Transformations/Transmutations. Bertoja vs Mosso: tensions-vibrations-transparencies in the architectural space.

Arieto Bertoja (1915-1978), also known as “Harry Bertoia”, and Leonardo Mosso (1926-2020) – the former being the preeminent Friulian sculptor-designer and the latter a Piedmontese architectural theorist – were exponents of innovative artistic designs in the field of contemporary architecture in the condition of the “intellectual-craftsman” and expressed some of the most fertile moments of artistic production in the second half of the XX century, facilitating subsequent formal hybridisation. Bertoja – who worked autonomously and in co-operation with E. Saarinen and the Eames – synthesizes the experience of the European Vanguard by applying “synaesthesist” design conception to vibrant structures, “musical” in space and light, creating suggestive suspended metal screens. His is the design and fabrication of the Floating Screen, the cascade of light on the altar of the MIT Chapel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fully autonomous was the biographical-artistic reciprocity of Leonardo Mosso, son of Nicola, talented futuristic architect. According to the philosopher Mario Trinchero, the design conception of space by Mosso – in long-term collaboration in Italy with mentor Alvar Aalto – is called “experimental ideography”. His research is shared in the investigations of the Gedankenesperiment (E. Mach) and the Sprachspielen (L. Wittgenstein): the “theory of the container” substitutes the “theory of the object” in the fictitious space. Thin, slender metal constructions – luminous meshes, spirals, trellises – dialogue with or are estranged from the natural and urban landscape, reducing it to a mere mathematical abstraction. Architectural projects, learning experiments, word-shape combinations, luminous installations by Mosso that reveal the enduring tension in the concentration of the art as Gesamtkunstwerk.