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Per gran parte del Novecento gli interventi architettonici nei contesti storici sono stati ricondotti entro i poli della conservazione e trasformazione. In Italia gli anni Ottanta hanno segnato una tappa decisiva nel percorso teorico, metodologico e operativo verso l’approccio richiesto dalle attuali e futuribili condizioni delle aree urbane di antico impianto: guidato da strategie a lungo termine; più responsabile; multiscalare e includente l’intera città contemporanea. L’esperienza di Culotta e Leone nel centro storico di Cefalù, pur costituendo un unicum per il loro ancoramento alla realtà sociale del luogo, fornisce un interessante esempio di continuità tra piano, progetto e attuazione che ha dato corpo a soluzioni progettuali in continuità evolutiva con le preesistenze storiche. Architectural interventions in historical contexts throughout most of the 20th century were inter-linked by the two extremes of conservation and transformation. In the 1980s, in Italy, an important step forward was taken along the theoretical and operational path towards the approach as demanded by the current and future conditions of historical urban areas: long-term strategy oriented; more responsible; multi-scale and including the entire contemporary urban settlement. The experience of Culotta & Leone in the Historic Centre of Cefalù may well constitute a unicum, as a result of their particular anchoring to the social context, and yet it offers an interesting example of continuity (between plan, architectural design and execution) that gave substance to architectural solutions which may be seen as an evolving continuity of the historical remains.

Pasquale Culotta, architect of churches, plays a leading role in this essay. This choice is pertinent to the theme of the conference on urban renewal, and allows recognizing some peculiar aspects of Culotta design activity, the largest part of which was carried out with Giuseppe (Bibi) Leone, who recently passed away. We can affirm that every architectural project by Culotta and Leone is always an urban project, in the sense that it’s founded on the fabric of old centers, or, as in the case of the churches built in the suburbs, has created new connections in urban areas previously characterized by shapeless asphalted spaces. Against random suburban spaces, the churches designed by Culotta and Leone, later on only by Culotta, are conceived as cores able to give meaning to existing qualities but most of the times invisible. However, the urban project in the experience of Culotta and Leone is something different from a condescending and mimetic attitude towards the built environment. Small and large “deviations”, some not to scale elements, underline, where it is possible, the inclusion of one of their buildings, able to reveal and give significance to what is next and to features of the place recognizable at a territorial scale. In the design of parish complexes, from Maria Santissima della Lettera in Finale di Pollina (Pa, 1967-70) to San Carlo Borromeo in Tor Pagnotta (Rome, 2005), we can see how some architectural and urban design issues identified in the first Sicilian experience have been kept and developed, while others, such as the relationship between art, architecture, and liturgy, have become more and more central, dictating a research practice compulsory for the topic of the project. Except for the restoration of Temple-Cathedral of the district Terra in Pozzuoli, all parish complexes are in the suburbs, and, comparing the as-built plan with the design plan, we can see how the Sicilian architects with great skill and sensibility, turn deteriorated areas without identity into urban places where churches return to be, in the style of Alberti, the most important ornamentation of the city.Sciascia lets us see, in the description that goes from the mid-sixties of XX century to mid-2000s, starting from the restoration project of the Temple-Cathedral in Pozzuoli and above all in the design of the parish complex of San Carlo Borromeo in Rome, the direction followed by Culotta, in the early 2000s, after the dissolution of a forty years long partnership with his close friend Bibi Leone. The conclusions of the essay demonstrate that the collaboration with the world-famous liturgist monsignor Crispino Valenziano, and artists like Michele Canzoneri and Mimmo Paladino, has guided Culotta far beyond the boundaries of contemporary architecture, letting him discover and put into practice a huge universe of references. He deeply investigated these references thanks to his boundless curiosity, which allowed him to find design methods and formal results which were new compared with those developed between the mid-sixties and the early 2000s. Therefore, the essay provides a specific contribution to the conference topic since the design of churches tends to regenerate or reshape the urban space completely, and, at the same time, it can represent the starting point for a new exploration of the intimate research undertaken by Culotta at a mature age and unfortunately prematurely interrupted.

