Frediano Frediani and the Santa Lucia Skyscraper Drawing and Re-drawing an Urban Utopia.

In the panorama of 20th century architecture and the great urban transformations that marked the city of Naples between the two world wars, Frediano Frediani is one of its “minor figures”. Nevertheless, there are several works of significant architectural quality in his prolific production as a designer and consultant for large transport and infrastructure companies in Campania. It is worth merely mentioning the two stations in Piazzale Tecchio and Via Leopardi (1939/40) built for the Cumana railway in the context of his long collaboration with the EAV (Ente Autonoma Volturno) as well as the collaboration with Luigi Cosenza with the construction of the Fish Market and the Sannazzaro quarter (1929/30). However, his most utopian project remains without doubt the International Work Centre ‘Santa Lucia’ (1945/46), a magniloquent building imagined on an artificial peninsula to be built between Molo San Vincenzo and Castel dell’Ovo along the east coastline of the city. The work was never realized, but the project represents a significant and little-known episode of 20th century architectural production in Naples. The contribution proposes an analysis of the project and the vibrant debate that it generated, through an operation of re-drawing that, using the strategies of representation as a valuable critical tool, proposes an interpretation of the instances of the project and spatial thinking of a work that is presented with the force of a real ‘provocation’ in the context of post-war architecture in Italy

Earthen Construction. Graphic Mediation in Spontaneous Architecture

This paper proposes a reflection on spontaneous architecture, a theme dealtwith in detail by BernardRudofsky, who in the exhibition "Architecture without architects” is critical of the author’s architecture that places more emphasis on the creator at the expense of collective logics that have formed the basis of architectural thought. Considering that the evolution of building has not been shaped by architects, but by certain social, political and economic contexts, means reading the history of architecture not on the basis of a scientific production carried out in individual graphic elaborations, but by communitarian reflections and awareness. In this sense, architecture is free from aprioristic thought, and not constrained by a tension that starts from the final form, but generated by the constructive process that progressively occupies the space defining a place. Two fundamental questions are connected to the mediation of design in the project conception (and its possible lack): the first concerns the authorship of the work that is the need -found by Vasari for the first time- to identify an architect and his cultural context in order to attribute meaning and value to a building. The second theme, on the other hand, is closely linked to the constructive reasons and processes that generate a type of participatory architecture, sometimes without overall planning and graphic design representation. This is the case of earthen architecture, its evolutions and the approach to this technique in the contemporary culture

"Mauro Galantino, Opere"

Monografia di progetti e realizzazioni dell'architetto Mauro Galantino, con saggio critico e posizionamento internazionale di Kenneth Frampton e Vittorio Gregotti. Analisi tecnica critica e cronologica di Silvia Milesi, narrazione progettuale di Mauro Galantin

Interpreting Art Nouveau in drawings by Gino Coppedé

Gino Coppedé was an eclectic Florentine architect who actively contributed to Italian architecture during the first two decades of the twentieth century. During his professional career, his formal style—above all his drawings—was very similar to what in Italy was known as “stil-nuovo”, “stile foreale”, or Liberty, in other words the Italian version of Art Nouveau. This contribution reviewed the many works he executed in Rome during the last period of his career. Our critical analysis concentrated on the representation methods and communicative-graphic mediums used by the architect. The aim of the study was to try and understand to what extent a professional like Coppedé—who invented an architecture focusing on finance and business and therefore on the requirements of the world of luxury—was actually involved in the new cultural movement or whether his involvement was merely instrumental. We believe our results indicate a third option: if we consider his graphics, representation methods and style of drawing as signs of a specific cultural identity, Gino Coppedé’s works take on an independent denotation, difficult to define in a stylistically definable environment