Towards a New Objectivity of the landscape. Edoardo Gellner’s tools and methods
Abstract
Edoardo Gellner never concealed the fact that he was a self-taught architect, although the references to the pragmatism of the Deutscher Werkbund and the theoretical teachings of the first Bauhaus are evident in his works. Drawing and photography are the tools through which Gellner educates his eye to look at the reality of things objectively and analytically. His method of analysis is based on a careful understanding of the territory and its matrices: from the comparison between military cartography and cadastral maps, Gellner draws a whole series of considerations on the historical, morphological, and social reasons that led to the development of such landscapes, and the study of centurial grids offers Gellner a counterproof to his theories. Thus, understanding the motivations of architecture but above all the origins of a landscape become the themes that Gellner deepens in an extensive series of studies for publications that were never completed that make these menabò real synthetic “or even artistic” visions of the landscape, as a tribute to the most perfect purovisibilist theory.
