For years, Paolo Zermani's architectural research has developed a precise comparison with the Italian and Western landscape in gradual transformation and with the loss of the meaning of its scale.
The book records the architect’s theoretical development and ten of his projects by looking at five of his lectures given since 2004: the chapel by the sea in Malta (1989), the monumental cemetery and museum for illustrious citizens of Turin (1989), the Mausoleum to the First Christians in Rome (1994), Noceto town hall (2000), the church of San Giovanni in Perugia (2006), the chapel-museum of the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca at Monterchi (2001-15), the cemetery at Sansepolcro (1997-2015), the cremation hall in Parma (2010), the restoration and reconstruction of Novara Castle (2004-2015) and the recent woodland chapel at Varano. In Zermani’s work, as in his lectures, the merging of his thinking and his work manifests itself with the precision and the synchronism of something deliberately planned. The result is almost an epiphany of gestures and scale, which is renewed each time. Place, time, land, light and silence are gathered together to create a perimeter of work within which the themes become interchangeable and reciprocally necessary, until they assume the form of a single lectio tacita.