Palazzo dei Diamanti expansion, the Architects: the competition must be respected. When will we have a debate without insults?

Giuseppe Capocchin, president of the National Council of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects and Conservators, also spoke on the debate around the expansion of the Palazzo dei Diamanti (Ferrara). “We would have liked to intervene in the cultural debate and affirm, as architects,” he said in a note, “that we are surprised by the drastic and clear-cut statements that something ’cannot be touched,’ since the entire Italy of masterpieces is the result of successive interventions, stratifications, overlapping-in short, of the becoming of history and epochs on buildings, territories and places. So, we would have liked to talk about that. Instead, we are forced, given the violence and the extent of the controversy, to intervene to protect something much more specific that is called into question in the dispute between the municipality of Ferrara and its critics, namely the importance of the competition at the basis of the entire path.”

“A transparent competition that involved dozens of studios and the citizenry itself,” Capocchin continues, “cannot be ignored for reasons that, in the end, have nothing to do with its validity. The competitive process must be respected, the professionals involved must be respected, and the time progression must be respected, which makes a discussion at the end and not at the beginning of the process nonsensical.”

“Finally,” the president concludes, “allow me one consideration: thanks to the virulence of the arguments and statements about the Palazzo dei Diamanti, it was achieved that - for a few days - in our country the attention on ’architecture and its value, on the sense of cultural stratification, on the quality of the built became central in the public debate. When will there be a similar debate on these issues without insults, losers and winners?”

In the photo: a rendering of the expansion of the Palazzo dei Diamanti

Palazzo dei Diamanti expansion, the Architects: the competition must be respected. When will we have a debate without insults?

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