The City-bridge that Defied Perspective: a 1965 Vision by Maurizio Sacripanti

This is an extract of an essay published on koozArch with Matteo Flavio Mancini and Giovanna Cresciani, full text can be found here.
An extended version of this research, published in Italian, can be found here.

Abstract

This essay condenses the first and only research project undertaken on the unrealised City-bridge designed by the Italian visionary architect Maurizio Sacripanti. The project crosses the Strait of Messina and is Sacripanti's only urban design; it represents his unique ideas of a contemporary city and embodies the most advanced Italian architectural and artistic criticism of his time, sometimes foreshadowing renowned, international solutions. Starting from some reflection on the historical city, Sacripanti proposed a design process that relies on the rejection of perspective as a design tool, and embraces the criteria of module-object and multi-directionality to overcome the modernistic urban condition. The result is a City-bridge composed of different systems with peculiar geometric features where the forms and space mutability is the core of the project. The 3D digital interpretation of the project manifests these properties and finally suggests a suggestive relation to John Cage's research on aleatory music.

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Just over three kilometres separate the tip of Italy’s boot from one of its main islands, Sicily. The strait, in the middle of the Mediterranean, is a pivotal point in Homer’s Odyssey and was the core of architectural experimentations in the second half of the 20th century.[1] Amongst many others, visionary architect Maurizio Sacripanti proposed a solution and designed, unlike his contemporaries, a city-bridge for the strait. It was a massive suspended structure that is halfway between an urban infrastructure, a city and an architecture (Fig. 1). Notably, his project not only foreshadowed national and international radical urban visions, but also defied architectural representation. The project and the architect never received the attention that it was due to them. Paper architect Sacripanti, whose eccentric designs, writings and undeniable genius have been recently recognised in Italy is, indeed, mostly unknown outside the peninsula.

Sacripanti was a Roman architect and his experimental, provocative architecture, his drawings and his connection to Italian Experimental Art along with his linguistic research characterise his peculiar work and make him one of the most interesting and overlooked figures of Italian post-war (unrealized) architecture. Throughout his long career he designed multiple architectural projects that encapsulated the stimuli of post-war Italian art and literature but were never built. Indeed, the artist Renato Pedio notably stated that Sacripanti designed “great projects, all feasible and none realised”. Thanks to his innate talent in drawing - that influenced the work of his student and collaborator Franco Purini - he created beautiful perspectives, axonometrias and elevations, hence the so-called "primacy of drawing" in his work that makes this figure fascinating and deserving of further analysis (Fig. 2).[2]

Urbatecture

Amongst the numerous architectural projects stands out his only urban project, the unrealized city-bridge (1965), a groundbreaking design for 1960s Italy. The city-bridge is and remains a work in progress, as the architect left only two models and few photographs. His writings on the city, specifically his book Frontier City (Città di Frontiera, 1973),[3] hence played an important role in the understanding of Sacripanti’s unbuilt project (Fig. 3).[4] In fact, Purini explains that Sacripanti was extremely interested in the theory of architecture and although he wrote few and cryptic theoretical texts, the architect had a deep, careful and reflective approach to both the theoretical and the intellectual debate of the time. Furthermore the frontier, by its very definition, is nothing but an ambiguous geographical convention, a linear boundary like the horizon line that divides - according to Sacripanti - the “above” of the new city from the “below” of the old city, the past from the future.[5] This boundary with both spatial and temporal connotations is the place where the city-bridge rises, halfway between two worlds, ready to unite them, collapsing the time they represent through a structure that is a mirror of both (Fig. 4). His text is, therefore, considered an hypothetical and speculative architectural project just like the city-bridge.

Despite the numerous urban designs contemporary to Sacripanti's project - such as Yona Friedman or Archigram’s suspended cities, or the cities designed by the Japanese metabolists - present formally and strategically similar urban solutions, the architect's attitude towards the historic city is more sensitive, in fact his entire conception of the Frontier City is based on a profound understanding of the existing city and society. In this regard, the renowned historian and theorist of architecture Bruno Zevi provides us with the word that best describes the city-bridge: "urbatettura" or the union of “urban” and “architecture”, translated here as “urbatecture” (1973).[6] The latter allows the "reintegration" between the architecture, the city and the territory: "it is a horizontal and vertical reintegration with polidirectional paths. [...] Once the volume is broken up into slabs then assembled in a four-dimensional sense, the traditional facades disappear, every distinction between internal and external space, between architecture and urban planning collapses; urbatecture is born from the merging of architecture and city.”[7] Zevi, thus, resolves the scalar differences between building and city, providing us with the necessary elements to understand Sacripanti’s city-bridge.

Sacripanti’s urbatecture is a composition of systems, of solid, flat and linear elements that remain almost abstract forms. In fact their functions are not specified and their use is irrelevant since the project shows a compositional thought that structures an urban reality. Through the reconstruction of this system and its composition, the visual and graphic analysis of Sacripanti’s city, this essay recognises the role of unrealised architecture as a space for experimentation and imagination, but also as a place for the consolidation of possible and impossible memories and ideas, never fully realised. The materials of which these architectures or urbatectures are made of are paper, ink and graphite, models and photographs, preserved inside architecture’s archives. These witnesses, often partial, can say a lot about their authors and the cultural context in which they were designed, and this is possible thanks to digital reconstructions and visual analyses.

[…]

Notes:

1 The most famous Italian architects of those years participated in the competition. They were, among others, Pier Luigi Nervi, Giuseppe Perugini and Sergio Musmeci. Some of the projects presented are kept at the MAXXI Architecture Archives in Rome.
2 Poplab, “The Osaka Experience V: Interview with Franco Purini – Italian version.” Available at: https://urlis.net/huxco
3 M. Sacripanti, Città di Frontiera (Bulzoni Editore, Roma 1973).
4 Ibid, p. 10.
5 Ibid, p. 8.
6 B. Zevi, Il Linguaggio Moderno dell’Architettura: Guida al Codice Anticlassico (Einaudi, Torino 1973).
7 Ibid, p. 59.