This scenario implies that, by the time they begin to make real interventions into the built environment, Italian architects must be firmly ensconced in a highly bureaucratic (even baldly nepotistic) and commodified position of networked power. It is little wonder, then, that the large public works of the present time hold far more interest from a political and financial perspective than from any architectural or urban quality. One such project is Milan's Porta Nuova development area, one of the largest sites for new planning and construction in Europe, which proceeds (albeit with plenty of legislative and logistical stalls) at the expense of the fine-grained existing context, with little input from the local community. In the shadows of the towers being raised at Porta Garibaldi, however, a small group of architecture students is plotting a different mode of creation, in subtle protest against the prevailing conditions of both academia and conventional architectural construction.
Parasite 2.0, a collective of 23-year-old students from the Milan Polytechnic, was borne out of frustration with the removed, yet simultaneously unimaginative, nature of university projects. Their first work took the form of a humble experiment during the 2010 Salone del Mobile: a domestic setting of table and two chairs was installed in a neglected alcove beside the bridge over the Porta Genova train tracks, highlighting the fair's general disregard for public space in place of naked commercialism.
Parasite 2.0 defines its context as post-crisis architecture, imagining a "primitive future" that feeds voraciously upon the vestiges of the old world