the topics and myths of this post-industrial world, such as the ‘all-absorbing everyday life’, in the same way Radical Architecture instigated other topics such as: ‘the release of planning from three-dimensional space’, ‘space as language’, ‘behaviour as architecture’, discontinuance as ‘the other half of reality beyond rationality’, etc. Radical Architecture gave rise to a new tolerance, which did not only include creative intervention on the part of the user, but also the possible presence of designer objects that stimulated the user’s interest with their eccentric vitality. Mario Perniola defined this new design as ‘semeiotic or informational design’. ‘Its function is to transform something useless into something useful, that is, to make the purchase and possession of these objects psychologically necessary, whatever their use may be. Unlike functional design, which considered the necessary relationship between the object’s form and its function, radical design envisages the object as a sign, as getting across a message, with almost all pertinence to utility lost. So it is that in radical design utility dissolves into exchange value.’ Having lost their identity as useful objects, it was their very image that allowed these ‘new goods’ to become a sign distinguishing a certain cultural and social condition. Connotation prevailed over denotation. Radical Architecture gave rise to ‘the language of goods’, insofar as the objects were made to appeal by means other than their use, they created the psychological demand to possess them, and offered themselves up to satisfy the need. The principles of utility and the economic world linked to them were overturned and replaced by a new outlook. Thus architecture was able to perfect its doing and draw out the principal means of its being to underline the coherence between its thought and feelings. The groups most representative of Radical Architecture in Italy were: Ettore Sottsass, Archizoom, Superstudio, Ufo, Gianni Pettena, Gaetano Pesce, Ugo La Pietra, Riccardo Dalisi, Franco Raggi, Alessandro Mendini, Remo Buti, 9999, Ziggurath; in America: Peter Eisenman, Ant Farm, John Hejduk, Site, Onyx; in England: Archigram, Cedric Price, Street Farmer; in France: Architecture Principe with Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, in Austria: Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Raimund Abraham, Heinz Frank, etc.; in Japan: Arata Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake. The strength of ‘radical’ design was its ability to communicate thoughts and emotions, to cause public and critics to discuss the evident unsuitability of the majority of the new residential buildings and, at the same time, to reflect on the false progress made by technological society. The daring and surprising shapes, the garish colours, the industrial materials of the creations by the Archizoom, Superstu-
dio, Ufo, Alchimia and Memphis groups, put across the idea that the alienating logic of industrial production and consumerism could be overcome, anticipating the topic of saving the environment by several decades. The radical experience, founded in Florence, Tuscany, by Superstudio, Archizoom, Ufo and Pettena – influenced by the anti-rationalistic creations of the pioneer Ettore Sottsass and thereafter enriched by the work of Mendini, Pesce, Buti, 9999, Ziggurath, Dalisi and Raggi etc., was brought into the international limelight by the famous design magazine ‘Casabella’ in the period when it was under the direction of Mendini (1970-75). In 1996 under Hans Hollein the Venice Biennale held an international retrospective on the radical phenomenon, curated by Gianni Pettena. In 1999, again curated by Pettena, an exhibition was held at Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia entitled: ’Archipelago. Experimental Architecture 1959-99’. This exhibition aimed to bring the movement up-to-date by comparing it to examples of daring or experimental contemporary architecture. In 2000 the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne and the Centre Pompidou promoted the great historical exhibition on this movement, the first leg of which was held at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (September-December 2000) in Cologne and at the IAC in Villeurbanne, before moving to Valencia, Spain and the Museo Valenciano de la Ilustracion y la Modernidad (MuVIM). In the 1990s the Italian radicals’ research had already received attention: at the Centre Pompidou Alain Guiheux included the Florentine radicals in the permanent collection, which already included Sottsass, and following that Dominique Rouillard also studied the movement. The Italian radicals’ work progressively became the subject of exhibitions and various types of event in France, amongst which we must cite the activity at the FRAC Centre in Orléans initiated by the then director Frédéric Migayrou, who is now the director of the architecture and design sector at the Centre Pompidou. The Radical Architects fought to cause a real revolution in their discipline but unfortunately they were often hindered by the power of academia which did not want to redefine the languages of architecture. Today, thanks to the intelligent French revival, Florentine Radical Architecture has left behind an important historical legacy of the significant progress it prompted in the evolution of the design and architecture system: the result of the artists’ ‘utopian desire’ to break with the old and renew and regenerate their discipline. Genova, january 2009
