Vesper No. 7 | Sky | Fall-Winter 2022
Marzia
Marandola
Building
a Tent under the Sky
Keywords
Giovanni Michelucci,
acrobatic, roof, concrete, marvellous undulations
The church
of San Giovanni Battista ‘dell’autostrada’ (1960-1964) in
Campi Bisenzio, Florence, is certainly one of the most studied and well-known
masterpieces of Giovanni Michelucci’s long and prolific architectural
production. The different phases in the conception and design of this
celebrated work are known thanks to the wealth of amazing sketches and
documentary materials preserved in the Archive of the Giovanni Michelucci
Foundation in Fiesole and the Giovanni Michelucci Documentation Centre in
Pistoia; conversely, it is still possible to find some largely unexamined
material concerning the acrobatic and experimental construction phases.
During his
professional experience, Michelucci remained faithful to his desire to free
himself from the seduction of form as well as from typological canons: always a
master in composing planimetric distributions, he reached the apex of
compositional freedom in the church ‘dell’autostrada’, where
the hierarchical sequence of prospectuses disappears in the indistinguishable
fusion with the roof. The experience and skills gained by Michelucci over the
years of the complex construction of the church revealed to him the great
potentials of concrete, opening up new horizons on the construction techniques
that enabled the creation of different effects for this material in terms of
surface, colour and texture. Both a point of arrival and a turning point, its
construction marked for the architect the moment when he abandoned the shapes
dictated by the geometric grid of the wall structure to draw on the marvellous
undulations of concrete roofing, which annihilate the conventional geometries
and the hierarchy of the fronts, merged with and indistinguishable from the
supple cover.
contacts
t. +39 041 257 1542