Bruno Zevi: Historiographical Redefinition as Methodology of the Contemporary Architectural Practice

Abstract

The critical and anti-historical reading that Bruno Zevi, one of the greatest Italian theorists, does of the "official architecture" is a useful means to redefine the boundaries - and also the limits – of the Modern Movement. Casting new light on architectural geographies too often neglected by the official historiography, Zevi corroborates the principle of the disorder and the imperfect as a powerful design tool that has established itself at various stages of the architectural history. According to this meaning, to what extent has influenced the historiographical process the architectural practice? Which is the legacy of the battle of Rationalism versus Expressionism for the architecture of the third millennium? Overcome the academic rules - proportion, assonance, perspective, the idea of the "finished” artistic object - today it prevails a line of architecture which is openly instability, disharmony, insecurity and conflict. "The architect does not pursue anymore superstructural values: he speaks in prose, accumulates semanticised words, avoids any kind of synthesis, and achieves a full, persuasive poem, intrinsic to things" Zevi states. Referring to the zero grade of the architecture, definition borrowed from Roland Barthes, he asserts the aspiration of non expressing oneself in the formal perfection of the harmony, symmetry, geometrization but rather in the uneasiness, disorder, and in the imperfect. The historian goes for the compactness of the historicist view of architecture to reveal, in its crumbling, that wealth of elements object of inspiration and continuity in the history of architecture. Thus from Zevi idea that the architecture of the past is always present architecture which has to deal with the contemporary, it follows that each true interpretation of the past must be spurred by a profound sense of commitment to the milieu of the contemporary art. In this sense, the history can be taken into consideration as a modern methodology of making architecture.