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New Cemetery of Nice – GRAU: Paola Chiatante, Aldo Coacci, Gabriella Colucci, Roberto Mariotti and Franco Pierluisi, 1983.

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The G.R.A.U’s contribution to the existing architectural debate was timely in putting into focus the question of representing architectonics. It brought about a research that concentrating on the design stages, consequently recuperated a disciplinary “tool” to attain knowledge, as well as an “aesthetic“ value related to beauty by reacquiring the symbolic meaning of historical forms. History, as the G.R.A.U seems to reveal, can be detached from happenings to assure absolute, abstract Values. Nor is history linked with disciplines or places with dei daily occurrences: thus, to a history seen as a continuous process, they juxtaposed the fundamentals of it. Their overall program was thus always a project that resisted the metropolis as the place in which the traditional categories of time, space and event had lost the emphasis that “capital” letters denote, to become instead disquieting illusive presence. The place each G.R.A.U. project still refers to, is the renaissance city, no...
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The Essential "Art" – Drawing. Thoughts on projects and designs by Franco Pierluisi. Alessandro Anselmi

If to design means to "think while drawing", then Franco Pierluisi was one of its main figures and advocate. Thought and drawing, thought and construction of form in art are indissociable and, together with the connection of language and thought in literature, it is one of the main points of modern culture, and we could even say is a larger degree of freedom compared to historic legacies. Rigor in thought and freedom in figurative arts, then. Of this rigor and this freedom is what Franco lived, expressing his graphical talent at every level of the complex hierarchy of architectural creativity. His floor plans, for example, are always a methodological model where rationality, typological and figurative both, turns into the exactitude of the geometry but without compositional rigidness, geometry is reinforced in his rigor by apparent "tremblings" in the gesture. Here is the dialogue between the construction of the space (the abstraction) and its realization thr...
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Proposal for the Archivio di Stato in Firenze "Isti Mirant Stella", Firenze, 1973 - A. Anselmi, P. Eroli, F. Pierluisi

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...the compositional approach of the Archivio di Stato has the following objectives: a) a longitudinal architectural organization that, by placing itself as a "isotropic unity of space", connects elements as "man", "city" and "nature" (nature-history) through the rigorous application of spatial techniques of the three figurative arts. b) the functional unity of the three figurative arts, as a consequence of the first objective. The longitudinal section and the plan show the longitudinal development of the form in the building through the iteration of the base sign and the way it shapes and forces other spatial events; rebuilt nature , bases , the  cube , the doric rotunda , towers  in the central part, the  tricora  ( three apsis room ), the great paintings  on the outside walls. In that conception the ground line loses its inevitability and its fatal inflexibility becoming a "logic plan". This logic plan defines two...
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Paolo Portoghesi – ANSELMI, EROLI, NICOLINI Editoriale – Abitare la Terra, Rivista di Geoarchitettura, n° 33-34, anno XII 2013

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Drawing of the proposal for the National Archive in Firenze, Alessandro Anselmi In 1963, when I started teaching in the Faculty of Rome, in the complementary course “Letteratura Italiana”, student insurrections were about to mount. I immediately noticed that, among my students, there were a lot who knew things that I never heard or saw before and I understood that teaching and learning are two inextricable moments. I was obviously interesting in opening their horizon and explaining them things they didn’t know nor hear, but I was open to contamination, open to confrontation with those who “came later”. I remember, among my first students, Sandro Anselmi, Giovanna De Santis, Franco Purini, Laura Thermes, Renato Nicolini and Rosanna Fraticelli, the three couples that I watched form and then grow, and many others, like Franco Pierluisi, Pier Luigi Eroli, Anna di Noto, Paola Chiatante, Francesco Montuori, Duccio Staderini, Gianni Accasto, Lucio Valerio Barbera, Sergio Petru...
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Municipal Cemetery in Santa Severina, Catanzaro, 1974 - A. Anselmi (con G. Patanè)

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[...] Even though quite small, it's the cemetery the real heart of all the interventions (in Santa Severina). Thought as an enclosure containing also the precedent cemetery, it evokes the idea of a more intimate place, a " sancta sanctorum " hidden inside. Here too, the apparent simplification of forms it's the result of clear design intentions: a logic based on contradictions, a barely-there axis of symmetry, the use of circles and arcs, like self references. The entire design oscillates between a clear distinction of elements – clearly identified and autonomous – and a sort of continuity, as if the building was carved out from the hill, emphasized by the slope of the valley and variations in height. This oscillation between " architecture achevée " and " talking architecture "  gives rise to a sort of limbo where all the architectural elements, uninterested in monumentality and eloquence, strive for a more unassuming, barely vibrating ...
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1968

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Roberto Mariotti (G.R.A.U.) “Nuovo cimitero di Nizza 1982-1986” - Ingresso, 1985 (con Paola Chiatante, Aldo Coacci, Gabriella Colucci, Franco Pierluisi, G.X. Marguerita, M. Schwartz) China, matita e pastelli colorati su carta da lucido, 46,5x69,5 cm. Copyright: Roberto Mariotti (G.R.A.U.) Courtesy: Francesco Moschini e Gabriel Vaduva A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna ... the problem we want to discuss here is architecture as art . Art is thought : multiplicity as unity, truth, judgement. A thought that enacts and realises itself through specific organisation of signs and techniques, particular for every art. That specific organisation of signs is closed; only within the organic relations inside the artistic object  we can witness the realisation of the concept or artistic truth. The true artistic value in the architectural object is found in the organised relations , thought with specifically signs. This kind relationship is: – sem...
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Slaughterhouse in Santa Severina, Catanzaro, 1974 - A. Anselmi (con G. Patanè)

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picture from G.R.A.U. isti mirant stella - Architetture 1964-1980, edited by Kappa / A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna, 1981, Roma - Città e progetto 1. Collana di Architettura diretta da Francesco Moschini. [...] The complex logic that undergoes these works let see a tension towards formal simplification, where geometry, far from becoming a field of virtuosity, is an element of clarity and order. [...] In this slaughterhouse two elements are simply pulled together, a circular one for the butchery and a square one for the stable: but still those two volumes, so different, exchange important cross references. Blocked in austere closure – even if the circular shape would suggest opening towards landscape – they seem to hold, wrapping it in their intimacy, an extraneous element, turned mythical through history but reduced to a purely domestic use: so they are those two secret, vaguely hinted references t...
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