Brunetto De Batté's 'Abaco': A Hypnotic Collection of Architectural Drawings

Architect Brunetto De Batté (born 1948 in La Spezia, trained in Florence, long based in Genoa) has published a limited-edition booklet titled 'Abaco' featuring a selection of sketches from his countless notebooks. The publication serves as a reminder that drawing remains the fundamental act of architecture. The anthology presents a sequence of fantastical scenes, forming a liquid flow of solid imagination. De Batté's work spans decades, reinventing physical structures through mental collages of cylinders, parallelepipeds, cones, steps, ziggurats, audacious projections, contorted volumes, distorted axonometries, sharp edges, and curved softnesses. The result is a metaphysical, labyrinthine, Borgesian game. The drawings reveal a narrative, mythopoetic quality, suggesting that imagining the impossible helps understand the possible. The varying representation techniques, from fast to slow, underscore an unending desire to remodel reality. The booklet is available at brunettodebatte.it.