Tesi su Bramante. Logica, politica, architettura

Abstract

Bramante's work is used as a pretext to develop theses on the problems facing architecture today. Thus, the terms of reference of this book on Bramante, along with Vasari, Bruschi and Thoenes, are Giorgio Grassi, Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi and James Stirling. Their presence signals what is the contemporary problem with which Bramante's work is being made to react each time’.

Adopting the point of view of an architect active in the profession and not a historian, Pier Paolo Tamburelli re-examines the work of Donato Bramante in this book and suggests a possible agenda for current architectural practice. Bramante, Tamburelli argues, offers a starting point for imagining a contemporary theory of space, for reflecting on the relationship between architecture and politics, and for looking back - without nostalgia or contempt - at the tradition of Western classicism understood as universal architecture, i.e. with a claim to validity that extends to all possible architectural problems and addresses everyone. Starting with a discussion of the difference between Bramante's work in Milan (1481-1499) and Rome (1499-1514), the author thus highlights the peculiarities of Bramante's architecture, especially in comparison to that of other Renaissance masters such as Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio. This reading in turn opens up new possibilities to appreciate his spatial experiments and to derive from Bramante's abstraction and dissociation of form from function a theory of space for contemporary architecture. A theory that could perhaps lead to a new political understanding of classicism and a new model of public architecture.