Alessandro Melis

A romantic in Tuscany: Alessandro Gherardesca and the transformation of Pisa’s Piazza del Duomo

Abstract Pisa’s Piazza del Duomo is well known as a public space of medieval origin. This article explores its nineteenth-century transformation, presenting the project as one of the most symbolic and evocative examples of Romanticism in Italian urban space. Before this transformation, Pisa, a secondary city of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (Florence was the capital), was still dominated by a conservative society. But Alessandro Gherardesca, the renowned Pisan architect who was in charge of the nineteenth-century works, abandoned the late Baroque tradition, employing instead a neoclassicism in his work. He bridged the cultural gap that existed between the Europe of the Revolutions and the periphery of the Austrian Empire. Then, as he matured, he increasingly embraced the neo-Gothic architecture, and his references, without denying his initial preference for the French masters, were consistent with the exploratory approach of the Enlightenment. The article shows that in his transformation of the Piazza del Duomo, Gherardesca created an idealised image of the original square, one that was in line with British trends.

The history and invocation of the Arche in Austrian Radical architecture thinking

Abstract The architecture of the European Radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s is principally associated with the forward-looking principles of the architectural avant-garde. Scholarship on the movements emphasizes its futuristic and accompanying science fiction elements. While the importance of a visionary focus on the birth and development of the Radical movements is widely acknowledged, the same cannot be said for the connections of the visionary production to the architectural past. This article focuses on the Austrian Radicals and stresses their use of archetypal forms as a means to signify the difference between them and the preceding generation of Austrian modernists. In this sense the passing of editorial control of Bau from the Modernists to the Radicals is a crucial moment in the context of this article.