Aurelio Galfetti Castelgrande, Bellinzona

The notion of "building in historical surroundings" gained a whole new meaning from Alexander Mitscherlich's 1965 book Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Stadte, and the subject has lost none of its topicality today. The Ticino architectural scene is particularly interesting in this respect: it has attracted international attention since the sixties because of its programmatic tendency towards design rebellion. Although Ticino architecture's considerable impact since then has come principally from new buildings, revitalization and conversion of historical architecture was always on a par with new building. Aurelio Galfetti is one of the leading lights of the Ticino scene, and his transformation of the ruined remains of the Castelgrande in Bellinzona into a contemporary museum and culture centre provides us with something like a provisional resume of decades of architectural reform effort. After a continuous series of typological corrections to Bellinzona's diffuse townscape, Galfetti was concerned mainly to sharpen public awareness of the genius loci and its history, but above all its future, when rebuilding the Castelgrande. These efforts produced what is without a doubt one of the most important conversion projects in recent building history since Carlo Scarpa's legendary work on the Castelvecchio in Verona. Galfetti had neither restored nor conserved Bellinzona's "Acropolis". At the most -- as the Neapolitan architect Francesco Venezia would say -- he had joined pieces together to spaces in which light, objects and landscape hold silent communication. He was concerned in the first place to transform an extraordinarily damaged historical situation into an analogue reality that would make it able to speak again. This happens in a way that places topography, town and monument in a completely new context, namely that of the late 20th century. If we really are to learn from the past and learn from history, then here history has been made present in the best sense of the word. Architectural historian Frank Werner has already made an intensive study of the architectural and theoretical roots of the Ticino reform movement in his book Neue Tessiner Architektur -- Perspektiven einer Utopie. Stefania Beretta is a highly esteemed architectural photographer in the Ticino and has photographed all the work of Galfetti.