Finalist: Ignazio Gardella: building within the built: dialectics of history, character of architecture

114 finalist Claudia Cavallo Ignazio Gardella. Building Within The Built: Dialectics Of History, Character Of Architecture At the heart of this doctoral research lies an interest in a way of understanding the reconstruction and rewriting of the existing city as the unveiling of the essential features of living in a place. The research adopts the theme of “building on the built” both as an intellectual attitude and as a recurrent and paradigmatic condition of the project, exploring it through an interpretive reading of some “exemplary” works by Ignazio Gardella. Projects capable of involving parts of the city, buildings, architectural elements and ancient objects as active elements of the composition. The study of an urban reconstruction project is the starting point for a critical and operational reflection on architecture, delving into some emblematic works that exemplify a dialectical comparison with the built to investigate architecture in its “making” as a tool for relationship with the environment, both in physical and meaningful terms. 1. Gardella: Genova, ruins of San Silvestro area, Site inspections, 1969-70, Archivio CSAC. Figure [Free position and size. Full bleed is also permitted] Ignazio Gardella: Building Within The Built: Dialectics Of History, Character Of Architecture Author Claudia Cavallo Supervisors Antonella Gallo (IUAV) Co-Supervisor Raffaella Neri (POLIMI), Maria Grazia Eccheli (UNIFI), Andrea Iorio (IUAV) University Università IUAV di Venezia (IT) Jury members Domenico Chizzoniti (POLIMI), Loredana Ficarelli (POLIBA), Giovanni Marras (IUAV) 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 115 2. Author: Genova, Palinsesto, interpretive drawing: Overlapping of the planivolumetric plan of the Piano Particolareggiato di San Donato e San Silvestro on the survey of the old town centre made by Luigi Vagnetti in the same years. Destroyed or modified tracks in blue. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 116 The thesis, therefore, does not aim to provide an exhaustive treatment of the theme in all its various and potential interpretations, nor a complete reading of the author’s overall work. Instead, it chooses and adopts a specific and oblique perspective on the relationship that architecture can establish with the existing world. The underlying goal is to affirm the role of architectural experience as the foundation for all construction. Methodology Abandoning any claim of completeness, this thesis is thus an attempt to delve into the specific theme and, above all, into the particular “ways” in which the author’s intentions are translated into the forms of his projects, in order to return an operative reflection on architecture. In this sense, the “cut” of the thesis is not indifferent to the context of the Doctorate in Architectural Composition at the IUAV University of Venice, where the research matured. A doctorate connoted by a precise cultural project consolidated over the years in a tradition of studies and research methods aimed at addressing architectural issues through the study and interpretative redrawing of an architect’s works or incisive comparisons between exemplary cases. The method of research has intertwined two complementary paths: on the one hand, archival research through direct sources, interviews, and state-of-the-art knowledge, to which was added the unforeseen tool of online magazine archives during the period of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which offered a new possibility of research in the face of the disappearance of several other modes of study and comparison; on the other hand, the critical and interpretative redrawing of works, aimed at decomposing them into syntagmas and systems of elements, or at comparing different design hypotheses. 3. Gardella: Genova, defining the figure of the Architecture University building, Archivio CSAC. 4. Genova, photo aerea, the areas of the plan, 1973-74, Regione Liguria. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 117 Due to the subject of investigation, comparative readings between the actual state and the reconstruction hypotheses have taken on particular importance, with overlaps aimed at understanding the author’s choices in relation to the pre-existences. The direct interrogation of the architectural “text”, its decomposition into significant parts and categories and its subsequent “recomposition” has here “a manifest objective: to reconstruct, to retrace the design process, on the one hand, in order to understand and describe ‘the how’ of making, and on the other to explore ‘the sense’, the ‘why’, the ‘aim’ of that making” 11. A complex of operations aimed at entering deeply into the study of architecture’s forms and creative processes to appropriate an author’s techniques and compositional strategies and unleash their current value and transmissibility. Structure of the thesis Starting from the study of a little-known urban project, the Piano Particolareggiato di S. Donato e S. Silvestro (1969-74) for the reconstruction of a part of the old city centre of Genoa destroyed by bombing, the research path proceeds by exempla, seeking answers to specific questions and recurring design scenarios, to which current and useful strategies correspond. It outlines a diachronic and transcalar journey through Ignazio Gardella’s experience, going back from the city to the architecture of the museum — the PAC in Milan (1948-54) — to the interiors realised by the young Gardella in the 1930s and 40s, to focus on the genesis of strategies and tools of full expressiveness capable of dialogue with places, their history, and their future. The structure of the thesis is schematically divided into three parts corresponding to three different scales of the project and of the comparison with “preexistences”: city, building, interiors. 1 Gallo, “Postfazione”, The Clinic of Dissection of Art.5. Author: Genova, San Silvestro area, analytical drawings: de facto and planned status. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 118 6. Author: Genova, Piano Particolareggiato di San Donato e San Silvestro, analytical drawings. Deconstruction of the project: strongholds (red), ancient fabrics (yellow), and new soils (grey and green). 