Architecture as Pedagogy

Gianugo Polesello. Through the Figures — a beautiful new volume by Armando Dal Fabbro, Vincenzo d’Abramo & Claretta Mazzonetto, produced for the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. The book gathers four urban-scale projects Polesello developed between 1983 and 1992 — Kraków, Gdańsk, Warsaw, and Berlin — reconstructed almost entirely through his sketches, drawings, and models. The editors call it “a project of architecture ex-post”: not a conventional monograph but a way of thinking through the figures. What emerges is Polesello’s method of composing with a small, recurring repertoire of elementary forms — the square, the circle, the triangle; the tower, the hall, the gallery — endlessly recombined into new spatial inventions. Three of the four projects line the Vistula; Berlin’s Spreebogen runs parallel on shared themes. Underlying it all is a conviction that drawing and composition are the architect’s true critical instrument — the only real way to reach the deep structure of the city: its form, its history, its memory. A quiet, rigorous lesson in why architecture still thinks best through the figure.