Introduction Silent Sentinels
Piero and Gloria share a profound sense of life, beauty and simplicity that lends a quietness to their works. Both hail from the magical town of Florence in Italy, and yet, experienced very different formative years. For both, architecture is not only a search for beauty but also has a deeper social aspiration, given the influence of the Leftist cultural milieu in early postwar Europe on them. Back in his student days, Piero was often concerned with ideas of mediation between rationalism and expressionism, between intellect and artistic intuition. He would discuss these at length with his professor and mentor, Giovanni Klaus Koenig1 who later wrote an article on the role of the architect’s intuition in the process of design, with reference to one of Piero’s university projects.2 Traces of this process of designing can be seen in many of the buildings by Piero and Gloria in Auroville, where
a balance between order and freedom has led to various intuitive expressions. Explaining their method of working, they say: “The first phase is to make ourselves aware of the functions requested by the project, of their interrelation, their size, the budget, the location, orientation, access… Then we close all this data in a special drawer of the mind (but which is easy to reopen), before they can become an aim in themselves. In this phase the space is like a fluid: it can assume endless shapes. At the same time, we think of the structure, the entrance, the manner of protecting the openings and external walls. One begins to make sketches by hand and a first idea of volumes is generated. In this phase may emerge subconscious memories of details of projects or styles known to us.” They especially attribute Luis Barragan3—who claims that “…any work of architecture that does
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