The functional tradition in italian contemporary landscape
Giuseppe Rizza
Giuseppe Rizza was born in Sicily. He lives and works in Milano as an architect. He studied at Politecnico di Milano and ETSAM, the Higher Technical School of Architecture in Madrid.Since his graduation in 2019, he has been collaborating with an architectural firm and with Politecnico di Milano as a teaching assistant in a design studio. He also develops his personal interests through design competitions, projects, researches and dialogues.
Overlapping three renowned travels, the “Italienische Reise” (1817) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the “Viaggio in Italia” (1957) by the journalist Guido Piovene, and the trips in “La speculazione edilizia” (1958) narrated by Italo Calvino, many other travels comes out: these are the ones lived by our eyes looking through the car window going throughout all of Italy.
We see precious villages, amazing towns and between one and another we go through marvelous landscapes, but suddenly some ‘odd marks’ come out: social housing, warehouses, factories, sheds, bridges, industrial buildings or, more generally speaking, ‘functional buildings’.
They catch our eyes because of their disharmony with the landscapes in which they are placed.
But which are the characteristics of such buildings? What does make them ‘disharmonious’?
Actually, if we observe these landscapes deeply, we find a lot of other ‘functional buildings’, but these do not come out as ‘odd marks’, they rather intensify the landscapes in which they stand. It seems that they stand there since ever, they are awesome, harmonious, consistent.
And so again, which are the characteristics of such buildings? What does make them ‘harmonious’?
The aim of this essay is to look deeply at ‘harmonious functional buildings’, the ones belonging to italian functional tradition, and try to catch their common characteristics; in other words, to grasp the secret behind their harmony.
