Bari Discovering Dioguardi. Possible Strategies for Reading the Built Work of Saverio Dioguardi

Drawing the urban space and the system of architectures represents a peculiar way of questioning and getting to know things. Drawing leads to reflect upon the very essence of built architecture, the landscape and the world where ideas, considerations and desires are made of visual material. In 2008, began the research on the Bari city image starting from the systematic road section surveys along the fronts of the architectures built between the 19th and early 20th centuries in Bari, with the aim of creating the visual archive called BDA Bari Drawing Architecture. In Bari there are examples of good modern architecture, scattered throughout the city, isolated in a middle ground, compressed between an anonymous, disengaged and timeless building and that which, instead, one’s time ignores, as it is committed to the adoption of signs and languages that can camouflage it in the identity heritage of the city, already acquired and internalized by its inhabitants. Saverio Dioguardi’s works mark this time emerging, monumental and solemn in the urban scenario, describing a “new order”, and connoting the urban image for fifty years. The figure of Dioguardi, the practice of his work, the “fantastic tension of the expressive traces” of the decorative apparatus, the “synthesis between elements of tradition and rationalist elements”, the “rhythmic concentration of the facades”, inspired the present research work.