Gli esercizi del collezionista

Edgar Allan Poe’s essay of 1846, The Philosophy of Composition, for the first time in the literary culture, goes through the folds of a slow exploration of the compositional process: crossing and cutting parts and marginalia of the poem The Raven, the author decides to reveal both the poetic idea and the main effect he wanted to achieve; as much as the tools used, the poetical moves put in place, with a number of possible alternatives, as in a mathematical problem. In searching for the elements of composition, to understand how to combine them, the control on the bricolage method has to be maximum: one needs to know the potential of each fragment and the final effect of each echo part combined. Even the design project, when called to describe its process, expresses the authentic intentionality of the architectural form. Aldo Rossi, within the pages of Quaderni azzurri, clearly recalls the power of the process of decomposing and rebuilding an object to communicate its internal rules. Through this expedient, he explicates how the processual phases of composition could take over the project. The design project emerges as a coordinated system of choices, a machine that can be unveiled and decomposed. The exercises – drawings, models, diagrams, collages – carried out over two classes of Architectural Theory at the Department of Architecture of the University of Naples “Federico II”, focus on architectural buildings of the last sixty years. They express the need for looking closely at the mechanism to read some of their specific conditions and compositional operations put in place. A collection of fragments that can be read and returned to reverberate the attitude of the collector – the intérieur – who lives in things jealously guarded.