The book published by Humboldt Books illustrated the coast-to-coast trip Bellini made with his friends back then and featured his own “private” photographs because the intended report on American living had been lost over time and in transfers.
The pictures show the free America of the hippy dream, the poor America of the suburbs, that of the artists and architects who have forged its history and, as Mario Calabresi says in the book’s foreword, contain colours that are not seen in nature and only existed in the film produced in the 1970s, that deep green and the Kodak Moment orange, memories that we have all buried away in some drawer.
Mario Bellini, USA 1972, Top: Travelling from Chicago to the Pacific along Interstate 80. Above: Rockefeller Center, New York City, New York
Mario Bellini, USA 1972, Students’/workers’ accommodation in Arcosanti, the project by Paolo Soleri
Mario Bellini, USA 1972, Humboldt Books, 2015, € 24. With texts by Mario Calabresi, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Mario Bellini