Radical Visions

These few notes are prompted by an established fact: that architectural design periodically presents visionary and utopian accelerations which are more social and political than strictly disciplinary. In other words, architecture, its languages and its criticalities are used to talk about something else.

Architecture, as a concrete art of constructing, presents itself as a form of thinking which offers theoretical and figurative hypotheses. These can represent alternative and definitive answers to the problems of man's relationship with his natural and built environment. Experimental Architecture and Radical Architecture are synonyms of a propulsive attitude, of a thrust beyond architecture's canonical purposes and instruments in order to produce theories, images and elaborated thoughts. Such visions and scenarios may appear to be only future-oriented, but in reality they are bound up with the permanent crisis of contemporaneity.

"Madam, how much does your house weigh?" was a provocative question asked by Buckminster Fuller. It signified the necessity to think of architectural design as an act of discreet, technologically updated and measured occupation of the planet, while reintroducing the categories of time, space, movement and economy into the constructional process and act of living. In the 1960s this state of technological, ecological and sociological inadequacy led to a number of different research projects and experiments in Europe and America.

"Everything is architecture," claimed Hans Hollein in the '60s, while dissolving disciplinary borders into a view of architecture as a primary, ritual, behavioural and existential condition.

Works of architecture were paradoxical visions of city/objects without inhabitants, of anthropomorphous skyscrapers or metaphorical installations of a lost relationship between body, space and objects as ritual prostheses. The Experimental Architecture of Raimund Abraham and Friedrich St. Florian exposes the linguistic and thematic inadequacy of current architecture in terms of technological acceleration and the parallel necessity for symbolic expression. The result of this consideration is a sophisticated technological and spatial vocabulary with archaic sensitivities.

Situationist groups like Haus-Rucker- Co., Coop Himmelb(l)au, and UFO in Italy, identify a radical utopia in the destabilising and provisional nature of broken urban space. This utopia expects figuratively subversive attitudes to reveal the oppressive banality of reality, by releasing aesthetic and political awareness. The functional and critical missions of architectural design are basically united, while theories and instruments devised to "present" this condition are different.

Here one might consider the radical living solutions offered by Yona Friedman, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Fuller, the Japanese Metabolists and the ironic and visionary technology of Cedric Price and Archigram, as well as Archizoom's No-Stop City and Superstudio's Continuous Monument. These must all be interpreted as lucid, provocative observations suggesting that the crisis of modernity lies primarily in the economic and spatial model of social coexistence. Hence it is a crisis of the city as a place and condenser of identities, collective representation and the production of work.

Playing on the impossibility of compromise with the existing city, they propose, oppose and superimpose a different city upon the urban model. This other city is created through the rigorous application of new processes to generate space and its physical structures. The political and existential crisis of the 1960s found no solution within the theoretical and disciplinary corpus of architecture. The Modern movement had hailed that solution as a new formal system within the existing urban and linguistic fabric, superseding but still living alongside it. Indeed, this formal system would charge architecture with a saving and reinvigorating message aimed at the actual form of the city and society. This positive and reformist aspect was missing from the radical proposals of the 1960s and '70s.

In that period the search for new socio-political balances shifted "the ethical and aesthetic axis" of the new generations. They consequently moved towards a laissez-faire anarchism and a commitment which creatively and anti-consumeristically involved the lifestyles, culture, politics, forms and instruments of living. In its behavioural and aesthetic revision, architecture discounted the dogmatic and state-controlled roots of the Modern movement, which had postulated architecture as an allegory of a new society but failed to decipher the changing times. The dichotomy between architecture without politics and society without architecture projected the radical groups into visionary leaps forward, prophesying the dissolution of the city and its forms into an indistinct and globalised form.

In that context, Italian Radical Architecture presented a peculiar cohesion and lucidity. Its variegated course united critical options and working philosophies, enabling the progressive loss of effectiveness in the great structural utopias to be assessed in favour of formal, cultural and productive systems spread further afield. These systems, moreover, could follow and represent deep linguistic and cultural mutations which also had elastic and fluid disciplinary borders, like design in its various forms and dimensional scales. By shifting its target from general utopian and theoretical visions to the detailed and effusive world of objects, inhabited space, materials and non-rigid formal structures, Italian Radical Architecture closed its cycle in the mid-'70s. But it strategically indicated that the most practicable field of action in productive and anthropological terms lay outside architecture itself.

By looking back to those visions and theories today, we can size up the empty and self-referential technological formalism which has developed internationally under the system of star architecture. On the other hand, one can perceive the re-evaluation of utopia as a means of theoretical analysis to create awareness and energies in wider and politically more pregnant circles. And this assessment converges with Rem Koolhaas's critical consideration that today we should be less worried about having too much utopia than not having any utopia at all.