Abstract
This essay condenses the first and only research project undertaken on the unrealised City-bridge designed by the Italian visionary architect Maurizio Sacripanti. The project crosses the Strait of Messina and is Sacripanti's only urban design; it represents his unique ideas of a contemporary city and embodies the most advanced Italian architectural and artistic criticism of his time, sometimes foreshadowing renowned, international solutions. Starting from some reflection on the historical city, Sacripanti proposed a design process that relies on the rejection of perspective as a design tool, and embraces the criteria of module-object and multi-directionality to overcome the modernistic urban condition. The result is a City-bridge composed of different systems with peculiar geometric features where the forms and space mutability is the core of the project. The 3D digital interpretation of the project manifests these properties and finally suggests a suggestive relation to John Cage's research on aleatory music.
Just over three kilometres separate the tip of Italy’s boot from one of its main islands, Sicily. The strait, in the middle of the Mediterranean, is a pivotal point in Homer’s Odyssey and was the core of architectural experimentations in the second half of the 20th century.1 Amongst many others, visionary architect Maurizio Sacripanti proposed a solution and designed, unlike his contemporaries, a city-bridge for the strait. It was a massive suspended structure that is halfway between an urban infrastructure, a city and an architecture (Fig. 1). Notably, his project not only foreshadowed national and international radical urban visions, but also defied architectural representation. The project and the architect never received the attention that it was due to them. Paper architect Sacripanti, whose eccentric designs, writings and undeniable genius have been recently recognised in Italy is, indeed, mostly unknown outside the peninsula.
Figure 1 - Pictures of the City-bridge second physical model (source: Neri, Maria Luisa, and Laura Thermes. Maurizio Sacripanti, Maestro di architettura. 1916-1996, p. 75. Roma: Gangemi Editore, 1998; Sacripanti, Maurizio. “Appunti per una struttura urbana” In Sacripanti Architettura, edited by Maria Garimberti, Giuseppe Susani, 75-76. Venezia: Edizioni Cluva, 1967).
Sacripanti was a Roman architect and his experimental, provocative architecture, his drawings and his connection to Italian Experimental Art along with his linguistic research characterise his peculiar work and make him one of the most interesting and overlooked figures of Italian post-war (unrealized) architecture. Throughout his long career he designed multiple architectural projects that encapsulated the stimuli of post-war Italian art and literature but were never built. Indeed, the artist Renato Pedio notably stated that Sacripanti designed “great projects, all feasible and none realised”. Thanks to his innate talent in drawing - that influenced the work of his student and collaborator Franco Purini - he created beautiful perspectives, axonometrias and elevations, hence the so-called "primacy of drawing" in his work that makes this figure fascinating and deserving of further analysis (Fig. 2).2
Figure 2 - Front cover of the book “Città di frontiera” by Maurizio Sacripanti.
Urbatecture
Amongst the numerous architectural projects stands out his only urban project, the unrealized city-bridge (1965), a groundbreaking design for 1960s Italy. The city-bridge is and remains a work in progress, as the architect left only two models and few photographs. His writings on the city, specifically his book Frontier City (Città di Frontiera, 1973),3 hence played an important role in the understanding of Sacripanti’s unbuilt project (Fig. 3).4
Figure 3 - Photomontage of the City-bridge second model (designed by the authors).
In fact, Purini explains that Sacripanti was extremely interested in the theory of architecture and although he wrote few and cryptic theoretical texts, the architect had a deep, careful and reflective approach to both the theoretical and the intellectual debate of the time. Furthermore the frontier, by its very definition, is nothing but an ambiguous geographical convention, a linear boundary like the horizon line that divides - according to Sacripanti - the “above” of the new city from the “below” of the old city, the past from the future.5 This boundary with both spatial and temporal connotations is the place where the city-bridge rises, halfway between two worlds, ready to unite them, collapsing the time they represent through a structure that is a mirror of both (Fig. 4). His text is, therefore, considered an hypothetical and speculative architectural project just like the city-bridge.
The frontier, by its very definition, is nothing but an ambiguous geographical convention, a linear boundary like the horizon line that divides - according to Sacripanti - the “above” of the new city from the “below” of the old city, the past from the future.
