Ph.D. Doctorate of Research in Architectural Composition. XXII cycle

Università IUAV Venice

Como – Terragni, a double strain

It concerns an interpretation that crosses two terms: the historical evolution of the urban facts of Como and those gathered from Terragni’s entire works.A critical device can be gathered from both terms, useful to understand and demonstrate the inseparable and mutual link between architect and city, providing a figurative reading: “Terragni’s city”. Integral part of the research work is the critical and figurative reshaping of references and projects and the images of the plaster models. The thesis claims that the collection of urban and architectural projects aims to a city image, capable to understand the past, present and future urban facts in an ordered outline of dialectic polarities between parts. Terragni seems to include a double meaning: one that aims to set in an urban-land context (E. Mantero) and the other that aims to a totally inside experience on the architectural object, assuming itself as an “analytic search inside the figurative language possibilities” (D. Vitale).  This research wants to give a synthesis between an “extrinsic strain”, addressed to the city, and an “intrinsic strain”, addressed to a linguistic experimentation. Terragni’s work is the link between the classical world, depositary of a rich repertoire of determined and defined forms, and the modern world, characterized by the break-up of sense and place unity in the meaning adopted by the “open city”. The actual interest in Terragni’s work comes from Terragni itself: he doesn’t assign a moralist or worthly meaning to the overtaking of the historical city limits, but he sees them as an essential and fundamental term. The outline built by the established city – the classic world – and the open city – the modern world – isn’t a irreconcilable and peremptory contradiction between form presence and absence, between identity and nothing, but as the essential image of complementary terms, as figure and background, both essential, and as mutual re-understanding and requalification of the cities’ past, present and future.