Buildings that come to life

text published on C3 Magazine, n.351

versione italiana

A voluminous machine

In 1977, when the Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, was inaugurated, it was clear that the architectural space imagined by the architects was nothing more than a free volume whose support plants had become the space’s very reason for being.

The space evinces, in other words, a total preponderance of systems, of the engine of the building, which, instead of being a support for the building, acquire a new nature as a wall in their own right, a container, the boundary between interior and exterior.

A long process underpinned this vision of architecture; it arose from radical groups who, in the years immediately preceding, articulated a vision of architecture in which interior and exterior spaces do not exist, but are replaced by a generic, continuous free surface, fully air-conditioned and well-illuminated, and bearing no relation to exterior climate or natural lighting.

Measure, enlarge, unify: Spanish landscapes

text published on Dlle, n.2, 2010 – Spain Landscape 2010 – Urban Hybrids – Evolution in Regeneration

testo italiano su Arch’it

– Mire vuestra merced – respondiò Sancho – que aquellos que allì se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento, y lo que en ellos parecen brazos son las aspas, que, volteadas del viento, hacen andar la piedra del molino.-

(- Look, your worship; – said Sancho – what we see there are not  giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that  when turned by the wind make the millstones go. -)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, 1605.

Windmills, Castilla La Mancha, Spain, photo by chiara quinzii