There are places and architectural structures that seem more harmonious and elegant than others, even when located in poor or rural settings, villages and districts. We may not immediately understand what fascinates us, but we remember them for their innate balance and the charm that reveals a rhetorical basis (synecdoche) where a part – the material – has the ability to express and define the value of the whole – the context. This evocative ability of the material is effectively the most satisfying literary form because it is able to express with a single code the varieties of the forms of living, exalting those subtle differences, those fragments of life and thought, that would otherwise be lost in the multitude of possible pairings. Also, when a building or a group buildings is constructed with a single material, the art of building approaches the other plastic arts, particularly sculpture, or certain extraordinary works or art like the monochromes of Piero Manzoni, the Slashes of Lucio Fontana, the marvelous Cracks of Alberto Burri, that have so much in common with the Sassi of Materia, the Stones of Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, but also with the sunken bricked Hollows of Louis Kahn in Dacca.

The decision to work and create in monomateriality, which is, of necessity, also a uniformity of tones and colors, can be entirely involuntary, as in the case of cities like Lecce, where the architect’s signature is unimportant with respect to the materials, but can be found in the repetition of the same color patterns and in the warm, smooth feel of the stone, making it the protagonist of an environment that would be impossible to imagine otherwise than in the way it appears. This is true of many places whose unquestioned beauty is an exercise in spontaneity, because it is the surrounding soil, the rocks transformed into blocks for construction that, shaped by the artisan’s hand, become one with nature, despite the artifice, in a perfect symbiosis between the architectural design/text and the context.

This pars pro toto, however, can also be intentional and used to detach itself from the land and wildness of nature by contrasting it as in the case of whitewash used to challenge the powerful solar radiation that blasts the Mediterranean. I am referring here to the architectural uniqueness of Santorini in Greece, or of Ostuni in Puglia, where the candor of the whiteness deflects the powerful heat of the sun’s rays. It is a method of the architectural project to make limited use of materials, but I, personally, find it impossible to free myself of them. I tend to assign a narrative content to the subject and materials, capable of representing and describing the author’s intent in a more direct and comprehensible manner with respect to the fragility of style. The material is physical substance, after all, it expresses history and tradition, or innovation and pure research; it is the actual content, and not the calligraphy of the architectural project.