In a volume of the Library of modern culture, Manfredo Tafuri published a drawing of two students of the Faculty of Architecture of Rome. The work reproduced on the cover, was next to that of Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino, Ludovico Quaroni and a few other Italians. In 1968 he could look at opening a student protest, or super-critical that an assessment can sometimes afford, but the next production of Pure Franco (who has since been working with his wife Laura Thermes) ruled in favor of the author Theories and History of Architecture . To establish itself as one of the most significant theoretical and Italian architects Today, Pure Franco followed a typical route to a certain extent, to other individuals.
Typical, because he graduated later (in 1971, more than thirty years) because then taught to Reggio Calabria, official satellite of the School of Rome, and he has come to the capital in 1981 as a professor (and now teaches in Venice Laterza published Compose the architecture on the themes of his teaching IUAV).
singular, because in the crucial years of training has worked with Maurizio Sacripanti-architect-visionary, popular in Rome in the sixties, and then with Gregotti with whom he collaborated on major projects in Milan of the early seventies such as the University of Calabria and Palermo Zen.
Pure, from an early age, did not let flatten in schools belonging to different experiences but has built its specificity. He was able to draw on the lessons of classical rigor of Saverio Muratori and, on the opposite side, the one that is rooted in modern Bruno Zevi. The founding moment of the young Roman intelligentsia of the seventies (the magazine Controspazio Paolo Renato Nicolini and Portuguese) has seen outstanding protagonist together with Francesco Cellini, Alessandro Anselmi, Laura Fraticelli and others.
His name is internationally known primarily for being the champion of the so-called architectural drawings that Roman architecture from the gallery of modern art Francesco Moschini, has made known his job a bit 'all over the world.
In the eighties what at first glance appears to be a turning point. Pure and Thermes begin to build. The house of the pharmacist in Gibellina (1981) is based on the idea of \u200b\u200bderivation-Mannerist-house in the house. The four fronts correspond to different programs (pharmacy access, entry to the dwelling, fence of a walled garden, parking for guests) and the shapes change radically on different schedules. It abandons the criterion of stylistic coherence to the diverse and open to the collage with a valid result in the characterization of both interior spaces that public image.
A realization of particular relevance is that of public housing in Naples for the post-earthquake reconstruction program. Pure and Thermes (with A. Aymonino, G. and N. Blacks Surchat) based their design on the contrast between the short-onto which mainly apartments-and the space occupied by the stairs. The project consists of 65 homes so a board consisting of a succession of spaces served and serving space that exemplifies the fundamental connection of each apartment complex. In addition to using natural materials like travertine in contrast with the walls plastered and the points of exceptional floor plan, and enhances the image of a monument to the court of distribution with the stair-tower in the past had been studied in several designs.
The design for the new station Termini moves in the relationship between rarefaction (Piazza dei Cinquecento in the large populated by a few objects metaphysical) and densification (with the development of green roofs over the docks and a new parking system). The five squares
Pure-Thermes build Gibellina to follow the idea of \u200b\u200bpublic space with a perimeter of the porch aqueduct (Rome clear memory of urbanization in the former breadbasket of Italy). This project creates a public space efficient in a city that precisely this challenge was not able to solve.
along the periphery the Rome ring road (in the recent competition of ideas for the area east of the city) the group of Pure uses a fragmentation of the volumes that, like the frames of a film, can be reassembled only by the vision in motion. Finally, in competition for the expansion of the Faculty of Architecture of Rome, the comb structure of the building is reinterpreted as a pre-existing absolute rule to design the expansion.
* An exhibition of his drawings housed in the library of the Academy of Brera is revealing. In black ink and all the same size, the subject of the thirty drawings represents a single theme: the wall pierced by a window square and overlapping textures, plant matter, deep contrasts. The reason is duplicated, turns, breaks and, when viewed in rapid succession, the images form a virtual kaleidoscope. But if the effect is easy to replace the scrutiny, the quality of design, craftsmanship tract, virtuosic control of black and white surfaces. No inch of paper is left unexplored. The pure white is part of a dialectic tight that saturates the paper.
is enough to justify this exhibition at the prestigious academy that once belonged to Camillo Boito, but the meanings extend beyond the visual arts.
