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Human Experience Human Spaces The Osaka Experience

Demogo – Treviso: Seeing architecture through the mind of the architect

After visiting Matteo Silverio (find the article here), we returned to the Veneto region to show Sacripanti’s pavilion to Demogo‘s Alberto Mottola. Their panoramic studio in the center of Treviso — the building that housed the artist Arturo Martini — hosted the Osaka’70 experience in June 2021.

This meeting gave birth to a reflection on the architectural process “tout court”. Alberto’s approach to design is linked to the two-dimensional drawing of plans, elevations and sections that he places side by side to the 3D model. His idea of architecture emerges through the design of the boundaries that delimit the space of the project. In this phase of the working process, he is able to enter with his mind inside the project idea, to see it and walk through it. His vision is clear, even before refining the three-dimensional model.

Seeing Sacripanti’s project in virtual reality, his sensation was that of retracing one of his own design visions. In fact, the intent of Osaka’70 is first and foremost to get people into Sacripanti’s mind for a moment.  

Alberto Mottola inside Osaka’70 – Treviso (Venice), June 2021

The building was never constructed and the details were never studied, so it would have been unrealistic to show it as a completed work. Instead, it becomes precious as a testimony if we stop to report in three dimensions the vision that the architect had and that he wanted to describe through the technical drawings, the scale model and the reports. In particular, reading the texts that speak of the pavilion, one understands how he had a clear vision of that space, which went far beyond the representation on paper.

Beyond the digital tools that we can use today, the ability of the designer to enter his architecture with his mind, to walk through it and explore it before it is built, is still inescapable.

So we were not the first visitors to the Osaka pavilion. Sacripanti has walked through those spaces before us. He has considered the infinite variations given by the kinetic part. He has stopped to evaluate the sense of vertigo given by the encounter between the horizontal planes suspended in the void and the verticality of the blades. And finally he reported what he saw in the sketches that have come down to us.


If you want to know more about what we do or to visit the pavilion write us at: info@poplab-team.org