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 119 However, the three parts are different in nature and objectives. The first part of the research deals with the theme of reconstructing a complex and highly stratified part of the city, related to the material and immaterial pre-existences of the destroyed and transfigured urban landscape. It manifests an idea of the city itself and a general approach to the existing context. With the analysis of the detailed plan of S. Donato and S. Silvestro, the first chapter deals with the most articulated case study, which constitutes a kind of “unicum” in the experience of Gardella, while the second and third chapters propose two thematic explorations on the nature of the creative process and “theatricality”, that are both crucial for clarifying the specificity of a dialectical architecture that is declined across the different scales of the project. Thinking of the city from within The main part of the research deals with the theme of reconstruction on an urban scale through the case of the Piano Particolareggiato of S. Donato and S. Silvestro. It was an exceptional and controversial plan in many aspects, which provided for the establishment of humanistic universities on the site where the city of Genoa was founded, which was destroyed by bombs. The urban project is little known in terms of its essential content. Certainly penalised by its non-realisation, and perhaps misunderstood due to the construction of a single building that we know today as the Faculty of Architecture in Genoa. A building designed almost ten years later and with a substantially different perspective of use, which was conceived as the only emerging figure of the entire plan to represent on an urban scale the civil re-foundation of this part of the city. The radical change of use made a discourse on the pre-existing typologies impossible and the reconstruction of the fronts of the disappeared urban fabric at least artificial. Gardella planned the reconstruction of some ruined monuments “where it was, as it was”, imposing a selective discourse on preserving the fabric. In the destroyed areas, the new buildings take up some pre-existing street axes and erase others. However, the city’s complex topography animates the project as a memory of narrow streets, staircases, ramps, tunnels, porticoes, and sudden openings. Above all, the chapter addresses the issue of the persistence of the images, spaces and figures of the ancient city in the construction of a new city, responding to new and very different needs. The project is a far cry both from the more conservative positions and from the disinterested approach to the ancient city that was manifested in the first reconstruction plan of 1950, in which a single new redented building overlooked the hill of San Silvestro, indifferent both to the pre-existing fabric and to the orography. From the urban palimpsest — generated by an operation of superimposition between Gardella’s project and the preexisting city — emerges a particular relationship between memory and invention, which accepts an interpretative dimension based on the experience of the lived city. As in a blank sheet of paper from which ancient writing emerges, some pre-existing signs, traces, and figures are confirmed or transfigured in the project. In blue are indicated the traces that the plan’s design does not repeat, while where blue traces do not appear, the project confirms the state of the place.There are a few interesting points where the new traces barely deviate from the old ones so that we can recognise the pre-existing alley, street, or stairway shifted or manipulated in the new design. On the other hand, other signs arise from new needs of the university or new urban connection possibilities brought about by wartime destruction. Selective demolition erodes the 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 120 existing blocks, while a new urban morphology emerges that overlaps the large voids left by the bombing. Gardella adopts an approach to the reconstruction of the city that is difficult to classify. The project expresses an ancient and, in many respects, “inactual” attitude that has guided the construction of cities on themselves for centuries: a humanistic attitude to reuse and recycle, composed of economic and spiritual needs. The project’s deconstruction into several significant categories — “strongholds” (red), “ancient fabrics” (yellow), and “new soils” (grey and green) — made it possible to highlight points of convergence and differences with other urban projects. I have called “strongholds” the main monuments and figures of urban weight, such as the city walls and gates, to which the project attributes the role of certain, secure and indeed solid elements, from which to start building a new urban configuration. The “old fabrics” are the fabrics of minor buildings, mostly residential, which are subjected to a selection and “cleaning” operation, following the dominants of the consolidated urban structure. Lastly, the category of “new soils” refers to the new buildings proposed by the project, which interpret certain characteristics of the pre-existing city and, at the same time, offer themselves as new soils, in fact, that can be walked over. The role Gardella attributes to pre-existing buildings of a different nature does not correspond to the established categories of urban restoration. The cornerstones of the project, chosen as the elective reference for the construction of the new university citadel, do not coincide with the monumental buildings of the ancient city. Urban infrastructures and the city’s persistent layouts are also considered cornerstones of the project. While not all historical monuments are restored and different conservation principles are applied. It is a perception-driven “case by case”, reflecting on the role each of these urban facts plays in the new dimension of the city. The collages of the photographs of the surveys seem to anticipate the project’s key choices by recomposing some fundamental “scenes” that, at least in part, consolidate the urban void created by the wartime destruction in order to open up new and broader urban triangulations. Emerging facts and building fabrics are read in the progressive dimension of the city, to grasp the essence of its immutable physiognomy, to which the operations of selective demolition, as well as the choices of reconstruction, can be traced. Gardella’s attitude towards the ancient city is very far from the Enlightenment concept of the monument as an exceptional and isolated fact, later introjected into the functional city concept of the modern movement. