Angiolo Mazzoni in Colombia: un patrimonio di immagini. Architettura di immagini | immagini di architettura = Angiolo Mazzoni in Colombia: a heritage of images. Architecture of images | images of architecture

The history - personal and professional - of the architect Angiolo Mazzoni, known for his public railway and postal buildings scattered throughout Italy, often forgets to tell the fi fteen years he spent in Colombia, thus failing to attribute due value to a work that - although largely unrealised - contributes to reconstructing the multifaceted image of an important 20th-century fi gure such as Mazzoni. The research intends to bring out the signifi cance of the Italian architect’s Colombian work, also by restoring the right value to the architecture represented by Mazzoni, recognising the value of theoretical drawing, the site of an important experimentalism on form (Purini, 2017) to the rich graphic corpus stored at the Fondo Angiolo Mazzoni at MART in Rovereto . The analysis of the Fondo Mazzoni, together with that of the Fondo Ministerio de Obras Públicas at the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá, has made it possible to reconstruct a geography of Mazzoni’s Colombian projects: of the 95 projects catalogued, only fi ve have been built and two have just begun, providing the image of what we might call a represented architecture, an expression of ideas, mental images, forms and ways of composing interiors. Zuccari speaks of internal drawing, meaning the idea, the image in its being a mental representation, and of external drawing, meaning the form; Mazzoni - like every architect - used drawing as an instrument of the imagination, giving the elaborate perspectives he drew up the task of expressing in their materiality the prefi guration of an architectural space that had reached the culmination of an important mental process of elaboration of the idea, which for the most part remained on paper.