Aurelio Galfetti. La poetica dello spazio traversante

For more than half a century, Aurelio Galfetti has been engaged in defining a personal architectural design poetics based on the formulation of two complementary spatial and formal concepts: the “territorial space” and the “traversing space”. These concepts reinterpret the Modern invention of “open space” in an original way and propose a way of living grounded in the continuity between the internal space of the building and the external space of the surrounding territory. If “territorial space” is the most widely recognized key to interpreting his work, “traversing space” is an entirely overlooked aspect of his oeuvre. This essay examines this specific feature of Galfetti’s poetics, which finds its main application in projects focused on the theme of the house conceived as a “villa”. The research on “traversing space,” which he began with the Rotalinti House in Bellinzona, Switzerland, in the 1960s and continued through to the holiday houses built on the island of Paros, Greece, in the first decade of the 2000s, unfolds as an exploration of the expansive and centrifugal spatial properties of the house. This investigation aims to probe the possibility of generating relationships between the parts and perceptual tensions capable of establishing a continuity between the building and its context − whether natural or urban − so that the latter, revealed in its essential characteristics, absorbed into the building, and scaled to human dimensions, becomes a fundamental condition of dwelling.