Vesper No. 6 | Magic | Spring-Summer 2022
Giuseppe Caldarola
Evocazione
Evocation is, broadly speaking, the summoning of mysterious or latent
entities until they make themselves visible. It is a solicitation to establish
contact between different worlds; it is a rite intended to invoke, by magical
virtue, a soul from the underworld as well as a divinity from its usual seat
through practices that make use of gestures and formulas capable of
establishing relations and of prompting encounters. Architects practise
evocation – becoming evokers themselves – because they are the
custodians of the knowledge of the elements that are to be evoked; they then
proceed in the composition of a project by means of ‘gestures’ and
‘forms’, almost enacting a ritual.
As part of Italian Eclecticism, those architects who were active in the
debate on the national style offer some theoretical references on the visual
power of forms, stylistic lemmas, sign systems, and languages. Ettore Bernich
(1850-1914), a Rome-based architect, is a prominent representative of these
trends, where evocation becomes a monumentalised reminder of more or less
recent pasts.
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