Radical tools

Emerging from a Florence, immediately after the November 1966 flood, in December of the same year in Pistoia, emerged Archizoon and Superstudio in the exhibition titled “Superarchitettura”.

With all the uncertainty, skepticism and a little bit of cynicism, they decided to become “Super”. Freed from the residue and the infatuations of architectural culture represented by the legacy of rationalism, they began the demolition of the discipline through guerrilla actions, Trojan horses, and transgressions. In the same moment, Gianni Pettena and Ufo were also operating inside and outside the University, intending to subvert the foundations of a society monotonous, gray and bourgeois. One way in which they worked was to mix and contaminate the arts, leading to anti-design with its thrill of novelty, which so irritated the Milan designers who called them vulgar.

“Our work was indeed a critical job but a job in a particular sort of no man’s land, which was what lay between art and design, between politics and utopia, between philosophy and anthropology. It was an attempt at a radical critique and from that the name of radical architecture, a radical critique of society“. From these words of Adolfo Natalini, it is possible to capture the full essence characterizing the radical movement in Florence, that even in the wake of the student revolution had grown, as well as Archizoom, Superstudio, Ufo, Pettena, 9999, the Zziggurat and Remo Buti, many of whom had attended a course on “Piper” by Leonardo Savioli.

Among these authors, even if they moved in different, sometimes contradictory, terrain, there was an irreverent irony, cold and sharp towards a society that wanted them on the sidelines. It represented the crisis through the use of utopia in order to bring society into a dimension of reality, criticizing its apparent and misleading image. At the same time, in the same scene of visionary research, we find in England Cedric Price, Peter Cook and Ron Herron of Archigram, in France Yona Friedman, in Vienna Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Coop Himme(l)blau, Salz der Erde, and a little later in Milan, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Franco Raggi, Ugo La Pietra, Strum in Turin, and in Naples Riccardo Dalisi…

Their works, now exhibited in the collections of the most celebrated museums in the world, were seen in Italy as a series of goliardic, almost incomprehensible, provocations. Nevertheless they had an immediate international circulation, and many young architects were influenced by these mysterious visionary groups, among them Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and the Site, and also Eisenman, Foreign Office, Future Systems and many more. 

Today they are still referenced by younger generations of artists and architects who recognize in them, the role of iconoclast and of the founding of the freedom to draw and design the world as a physicalization of emerging culture.

Then events at Base | Progetti per l’Arte, each with the presence of some of the protagonists, will present objects and radical documents, actions, performances, storytelling, and subsequent discussions that may arise between the authors and the audience.

from July 23 until September 15, 2014
Radical Tools
A project by: Base / Progetti per l’arte with Pino Brugellis, Lorenzo Bruni, Giovanni Bartolozzi.
Base / Progetti per l’arte
Via San Niccolò 18r, Firenze

July 3, h. 19.00
Gianni Pettena

July 8, h. 19.00
Archizoom (Dario Bartolini, Gilberto Corretti)

July 10, h. 19.00
Zziggurat (Alberto Breschi)

July 15, h. 19.00
Remo Buti

July 17, h. 19.00
9999 (Carlo Caldini)

July 22, h. 19.000
Superstudio (Piero Frassinelli, Adolfo Natalini)