Carlo Aymonino disegni 1972-1997

BETWEEN REALITY AND IMAGINATION A journey in the name of design: between the past and present The new book on Carlo Aymonino is a special book made with drawings. Autographed drawings, drawings full of history, drawings that outline a complete profile: thirty-five years of architectural research and reflections. Speaking of Aymonino, or of his work, is always like retracing many of the essential and fundamental stages of the research conducted in Italy over the last forty years. Through his experiences, his drawings represent cities where time goes by slowly; a time that can be chronologically defined thanks to his notes, which are full of reflections and comments. This book is the result of a life devoted to architecture, to architectural research, to that architecture he defined - in his first writings - as the common expression of a civility that often changes and that willingly moves towards new horizons. Is CaroloAyminino chasing after the architecture or is the architecture chasing the hopes and imagination of a man who is passionate about history and art? Through a succession of strictly black and white images, this question repeatedly keeps on coming back to mind; page after page, the image continues to become more and more defined until it finally reveals its completeness. An image of "parts of cities". It is precisely from the "parts of cities" that this book starts to unfold; a city by excellence, such as Rome and Venice. The cities are represented through partial and expert sketches and quick and immediate notes until a studied and properly elaborated drawing starts to form: shadows are used in the right perspective... shadows that emphasize and strengthen the idea of a city and how he sees the city. The book contains a succession of tables and panels whose chronological sequences perfectly observe the evolution of the way he sees architecture: how he opens himself to it, how he materially possesses it, how he discovers its structure and its most hidden components to represent the expressive and linguistic excesses of an architecture that often belongs to a history... our history. Two paths and two plausible interpretations of the fortified idea of experience and continuation