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin is emblematic of an idea of the city where it is possible to select monuments isolated from their context, ideally extract them, and then relocate them on a new abstract and idealising urban grid, expressing a new model of the city conceived a priori. On the contrary, Gardella’s project realises a particular relationship between monuments and urban fabric that establishes a new form of continuity because “there is no problem of conservation of monuments ‘in vitro’, but there is a problem of ‘urban context’, that is, a problem of 7. Author: Genova, San Donato area, Comparison between preliminary and final design: 1968-1971. 8. Gardella: Genova, wood model of the urban project, ASG. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 121 co-presence in the city of the old and the new, so that both become organic components of the same urban reality”. A relationship of continuity that is expressed as much in the choices of conservation as in the proposal of new volumes. The “new soils” create a new city that is simultaneously unprecedented and familiar, starting from the dialectic between buildings and orography, between open space and roof gardens arranged at different heights, which has always belonged to the city of Genoa, but which is extended here to a public dimension. The forms of the new volumes are defined by the paths of the old city, recognised as its most enduring structure. It is the empty spaces that give shape to the solid bodies. The new university citadel is both an unveiling and a refounding project. Through the selection of images and the interpretative redrawing of some parts of the plan, the research focused on the value of the “construction of the void” in Gardella’s city. Emptiness is understood as a dialectical space in which the city represents itself, through the emerging elements and through the forms and open spaces that welcome collective life. 2 Bergson, Matière et mémoire. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 122 The thesis focuses on the analytical study of the urban project, starting from the conviction that the plan offers a relevant reflection on the city’s construction starting from memory. A memory understood as the selection and “use of past experience for present action”.2 A way of thinking of the city from the inside emerges, which does not recognise any possible split between town planning and architecture. For Gardella, the detailed plan is a “guiding image” that cannot disregard a figurative and formal prefiguration (otherwise, it would have to be a simple address programme). The thesis insists on the search for the appropriate signs to invert an idea of the city and on the work of progressive refinement of forms that tend towards the synthesis and representation of an essential and irreducible portrait of the city, new, ancient, and timeless. The purpose of the chapter is precisely to show the value of an approach to the city that cannot be ascribed to canonical categories of intervention or established theories because it is based on listening to the place and a particular sensitivity to phenomenological reality. It is a thought that moves from within, from perception and experience, to build a dialogue between the city and its histories, to continue building the city on the profile of its “essential” character. Making architecture The second chapter delves into understanding and describing Ignazio Gardella’s creative process through the study of the project for the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan, which is, in many respects, a manifesto project. The pavilion is a wonderful account of the life of this suspended, intimate place in the city and a perfect exhibition machine for the works. A theatrical machine bent on staging life and history in a specific place. The aim of this lunge is to discover and show how the museum’s image has taken shape through choices and refinements that cannot be traced back to the building’s preexisting character, nor mechanically derived from its function. In other words, it is a question of identifying strategies and techniques of a dialectic and receptive architecture, built as a system of relationships. With a myriad of sketches, design versions and refinements of each building element, which increasingly converge on the appropriateness of solutions, the PAC project is demonstrative of an approach that is both empirical and rational. Gardella states that we only know what we do. He denies the existence of creation ex nihilo, creative genius and raptus; he states that the project is “critical research of the formal outcome”. A search made with the hands, as well as with thoughts, which is precise precisely in its “making”. Gardella’s creative process is a non-linear path, full of discarded trials and returns, with no formal a priori, or transcendent reference to guide it. However, in this path, there is an extreme rationality aimed at pursuing the most appropriate solution concerning the needs of use. The PAC project is thus constructed in dialectical form with respect to its spatial envelope and with respect to the character of the characters with which it enters into relation: the royal villa, the park, the walls of the old, destroyed stables, the intimacy of the park and the light filtered by the trees. The thesis observes the progressive and intentional construction of the building’s character in relation to its elective references and uses the tool of the interpretative redrawing to show the richness of this type of process, through the comparison of the individual elements of the final project with the first versions and isolates and dissects certain devices of the project aimed at communicating with its surroundings. The research thus achieves an in-depth study of the nature and genesis of the language of architecture in Ig12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025