Lina Bo Bardi. Unbuilt in Sicily

Abstract

In August 1940 the magazine ‘Domus’, in a special issue dedicated to the “casa al mare”, publishes the project of the “Casa sul mare di Sicilia” by Lina Bo Bardi and Carlo Pagani. It is one of the first projects of Lina Bo, an utopian project whose representations indicate a way of proceedings that coagulates theory and imagination conceived as indissoluble relationship of “doing”. Add to the ‘unconventional’ drawings of the project, plans, perspectives and perspective section, indicating a very personal way in using of graphic language, we can find a synthesis’ drawing that underlines how the representation is intended both as an extension of the mind, and as order structure of a speech. It is a project, which because of its visionary character, contains an idea of landscape, living, relationship with the history, that a possible realization would not allow it to take shape with such expressive intensity. The house, on two levels, is completed by a terrace with hanging garden in which stands the vault of patio’s covering below; the rigorous square matrix structure, is made by high thickness walls conceived in local stone as well as those of the wall that surrounds the rectangular block in which there are a “primitive” pavilion, a fence that contains an exotic garden, a garden in the garden, a stream, a pond that receives the shadow of an obelisk topped by a sphere that refers to the astrological cycle to underline, perhaps, the stages of becoming. The paper deals with a graphic reading of the dwelling designed by Lina Bo through new digital representations that not only implement the existing graphic corpus but also try to retrace the project’s ways that often the word, entrusted to architectural criticism, cannot identify. If this sentence is true, then the drawing conceived as analysis and then as a critical tool, is the medium between words and things.