These designs have little in common with those of the great architects and designers of this century. Very little with those of Louis Kahn, where the sign-in charcoal and air-travel light or with those of Le Corbusier or waving with all those atmospheric Frank Lloyd Wright. The contact is remote Giambattista Piranesi. Engraver of the eighteenth-century Rome, Pure has the same visionary, the same sense of vertigo, the same down to the bottom vortex of soul and thought, inevitably confront the same archaeological layer of Rome (but also similar expertise and constant productivity).
LAMINATED
[link to this you access to all the designs of show]
Referrals are closer in time Sacripanti, and Mario Ridolfi. Pure retains the tension of the first that was new to the Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia, the second the density of the design as a tool of thought. In the Architect who has linked his name to Terni (Ridolfi has realized there is finally a lot of architecture and building up its project for the Town Hall) is a design that explores the implications of construction, in Pure is a drawing-writing: Ridolfi look down at what the architecture should be, Pure upward, the theoretical foundation. Suffice it to note the titles that the author, almost shyly (known as Gianni Contessi who along with Fernando De Filippi Director of Brera has been promoting the event), written in pencil in his drawings.
The series begins and ends with the title of a book How you act and in architecture from the first volume of Nanni Balestrini seventies, the second from a recent written Gregotti. Each design within these two brackets is signed with an infinitive verb: strain, superimposed layering and so on. Overall it is therefore a practical demonstration of "How you act in architecture" observatory purine.
designs become examples of a synthetic and do have the same force as a summary of cover pages of the books of the Enlightenment. Their placement in the library with its rare works of Eighteenth century emphasizes its true meaning.
CROWDED
[link to this you access to all the designs of show]
Pure uses from time to time different means to say the same thought. "Everything starts with the writing and everything is back to writing," he says. Design, construction, projects through "the many areas of mass society with the force of a slogan and the weight of reflection essays." The development of his thesis is conducted with such consistency and with such intensity as to stimulate reflection, evaluation, a new writing.
course vocation and theoretical manuals, establishing a set of attitudes to direct the design is shared by other theorists, architects today. Peter Eisenman, with his graft , folding , scaling, for example, there has based its teaching.
With the work of former member of the New York Five and Theoretical In-between, Pure provides affinity, but also significant differences. Even Pure, like many of his generation, is the result of the big-bang sixties when the overall vision held together by the masters of modern explodes in a series of details. Pure works for exclusion rather than inclusion. The social and psychological sciences, the specific technology and are planning for him to be damn ball outside perimeter. The center is not what revolves around the architecture, but rather the architecture itself, or rather the foundation that motivates learning. ( teaching architecture is the title of his first book). Pure
But, unlike Eisenman, is not too interested in the purely syntactic nor all'allusività metaphorical meanings that the U.S. has rediscovered the last decade. The objective of purine-and can not be that way for a Roman architect-is historical in nature. Pure
took the unique experience of European art produced in our country are Futurism and Metaphysical. The first, have already gone missing in the thirties (except for some work Oriolo Mazzoni, Luciano and Carlo Mollino Baldessarri) the Met, however, helped him noticed for the first-Edoardo Persico-to form a singularity of 'Italian architecture already works with some of Gardella, of Freedom, the BBPR.
Aldo Rossi since the sixties raised the Met and made it the key ingredient of its architecture. Futurism, by contrast, has never been recovered except by Luigi Pellegrin, Sacripanti, Leonardo Savioli or Aldo Loris Rossi, but without exceeding the experiences of individuals. It remains to Renzo Piano, the Genoese architect but has toned down the obvious Futurist traces of its first projects, a new internationalism. Pure
But often speaks of the marginalization of our country, of our being the periphery. He argues that our architecture must take a heavy simple stone, poor: French far eclecticism, glass mirror Americans of every fashionable paraphernalia. Maybe he thinks that component to value that, looking at the cinema than to the buildings, you might call Neo-realist.