Radical Architecture: Rome, Florence, Milan

This week focused on objects from three Italian cities - Florence: Superstudio, Milan: Ugo La Pietra, and Rome: Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s photographs of the student protests at Valle Giulia.

Ugo La Pietra's Recupero e Reinvenzione

Ugo La Pietra is an architect, filmmaker, artist, and designer. This book Recupero e Reinvenzione (Recuperation and Reinvention) 1970-75 was part of his larger series calls I gradi di Liberta, the degrees of freedom. He explored the urban space around the periphery of Milan, and in this case, observed the informal construction of shacks.

In it, he writes,

“The places in which we live are constantly imposed on us, in reality the space in which we operate can exist only like a mental model that is continually modified by experience. We must search for the form that is born from our experience instead of from imposed schemes.”

Fausto Giaccone Photography in Portugal

The photo was taken in Portugal by Italian photojournalist, FaustoGiaccone. He were a former architecture student in Valle Giulia School of Architecture when the Battle of Valle Giulia happened. He documented the events during the Battle Valle Giulia in detailed. Later, Giaccone’s reportage also includes social and political movements in other countries, such as Portugal. This photo belongs to his Una storia portoghese collection, depicting the political campaign of Alvaro Cunhal, one of the important leaders of the Portuguese Communist Party, in 1975

Bibliography

Selections, Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976.

Archizoom, “City, Assembly Line of the Social,” Casabella, 350-351, (1969)

Superstudio, “Invention Design and Evasion Design,” Ockman, 456-459

Felicity Scott, “Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture,” Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, (New York: Columbia, 2008), 4-20; 69-78.

Gabrielle Mastrigli, ed. Superstudio: Opere 1966-1978, (Macerata : Quodlibet, aprile 2016).

Emanuele Piccardo, Amit Wolf, Beyond Environment (Barcelona: Actar, 2014)

Manfredo Tafuri, “Introduction to Theories and History of Architecture,” Ockman, 450-455.

Special issue of ANY, no. 25-26 (fevrier 2000)

Casabella, no. 619-620 (Jan.-Feb. 1995).

Session Documents

timeline_battle_of_valle_giulia.pdf