Petreschi

With texts by Alessandro Castagnaro, Michele Costanzo,
Renato De Fusco, Massimo Locci, Paolo Melis, Giorgio Muratore, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, Joseph Rykwert, and Livio Sacchi.
This is the first complete monograph about “an architect who transformed himself over time into a university professor and who is no longer able to forget, as he works as an architect, that he is also a university professor” (Marco Petreschi).
Marco Petreschi is a “Roman architect”, as pointedly suggested by Joseph Rykwert, Giorgio Muratore and Renato De Fusco in this book, in other words, a man who, independently of the stylistic fashions traversing Italy in the past few decades, has obsessively followed his own path: with irony in terms of current fashion and its power, physically in the tender relationship with materials and the techniques used to dominate those materials, in an empowering sense through design as a complete and aesthetic control of space, and never in an indifferent way towards history, but rather with care to have a proper distance from it.
This is not a common path taken in Italian architecture, especially recently; more often than not architecture is muzzled by the disparate schools and groups or seduced by the latest and transgressive sirens of fashion.
Throughout his thirty-year career, Petreschi has worked professionally to explore experimental, silent and lateral practise, without searching for effects but focussing on space’s physical density, its details and a telling of architecture as the rich uncovering of what has come before.
This publication travels through this long experience by alternating projects and texts by critics and architect friends; the different changes in scale – from domestic interiors to the many public buildings dedicated to culture or the sacred, including the design of the altar for the Jubilee 2000 mass rally, seem to follow a single thread, with great persistence: creating a third way between modernity and the breadth of history and the materials which have built it.
The volume is available at the bookstore in via Torino 61, Milan and from Apr 4 2007 in all Italian bookshops.