Oscar Niemeyer’s latest project for Ravello comes to our eyes. With my great interest we consider and open our hearts and minds to the next teaching that this great teacher gives us at his venerable age. The testimony of a human poetics that measures itself against nature and becomes its seal of existence, redeems history and the ugly and full fills a linguistic hyperbole by delivering the work of art to the place, to the people, to history and to the self-righteous.
The relationship with the place and the genesis of the project, and the plot of elements that formalize it in a splendid volume for its simplicity not like a Fuksas cloud, too often imitated, or for the inhuman proportions of a dictatorial building to be knocked down with smart bombs.
A splendid little jewel appears to us on the border with an architectural sculpture that speaks as if coming from Brazil to the immense natural space, becoming its seal, a controlled and commensurable area of the stratigraphic reality that slopes down into the sea, a of acustica conchiglia protagonist indeed of the territory of Ravello.
The overlooking futuristic-ancient-theater, an echo presence of very distant and immense spaces that speak in fragments.
It is like when, as a young boy, you visit the Farnesina and are struck by the henchmen’s mistakes on the Raphaelesque frescoes. Anti-symmetry and orientation are points that clearly indicate the relationship with the place, the stripe square fills us with admiration for the enhancement on the one hand of the aggregative possibilities of the container, and on the other of the anti-symmetrical agora as memory and as an innovative intersection between urban and nature, between historical city and coastal orography, between the human texture for DNA fragments of Brazilian memory hybridized to the muted dimensions and the mixture of local people with new integrations, a mirage of Amalfi mosque flavors of Mediterranean cuisine carried by the wind beyond the sea.
We are shown the relationship between the aiming at the sea by the winds that persist on the coastal
front and the possibility of a viability that runs the territory inside the hybrid shell-auditorium to the
life of sea and land, between boundless South American spaces and minimal South-Italian urban
environment, between silent wild nature to be anthropized and provincial social nature to be
culturally oriented towards a future of diversity, that can also be structured architecturally with less
coexistence and more conviviality.
https://www.homify.it/esperti/7622096/aetneas-design
Francesco Pietrella
Rosa Lucia Motta