Elaboration of a critical paradigm for interpreting modern architecture: the almost intangible essence of Luigi Moretti’s Casa del Balilla at Trecate

Abstract

Modern architecture is not, from a lexical point of view, uniquely definable. The heterogeneity of the twentieth-century heritage is therefore a collective wealth that should be protected from the risk of falling into oblivion. In order to avoid this, it could prove fundamental to establish a process of the knowledge of these assets. This should not, however, result in a simple and passive recording of architectural facts: a deep understanding of the complexity of modern architecture, which has as its objective the protection of buildings, could be obtained, for example, through real and proper decoding of signs, conducted by a critical use of the metalanguage most congenial to the architect: the drawing. This is what was attempted with LuigiMoretti’s Casa del Balilla at Trecate. After the war, the building was seriously and repeatedly altered causing it to definitively lose its original structure. So, an investigation is proposed. When proceeding from the original project drawings as a starting point, the application of instruments of the science of representation are seen: drawing, relief, three-dimensional modeling and graphic analysis. These are the means to understanding the concept of modern architecture materialized at Trecate by Moretti. Digital technologies, therefore, would be fundamental to revealing/detecting the profound reasons of a lexicon with all its facets, be they morphological-structural or spatial, in a unitary logic of architectural design understood as an intangible process of ideas, here reconstructed according to an inverse trajectory with respect to that adopted by the designer. The desired goal is to render virtually tangible the essence of an architecture that has become intangible, due to the absence of knowledge.