SOCKS

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

  • Media
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Culture
  • Sounds
  • Territories
  • Visual Atlas

Peugeot Skyscraper in Buenos Aires, a Project by Maurizio Sacripanti (1961)

November 15, 2013 by Mariabruna Fabrizi Leave a Comment

Maurizio Scripanti (1916-1996) was an original figure in Italian post-war architectural panorama. You maybe remember another project of him that we featured here in Socks:  the Teatro Lirico for the City of Cagliari (1965)

His lifelong research was daring in every aspect of the architectural production (from the representation techniques, to the technological and spatial investigations) without ever being utopical.
His proposals tended to always keep a pragmatical approach and focus on feasibility even when they looked extremely visionary.

His entry for the competition for an office building for Peugeot in Buenos Aires (competition: 1961) deals with a double scale: the monumental, embodied by the skyscraper as a whole, and that of the single offices for the different companies which were to occupy the spaces.

The main volume is plastically fragmented in several blocks and the façade is composed by orientable brises-soleil plated with coloured elements and lights.
The brands of the offices could be integrated over this movable façade and changed throught time, merging completely with the architecture of the building. In Sacripanti’s words (our traslation from the Italian text) the Peugeot skyscraper was a “vertical neighborhood warped with lames upon which it is possible to write”

The introduction of a strong graphical component in the project underlines the architect’s awareness of the communicational role a building could play in the consumer society.

Further reading:

(in Italian) mauriziosacripanti.blogspot.com

 

 

 

sacripanti-peugeot-01

Elevation (Casabella 268, 1962:49, via Rndrd.com)

 

sacripanti-peugeot-02

Model from the collection of the MAXXI, Rome

 

 

 

sacripanti-peugeot-03

Drawings from the project

 

Find some of the other projects in the competition (including the winning proposal) here.

About the competition winner, the italian historian Bruno Zevi harshly wrote : “The Peugeot skyscraper in Buenos Aires: the winning skyscraper is only tall”
Zevi B., Il concorso Peugeot a Buenos Aires: ha vinto un grattacielo che è soltanto alto, in «L’Espresso», 19 agosto 1962.

Related Posts

  • Lyrical Theatre in Cagliari, Maurizio Sacripanti, 1965

    Among Italian avantgarde architects of the 60's and 70's, Maurizio Sacripanti was one of those…

  • The Noun Project

    The Noun Project’s mission is to share, celebrate, and enhance the world’s visual language. The…

  • Project of my 'Self', by Golnar Abbasi

    Project of my 'self' is a tumblr curated by Golnar Abbasi which contains the elements…

  • Tokyo-X: an "Anti-Compositive and Anti-Typological" Project by Andrea Branzi

    Tokyo City X (1990) is a meta-project, the design of a theoretical city based on…

  • Oma's 1989 Sport Center Project for Noorddijk, Groningen, Netherlands

    Through Facebook photographic reportages, OMA is providing an insight into its far and less known…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr

Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

About | Visual Atlas | Topics

We are Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli from Microcities. Ask us anything

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr


SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Whenever possible we try to attribute content (images, videos, and quotes) to their creators and original sources. Please feel free to write us if you notice misattributions or wish something to be removed.
SOCKS is powered by WordPress.