La riflessione si muove dal confronto fra due architetture diverse, eppure simili: la Casa Salem di Pasquale Culotta e Giuseppe Leone e la Kitchen House di Marcello Panzarella. La prima realizzata, tra il 1972 e il 1973, a Cefalù, in contrada Ogliastrillo; la seconda immaginata da Panzarella nel 2011, sul 38° parallelo, forse lungo la costa settentrionale della Sicilia, adagiata su un pendio rivolto verso il mare. Le due descrizioni sono i poli attraverso cui si dipana un ragionamento che trova una parziale e contraddittoria spiegazione nel titolo. Perché, pur nelle differenze, le architetture prese in considerazione costituiscono due modi per tenere insieme una appartenenza mediterranea e d’Oltreoceano, come si scoprirà, dichiaratamente americana. La riflessione si sofferma sulle ragioni di questa particolare duplice relazione. La doppia confluenza è, più che un’inspiegabile antinomia, una peculiarità della ricerca architettonica intrapresa in Sicilia da Pasquale Culotta e Giuseppe (Bibi) Leone. L’intervallo fra le due architetture potrebbe generare dei malintesi. Invece si dimostrerà, in conclusione, come il progetto di Panzarella possa essere pensato come l’anello di congiunzione tra le architetture americane, prese a riferimento, e la stessa Casa Salem. Our research starts from the comparison between two different and yet similar buildings: the Salem House by Pasquale Culotta and Giuseppe Leone and the Kitchen House1 by Marcello Panzarella. The first was built in Cefalù in contrada Ogliastrillo between 1972 and 1973 for a precise client, the second was imagined by Panzarella in 2011 on the 38° parallel, probably along the northern coast of Sicily, on a slope overlooking the sea between Termini Imerese and Cefalù. Its volumes respond to living needs of the same architect who is indeed the only demanding client. The Salem house is a five-level prism on a square base (7,20 m side), which rises a few meters from the sea on nine pilotis. A mono-material and monochromatic building, of an anthracite green from the ground up to the pitched roof, which appears as a fifth façade for those who come from above. The Kitchen House, which is also mono-material and monochromatic, has an articulated plant where the northern front overlooking the sea rises as a tower over other volumes: entrance, oven, bedroom and living room with swimming pool. The living area is a kind of large tail with a triangular section that closes the edifice to the south becoming a façade/roof in succession with the ground and generating a continuity between nature and artifice.

Una esplorazione degli adeguamenti liturgici di Pasquale Culotta e Giuseppe Leone conduce a comprendere in che modo la loro riflessione sulle architetture per il culto cristiano cattolico sia parte integrante della sperimentazione progettuale incentrata sul rapporto architettura-città. Nel saggio si specifica in cosa consista il lavoro di adeguamento rispetto alle indicazioni formulate nel Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II (1963). Ci si sofferma sulle peculiarità della liturgia rinnovata: il valore "processionale" dello spazio ecclesiale e la relazione immanente-trascendente, a scala architettonica e urbana. In seguito si approfondiscono, "caso per caso", la riconfigurazione dell'ambone del Duomo di Cefalù, gli adeguamenti della SS. Trinità, del Presbiterio della Cattedrale di Pisa, delle Cattedrali di Piazza Armerina, di Bergamo, di Trani e il progetto dell'altare della Cattedrale di Mazara del Vallo. Il saggio mette in luce come la ricerca progettuale di Pasquale Culotta e Bibi Leone sugli adeguamenti liturgici, condotta con raro rigore, esplora il nodo di tale questione e si allarga a quell’intorno geografico che qui ha depositato l’essenza di un’idea dell’architettura incomprensibile senza la comprensione dei luoghi. Si tratta di un lavoro che pone ancora un problema irrisolto, quello della specificità dell’architettura siciliana, del perché della sua “diversità” e del suo vigore giovanile che molte opere recenti di architetti locali mostrano al massimo livello. Il loro modus operandi, sempre teso a porre in essere relazioni tra architettura e contesto, si è ulteriormente inverato nei progetti di chiese divenute, nei loro ragionamenti, degli straordinari fulcri urbani. Architetture indispensabili per la definizione di labili tessuti periferici, e per lo svelamento di interazioni fra parti di città contigue eppure, reciprocamente afone. Tale approccio, volto a connettere, ha costituito una costante fondamentale nella loro esperienza della progettazione. An exploration of the liturgical adaptations