#ionone

The celebrated curves of Alvar Aalto represent a natural derivation of this lineage, affirming the exaltation of Nature as a rediscovered locus of human being, a place where ornament and architecture converge in organic resonance.

From "Design of New Words"

The Aesthetics of Ornament

by Filippo Lo Presti 1989

The ideal schema of the Vitruvian city and that of Sforzinda, though sharing analogous symbolic valences, establish a profound nexus between architecture, geometry, astronomy, and esotericism, dimensions that, in their reciprocal interaction, converge toward a single definition of primordial form. In both cases, the city is not merely a functional organism but the earthly projection of a higher order, a cosmic diagram translated into matter. The symbolic and numinous aspect of architecture was therefore regarded as its authentic form, while its material manifestation was considered only the shadow of its spiritual counterpart, an imperfect reflection of the Idea.

Returning to Vitruvius, his interest in compositional canons emerges clearly, conceived as criteria for recognizing works that conform to the fundamental principles of the building art. The Vitruvian order assigns the right measure to each part of the work and then harmonizes them through a system of symmetric proportions extended to the building as a whole. Priority is thus given to the conception of each architectural element, understood as an integral component of a unified corporeal form, capable of preserving within itself the coherence of collaboration among the parts and the simultaneous condition of unity within multiplicity.The subsequent symmetric harmonization gathers these elements into an ordered complexity, establishing an intrinsic dialogue between the individual parts and the building as a totality ...

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

Architecture as a Living Body

Filarete and the breathing city

The idea of architecture as a living organism, already intuited by Filarete, does not limit itself to analogies with the human body: it surpasses them, transforming the city into an organism endowed with rhythm, metabolism, and breath. In his Treatise on Architecture (1461–1464), the building does not imitate human form but the vital process itself, accepting growth and physiological decay as expressions of the cosmic law that governs every living structure.Unlike Alberti, who seeks eternity in the solidity and permanence of architectural matter, Filarete imagines materials that age like skin, surfaces that mutate, urban tissues that require care. Maintenance becomes a therapeutic gesture rather than a repair: an act of continuity between the human body and the urban body.Gates, windows, water channels, and squares become the organs through which the city breathes. Streets flow like veins, squares pulse like hearts, and the entire urban organism synchronizes with the cosmic cycle. The astronomical orientation of the cardinal gates regulates the city’s respiration, aligning it with the movement of the sun: an urbanism that is not merely technical but a cosmic liturgy.With Filarete, the illusion of geometric immortality—the humanistic aspiration to eternal form—begins to fracture. The city no longer belongs to its users but to the souls that animate it, to the vital flows that traverse it. It becomes a place of mediation between the human cycle and the universal cycle, an organism that lives, changes, falls ill, and heals.Today, in the face of ecological crisis and the fragility of contemporary metropolises, Filarete’s lesson appears strikingly current: it reminds us that architecture is not an object but a time, a process, a shared breath between human beings, the earth, and the sky.

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Notes from a Future Past

Filippo Lo Presti, 2026

The Vitruvian treatise, written out of gratitude toward Augustus and, in particular, toward Octavia, is articulated in ten books. Auguste Choisy defined them as the “testament of art at the exit of the Roman Republic”: a suggestive but imprecise formula, since Vitruvius dealt above all with the art of architecture. In the preface to the first volume, Choisy observes that Vitruvius presents architecture “almost as it was practiced by the Greeks two centuries before our era”: the most ancient monuments are scarcely familiar to him, and many precepts come from the Alexandrian school, from which entire chapters seem to derive…

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

A first and lucid line of inquiry examines the possible relations between the phenomenal world of the sensible and that of the imaginary, assessing within these components of the psycho‑physical system a plausible material appropriation of the various levels of perception ...

The Mystic Machine

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

Projection

What we observe around us represents a projection of our identity. We determine and define our future through the choices and decisions we make. The surrounding environment reflects our essence, as do natural and non-natural events, which continuously highlight its influence. Automation and technological-digital emancipation play a significant role in the intellectual and social development of the context in which we operate; delegating tasks previously performed by humans to the machine allows the individual to be freer in deciding how to spend their time and use their intelligence to improve the state of things and people. Don't fear yourself; achieve what you truly desire.

Projection and Time Machine (Version 2025) Ionone Music - Filippo Lo Presti

YouTube

The Mystic Machine

Between acquired languages and stereotyped ones, a fracture opens: not a neutral space, but a zone of friction where knowledge is produced as collision. Here, intuition and reflection do not harmonize; they confront each other, overwrite each other, cancel each other out to generate new forms. Architecture emerges from this very friction, as an act of insubordination against every inherited syntax.

The eternal rhythm of the pendular motion is not a metaphor: it is the primary structure of being. It exposes the binarity that may constitute us, mental light and sensible matter, abstract impulse and the density of the real, an energetic field that cannot be reconciled. Architecture must take this tension as its own material, not to resolve it, but to intensify it ...

Design of New Words

The Mystic Machine

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

The Mystic Machine

Harmonic connections, within the field of intellectual activity,

emerge along the very edge where the word begins to define itself. A first bifurcation of the unity of being is felt in the awareness of a possible zone of dilation within the verb—an expansion that, in the aesthetic realm, would push the limits of definition outward.

Piercing the superficial, “physical” form of the word, treating it as a projection screen for an entire constellation of analogous events, opens the way to an intrusion into spaces situated near the verbal threshold, where meaning loosens and begins to resonate beyond its own perimeter.

The temporal condition of space, beyond decomposing the elements of matter, also enables an analysis of the word itself, transforming its meaning from something merely representational into something formative. Through the object of creation, the models of time and space may be inverted, depending on the new relationship established between the former system of object‑production and the new mechanized process.

By shortening distances, the human being becomes an active participant in one phase of this multifaceted creation, a phase that opens onto a wide range of operative possibilities residing within one’s own mental and physical system ...

Design of New Words

The Mystic Machine

Filippo Lo Presti 1989