SERGIO MUSMECI'S "FORMS WITH NO NAME" AND "ANTI-POLYHEDRONS"

SERGIO MUSMECI (1926-1981) is one of the most daring and unconventional engineers born in the twentieth century; he was master equally of music, astronomy, aeronautics, mathematics, and philosophy, all of which informed his structures, whose shape was determined by the spatial distribution of static actions. Musmeci thought that he could reach the expression of "modernity" through science. His activity is the answer to those who believe that the studies concerning the relationship between architecture and mathematics are much too theoretical. His works are substantially of two types. The first one is referred to a "geometry of the continuous", as in the constructive technique of the lightweight stressed skin structures and improved in what he called "forms with no name" elaborated for the bridge on the Basento. The forms he conceived can be truly defined as three-dimensional because they are endowed with a different kind of curvature and orientation in space, in every point, being different the intensity and the direction of strength at each point. As a consequence, the construction of spatial forms can be obtained through automorphic transpositions of symmetries due to the rotation or the translation of plane figures, so that the volume was directly connected with the concept of structural minimum. The other subject of Musmeci's researches concerns those aggregated structures that are the expression of a geometry of discontinuity, represented by the crystallographic conformation of trussed structures. In 1979 Musmeci exhibited full-size models representing various aggregated structures illustrating those "enigmatic and sharp space frames", geometrically constructed through the same formative process of regular and irregular polyhedrons and their reciprocal transformation from one into the others. His studies on polyhedrons culminated with the definition of the anti-polyhedron, a potentially unlimited and undetermined geometrical figure, even though it was generated from regular figures.