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Marco Frascari
Carleton University
Typical after the war inconplete constructions in Northern Italy slowly erected and mostly never finished by emigrants during their vacation time spent in their place of origin
Years went by, but the Italians did not lost the vice of leaving unfinish building around
A twenty years old unfinished building in Ragusa (contrada Treppiedi, Modica) demolished on Sept 4th 2011
Non-finito is an art history expression mainly used to refer to Michelangelo s uncompleted sculptures: a celebrated art technique pioneered by in sculpture by Donatello before him. My proposal, following the convention set by Zevi, is to use the same locution in architecture to indicate those buildings that have been left, for a number of possible reasons, in an elegant but incomplete state by architects or builders.
I propose to show that unfinished edifices, through their being suspended in time, the non-finito state, affects in a positive way the brain-body activity of people that partake of their architecture and make a beneficial use of them even in their incompleteness. On the other hand, deficient architecture, even if completed and whole, always affects our brains in a negative way.
This essay on the architectural non-finito is intended as a contribution, however small, towards an understanding of the role of neuroscience in understanding the facture of architecture. It is commonly thought that the physical sciences have, to the present day, governed the stages of human factures while increasingly future factures will be controlled by physiological sciences and especially by neurobiology. Physics and chemistry have ruled the making of building and by now their contributions are considered mature branches of learning contributing to architecture. With the aim always to increase comfort and wellbeing, using a proper understanding of the physical environment architects have been able to subjugate positively building tectonics.
Inconpiuto Siciliano
Incompiuto Siciliano is a project in progress that aims to identify and classify the aesthetic and formaI characteristics of unfinished public architecture in ltaly. The survey, carried out by Alterazloni Video together with Enrico Sgarbi and Claudia D'Aita, has so far resulted in tne classification of around 500 unfinished architectural projects. The Italian region with the highest number of unfinished public works is Sicily and for this reason the style identified by the researchers, widespread in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, was dubbed "Unfinished Sicilian". The intention of the project was not merely to expose the phenomenon, but also to promote dynamic acceptance of it in order to trigger virtuous response mechanisms.