Despite the numerous urban designs contemporary to Sacripanti's project - such as Yona Friedman or Archigram’s suspended cities, or the cities designed by the Japanese metabolists - present formally and strategically similar urban solutions, the architect's attitude towards the historic city is more sensitive, in fact his entire conception of the Frontier City is based on a profound understanding of the existing city and society. In this regard, the renowned historian and theorist of architecture Bruno Zevi provides us with the word that best describes the city-bridge: "urbatettura" or the union of “urban” and “architecture”, translated here as “urbatecture” (1973).6 The latter allows the "reintegration" between the architecture, the city and the territory: "it is a horizontal and vertical reintegration with polidirectional paths. [...] Once the volume is broken up into slabs then assembled in a four-dimensional sense, the traditional facades disappear, every distinction between internal and external space, between architecture and urban planning collapses; urbatecture is born from the merging of architecture and city.”7 Zevi, thus, resolves the scalar differences between building and city, providing us with the necessary elements to understand Sacripanti’s city-bridge.
This essay recognises the role of unrealised architecture as a space for experimentation and imagination, but also as a place for the consolidation of possible and impossible memories and ideas, never fully realised.
Sacripanti’s urbatecture is a composition of systems, of solid, flat and linear elements that remain almost abstract forms. In fact their functions are not specified and their use is irrelevant since the project shows a compositional thought that structures an urban reality. Through the reconstruction of this system and its composition, the visual and graphic analysis of Sacripanti’s city, this essay recognises the role of unrealised architecture as a space for experimentation and imagination, but also as a place for the consolidation of possible and impossible memories and ideas, never fully realised. The materials of which these architectures or urbatectures are made of are paper, ink and graphite, models and photographs, preserved inside architecture’s archives. These witnesses, often partial, can say a lot about their authors and the cultural context in which they were designed, and this is possible thanks to digital reconstructions and visual analyses.
Perspectives
The unreleased project for the city-bridge was probably born as a purely theoretical exercise within Sacripanti’s studio, and its documentation consists of six photographs - including two photos of the first study model and four photos of the second model - and a perspective sketch.8 While the first project model seems to be the result of the architect's creative gesture, a sort of three-dimensional sketch preliminary to the actual formulation of the city idea here sketched in pure solids set in an indefinite grid,9 the second model refers to a second design phase in which the idea and form of the city-bridge are clarified and articulated. Both models immediately confronted the water mass of the strait, here represented by shiny and reflective materials, that multiply the elements of the project and produce changing images of the "above" and "below" of the model (Fig. 1).
For the Roman architect, the fundamental step to envision the contemporary city is to abandon perspective as a design principle.
Even more intentional is the photomontage (Fig. 3), in which an image of the second model is mirrored with its reflection on the rippled surface of the sea, obtaining an effect of repetition that multiplies the image and extension of the model, alluding to possible infinite development.
The only drawing surviving is a perspective section in which the prefiguration of the urban space is more detailed than in the two physical models: vehicular traffic flows through two overlapping main roads at different heights, and a system of ramps and small plates connect to the built system. Functions are delineated through the representation of furnishings and plants. The L-shaped elements supporting the “clusters” of solids are clearly visible, but the essential element is the role that the diagonal grids seem to play in the design of the urban space: in fact, they structure the city-bridge becoming part of the structural metal grid and add their directions to the Cartesian directions of the vertical and horizontal planes.10
Just like the project for Messina, its representations are therefore configured as the materialisation of the idea of a city in which the “above” and the “below” are reassembled “in a multi-faceted unity”.11
Sacripanti's city-bridge stems from a profound reflection on the historic Italian city and the cultural principles that have defined it at least since the Renaissance.
Sacripanti's city-bridge stems from a profound reflection on the historic Italian city and the cultural principles that have defined it at least since the Renaissance. For the Roman architect, the fundamental step to envision the contemporary city is to abandon perspective as a design principle.12 The dismissal of perspective has several consequences: on the one hand, it has a substantial symbolic value, as it allows a departure from the traditional image of the city and from the “symbolic form” used by western civilisation to cast and represent its values and cultural identity;13 on the other hand, it leads to essential design implications concerning both architectural composition and perceptual values. Perspective, in fact, was an instrument of artistic and architectural creation because it allowed “to walk in those spaces with thought [...]"14, placing man at the centre of design prefiguration and spatial representation (Fig. 4).
Figure 4 - Piero della Francesca, Flagellazione di Cristo (1459-60); Filippo Brunelleschi, Basilica di San Lorenzo, Firenze (1418-46) (sources: Wikipedia, shorturl.at/fh368; picture by the author).
