Giuseppe Perugini

Giuseppe Perugini (Buenos Aires, March 17, 1914 – Rome, September 19, 1995) was an Argentine architect who worked in Italy.
Giuseppe Perugini arrived in Rome in the early Thirties with the intention of deepening his interest in art and architecture from the very beginning and comes into contact with the still vital avant-gardes and with rationalist ideas that were then almost clandestine. He then enrolled in that faculty of Architecture that he would never have abandoned, later contributing, as a professor of Architectural Composition, to the training of most of the current exponents of the Roman architectural world.

In these years of study he has the opportunity to attend the Masters of the Roman School, such as Adalberto Libera. Graduated in 1941, he immediately began an intense teaching and research activity, a direct expression of an architectural creed, marked by respect for a formal and dimensional rigor of a classical nature combined with a rationalist matrix, which we find constantly reaffirmed throughout his production. He is the tangible result of the activity carried out in the field of architecture and architectural research. are the awards he has been awarded 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 Arcchtects (for the Monumento delle Fosse Ardeatine) and the 1967 Inarch-Finsider Prize for the innovations introduced in the design of steel housing structures. As a further demonstration of his desire to experiment, he was among the first scholars to propose, in the 1960s, the use of computers as To this end, it has presented a series of projects at international competitions, such as the circular bridge over the Strait of Messina, the helix-tower of Plateau Beaubourg, born from the integration of particularly expressive signs and avant-garde 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 elementary cells electronically aggregated according to actual needs, thus eliminating the conventional dispersions of the traditional architectural object. the desire to deepen the dialogue between architecture and the technical-scientific process exposed with a language that can also be understood by the non-initiated. Furthermore, the dialectical confrontation and the collaboration between the leading figures of the culture itself of our age such as Neutra, Bakema, Moore, Arp, Mirko, and Cagli contributed to reinforce its original rationalism leading to increasingly advanced abstractions up to the transformation into "Symbol" of each of his design ideas.
Thus the work of him before him, the Monument to the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, at the same time an architectural structure, a symbol and a memorial, appears as a "single tomb". While the buildings of the Judicial City are configured as a real "citadel", inspired by the "urban" and itinerant aspect of the justice of the Classical Age. The church-shrine of Piedimonte Sari Germano, the aforementioned Messina bridge – 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, also belong to the same ideology. material-music binomial of the Memorial Fermi prism in Chicago. Thus the very recent cubic monolith dedicated to Natalino Sapegno, the "dynamism" of the Turin airport project, the "tree house" in Fregene, are all works that concede nothing to form as an end in itself, to compositional occasionality, and from which transpire a “stylistic” continuity and a rigorous method of interpretations of space expressed, under the aegis of geometry, with "pure" materials, among which steel and reinforced concrete prevail. But, this particular design "method" does not end in strictly architectural or monumental production, so much so that in urban interventions, in the motorway sections – just think of the Restoration "node" along the Palermo-Catania or even in the restoration of buildings of particular value – the Muti-Bussi palace or the Villa Mondragone – the desire to reveal through the architectural medium a meaning derived from the same matrices of the work is always easily recognizable.

As far as his socio-public activity is concerned, he was called immediately after the war to participate in the initiatives promoted by the LL.PP. for the formulation of legislation intended to standardize the reconstruction processes of the country. In the following years, from the I.S.E.S. He is therefore part of the Council of the Ministry of P.I. for the regulations on school buildings and, between 1962 and 1966, as president of the Order, the Architects of Rome and Lazio participated in the debate on the equivalence of professional qualifications within the EEC. He is 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 A.P.A.O. – 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 (The form in architecture, Rome 1953), to the comparison between theory and built Architecture by Borromini in the church of S. Maria dei Sette Dolori, Rome 1959 and Borrominian models in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Rome (1962), Michelangelo's intervention in the Campidoglio in AA.VV., Michelangelo's Campidoglio, Accademia di San Luca, Rome (1965) and the applicative potential of the electronic medium in architecture.
Source: http://www.architettiroma.it