Let’s say the project is a dialogical practice, an exercise in listening and comparison with a plurality of external conditions: so, the first moment of this dialogue, is surely the dialectic with the site, with the characters, physical and cultural, of the space that will have to embrace the new architecture intervention. In some cases, it is this first confrontation that is crucial and that provides the synthetic image that defines the building once it has reached its final completion.
In the process of modifying places, the architect has the task of mediation. He must negotiate between expectations and empirical conditions defined in reality. This dialogue becomes essential when the preexistence has lost its original functionality and the project is called to adapt it to new uses. A condition that unify the heritage of abandoned architecture, composed of civil, industrial, public and private buildings which, having lost their original functionality, become passive containers, inert elements in the network of economic and social relations of which they were once an active part.
Faced with the demands defined by the need to work on the traces of man's past activity, the project must aspire to reinterpret what already exists, according to a conception of reuse that is not merely instrumental, rather as a possibility of rethinking and innovation. In particular, the case in which the comparison with a place is also an opportunity for reuse is the theme studied in this essay.
Marco Lecis
Città Postume. Costruzione retorica e strategia analitica nelle immagini urbane di Gabriele Basilico
With the death of Gabriele Basilico the impressive sequence of his images of contemporary cities remains as a legacy for those architects and urban planners who, over the past thirty years, have imagined and built real cities starting from the photographs and aesthetics of the Milanese master. This is a strong legacy, of great influence and capacity for suggestion, not only in Italy and not only in the field of architecture: a heritage that can be reorganized starting from strategies of resistance to the dynamic flow and to excited rhythms of the metropolises.
Marco Lecis
Da Milano a Barcellona. Architettura italiana nelle riviste catalane negli anni della Transición
My purpose is to study a particular moment in the history of architectural theories in Spain during which forces as powerful as Catalan identity and Italian influences played a major role.In the mid ‘70s the libertarian tensions of Catalan culture urge to reconfigure themselves in the new democratic frame and start looking outside the country, depicting themselves as an emancipating and cosmopolite force. At the same time Italian architecture plays a role in the process: some protagonists of Milanese debate, like Rossi and Gregotti, were building their international reputation, just starting from the Iberian peninsula. In that very moment their work has been used in the Spanish scenery to define a new international profile for Catalan architecture and to reconsider some figures of his canon (Cerdà and Sostres, for example). Analyze the intersection between these components could be fruitful to point out the role that architectural theories were playing in that social and cultural context: a role that went far beyond their disciplinary purposes and their programmatic statements.
Guido Guidi builds his photographic sequences as narrations: an architect could consider his images as evidence of the contemporary landscape only if he is aware of their semantic connotations and if he is able to detect the rhetorical tools by which the author displays and interrelate his images. Photobook Cinque Paesaggi 1983-1993 (2013) it's a useful case study: in its pages the image of the house is presented as an architectural archetype in dialectical relation with the figure of the road, both standing by an always persistent natural scenery. Guidi’s images could be used by architects in their job only if they achieve to understand them beyond their mere evidence.