The basic character of Guido Canella’s work is the search for an “architecture of knowledge”, which, starting from the need for new expressive values, more adherent to the transformations of Italian reality, tends to be defined as a “conscious vocation to the city”.

History, context, type, destination, and formality of architecture are the constituent elements of his design.

Architecture, Canella argues, cannot be camouflaged with respect to the context, but must extract the typological, functional, and formal constants capable of expressing a will to transform in addition to representation.

If this conviction acts with almost programmatic evidence in the works created in the years 1960-1980, even in later, more lyrical executions, it remains a constant of its poetic, in the will to promote more evolved public and collective behaviour.

Through the design of the main typologies for associated life functions (from the school building to the museum, from the working-class neighborhood to the church, from the civic center to the theater), the original vision and reinvention of a personal figurative language becomes, for Canella, an expression of civil commitment not only in design research but also in the definition of the principles of an architectural school.