Vittorio Mazzucconi - Architecture - A POETRY FOR THE CITY

B.2.1.4

Extracts from the Catalogue (3/4)

Extracts from the Exhibition Catalogue

Riccardo Barletta

Three are the vertices that unite all Mazzucconi’s activity - past, present and future - no differently to the ideal triangle. On one side, a profound need to seed and develop a culture in its humanistic interpretation. At a second level, a tendency to, implicitly, overturn Rationalism’s leadership or that of any of its derivations - however strongly this permeates architecture’s theory and practice alike - by diving into myth’s obscure e vibrant emotions. At a third level, the anchoring to the Mother-City archetype. In short: Humanism, Myth, Mother-City. A catalystic process led in the past decades in order to obtain the fusion of matter and spirit, of History and today’s presence, of scientific-technological reality and numenous golden pathos.

Jean Marie Benoist

Mazzucconi brings us to believe in the existence of a harmony, of a cipher, whose light cradles the fecund voices of memory and of symbol: a city’s secret cipher does not represent the finishing point of a sterile initiatory search, but rather a prolific toil made of symbolic creativity that endlessly develops its rich enigmas and the ambiguities it rigorously creates; and it is today, in this very exceptional resurrection of rigour and of Baroque fecundity that we see Mazzucconi’s worth.

Giovanni Klaus Koenig

Mazzucconi often leads a game of destructurization with severe rigour, but also with a rare thoughtlessness, dense of sweet self-irony, that may be found in very few other fortunate architects, starting from Stirling. To comprehend how talented his procedure can be, let us imagine to expand, or diminish the mural inclusion of the Avenue Matignon facade: the equilibrium wold be unredeemably lost and all the effect would vanish. And when, in a text, one is incapable of changing a small comma, then one knows that the work is near a masterpiece. Furthermore, one can always detect a slight desperation in his works, that translates his refusal before all convetions; and that is sign of every true poet. Mazzucconi truly is, without the shadow of a doubt: of how many other architects could we claim the same, today?

Agnoldomenico Pica

Two elements, in Mazzucconi’s work, dig in deeply: the paradoxical (and thus utopian) view and the prospective, that is to say the geometry. The geometry is surely essential in any architecture, but for Mazzucconi it becomes a sort of sublimation of the geometry, that may even lead not to a form, but rather to a baroque spirit. In truth his style is devoid of any comparison if not with itself, with its peculiar symbiosis of daring broadmindedness towards the future and of scorching nostalgia. With no chance for equivocations, this symbiosis is evidently portrayed in the project for the new centre of Florence to which Mazzucconi, with filial love, returns that sacredness that today is rooted in the Etruscan discipline and that was later translated into Christianity. Sacredness that today has been wretchedly recanted by a society blinded and humiliated by technological delirium and by vulgar costums.

Bruno Zevi

Mazzucconi, while on one side drawing a high and noble portrait of modern times, intends to unscramble and animate the spirit of tradition. Nothing is academical in the dialogue with the ‘genius loci’, nor in the ingredients that articolate its code. The difference between Mazzucconi and rationalism gushes out in the moment that he realizes that the authentic ‘functional’ correspondence is only that which concerns the human soul. He feels that he belongs to a period of extraordinary virtuality both in building and destruction; and he claims that this dualism imposes the reordering of the utopia, at each step. The Architect-Town planner ‘must, first of all, set out in search of himself’.