Il tipo come mediatore fra le dimensioni «eteronome» dell’architettura: alcuni casi esemplari nelle infrastrutture idroelettriche

The paper analyzes the dialectic between the tendency for autonomous development of architecture and its «heteronomous» conditioning. Starting from the analysis of the hydropower plants type, structural and formal invariants were identified together the link between architecture and external factors influencing design and construction. The type evolutions in the relationships between building and architectural-constructive design are paradigmatic, since they are conditioned by the demands of industrial progress, and balanced with the natural environment and man-made contexts, infrastructure and architectural instances. The paper explains how the distribution system of the building organism has modular references related to the machinery size and characteristics. So the examples of hydroelectric power plants, majestic «cathedrals» related to the industrial revolution, concretize an architectural-design vision deployed in optimal balance between functional needs and anthropic-infrastructural environmental constraints, creating building bodies that foreshadow future modernity.