Itineraries of Contemporary Architecture in Ivrea
La Serra building by Iginio Cappai and Pietro Mainardis.
Built between 1967 and 1973, and marked by an architectural language associated with the Pop Art imaginary of the 1960s, the building has a very complex planimetric organisation, being distributed over six levels starting from the basement (where the Roman ruins are structured into an archaeological itinerary), that plays upon the reproduction of the complexity of the urban space of the ancient city in a critical vein.
The photographic campaign investigated certain special sites of Ivrea today, concentrating first on the area around the ICO Workshops in Via Jervis, and then continuing with the area around the building by Cappai and Mainardis. The choice of objects and shots follows in ideal terms the reflections of Italo Calvino - “if one wishes to describe a place, to describe it completely, not as a momentary appearance, but as a portion of space that has a form, a meaning and a reason why, it is necessary to represent it traversed by the dimension of time; it is necessary to represent everything that moves in this space, with rapid motion or with inexorable slowness, all the elements that this space contains or has contained in its past, present and future relation” - finding emotive implications and connections in the work of analysis.
This part of the research looks at the project concerned the part of the city including the eastern edge of the historic centre, where there is La Serra building by Iginio Cappai and Pietro Mainardis.
Built between 1967 and 1973, and marked by an architectural language associated with the Pop Art imaginary of the 1960s, the building has a very complex planimetric organisation, being distributed over six levels starting from the basement (where the Roman ruins are structured into an archaeological itinerary), that plays upon the reproduction of the complexity of the urban space of the ancient city in a critical vein.
