Sophisticated Essential Elementarism

By Valerio Paolo Mosco - 5 June 2024
Metra has participated in the project

An overview of the work of Giulia de Appolonia leaves you amazed by its consistent compactness. Her projects are usually of average size, their basic concept essential to the point of being spare, the stereometric forms equally essential and spare. Yet the way the buildings rest gently on the ground contrasts with the stereometric shapes. The result is architecture whose overall tectonics are resoundingly legible as, for example, in the way structural elements and infills are matched.

A recurrent overall theme is her juxtaposition of contrasting pairs: black and white, soft and hard – never, however, used in excess to become rhetorical or sententious. De Appolonia’s architecture can be defined as essentially clear, even limpid, eminently readable from first glance. Yet, although explicit, her constructions retain a certain studied reserve that lends them a distinctive aura. This is an essential point that asks a broader question beyond the buildings under discussion: can that type of assertive architecture we know as d’auteur – even dirigiste – be combined with its opposite: architecture that adopts the current taste, even taking it to an extreme? Italian architecture has long answered in the affirmative, producing architecture that we could define as media res, halfway between starchitect products and the prevailing taste. In our “journey through Italy”, we have encountered and described many examples, arriving at the conclusion that today it is the media res product that prevails – to such an extent as to supplant eclecticism as the prevailing characteristic of Italian architecture, with the exception of the 20-year fascist period.

Yet while Giulia de Appolonia can be considered part of Italy’s media res, she stands out in this vast arena as an autonomous figure, a fact that can also be explained by her training, which was only partly accomplished in...