Not everyone can say their name is Fiorenzoli and be born in the most popular district of Florence, the Borgo San Frediano beyond the Arno. You cannot get much more genius loci than that. Yet Giuliano Fiorenzoli has spent most of his life in New York. He has a classic love-hate relationship with his hometown, as well as with Adolfo Natalini, “with whom I had a good relationship because he was culturally honest, even though he played a bit of a trickster at the university. He believed in the longevity of architecture and therefore focused mainly on masonry.”

During the summer, you can find him by traveling up from San Martino a Gangalandi to Lastra a Signa, where there is an apse designed in the 1470s by Leon Battista Alberti, all the way to Montespertoli in the Chianti region. Five hundred years later, Fiorenzoli built an exceptionally unique house there, with a nautical feel yet anchored to the slope between the vineyards and the belvedere overlooking the Val di Pesa. His father had been sent to war in Ethiopia and returned shaken, dying young. It was his peasant mother who raised him and his brother in San Frediano among the gilders, artisans who lived and worked in dark and medieval houses.

He has just turned 80, and on September 2nd, he will inaugurate an exhibition of his drawings at the ‘T’ Space Gallery in Rhinebeck (New York), thanks to his old friend Steven Holl – guest editor for the 2023 issue of Domus, “a generous spirit.” When he enrolled in architecture in 1962, he did not know he was in one of the most vibrant faculties in Europe. “From the very beginning, I was able to see two beautiful exhibitions. One about Frank Lloyd Wright and another about Le Corbusier, where a stunning model of Chandigarh in dark wood was displayed. I still have the image of Corbu – a big man – coming out of Palazzo Strozzi in my mind.”

Giuliano Fiorenzoli

Leonardo Savioli, his university professor, had collaborated on those exhibitions. “He was an aesthete, perhaps even excessively so. His drawings absorbed a lot of artistic influences. His projects for the Piper and the new flower market in Pescia were memorable. Another professor was Giovanni Klaus Koenig, with eclectic intelligence ranging from semiotics to industrial design. He was a great hedonist, highly knowledgeable yet elusive. Lastly, there was Umberto Eco in his first teaching experience. He was very important for us architects, especially those not yet aligned with radicalism.”

Exactly, the Florentine radicals: the groups Superstudio, Archizoom, 9999, Ufo, and the one-man bands Gianni Pettena and Remo Buti. Fiorenzoli founded the Zziggurat group with Alberto Breschi and Roberto Pecchioli. Their project of a linear city cutting through Florence to connect the suburbs with the center, incorporating corridors of urban greenery, is as visionary as it is provocative.

After his graduation in 1969 and a few misadventures, he goes to the USA. “But before that, I attended a few summer schools at the Architectural Association in London. There, I met the dean Alvin Boyarsky and the Archigram group, that were not only involved in their bubble architectures but also in ceremonial activities. They were quite likable: Cook, Webb, Herron was always a bit tipsy…”

And finally, the Big Apple. “For ten, fifteen years, it was a wonderful city. A place full of opportunities for dialogue. Drawing for the Americans is not just a project, so my works and those of many other Europeans who arrived then was big news.” Leo Castelli noticed this right away, inaugurating the era of architecturally designed spaces even on a commercial level. “But Gian Enzo Sperone also organized an exhibition in SoHo featuring my drawings, along with those of Holl, Webb, Zaha Hadid, and others,” he adds.

When Fiorenzoli moved to Manhattan, the city was still gritty and dangerous. Even Tribeca – where he rented his first loft – until a dozen years ago “was an affordable place, just two hundred meters from the Twin Towers that I saw collapsing in front of me in 2001, an apocalyptic sight... Today, however, it is the most expensive neighborhood of the city.”

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, many successful Italians were invited by American universities such as “the Rhode Island School of Design, the Pratt Institute, and others. These places provided a refuge from the skyscraper factory that NYC was, where Harvard-trained architects like Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Hugh Stubbins, and Gino Valle held sway. I also remember that Aldo Rossi at the Cooper Union and Giancarlo De Carlo at MIT, both very assertive, were highly successful in their lectures, adored by the American left, which was in a very fertile and happy period at that time. We designers were mostly Europeans, we used to live from competitions and teaching, like Bernard Tschumi. As for myself, I completed many interior designs for shops, apartments, and restaurants.”

His closest friends, however, were Raimund Abraham, “a character, an Austrian mountaineer raised in Alpine Baroque, obsessed with closed forms and with a particular love of death,” and Lebbeus Woods, “son of a soldier, a meteorite with no origin or destination.” All three were visionaries, designers of towers and architectures, both utopian and dystopian, which now seem impossible even to imagine. “Today, everything must be done quickly; no architect truly knows the people they design for, and in this sense, they are all very isolated. There is a significant hemorrhaging of the visual, a great saturation because everything is image today. I think there is a gap between architects who wish to become artists and the others. I am not particularly fond of the current politicization in some universities, just as it was during my time. In a Florentine occupation, they even hissed at a giant like Louis Kahn. After over fifteen hundred projects, I still teach at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. But in the summer, I always come here to Montespertoli to check on how the red wine has turned out.”

Immagine di apertura: Giuliano Fiorenzoli, Image of the Home, 1978. Courtesy ‘T’ Space / Steven Myron Holl Foundation