Resumen de La arquitectura como texto: el Danteum, entre la selva y el paraíso
Edgar Alberto Torres Paredes
1. May 1983. Rino Valdameri, director of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (the Brera Academy of Fine Arts), and Senator Alessandro Poss, propose to the authorities of the city of Rome a monument in honour of the most celebrated poet of Italians. This project is entrusted to architects Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni, and is given the name Danteum. In October 1938, architects and promoters were called on Thursday 10th November, at 5.30pm, at Palazzo Ducale di Venezia (Doge¿s Palace) in order to present their project to Benito Mussolini. In May 1939, a second audience with the Duce had to be cancelled and the possible execution of the project was threatened. On 1st September 1939 Germany invades Poland. Due to constant requests for a second audience, promoters receive the answer of the Segretario particolare di S.E. il Capo del Governo, who announces that better times for the audience are to come. A day later, Terragni is mobilized and assigned to the third regiment of artillery of the army at Cremona. Nevertheless, the project suffered several modifications until spring 1941. By the end of January 1943, Terragni was repatriated and taken to the military hospital in Cesenatico. On 19th July Terragni died suddenly a few meters away from his house. On 25th July, king Victor Emmanuel III of Italy gives the order to arrest Mussolini. During the bombing of the allied troops in 1944, Lingeri saves the original documents of the Danteum project: a series of drawings with mixed technique, watercolour and ink on Fabriano white paper, assembled on rigid panels made to scale 1:100, and a wooden model, scale 1:50. On 28th April 1945, Mussolini was seized and executed by the partisans. In September 1957, the Danteum was published by the first time in a magazine. 2. The project¿s central argument fixes a composite correspondence with Commedia (The Divine Comedy), from the common structures ¿proportions and measures- that the architecture work may take from Dante¿s poem. Such dependence between architecture and literature has consigned the Danteum, from time to time, further than the architecture field, provoking its exile from the inscrutable architectonic specificity, condemned by its involvement against the autonomy of the discipline, and for such a personal and excessive gesture. 3. Why a hybrid object, not very convenient, instead of the major works of its author? The fissure that emanates from the Danteum does not refer to architecture as a stationary, closed and finite product, but to a transition between the univocally formal and the narrative vertigo. Within this process, which unites and separates the arbitrary issues from the strictly disciplinary, is the will of our choice. With its liminal logic, the Danteum spreads like a shadow in times of modern brightness. A kind of non-architecture as an existential point, which may be said to be ¿not totally¿ and which exception makes everything exist. In this landscape of non-arranged notions, the coexistence of architectonic and non-architectonic terms gives rise to paradoxes and antonyms very propitious for the analysis of uncertainties spread under the paradigmatic dominance of modern architecture. 4. The most relevant is not the search of the author, but the process of this search. Lingeri and Terragni are only suspicious and respond only to research interests. The research process has not followed a straight line in the attempt to examine the Danteum project anatomy, which has needed a dramatic and quasi mythological element in order to disguise its modern face. The result is a mosaic of half defined and half blurred, with reflexes, drafts, notes. In this context, history occurs like the movement of a scalpel in the dissection of a corpse.
