Some small sculptures connect the forms of the city’s architecture to the design research we are carrying out. The octagon of the Baptistery, the Leonardesque central plan of the Steccata, the buttresses of the Pilotta as well as the porticoes of the Regio are the starting point for the conceptual reworking of these identity archetypes. We know that monuments represent the idea of a city of which Joseph Rykwert speaks. They are symbols in which everyone recognises themselves, shared references in the sentimental imagination of citizens. We attempted to make them contemporary again and reinvent them by stripping them of everything but the plastic derivative of their typological matrix. We designed them as simple volumes, distinguishing the inside, which was left untreated – perhaps to be lit up – and the outside, which was treated with metal leaves. We covered them in gold like the Chrysopolis to which they belong, with a skin ravaged by time on the closed geometries, reduced to their essential form. They are accompanied by two other urban objects with a poetic reaction. The first is Numana, which synthesises the search for indoor-outdoor oriented space as experimented in recent years and sees architecture as a device for living in the landscape. The form is a visual frame that emerges from the ground and chooses where to look. The second is the Ambo, the triangular volume that opens a door inwards, towards that intimate dimension that we call the luminous heart of things, to paraphrase Ruggero Savinio. We designed them in copper, but they could be in silver or even just rust. They are all there in front of Parma città d'oro, the great urban sculpture to which they belong, which highlights the system of public spaces and buildings for collective use identified by the Atlante Civile dell'Architettura (Civil Atlas of Architecture), the physical space of the Common Good and a constructed metaphor for Civil Society. They are the small protagonists of an exhibition designed to share architectural scenarios for urban regeneration with the population.
Fondazione Cariparma
2021 with Paolo Mezzadri Metalli Filati
Photography Carlo Gardini & Paolo Mezzadri