Furthermore, perspective is as close to visual perception of what artists and architects have at their disposal. For Sacripanti, however, it represents an outdated way of seeing space since "the illusion of staticity, of fixed perspective, of timeless contemplation, has been defied by reality [...]".15 The inadequacy of perspective in the face of the mechanised and computerised dynamism of the contemporary world entails the disappearance of another element linked to the experience of visual perception, the horizon. Its abolition is conceptually and perceptually functional to achieve a continuous space such as in the city-bridge for Messina. Here, no univocal horizon is identifiable but rather a series of horizons, interconnected by inclined planes, multiply the potential perceptual references without defining any prevailing one. Furthermore, intrinsically linked to the Renaissance perspective is the concept of symmetry16 and the composition's static nature due to the equal distribution of elements on both sides of its axis. This axis is traditionally vertical in architecture. Thus, the rejection of perspective simultaneously entails the elimination of the two main directions around which the composition of classical architecture has permanently moved, opening up to the other infinite directions and "n dimensions" of space.17
In place of the perspective, Sacripanti adopts two new design themes for the city-bridge: the module-object and multidimensionality/multidirectionality. The city-bridge hence originates from a primary grid subdivided into modular elements in which the module is not to be understood as a metric-proportional reference but as an entity-object, according to the definition given in the same years by art historian Giulio Carlo Argan.18 In the context of a repeatable module-object, which is the basis of a compositional and combinatorial principle, the city moves "from the aesthetics of the object to that of the generative process of objects" and imagines "mobile configurations".19 This idea seems to anticipate the architectural research of the first decades of the 21st century on non-Euclidean, fractal, procedural and parametric geometries20 made possible by the evolution of digital technologies (Fig. 5).
Figure 5 - On the left, a graphical interpretation of the “module-measure” concept; on the right, a graphical interpretation of the 'module-object' concept based on the Messina City-bridge project (designed by the authors).
The infinite dimensions/directions of the city can not only be designed but also perceived thanks to the movement of humans within the system.
Architectural objects and cities are composed of systems that can extend to infinity; modular elements transcend their nature of continually equal components and develop according to a logic of continuous multiple variations, thus defining a new space "with infinite dimensions and directions: a space-time 'continuum'. The space of human existence, of action."21
The 'n' dimensions/directions in the City-Bridge are developed through the networks/grids that move in Cartesian space. The infinite dimensions/directions of the city can not only be designed but also perceived thanks to the movement of humans within the system. Movement and variation make this work a perfect example of an "Open work as a proposal of a 'field' of interpretative possibilities, as a configuration of stimuli endowed with a substantial indeterminateness, so that the user is induced to a series of ever-changing 'readings'; structure, as a 'constellation' of elements that lend themselves to different reciprocal relationships" (Fig. 6).22
Figure 6 - The grid layouts in the City-bridge project: on the left, an axonometric view; on the right, an orthographic view (designed by the authors).
The materialisation of these themes in the city-bridge project was analysed in detail through the three-dimensional digital translation of the second study model.23 In this city "assembled no longer by parts but by systems"24 - i.e. where the systems and their relationships are more important than the individual elements - it is possible to recognise three types of crucial entities which can be organised into homogeneous systems: the three-dimensional object-modules, the grids and the slabs (Fig. 7).
Figure 7 - Project decomposition into systems (designed by the authors).
These systems can be further analysed through the decomposition into geometrically homogeneous families: the surfaces present have a linear (the main road) or punctual (ramps and platforms) development; the grids have a horizontal layout; or vertical-transversal to the circulation direction within the city-bridge; composite-oblique, which includes both the aforementioned oblique planes that cross and reconnect the urban space as well as the structure placed below the main road; composite/L-shaped, in the variously arranged structures that support the clusters of solid elements forming the constructed area. Solids are present with a punctual pattern, where cubic elements are observed, ideally made up of a single module-object; or they are aggregated in parallelepipeds of variable length, which assume longitudinal, transversal or vertical alignment with respect to the city's travel direction (Fig. 8).
Figure 8 - Systems decomposition into geometric elements (designed by the authors).
The digital model enables to resume the design process where historical events have interrupted it, providing a virtual maquette to extract new graphic documentation that allows a deeper critical investigation of the work and more direct communication of its architectural values.
