Il primato del disegno nell’architettura italiana del secondo Novecento

Among the possible declinations of the practice of drawing, two prevalent attitudes emerge in architecture, both generating different approaches to the project and divergent fields of research. We could in fact distinguish a fantastic aproach to the practice of drawing from a geometric approach, which corresponds to an evident mathematization of the architectural object and to the impulse towards the measurability and controllability of Cartesian space. This distinction is based on the assumption that exists a substantial difference between conceiving the drawing as a form of representation (more or less autonomous), and conceiving the project itself as a drawing, or as a search for order, or collocatio, investigated through the tool of geometry. In this paper this second modality will be discussed; a modality which doesn’t distinguish the domain of drawing from the domain of one’s own idea of architecture: the triangular-based parallelepipeds of Polesello, the rarefied primary geometries of Costantino Dardi, the obsessive modular repetitions of Franco Purini, remain in fact among the most suggestive prefigurations that the Italian architectural language has ever known, to the point that today we cannot casually denounce the aporias of this approach, without simultaneously asking ourselves what, from this season of ‘divine geometries’, we can inherit for the future.