Institute Publications

This volume recounts the story of unrealised architectural projects dedicated to the poet Dante Alighieri and the Dvina Commedia, conceived in Italy between the 1910s and 1930s. Thanks to a vast body corpus of documentation and an examination of certain conceptual junctures concerning the notion of national monuments and the relationship between utopia and ideology, this study highlights the complex intertwining of architecture, politics and ideology during those years.

Who were the first visitors to public museums? How were they received, observed, and regulated? And how did museum institutions help shape – and construct – the very idea of ​​the “public”? This volume inaugurates a new series of studies devoted to the publics of the first public museums (18th-19th centuries). From the Museo Capitolino to the Louvre, from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana to the Rome of the catacombs, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the public collections of Poland, Thuringia, Romania, and Chile: different geographies and periods that enable us to reconstruct the complex network of norms, practices, and representations through which the museum space developed, dialogued, or conflicted with its public. In the essays collected here, institutional sources are given a new voice, especially those from the period between the 1730s and the late 19th century: regulations, admission registers, correspondence, catalogues, and visitors’ books. What emerges is a shared and largely untold story of mediations, disciplinary strategies, material experiences, and cultural discards: a history that invites us to rethink the genealogy of the modern museum as a living space of relationships, tensions, and negotiations between institutions and publics.

With the dawn of the modern age, the conquest of the third dimension—the aerial domain—set in motion a spatial revolution that irrevocably transformed humanity’s relationship with the city, with territory, and with the planet itself. The view from above introduced an unprecedented form of spatial knowledge, one from the outset charged with profound practical implications: the command of space, largescale planning, control and surveillance, and aerial warfare. At the same time, aerial—or aero-spatial—vision gave rise to fundamental ethical and political experiences, including the emergence of an early global consciousness and the first stirrings of ecological awareness.
Through a historical and philosophical lens, this book investigates the impact of the aerial revolution on both fronts, tracing the continuities and ruptures that have shaped humanity’s gradual conquest of the skies.

The Baptistery of Riva San Vitale is the oldest intact Christian building in Switzerland. In 2018, European Year of the Cultural Heritage, the Academy of Architecture, in the course “Methods and Techniques of Architectural Restoration”, began a new research project by cross-referencing the archival documents with information derived from the site survey to analyse the complex’s history and material qualities with subsequent stratifications and explore its “authenticity”.
The publication brings together a number of critical essays and a series of “thematic maps” comparing the material data with the documentary data, as well as the results of the restoration work conducted on the internal decorative apparatus by the course in “Conservation and Restoration” of the Scuola Universitaria Professionale of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). This documentation is a highly complex work of synthesis and at the same time a flexible and detailed instrument for scholars, professionals and officials in charge of its protection. 
An extensive catalogue of plates and the complete transcription, edited by Eleonora Alberti, of the Giornale di cantiere edited by Guido Borella accompany the publication.
Texts by: Sergio Bettini, Marco Di Nallo, Paola Iazurlo, Vladimir Ivanovici, Giacinta Jean, Daniela Murphy, Irene Quadri.

The process of the construction of memory that the volume seeks to examine takes the form of a layered and complex examination of the political and social issues leading to the failure to build two important projects devoted to the traumas of World War II: the Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs designed by Louis I. Kahn, which was to have been built in New York (1967-1973), and Peter Zumthor’s design for the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre in Berlin (1993-2004).
A retrospective study of the history of commemorative architecture in the twentieth century clearly reveals the lack of importance attributed to unbuilt or unfinished memorials, of which, in most cases, only the documentation remains. However, as the American professor of English and Judaic Studies James E. Young suggests, the history of an unbuilt memorial could conceivably be more instructive than an account of one that has been built.
The history of the construction of a memorial is a task of excavation underpinning the complex process of visualising and materialising the intention of memory expressed by a specific group of individuals, in a given place and historical time. A memorial, in fact, is an architectural work conceived to  belong to the public space: a highly stratified social, political and aesthetic place, to which the community at the same time assigns a fundamental cultural value. Seen in this perspective, investigating the historical and political dynamics, as well as the aesthetic and architectural factors that presided over the design of a memorial is an act of great historical awareness, since it helps reveal the way a community interprets its own past, in particular its memory of traumatic events.

