Ștefan Simion

‘Ion Mincu’ University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest, Romania
stefan.simion@uauim.ro

Inner Duality. Livio Vacchini’s School of Architecture in Nancy

https://www.doi.org/10.66966/COTAA.2025.05

This essay explores the architectural and theoretical stakes of duality in Livio Vacchini’s School of Architecture in Nancy (1992–1995), proposing it as a key to understanding the radical nature of his mature work. Beyond compositional strategy or formal symmetry, duality is framed as an ontological principle—an inner structure of thought that governs Vacchini’s design process and underpins the logic of the built form. The article draws on
critical readings by contemporaries (Vigato, Abram, Masiero, Le Garrec) and builds an interpretive framework that sees in duality the convergence of Vacchini’s architectural credo: the encounter between dogma and calculation, belief and method. The school in Nancy becomes the exemplary site where duality unfolds spatially—through the articulation of two U-shaped volumes, mirrored courtyards, and a central fissure—and conceptually, as a tension between unity and division, presence and absence, reason and intuition. By reactivating archaic values through abstract means, Vacchini reclaims an essential dimension of architectural thought, one that resists composition and representation in favor of internal necessity. In doing so, his work speaks to a disciplinary core concerned not with forms, but with ideas—the enduring potency of architecture as a mental and material practice.

Keywords: Ticino school; abstraction; architectural theory; archaic; self-reference.