Vittorio Gregotti.

When I consider a project, I almost always start to design with a pencil, because I believe that thought passes through the hand onto the sheet through successive approximations. I generally start with sections, horizontal and vertical, until the point when I find some fragment of certainty. I believe that sections--of a building and an urban system--are my most significant instrument for the construction of an architecture project. The section compels an urban or architectural structure not only to form an organicity between the parts--between outside and inside--but also to control the spaces between the things built, and their siting on the terrain, to relate geography to history. The section is also the evidence of the habitability of an architectural organism or an urban system, measured directly with actions, gestures, paths and movements; also in terms of height. Working with models in section also has advantages in terms of clarity and precision (see opposite, our Banca Lombarda HQ).

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Sections avoid the fascination of the image (architecture has an image but it is not image alone), and move away from consideration of the design as an autonomous figurative product (and this also applies to the false visual autonomy of the products of computers), with its meaning remaining instrumental to the construction of the architecture project. The section is our way of investigating the problem that lies before us, of establishing a dialogue with its complexities, of relocating them in an order according to a form (see above, our Pirelli HQ in Bicocca). The plan is a horizontal section; it is part of the dialogue that identifies the organism. It is indispensable to control the height at which we imagine sectioning the organism horizontally. It is from the section that the best perspective views are developed (see left, our rearrangement of Salle des Etats at the Louvre); in this way they remain faithful to the real measurements and guide their development: inside and outside, from the bottom up. Then the section has to do directly with the rules of the construction of things; it highlights their concealed yet constituent connections, the character of the construction.

VITTORIO GREGOTTI, GREGOTTI ASSOCIATI

Admired:

Probably nobody as much as Piranesi has been able to show in such depth the relationship between expressive form and construction endowed with meaning and duration, also using the section as archaeological investigation, to show that great architecture leaves behind ruins, rather than wrecks or rubble, which there is no alternative but to eliminate.