A Letter from the UFOs to Domus

UFO, Photograph, Umberto Eco fatto segno a numerosi colpi di forchetta dai suoi discepoli (“Umberto Eco turned into the target of numerous fork-stabs by his disciples”), n.d. Between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies of the last century, modernity held a rendez-vous with itself. It came out transfigured. Seen in hindsight, the whole affair appears a postmodern conspiracy against modernity, not to end it but to bring it to its final, logical outcome. Literature and architecture, with semiotics on the background, are the principal characters of the story told here, proposed as a synecdoche of a more general cultural phenomenon. The setting is Italy, in turn presented as a hyperbole of a global phenomenon. As the title suggests, 1963 and 1973 are the termini post quem and ante quem. Many reasons recommended the choice of this time-frame: ten is a round number (which is good for a tale); two avant-garde radical groups were born at this time: the literary movement Gruppo 63 and the architectural movement Global Tools (1973)—a stillborn attempt to group various radical architects into a sort of all-star team; and, last but certainly not least, the two dates mark, respectively, the peak of Italy’s so-called “Economic Miracle,” and October 1973’s oil crisis, in turn triggering the first economic recession post World War II. Between the two, “68”—a number become a hallmark—is there as a placeholder for the peak of the first global cultural phenomenon in history, setting the mood for the whole decade in question.