Piergiorgio Semerano

By Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi - 24 October 2009

Piergiorgio Semerano was born in 1941. He graduated from Venice University under Giancarlo De Carlo, and worked with him for a certain time. He was also drawn to the genius of Carlo Scarpa. Not the uniquely inimitable style that his mediocre epigoni wax so enthusiastic about, but his ability to dialogue with the pre-existing architecture and preserve it, though only after changing the spirit of it in a way we would nowadays consider violent.
Feeling out of his element in the Venice milieu, Semerano decamped to Finland where he worked for some months with Alvar Aalto. He tried to introduce various Nordic architects to the Venice scene, but with limited success: the informal language deriving from organic architecture tended to be misunderstood by a school that was increasingly bound up with ‘historical’ and neo-rational tenets. He set up a practice in Padua but was often away on lengthy, usually solitary, journeys to the East where he would alternately visit monuments of the remote past - monasteries, fortresses, hermitages - and works of recent years: Chandigarh by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn’s Dacca. For a while he emigrated to the United States, living in New York for preference, designing and fitting out stores there.
A typical product, one might say, of the years around 1968: restless, inquisitive, anti-academic to the core, as enamoured of archaic civilizations as of the ultra-technological. His idea of architecture follows much the same line: intensely anti-conformist, lacking the certainty exuded by some who see architectural design as about drawing up a decent plan and four elevations. To Semerano it is about the human body in movement and space. As he confided, “I’ve always felt a building should highlight the way things follow one another. Not freeze the gaze on a dominant image, but kindle a kinetic experience”. Hence the site-oriented approach where the architect gains insights that elude him in the studio: the quality and brightness of the...