Italian architecture not very responsive. And use a euphemism. Maybe it's true: the ability to respond to change, is not unique component of our country because modernity is constantly hampered by the presence of layered time, because the memory is still burning so-called contradictions of the boom years and because the increasingly cumbersome equipment service and decision support almost prevent the emergence of wills. Individually, or associated with, vetoes almost always win. The high unemployment rate and the same birth rate is now near zero describes a country that, among Western nations, has the lowest planning.
In recent years, Italy has established a concept of maintaining the status quo that if for some it may be beneficial for large sections of society is enormous and growing source of frustration. In the world of architecture (the profession, universities, and publishing spheres of the company) there is little openness to new problems, little curiosity about a different way of doing and seeing things in strong defensive positions and ideas consolidated. The recognition of the defeat of architecture in Italy, however, is unanimous. This is confirmed by the magazines foreign sector which is almost absent.
Our situation is all the more surprising because it corresponds to a phase of high productivity on the international scene. We have all witnessed the takeoff of Spain, long wave of France, the courage to new challenges in Germany, also the activism of the small countries like Finland and Austria, with the constant development of architectural research in the Netherlands and Denmark. And leave out the United States, where the architects are experiencing a moment of euphoria, or what happens feverishly over the Pacific.
Italian architects today look shocked the world: the young, and there are plenty of valuable, are trying to hard work and dedication that is probably equal to the difficulties, an update. Sifting through the Internet, maybe you should be on bread and water to make Erasmus abroad, enroll in seminars, working in studios across the Alps, based on-line magazines. The architects with more than few decades of work behind, and who knew the most productive stages, they look perplexed architecture that makes the rest of the world. And maybe shrug their shoulders, labeling impracticability of those experiences here, or bias tracking of trends and quirky language, or adherence to advertising and strong signs of surface or vacant, or lack of coherence between form and function, division between construction and image. Defenders have known that, at the head of the system architecture in Italy for at least three decades, and share responsibility for the situation, now lead the "resistance" the wave of international architecture.
But the mechanism is old. Also the renewal of architecture here has gone through gauntlet. Who like Pagano, or perish or Giolli claimed indispensability of opening a European, was branded a traitor or traditions of the Bolshevik internationalism. In reality those personalities have established a practicable road, between instances of renewal and international interpretations of our own. And this way, it was not just the elite but was not covered by collective adventures despicable. Or do we forget the many rationalist buildings of the thirties, the vital phase neo-realist and organic fifties, the same troubled but courageous idea of \u200b\u200bthe house of popular sixties and seventies, the sensitive entries in the contexts of pre-existing lot of good architecture until at least the mid-eighties?
Returning to the dismay of that said, the criticism often than is done elsewhere is because of how episodes (ie unrelated, accidental and ephemeral) those that are obvious signs of a transformation in our company's overall which architecture is capturing and raising some characters.
We are living through years of profound change: from a society based on the mechanisms of industrial production, the requirements of a society based on production, formalization and distribution of information. The theme has been explored by at least two decades. What is new is that this change has now an impact in the areas of "our" and take concrete architecture of the city.
As fireworks display divide the issue into two aspects: one concerning the opportunities, the other the consequences for our actions.
start with the problem of brown areas or brownfield sites. The society has less and less need for large amounts of land, particularly if located in the city, to produce manufactured goods. The plants we buy at the supermarket is 90% information (research, marketing, distribution), the same and even more are the household appliances or cars and more people produce goods that are "pure" information. The production moved to offices, universities, research centers, but once unthinkable even in places such as homes, places of business or entertainment. The specific location becomes less and less self-determining factor.
In this process, which invests throughout the Western world, areas that are released by factories (which may become smaller and smaller, less polluting and depriving) and large resources are at stake, first of all precisely those abandoned by industrial production. We know the magnitude of the phenomenon and how many cases the architecture around the world are open.
The second opportunity is tied to a new relationship between man and nature. In fact, if the mechanism of industrial production that could not exploit, dominate, even violently use the natural resources that can enhance the information society. This opens the great theme wise use of resources, alternative energy sources, materials, healthier, more intelligent buildings that are able to use the natural energy instead of polluting waste it.
The third opportunity is related to the means Prince of the information society, namely the electronics and then to the new machines that process information. Now the opportunities to talk about these tools, or computer programs now appear simplistic because more and more electronics invests all down to our own bodies-are evident primarily in the immediately practical aspects (continued convertibility of the information, remote transmission, access a database, computational power, support for globalization mentioned before) is the most profound and radical (simulations, interconnection, integration, interaction between architecture and environment).
Now we come to the relationship between these three great opportunities and consequences. And rimettiamoci in a rigid position of closing, including maintenance of our conceptual staus quo, our certainties. We can each of these great opportunities to make a minimal level so to speak. Use the great topic of brownfield sites to enter the grid of a city monofunctional, regular and modulated as the big cities and middle-class dream from those features, increase the ratio of greenery around the buildings, or care to landscaping, use the computer to draw more efficiently and quickly.
And we can ignore those who think that those opportunities do require a profound change in the architecture and feel and the city. In fact it is not true as we had to do to simplify that on the one hand there are "opportunities" and other "consequences", even painless, temporary, relocatable under which we are accustomed. You could, of course, use the concrete to cover the buildings with the old putty, or do the factories with arches and columns, before the news and the crisis of transformation are expression it takes effort, courage, tensions and clashes. Many show signs of the international opportunities that are already linked in various ways to determine the information society consequences "strong" and basically required a closer look. It is surprising perhaps that having as great topic of brownfield sites that reveal a feeling that would break away from the certainties-type morphology that were processed (in particular by its Italian architects) to operate in the fabric of the consolidated city? It is surprising that operate in a residual, intricate, full of twists between uses, abandonment, was sought in the folds of the landscape poor new vitality?
