Bruno Di Marino

ARCHITECTURE DURING'68

a conversation with Franco Purini, Luca Galofaro, Gian Piero Frassinelli and Llazar Kumaraku and moderated by Bruno Di Marino article by Bruno Di Marino financed by Instituto Italiano di Cultura Tirana The idea to organize am architecture talk about the ’68 movement came from the desire to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a revolutionary year which inflamed the entire world. Initially, the debate was supposed to be part of a broader cycle entitled ’68 Ritorno al futuro Arti, politiche, visioni nell’Italia del cambiamento (’68 Back to the future. Arts, policies, visions in a changing Italy) conceived for the Maxxi museum in Rome. Paradoxically, such a cycle of events never took place in Italy, and only one of the six original meetings took place in Tirana. The event represented first of all the occasion for a confrontation and cultural exchange between Albania and Italy, hence a moment for reflections on a historical period which influenced and had consequences on both art and society. The years evolving around 1968, were also crucial in the fields of Architecture and Design, contributing to the transformation of our relationship with the idea of living and the use of objects, rethinking notions such ad form and function. The experimental movements of radical and “counterdesign” architecture developed in fifteen years (from 1960 to 1975), but they climaxed during the year of the student revolts. If, on an international level, the protagonists are, among others, the Japanese architect Isozaki and the London

collective Archigram, in Italy the Tuscan architects that funded the collectives Superstudio, Archizoom and UFO stand out in this panorama. In Itlay we can also identify figures such as Ettore Sottsass and Ugo La Pietra in Milan, and Riccardo Dalisi in Naples – in 1969 the latter began field research bringing architecture among children in a suburban and degraded area, the Trajan neighbourhood. The architectural utopia of ’68, which we strangely define as the conquest of a new space, develops alongside – in a decade dense of events – another utopia, a lot more science-fiction, the conquest of space represented by the moon landing. Indeed, the myth of the Moon influenced different architectural visions of that time, giving life to what is commonly called space age in fashion design. The Superstudio experience and its role in the context of ’68 have been illustrated by Gian Piero Frassinelli (one of the members of Superstudio together with Natalini, Toraldo Di Francia, Poli, Alessandro and Francesco Magris). Architecture as a continuous monument which superimposes and fuses real elements and imaginary structures, with the illusion of fusing different models of the ideal city and solving all the problems in the world. Is it not a coincidence that Superstudio was born in 1966 in Florence, the year of the flood, an event which triggered a spirit of solidarity, connecting young people all around the world, and acting as a practice run of the’68 movement. The architect Franco Purini retraced his ’68, the one of a University Professor in Rome, reviewing a long list of projects developed in a special climate, the same climate well represented, in real-time, in the documentary Della conoscenza (1968) by Alessandra Bocchetti. Purini himself appears in the documentary, making considerations about how architectural research can be interfaced with political protests and fights, starting from the data and the materials at the base of the work of an architect. It is not a coincidence that in Rome the movement of the “uccelli” (birds) was initiated in the school of Architecture and Urban Design at Valle Giulia. It is in this very place that the first confrontations between students and police took place, and such events are the ones who officially launch the Italian ’68, and later propagated in other cities of the peninsula. However, the uccelli – which we can consider some kind of situationists, interested in a dialogue and exchange with the world of art through creative and social commitment - are a nonviolent movement. They indeed refuse to take part in the fights, and they search for other forms to oppose society’s conformism. In some way, they are like the older brothers of another tribe, the tribe of metropolitan Indians, which will be born about ten years later, during the movement of ‘77. In his contribute Luca Galofarlo took into account two critical texts that published during ’68; the first one The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard, on the nature of consumer goods which went beyond their functional use and invaded the households. To put under discussion such a system meant to criticize the institution of the bourgeoise family. The second text is Everything is Architecture by Hans Hollein, published in the magazine Everything is Architecture, composed of 1000 words and ninety images resulting from a montage between fairly different things (commercials, news, objects, characters, photographers, etc.). Both Baudrillard and Hollein, in their critical contribute, describe the dissolution of modernity, envisaging the advent of post-modernism, whose notion is formulated precisely in the architectural field. To complete this reflection on ’68, also made of visions (like the projection of the film Gli atti fondamentali, Cerimonia by Superstudio, at the end of the talk) the Albanian Architect Llazar Kumaraku – trained in Italy following also courses by Prof. Purini – presented his point of view talking about the “nonsixty-eight” of a country, his own, totally isolated from the Western world and the youth revolts, considering all the consequences that such a gap (social, cultural, and political) had in terms of architecture and urbanism.