The digital model also enables to resume the design process where historical events have interrupted it, providing a virtual maquette to extract new graphic documentation that allows a deeper critical investigation of the work and more direct communication of its architectural values. Thus, a series of cross-sections highlights precisely that variability of form and space so central to the theorisation of modern language and the city-bridge. Moreover, a series of perspective views, shot from the central traversing axis, enables the simulation of the dynamic travel otherwise impossible through a physical scale model, showing how in Sacripanti's city-bridge; "The ambiguity of the sign does not make indeterminate the vision of the represented forms: it suggests an innate vibratility, a more intimate contact with the environment, it challenges the contours, the rigid distinctions between form and form, form and light, form and background" (Fig. 9).25
Figure 9 - A route within the City-bridge: on the left, cross sections; on the right, perspective views (designed by the authors).
Compositions
It is also possible to observe a variability in the distribution of solid “lumps”, a thickening and thinning of the built around the central part of the city, dedicated to fast vehicular travel. The top view of the 3D model clearly shows this characteristic of the bridge-city and recalls one of the drawings (Fig. 10) used by Kevin Lynch in his The Image of the City (1960);26 Even the text related to the diagram seems to describe Sacripanti’s city: an urban “melodic” structure is outlined, and it is characterised by the variation of spaces and references, which can be experienced in the time it takes to cross the city.27 It is a unitary composition that offers continuous spatial variations generated by the articulation of the systems originating its complexity, perceptible only over time thanks to the central route.
Figure 10 - Descriptive diagram of the "melodic" organization of urban routes (source: Lynch, Kevin A. The Image of the City, p. 99. Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press, 1960) in comparison with the Bridge-City of Sacripanti (designed by the authors).
The suggestion of the musical analogy allows further reflections: music and architecture share the coexistence of a regular rhythmic partition with a melodic composition following its own laws;28 a coexistence which "[...] should be a perception of identity and also of difference. As in music, where dissonances are introduced to give value to consonances, so in architecture simple relationships should be used in connection with more complex ones."29 This "perception of identity and also of difference" is clearly expressed in the project, which incorporates the variability of the definitive form of the urban agglomeration, continuously changing the scenario that surrounds and involves the user-crosser of the city. The articulation into unity and the introduction of change in the composition are also characteristics of complex aleatory music that John Cage experimented in those years.30 Cage's scores were indeed “works” with a strong visual identity (Fig. 11).31
Figure 11 - John Cage, Indeterminate score for “Fontana Mix”, 1958 (source: shorturl.at/DFGMQ).
In particular, the score of the "Freeman Etude" n. XVIII, recalls the model of the city-bridge, with a curious cross-reference of musical and architectural elements. The compositions seem "structurally" comparable: the pentagram immediately relates to the linearity of the road; on one side the heads of the notes gather in clusters, as in the city do the solids representing the built; on the other side it is the dynamic signs that give life to "lumps" of varying density. The two vertical planes, transversal to the direction of the city, seem to outline only "a beat" of Sacripanti's city, while the rest of the composition remains to be written, using the same generative principles (Fig. 12).
Figure 12 - Above, John Cage, the score of the Freeman Etude n. XVIII (source: shorturl.at/ET469); below, a top view of the 3d model of the bridge-city (elaboration by the authors).
Although the compositions are not contemporary the juxtaposition of two characters sharing an attitude of strong innovation is interesting and suggestive because it establishes a transdisciplinary research field, which crosses almost forty years, that introduced the uncertainty in artwork, giving up the established prescriptive rigidity in respective disciplines.32 Sacripanti and Cage shared visionary experimentalism, the break with the past and the search for the new as an expression of contemporary people and their profound needs; both stimulated the users to a different participation in architectural and musical phenomena, to a different way of understanding art.33
Cover image credits: Digital graphic elaboration of the City-bridge 3D model (designed by the authors).
A longer version of this essay with an indeep study about linguistic aspects of Sacripanti’s book “Frontier City”, has been published in Italian in 2017. Eliana Capiato, Giovanna Cresciani, Francesca Romana Forlini, Matteo Flavio Mancini, “IMMAGINI DI CITTA’. RIFLESSIONI DI UNA CITTA’-PONTE NELLA MENTE DI SACRIPANTI”, AAA ITALIA, Progettare il mutevole. Nuovi studi su Maurizio Sacripanti Numero speciale (2017): 4-39.
