Giuseppe Perugini

Giuseppe Perugini (Buenos Aires, March 17, 1914 – Rome, September 19, 1995) was an Argentine architect who worked in Italy. 
Giuseppe Perugini Having arrived in Rome in the early 1930s with the intention of deepening his interest in art and architecture, he came into contact with the still vital Avant-garde and with the rationalist ideas that were then almost clandestine. He then enrolled in the faculty of Architecture that he would never abandon, later contributing, as a professor of Architectural Composition, to the formation of many of the current exponents of the Roman architectural world.

During these years of study he had the opportunity to frequent the Masters of the Roman School, such as Adalberto Libera. After graduating in 1941, he immediately began an intense teaching and research activity, a direct expression of an architectural credo, based on the respect for a formal and dimensional rigor of a classical nature combined with a rationalist matrix, which we find constantly reaffirmed in all his production. Tangible result of the activity carried out in the field of architecture and architectural research. are the awards he has received over the years; among these: the title of Officier (le l'Ordre de Léopold of Belgium (for the Italian pavilion at Expo '58), the 1969 Henry Bacon Medal for Memorial Architecture of the American Institute of Architects (for the Fosse Ardeatine Monument) and the 1967 Inarch-Finsider Award for innovations introduced in the field of steel housing design. As a further demonstration of his desire to experiment, he was among the first scholars to propose, in the 60s, the use of the computer as a tool for organizing modular elements. To this end, he submitted a series of projects to international competitions, such as the circular bridge over the Strait of Messina, the helix tower of Plateau Beaubourg, born from the integration between particularly expressive signs and cutting-edge technological choices. And others, such as the well-known "cybernetic hospital" or the UNIDO headquarters in Vienna, where the function is privileged through the decomposition and recomposition of aggregated elementary cells electronically according to actual needs, thus eliminating the conventional dispersions of the traditional architectural object. In all the projects, however, it is possible to read the desire to express the message that each work must contain by making its symbolic and psychological values ​​as clear as possible, but also the desire to deepen the dialogue between architecture and the technical-scientific process exposed with a language that can be understood even by the non-initiated. Furthermore, the dialectical comparison and collaboration with the leading figures of the culture of our era such as Neutra, Bakema, Moore, Arp, Mirko, and Cagli has contributed to strengthening its original rationalism leading to increasingly advanced abstractions until the transformation into a "symbol" of each of its design ideas. 
Thus his first work, the Monument to the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, simultaneously an architectural structure, symbol and memorial, appears as a «unique tomb». While the buildings of the Judicial City are configured as a true «citadel», inspired by the «urban» and itinerant aspect of justice in the Classical Age. The church-shrine of Piedimonte Sari Germano, the aforementioned bridge in Messina – a tangible emblem of the connection between the two banks, the «kinetic explosion» of the project for an exhibition center in the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, the material-music combination of the prism of the Memorial Fermi in Chicago also belong to the same ideology. : Thus the very recent cubic monolith dedicated to Natalino Sapegno, the “dynamism” of the project for the Turin airport, the “tree-house” in Fregene, are all works that give nothing away to form as an end in itself, to compositional occasionality, and from which a “stylistic” continuity and a rigorous method of interpretation of space emerge, expressed under the aegis of geometry, with “pure” materials among which steel and reinforced concrete prevail. But this particular design “method” is not limited to strictly architectural or monumental production, so much so that in urban planning interventions, in motorway sections – just think of the Restoration “node” along the Palermo-Catania or even in the restoration of particularly valuable buildings – the Muti-Bussi palace or the Villa Mondragone – the desire to reveal through the architectural medium a meaning derived from the very matrices of the work is always easily recognisable.

As regards his socio-public activity, he was called immediately after the war to participate in the initiatives promoted by the Ministry of Public Works for the formulation of a regulation intended to standardize the reconstruction processes of the country. In the following years, from the board of directors of ISES, he contributed to the recovery of the earthquake-stricken areas of Belice. He was then part of the Consulta of the Ministry of Public Works for the regulations on school buildings and, between 1962 and 1966, as president of the Order of Architects of Rome and Lazio, he participated in the debate on the equivalence of professional qualifications within the EEC. He was also president of the Opera Universitaria, member of the commission in numerous national and international competitions, member of the building commission and of the commission for the study of the new urban planning of the metropolitan area of ​​Rome, as well as founder of the APAO – Association for Organic Architecture – and of the Circolo di Roma. 

Among his writings we find essays and works dedicated to the analysis of contemporary architectural culture (La forma in architettura, Rome 1953), to the comparison between theory and construction (Borromini's Architecture in the church of S. Maria dei Sette Dolori, Rome 1959 and Borromini's Models in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Rome (1962), to Michelangelo's intervention in Campidoglio in AA.VV., Michelangelo's Campidoglio, Accademia di San Luca, Rome (1965) and to the potential applications of electronic media in architecture…Wikipedia…>>
Source: http://www.architettiroma.it