The lecture will be held in Italian.

Link: https://politecnicomilano.webex.com/join/pasquale.mei

Curated by Pasquale Mei

Thursday 8 April 2021
h. 18:00

For 50 years the figurative and technological modernity of the Pirelli Building has represented the main icon of twentieth century Milan for everyone arriving at the Central Train Station coming out onto a landscape of tall and civic buildings. Via Vittor Pisani, the major street that connects Piazza Duca d’Aosta (where the Pirelli Building is located) to Piazza della Repubblica, is a symbolic synthesis of the role of the Building, enhancing its shape and perspective. This condition is, in our times, the deep meaning of modernity assigned to twentieth century architectures. Modernity not as a value itself, merely anchored to technological progress and willing to cut ties with tradition but, on the contrary, as modulation of a collective language in a specific historical and geographical context. Restoring the Pirelli Building is to recover the sense of  free expression of a figurative simplicity, but at the same time the sense of "continuity" between the new architecture and the context, as proposed by Ernesto N. Rogers just after the Second World War. It can therefore be said that the Ponti’s metaphor of architecture as crystal, architecture judged as a figure of perfect completeness, made it possible to recover the character of a figurative architecture that has been a great operating condition in terms of restoration of the building.

The recognition of its values, from the constructive to the symbolic, the planned conservation and restoration of a contemporary building, the recovery of the interrelationship between architecture and the city as its landscape: these are the central themes of the research and of the project.