UFOs Read (Review: John A. Walker, Glossary of Art Architecture and Design Since 1945)

Author’s Note With rare exceptions, UFO provides no interpretations of its works; this so-called “rejection of explanation,” as described by Lapo Binazzi, aims to apply the “amplifications of the sign” in architecture, simultaneously making the work of art available to multiple interpretations. If this practice jeopardizes UFO’s productions by transforming them into cryptic devices that are borderline incommunicable, this risk is promptly averted through the use of a double-coded language capable of bringing together popular images and themes aimed at a more elitist audience; UFO directly involves the public in its works, leading the audience to participate in the provocative actions to which they are subjected, triggering a kind of playful intellectual competition with the authors.

This half-serious approach to architecture places UFO in a long-standing lineage that connects Giulio Romano’s “joke” to Léon Krier’s illustrated satire, caricatural symbols in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s architectures, the playful furniture of the Memphis Group, and Ugo La Pietra’s disequilibrating systems. We have catalogued various buildings and objects selected from the history of architecture and design and established a large laboratory of these works to celebrate the relevance and usefulness of a half-serious attitude in contemporary debate. This extraction of those fragments from their times, places, and socio-political contexts, and their later assemblage in a new composition are, in fact, acts of manipulation to verify and amplify their rhetorical value in today’s culture.

Well are well aware that these procedures risk reducing architecture to a freak show. Nonetheless, we have decided to stage the outcomes in a phantasmagorical theme park—called UFOland—described and illustrated in the following informative booklet addressed to future visitors.

UFO, Bamba Issa Discoteque, Forte dei Marmi, second season, 1970, Titti Maschietto Archives, Florence