By analysing issues of an attributional, iconographic and iconological nature, and studies in depth of the relationship of sculpture and architecture with social issues ‒ such as the management and organisation of building sites, the relation between the centre and the periphery, and the ties between workshops and individual craftsmen ‒ this volume offers a complete tool for understanding the complex panorama of sculpture in the State of Milan from the late 14th century to the early decades of the 16th century. The broad timespan examined, during which the Visconti were succeeded by the Sforza and then the French, enables us to follow the cultural and stylistic changes that characterised Milanese art between Late Gothic and the late Renaissance and to focus on the work of those sculptors who most influenced the artists contemporary with them: above all, the Masters of Campione and Carona, Jacopino da Tradate, the brothers Cristoforo and Antonio Mantegazza, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, Cristoforo Solari and Bambaia, active, on various occasions and on several levels in the major building sites in the area, namely the Cathedral of Milan and the Charterhouse of Pavia, veritable centres of irradiation of Lombard figurative culture in the period. Furthermore, the emphasis placed on the movements made by the native workers in these Milanese regions and on the cultural and artistic exchanges that accompanied these movements, performed above all by the so-called “masters of the lakes”, means that the research it presents goes beyond the boundaries of Milan, ranging from Spain to modern Silesia and taking in Liguria, Venice, Ferrara, the Rome of Andrea Bregno and in the Sicily of Domenico Gaggini, bringing out the great scope of the themes addressed in the various contributions brought together in this volume.
Texts by: Alessandro Barbieri, Beatrice Bolandrini, Massimiliano Caldera, Laura Damiani Cabrini, Grégoire Extermann, Laura Facchin, Giuseppe Fazio, Rosa López Torrijos, Predrag Marković, Fernando Marías, Giovanni Mendola, Mirko Moizi, Charles R. Morscheck, Thomas Pöpper, Marco Scansani, Martina Schirripa, Federica Siddi, Mariusz Smoliński, Andrea Spiriti, Michela Zurla.

Gottfried Semper’s years of exile in London (1850-55) were a time of highly inspiring experiences. The London of the Great Exhibition offered the German architect an immense trove of objects for study and an intellectual environment that provided seminal impulses for his innovative cultural-historical theory of architecture. The present volume, resulting from a collaborative SNSF research project of the Institute for the History and Theory of Art and Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana, and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, positions Semper as both an observer and actor in this period. It goes beyond focusing on Semper as an individual person and considers his work as a designer, teacher, and writer of architecture against the backdrop of the historical, architectural, and disciplinary surroundings.

Texts by: Elena Chestnova, Murray Fraser, Michael Gnehm, Sonja Hildebrand, Mari Hvattum, Claudio Leoni, Kate Nichols, Alina Payne, Philip Ursprung, Caroline van Eck, Dieter Weidmann, Beat Wyss.

Through an analysis of the artistic and social dynamics underlying the organisation and direction of the important construction site of Como cathedral, on which painters, master glass-makers, goldsmiths and sculptors were active, and by retracing the historiography of the four brothers Rodari, the volume reconstructs the work of Tommaso and his workshop, reordering the chronology of some works and proposing a linear path from his early to his late activity.

Preface by Giovanni Agosti.

This collection of studies investigates the works and cultural context of Giovanni Battista Mola and his son Pier Francesco, who hailed from Coldrerio (Canton Ticino, Switzerland) but were mainly active in Rome and the Papal States. Both were inquiring and many-sided, like their art. The former expressed his talent through architecture and historiographic writings; the latter, after an early training with his father, turned to painting, drawing and caricature, playing an important part on the Roman scene, where he was imitated by his pupils and colleagues as the highly appreciated inventor of new iconographic themes inspired by the ancient world.

Preface by Christoph Frank.

Texts by: Adriano Amendola, Sonja Brink, Patrizia Cavazzini, Valeria Di Giuseppe Di Paolo, Federico Fischetti, Axel Christoph Gampp, Carla Mazzarelli, Elisabeth Oy-Marra, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Antonio Russo, Giovanni Santucci, Cinzia Maria Sicca, Yuri Strozzieri, Caterina Volpi, Jörg Zutter.

During the last twenty years, the topic of form has become one of the most controversial issues in public and professional discussions about architecture. Hardly anyone reflected on this as intensely as the 2015 Pritzker Prize winner Frei Otto, whose concept of Form-Finding is aimed at preventing any processes of designing or shaping.
This book aims to re-examine the issue by expanding on the exemplary case of Frei Otto. The subject is approached from varyingly wide perspectives, ranging from pathways to form in engineering research and in experimental model-making to the ideological-critical reflections on form by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas.

Texts by Elisabeth Bergmann, Daniela Fabricius, Roberta Grignolo, Sonja Hildebrand, Sean Keller, Kurt Möser, Gabriele Neri, Stefan Neuhäuser with Martin Weickgenannt, Christoph Witte, Walter Haase, Oliver Sawodny and Werner Sobek, Lara Schrijver.