NATURA ABHORRET A VACUO
‘Now what does the word “phusis” say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding sway.’ — Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics.[1] I take that ‘emerging-abiding sway’... Continue Reading →
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space and place
“… static patterns of value are divided into four systems: inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns and intellectual patterns. They are exhaustive. That's all there are. If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics - Inorganic, Biological, Social and Intellectual — nothing is left out. No 'thing,' that is. Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be... Continue Reading →
I continue the series of articles on the relation between architecture and the environment, proposing a brief contribution I made on the occasion of a conference call promoted by the Landscape Research Group at the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture, in 2012; the issue of the call was: Ethics and Aesthetics of Architecture... Continue Reading →
The recent spread of a new biological menace — the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) — has completely changed the appearance of our cities for months: during the lockdown period, the virus that caused the Coronavirus Disease 2019, or COVID-19, literally transformed the familiar places we were used to, into ghost... Continue Reading →
In October 1933 the American philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead delivered two lectures at the University of Chicago, published under the title ‘Nature and Life’, the following year.[1] The content of those two lectures, now in the public domain, is available in the Internet Archive. What follows is the integral reproduction of the second... Continue Reading →
The argument I’m introducing regards the result of my initial inquiry into the relation between architecture and the concept of environmental sustainability, which is an issue I began to work on in the second part of the last decade. The draft of this document goes back to the late 2012 and it was the architectural... Continue Reading →
In the second part of the first decade of the 2000s, I felt very dissatisfied with the current status of architecture, which had reached a peak of extreme formalism far beyond the premises of postmodernist and deconstructivist trends, which dominated the architectural debate over the last decades of the past century. With the definitive capillary... Continue Reading →
In this article, I will analyse the traditional spatial vocabulary of a pioneer of modern architecture, Richard Neutra, as we find it in Chapter 22 — ‘Physiological Space’ - Has Direction and Ranges — of his famous 1954 book ‘Survival Through Design’.[1] My purpose is to see continuities and differences with respect to the reformed... Continue Reading →
One of the main tenets of my inquiry into the concepts of space and place can be synthesized by the following assertion: at fundamental level, for me, things and places are the same. It is as if there is just one substance, which I can also call place (or even space), according to the modes... Continue Reading →
https://vimeo.com/12046005 Project for the “Concrete Geometries” Research Cluster at the AA School of Architecture in London, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto (April 2010). This video-clip is a survey on Perception and Geometry and it shows the process of construction of an architectural form, analyzing a case study based on the preliminary concepts of the author’s... Continue Reading →
I am also asking the reader to suppose that the concept of space has nothing to do with perception. Geometrical space is a pure abstraction… The visual third dimension is a misapplication of Descartes’s notion of three axes for a coordinate system. The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we... Continue Reading →
1. Young Man at His Window This is just common sense: look out the window of your home or office. What do you see? You just see places. A bench, a tree, a park where people can talk and children can play, a square, a street, a building, a mural on the facade of a... Continue Reading →
The first article of this website is dedicated to the complete transcription of the paper that I presented on Friday, the 5th of September 2014, at the ‘5th Global Conference, Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues’, held at the Mansfield College, Oxford (UK). The conference was organized by Inter-disciplinary.net, a Global Network Association for Dynamic... Continue Reading →
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YydyYeyvxZk Introductory video clip of the talk - ‘From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture…’ - that I gave on Friday, the 5th of September 2014, at the ‘5th Global Conference, Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues’, held at Mansfield College, Oxford (UK).
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, following important scientific advances, a reconsideration of basic natural phenomena is underway, as well as a reconsideration of the relationship between man and nature. This fact will lead to the formalization of a new post-Newtonian cosmology, that is a new conception of nature, and, therefore, a new model... Continue Reading →
rethinking space and place 