SULLIVAN AND PELLEGRIN: A DIALOGUE THROUGH SPACE AND TIME

Sullivan e Pellegrin: A dialogue through Space and Time

Location

Rome, Italy

Client

AIAC – Associazione Italiana Architettura e Critica

Status

Realized

Year

2017

Design Team

Sergio Bianchi con Chiara Pellegrin, Simone Fracasso, Simone Russo, Ahmed El Gazzar, Valeria Menculini, Roberto Ruggeri

The exhibition is articulated on several layers:
Pellegrin talks about Sullivan, Sullivan talks about Sullivan, Pellegrin elaborates Sullivan and lastly Zevi speak about Pellegrin.

Pellegrin is honored to say that he did not immediately understand, but that he “felt”, the afternoon when he was at the Art Institute of Chicago when a kind lady showed him Sullivan’s drawings. He found himself facing the law (written with a very light pencil). He had not understood, but he had “heard”. Since the end of 1953 Pellegrin is in the United States, in New Orleans, where he works in the study of W.R. Burck.
In 1956 Pellegrin writes for the magazine a series of articles on the school of Chicago, one of these, is presented in this exhibition and it is called: Historicity of Louis Henry Sullivan.

We then present the large-format prints of some Sullivan wall decorations, an evident demonstration that the upholstery, seeking a sense in iterations and juxtapositions, can intuitively grasp the biological matrix and that this matrix generates complex spatiality. The prints are accompanied by the plates taken from “a system of architectural ornamentation” and a piece by Sullivan on the value of poetry as an anticipation, published in the magazine “Poetry” in 1916.

There is a letter, written by Pellegrin to Luciana Menozzi in July 1954 from New Orleans, in that fruitful incubation period, which was for Pellegrin the American experience, in which he emphasizes “I do not see”. That not seeing has never been enough for him.

The attempt to understand and elaborate innervates all his activity. Still in “Un percorso nel potenziare il mestiere del costruire”, this time telling himself Pellegrin writes:
Someone can say that Pellegrin designed the LINES above all for the pleasure of imagining the growth. If it was true.

Pellegrin would not object. Another reason for Pellegrin’s design is a felt “necessity”. Necessity that the welfare of man is no longer only sectorally faced by trade unionists, or priests or ecologists. They PROTECT, they do not propose. The sedated men have solved much in terms of individuality. Very little at the womb level, built physical site, ie a built settlement system.

Pellegrin’s lines feed on the biological concatenation of Sullivan’s drawing to elaborate a human settlement system, in a tension that evokes Luciana’s “PREMESSA”.