Saverio Muratori. Architecture and reality

Muratori says: «while the relationship between the animal and the environment is an absolute relationship, because there is no reflection of consciousness, it is a relationship that is established and that the animal cannot correct because it does not have the possibility of self-determination, in man instead there is consciousness, for which man can adapt the environment to himself...». Saverio Muratori, architect between the '30s and '70s, was certainly not the first to pose the problem of the environment. Many before him have questioned how to behave with respect to the cultural importance of a place, its tradition and history, how to design the new and how to insert it into the environment, but it is with Muratori that the concept of environment itself reaches a new complexity. Complexity that unfolds on two coplanar levels: on the one hand architecture and on the other reality. Muratori lived an era of uncertainty, in which modern architecture showed signs of subsidence. Echoing the words of Alessandro Giannini: «The irrationality of reality is nothing but structural inadequacy of modern science, an implicit failure in the modern way of formulating science and a threatening ghost that looms over humanity and that will eventually overwhelm it. Therefore architecture is the salvation of man.» The question I ask myself is: Which architecture? What will be the thought that will allow us to overcome a new crisis, like the one we are experiencing, in which everything is temporary, dispersive. In architecture there is not a single truth, but multiple and Muratori has expressed, thinking and doing, his vision of architecture, linked to the world of urban morphology. Active architect and thinking man between contradictions and confirmations offered, for those who want to accept it, a design method capable of establishing a living, coherent and rational relationship with the existing urban scene, far from imaginative and self-referential visions. The only protagonist is the city, its history, not intended as a set of data but as the starting point of the project, and the only recipient of the project is the man, the civilization that lives the city. The aim of the paper is to deepen some of Muratori’s projects, not in an historical key, but as an architect from a design point of view. Understand how Muratorian architecture has gone beyond the inadequacy encountered and how even today its thought can be current.