043 Palermo

FEEDBACK VINCENZO MELLUSO’S PALERMO

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Feedback: fig. The effect of an action not on its recipient, but on the person who carried it out. This reversal of perspective is interesting. It is an inversion which proves to be particularly useful when speaking of cities and the choice of where and, above all, how to construct.

It took 3,000 years to build Palermo. Its completion involved many: an entire population of constructors driven by volatile and differing values and motives who, having arrived at a certain point, in an amphitheatre created by nature, began to build.

This overlaying is sensed in an explosive manner by those who live there today. One does not need a particularly trained eye, one that can examine settlements, the variations in character, the structural functionality of meeting points between urban and private space: just take a 15-minute stroll around Palermo and you will see.

Commenting on the work by Álvaro Siza, Vittorio Gregotti claimed that he was one of the few who says things that can only be said through architecture. Extending the principle to that formal self-determination that historical cities tend to spontaneously impose on their inhabitants, this therefore becomes one of the trying fortunes of Palermo: its buildings jostle against each other and continue to communicate.

They express a sense of explosion, of disruptiveness, allowing us, having been called upon to construct or rather add, to have a residual space in which to seek out the energy with which to try and communicate: a dialogue of emergence, which nowadays is focused on incoherence, dysfunction, and above all, on the interrupted dialogue between public and private space.