La forma del tumulo

How do the domus’s atrium cease to be a necessary room at the sole service of the house’s metabolism for becoming a sacred place where contemplating nature? As the roman atrium, the mound shifts from a pile of earth to a stony construction, becoming an idea. Between the mound and the grave there is the work conducted by Adolf Loos. Loos’s work as a key to access the deep sense of architecture, especially the transition from the “necessary form” to the “symbolic form”: the passage from shape caused by the nature to form as representation of death is the matter of this paper. The Greek temple and the Egyptian pyramids are the examples able to shed light in this fundamental problem. The first by the petrification of its wooden shape and the second as the result of a reduction work. Loos as a lens for looking through the matter of form in architecture, his buildings’ “ornamental” appearance hides a deeper truth: a work “per via di levare” aimed at purifying forms. Elliptically we can come back to the beginning and looking at the atrium’s overturning with the Loos’s theory realizing that it consists in the shift from the Baukunst to Architektur: from the mere building practice to the pure representation of itself, ab-solute form freed from a functional purpose. The entire architectural tradition has always attempted to elevate the building to architecture, pushing the work to build to the one to represent. It is not the mound’s functional uselessness that makes it an architecture but its idea: “Soltanto una piccolissima parte dell’architettura appartiene all’arte: il sepolcro e il monumento. Il resto, tutto ciò che è al servizio di uno scopo, deve essere escluso dal regno dell’arte.”