La "macchina reticolare". L'opera di Guido Canali nelle preesistenze architettoniche: logica e poetica della razionalità

Guido Canali's works are based on a special form of dialogue with pre-existences: with rigour and coherence, they imprint the interpretation of antiquity with an inventive impulse, based on an idea of reconnection between logic and poetics through precise methodological choices. These identify the hypotheses from which to start and can thus be declined with respect to the specific identity of historic buildings, with the quality of dimensional and constructive precision that characterises each intervention. New architecture insinuates itself into the old, redefining it with interventions that dialogue with history, materialising thanks to respect for the specific properties of building. Every intervention on the pre-existing is for Canali a form of working meditation, which is accomplished in the continuous exercise of measuring and experimenting in the course of its own realisation. It is particularly through the dimension of the Museum that Canali shows us what it means to work in architectural pre-existences. The Galleria Nazionale della Pilotta in Parma, the museum complex of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the Museo del Duomo in Milan and the Museo delle Statue-Stele in Pontremoli are exemplary projects that move from a common methodological principle: to offer, through the architecture of restoration, a further form of knowledge of pre-existing buildings and with it a new awareness of the values they bear, prerogatives that must first be known in order to be able to be revived.