Bio
Matteo Flavio Mancini is an architect, a PhD in Sciences of Representation and Survey at Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on architectural perspective illusionism. Since 2015 he has been teaching and researching at Roma Tre University, Department of Architecture, where he has been an assistant professor since 2022 on the topic of cultural heritage analysis and valorisation through digital technologies. His teaching and research activities deal with the history of representation, architectural survey, advanced 3D modelling and digital representation.
Giovanna Cresciani is a PhD in Science of Representation and Survey at Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on the use of representation for the analysis of urban transformations. She worked with the CNR at ITABC (Institute for Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage), in the research project "Land of Nineveh - Training for the enhancement of the cultural heritage of Northern Kurdistan" directed by the University of Udine (DIUM - Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage). She collaborated with the Building Management Area of Sapienza - University of Rome. She also works with professional firms and freelancers in the field of architectural survey and representation, as well as in graphic design.
Francesca Romana Forlini is an architect, Ph.D, editor, writer and educator whose research is located at the intersection of feminism, cultural sociology and architectural history and theory. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School in New York, where she teaches Global History of Architecture and interior design. She worked as chief editor at KoozArch, where she is currently a contributor. She was also the head of History and Theory of Architecture at the BArch at the University of Hertfordshire, researcher at Foster + Partners, lecturer and researcher at Middlesex University, Harvard University and the Royal College of Art (RCA). Francesca was contributor and editor at the Giornale dell'Architettura and Oblique, Critical Conservation Vol. 1, and is the director of the book series Stanze. She is a Fulbrighter ed alumna of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the RCA.
Notes
1 The most famous Italian architects of those years participated in the competition. They were, among others, Pier Luigi Nervi, Giuseppe Perugini and Sergio Musmeci. Some of the projects presented are kept at the MAXXI Architecture Archives in Rome.
2 Poplab, “The Osaka Experience V: Interview with Franco Purini – Italian version.” Available at: https://urlis.net/huxco
3 M. Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera (Bulzoni Editore, Roma 1973).
4 Ibid, p. 10.
5 Ibid, p. 8.
6 B. Zevi, Il Linguaggio Moderno dell’Architettura: Guida al Codice Anticlassico (Einaudi, Torino 1973).
7 Ibid, p. 59.
8 The materials used for this study can be partially consulted thanks to the digital media resources of the Maurizio Sacripanti Fund at http://www.fondosacripanti.org/opera.php?id=33 (accessed on 18/08/2022), and were partly found through bibliographic research: Maria Luisa Neri, Laura Thermes, Maurizio Sacripanti, Maestro di architettura. 1916-1996 (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 1998), 75; Maurizio Sacripanti, “Appunti per una struttura urbana”, in Sacripanti Architettura, eds.Maria Garimberti, Giuseppe Susani (Venezia: Edizioni Cluva, 1967), 75-76.
9 The only image of the first model is available at the Fondo Sacripanti’s website. http://www.fondosacripanti.org/elemento_opera.php?id=414(accessed on 18/08/2022).
10 See http://www.fondosacripanti.org/elemento_opera.php?id=412(accessed on 18/08/2022).
11 Maurizio Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1973), 6.
12 Maurizio Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1973), 8; Maurizio Sacripanti, “Discorso sull’architettura”, in Problemi di architettura contemporanea, eds.Leonardo Savioli, Danilo Santi (Firenze: G. & G. editrice, 1972), 56; Maurizio Sacripanti, “Maurizio Sacripanti sulla linguistica architettonica”, L’architettura. Cronache e storia 20, no. 8 (1974): 531-532.
13 The idea of “perspective as a symbolic form” is due to the German art historian Erwin Panofsky. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 40-1. The first Italian edition of the text dates from 1961, close to the years when the project for the Messina City-Bridge took shape.
14 Maurizio Sacripanti, “Maurizio Sacripanti sulla linguistica architettonica”, L’architettura. Cronache e storia 20, no. 8 (1974): 532.
15 The theme of a new motricity, mechanics for transport and information technology for communication, is recurrent in Maurizio Sacripanti's writings and is presented relating to the use and perception of spaces and the transmission of information. Cfr. Maurizio Sacripanti, “Discorso sull’architettura”, in Problemi di architettura contemporanea, eds.Leonardo Savioli, Danilo Santi (Firenze: G. & G. editrice, 1972), 56; Maurizio Sacripanti, “Un geroglifico spazio-temporale”, Lineastruttura 1 (1966): 43.
