Design
Inspiring Reference For Beauty And Social Aspirations | Madhu Pandit
LA 55 |
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The Auroville Architect Monograph Series explores the legacy of Piero and Gloria Cicionesi and their imprint on the architecture of Auroville. The book illustrates the play of universal harmony and spatial order in maintaining that the built form is an extension of the individual's physical and spiritual world. Through Piero and Gloria's buildings, Pingel illustrates the subtlety of senses through a collection of archival photographs, personal sketches, drawings and quotes. |
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Piero and Gloria Cicionesi, Auroville Architects Monograph Series
Author: Mona Doctor Pingel
Published: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 2018
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This wonderfully exuberant book is the second of the Auroville Architects Monograph Series. It is a comprehensive record of the architectural legacy of Piero and Gloria Cicionesi and the timeless imprint it has left on Auroville. More than that, what is compelling is the weaving together of the community's unwavering belief that built form is on extension of an individual's physical and spiritual world.
I visited Auroville as a student in 1979 when the Matrimandir had just about 'burst forth' out of the ground. Its skeletal space frame looked staggeringly out of scale, and perhaps even brutal, to my inexperienced eye, especially in the context of the philosophy communicated to us and the pastoral/communal scale of the rest of what was built at that time. Since then I have been training my eye and time and again I have wanted to visit, but it was not meant to be. I was curious to put together the puzzle how the sheer muscle of that giant sphere, now softened by its gold exterior, sat in consonance with its structural spatiality and function. Going through this book comes close to the journey which never happened.
The reader can switch back and forth between pages which are beautifully illustrated, and watch the 'urban experiment' take shape. One does not have to endorse the philosophy of a 'new consciousness' to find the symbolism of Matrimandir, a centring point of a city in a modern-day context of town planning, curiously compelling.
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