Dardi, Costantino
Costantino Dardi (1936-1991) was Giuseppe Samonà’s student at the IUAV (Venice University Institute of Architecture), and he was very young when he started his teaching, working as Aymonino’s assistant. At the beginning of the 1970s, he took part, together with Aymonino and De Feo, in the architectural competitions for the university campuses of Florence, Cagliari and Calabria. These three projects marked a period of fruitful resurgence of Italian contemporary debate on architecture. In Rome, where he was called to hold the professorship at the Faculty of architectural composition at the University La Sapienza, Dardi lived a period of effervescent collaboration with artists and critics, who involved him in a professional activity that focused on exhibition design. He carried out the re-arrangements of the exhibition spaces in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Exhibition Hall) (1982/89) and in the ex-Palazzo Massimo (1989/91), and the refurbishing of the twentieth-century wing and the library in the National Gallery of Modern Art (1985/91). In two books, Il gioco sapiente (1971) and Semplice, lineare, complesso (1987) he expressed the figurative and formal features of an architectural thought dominated by both the pleasure for pure geometry and the brightness of the white colour surfaces. In 2011, some of his projects have been acquired for the MAXXI Architettura collection.
Costantino Dardi, Progetto per il Ponte dell’Accademia, Biennale di Venezia, 1985 – Prospetto laterale, radex, 1985 (part.)