Between Pragmatism and Theory
For the last three decades, Italian architecture has been characterised by an extreme
polarisation. At one end of the spectrum have been the neo-conservators, who are
subsumed by Italy’s history, and at the other end the avant-garde for whom innovation is the
Holy Grail and the present is a clean slate. Francesco Proto outlines the current potential for
steering a middle course that will afford a greater eclecticism, enabling a natural balance
between pragmatism and theory.
Cover of Less Aesthetics – More Ethics, the catalogue of the 7th Mostra
internazionale di Architettura, Venice, 2000
With the ‘Less Aesthetics – More Ethics’ Venice Biennale, Massimiliano
Fuksas launched a completely different approach to architecture. The move
was represented by a different way of sensing architecture, more in tune with
contemporary artistic vanguards and their need to describe reality other
than being simply reassuring or pleasant. Fuksas’ Biennale therefore ratified a
kind of architecture whose aethestic making is never disjuncted by the
contamination and superimposition of a number of mediums and issues such
as those brought to the fore by globalisation.
The Return of the Repressed
Something significant remains as yet unresolved in the recent
history of Italian architecture. It is the mainstream’s rejection
of the tabula rasa proposed by the vanguard. Though this
rejection lies behind Italy’s lack of exposure on the
international scene, it is also identified by some critics as the
very essence and strength of the ‘Italian paradigm’.
Characterised by a series of fractures, caesuras and
discontinuities from the recent past, it marks both theory and
practice inasmuch as it has not yet been filled, hailed or
overlapped.
Modernism, Postmodernism and Beyond
If, for example, in the first half of the 20th century Italian
architecture was affected by the country’s delayed
industrialisation, a lack of national identity and the richness
of a past artistic grandeur that was difficult – if not
impossible – to overcome, the second half was instead typified
by the iconoclastic rejection of Modernist tradition (1950s), an
increasing but misleading interest in megastructures (1960s)
solely interrupted by the experience of the ‘Radicals1 and,
finally – as a consequence of the student rebellion – by the
professors’ withdrawal from practice in response to the
‘suspicious’ role of politics in architecture (1970s).
This situation is made all the more ambiguous and difficult
to grasp if one takes into consideration the very fact that,
while the posthumous acceptance of Modernist principles
after the First World War was turned into such a positive
feature by the former generations as to propel Italian
Rationalism to unrivalled success, these same achievements
were rejected at the beginning of the Second World War as
unacceptably obsolete, demagogic or ideological.
In this respect, the birth of Postmodernism – later
sanctioned by Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima at the Venice
Biennale in 1980 – only exacerbated a cultural climate
dominated by Bruno Zevi’s urgent need for innovation and
Aldo Rossi’s taste for symbolic historicism. The radical
contraposition between Organicists and Rationalists, which
inexorably immobilised the country’s creative energies for the
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Cover of Bruno Zevi, Storia dell’architettura Moderna, 1996 (first edition 1950)
Bruno Zevi is one of the most eminent theorists of Italian Rationalism. After
graduating from Harvard with Walter Gropius, he established the Association
for Organic Architecture (APAO), as well as the monthly magazine
Architecture - Chronicles and History in 1955. His sensational withdrawal from
academic teaching in 1979 was his way of denouncing the cultural
degradation and excessive bureaucratisation of Italian architectural culture.
next decade, was emphasised by the emergence of a polarised
critique of Modernism whose mouthpieces – Vittorio Gregotti
and Francesco Dal Co – are both the heirs of high-cultured
bourgeois understanding.
Winds of Change
In a suffocating atmosphere of sclerotic motionlessness, a
breath of fresh air in 1996 was the advent of a brand-new
generation of practitioners and scholars unwilling to accept
the sterile polemics addressing the rise of the international
‘star system’ and ready, instead, to challenge and share the
excitement and duties issued by global phenomena.
The so-called Erasmus generation – who escaped the short
circuit of Italian academism via worldwide student exchange,
as well as the diffusion of international magazines and
paperback editions open to the unexplored topics of digital
revolution – challenges the solipsism of a distorted
interpretation of ‘Italian tradition’ in the name of a renewed
interest in experimentation, creativity and research exemplified
by the ‘Less Aesthetics – More Ethics’ Venice Biennale held in
2000 and curated by ‘superstar’ Massimiliano Fuksas.
The Novelty of Tradition/The Tradition of Novelty
Despite a stasis pinpointed and aggravated by the World Trade
Center disaster in 2001, the current conflict between neo-
conservators and vanguards is mediated by Franco Purini
who, at the latest Biennale (2006), solicited the upsurge of an
‘up-to-date eclecticism’ by labelling the utopia of the
foundation city of VEMA (VErona-MAntova).2 The result – the
‘ground zero’ of Italian Urbanism – transforms the
presuppositions of a telecommunicative society into the
anachronistic rhetoric of the orthogonal grid.
If a crisis must be detected in contemporary Italian
architecture, this crisis must therefore be acknowledged first
as an unprecedented will to face ‘modernity’ as a concept
never taken for granted, the latter being exemplified by the
acceptance of the complexity of a peculiar artistic and
technical heritage to be understood as a means of innovation
rather than reactionary conservatism.
Marked by an innate instinct for form and proportion, and
a genuine interest in urban environments as the living
condition of social expressions, ‘Made in Italy’ architecture
testifies to a constant equilibrium between the designer and
his or her creation, a horizontal exchange which, in
subverting any prefixed code or rule, stands in favour of the
aware and, for this very reason, seductive balance between
subject and object.
This, in the hope that a better contiguity between
educational training and professional career, as well as a
stronger corporate identity, may guarantee the talented –
both those in fieri and those yet to come – a higher degree of
professional dignity. 4
Notes
1. See the rise of Italian Radical design at the end of the 1960s, later
celebrated in ‘The New Domestic Landscape’ exhibition held at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 1972, the Situationist-inspired spread of inflatable
(architectural and urban) events and the irreverent work of architectural
groups such as Archizoom and Superstudio, which challenged, echoed and
brought to extremes the idea of happening in architecture first explored by
Archigram in the UK and American ‘Diagonalism’ during the 1950s.
2. A utopian city halfway between Verona and Mantova, VEMA was recently
exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 10th Venice Biennale di Architettura in
2006. At the crossing of the railway corridors ideally connecting Lisbon with
Kiev, and Berlin with Palermo, VEMA synthesises and proposes a hypothesis
of Italian architecture in 20 years time (2026) corresponding with the
centennial of the debut of Gruppo 7 and the birth of the Modern movement in
Italy. Both the city plan and model – an area of 2,260 x 3,700 metres (7,415 x
12,140 feet) for approximately 30,000 inhabitants and also incorporating pre-
existing urban footprints – was realised by 20 young Italian architects on a
‘grid’ provided by the curators.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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