Hadrian's secret

Luigi Moretti and the negative space

Abstract

The plastic language of Luigi Moretti has its own coordinating logic, sustained by deep roots, woven through with well-grounded reflections, which each piece of architecture appropriates for itself and in which there lies its “living consciousness”. So Moretti’s architecture, in its relationship with the city, often finds itself in the
intrinsically contradictory situation of having to produce, with the urban space on which it acts, a unitary whole, whilst it is, in itself, already a whole. From the lesson drawn from Hadrian’s building, Moretti learnt the secret of the concavity – its natural tendency to yield to the force that it generates itself, and the tendency to dilate according to the scale and the narrowness of the elements that circumscribe it. Whilst, in contrast, from the geometrics of Rationalism he learnt that the antagonistic play between force and counterforce creates an approximate neutrality if the space is delineated by planes or straight lines, or, if one prefers, if a cubical space expands outwards from its own centre, although it does so much less peremptorily than a cylindrical space.