Traditional and Innovative Tools of Planning Thought. The Project of Town Hall in Sesto San Giovanni by Piero Bottoni

Abstract

This paper represents an experimentation on the use of information technologies applied to the planning iter followed by Piero Bottoni for the definition of the project of the Town Hall in Sesto San Giovanni. It is part of a wide research that has the aim to understand and to propose again, into the horizon of the digital world, the ideational logics and the compositive methodologies used into the Lombard architectural tradition and used by the exponents of the so-called Milan School, both bonded by the inclination to conceive the architectural shape as the result of a cognitive path and a critic rereading of both the context and the historical experience. This trend is in contrast with the one that characterized a significative part of the contemporary architectonical production, which takes advantage of the computational procedures and manipulation of the three-dimensional space to generate buildings conceived as plastic objects, destined to raise emotions thanks to their dimensions and/or unusual volumetric articulation. Based on the archival materials developed by Bottoni, from the first sketches in 1961 and up to the final result in 1967, the design process followed was reconstructed, retracing the forms’ generative process with the new tools, highlighting the analytical procedure of a logical-formal nature, which as analogies with the one used by Peter Eisenman for the Palladian architectures’ analysis.