Museum of Horse

Studying the drawings that Marcello Guido prepares to approach his works is fundamental in order to understand his architecture. Not so much as to receive enlightenment regarding the complex spatiality that he composes, but rather to be immersed in the spirit of the inventive process that the images reveal: elevations, sections, plans collapse one on top of the other, the lines of the drawings invade the neighbouring space, hooking it up and dragging it into their own domain.

Mergers of several abstract visuals make it impossible to read the subject, sudden jumps in scale make architectural details stand out in the centre of a layout that appear at first sight to be sections of immense structures. The lines are violently manipulated, the backgrounds of colour fade to form a sky, then a glass window, finally the base of an embankment that merges ambiguously with the façade of a building which can be perceived from afar. The elevations gain independence from every other drawing, and thus they mirror themselves, they overlap, they provide an overabundance of information. Removals and erasures become tools for exploring form.

The same structures, to which these drawings are preparatory, instigate this desecrating attitude: buildings crumble, creating wall sections on diagonals, making sure that, even in the technical drawings, plans and sections must forcibly contaminate each other. Vasari, after all, it was who said “Sketches are a sort of first drawing that is made in order to find the manner of the pose and the first composition of the work; and they are made in the form of a stain, only hinted at by us in a single draft of the everything”, an expression of the “ardour of the architect”, who resorts to this form of representation “to tempt the soul with what comes to mind”. Taken from “Surfing complexity. The work of Marcello Guido di Carlos Villagomez

Project Details: Museum Works: 2002 – 2006

Principal: Municipality of Bisignano

Project: Architect Marcello Guido

 The project stems from the need to exhibit an ancient noble carriage given to the municipal administration of Bisignano. The very small building stands at the back of a late Gothic church, in the area once occupied by the adjoining monastery complex, which was casually demolished in the 1950s to build an industrial car wash. The other part of the area, freed from industrial artefacts, is occupied by some terraces which form a small open-air theatre, but sheltered by a wooden roof. At the centre of the theatre there is a glass floor that showcases an ancient cistern for the collection of water, with a domed vault; this had been long forgotten but was found intact during the excavations for the foundations. The project presents some energy measures and a focus on sustainability: there are no openings towards the south in order to avoid the summer overheating of the interiors due to the greenhouse effect, the building is energetically autonomous and supplies electricity to the public lighting network; the greenery is integrated into the design and the old cistern has been converted to its original purpose of collecting rainwater which irrigates the flower beds.

The project and the model were on display in Istanbul during the 2006 UIA congress