Leonardo Ricci and Umberto Eco. The Merging of Parallel Visions on the Scientificity and Openness of Experience in the “Ricci-Eco Motion”

Abstract

Leonardo Ricci and Umberto Eco’s collaboration at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence in the Sixties brought to the end of the student revolt in 1968 and to the publication of Eco’s La Struttura Assente. La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale (1968). Eco dedicated the book, firstly titled Appunti per una semiologia delle comunicazioni visive, to Ricci, it was released in 1968 and immediatly entered the heart of the debate on Structuralism - the theory that most dominated the cultural climate of those years and that seemed to deliver the sense, the knowledge, and a cultural new destiny to the specificities of history. More in detail, Ricci’s idea of “open work” in architecture is analyzed. The concept of “open work” was firstly forged by Eco in his text “Il problema dell’opera aperta” (1958) published in the second part of the collection of essays La Definizione dell’Arte. Dall’estetica medievale alle avanguardie, dall’opera aperta alla morte dell’arte titled “Il concetto di forma nelle poetiche contemporanee” which encompassed Eco’s writings about Art, Music, Photography, Aesthetics, and Theater and led to the completion of his Opera Aperta in 1962. The purpose of this text is to explain, by means of a direct comparison between Ricci and Eco’s thinking on each analyzed aspect, to what extent Visual Design, and Urban Design, even to a minor degree, constituted the connection between Ricci and Eco’s work, the core of their collaboration at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence, that showed a main affinity in the “Open Work” derived from the concept of “Open Formativity” firstly theorized by Benedetto Croce and then by Eco’s master Luigi Pareyson.

Keywords

• structuralism
• open work
• semiotics and architecture
• urban design
• visual design