FRANCESCO PALPACELLI – ARCHITECTURES
Macerata (Italy), 2004
Location
Macerata, Italy
Client
Ordine degli Architetti di Macerata
Status
Realized
Year
2004
Design Team
Sergio Bianchi with Zsofia Dreher, Janos Vagi
Luigi Pellegrin once wrote: the wish written on the edge of a drawing that shows the piezometer of Vigna Murata projected vertically and horizontally enlarged to accommodate complex spatial residential areas.
The choice of the sentence and of the drawing has a very important meaning for me that I am writing to you since I came into contact with the work of Palpacelli through Pellegrin. It was 1991, I was an architecture student and I was studying the latter while he was doing some of those drawings.
Before that I had been able to observe the piezometer many times, living not far from Vigna Murata road, but I had never made up a judgment on that work in my mind: I simply did not understand it. Pellegrin’s teaching has opened up a world to me: he taught me the responsibility of making architecture.
Responsibility primarily towards nature.
The detachment from the ground, predicted by Le Corbusier and the admirable architects of science fiction, with the consequent opportunity to have a free and clean ground, had in Francesco Palpacelli a very high performer. The link between his architectures and the ground is never invasive, matter hovers in the air with a lightness that seems to materialize the visions of the constructivist Jacob Tchernykhov.
The soil for Palpacelli is never inert; it is a field that must be shaped, liberated, never occupied trivially. His work reminds us that we share Mother Earth with a myriad of other creatures that just as much as we are entitled to inhabit the planet.
A separate consideration concerns the extreme technical ability with which Palpacelli manages to support his visions. Observing the hundreds of preparation boards for the piezometer in Vigna Murata or the drawings for the government palace of Tanzania, one is fascinated by the expertise and precision.
It was not just the elegance of a hand to conceive those spaces, there was always a vigilant and elegant intelligence that had clearly the place of humans in the universe and that he knew well, paraphrasing again a teaching by Pellegrin: a good architecture is that which organizes the territory.