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progetti per l’abitare contemporaneo

Can Carlo Scarpa come to mind when looking at projects by Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo? Under many aspects, the two couldn’t be more distant: Veneto against Sicily, infinite detail against austere precision in the approach, poetics of the fragment against a proud sense of formal and expressive unity. However, they also have much in common: the individual nature of their research, a passion for materials and their specific qualities, the many – but not necessarily looked for – occasions to work on a small scale, closeness with art, the ability to “design” their own clients, the distant echo of Japanese accuracy. As some of Scarpa’s creations, the house in Modica is a work of art in its fullest sense, imagined together with its bold construction method and the effect it would have on the landscape and its inhabitants. As always, what strikes us is the amplitude of Grasso Cannizzo’s design language, as technical as an engineer, as synthetic and visionary as an abstract artist.

Luigi Pellegrin and Giuseppe Perugini are two heroes of the wildest and most interesting phase of Italian architecture. With constant support by Bruno Zevi, they were both tireless creators of projects directed towards a technical and social future, intolerant towards “paper” utopias. They both had a penchant for the public or even monumental dimension, made up of schools, public buildings, large complexes. It is therefore interesting to see them here self-commissioned and “forced” to a domestic dimension, while they try to empty the architecture of the house of any intimate aspect to transform it into a purely spatial archetype. In his semi-detached family villa, Pellegrin uses the building plan as if it were one of his memorable sections, he makes it burst and imagines it at the centre of an in nitely dynamic perspective spatial system. The Perugini family’s Casa Albero – another “house like me” – is built as an organic structure to which individual cells containing domestic spaces are added, as in a cellular organism with unlimited growth.

Roman Baroque is among the architectural passions that Zaha Hadid often mentioned, wit its ability to sculpt the urban space, its unique blend of solidity and lightness. Her project for the MAXXI is perhaps the most explicit testimonial to this passion, which is however also present in her later work and in her firm’s current projects. It in fact appears in the house built near Moscow, in the characteristic way in which the dynamic development of curved shapes is interwoven with the sudden changes in altitude and height. It is unavoidable to travel back in time and place this project designed by Hadid’s office beside the first successful tribute to Baroque tradition, namely Casa Baldi by Paolo Portoghesi, creative in its form and spaces, traditional in materials. The connection between the two architects becomes clearer if we consider the second – unbuilt – project for the same house: slender in height, hyperdynamic, enriched by a complex series of rotations and vertical spatial joints.

The assonance we perceive between Franz Prati’s house in Reggio Emilia and Danilo Guerri’s in Recanati is subtle and interesting. It can be traced in a similar passion for ancient materials, notably bricks, in a sort of vaguely rural chromatic familiarity, in their absolute dedication to the strength of drawing. For Prati, the drawing is of course the central aspect of his identity as an architect, a semantic platform where the author draws out not only everything that will actually be built, but also everything that will not: alternative solutions, impossible developments, changes of heart. The project is thus the decisive joint between the realism of the completed building and the radicalism of the initial drawings. Guerri is also always in search of “the most beautiful architecture in the world”, which according to him arises from the summation of details that are designed and changed a thousand times, from the “improper” and authorial use of traditional materials, from the challenge to almost impossible morphological contexts, such as the slope of the “solitary hill” in Recanati, which the house descends floor after floor.

Francesco Berarducci’s villino and this typology itself are true expression of the history of architecture and urban planning in Rome during the post war period. The architectural type of the small villa – three floors and a surrounding garden – has here been stretched in length and width, adapted to a slope, redeemed with such a wealth of volumetric complexity, of materials and details, of internal organization, that it is transformed into an almost ideal building. Jo Noero, along the same longitude but in the opposite hemisphere, and belonging to a very distant architectural culture, also seems committed to defining a new type of urban residential building, high rise (12 oors) and organized as a suburban slab block, but shorter, with a façade whose measures are more in line with a city centre. Despite the distance of space and time, the two projects share an absolute trust in the drawing as a regulator of relations between the building, the landscape, the city and the life that takes place within them.

In the developing dialectic between individual homes and collective housing, the Vertical Forest by Stefano Boeri and the Moriyama House by Ryue Nishizawa both occupy an intermediate position, where architectural types and life styles are confused but also represent an essential part of the building’s identity. More than an apartment tower, Boeri’s building aspires to be a superimposition of villas, each one with its own garden. It is the superimposed villas imagined by Le Corbusier, here translated into an environmentalist icon for Milan. The Moriyama House is a small Japanese miracle, a portrait-home for one single inhabitant that turns without jolts into a mini-neighbourhood of small isolated houses, where each room, separated from the others, can be transformed into an independent unit, available for short-term lets. The building designed by Studio Boeri ideally reunites the city within itself, with an idealized ratio between building, sky and vegetation. In Tokyo the house explodes to become city, regardless to whether it is inhabited by a single individual or by a collage of temporary residents.

For many years Corviale by Mario Fiorentino has been not only a building: it is a theme of urban sociology, a useful topic in cultural, political and aesthetic battles, a device of artistic production and one of the few completed symbols of the Italian way to social utopia, a crucial theme of the 1960s research on housing. Lately, however Corviale has also become a paradigm – a borderline case and at the same time a standard – of the urgency and potential of Italian suburban residential buildings, and not only. Beyond loving or hating it, the kilometre-long building may perhaps be regenerated, recycled, completed, “revived”, newly contextualized. The sense of urgency that comes from the sum of its physical size and of its many problems has thus given rise to regeneration projects and programs. Those by Laura Peretti for the rethinking of the spaces of relationship and by Guendalina Salimei for the liberation of the fourth floor, here on dispaly, fuel not only hopes of renewal for the residents and the city but also provide interesting elements for a debate that involves most European cities, regarding the future of large modernist residential neighbourhoods, fascinating but obsolete remains of a past welfare system, that we must somehow incorporate into contemporary space.