Al confine del Moderno. Un’opera inedita di Michele Capobianco / On the edge of the Modern. An unpublished work by Michele Capobianco

Abstract

In the debate on the restoration of twentieth-century architecture, works that fall outside the canonical chronology of Modernism raise crucial questions concerning recognition, transmission, and heritage preservation. This is the case of the school designed by Michele Capobianco in 2001 in Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi (AV). Unpublished and absent from the critical literature on his work, it represents a significant key to understanding the theoretical and operational tensions in the transition to the twenty-first century. Integrating the renovation of the existing building with new volumes, the intervention is rooted in the post-earthquake landscape of Alta Irpinia, reasserting an architecture attentive to context and the memory of place. The analysis of the project – conducted through archival documentation – confirms its coherence with Capobianco’s method, based on space as an organising structure, on the dialectic between geometry and plastic articulation, and on a compositional approach that interprets rather than merely represents reality. The project also confirms the architect’s focus on colour as a compositional tool and as a mediator between architectural language and the urban fabric – understood not as a mere aesthetic overlay, but as an optical and symbolic device capable of reconstituting a collective scene through tactile, luminous, and material relationships. The calibrated choice of materials and the balance between constructive rationality and evocative imagery reflect a practice that conceives the project as a critical act – a place where time and history are condensed. The work – the last completed by Capobianco – stands as a paradigmatic case of “threshold” architecture: it reworks the assumptions of Modernism without nostalgia or rupture, actualising its values of continuity, proportion, and civic responsibility. This paper proposes a possible interpretative key for approaching the architecture of the second half of the twentieth century not merely as material to be preserved, but as a medium capable of transmitting cultural continuity through the very act of design.