Edoardo Piccoli

Abstract

Dismantling an architectural scholar and draftsman’s apartment leads to an interrogation of the concept of agency of buildings and place. The setting is a rental flat in an Italian working-class neighbourhood, a place of life and work for an architecture historian, a specialist in survey drawings, who used it as his workspace for decades. Upon entering the apartment, the rooms and objects within it appeared as physical and spatial entities testifying to a deep connection with the former owner. The objects, the interiors, and the building itself seemed to possess an ‘agency’ that had resisted the departure of the human dweller and acted with disquieting power over those in charge of reordering his archive. Further investigation, however, also revealed that this same place witnessed the progressive vanishing of memory of the draftsman and scholar during the last years of his occupancy. The fragility of the bond between individual and place was exposed. The house as a physical space still proved to be essential in the mediation between archival legacy, memory, and history; however, it did not do so as a static time capsule, rather, as a place for reflections and activities extending well beyond the walls of the house itself.

Keywords: apartment, agency, architectural survey, domestic space, Antonelli, Guarini

Full text: OAJ ISSUE 11 FINAL_Article_7

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2024s07

Biographical note

Edoardo Piccoli is Associate Professor in Architectural History at the Politecnico di Torino, where he teaches and participates in Ph,D. programmes and conferences. Board member and co-founder of the Construction History Group at the Politecnico di Torino, his research focuses mainly on early modern architecture with specific interests in French and Italian architecture and construction history. He has edited books and contributed essays and chapters to collective works and exhibition catalogues. He has written essays on Guarino Guarini, Bernardo Antonio Vittone, and baroque vault construction. He has been involved in historical research applied to heritage sites and in support of restoration projects, such as the Cavallerizza and Palazzo Carignano in Turin and the military Citadel in Alessandria.

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