The work of the Ragusa-born architect Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo is analysed by Sara Marini in a book on the concept of authorship in architecture.
Despite the fact that her secluded design work is concentrated almost exclusively in Sicily and lacks declamatory or sensationalist conceits, Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo is a highly esteemed architect on the international scene, so much so that she has received prestigious awards and was selected by Alejandro Aravena for Reporting from the front, the 2016 edition of the Biennale di Architettura di Venezia. Sara Marini, an associate professor of architectural and urban composition at the Università Iuav di Venezia, dedicated the volume Sull’autore. Le foreste di cristallo di Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, published by Edizioni Quodlibet, to her.
Drawing inspiration from the sci-fi novel The Crystal World by James Graham Ballard, Marini examines the destiny of the architect by structuring a journey through her designs and completed works based on the number four. In fact, four recent installations are compared with a similar number of completed works, creating four “implicit theories”: Senza lingua, Costruire eredità, Risarcimenti and Artifici (Without a tongue, building heritage, compensation and artifices). Born out of a lot of time that the architect and author spent together, the volume reflects on the dialectic that juxtaposes the eternal and the ephemeral in architecture, temporary installations and buildings, always and regardless designed to be enlivened by the shifting presence of light and of people. Another important topic of reflection appears in the concept of “authorship”. As Marini writes: “Reading the path of an author allows us to trace an area, attributable to a name, to highlight the form and the language of a field of work, to build an argument encircled by existing materials”.
