fundamental approaches to architectural typology in 1960s Italy. The theoretical framework derives from Edoardo Sanguineti's call to "make avant-garde into museum art" and Franco Fortini's interpretation of this as a consciously self-reflexive, "classicizing" neo-avant-garde. Aldo Rossi's 1968 adoption of the motto "I paint only for museums" – attributed to Cézanne but likely derived from Sanguineti – sheds light on his approach. The San Rocco quarter in Monza exemplifies this "Piero" method: an autonomous grid imposed on the existing fabric, indifferent to context, transforming alienation into avant-garde architecture. Conversely, Saverio Muratori's Roman "re-weaving" projects embody the "Rocco" method: a historical, dialogical typology that seeks to heal urban fractures through mimetic adherence to reality.
Yet these seemingly irreducible positions unexpectedly reconcile in 1980s Berlin. Rossi's Kochstraße housing complex synthesizes both approaches: the volumes respect the urban palimpsest while the façades display recognizable Rossian characteristics. Here, Rocco dresses Piero, but "dressed anew" – abstract geometry becomes material, colored, and decorated, losing its hieratic quality for domestic proportions.
This Berlin synthesis reveals a broader cultural transformation. The avant-garde discovers a new museum concept: no longer the "Cézannian" museum "dear to us," but the "precociously (and luxuriously) archival" one that Sanguineti had already identified in 1962. The iconicity of Delon-the-star ultimately prevails over the characters he portrays, just as in the 1980s, the architect's image eclipsed the project itself.
The essay concludes by reflecting on our contemporary condition: we no longer know how to feel our time as "ours" as Eco, Sanguineti, Rossi, or Antonioni did. The very idea of "being of one's time" has had its time. We live in a posthumous present where the future promised by the avant-gardes has become an indifferent repertoire. Perhaps this is precisely the legacy of the avant-gardes: they gave us a freedom we no longer know what to do with
Il punteggio di Amburgo
No full textResoconto del Laboratorio di Progettazione Architettonica 1 - Anno accademico 2016/2017A report of the activity of Architectural Design Studio 1 - Academic Year 2016/201
Myths, Machines, and Words
No full textOn the threshold of the deep epistemological cut of the post-modern era, the traditional
architectural bulwarks that collapsed under the pressure of the avant-garde season
open their gates to innovation both in technology and, above all, the theoretical needs in
the discipline for managing the rich complexity of new horizons in science and society.
Thus, to fill the gap inherited from the pioneers, in 1968, architecture, for centuries
based on eminently constructive facts, had to deal with what was previously ascribed to
other disciplines, marking a turning point. History, social claims, music, new natural and
philosophical awareness, and, above all, language became the essential parts of the new
debate
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