Projects for the ancient city

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Good

Precisely because architecture measures with an expressive world that already exists – namely architecture – a project is first and foremost a way to pronounce oneself, or in other words to take stock, a declaration of intents; a project is always above all the expression of a judgment on the architecture, on the city, how it is, how it was, how it could be, a judgment on history, including the contemporary condition and the state of our work, an explicit judgment if it is to serve some purpose, that must be clearly visible, especially today. This is why we have titled our research "Projects for the ancient city", to immediately clarify, and avoid misunderstandings about the kind of relationship that links our work to the contemporary city, to immediately state the necessity, in our work, of always first of all taking a distance from the city as it is, from its architecture, and the need to always begin from the city as it was, as it has always been, not only in a physical and material sense but also from a more general point of view, we are referring to its expressive aims, but also its routines, the need to begin from that sole certainty that consists, precisely, of the experience of continuity of the historical city, its architecture, to seek to somehow reduce the gap between these two cities, because this is how matters stand by now, two cities and the absurd distance separating them, to be able deal with the contemporary one, the city that, even if it is the only subject of our work, it is not necessarily our only problem or objective. The need to always begin with architecture as it once was, from our work as it was, as it has always been, we are naturally speaking of its condition, to overcome the discomfort, not to mention the aversion, in the face of the city as it is today, of almost all its architecture, always so inadequate, in our opinion, always so unwilling to face, or at least distracted before, what has always been its duty. As we need to take a step back, to start from farther away in order to get further ahead, the first objective of our projects is to reveal, in all its magnitude, the distance and void that has been formed, and their ambition is to attempt to bridge this gap, as if it had belonged to the city for a long time, as if it had, even before its appearance, been part of the expressive horizon of the city as it has always been. Projects like parts of the city, as its only building material, the continuation of its history rather than its distortion or negation, projects as part of a city that strives to rediscover its meaning, its goals, and not of a city that seeks other reasons, other goals, who knows why, I am naturally speaking of the architecture – and here I must point out that what we’re against is not so much the city of speculation, of 145 architecture reduced to merchandise and so on, that is by now a foregone condition of our work, that everyone must deal with in his own way, and neither its results, what we see built or published, and that we have no business or particular interest in judging, but rather – precisely – the transformation of the meaning and nature of our work, the progressive shift of its duties and goals, a work that is becoming more and more limited and impoverished, to the point of becoming as it indeed has – the work of decorators, of creatives as it is called today, or paperhangers as Adolf Loos would have put it, and actually did, a long time ago. Projects, as answers to questions that have always been the same, answers whose only reason to exist lies in those questions, that would like to reduce to a minimum every possible margin with those questions, hence the need to eliminate precisely the element of interpretation and comment, that is legitimate and probably necessary in other circumstances, but certainly not today, at least not in our opinion. Hence the choice, as we may define it, of mediocrity for these projects, to be above all lucid and clear, as opposed to the certainly more gratifying one of appearing and distinguishing oneself, and thus also the final appearance of something incomplete, of things that seem to be half done, the inevitable consequence of a work that above all wants to measure to what extent, with the means that have always existed, it is still possible to be genuine, or at the very least credible.

Dipartimento di afferenza

Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’Architettura

Docenti afferenti

Full Professors
Giorgio Grassi
Rosaldo Bonicalzi
Riccardo Campagnola