Renato Rizzi. Pensare architettura e la forma delle cose. Lo stupore del pensiero

This brief contribution outlines the figure of Renato Rizzi, thinker and operating architect. By exposing some fundamental aspects, emerged with the lectio magistralis proposed at the opening of the ISUFitaly conference held in Bari in September 2018 and on the occasion of the exhibition on the models of his educational project for the Solomon Cathedral in Lampedusa, the fundamental stages of his theory are followed, which appears strongly linked to a critical speculation based on the complex plots of philosophical thought. From the doctrine of Emanuele Severino, one of the greatest thinkers of our time – recently died – he borrows some concepts that can also be considered proper to the world of architecture. On such a speculative horizon it lays the foundations for a renewed interpretation of the constitutive elements at the origin of the term “arch-itecture”, sensing the substantial difference in meaning between the first principles, defined by him as “indominable” (arché), and the use of the technique which he considers to belong to the sphere of the “dominable” (téchne), underlining today’s criticality due to the paradigm that made them ends rather than means. Through a series of questions posed in rhetorical form, some themes of the Roveretan’s thinker of are re-launched in order to fuel the debate on the topic.