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Be in Space, Space Loves You < 154 – 155 Carlo Caldini and Fabrizio Fiumi (with Paolo Coggiola, Paolo Galli, Andrea Gigli and Mario Preti): Space Electronic Discotheque, Florence, 1969. Carlo Caldini Archive, Florence.
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It was 1968, and neo laureates Carlo Caldini and Mario Preti had a theory about American architecture. It is “a space created through electricity. Completely, undeniably an electric city where there is no physical city [...but rather] a space of images, of action, [...so that] one can plan through electricity.” Traveling from Florence, Caldini and Preti were rising voices in the Architecture Department. They had just won a prestigious American fellowship, an extension of their dissertation, enabling a joint research spanning 50 North American universities and close conversations with personages as diverse as Louis Khan and Paul Rudolph. Back in Florence in 1968, for their irst experiment as full-ledged architects, they wanted to push their ideas further, to make them less abstract, more pragmatic. Ever ambitious, Caldini and Preti didn’t just want a better testing ground for their theory about American architecture and electricity, they wanted to recreate one of its lasting proofs—and Paul Rudolph’s secret obsession—the Electric Circus. With the Electric Circus, Caldini and Preti’s irst Greenwich Village stop on behest of Rudolph, the two had their irst encounter with American subculture: Set in an old Polish cultural center, and run by Andy Warhol, the Electric Circus was composed of supple canvas surfaces that developed and stitched together the historic structure’s walls, galleries, and ceilings. Light efects, comprising lasers, strobe lights, and ilm projections transformed what was in essence the spatial equivalent of a white canvas into an open-ended spectacle. As Marco Ornella describes, their Electric Circus experience “led the pair to reconsider their ideas about architecture as a physical object of spatial distribution [...] closely stud[ding instead] the evolution of performance, the control room and the instruments used for light shows.” A year later it was time to quantify and reproduce these electric efects in the immediate, usable and mutable environments of Space Electronic. And, remarkably, they succeeded. Space Electronic, the event-space Caldini created in 1969 together with Fabrizio Fiumi—with the help of Preti and Paolo Galli among others—also followed and conversed with philosopher and cultural thinker Umberto Eco, a professor of Decoration at the Florentine Faculty of Architecture between 1966 and 1969. Notably, Eco’s coursework in Florence was itself a febrile attempt to extract a new theory of signs and a language from his Introductive Section for the XIII Milan Triennale, 1964. Part commentary on youth leisure culture, part an experiment with new media
technologies, the section—curated with Vittorio Gregotti—replaced architectural space with multimedia space, exacting its use as to eliminate the need for captions and writing, and to relay instead on pictorial, graphic and representational elements of communication. Anticipating 9999’s Space Electronic, Eco’s Triennale ofered a landscape of sensorial pleasures. From the central stair passage, with its looming mirrored structures, to the soundtrack of Luciano Berio’s Omaggio a Joyce (where a vocalized Ulysses was distorted, multi-tracked, and spliced), Eco was developing visual and technical expertise that will become essential to Piper architecture. Eco, of course, already worked with Berio and likeminded artists from the Italian Neoavanguardia on a similar range of media efects two years before in his Arte Programmata. But it was only in Muzzio’s Triennale-cum-discothèque, that the technologies employed by Berio and others gained a theoretical sense: Eco found that under the efects of multimedia a new language was rendered as architecture, a discovery he termed “Architectural Semiology.”1 In 9999: An Alternative to One-Way Architecture, Ornella has produced a learned, engaging and lusciously detailed account of the personal and professional entanglements that led 9999 away from New York’s subculture, and from Florentine semiotics, and up to the most famous of the Italian Pipers, the still-active Space Electronic. In 2014, the restless electric-space-event that 9999 created in the warehouse of via Palazzuolo still exudes the same 1969 mantra, “Be in Space, Space Loves You.” For as it continuous to turn Warhol and Eco on their ear by insisting on ludic, autonomous management as architecture practice—Ornella reminds us of 9999’s historical role as mangers for Italian rock band Madri Superiori—it proposes broader, international assessments. In this Ornella’s account is aligned and, indeed, anticipates current research in the ield around the expansive work of architects and the extensions of the ield through new modes of architectural productivism, including robotics, ilm, art, and event production.2 Lastly, Ornella’s study is a monument to the particular and numerous contributions of Fabrizio Fiumi, the group’s engine and leader, who has recently passed away. It thus runs the gamut of Fiumi’s underground cinema and photography activities, his diverse documentaries, the ilm Minotauros il nulla non ha centro, as well as Fiumi’s Florence Film Festival, dedicated to alternative cinema (1979, with Giovanni Maria Rossi). In a self-published paper Ornella found in Fiumi’s archive, the architect-producer is particularly candid with regard to 9999’s true operation: “[T]hat, at least at irst, encompasses the entire dramatic experience, without making a distinction between architecture, staging, actors, audience, and strives to reach [...] that participation of ininite experiences.” Fiumi and the 9999, and Ornella in turn, do not premise a space for speculation; they create a room, several in fact, for new types of ludic architectures. Amit Wolf
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> 159 9999 and Superstudio: S-Space Mondial Festival n.1, lyer, Florence, 1971. Carlo Caldini Archive, Florence.
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1. See my â&#x20AC;&#x153;Superurbeimero n. 7,â&#x20AC;? California Italian Studies Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2 (2011). 2. Architectural productivuism is the theme of the up-coming 1st Barcelona Architecture
Biennale, 2015. See, for example, my Fabrication and Fabrication (Los Angeles: SCI-Arc Press, 2014) and the co-edited with Emanuele Piccardo Beyond Environment (Barcelona/NewYork: Actar, 2014).
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“Projects for the modiication of ourselves through ideas. After so many years, they no longer remain images – collected in the volume Ricordi di Architettura we published in 1972 – but signs of a behavior aimed at involving others in a communal research. The only project was the project of our lives and our relationships with others. When we created projects and images of Radical Architecture, the term did not exist.”
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