We, however, seems quite natural that many look to the research of the artists closer to stratification, a residual of hybridization: the bags or cracks by Burri, to posters of skinned Rotella, the American neo-expressionism of Pollock and Rauschenberg's harder at the front of the Pop-art and Arte Povera. The architecture is way into the existing mesh, use and re-launch the existing objects like ready-made, created with its joint dynamics between "spaces" between "new and existing. Now this tension is full of international architecture. Relegated to the easy category "fashion" or "language" is an understatement, I think, unproductive.
Returning to the relationship nature-architecture, it is clear that within this increasing interest in the architecture tends to act as a landscape. The nature of architecture in this concept is not looking But more than floral or liberty or even that of masters of organicism, human counterpoint to the truth of the functionalist drivers. It has become a much more complex nature, much more hidden and probed with anti romantic eye through the formalisms of contemporary science (fractals, DNA, the quantum, the jumps of a universe that expands the relationship between life and matter). Arise in this context, the figures of the flows, wave, whirlpools, crevasses, and the fluidity of the liquid crystal becomes keywords.
opportunities confrontation with nature and the large brownfield sites in cities triggered the issue of "compensation". In areas that are often built to very high density you can inject green, nature, leisure equipment. But this is perhaps to limit green areas and fencing, to contrast with the residential, tertiary, as was the logic of organizing directional dividing the industrial city? The trend that is emerging is to increasingly hand in trying to create new pieces of the city where he built, along with a strong presence of nature, is active in interacting with the activities of the society. Or Eurolille or Potsdamer Platz or Battery Park we are interested only shapes?
And now the third one even closer relationship between information (or society) and architecture.
The architecture is, as is well known, discipline polysemic. Since ancient times it was seen as a synthesis of different, at least at first, they were corresponding to the three major areas of construction, use and form. The architecture established itself in the twenties has completely changed the content of the three major areas (the building no longer continuous but discontinuous walls for points, a function not only directed to the most courtly themes but to those of mass society, and an aesthetic replace old hinges figurative orders and perspective with those of the abstract movements of the new mechanical world). The necessity to the summary, however, not only persisted, but it was even stronger because the architecture wanted to join forces to serialization, typing, rationalization of industrial production. It followed that, as the object of use, it had more value as working as a system of consistency: the form must follow function, the interior had to be manifest on the outside, the building had to be in solidarity with the other aspects as far as possible and made manifest. This process towards the inner coherence of the project found its apex in the work of Louis Kahn, as appropriate, some see it as the last of the great masters of the first generation of the century and others, however as the strongest disruptive .
Now, if we use a formula of convenience, the architecture of today is violent, absolutely, anti-Kahn. It means that the search for inner coherence and absolute and almost tautological overlap (for the American master of form and function, form and construction) is a reverse process of liberation, of release from any system pre-ordained hierarchy. The architect instead of being on top of a pyramid of choices to govern and prioritize search for a location within a network of choices that are interrelated, complex, partly indeterminate and random with respect to his will. And this happens at all scales: Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large particular, that in urban systems and territorial Rem Koolhaas theorized evident.
The problem obviously is not then in fashion or language. We live in productivity that is no longer linked to the duplication of an object in the series but opposite process of personalization, individualization, opening to the constantly changing information, the immediacy of the responses, the recognition of individual creativity, the spread in the network information. And in philosophical, artistic, scientific or not adhere to strict rules of the Renaissance, or looking for ways balanced, consistent and closed a good part of this century, but to an acceptance of complexity. The street architecture, as a hypertext, and every time to trace.
This is also scary, painful and dramatic as always happens when you open up new opportunities, new freedoms. For example, the form instead of finding his reasons as an expression of function looks more and more metaphorical messages, metaphors, concepts. A building is no longer the only good if it works, like a car no longer be valid only if and as she walks, and both need to say much more. Apparently it is the container that triumphs over content, in reality they are the "information" that both carry the new value.
The old ethic of the correspondence form-building is broken and also the building looking for his way of optimization. A project now can be built in many different ways. The function extends to a more extended series of connections, first with the surrounding context. An obvious result of this work of untying, capacity control, liberation, if you want to sectoralisation, is to have, often, buildings far more efficient on purely "functional" than in the past, sometimes much more intriguing, and at the bottom as the top can seem absurd given their apparent complexity, even more feasible. Also because the computer and electronics that we saw play a role because then they become very powerful tool in foreshadowing geometric and arithmetic, sin'anco in ad hoc cut the pieces. Moreover, if this were not true, you do not understand why such architecture based on these principles is realized abroad. They all wrong?
Returning to the status quo and their overcoming. Looking at these achievements with the nose and duplicate uncritically embracing the undulating zigzag or belongs to a primitive stage and initial. Mind you, not bad in my opinion, more than it is to copy any model uncritically. It's about understanding the framework within which these trials take place, confirm the level of consistency with the situations in which they operate without too much forcing, but not too sudden yields. Above all, particularly those who have little or nothing to maintain, you must open with curiosity and interest in the new yeast. The world is changing, opening new crises and new opportunities together.
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