Nexus Network Journal

Like that of Palladio in the sixteenth century, the work of Guarino Guarini (1624–1683) in the seventeenth century, both written and constructed, embodies the nexus of architecture and mathematics better than that of anyone else in the Baroque age. Guarini was both a methematician and an architect, but he was also well versed in their sister arts, including philosophy, stereotomy, geodesy, gnomonics, astronomy and more. Guarini is as rich as he is illusive: he left behind a corpus of ponderous works written in Latin, almost unstudied today, and of his many buildings, only a handful survive, the others victims of disasters both natural (S. Maria Annunziata in Messina destroyed by an earthquake) and manmade (the Chapel of the Holy Shroud destroyed by fire following restoration in 1997). But the fire that destroyed the Chapel of the Holy Shroud offered a unique opportunity to study how Guarini conceived and constructed his masterpieces. This argument was first addressed in these pages in an interview with Mirella Macera (Superintendent for architectural, landscapes, and historical monuments of Piedmont), Fernando Delmastro and Paolo Napoli (see NNJ vol. 6 no. 2, 2004). In 2006 a conference entitled “Guarino Guarini: Open Questions, Possible Solutions”, dedicated to the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin and its designer, Guarini, was organized by myself and Franco Pastrone of the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin, and sponsored by the Archivio di Stato and the Direzione per i beni culturali e paesaggistici del Piemonte (see the conference report by Sylvie Duvernoy in NNJ vol. 9, no. 1, 2007). The papers in this present issue of the NNJ grew out of that meeting, and will help increase our understanding of Guarini, his scientific and architectural works, and the seventeenth-century context in which he worked.

Paolo Freguglia examines the relationship between perspective and geometry before Guarini, and more precisely, in the 1500s. The representation of space, which in the pre-Classic age was substantially conceptual and sometimes ideographic, was gradually organised so that it became optical representation, and finally arrived at being able to give a sense of three-dimensions. The techniques of perspective were presented not only as practical rules for drawing in a given manner, in conformation with how observed reality appears to the eye, but were also described according to their geometric underpinnings. Thus were introduced new points of departure for considerations on geometry, as made evident by the work of Desargues and Pascal.

The structural investigations performed on Guarini’s Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Torino have made it possible to come closer than ever before to understanding its structural behaviour. They have also shed light on the building’s history. This paper presents some of the new findings about key elements of the structure, and mentions some of the still open questions.

In his church of San Lorenzo in Torino Guarino Guarini conceived a structural organism that transfers the weight of the dome to the foundations by means of a partially concealed ribbed structure. This rare example of architecture in which form and structure do not coincide is not the result of an eccentric choice of technical virtuosity, but rather a structure mechanism aimed at achieving certain effects that have been knowingly sought out by the architect.

Guarini considered the mathematical studies to be of fundamental importance for all artists and scholars. His own knowledge of mathematics was vast and profound. The aim of this present paper is to show, through an analysis of the most substantial of his mathematical works, Euclides adauctus, along with the Appendix to this printed a few months later, the role that philosophical and mathematical studies had on his cultural formation, on the new and original research that he conducted, and on his teaching activities, while looking for traces of the mathematical sources that he consulted and cited that indicate which authors and works exerted the greatest influence on him.

Michele Sbacchi investigates the real influence of the notion of projection on architectural design before and during the age of Guarini. He takes into consideration concepts such as light and shadow, abstract line, plane, section, projective geometry and perspective. To do this he looks at the ideas of Gregorius Saint Vincent, Alberti, Guarini, Desargues and de l’Orme, among others.

The triple-storey façade, one of the most original inventions of the Baroque period in terms of form and proportion, arose in Sicily and quickly spread throughout Italy, to Europe and beyond. Guarini’s design for the façade of Santissima Annunziata in Messina paved the way for its general acceptance. The roots for the concept, however, may be found in the work of Giacomo Del Duca.

This paper proposes a “reading” of the church of San Lorenzo in Turin, designed by Guarino Guarini, through the philosophical notion of “fold” introduced by Gilles Deleuze. The paper consists of two parts. The first part contains an exploration of the notion of “fold” in architecture and in philosophy and examines the use of the fold in the theory of Baroque architecture as well as the range of this new tool in architectural practise in contemporary architecture and in philosophy and examines the use of the fold as fundamental condition for understanding Baroque era. The second part contains the application of the notion of fold as a philosophical and conceptual framework for the “reading” of the chapel.

With the new architecture still in constant evolution, and its forms fragmented, bent, twisted and folded out of any immediately recognizable shape, a comparison with older, more canonical architecture also helps us to see the new, and to understand what we are seeing.

The long awaited, monumental volume dedicated to Guarino Guarini, edited by Giuseppe Dardanello, Susan Klaiber and Henry Millon is all it was hoped to be. Resulting from the 2002 seminar on Guarini held at the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, the present volume is the successor to the two-volume proceedings published in 1970 of the international conference that took place in Torino’s Accademia delle Scienze in 1968. The list of scholars present at the 1968 conference was star-studded, including Rudolf Wittkower, Franco Borsi, Werner Mueller, Wemer Oechslin, Manfredo Tafuri, Paolo Portoghesi, Henry Millon, Richard Pommer, Christian Norberg-Schulz and many others. The resulting collection of papers represented the latest word in Guarini scholarship up to that point. Now with the publication of this new book, Guarini scholarship — having in the meantime been enriched by the monographs of H. A. Meek (1988) and John Beldon Scott (2003) — is once again brought up to date, taking advantage not only of new information gleaned from the ongoing study of archives, etc. (and the dubious silver lining of the 1997 fire in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, which made it possible to learn things about the Chapel which would otherwise have remained unknown), but also of new methods of investigation that have been developed over the intervening thirty-six years.