Le ‘tarsie’ grafiche di Gianni Pirrone

Abstract

Gianni Pirrone, a Palermo-born architect, lecturer and scholar, born in 1924, was one most influential figures on the Sicilian architectural scene in the period between the Second World War and the end of the 1990s. A shy character, very often surly but absolutely multifaceted, he is still considered a point of reference especially for the last of the two generations of architects who trained with him. His intense professional and publishing activity covered the themes of town planning, architecture, restoration, landscape and garden art, the latter of which he investigated in the early 1980s. This short essay unveils an unknown project by the master from Palermo to reveal a detail of his painstaking work and to further refine our knowledge of it. It is the ‘Verde Sperone’ project, a public park designed for the outskirts of Palermo, drawn up between 1989 and 1990 together with Filippo Renda and Antonio Salvato, his most esteemed collaborators. The project drawings, veritable graphic and architectural inlays, not only recount a way of proceeding but also constitute a significant corpus for the history of representation, which finds in the designers’ analogue drawings, in India ink on transparencies, eloquent models on the art of garden design just before the beginning of the use of CAD and post-production software.