of Culotta Pasquale and Giuseppe Leone leads to understand how their reflection on architecture for the Catholic Christian worship is an integral part of the design experiment focused on architecture-city relationship. Above all if we read this exploration after the projects of the churches, it is possible a double level of considerations. The first is evident, and it concerns on the particular ability shown by Culotta and Leone successfully facing some even very complex projects of adaptation. The second is referred to the clues coming from the projects of the two ambo for Bergamo (2004) and Trani in order to understand which research direction the only Culotta had taken, in the last years of his life and after the conclusion of the association with Leone. We are going to peek out some hypothesis both for the first and for the second point, trying to understand if there is an ommon ground among them. As the project of the churches, also for the liturgical adaptations the figure of Valenziano is central, with its eye-opening hermeneutics able to explain the deepest meanings of the liturgy in the relationships between the architectural space and the eminent places. Given the privilege of Valenziano’s help, we suppose the two Sicilian designers found inside the churches the same relationships they usually employ in their architectures, obviously with totally new and different rules. Undertaking new churches projects and liturgical adaptations could be almost a natural destiny for them; called to deal with more and more dense project materials. The fact that the adaptations excursus starts in Cefalù, with the reshaping of the ambo of the Cathedral, around fif- teen years after the church in Pollina, shows something more and a link between the two architects and their principal action ground. It seems, instead, that there is a continuity between the confirmations and the exceptions done in the Cefalù urban knit or countryside and the very delicate operations made inside the churches. Some choices as moving the altar are operations about the limit, that is they are acting in the often very small field between the request of the renewed liturgy, the action range of the omphalos and the general features of the church space. While, inserting the ambo where there was not – in addition to the reconfiguration of Cefalù and to the translation of Pisa – forced and, at the same time, encouraged Culotta and Leone and then the only Culotta to go through less known paths. In this part of the research we can notice that the reference to the byzantine ambo – in its double meaning of double-scale element or high monument – gives place, in the last proposals, to something new. The reference to the high monument is both in Bergamo and in Trani. Nevertheless the dynamic component of resurrection and the strength of the Words match the centrifugal action typical of a lot of modern projects. This energy is able to make thousands-years-still shapes vibrate. Bergamo and Trani ambos are pitching into the nave, catching and re-interpreting the etymological mea- ning of the word ambo, letting Culotta find new ways for exploration in adaptations as well. The Bergamo (2004) and Trani ambo should be placed aside the project of Pozzuoli Temple-Cathedral, of Isernia Auditorium and of the squares of the historical centre in Benevento; all together they make another phase in Culotta architectural research. Just the ambos are the most important proofs of this new conditions, because they are exploration on the shape lead in places where a comprehensible caution tends to be prevalent on more daring behaviours. In the case of Culotta, the courage leverage on an aware- ness of his own means based on thousands of didactic and research projects. The ambos attracted by the nave, respecting liturgical reasons, are the result of the same sensitivity that had made the crowning element of Cefalù Town Hall inflect towards the Cathedral square or that had changed the EGV Centre of Via Roma into the urban joint between the railways station, at an higher level, and the city laid down. Architectures announcing other architectures, able to change isolated places into focuses of the urban pattern. A sensitivity finding into the liturgical adaptation projects an extreme condition useful to verify the results of many other projects. Bergamo and Trani ambos, dimensionally small architectures, are actually some of the biggest works in order to certify the value of one of the most significant Italian architectural researches between twentieth and twenty-first century.

Contributo scientifico sulla didattica di Bibi Leone