Rappresentare le connessioni mai nate: il progetto di Luigi Moretti per la Casa del Balilla di Messina

Abstract

Luigi Moretti (Rome 1906 - Capraia 1973) was one of the undisputed protagonists of the history of architecture in Italy during the twentieth century. This essay attempts to investigate one of his projects never built dating back to 1936, the Casa del Balilla in Messina, developing a method based essentially on critical redrawing, starting from the exhaustive graphic-design documentation of the time, found in the Central Archive of the state. An exegetical process which, in an attempt to delineate those spatial, architectural and urban connections that never materialized, reveals the attention shown by Moretti to the peculiarities of the place and to man as user, who is assumed as the center of the design of the spaces connected in succession. The combined application of the tools of the science of representation (which does not want to replace historiographic criticism) has as a final result a series of graphic returns derived from the digital model of the building, essential for the assessments described above and on whose effectiveness the result will depend –far from negligible– to generate new further critical contributions on the subject.