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RADICAL ARCHITECTURE - REFLECTION ON THE EDGE Mauro Panzera The arts have always wrapped human societies in a warm fabric, at times with a loose, very obvious weave, and at others with a close knit whose stitches flee from view and require research and passion. But the storylines have always tried to build clear pictures with well-defined outlines. The mid-1960s marked the beginning of a cultural information campaign in Italy around the contemporary arts, especially in the visual sphere; work well done, headed by renowned intellectual figures, but its aim had to be to clarify for the sake of the wider, averagely cultured public. However, the arts were moving in the opposite direction, the profound contamination undermining the very basis of their centuries-old edifice. Trust in the possibility to tell a story in order was ebbing; the first upshot was confusion in the artistic timescale, a steadfast point of reference for a whole community of studies. While the period of Art Informel may have marked the last koiné in international artistic culture, the two years of 1959 and 1960 were revolution, violent detachment and contrast: in short, the central focus shifted from the subject to the object. This not-necessarily-false scheme in the hypothetical manual of cultural history could be entitled: From the Existentialist Era to the Consumer Civilisation. And so art could be said to reflect reality. This is the fairy tale, the loose-knit fabric. But I think the territory of art needs to be outlined differently. We could go back to the figure of T. Tzara in the immediate aftermath of the war and see Isidore Isou and his Lettrism as his heir. In the most extreme speculations of the later post-war period, the utopian spirit once again took hold. This story has already been well related by Mirella Bandini, who intertwined Lettrism with the thought of Guy Debord and the establishment of the Situationist International. The direction of utopia in the later post-war period was very clear: it was trying to surpass art, in real life of course. What is striking about the whole theoretical movement around the arts was the central importance given to architectural discourse, or rather the question of bodies in space in general. In this formulation the truly artistic (therefore close to the image as intuition) core of the universe of the ‘architecture’ discipline came through clearly. What we were seeing in those years was a divorce, a split between the consciousness of art and the object of art; this resulted in chains of thought that were crucial in drawing the artistic landscape until at least the 1960s. A critique shared, I believe, with the Situationist Movement, clearly formulated by Mario Perniola for example, pinpointed the contradiction that undermined the movement from its very roots: the denial and refusal of the object of art – that is, the work – against the lack of refusal of the artistic consciousness – that is, creative subjectivity. Among those involved in the very dawn of the movement was Constant and his New Babylon, given this name by Debord himself. A utopian architectural design that placed central importance on the body’s freedom of movement in space, a nomadic thought that would directly influence the group of intellectual artists and architects who were to organise the This is Tomorrow exhibition in London in 1956. This London event was to mark the beginning of the phenomenon later renamed Radical Architecture, with
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the establishment of the Archigram group and the emergence of a new generation of architects. The controversy that today, in 2009, accompanies the presentation of new creations designed by top architects is the declaration that we have come to the end of an era, perhaps to go back to the object closed in upon itself or for a mere technicality, I do not know. While one path within the immense process of contamination that was subverting the arts system stemming from the Renaissance retrieved the theatrical setting – this would be the lesson given first by Pollock then Kaprow, followed by the performance -, another went to the very heart of architecture in the sense of the relationship between body and space: without doubt Gordon Matta-Clark, but also Richard Long, not to speak of the Igloo by Mario Merz. But the 1956 London exhibition was also the root for the other divorcé: the object. Hence the pop connotation. Now philosophy started to work on this concept, and we have to thank Jean Baudrillard for the important contribution he made with his 1968 work System of Objects. But the underlying topic, that is consumption and symbolism, had already been at the centre of the studies and speculation since the end of the 1950s. Gillo Dorfles had written about a new notion of consumption in the first issue of the Azimuth magazine, and Dorfles was in contact with the English group that would later give rise to the exhibition mentioned earlier, while with Banham he had discussed Italian industrial design. I think that the right observatory for following the story of the object is indeed the universe of industrial design. This is where the functionalist notion was refused, where a field of desire was unleashed which came into contact and to an understanding with the architectural utopias, especially in town planning; it seems to me that Italian culture played the leading role at this level, with the splendid Tosco-Florentine moment standing out in particular. Archizoom and Superstudio conceived spaces such as No-stop City, Monumento Continuo in which the individual was unbound from a functionalist space: the upshot being the conception of a new symbolic dimension. Now on one hand there was solid contact with the artistic avantgarde that came out in the revolutionary years of 1959/60, starting with Manzoni, Castellani and Yves Klein. But the trajectory of these theorist rather than architectural planning groups was to lead to the movement’s final act, that is, the exhibition in New York dedicated to the Italian New Domestic Landscape; and what emerged here was the new designer object, which did not respond to a function but to a series of desires. In this path I note a deep split in the ways of interpreting the object. On one hand, what would become the pop object, generated by the debates around the relationship between high and low culture and presupposing the American model of mass society, where consumption prevailed over production; a path that would be followed by the ingenious figure of Andy Warhol, who sampled and reproduced, but did not put his subjective dimension, his imagination at stake. On the other hand, there was the interpretation of the object prompted by the spatial relationship of freedom of the individual/body;