16 Sacripanti devotes considerable space to the criticism of the concept of symmetry, interpreting the thought expressed by Bruno Zevi. Cfr. Maurizio Sacripanti, “Maurizio Sacripanti sulla linguistica architettonica”, L’architettura. Cronache e storia 20, no. 8 (1974): 531.
17 Maurizio Sacripanti, “Discorso sull’architettura”, in Problemi di architettura contemporanea, eds.Leonardo Savioli, Danilo Santi (Firenze: G. & G. editrice, 1972), 56-57.
18 “[...] the architectural object [...] no longer being able to be defined by the site it occupies in space or its place in the context of nature, has in the lucid definition of function its principium individuationis. The standard, in fact, is not a type of form, but a type of object: tool, machine, furnishings, house and, if you like, city. And, as such, it takes the place that the module had, in the process of classical design: so much so that it can be said that the great discovery of modern architecture is the substitution of the module-object for the module-measure.” Giulio Carlo Argan, Progetto e destino (Milano:Il Saggiatore, 1965), 113.
19 Maurizio Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1973), 8.
20 Dennis R. Shelden, Andrew J. Witt,“Continuity and rapture”,in AD Mathematics of space, ed. George L. Legendre (London: Wiley, 2011), 37.
21 Giulio Carlo Argan, Progetto e Destino (Milano:Il Saggiatore, 1965), 113.
22 Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1997), 154.
23 The digital model was created from the perspectival redesign and critical interpretation of the photographs documenting the second model created by Sacripanti for the City-Bridge of Messina.
24 Maurizio Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1973), 8.
25 Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1997), 155.
26 Kevin A. Lynch, The Image of the City. (Cambridge: The Technology Press & Harvard University Press, 1960), 99.
27 In the chapter entitled "The shape of the city" Sacripanti writes: "[...] There is a final way of organizing a path or a set of paths, which will become of increasing importance in a world of great distances and high speeds. It might be called ‘melodic’ in analogy to music. The events and characteristics along the path - landmarks, space changes, dynamic sensations - might be organized as a melodic line, perceived and imaged as a form which is experienced over a substantial time interval. Since the image would be of a total melody rather than a series of separate points, that image could presumably be more inclusive, and yet less demanding. The form might be the classic introduction-development-climax-conclusion sequence, or it might take more subtle shapes, such as those which avoid final conclusions." Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera, 32.
28 Respectively, the music divides time into beats and rhythm, developing a plot of tones combined according to the laws of harmony. Architecture rhythmically divides the space, then composing the elements according to geometric and proportional laws.
29 Claude Bragdon, Bellissima necessità. Architettura come Musica Cristallizzata (Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon, 2017), 140.
30 Name given to compositional procedures established in the 1960s, based on uncertainty. Musical writing can be entrusted to chance according to different criteria (paper imperfections, coin tossing, etc.), but also to different performances from time to time by calling the interpreters to participate in the compositional choices. Composers engaged in this type of music were M. Feldman, E. Brown, J. Cage, P. Boulez, K. Stockhausen, S. Bussotti, M. Kagel.
31 Here it is meant that they are also of interest as "graphic objects" in themselves, as well as for the musical compositions they represent.
32 The composition of the Etudes ended in 1990 and they were performed in their entirety in 1991.
33We know for sure that Sacripanti knew Cage's work: "At the last Biennale a ballet by Cage was performed with sets and costumes by Rauschenberg. We went there [...]. As we entered, we were welcomed by heretical music, mixed, prehensile and rejecting, then a new show: no longer the scene with fixed objects, but a ‘non-scene’ organised with moving objects and a language resulting only from the modularity of moving planes, painted bodies of dancers, material images, treadmills. it was biting of vital fullness. The light graduating canceled or exalted it and the scenographic instruments combined the figurations. The show required unlimited gestures: but the seclusion of the stage limited it, forbidding the dancers to ‘fly’ around the hall, to the tapis -roulants to appear magic carpets and to the puppets to split the audience, mirroring it, crowding on the ceiling [...] the stimulating show and the disappointing stage accompanied my memories; the Cagliari competition was an opportunity to propose overcoming the ancient fracture." M. L. Neri, L. Thermes, Maurizio Sacripanti. Maestro di Architettura. 1916-1996 (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 1998), 60.
Bibliography
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