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, a 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 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.