Drawing, thinking: the experience of Livio Vacchini

Abstract

Livio Vacchini’s experience takes on a radical and particularly problematic perspective, especially if it refers to the relationship between drawing and research into architectural forms. Vacchini shunned the sketch as a place for the formation of ideas. Considering the project as a construction of thought, between questions and themes posed, his worktable was rather ‘inhabited’ by diagrams, signs, words. Instead, his drawings – those iconic ideograms that describe the concepts expressed in his architecture – are well known. Sometimes Vacchini used the sketch to describe the compositional ‘structure’ of some of his works. He did it during his lessons. Here, flowing from the mind and through the hand, his signs do not construct complete images or images endowed with any iconicity. Rather, they allow us to retrace the trajectories of his thought with amazement.

Keywords

• idea
• segno
• costruzione
• disegno
• progetto