Sapienza
Roma, 2012
Marcello Piacentini and various author, 1932.1935
in Marcello Piacentini architetto 1881-1960, Gangemi editore, 2012
Photographing Marcello Piacentini’s architectures means crystallizing and shaping a city idea strongly based on the deepest vision-related concepts. Architectures, which have a primary value in their three-dimensional essence, are the main actors in that complex task of creating articulated urban frameworks that outline the visual character of each city. Photography re-elaborates and returns, through an art of distance, certain prospective and material values kept in the physical composition of urban places; In its fineness it allows to explore, in a potentially unlimited time, all the meanings that an image carries through its surface. In these photographs, the frontal and symmetrical view that in its two-dimensional abstraction emphasizes the character of an ideal city in interventions such as this or the E42, there is added a glimpse of three-dimensional reality and plastic volumetric articulation of geometries piacentiniane. Photography, through precise operational choices, is always the interpretation and creation of a new partial order that can be considered as reinforcement or alternative to that created by the reality that it represents. In photographing the architectures of Piacentini to Sapienza, an attempt was made to agree with the compositional ideas that guided him and at the same time wanted to create a distance that does not want to reduce photography to documentary but interpret the need for anonymity and anti- -individualism that permeates the aesthetics of the university citadel. Through figurative simplicity you are certain to amplify, resonating images with the architectures that they represent, the powerful meanings retained between the silent masses of walls, the rhythmic party elements and the effectiveness of a clear urban system. The architectures become sundial appearances that in the cyclical play of shadows make scenery of an eloquent urban system with a strong utopian charge able to regenerate it over time.