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...

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...