Un'idea di cultura, un'idea di spazio. La biblioteca Luigi Einaudi a Dogliani

Deepening the topic of the spaces for culture, in particular the libraries for a little amount of people, I had the opportunity to analyse the Luigi Einaudi Library in Dogliani, near Cuneo, designed by Bruno Zevi and Studio A/Z in 1963-64. The architectural solution appears meaningful and deserves attention mostly because Zevi, in a typescript kept today at the Foundation, tried to summarize, through five thematic points related to the library, the features and the goals of that kind of space, just in a period in which the idea of culture was changing rapidly and profoundly. This became a sort of vademecum in which Zevi put some of his precepts in relation to the new cultural perspective, really detached from some dusty dogmas of the past and closed instead to lots of cultural dynamics insisting today, together with the related architectural answers. So dealing with “the positioning within the city”, “the openness of the organism”, “the functional flexibility”, “the osmosis between inside and outside” and “the human scale”, Zevi illustrated the architectural solution of the library, thought to be a repeatable model, a kind of manifesto both for the spaces and for the cultural proposal. This last was developed mainly by Giulio Einaudi, who wanted, in the birthplace of the father, the first Italian president Luigi Einaudi dead two years before, a library to dedicate to his memory. The result is a space that interprets actively a new idea of culture, making cultural perspectives coincide with the architectural ones.