3. Heritage 153
On February 12, 1968, a 100 meter-long,
For UFO, the city is a place of history, tradi-
semi-transparent, inflated plastic tube ap-
tions, and culture, where people live togeth-
peared in the city of Florence, carried by the
er, and where collective beliefs, desires, and
students of the city’s architecture school,
creative energy exist. UFO projects always
then under occupation.
place the city and its people at their centres.
The labyrinthine tube, initiated by UFO, was
UFO projects give a voice to the city. What
inflated on the atrium floor of the Faculty
would the city say if it had a voice? For once,
of Architecture of the University of Florence.
it becomes possible to hear it. People are not
Held over the students’ heads, moving from
just users, or inhabitants, but mediators of the
hand to hand, it soon penetrated the great
city’s voice. UFO projects cannot exist if we
hall, came out of a window, moved out to
try to think of them without the city or with-
the street, and ended up parading the city,
out the people. Words, objects, spaces, city,
passing by its monuments, leading the crowd.
and people merge. They become equally im-
People spontaneously wrote slogans on its
portant, and together they are able to create
surface, from plays on words to political
that language never spoken before or since.
statements, overloading it with meanings and
The projects are situations, mediums through
turning it into a support for words, desires,
which the city is revealed in new ways. They
and voices for all.
are definitely not simply about architecture, at all.
Some days before, a semi-transparent plastic sheet was hanging in the same Faculty entrance hall covered with messages, assemblages of words written in many hands. A screen of words against the rationalist architecture of the school, a fusion of words and space, that seemed to merge reality with communication as a true semantic device: an architecture that talks.
UFO, Festa de l’Unità, Parco delle Cascine, Florence, 1968, Patrizia Cammeo/Riccardo Foresi Archives, Florence