This book chronicles some of the most significant projects of Francesco Cellini's fifty years of professional experience and project research, highlighting the complexity and the objectives of his work.
Cellini’s work is characterised a series of elements: his radical functionalism and the belief of an ethical and poetical obligation in the interpretation of a programme; his frequently reiterated proclivity for repertoires of repeated, orthogonal or Euclidean forms, organised in equally elementary, rigorous structures, but which still manage to introduce a note of ongoing internal tension, a state of critical and cognitive anxiety; the importance attached to structural design, founded in the firm belief that one of the mainsprings in architectural vitality lies in the understanding and expression of the underlying physical forces and reified human knowledge in every element and tectonic process. Lastly, Francesco Cellini’s projects all betray his sensitivity to architectural history and the context and intrinsic nature of the sites he builds on, albeit without any trace of desultory conformity to the shackles of the past. It is as if the sense of place, that set of values which accumulates on the things of this world over time, could be discerned through investigation, but not deduced or reproduced, it can only be reactivated or (partially) renewed through a daring personal interpretation. The book explores how Cellini’s work evolved in terms of the way it was organised and carried out, together with the tools he uses, especially in consideration of the fact that these years saw a radical transformation of the profession thanks to the development of ITC and digital design. This is particularly evident in his preliminary sketches for projects. The examples illustrate how the whole procedure was gradually forced to change, while still retaining the underlying principles and characteristics that has always informed Cellini’s work, because solid professional skills still hold good whatever means are used for their expression.
With a critical essay by Francesco Dal Co.