Maurizio Sacripanti

The Roman architect Maurizio Sacripanti (1916-1996) has developed a cross-disciplinary, visionary architecture since the 1950s, producing sketches and buildings and working as a highly influential professor and author. The book edited by the Kiesler Foundation in Vienna documents a number of his larger sketches and competition projects (the Peugeot skyscraper for Buenos Aires, the new Teatro Lirico in Cagliari, the Italian pavilion for the Expo '70 in Osaka) and the built Museo Civico in Maccagno (Varese). In excerpts from his manifesto "Città di frontiera/Frontier City" and in project descriptions and texts (also including one by Boris Podrecca and another by Sacripanti's former collaborator Alfonso Giancotti), Sacripanti's dynamic spatial concepts and interdisciplinary designs, his invention of the "variable musculature of architecture" are presented. Boris Podrecca places Sacripanti's work and impact in a line with Archigram, against the backdrop of visionary concept - but at the same time "real, utopian, technically feasible, animated by the spirit of pragmatism."