Costruire una tenda sotto il cielo = Building a Tent Under the Sky

The church of San Giovanni Battista ‘dell’autostrada’ (1960-1964) in Campi Bisenzio, Florence, is certainly one of the most studied and well-known masterpieces of Giovanni Michelucci’s long and prolific architectural production. The different phases in the conception and design of this celebrated work are known thanks to the wealth of amazing sketches and documentary materials preserved in the Archive of the Giovanni Michelucci Foundation in Fiesole and the Giovanni Michelucci Documentation Centre in Pistoia; conversely, it is still possible to find some largely unexamined material concerning the acrobatic and experimental construction phases. During his professional experience, Michelucci remained faithful to his desire to free himself from the seduction of form as well as from typological canons: always a master in composing planimetric distributions, he reached the apex of compositional freedom in the church ‘dell’autostrada’, where the hierarchical sequence of prospectuses disappears in the indistinguishable fusion with the roof. The experience and skills gained by Michelucci over the years of the complex construction of the church revealed to him the great potentials of concrete, opening up new horizons on the construction techniques that enabled the creation of different effects for this material in terms of surface, colour and texture. Both a point of arrival and a turning point, its construction marked for the architect the moment when he abandoned the shapes dictated by the geometric grid of the wall structure to draw on the marvellous undulations of concrete roofing, which annihilate the conventional geometries and the hierarchy of the fronts, merged with and indistinguishable from the supple cover