Giuseppe Samonà

La miscellanea di scritti illustra tematicamente le conferenze tenute a Venezia negli anni '50 e '60 del Novecento e le proposte progettuali ideate per la città insulare da alcuni maestri del modernismo architettonico, ovvero Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright e Carlo Scarpa; i singoli saggi sono raccordati ed integrati da schede del redattore con note ed informazioni storiche, bibliografiche e d’archivio; il filo conduttore del volume è la documentazione conservata nel Fondo Trincanato donato all’Archivio Progetti dell’Università di Architettura di Venezia nel 2004 e subito notificato come bene di interesse storico dalla Soprintendenza Archivistica per il Veneto.

In allegato la scheda di referaggio del volume a cura del prof. Maurizio Oddo.

Thermoelectric Architecture.
Imagery and Project in the Augusta Power Station designed by Giuseppe Samonà

In 2015, it started the dismantling process of the Power Station designed in Augusta (Sicily) by Giuseppe Samonà.
Placing the origin of the architecture of Power Stations within the symbolic antonymic relationship between machine, electricity, factory and art that Western Europe has developed since the end of the XX century, this article discusses the mains architectural features of Augusta Power station first. Then, it considers the new perspectives to be faced for thermoelectric power stations in the transition towards the new principles of sustainability. Any potential of these production areas should be thus reconsidered, and any ability of their contexts still unexpressed should be activated in order to define concrete and productive actions of recycle that could recover the opportunity of energy experimentation indispensable for the community and practicable in these areas, together with the potential of attraction of these places.

Graphic reflections to safeguard the architecture. In the Thermoelectric Power Plant of Giuseppe Samonà, built in Trapani in the 60s, the concept of space not intended simply as a workplace, the harmonic relationships that the building establishes with the landscape, language as the outcome of the dualism between the envelope and structure and the lesson of the masters of the ‘900 are all characters extrinsectable through the critical redesign. A hermeneutical act that tries to define the value of the building and spread its knowledge, in order to avoid its oblivion or, even worse, its destruction.

Il terremoto del 1908 segna, per la città di Messina, un cambiamento nel suo aspetto estetico e funzionale; la ricostruzione, prolungatasi per decenni, prende spunto dalle esperienze urbanistiche europee, dagli studi mondiali sulle dinamiche dei terremoti (da cui scaturiranno rigide norme antisismiche) che confluiranno nel piano regolatore di Luigi Borzì.
Alla morte di Borzì (1919) sarà l’avvento del Fascismo a dare nuovo impulso alla ricostruzione, superando in parte le indicazioni del piano stilato dall’ingegnere messinese.
Il volume è ricco di disegni di archivio, fotografie dell’epoca ed estratti delle più importanti testate giornalistiche del tempo.

The Sciacca Popular Theatre by Giuseppe Samonà and his son Alberto - two important figures of Italian architecture - is one of the most significant Italian building of the second half of the 20th century. Inaugurated in 2015, after a forty years long construction, the building has an original layout with two auditoriums; composed by three big volumes (a parallelepiped, a cone and a pyramid) and expresses an architecture of image, an idea of space determined by pure forms and by the use of a single material (the raw concrete). The use of three archetypal forms is a return to the origin, an idea almost classical and rational of architecture; at the same time is the evocation of an archaic perfection. Within this context, the use of raw concrete is also fundamental. Understood as primitive material, it participates to the expression of stability and durability across the building. As a result, the building is converted to an icon that sits in the landscape like a monument. In this sense, this architecture is a tribute to Le Corbusier, built through the interpretation of the great master language. The Sciacca Theatre represents, probably, the most remarkable example of lecorbuserian architecture in Italy.

Su Enrico Calandra (1877-1946) ha pesato un lungo silenzio storiografico. Le memorie dei suoi allievi - tra questi Giuseppe Samonà, Lina Bo, Bruno Zevi - ci consegnano il ritratto di un maestro in anni che di maestri sono assai poveri. Attraverso lettere, scritti e disegni emersi dall'archivio dell'architetto, questo libro restituisce in un'unica immagine i molti volti di Enrico Calandra: quello del giovane architetto alla ricerca della modernità, quello del maestro amatissimo dagli allievi più diversi, quello dello storico dell'architettura impegnato nella definizione dei fondamenti di una disciplina che da allora, grazie anche ai suoi studi, appartiene agli architetti.

In 1976, Reyner Banham summarised megastructure as a mixture of pragmatism and lack of ideology, and he attributed the origin of such qualities to British architects – from Cedric Price to Archigram and their celebration of technology for a nomadic homo ludens. On this point, he contrasted the Italian mega-architecture of the same period, dismissing it for its political collusions and figurative anxiety. While it is a truism that postwar Italian architectural discourse was imbued with political ideology, Banham’s dismissal purposely ignores the intricacies of a period still awaiting thorough international reconsideration, besides a few widely recognised seminal texts by the likes of Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo Rossi and Leonardo Benevolo. By reviewing a neglected project – Giuseppe Samonà’s University of Cagliari – whose gigantism compares to any of Banham’s examples, this essay digs into a chapter of postwar architecture that ultimately escapes an easy classification in the history of megastructure as narrated by the British historian.