Phd in ARCHITECTURE AND CONSTRUCTION

Thesis title: La metamorfosi della forma architettonica. Figure nella Casa Albero di Giuseppe Perugini

The thesis affirms the existence of an internal intelligence of the form in architecture that, developing itself from an initial transformation, which is eminently specific, faces the outstanding issues of universal themes through the metamorphosis of its constituent elements, the morphemes, in search of its own visible expression by means of figures. Hence, the importance in an architect of the patient, willing and controlled invention of the language. Thus, this laminated and ‘thickened’ language opposes the current thesis of an architectural programme built on the makeshift gesture and on the occasional metaphor as a principle of meaning, both sources of an episodical and uneven language that leaves no time or room for the development and settling of a form, as well as the construction of a personal vision on architecture and the world. From the singular acceptance of a certain form, starts therefore a path of linked metamorphoses that builds the peculiarity and the recognizability of a forma, as well as the poetic language of an architect. On the merits of the thematic framework, the research reflects in architecture upon the connection between the creative process and the formal result. With this posture, the research intends to investigate the metamorphic course in the Roman architect Giuseppe Perugini to reveal, through an inductive process, the insights of a clear and valid poetics, which deals with the universal theme of inhabiting space. It is by virtue of the constant research that the Casa Albero, a work of architecture designed and built in Fregene during the second half of the Sixties, summarizes in a single operation of reductio ad unum the law of development through which rebuilding the constituent elements of the original form. According to a regular metamorphosis (J.W. Goethe, 1790) the form changes its figures while still retaining its identity unchanged and thus rising, in architecture, up on an ideal scale from the dwelling to the city. In this process, an important space of study is dedicated to the manners of the metamorphosis, which focus on the character of the architectural form and the conception of the dwelling as a matrix of growing organisms.